[In the following essay, Stewart discusses the metaphorical implications of Stephen Wright's experimental style in Meditations in Green.]

Stephen Wright's 1983 novel Meditations in Green distinguishes itself as the work of a strikingly original literary talent. Like such works as Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato (1977), Michael Herr's Dispatches (1978), and Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers (1979) it possesses an overt sense of "literariness," of realized aesthetic intentions, not found in the majority of narratives written about the Vietnam War.¹ With a verbal virtuosity, which only occasionally overreaches, Wright transcends the type of war narrative that adheres to a more confined style of conventional realism. In so doing he is able to suggest an ample set of truths about the Vietnam War and American society with a vividness that more traditional narrative styles seldom have seemed to allow. This is not to say that Wright leaves his reader with no sense of authentic Vietnam experience. In fact Meditations in Green succeeds in depicting Vietnam's wastage at both a literal, descriptive level typical of traditional realism and a non-mimetic level that links the novel to more experimental fictions. When I speak of realism here, I mean to emphasize the documentary quality at the heart of much realism; I mean to specify passages and procedures whose sole or predominant import is to reflect accurately the phenomenal world—in this case "the way it was" in Vietnam. When I speak of non-mimetic passages and techniques, I mean those whose significance is to be found primarily at a metaphorical or an intratextual level, passages whose import is not to describe phenomena representative of what actually occurred in Vietnam.²

Like O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, Meditations in Green has a three-part narrative structure. It is divided into two readily identifiable story-lines; these appear alternately in lengths of several pages and are punctuated at irregular intervals by the fifteen short "meditations", which form the narrative's third part and give the book its title. These meditations center on some aspect of plant life and refer quite frequently to the opium poppy, a particular focus of attention for the addicted protagonist of both story-lines, Spec 4 James I. Griffin. The first of these story-lines follows the doings (and undoings) in Vietnam of Griffin's unit, the 1069th Military Intelligence Group, focusing on Griffin, but by no means exclusively on him. This story-line provides an extensive exposure to the details of army life in the rear during the middle or later stages of the Vietnam War. Although there is never any evidence that allows the reader conclusively to identify this story-line's third-person narrative voice, it occasionally seems to resemble Griffin recounting his own experiences in a detached, apparently omniscient manner.

Without a doubt, Griffin does narrate the second storyline, which follows his squalid and aimless life nearly seven years after his return from Vietnam. Living in a large urban area clearly meant to resemble New York City, he is still trying to reassemble the fragments of his life, splintered by the war. He returns to the drug habit—probably heroin—which he picked up in Vietnam, spends time with his plants, his plant therapist, and his girlfriend Huey, whose name reminds Griffin of the assault helicopters used in Vietnam.³ He also finds himself involved willy-nilly in the plot of his paranoid ex-GI buddy Trips to assassinate a man whom Trips mistakenly believes to be Sergeant Anstin, one of their noncommissioned officers in Vietnam. As Thomas Myers has pointed out, one of the thematic virtues of Meditations is its insistent linking of the war with already-existent features of American culture, such as the looming violence and incipient paranoia inherent in contemporary urban life. Such themes are most generously elaborated in the second story-line.

Meditations' organization is certainly nontraditional and may initially put off some readers. But it is not as difficult as it may sound at first, nor as difficult as several reviewers have claimed it to be. The meditations themselves are clearly labeled as such and are no more difficult to identify than the vignettes with which Ernest Hemingway preceded his short stories sixty years ago in In Our Time, a helpful literary model for reading these meditations. Undoubtedly, like Hemingway's vignettes, the meditations' function in the entire context is not without ambiguity, but that ambiguity includes a compensatory rich suggestiveness. Several of the novel's recurrent motifs, most consistently those of botany and drugs, are present in these meditations. They also call attention to the drug-influenced quality of the narrative, told by or focused upon Griffin, the self-proclaimed "genial story-teller, wreathed in a beard of smoke" (8). Nowhere is the linking of the botanical and drug motifs more direct than in the final three meditations, wherein an opium poppy is planted, harvested, and prepared for smoking.

