Vietnam Vet Noir After 9/11: Quarry, Dog Soldiers, and the Anti-Ethical Appeal of a Contemporary Subgenre

Abstract

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, American noir has demonstrated striking permutations. This essay concerns itself with a subset of those changes, whose multimedia manifestations include pulp comics, prestige television shows, big-budget films, and critically acclaimed novels. I posit that these texts are part of a subgenre of hardboiled crime fiction, which I propose to name, “Vietnam Vet Noir.” Vietnam Vet Noir centers as protagonists traumatized American war veterans and their families, generally, and Vietnam War veterans and their children, in particular. As we will see, the subgenre’s emergence predates the era of war on terror. In fact, Vietnam Vet Noir appeared before the 1975 collapse of the American War in Vietnam. That said, the number of and consumer interest in Vietnam Vet Noir texts exploded only in the 21 century. Post-9/11 examples of the subgenre include Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005), in which one of our protagonists, Llewellyn Moss, is a two-tour Vietnam War combat veteran. One thinks, too, of the first and third seasons of HBO’s True Detective (2014 and 2017, respectively), written by Nic Pizzolatto. Likewise, one considers another HBO series, Barry (2018-present), popular with audiences and wildly popular with critics, which stars Bill Hader playing an Afghanistan War veteran-turned-hitman. Vietnam Vet Noir sometimes has critiqued American involvement in the war on terror, such as when Tommy Lee Jones starred in 2007’s anti-Iraq War film, In the Valley of Elah, which Paul Haggis directed. Likewise, any number of post-9/11 texts have blended aspects of Vietnam Vet Noir—already a hybrid of noir and war fiction—with other generic or sub-generic elements. Resulting texts include all four seasons of the Netflix international drug-crime series Ozark (2017-present); two of Ozark’s most intriguing supporting characters are