From Creechie to Charlie: Reflections on the Vietnam War

In her book The Word for World is Forest, Ursula Le Guin tells the story of a large, nonviolent race of  small humanoids whose home planet comes under hostile siege by small group of heavily armed Humans wishing to strip it of its natural resources, scour the land, and then take it over.  While the setting and characters might differ, the story presented in the book is extremely similar to that of the Vietnam war; where the U.S. Government went to war with Vietnamese communist in Vietnam, in an attempt to stop the spread of communism in Vietnam, and preserve it and the countries surrounding it as our allies.  By creating similarities between the two settings, and contrasting them, Ursula Le Guin is able to reflect on and critique the U.S. Government and the entire idea of the War.  One of the most obvious similarities in the characters involved, and how they compare to each other.  In the book, the native Athsheans are large in number with no real central government, instead acting is large groups completely separate from each other; most of which are non-violent and a few of which engage the humans in hit-and-run attacks using stolen weaponry to bypass their technological disadvantage.  The humans, on the other hand, are small in number and mostly aggressive and xenophobic, calling the Athsheans "Creechies" and treating them as lower life forms, and trying to wipe them out with more advanced technology to make up for smaller numbers.  Here, we see the contrast to the Vietnam war, where mass amounts of small, decentralized Vietnamese or Vietcong squads engaged the American army in Guerrilla warfare; while most of the other Vietnamese were non-hostile villagers and citizens.  Similarly, the U.S. Army continued to fight against "Charlie" despite being outnumbered and continual losses, using Napalm and Agent Orange to kill them en masse, at the cost of the land and numerous bystanders lives.  In the book, Ursula makes it clear the Humans are the villians and that their actions are not only malicious but completely useless, and through this attacks the War as the same, that it is a evil and pointless war that would not be won.