Each story-line is also readily identifiable from its narrator (stated or implied) and setting, and neither is in itself complicated or obscure. Both are strictly chronological and episodic; the only plot involved in either is the very literal and simple plot that Trips concocts to assassinate Sergeant Anstin, and this does not even come into play until the novel's midpoint. The narrative structure of Meditations in Green reinforces some of Wright's themes, such as the fragmentary quality of Griffin's life and the constant intrusion of the past into his present. Vietnam remains the major fact of his daily life even though he has been back in "the world" for seven years. Wright's narrative scheme asserts that Vietnam experiences can be powerfully portrayed in nontraditional forms.

This multifaceted organization indicates the text's demands for an adaptable reader. Different sections and different events in Meditations in Green must be read according to a supple aesthetic, for their impact may reside at a number of different levels. In some sections, the significance lies on a realistic plane; in others, on a metaphorical level; in still others, it is the mix of realism and metaphor that is important. Certainly, there are many passages of traditional documentary realism whose main purpose is to let the reader know what it was like to be at certain places doing certain things in Vietnam, a fact that critics who condemn Wright for being too "fanciful" either overlook or dismiss. Even the military analyst and Vietnam veteran Tom Carhart interrupts his grumbling condemnations long enough to admit that Wright manages "descriptions of people, places and things [that] sometimes take one's breath away with vivid, almost electrifying imagery." Indeed, Meditations in Green contains passages that convey the literal experiential quality of Vietnam with graphic intensity, helping us to hear, to feel, to see what it was like to be on a mission in the jungle or to be confined to the unrelieved grind of a tedious job in a dehumanizing rear-echelon environment.

It is hard to think of a more gripping description, for example, of one soldier's physical sensations and emotions than the section in which Griffin "humps" through the jungle as a part of the mission to recover Major Quimby's and Kraft's downed helicopter. The usually very unmilitary Griffin ("I want to be a champion cringer" he declares early in the novel [23]) volunteered for this mission because "he wanted a purge, a . . . primitive sacrament if necessary" (275). But Griffin soon finds that the mission's hard physical labor dominates his thoughts, deflating his intentions to the mundane level of enduring the expedition:

Beyond the boulders there was a second stream, swifter and deeper than the first. Two men slipped under and were carried downcurrent into a rock dam. . . . Griffin kept a careful grip on the rope and safe on the opposite bank watched his pants deflate as the water poured out onto the ground. The rest of the day his feet seemed encased in warm sponges. Accustomed now to the muscular aches, the tightening of the nerves, the suffocating air, the claustrophobic botany, the sweat slick as slime on his face, he realized , . . that he could actually take this torture, that despite his intentions he truly was a solider, a fact he had never before been able to imagine. (278-79)

In this and other passages Wright evokes the feel of taking part in a search mission in the jungles of southeast Asia with splendid clarity and vividness. At the same time, he is able to turn his descriptions to good account by combining their sheer evocative power with another textual mission. In the above excerpt, for example, we share Griffin's insight into his martial capability and the uncomfortable and unexpected sense of self-esteem accompanying this insight. The heretofore relentlessly nongung-ho Griffin had not known about this part of himself.

Another section equally memorable for its vividness describes the unworldy Indiana boy Claypool put out on his first and only search mission, a mission which eventually leaves him in a nearly catatonic state of devastation. Not only are the rendering of individual emotions during battle itself and the quality of combat convincing and compelling—a feat which many books have attempted, and some have accomplished—but also the quieter inner battles of Claypool's reactions to learning about his assignment and the hours he spends awaiting his march and then "humping the boonies." When he does begin the mission, the soft, desk-jockey's discomfort he initially feels shortly swells into distress:

