12 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
the political spectrum, such as the right-wing National Review and the left-wing
Ramparts, will provide a reliable sense of the emotionalism of the period. Stewart
O’Nan’s The Vietnam Reader is an excellent anthology of fiction and nonfiction
about the war, prepared specifically for students.
TOPICS FOR RESEARCH AND DISCUSSION
- In Visions of War, Dreams of Peace: Writings of Women in the Vietnam War (1991)
Lynda Van Devanter recalls the response she got when trying to publish an
account of her one-year service as a wartime nurse: “What could a woman have
to say about the Vietnam War?” Like their male counterparts, women who
served “in country” risked their lives and health and suffered post-traumatic
stress disorder. They also endured sexual harassment, lack of veteran services,
and the insult of having their wartime contributions doubted, ignored, or
forgotten because of their gender. Students exploring gender issues will be
interested in Van Devanter’s memoir Home before Morning (1983) and A Piece
of My Heart (1986), edited by Keith Walker, which includes the narratives of
twenty-six women who served in Vietnam. Le Ly Hayslip’s memoir, When
Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989), coauthored with Jay Wurts, pro-
vides a Vietnamese woman’s perspective on war and its aftermath. To identify
women writers, students can consult Deborah Butler’s American Women Writ-
ers on Vietnam: Unheard Voices: A Selected Annotated Bibliography (1990). Also
useful for its discussion of strategies used in female literary representations of
the war is Carol Acton’s “Dangerous Daughters: American Nurses and Gender
Identity in World War One and Vietnam.” Students may alternately wish to
consider images of women in literature about the Vietnam War and/or the
construction of “masculinity” and its connection to definitions of heroism. See
Kali Tal, and Gina Weaver’s “The Vietnam War Film, Victimized Veterans,
and the Disappearing Woman” (in Mark A. Heberle, pp. 42–52). - Representations of the war by nonwhite writers offer complex attitudes that
challenge stereotypical accounts about the war and race. Students interested
in investigating African American perspectives might consider the poems of
Yusef Komunyakaa, especially those collected in Dien Cai Dau (1988), and
the narratives in Wallace Terry’s BLOODS: An Oral History of the Vietnam War
(1984). The narratives of Chicano vets in Charley Trujillo’s Soldados: Chicanos
in Viet Nam (1990) offer a variety of responses to the war. For help identifying
narrative strategies in African American and Chicano Vietnam War litera-
ture, students can consult, respectively, Shirley A. J. Hanshaw’s “Refusal to Be
Can(n)on Fodder: African American Representation of the Vietnamese War
and Canon Formation” and Catherine Calloway’s “In Their Own Voices: The
Chicano Experience in Vietnam War Literature” (in Heberle, pp. 123–141,
142–158). - After the Vietnam War ended, it became a popular topic at the box office. For
inspiration, filmmakers looked to books. Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket
(1987) is based on Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers (1979); Oliver Stone’s
Born on the Fourth of July (1989) adapts Ron Kovic’s 1976 memoir of the same