Thanks to the seductive charms of Hollywood and the irresistible appeal of America's mass media, all these years later, the world views the Vietnam War as an American story. Indochina provided the lush, tropical backdrop against which the United States played out its fantasies of violence, tested its latest technology, furthered its ideology, examined its conscience, agonized over its moral dilemmas, and dealt with its guilt (or pretended to). The Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and Laotians were only script props. Nameless, faceless, slit-eyed humanoids. They were just the people who died. Gooks.
As a child growing up in the state of Kerala, in South India--where the first democratically elected Communist government in the world came to power in 1959, the year I was born--I worried terribly about being a gook. Kerala was only a few thousand miles west of Vietnam. We had jungles and rivers and rice-fields, and communists, too. I kept imagining my mother, my brother, and myself being blown out of the bushes by a grenade, or mowed down, like the gooks in the movies, by an American marine with muscled arms and chewing gum and a loud background score. In my dreams, I was the burning girl in the famous photograph taken on the road from Trang Bang.
Arundhati Roy, "The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky," in War Talk, pp.98-99