The patrol entered the jungle. At first Claypool was grateful for the shade. Five minutes later his uniform was heavy with sweat. He had difficulty breathing. It was like being locked in a sick room with a vaporizer jammed on high. A cloud of tiny bugs swarmed about his face, flew in and out his mouth. He spit out some, swallowed the rest. Fat drops of sweat slid across the lenses of his glasses, transforming the forest into a swirling blob of shimmery green. His pack grew heavier. The straps cut into his shoulders. His back ached. His feet hurt. He was afraid to check his watch for fear the four hours his body had ticked off were only thirty minutes by the clock. (153)

Claypool is about to experience suddenly the immediate horrors of a high-tech guerrilla skirmish, but it should be remarked that Wright's evocative powers are not spent upon the fire fights alone. He is able to convey not just the terror and confusion of battle, but the full panoply of physical and mental sensation of a GI humping the boonies.

Further, Wright skillfully conveys the boredom and dispiritedness of life in the rear, the life experienced by the vast majority of American servicemen in Vietnam. Indeed, the number of actual combat incidents depicted in the book is quite small in comparison to the number found in many novels about the war. Perhaps the unique strength of the novel's descriptive realism is its ability to portray the boredom and futility ever-present in the lives of many rear-echelon soldiers in Vietnam. In summary, there are so many nuggets of realism in Meditations that any accurate description of it must account for the convincing and evocative descriptions of Vietnam activities that it renders at a mimetic level.

Yet Meditations in Green is much more than a transcription of events, even though it renders them lifelike and palpable. Wright's larger intentions are often realized in the midst of his primarily descriptive passages; vivid depiction merges with metaphor. Certain passages assert themselves more as thematic suggestions than as accurate documentations. One such passage is woven into the search mission for which Griffin volunteers. We have seen that his boredom-inspired, romanticized hopes for a ritual cleansing are quickly knocked out from under him; he realizes almost immediately upon entering the jungle that "getting out alive was the major priority" (277). This is Griffin's first encounter with the environment he scrutinizes so closely on film as an "image interpreter" for military intelligence and his initial intimacy with the botanical world that is a central presence in the novel:

He felt like a spy in the camp of the enemy, a judge locked into a prison of those he had condemned. . . . And there was no end to it. You pressed through one layer to arrive at another just like it and then one beyond that and another and another like passing through doors in an estate of measureless dimensions. . . . Collapse and regeneration occurred at the same moment. Buckling walls and decaying furniture were repaired automatically here in this home of the future where matter itself was perpetually pregnant. (277)

We experience the jungle as literally stifling, overwhelming and fecund; at the same time it becomes a metaphor for Vietnam and the U.S. involvement there. The image of the Asian jungle as an endless mansion suggests America's long, futile war effort. In its resilient fruitfulness, the jungle is able to "repair" itself at an insurmountable rate, just as the Vietnamese enemy seemed to Americans to absorb devastating losses without defeat. A similarly organic metaphor for Vietnam is the description of the Ho Chi Minh Trail as "a living organism of strength and guile, slithering among the damage [of bombing runs], often filled in and repaired before the landing gear of the B-52s thumped down on Okinawa" (57).

Along with the sense of futility implicit in the jungle's "measureless dimensions," we see Griffin's almost epiphanic insight into his own connectedness with the enemy and his empathy for those destroyed by the U.S. military operations. He concludes that "the effort to bring down this house, of which [he] was a part, seemed at this close distance to be both frightening and ludicrous" (277). Griffin has only achieved this long-delayed realization by directly encountering the jungle. Previously he had been kept at a technological remove from the country, viewing it through the air reconnaissance photographs he interpreted.

