There are no soldiers in “Greasy Lake.” The story takes place about as far away from jungles of Southeast Asia as it is possible to get. The violence that is manifested on the banks of Greasy Lake does not involve snipers or helicopters or the small of napalm in the morning. And yet it is an inescapable conclusion that this short story is very much about the Vietnam War.
That long, enduring conflict which was ripping America apart in the 1960’s started out like every other war America had gotten into. It was a gung-ho call to action to protect the American way of life. Young men raised on movies in which John Wayne nearly single-handedly won World War II were shipped off to a faraway land with images of being just like the Duke. The only problem was that while many famous actors who also appeared in those war movies—like Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable—actually served as soldiers in the war, the screen’s biggest war hero did not. John Wayne was a sham. So, it would quickly become clear, was the war in Vietnam.
“Greasy Lake” tells the story of a group of guys whose idea of being tough—on the night they make the fateful decision to head up to Greasy Lake—is to wear leather jackets, read Andre Gide and hurl raw eggs at mailboxes at two in the morning. Everything changes from the moment they decide to launch an attack in which they are confident of the outcome. It is at this point that the only reference to the Vietnam War gets made even at that it is oblique enough that most would not get the reference today: “This was a tactical error, as damaging and irreversible in its way as Westmoreland’s decision to dig in at Khe Sanh.” The allusion here is to the Supreme Commander of American Forces during the Vietnam War, General William Westmoreland and one the American military’s most humiliating losses in any war. The narrator’s own tactical error is dropping dropping his keys on the way over to what he assumes is the car driven by a friend. Shortly thereafter he says this tactical error was compounded by another: misidentifying the target of their attack.
So what is really going on this night at Greasy Lake is the decision to wage war against an enemy for a ridiculous reason on the assumption that because they know the enemy, things will not turn out particularly bad but which actually turns out far worse than they could ever imagined due to misidentifying the enemy. The tragedy of the Vietnam War was not just that it very quickly became obvious that it could not be won, but that became quagmire in America could not even seem to find a way to safely escape. And so the war dragged on and on and the realization that John Wayne was a fraud and that even the moral high ground of keeping the world safe for democracy no longer applied. Meanwhile, every day there was people trying to kill and these were not necessarily always wearing a uniform and easily identifiable.
All of which contributed to some American soldiers engaging in acts nobody back home could never have imagined. When they arrive at Greasy Lake, the narrator’s friends are dangerous because one sports an earring and one is considering quitting school to study art. Literally just a few minutes later, these absolutely pathetic excuses for “dangerous characters” have suddenly transformed their fantasy image into reality as they attempt to gang-rape a girl while her boyfriend likes immobile and seemingly lifeless on the ground. When this attempt is aborted by the arrival of headlights bringing a new cast of dangerous characters into the mix, the narrator literally winds up in the quagmire that is the fetid swamp which Greasy Lake has become; a symbol of the corruption of what was once pure and innocent. Hidden death lurks in the mysterious dark waters of the lake while the very real potential of coming face to face with his own mortality remains on the banks.
What had commenced as an attack against an enemy that promised a celebratory end as peace with victory was quickly declared becomes a fight for their lives in which they were forced to realize just how easy it would be for them to revert to a primitive state barely superior to the worst they could imagine. Personal losses both in tangible and intangible forms are suffered and surrender and withdrawal is without honor, but at least they are still alive and physically intact. They are also forever changed not by what they did to anybody else nearly as much as by what they did to themselves. In its portrait of three less than dangerous characters forced to confront their true heart of darkness the apocalypse of their innocence transforms Greasy Lake into an allegorical Vietnam.
