SOURCE: Carter, Susanne. “Variations on Vietnam: Women's Innovative Interpretations of the Vietnam War Experience.” Extrapolation 32, no. 2 (summer 1991): 170-83.

[In the following essay, Carter focuses on the writings of female authors who have experimented with various literary modes in their interpretations of the Vietnam War experience.]

As the Vietnam War literary genre continued to evolve, writers of both genders have experimented with literary expression in search of the most representative interpretation possible for a war that still begs for definition, where absolutes appear to be missing and reality remains obscure. Of all literary expression, innovation offers the greatest freedom to explore such an elusive war in every conceivable direction. Although they are a minority, several women writers of the Vietnam War experience have broken with the tradition of realism predominant in women's war writings to express their impressions of the Vietnam War experience with more innovative variations in both form and content.

In his essay “The Literature Born of Vietnam,” Stephen McCabe maintains that the Vietnam War “defies conventional narrative techniques every bit as strongly as the conflict defied conventional moral, political, and military solutions” (30). If there is a strong unifying theme to this diverse literature, he writes, it is the “abundance of senselessness—of meaninglessness” that is pervasive (31). Similarly, John Hellmann criticizes realistic fiction in his essay “The New Journalism and Vietnam” as “too restricted in its techniques to convey the hallucinatory ambience of such a war” as Vietnam (142). To interpret this war calls for writers to employ the “most sophisticated techniques of fictive narrative,” Hellmann contends, not to restrict themselves to the “plausible world” of reality, but to journey into their own subconscious. Philip Beidler, author of American Literature and the Vietnam Experience, describes this as “a self-reflexive attempt to comprehend what can be known of the war within a dimension of consciousness at once incorporating both memory and invention” (141-42). The Vietnam War writer, bereft of a mission of meaning, discovers himself placed in the role of a sculptor who attempts to shape the experience through the “transforming power of art,” as Beidler explains: “It would become the task of the Vietnam writer to create a landscape that never was, one might say—a landscape of consciousness where it might be possible to accommodate experience remembered within a new kind of imaginative cartography endowing it with large configurings of values and signification” (16). A war described by Beidler as “always in a single moment, dreadful, funny, nightmarish, ecstatic” provides rich resources for experimentation in literary expression. “In its moment of high drama, it was always its own best and worst parody,” he writes (12).

In Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam, Thomas Myers also supports the belief that literary interpretation of the Vietnam War resists traditional modes of expression: “Fragmented, surreal, episodic, ungiving to singular readings, and resistant to convenient closure, the war seemed not the extension of an established tradition but something more akin to a collective nervous breakdown, an overload of the mythic circuitry that the managers sought to thread through the paddies and villages of an unreceptive culture” (143-44). Donald Ringnalda notes the absurdity of trying to reveal the Vietnam War experience through conventional literary means in his essay “Fighting and Writing: America's Vietnam War Literature,” because “nothing in Vietnam corresponded to those means” (36). He explains:

In military operations there was no front, no rear, no sense of progression; poof—there goes the structure of the conventional narrative. GIs rarely even dared to become close to another highly expendable person, and the enemy was indistinguishable from the ally; poof—there goes the matrix of character. The days numbered down, not up; poof—there goes the linear conceived plot. Events did not inexorably move toward a necessary and meaningful collision; poof—there goes the conventional climax.

(36)

The majority of women novelists and short story writers of the Vietnam War experience have continued to write in the tradition of realism characteristic of most women's war fiction of this century. Recurring themes in women's Vietnam War literature include the effect of war on male-female relationships (Laurie Alberts's “Veterans” and Julia Thacker's “A Civil Campaign”); the influence of war on changing family dynamics (Laura Kalpakian's “Veteran's Day” and Stephanie Vaughn's “Kid McArthur”); the combat experience (Susan Schaeffer's Buffalo Afternoon and Mary Ritchey's “Hunt and Destroy”); the postwar readjustment of returning veterans (Joyce Carol Oates's “Out of Place” and Corinne Brown's Body Shop); and the impact of this war on succeeding generations (Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country and “Big Bertha Stories”). Above all, these literary works illustrate the victimization of women during war, whether or not they are direct participants—the wives, mothers, sisters, and lovers whose suffering is more internal and less visible than the veterans', but no less intense or valid.