The passages that are at once the most strangely suggestive and true-to-life are those that describe Griffin's drug experiences. Although these passages are divorced from ordinary experience and are narrated in highly unusual verbal combinations and a distinctive diction, their effect is to replicate Griffin's drug-induced dreams and druginfluenced perceptions of the phenomenal world:

I rode out under urine yellow skies into a stony desert, scrub grass and dust, crumbling brick buttes and rubble canyons. Trouble on the reservation. I crept up among weeds, peered through binoculars. Indians. Teepees and Cadillacs everywhere. . . . An iron horse screeched in overhead, showering grit and sparks. A fan began to open. . . . Red dots bloomed in the cracks between objects, swelled into suns that obliterated space until all I could see was a featureless screen of bloody light. (74-75)

Here the language conveys the brilliant other-worldliness of drug-induced experience. His "consciousness was shaken in a bag," Griffin states, "dumped into pandemonium" (75). The experience is vividly surreal, and the events literally implausible in the manner of dreams, but these events are metaphorically evocative of larger issues, both formal and historical.⁴

First, drug addiction is the central facet of Griffin's Vietnam and post-Vietnam life; therefore, it is important to feel and see its quality and to be able to compare the nature of drug-altered reality with the nature of "ordinary" reality.⁵ Much of our "genial storyteller's" narration is delivered, Thomas Myers reminds us, "in a hallucinatory haze," which may call into question the exactitude of Griffin's memory but "also heightens its colors and sharpens its contours" (210). Such passages make clear that the reality of Vietnam includes the fact of drug altered mind-states. Such passages also imply that verisimilitude may need to be achieved outside the bounds of a narrowly conceived realism delivered in conventional language.

Furthermore, the destruction due to addiction portrayed in the previous passage suggestively parallels the deteriorating U.S. military efforts in Southeast Asia. The apocalyptic nature of this destruction is alluded to in the imagery of the passage just quoted, as is the suggestion that the destruction is linked with archetypal American frontier experiences. Perhaps Vietnam is an extension of America's frontier-conquering spirit, complete with intrusive technology (the "iron horse") and genocidal notions of racial superiority ("trouble on the reservation" that will have to be snuffed out). That these national impulses are not only destructive of others, but reflexively destructive as well, is suggested in the drug dream's ending: "when all the images disappeared, so did I," the image-interpreter Griffin reports (75).

Many of the novel's metaphors and thematically significant images are of a piece with its large formal designs so that even in the first-person, post-Vietnam sections, the novel's most steadily realistic, Griffin's narration contributes to internal design. Some paragraphs narrated directly by Griffin concentrate on a given theme or motif that points at least as much to the structures of the text as to the phenomenal world. In the following example, Griffin is contemplating the graffiti on his apartment's walls, graffiti that he had tried to erase by painting over them:

At night, during periods of the month when the swollen moon peered anxiously in, the letters became visible again, rose to the surface like bloated corpses. So when Huey began to practice her calligraphy on the walls I did not object. Another layer of paint might help to up the interference level, scramble communications, generate some white noise in the text. Besides, I loved to watch Huey work. Her brush arm, flowing with an orchestra conductor's grace, weaves intricacies of calm as it soon filled acres of arctic space with the bold lines and squiggles of a language I could not understand. (73)

The emphasis on the written symbol here draws attention to Griffin's role as narrator and to the narration's own status as text. Wright could have had Griffin state discursively, straightforwardly, "I wanted rid of the past, but it kept intruding on me so much that I could not make connection with anything in the present," a legitimate narrative tactic, especially with such a sensitive and self-aware narrator as Griffin. Instead, the language is allowed to lead the reader to these conclusions, echoing as it does the novel's many other references to letters, initials, acronyms, codes, slogans, signs of all sorts, the very semiotic presence of Vietnam.

The calligraphy's power to "scramble communications" would seem on the surface to be at variance with its ability simultaneously to weave "intricacies of calm" for Griffin. Griffin may be functioning here in part as Wright's alter-ego, expressing a sort of metafictional paradox that at once indicates the difficulty of signifying the reality of Vietnam, while also suggesting that there is a helpful, perhaps healing, potential found within the elusive task of (re)creation that defines the making of fictions. (We might recall here that Griffin's middle initial is I.) Yet, this metafictional thread, however bright, is not the primary one in Meditations' verbal tapestry. At the same time that this passage underscores the novel's status as a text and alludes to the difficulties of describing a seemingly incomprehensible war, it most importantly also emphasizes Griffin's predicament. Both his need for healing and his difficulty in making communicative connection are problems that relate directly to his Vietnam service. We should remember that Griffin's military job was interpretation, the "reading" of photographs. What once was literally to be a matter of war-time expertise for Griffin, the ability to "read" Vietnam, now comprises the vehicle of the metaphor used to depict his alienation, his disconnection from the post-war world. Learning to "read" Vietnam may make it impossible to "read" back in "the world."

