This essay firstly focuses upon the images of a “diseased land” and “vermin–like natives” that were commonly used by American military personnel to describe the land and the people of Vietnam. Referring to Francis Fitzgerald’s classic study of the war, I would argue that those images reflect America’s desires to place Vietnam in its mythological perspective, to downplay the complexities of the conflict, and to make it a simplistic battle between good and evil. By figuring Vietnam and its people as insanitary and disease-ridden, and, in turn, describing US military as a physician bound by a moral oath to sanitize/medicate the Vietnamese land and people, US military officials in effect endorsed their aggressive actions against Vietnam, including the use of chemical defoliants and napalm bombing. The discussion about the pathologized images of Vietnam leads us to examine Vietnam-vet author Stephen Wright’s novel Meditations in Green (1983), which attempts to criticize America’s neocolonialism by explicating the racist/colonialist ideologies underlying those images. The protagonist of the novel is James I. Griffin, an herbicide researcher working for the army’s Agent Orange operation in Vietnam. By narrating the war through the protagonist’s unique perspective, Wright describes US military’s erroneous efforts to control/sanitize the resilient forces of the Vietnamese natural world, which American officials regard as cumbersome, diseased, and insanitary. Informed by Susan Sontag’s reflection on illness as metaphor, I will especially illuminate the ways in which Wright challenges the discourse of diseased Vietnam, by destabilizing the binary oppositional imagery of the technologically advanced American order and the backward, unsanitary Vietnamese chaos that Americans have fabricated
