“The Accounting is Scrupulous”: No Country for Old Men and the Specter of the Vietnam War

This essay argues that Cormac McCarthy, in his novel, No Country for Old Men (2005), presents readers, however obliquely, with the dangerous legacy of American militarism and the doomed struggle to maintain one’s belief in “American exceptionalism” in the face of such bloodshed. I address three clusters or groupings of textual echoes of the Vietnam War that appear prominently in No Country for Old Men while discussing their significance. I conclude by reflecting upon the absence of almost all of these references in the Coen brothers’ otherwise superb, Academy Award - winning film adaptation (2007), particularly in light of the recent withdrawal from Afghanistan, and briefly consider the significance of that erasure.