Although their chosen themes differ little from realistic writers, innovative writers reach beyond the confines of realism to expand the possibilities of interpretation in their individual novels and short stories. Foremost among these writers is Jayne Anne Phillips, whose novel Machine Dreams spans two wars and represents an experimentation in form. Former Vietnam War nurse Elizabeth Ann Scarborough has written an essentially factual memoir of her war experience in The Healer's War, excepting part two of three in the novel, which is a flight of fantasy that contrasts sharply with the realism controlling most of the narrative. Karen Joy Fowler's short story “Letters From Home” is one woman's fantasy of the war experience from the perspectives of both an imaginary combat soldier and a civilian longing to know the truth of the experience. Ursula Le Guin depicts a recurrence of the Vietnam War on another planet in a future century in her science fiction novella The Word for World is Forest. Both Susan Casper in “Covenant With a Dragon” and Karen Joy Fowler in “The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things” have also chosen the science fiction genre to illustrate their short story interpretations of the postwar readjustments of Vietnam War veterans. Kate Wilhelm uses speculative fiction to depict a reenactment of the My Lai Massacre on American soil in her short story “The Village.” Emily Prager experiments with postmodern satire in her bizarre short story “The Lincoln-Pruitt Anti-Rape Device,” offering a solution to the war as absurd as the war itself. Although their paths of deviation from the norm of realism may differ, all of these women offer individual interpretations of war entirely appropriate for a war as nebulous and incomprehensible as Vietnam.

Machine Dreams, an experimental novel in form, spans four decades and covers the history of an American family and the service of a father and son in World War II and Vietnam. The novel is a compendium of letters, journal entries, flashbacks, personal narratives, and flows of stream of consciousness, all given voice by four family members. The only real continuity in the novel comes from the dual motif of dreams and machines that loosely hold it together. Machine Dreams “captures the way the war seemed to shatter all the given values, rendering all the customary things unstable,” through a series of childhood images of dreams and machines that are fanciful and intriguing in youth, but acquire sinister proportions in the hands of adults who wield their power in a new form of lethal weaponry (Wolf 258). Billy—the drifter, the pretender, the make-believe airplane pilot—becomes another MIA in Vietnam, shattering whatever continuity was left in the Hampson family's divided household. His sister, Danner, who continually relives their childhood fantasies in a desperate attempt to keep Billy's image alive, becomes an embittered, isolated victim of the war, unable to cope with the present because she is so emotionally burdened by the past. Danner, too, could be considered “missing in action” as she floats in a time warp of unreality in a futile search for the only close human tie left in her life, now only a phantom of her imaginative play (Bradley 17). Critic Susan Wolf characterizes Machine Dreams as a “meditation on loss, the unresolvable loss of unfulfilled lives, of a family amputated by a loss that cannot be named” (259). The discontinuous narrative style of Machine Dreams is an innovative break with the continuity of most realistic fiction. In the novel, Phillips does not attempt to simulate reality, only to catch glimpses of it from four different perspectives—veteran and civilian—of a family suffering its own internal conflicts as well as those imposed by war. Instead of clear definitions, the novel offers blurred impressions. The sustained, hazy, dreamlike tone of magical but ominous fantasy gives readers the sensation of floating through the novel's lyrical prose. By interacting with the novel's four voices, readers give the narrative whatever realistic cohesiveness seems necessary.

The Healer's War, written by former Vietnam War nurse and fantasy writer Elizabeth Scarborough, is a curious blend of fiction based on fact, fiction that dissolves into pure fantasy. Part one, “The Hospital,” reads like a nonfiction account of a Midwestern nurse's transformation from naive idealist to cynical realist when she confronts the horrors of Vietnam: napalmed children, maimed civilians, frazzled medical teams, and cocky American soldiers who assume nurses who volunteer for Vietnam are either lesbians or whores. Part three reads like the typical script of a returning Vietnam veteran: the anticipation of returning to the “World,” the lack of decompression and transition back into civilian life, the shock of the comparative triviality of American society, the loneliness of incompatibility, and finally, the alluring temptation of suicide as an escape. But part two, “The Jungle,” is as unrealistic as the first and third sections of the novel are realistic. When the stressful reality of war nursing brings Kitty close to a psychological breakdown, Scarborough allows pure fantasy to intervene and sends her protagonist on a hallucinatory trek through the jungles of Vietnam with an amulet that empowers her to see brilliant auras reflecting changing emotional states as her only protection. The innovative perspective in this section allows Scarborough to project both inside and outside views of the war, from both male and female viewpoints, as Kitty becomes an unwilling participant in war and discerns that she must adopt the nontraditional role of soldier as well as her accustomed role of nurturer of the wounded if she is to survive her first encounter with the enemy. To interpret the fantasy of Kitty's imaginary trek in this part of the novel, the narrator assumes the roles of multiple personae, offering various impressions of the conflict as it progressively grows more absurd.

