Vietnam War (and Antiwar) Literature 11
working as a teacher and humanitarian in Vietnam, provides him a perspective
unavailable to soldier veterans. The poems collected in After Our War (1974) stand
out for their sympathetic portrayals that contrast the beauty of Vietnam village
life with the war’s disruption of it.
Other writers explore the often unseen or untold aspects of war, presenting
perspectives influenced by race, ethnicity, and/or gender. The poetry of Yusef
Komunyakaa shows the complexity of emotions felt by African American ser-
vicemen. An established poet by the time he published his first war poems, col-
lected in Dien Cai Dau (1988—the title is taken from a Vietnamese expression
roughly meaning “crazy”)—Komunyakaa explores experiences with racism and
relationships with Vietnamese civilians that lead to complex responses ranging
from identification and ambivalence to abhorrence. Other voices that often go
unheard include those of female veterans such as Lynda Van Devanter, whose
memoir Home before Morning (1983) recounts her one-year service as a nurse
in Vietnam. Also important are the perspectives of those who did not serve but
were deeply affected by war. In the novel In Country (1985) Bobbie Ann Mason
reflects on the legacy of the war for younger generations. Taking place during
the summer of 1984, In Country features teenager Samantha Hughes’s attempt
to deal with her father’s death in Vietnam—which happened when she was in
the second grade. Sam’s attempts to understand the war through popular culture
and interaction with her veteran uncle, Emmett, dramatize the importance of
the Vietnam War on the national and personal history of all Americans. Maxine
Hong Kingston also dramatizes this importance in The Fifth Book of Peace (2003),
which combines memoir and fiction in its exploration of loss and healing.
Recent writings about America’s involvement in Vietnam pay more attention
to Vietnamese and Vietnamese immigrant perspectives. Each of the stories that
make up the Pulitzer Prize–winning collection A Good Scent from a Strange Moun-
tain (1992) by veteran Robert Olen Butler features a Vietnamese immigrant liv-
ing in Louisiana. Vietnamese immigrant writers have not remained silent about
the war either. Expressing a wide range of personal reasons and perspectives,
Vietnamese immigrant writers recount life in war-torn Vietnam, immigration
to the United States, and postwar returns to Vietnam in memoir, fiction, and
poetry. These writers include Lan Cao, Le Ly Hayslip, Andrew Lam, Christian
Langworthy, lê thi diêm thúy, Aimee Phan, Andrew X. Pham, and Dao Strom.
For Vietnamese who left their homeland or whose parents left, Lam notes, the
conflict “is long over, yet hasn’t, in many ways, ended. It continues to divide as well
as claim us.” The imaginative literature about the Vietnam War seeks to heal this
divide by allowing those who experienced the war to tell their stories, thus creat-
ing connections between them and all affected, directly and indirectly, by war.
Students interested in the literature of the Vietnam War should first develop
a solid understanding of the political, social, and military aspects of the conflict.
Frances Fitzgerald’s award-winning sociological study of the war, Fire in the Lake
(1972), had a significant impact on writers reacting to American involvement in
Vietnam; it should be read along with Stanley Kranow’s more traditional history.
A survey of periodicals of the period, beginning with popular newsmagazines
such as Time and Newsweek and extending, perhaps, to publications that span