Vietnam War

The Vietnam War is part of the novel’s background to American military service, but it also marks a formative and violent period in Ratoff’s history. Its presence links a family’s account of civic duty to the obscured record of an intelligence operative whose wartime injury became the subject of conflicting explanations.

Military Service and Ratoff’s Wartime Record

An American discussing his Albany Irish family explains that successive generations joined the U.S. Army in wars fought by the country, including the Vietnam War, because they believed their country needed them. He contrasts that inherited sense of service with his own decision to study political science, seeking to understand why the United States established bases abroad and became involved as the world’s police force. The reference places the novel’s questions about American military presence in Iceland within a wider history of intervention and service.

Ratoff’s personal connection to the war is darker and less certain. He enlisted in the Marines in 1968 and served two consecutive tours in Vietnam before Vytautas Carr recruited him into military intelligence. Ratoff attributed the scar and damaged vocal cords on his face to an accidental rifle discharge in his barracks. Carr’s inquiry produced a different account from men in Ratoff’s platoon: they described him as a sadist who used extreme violence to extract information, and some alleged that he kept body parts as trophies. Although the allegations about trophies were never confirmed, the accounts converged on the origin of his wound: a young Vietnamese woman seized his gun, forced him to his knees, and shot him in the face before killing herself. The novel therefore presents the war through an unresolved collision between Ratoff’s explanation and the testimony Carr gathered, making Vietnam part of the concealed history that shadows his later work.

From Vietnam to Covert Intelligence

After Vietnam, Ratoff’s work carried him through a sequence of increasingly concealed assignments. In the early 1970s he served in El Salvador and Nicaragua, then Chile and Guatemala, working alongside troops sent by their governments to support dictatorships. When domestic protests led the United States to cut back that support, he was relocated to the Middle East, where he continued gathering intelligence by methods Carr preferred not to examine. He was stationed in Lebanon and served for a time with Mossad. By then Ratoff officially did not exist: his records had been removed from ordinary circulation, and only a handful of senior officials knew he was there. His Vietnam service thus sits at the beginning of a career whose institutional value depended on violence and whose secrecy made its agent easy to disavow.

Narrative Function

Vietnam enters the novel through retrospective accounts rather than a direct battlefield scene. One account places the war in a family history of ordinary military service and national obligation; another reaches it through the sealed personnel history of an intelligence operative. The contrast makes the war both a public inheritance and a private wound: Ratoff’s disputed injury is the point where official explanation, soldiers’ recollections, and institutional secrecy fail to align. The novel leaves that discrepancy unresolved, so Vietnam functions less as a settled backstory than as an early instance of the compromised testimony and concealed violence that shape the later operation in Iceland.

The War as Public History and Private Testimony

The novel gives the Vietnam War no battlefield scene of its own: it reaches the reader through two sharply different kinds of retrospective speech. One is a broad family account that places Vietnam among the wars in which Albany’s Irish Americans served out of patriotic duty; the other is an intelligence file reconstructed through Carr’s later inquiry into Ratoff. That difference in scale matters. The family account presents service as inherited civic obligation, while the account of Ratoff makes wartime experience difficult to separate from violence, injury, and disputed testimony. Vietnam thus appears not as a single authoritative history but as a public memory and a concealed personal past, each revealing different limits on what can be known.