When the war comes too close, Scarborough allows her narrator to back away and mentally escape the trauma of a direct confrontation. Kitty becomes the detached observer who moves away and comments on what is happening to her at the moment. When Kitty's own fantasy becomes psychologically overwhelming, she becomes the dreamer who fantasizes in order to escape her own fantasy. Instead of the war taking place in Vietnam, Kitty dreams a half-waking nightmare of the Vietcong torching her Kansas hometown. The terrified children hide in the gullies and watch their houses being consumed by flames, a reverse impressionistic dream of what Vietnamese children witnessed daily during the war in their homeland. And when the tragic becomes too melancholy, comic balance is offered. Several times Kitty mentally constructs letters to her mother, distorting the truth somewhat to perhaps shelter her mother and convince herself her situation is not quite as hopeless as it appears. She writes: “We've been spending the day on this wonderful nature hike. Your African violents would really take to this country. The place looks like one big greenhouse” (188).

Through the innovation of diverse perspectives, Scarborough also allows room to question this undeclared war of uncertainty and atrocity using her protagonist as the moral conscience of war without heavy-handed didacticism. The Vietnamese colonel who leads Kitty on a forced march north makes a strong antiwar, anti-American declaration: “You come up North with us, you talk to your American press, you tell them that your men rape our women, murder them, but we treat you with respect. You tell them how wrong this war is. You say to them that your healing hands can make no difference when for every person you save, thousands die” (249). The mosaic composite of war offered in this part of the novel is an amalgam of fantasy, romanticism, postmodern commentary, and impressionism created to offer an alternative to the realism that controls the narrative in the beginning and ending sections. Kitty's hallucinatory adventure may serve to save her sanity by offering a respite from the intensity of nursing during an emotionally exhausting war, but the experience also serves as an introduction to the insanity of war presented in the guise of fantasy. The Healer's War thus innovates with elements of modernism and postmodernism, blending reality and fantasy to assemble an interpretation of one woman's encounter with war.

Karen Joy Fowler experiments with a fantasy of imagined war experience in the short story “Letters From Home.” The structure of the story is actually an extended letter addressed to a soldier who went to Vietnam not because he supported the war but because he believed he might “have some impact from within” to end the conflict. The narrator never learns his fate, for he never writes, as promised, from Vietnam. In her continued letter to him, she juxtaposes her own life's story of war resistance on the homefront with what she fantasizes his life must have been like during and after the war. In her fantasy she attributes the growing dissatisfaction among Vietnam grunts to him and suggests the “Vets against the war” was probably his idea (80). At one point she imagines him in an Armageddon scene where war has reduced all of life to nothingness:

You are on the surface of the moon and the air itself is a poison. Nothing moves, nothing grows, there is nothing, but ash. A helicopter has left you here and the air from its lift-off made the ash fly and then resettle into definite shapes, like waves. You don't move for fear of disturbing these patterns, which make you think of snow, of children lying on their backs in the snow until their arms turn into wings. You can see the shadows of winged people in the ash.

(86)

But her imaginings are only conjecture, and it continues to disconcert her—even fifteen years later as the story is written—that she never learned his version, or any other veteran's version, of the truth of the war. The thirty-five-year-old wife and mother-narrator of this story is symbolic of many of the Vietnam generation still groping for meaning and context of this ambiguous war in their lives, even if they never experienced direct combat. The narrator defends the members of her generation who did not go to war against her imagined accusations of the veteran that they somehow “escaped” the experience: “Perhaps we lacked imagination. Perhaps we lacked physical courage. Perhaps our personal stakes were just not high enough. We were women. We were not going to Vietnam” (79); “Some of us were killed. (And the numbers are irrelevant). Some of us went to Canada and to Sweden. And some of us had a great time. But it wasn't a clean escape, really, for any of us” (88).

