The Enemy Theme Analysis

For many American soldiers, the Vietnam War lacks the clear-cut objectives and open battlefields of past major wars, particularly compared to World War II. Instead, they find themselves fighting in a war they don’t understand against an enemy who employs guerrilla tactics, hiding within the jungle and killing American soldiers in ambush attacks or with booby-trapped mines. As O’Brien describes, he and his fellow infantrymen in Alpha Company begin to lose their sense of who their true enemy is, since they don’t actually care about the Viet Cong and suffering comes not only from enemy soldiers, but from the environment and the American military hierarchy as well. Through O’Brien’s own experiences, he demonstrates how this impersonal style of warfare can extend the horrors of war to a wider array of targets—when foot soldiers don’t even know what they are dying for, the enemy becomes whomever causes the most suffering or happens to be nearby.

The American soldiers’ real enemy, the Viet Cong fighters, are rarely seen, leaving the Americans without a traditional, visible enemy to face. In the worst fighting that O’Brien sees, in a region nicknamed Pinkville, Alpha Company often finds itself fighting against the elite Forty-eighth Viet Cong Battalion. Despite constantly encountering the Viet Cong and getting picked off by their bullets, Alpha Company almost never actually sees the enemy soldiers—they only feel the spray of gunfire coming out of the bushes or hear snipers shooting at them from somewhere in the jungle. The Viet Cong are so adept at remaining invisible that O’Brien thinks of them as “phantom[s]” and recalls that he only sees a live enemy once with his own eyes. However, at night, the Americans often imagine that the Viet Cong are waiting for them. O’Brien recalls, “We would see [them] in our heads: oiled up, ghostly, blending with the countryside, part of the land.” As skilled guerrilla fighters, the Viet Cong remain virtually invisible yet so present through their bullets and mortars that they become an intangible fixture in the American soldiers’ minds. This effect is only made worse by the fact that more American soldiers die from mines than from gunfire: the Viet Cong and the villagers who choose to help them riddle the jungle and empty villages with booby traps. They build mines of varying severity: some only blow off toes or lower legs, whereas some shred a person’s entire body or spring into the air before blowing up in front of a person’s stomach. Because of this hidden but ever-present danger, the American infantrymen feel as if they are fighting an invisible, phantom enemy—they lack any clear target or person to struggle against.

With so many men dying and without a clear enemy to fight, O’Brien recalls that his company sometimes considers the Vietnamese civilians to be their enemy instead, since they are easy to find and they become representations of the Viet Cong by association. As frustration and rage over dead comrades mounts, O’Brien admits that the soldiers’ hatred often turns toward people who have nothing to do with their own suffering. After a mine blows two well-liked American soldiers to pieces, O’Brien remembers, “men put their fists into the faces of the nearest Vietnamese, two frightened women” and “an officer used his pistol, hammering it against a prisoner's skull.” O’Brien notes that “the men were crying, doing this,” suggesting that the sporadic, brutal violence is a result of the Americans’ pain and frustrated rage that they lack a traditional enemy to fight. Tragically, O’Brien recalls that such outbursts aren’t just limited to individual civilians: Alpha Company takes to setting whole villages on fire. “On bad days the hamlets of Pinkville burned, taking our revenge in fire. It was good to walk from Pinkville and to see fire behind Alpha Company. It was good, just as pure hate is good.” Because Alpha Company cannot find their true enemy, and they continue to die by that enemy’s bullets and explosives, they turn the Vietnamese civilians into representational targets, an outlet for their festering rage.

Often, the American foot soldiers even regard their military superiors as the enemy because they treat the soldiers as dispensable, abusing them or sending them into needless danger. This demonstrates how the foot soldiers’ hatred and angst can even redirect against their own army. The “gung-ho” American, Colonel Daud, becomes one of Alpha Company’s most hated villains, perhaps even more so than the Viet Cong. Though he himself never goes into combat—he flies safely around in his helicopter overhead—he orders Alpha Company into numerous dangerous ambushes and charges that often incur heavy death tolls, all because he is enthusiastic about war and wants to report good numbers of enemies killed. O’Brien states that Alpha Company grows to hate the man so much that when they hear that Vietnamese soldiers killed him in a night raid, they sing a “catchy, happy, celebrating song: Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead,” suggesting that they regard Daud as a villain, the very worst enemy.

More than just wishing death on American officers, some soldiers take vengeance into their own hands. A handful of Alpha Company’s black soldiers believe that a white lieutenant mistreats them and gives them the most dangerous assignments. Within weeks of their frustration building, the lieutenant dies when a small explosion blows his legs off, and one of the black soldiers later confides to O’Brien that it was their own doing. They’d meant to shoot a grenade launcher in front of the lieutenant to just scare him, but “the blacks weren’t crying, he said.” Since the lieutenant caused the black soldiers to suffer, they saw him as just as much an enemy as the Viet Cong. Alpha Company’s murderous hatred for Vietnamese civilians and for certain American officers suggests that in a war without a clear enemy and that no one believes in fighting, the traditional concept of the enemy becomes increasingly blurred. Rather than only the opposing army being the enemy, American foot soldiers during Vietnam treat whomever causes them suffering as their enemy, whether they are Vietnamese, American, or simply civilians who happen to be close by.