The Vietnam War in Literature and Film

The United States's involvement in the Vietnam War, which ended in April, 1975 when the last American soldiers were withdrawn, has been the subject of an extensive and diverse body of creative works in a variety of genres, including drama, fiction, film, and poetry. Many of these efforts share such themes as a search for meaning and authenticity as well as a lack of faith in traditional values and forms. Vietnam War poetry, for instance, is primarily confessional, sardonic, and empirical rather than idealistic or transcendent, and the poems generally seek to instruct rather than delight or provide the affirmation and closure typical of traditional lyrics. Common subjects include atrocities and mass violence as well as records of sensory details and character sketches that evoke the soldier's experience in Vietnam. Efforts to confront anguish, guilt, post-traumatic stress disorder, the conflict between poetic and political uses of language, and the reconciliation of memory with the present are among the poetry's common themes. W. D. Ehrhart's "The Generals' War," for instance, points with contempt at the ironic distinction between "paper orders" and their actual execution in the field, while Bruce Weigl's "Song of Napalm" shows wartime memories infiltrating a domestic scene. Commenting on the lessons Vietnam veteran poets have to offer, Lorrie Smith has stated: "By rooting Vietnam in our collective consciousness and connecting it to contemporary American life, these poets insist that their memories form part of our past, their anguish part of our present…. If we ask and listen and respond, we may finally relinquish our illusions of national innocence and personal neutrality and begin to chart a truer history of our involvement with Vietnam."

Vietnam War fiction shares many concerns with the poetry, particularly the search for meaning and the emphasis on finding explanations for the conflict's conduct and outcome. "Vietnam affected our literary imagination in ways that no other war has," Jerome Klinkowitz has stated, "and the result has been a body of fiction that relies on various innovative formal devices, similar to the experimental features that characterize other postmodern fiction, to capture a sense of that war's assault on language and on our sense of reality." Some of the more prominent writings about the war include Graham Greene's The Quiet American (1955), which focuses on American involvement before the introduction of troops; Robin Moore's The Green Berets (1965), one of the few positive portrayals of American involvement; Tim O'Brien's Going after Cacciato (1978), a formally innovative work that combines the protagonist's memories of combat with an imaginary journey to Paris as it dramatizes the main character's coming to terms with the horrors of war; and John Del Vecchio's The 13th Valley (1982), a naturalistic account centering on the fate of a single patrol. Other works, such as Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country (1984) and Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story (1986), address the problems of veterans attempting to reenter civilian life. In their discussions of Vietnam War fiction, critics have remarked on the appropriation and reinterpretation of American myths, particularly those associated with the American frontier—in Going after Cacciato, for instance, the protagonist "goes West" in search of the deserter Cacciato—and have argued that the most provocative fiction about the war ultimately goes beyond the story of combat in a foreign environment to offer insight into the evolution of American society during the 1960s and 1970s.

Discussion regarding drama and film about the conflict center on themes of alienation from society due to military training and combat experience and the reinterpretation of American myths. Considered the most prominent playwright on the...