In an introduction to the story, Fowler writes, “I do think those of us around my own age were defined by Vietnam in ways those much older and much younger will never understand. Which leaves us only each other to turn to for understanding” (70). This extended letter is this Vietnam-generation author's “gesture of reconciliation,” written in an innovative style that reflects the disillusionment of many who may not have fought during the Vietnam War but were deeply affected by their encounter with it.

For many Vietnam War writers, science fiction seems the only logical mode of representation for such an illusory experience. In many ways “Vietnam was science fiction,” David Bradley declares in his review of the short story collection In the Field of Fire:

The landscape was alien. … The people were alien-seeming—and certainly we, with our cold beer and napalm and helicopters, must have seemed to the Vietnamese to be an invading horse of bug-eyed monsters. … The place seemed like an alternate universe, where all the sanity, rationality, logic just seemed to not work.

(26)

Critic Ihab Hassan, who analyzes postwar science fiction in Contemporary American Literature, proposes that science fiction offers the capability to explore “both the creative and destructive potentials of current experience,” thus making it a logical choice for the representation of war. Ursula Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler, and Susan Casper have all chosen the science fiction/fantasy genre for their fictional representations of the Vietnam War experience.

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest depicts a Vietnam in a future century on another planet. In this science fiction novella, the planet Earth has been reduced to a “cement desert by human unconcern for ecology; and wood, which is now unobtainable on Earth, has become more precious than gold” (Bucknall 96). Earth is now sending soldiers to the planet Athshe to colonize the heavily forested planet and export its most precious resource—trees, which have “subjective spiritual value” for the inhabitants of Athshe, but only “political and commercial value as products” for the invading American troops (Spivack 68). This novella is an expression of fictional protest against the Vietnam War, prophetic in its pessimistic prediction for the ecological future of planet Earth and its coming generations. By casting the setting into the future, Le Guin places the war in historical context as a misguided, tragic example of American aggression imposed upon passive victims whose land and lives were raped unmercifully. Science fiction serves as Le Guin's medium of innovation to project readers into the future of war so that the inhumanity of past wars—in this instance, Vietnam—does not fade from our consciousness.

Obvious similarities exist between Athshe and Vietnam. The Athsheans are by nature a peaceful people, but their nonviolent philosophy of life is shattered by the hostile Americans, led by a captain who regards the natives as a subhuman species and upholds the contention that “the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he's just had a woman or just killed another man” (81). In an obvious parody of the Vietnam War, the American soldiers are supplied with drugs and prostitutes (called the “Recreation Staff”) from earth and encouraged to engage in homosexuality—anything to keep the troops content. Other similarities to Vietnam exist in the numerous land mines and underground tunnels, helicopters continuously combing the sky, and the presence of monstrous, oversized weaponry as ill-suited to Athshe as was the technologically advanced but totally ineffective American weaponry sent to fight a guerilla war in the jungles of Vietnam. The most obvious parallels, however, are the defoliation and ecological rape of the lush Athshe landscape and the violation of its peaceful inhabitants.

Le Guin herself was an active participant in nonviolent demonstrations against the Vietnam War during the 1960s. One of the few pieces of Vietnam War fiction published by a woman while the war was ongoing, The Word for World is Forest was written while Le Guin was living in London as an emotional catharsis for her angry disapproval of American involvement in Southeast Asia and “the victory of the ethic of exploitation,” which, to her, seemed as “inevitable as it was disastrous” (Bucknall 100). Perhaps living in a foreign country at peace while her own country was at war gave Le Guin a displaced frame of reference that, combined with her affinity for the science fiction form, made a depiction of war in the future seem the medium most suitable for a critical, innovative analysis of the controversial war that divided American allegiances during the late 1960s.

