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pylduck.livejournal.comI stayed up late last night to finish Cynthia Kadohata's Cracker!: The Best Dog in Vietnam (Atheneum, 2007).
I've been meaning to read this book since it came out--I even bought it when it was only available in hardcover--but have only just now gotten around to reading it. Military dogs are fascinating examples of the kinds of relationships that humans have to dogs. A few years ago, I had a graduate student who wrote a paper in my "War and Colonialism in Asian American Literature" course about her father's military career as a dog handler stationed in Thailand. She even had a photograph of him with his dog. More disconcertedly, the infamous pictures of torture and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib featured the use of dogs as intimidation weapons.
This book is a bit of a departure from Kadohata's other work, which have focused on Japanese American children and their experiences in difficult times (illness and WWII internment, for example). Instead, Cracker! is about the eponymously-named German shepherd and his handler, Rick Hanski, as they train for and fight in the Vietnam War as a dog-human team. The human characters are all white Americans (some may be black, I suppose, though that fact is never highlighted), and aside from a brief appearance by an Asian American army doctor, the only other Asians in the book are the Vietnamese, either Vietcong or unaffiliated peasants. There is also the appearance of some Montagnards (Yards), an ethnic minority/Indigenous people of the mountains of Vietnam, who fight with the U.S. Special Forces.
The book ultimately is about the bond forged between Cracker and Hanski. Cracker is named after firecrackers, not the food-item nor the epithet for white people. Hanski trains Cracker to be a scout, a dog who searches out booby traps and hidden guerilla fighters. As a book about war, too, it is inevitably rather traumatizing in its depictions of skirmishes. It makes me wonder how "young adults," to whom this book is marketed, might process such a bleak narrative.
Kadohata seems very careful in her attempt to recreate the mindset of a young man (17!) who enlists to fight in the unpopular war as well as to sketch out the way soldiers related to one another. However, she never plumbs the depths of hatred that American soldiers must've felt for the Vietnamese enemy. There is, for example, absolutely no mention of any real epithets or racist descriptions of the Viet Cong (they are called, simply, "Charlie" for the radio letter code). Instead, Kadohata tries to represent how it might feel to experience warfare, to feel the rush of adrenaline in gunfights or the nausea of realizing the slim chances one has of surviving a mission. Additionally, little moments pop up where Kadohata seems intent on offering a slightly more Asian/Americanist perspective on the war, such as with the Asian American doctor and the Montagnards. Though they are only side characters, their presence signals a world that is more complicated than even what Hanski, a Scandinavian-American from small-town Wisconsin, might be able to recognize.
It took me awhile to get past Cracker's thoughts explored in a free indirect speech narrative style. These chapters alternated with ones in which Rick becomes the center of narration. However, I was ultimately intrigued enough by the relationship developed to set aside my sense that canine cognition is radically different from what Kadohata writes. She represents Cracker as having emotions and thoughts that are quite human-like, especially child-like. I haven't read it since I was, like, ten, but I think Cracker! might be an interesting companion text for Sheila Burnford's The Incredible Journey, a story about two dogs and a cat who make a cross-country (Canada) trek to find home. Burnford's novel is a popular one for the young adult set, and it was made into a two movies by Disney.
I've been meaning to read this book since it came out--I even bought it when it was only available in hardcover--but have only just now gotten around to reading it. Military dogs are fascinating examples of the kinds of relationships that humans have to dogs. A few years ago, I had a graduate student who wrote a paper in my "War and Colonialism in Asian American Literature" course about her father's military career as a dog handler stationed in Thailand. She even had a photograph of him with his dog. More disconcertedly, the infamous pictures of torture and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib featured the use of dogs as intimidation weapons.
This book is a bit of a departure from Kadohata's other work, which have focused on Japanese American children and their experiences in difficult times (illness and WWII internment, for example). Instead, Cracker! is about the eponymously-named German shepherd and his handler, Rick Hanski, as they train for and fight in the Vietnam War as a dog-human team. The human characters are all white Americans (some may be black, I suppose, though that fact is never highlighted), and aside from a brief appearance by an Asian American army doctor, the only other Asians in the book are the Vietnamese, either Vietcong or unaffiliated peasants. There is also the appearance of some Montagnards (Yards), an ethnic minority/Indigenous people of the mountains of Vietnam, who fight with the U.S. Special Forces.
The book ultimately is about the bond forged between Cracker and Hanski. Cracker is named after firecrackers, not the food-item nor the epithet for white people. Hanski trains Cracker to be a scout, a dog who searches out booby traps and hidden guerilla fighters. As a book about war, too, it is inevitably rather traumatizing in its depictions of skirmishes. It makes me wonder how "young adults," to whom this book is marketed, might process such a bleak narrative.
Kadohata seems very careful in her attempt to recreate the mindset of a young man (17!) who enlists to fight in the unpopular war as well as to sketch out the way soldiers related to one another. However, she never plumbs the depths of hatred that American soldiers must've felt for the Vietnamese enemy. There is, for example, absolutely no mention of any real epithets or racist descriptions of the Viet Cong (they are called, simply, "Charlie" for the radio letter code). Instead, Kadohata tries to represent how it might feel to experience warfare, to feel the rush of adrenaline in gunfights or the nausea of realizing the slim chances one has of surviving a mission. Additionally, little moments pop up where Kadohata seems intent on offering a slightly more Asian/Americanist perspective on the war, such as with the Asian American doctor and the Montagnards. Though they are only side characters, their presence signals a world that is more complicated than even what Hanski, a Scandinavian-American from small-town Wisconsin, might be able to recognize.
It took me awhile to get past Cracker's thoughts explored in a free indirect speech narrative style. These chapters alternated with ones in which Rick becomes the center of narration. However, I was ultimately intrigued enough by the relationship developed to set aside my sense that canine cognition is radically different from what Kadohata writes. She represents Cracker as having emotions and thoughts that are quite human-like, especially child-like. I haven't read it since I was, like, ten, but I think Cracker! might be an interesting companion text for Sheila Burnford's The Incredible Journey, a story about two dogs and a cat who make a cross-country (Canada) trek to find home. Burnford's novel is a popular one for the young adult set, and it was made into a two movies by Disney.
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