The recurrence of semiotic bits and allusions to semiotic matter are not the only regular leitmotif in Meditations. (I have already noted the steady appearance of the capital letter O.) The novel is also marked by a number of different opposites that sporadically contend against one another: urban versus rural, form and design versus formlessness and chaos, words versus experience, straight versus stoned. As in Michael Herr's Dispatches, there are many direct and indirect references to spooks, and here also to ghosts. Cameras, movie and cinematic equipment, film and photography abound. And, as the title suggests, vegetation plays a major role, with numerous botanical references—trees, plants, flowers, and the jungle—all playing a regular role not just in the meditations themselves, but in both the Vietnam and post-Vietnam storylines. Sometimes the novel's internal patterning obviously calls attention to itself, as in the example of the metafictional graffiti; at other times it is subtly woven into the text, requiring careful reading and exegesis. Wright's style, then, combines traditional documentary passages with a poetically intensive use of metaphor, and each of these aspects of his style is consistently present from beginning to end.

From page 287 onward, however, the novel's significance resides at an almost purely metaphorical level. At the same time that questions of literal truth and documentary authenticity arise with increasing frequency, these very notions become decreasingly germane to the text. This movement towards a concentratedly metaphorical level parallels one of the novel's most important themes, that of destruction. In both the Vietnam and post-Vietnam story-lines, the depiction of decline, deterioration, and disintegration is inextricably linked with Griffin's rapidly growing dependence on drugs. Griffin's ever-increasing use of drugs in Vietnam turns into abuse and eventually into the addiction with which he returns from the war. We notice that simultaneous to Griffin's personal deterioration events in the Vietnam sections grow increasingly strange to the point that they become more the stuff of fantasy, nightmare, or surrealism than of a conventionally realistic war story. Indeed, the narration reflects this increasing strangeness so that by page 260 the narrator reminds us of Griffin's illness-generated hallucinations only to remark that they never actually transpired except in his mind:

Between spasms he would dream about winter again and a helicopter would wobble out of the whiteness and it wouldn't be like dreaming anymore but like someone shaking him awake. . . . There was a fever like a machine gun. Countryside zipped past him like film on fast forward. His blanket was the texture of a flight suit. There was a big helmet on his head he couldn't get off. He was suffocating and the visor was so darkly tinted no one could see his face, no one knew who he was. . . . None of this ever really happened. (260)

Here, the symptoms of Griffin's illness appear in his fevered dreams in the guise of military gear and activities, including a nightmarish version of photographic interpretation, his own military specialty. But besides the impact of the surreal, febrile imagery and the brilliantly implied metaphors of the war as illness and illness as war, the passage's last sentence focuses on the question of plausibility, a question that the reader has had to entertain for some time and a question that will repeatedly assert itself in the novel's final pages.

The seemingly unexceptional statement that "none of this ever really happened," could well serve as the focal point for a central critical question raised by this novel. The word this apparently refers only to the events contained in Griffin's feverish dreams, none of which really did occur to him. Yet, the statement as a whole focuses attention on the status of other events depicted in the novel. To what degree are the events in Meditations to be taken as documentary-style realism that recreates typical actualities of Vietnam, and to what degree are they to be seen as predominantly metaphorical? No matter how one chooses to judge each event, it is worth noting here that the main accomplishment of the final chapters is to demonstrate that Griffin's overall experience of Vietnam was truly nightmarish.