Karen Joy Fowler also uses the science fiction genre in her short story “The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things” to examine the profound guilt of a former lover of a Vietnam War casualty who terminated their relationship when he left for Vietnam because she opposed his involvement in the war and predicted his death. Years later she has never reached reconciliation for her part in his death. Through intense therapy and hypnosis, Daniel is reborn in Miranda's mind, and they are allowed to continue their former relationship in an attempt to resolve lingering conflicts. Miranda insists, “The war's over now,” but Daniel reminds her, “Wars never end. … Do you imagine for one minute that it's over for me” (130). Most irreconcilable to Miranda is Daniel's confession that he killed a six-year-old Vietnamese boy. As she relives the moment during therapy, Miranda witnesses the murder, powerless to intervene, and is forced to realize she cannot change the past.

Miranda had never imagined a war could be so quiet. Then she heard the chopper. And she heard Daniel. He was screaming. He stood right next to her, beside a pile of sandbags, his rifle stretched out before him. A small, delicately featured child was just walking into Miranda's view, his arms held behind him. All Miranda had to do was lift her hand.

(135)

To Daniel's plea for forgiveness, she responds with a question: “Was it a crime of cowardice or of cruelty? I'm told you can be forgiven the one, but not the other” (135). Miranda also foresees the death of Daniel in a symbolic fantasy, “A bird flew over them in a beautiful arc, and then it became a baseball and began to fall in slow motion, and then it became death and she could plot its trajectory. It was aimed at Daniel whose rifle had reappeared in his hands” (135). Using fantasy and psychotherapy techniques, this innovative story explores the feelings of those who never participated directly in the war but nevertheless must confront unresolved emotional conflicts and guilt that linger from the war. The fantasy elements of this story allow Miranda to explore her past and face the painful realities of war.

Susan Casper's science fiction story “Covenant With a Dragon” explores the feelings of a Vietnam War veteran trapped between two cultures and his emotional commitments to both his wartime and postwar families. Although he establishes an American family of his own following the war, he continues to fantasize about the woman he loved in Vietnam fourteen years ago and the daughter he fathered, whom he assumed was killed with her mother during the war. When he meets an orphan refugee of her age and sees his own reflection in her face, he realizes that this may be his daughter and that his Vietnamese ties have an equally strong claim on his devotion and sense of responsibility. “It's a terrible thing for a child to be without a father,” he concludes as he goes to claim the young woman he believes to be his daughter (322). It is equally difficult for a father to live without his daughter, he realizes, even one he has never known. Torn between his American wife's blatant prejudice against the Vietnamese people and her unpredictable reaction to his wartime liaison and his desire to know and nurture his Vietnamese daughter, Richard becomes involved in a conflict so stressful it culminates in his experiencing hallucinatory visions of fighting dragons that—although violent and disturbing—nevertheless, help guide him toward a resolution as the two dragons merge into one before his eyes:

They rolled, two distinct forms, across the living room floor. Then, suddenly, an even stranger thing happened. They stood, facing each other, paws raised and flailing, and yet, Richard realized, they were no longer fighting. They began to merge, sinking each into the other like one creature falling into a mirror. They slowly came together while there was only one great white dragon that thinned and faded even as he watched, until there was nothing left but a thin white mist … and then even that was gone.

(324)

This story portrays the emotional burden of the veteran whose allegiances are torn between his wartime and postwar relationships. The realization that these relationships—strained by cultural barriers and biases—may not be able to coexist peacefully presents the veteran with difficult choices. Through the medium of science fiction/fantasy, Casper allows the veteran to enter another dimension of experience to visualize his choices symbolically and resolve his torn commitments.

Kate Wilhelm, however, finds the scope of science fiction too broad for her kind of innovation. Instead, she writes what she calls “speculative fiction,” an innovative mode that “involves the exploration of worlds that probably never will exist,” but “for one reason or another they are worlds we most dread or yearn for” (Introduction 12). Wilhelm claims her short stories are not realistic in a “materialist” sense but are “always very real psychically. And the psychic landscape has a more enduring reality than suburbia U.S.A. can ever achieve” (Introduction 14). “The Village” speculates what it would be like to be an unsuspecting small town Southerner “when the wrong village and the wrong war meet” (Introduction 12). In a style similar to Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery,” written three decades earlier, this story manifests a foreboding sense of doom that climaxes in atrocity. The structure of the plot oscillates back and forth between perspectives, abruptly switching from the complacency of the village citizens carrying on their daily ritualistic routines—garden club meetings, shopping sprees, gossip exchanges—as if defiant of the inevitable, to the assertive search-and-clear maneuver of American troops approaching the village with orders to “clean out.” While Mildred Carey argues with the local grocer over the exorbitant “sixty-nine a pound” price of tomatoes, one of the infantrymen on the road reveals his callous conditioning to the task ahead when he admits, “One fucken village is just like the others” (“Village” 277).

