American literature on the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War affected the entire American nation, and the volume of American writing on this subject is enormous.
American literature on the Vietnam War: until the war ended in 1975, I only read a few American literary books on this topic: Letters from Vietnam (1967); A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War (1966); the two novels I remember most are Sand in the Wind (1973) by Robert Roth (born 1948) - a former US Marine - a work of nearly 500 pages, describing 13 months in Central Vietnam of a platoon of American soldiers, the romantic love of an American lieutenant in Da Nang and Hue, a war of unclear meaning, heroes and victims, cruel soldiers, brave Viet Cong...
The Vietnam War marked an entire generation of Americans. Ending his book Dispatches (1977) with a touch of romance, Michael Herr (1940-2016) spoke for his generation: “That’s Vietnam, we were all there.” In 1990, 15 years after the war, the first reunion between Vietnamese and American writers and veterans took place in the enthusiastic atmosphere of those who had been on both sides of the war. I received a free book and talked with a series of writers and poets such as WD Ehrhart, Yusef Komunyakaa, Larry Heinerman, Larry Lee, Larry Rottman…
The Vietnam War also affected the American people, and the volume of American writing on this subject - research, reality and fiction - is huge. People who lived in Vietnam told about their life experiences, finding a novel form to explain Vietnam. The first work of this type was One Very Hot Day (1968) by journalist David Halberstam (1934-2007), which tells about the fear and heat that enveloped a group of American soldiers in an ambush... Larry Heinerman (1944-2014) wrote a work with the heat of the battlefield as early as 1974, and he won the National Book Award for Paco's Story (1987), which tells about the only survivor of a company of American soldiers, wandering like a soulless shadow. Born on the Fourth of July , 1976 by Ronald Lawrence Kovic (born 1946) depicts the tragedy of a soldier.
The work A Rumor of War (1977) by Philip Caputo (born 1941) - a Marine lieutenant, landed in Da Nang in 1965, later became a war correspondent. The work analyzes the penetration of cruelty into the human heart, reminding us of the story Heart of Darkness (1899) by Polish-born British writer Joseph Conrad (1857-1924).
Jerry Gustav Hasford’s (1947-1993) The Short-Times (1978) is a work that uses a biting sense of humor with the argument of some Pentagon officers: “To save the village, we have to burn it down.” Soldier Leonard Pratt waits for the weapons ceremony to kill his drill sergeant and then commits suicide. The final story is about a unit patrol in Khe Sanh; there are soldiers stationed at the base counting the days until they can go home. There are soldiers who make painful jokes like: “Hey, I don’t blame the dead. My best friends were among them,” or the new soldier to Vietnam: “Man, I don’t think you’re going to like this movie.”
Going after Cacciato (1978) is considered the best novel about the Vietnam War, the book won the National Book Award in the United States in 1979. The author Tim O'Brien (born 1946) is a soldier who was drafted. Vietnam for him is a planet as strange as the moon; he only wants to live to return home. The work describes the escape of Cacciato, a soldier who knows nothing about the war, and is wanted all over the world by a squad led by Corporal Paul Berlin. The writing style is influenced by Hemingway's style of recording unexplained impressions, almost surreal or "magical realism".
Dispatches (1977), a novel by Michael Herr, originates from the perception of the Vietnam War in a magical, real, yet dreamlike way. Many tragic or cruelly humorous scenes appear through the telegrams. The image of an American soldier who was ordered to carry an M16 to kill the Viet Cong was wounded, and when he returned, his mouth was wide open, his eyes rolled back, almost crazy. A young American soldier's body had a letter from the hospital pinned to his shirt: "The X-ray film has been developed. Based on the film, the hospital will soon diagnose the disease."
Vietnam was an early influence on the stage, especially with the trilogy of plays by David William Rabe (born 1940). The first, Sticks and Bones (1969), tells the story of a young man who returns from Vietnam blind, isolated from his family, and commits suicide. The second, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971), opens in a Saigon bar: drunken soldiers swear and brag about their lives; when Pavlo begins to tell his story, a Viet Cong grenade explodes and he is wounded and has to be led away by a black comrade. The third, Streamers (1976), depicts three soldiers, two white and one black, sharing a room in a camp, waiting to go to Vietnam. They compete to tell gruesome stories of the fighting that awaits them in the green jungles of Vietnam.
In addition to the novels mentioned above, here are some other works: The Armies of the Night (1968) by Norman Mailer (1923-2007); Fire in the Lake (1972) by journalist Frances Fitzgerald (born 1950); Viet Journal (1974) by James Jones; Indian Country (1987) by Philip Caputo ... These are not the last works about the Vietnam War because American history is divided into two periods: one period before and one period after the Vietnam War.
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