As the novel draws to a close, the events it depicts seem to reside less and less at the level of documentary realism. From page 287 onward, the number of unusual, unlikely, and atypical incidents increases dramatically, especially in the Vietnam sections. The militant black GI Franklin goes AWOL, maybe even "over to the other side" if rumors can be believed, and his commanding officer is "secretly pleased"; Griffin is obviously stoned at work, but no one punishes him, helps him, or even seems to notice; eventually Griffin simply stops going to work with no apparent reprimand; a young Vietnamese is allowed to hawk drugs openly on a daily basis inside the U.S. military compound; the seriously disturbed, prize intelligence operative Kraft is left alone in a seemingly psychotic state of delusion for the final forty days of his tour because no one cares enough to bother seeking help for him; men do not know their defensive assignments during the final, apocalyptic enemy raid because their sergeant has never held any drills; Sergeant Mars coldbloodedly shoots his Vietnamese ally, Lieutenant Phan, in the face during a Vietcong attack. These events, judged against reported experiences of Vietnam, are of varying plausibility. Some of these incidents, if considered in isolation from the others, could be judged plausible if atypical. Such events did occur in Vietnam, but, even late in the war in support-oriented companies such as the 1069th of Meditations, these events should not be thought of as typical. Furthermore, the effect of piling them up in rapid succession ensures that their literal plausibility repeatedly will be called into question. But the significance of these events is not to be found on the literal level; in fact it scarcely matters whether or not they are typical of Vietnam.

These incidents and others like them surprise us by the straightforward manner in which they are presented. Terse and without evaluation by the narrator, they are invariably unflattering to the U.S. military in that they suggest an entire compound full of inefficient, careless, and uncommitted soldiers and officers. Because these incidents appear with such frequency and are narrated in such a matter-of-fact tone, naive readers might mistakenly believe that they are being presented as the usual experience in Vietnam. But coincident with this train of events in Griffin's burgeoning use of opiates—drugs more powerful and addicting than marijuana—a habit revealed in narrative sections that describe Griffin's feelings while stoned. We should note, too, the similarities between drug addicts and the disengaged behavior of the military men in Griffin's compound. Each is marked by a divorce from the mundane proceedings and accepted procedures and responsibilities occasioned by life's circumstances. For the drug addict this divorce is spurred by his craving for the drug and by the effects it has upon him. The men of the 1069th have been conditioned to indifference by the hopeless and meaningless environment in which they live (the very environment that has fostered the recreational or escapist use of drugs) and the pointlessly destructive enterprise of which they are a part.

The presence of the drug habit also expands rapidly in the final sections of Griffin's story in New York so that it becomes clear that the movement of both story-lines embodies exponential self-destruction. First, there is a slow erosion of Griffin and of traditional values depicted in language whose function is sometimes documentary and sometimes metaphorical; then there is an explosive sort of ruin depicted through events whose import is largely metaphorical. This is the ruin not only of Griffin but of the U.S. military and its efforts in Vietnam. To compound the disaster, Griffin repeats this destructive pattern seven years after his discharge.

Unlike more traditional Vietnam War narratives that consistently and unabatedly present themselves in the style of documentary realism, Meditations in Green has asked its readers to read with a dual eye, indeed with a multiple vision, from the outset. The proliferation of unusual incidents and the complete deterioration of Griffin is consistent with Wright's method. Because Meditations in Green has integrated traditional, descriptive realism with more experimental techniques from its outset, it has been building towards such a cluster of shocking incidents, preparing the way for our acceptance of these incidents on a metaphorical level. In great measure because of the multiple levels of reading that the novel calls for, it is able to suggest truths that the run-of-the-mill Vietnam narrative cannot render with equal power and vividness. We are ready to see the wealth of "unrealistic" incidents not as reflective of experiences necessarily typical for someone in Griffin's position in real-life Vietnam but as metaphors for the destruction wrought by military life during the Vietnam War on young men, on U.S. military institutions, and upon the countries involved in that war.