This fantasy was created even as the Vietnam War was being fought. Miz Carey's son is a short-timer with seven weeks left to serve in Vietnam. As she bemoans the drug use and lengthening hair of the local boys to a neighbor, she confesses ironically (in view of her pending fate) that her son is “probably safer over there than at one of the universities right now” (“Village” 280). The similarities between the story's setting—and even title—and Vietnam, and My Lai in particular, are evident. American soldiers in the tropical climate suffer from jungle rot and indifference to their fellow man. Helicopters “throb” above “as if the clear blue sky had loosened a rain of them” (“Village” 284). The villagers about to be butchered are not American citizens—they are “gooks” and “slopes.” As the massacre begins, a woman is tied to the porchrail of a real estate office and repeatedly raped. One child flees down an empty street, but “after an appreciable pause there was a volley of shots and the child was lifted and for a moment flew” (“Village” 287). As the village is abandoned, the victims are led to a ditch by the highway and murdered en masse, in similar fashion to the way 347 Vietnamese villagers, mostly women and children, were actually slaughtered in another village on the other side of the world in 1969 (Fitzgerald 494).

Using innovative methodology similar to the style of Le Guin, Wilhelm seems to be warning with her “speculation” that Americans who can destroy the environment, accept orders without objection, and ignore the obvious signs of degradation around them are equally capable of committing an atrocity of the gravity of My Lai on their own soil—as the Kent State Tragedy of 1970 so aptly proved. Anyone is capable of being caught in the “wrong village” during the “wrong war” if war is accepted as a natural consequence of our territorial nature instead of questioned as an aberration of an inherent instinct for survival of the species. For Wilhelm, this insight is best couched in the speculative mode, which allows her to juxtapose the casualness of the townspeople with the compelling drive of the mass murderers dehumanized by the military machine and to draw distinct parallels between this fictionalized incident and the My Lai Massacre. Fantasy distorts the reality just enough that the implied possibility of the tragedy—similar to the stoning at the climax of “The Lottery”—makes as strong an impression as the shock of the tragedy itself.

One of the most bizarre innovative short stories written by a woman to arise from the Vietnam War is Emily Prager's “The Lincoln-Pruitt Anti-Rape Device.” The dense texture of macabre satire that permeates this story and its total lack of connection with reality place it among the innovative writings of Vietnam literature that could be considered postmodern. In this story the Vietnam War is revisited, this time with women as combatants armed with an ingenious, if sadistic, invention for killing Vietcong in the form of a microchip-energized gadget which works like a diaphragm but includes a probe, shredder, and laser, all designed to work together to inflict instant death on penetrators. The inventor of this unique weapon, Major Victoria Lincoln-Pruitt, explains its appeal for the female warrior, “Not only does it remove from the female soldier's mind the helpless terror of rape, and its concomitant submissive attitudes and postures, it actually places her in the position of being eager for intercourse with the enemy” (155).

For a war that increasingly lost meaning and gained absurdity, Prager proposes a solution equally ludicrous. If the men have failed, let the women take over and wield their vaginal wrenches. Despite their eagerness for the joy of the kill, the women soldiers (a troop of former prostitutes disguised as Buddhist nuns) also fail. At the very height of feminist power, when an opportunity presents itself for women to take revenge upon males for every rape that ever violated a sister, the women cannot follow through because they have, ironically, become estranged from the very part of their anatomy that is at the center of power and retaliation at the moment. They have lost their ability to have orgasms—a necessity to activate their weaponry. One soldier confesses, “I think I've always been afraid if I came I might die” (168). The phallic Big Bertha machinery that dominated offensive male strategy during previous wars in this century has been reduced to a tiny weapon inserted vaginally in women. When women, who have been historically excluded from the front lines of combat, assume the role of warring aggressors, the act of creation reverses itself to become an equally passionate act of destruction, but the women ultimately lack the will to carry it out.