¹ John Newman's 1988 bibliography of Vietnam War literature lists 429 novels about Vietnam; subsequently published novels will need to be added. These novels are joined by no fewer than several dozen collections of oral histories and nonfiction memoirs. Even well-written, serious narratives frequently present themselves in a "tellit-like-it-was" realistic style that eschews experimentalism. Noteworthy exceptions (such as those named above) do exist, but the central quality of most Vietnam narratives is documentary.

² Among the effective narratives written along more rigidly realistic lines are Body Count (1973) by William Turner Huggett, Better Times Than These (1978) by Winston Groom, Fields of Fire (1978) by James Webb, and the nonfiction memoir A Rumor of War (1977) by Philip Caputo. Philip D. Beidler notes the strong documentary strain in Groom's and Webb's novels, their avoidance of unconventional passages and experimental prose, their impulse to demonstrate the typical "representativeness" of what their characters experience. They do not seek to "extend themselves into the domain of the 'new' novel of war as written by Heller, Vonnegut, and Pynchon" (169). What Beidler says about Groom and Webb holds equally true for Hugget and Caputo and serves as a further description of what I mean here by realism and traditional narrative styles.

³ The drug is never identified except as being DOUBLEOGLOBE brand, and those reviewers who have hazarded an opinion have identified it as heroin. This is plausible since Griffin is seen injecting himself in the latter stages of his tour of duty in Vietnam. The way this drug is smoked and the nature and quality of the dreams it produces could also indicate opium, although a smokeable form of heroin was available in Vietnam. The inordinate number of capital letters O standing alone at scattered places in the text (shades of Pynchon's Vs perhaps) point to some sort of opiate.

⁴ Surprisingly, such passages now call for defense against readers who have complained about the existence of a "dope and dementia" school of Vietnam literature. This phrase was coined by James C. Wilson in his 1982 study Vietnam in Prose and Film, and others have joined the attack on those Vietnam narratives and films that they see as residing in a "never-neverland," to use Wilson's term, that only "obscure[s] an event already obscure in the minds of most Americans" (44). Wilson sees a concentration upon drugs or other nonrational or irrational elements in texts as an "evasion" of responsibility by writers who concentrate upon such elements. Political opinions about the war aside, such critiques, it seems to me, hinge upon the belief that only a narrowly conceived realism can tell the truth, an aesthetic principle clung to by some with a tenaciousness hard to credit in 1992. Wilson does not himself discuss Meditations, which was published subsequent to his study, but it has fallen prey to such categorical condemnation and will no doubt continue to do so.

⁵ The ability to so compare is important because the novel, though not conclusive, leads one to believe that Griffin had overcome or held in abeyance an addiction some time subsequent to his discharge and thus chooses to risk becoming addicted once again. The reader needs such comparisons because, as Walter Kendrick rightly pointed out in his review of the novel, Wright himself offers no judgment on the matter, but leaves the reader to judge (7).

Beidler, Philip. American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1982.

Caputo, Philip. A Rumor of War. New York: Ballantine, 1977.

Clute, John. "The Lie Redemptive." Times Literary Supplement 13 July, 1984, 791.

Groom, Winston. Better Times Than These. New York: Summit, 1978.

Hasford, Gustav. The Short-Timers. New York: Harper and Row, 1979.

Herr, Michael. Dispatches. New York: Knopf, 1977.

Huggett, William Turner. Body Count. New York: Putnam's, 1973.

Kendrick, Walter. "Drugged in Vietnam." The New York Times Book Review 6 November 1983: 7, 24.

Myers, Thomas. Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Newman, John with Ann Hilfinger. Vietnam War Literature: An Annotated Bibliography of Imaginative Works About Americans Fighting in Vietnam. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1988.

O'Brien, Tim. Going After Cacciato. New York: Delacort, 1978.

Webb, James. Fields of Fire, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978.

Wilson, James C. Vietnam in Prose and Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1982.

Wright, Stephen. Meditations in Green. New York: Scribner's, 1983.