This short story, so radically different from the majority of Vietnam War stories written by women—most of which follow the modernist tradition of depicting women on the homefront, not as combatants, and adhere to realism in tone and detail—is a sustained, satirical lampoon that is simultaneously antiwar, antimale, antisex (or how American society has perverted sex), and antirealism. By placing women in combat, with such ludicrous weaponry, Prager treads on new and innovative fictional territory. She is an experimentalist with a radical feminist point of view and sardonic sense of humor. Like many innovative writers, she would rather exploit and exaggerate than try to make sense out of an experience, especially one as elusive as the Vietnam War. Her brand of innovative fiction brings the comic and ironic modes together in a satirical and cerebrally humorous combination that is unique among women writers.

As more and more contemporary women have offered fictional interpretations of the Vietnam War experience, they have expanded the traditional boundaries of realism that formerly dominated war fiction while narrowing the gender gap of war writing previously dominated by male writers. The Vietnam War is even now being recast into what Jean Bethke Elshtain describes as a “story of universal victimization” in her book Women and War—a pervasive story with cross-cultural repercussions for both soldiers and civilians of both genders (218). This broadened definition has attracted more women to write war fiction and create more innovative short stories and novels than in any previous war in this century.

For the women writers who have travelled beyond the traditional scope of realism in innovative directions to create their individual interpretations of war, experimentation has not diluted their antiwar sentiments; it has projected them into new modes that enable readers to view war and its horror in ways never before envisioned. Whether they have experimented with fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction, or postmodern satire, these writers comprehend that coming to any understanding of the Vietnam War experience requires more than a representation of reality in fiction; it requires that we examine the experience from all possible points on the literary spectrum—even the postmodern extreme, which pushes literature to its very limits of absurdity, where war remains an inexhaustible topic for exploration. Elshtain describes war as “an extraordinary laboratory; a high-pitched human experiment, dreadful and sublime, coarse and ennobling” (212). This laboratory has proved to be full of innovative possibility that continues to bear fruit for both men and women Vietnam War writers in search of fictional variations in their continued quest to comprehend and interpret the war experience.

Works Cited

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

Bradley, Christie. What Happened on the Inside: Women Write About Vietnam. ERIC, 1988, ED 296-340.

Bradley, David. “War in an Alternative Universe.” Rev. of In the Field of Fire. Eds. Jeanne Van Buren Dann and Jack Dann. New York Times Book Review (May 3, 1987): 25.

Brown, Corinne. Body Shop: Recuperating From Vietnam. New York: Stein and Day, 1973.

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Fitzgerald, Frances. Fire in the Lake. New York: Vintage, 1972.

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———. “Letters From Home.” In the Field of Fire. Eds. Jeanne Van Buren Dann and Jack Dann. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1987.

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Mason, Bobbie Ann. “Big Bertha Stories.” Unwinding the Vietnam War. Ed. Reese Williams. Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1987.

———. In Country. New York: Harper and Row, 1985.

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

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Out of Place.” The Seduction and Other Stories. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1975.

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Ringnalda, Donald. “Fighting and Writing: America's Vietnam War Literature.” Journal of American Studies 22 (1988): 25-42.

Ritchie, Mary. “Hunt and Destroy.” New American Review 6 (1969): 64-68.

Scarborough, Elizabeth Ann. The Healer's War. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

Schaeffer, Susan Fromberg. Buffalo Afternoon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.

Thacker, Julia. “A Civil Campaign.” New Directions in Prose and Poetry. Ed. J. Laughlin. New York: New Directions, 1982.

Vaughn, Stephanie. “Kid MacArthur.” Prize Stories 1986: The O'Henry Awards. Ed. William Abrahams. Garden City: Doubleday, 1986.

Wilhelm, Kate. Introduction. The Infinity Box. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

———. “The Village.” The Infinity Box. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

Wolf, Susan. “Women and Vietnam: Remembering in the 80's” Unwinding the Vietnam War. Ed. Reese Williams. Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1987.