Rewriting The Vietnam Narrative

A narrow space of time between 1959 thru 1975 during what the West calls the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese People refer to as the American War defines what many consider the US-Vietnam Narrative. In 2011 the United States signaled to the world an unprecedented shift in strategic focus to the Pacific. The rebalancing of American National Power into a region devoid of the level of American Diplomacy, Information, Military, and Economic (DIME) resources applied to other regions of the world has forced the reset of regional strategic norms. This book will explore why it is in both the United States and Vietnam's national interest to improve their cooperation and partnership. Understanding Vietnamese history, geography, and culture is critical to truly understand its impact this emerging relationship. The core of this books documents the coordinated application of the elements of National Power focusing predominantly on the military. This includes what has been implemented to date as well a strategy to enhance cooperation and stimulate meaningful engagement with Vietnam and conversely within the greater Southeast Asia Region.

A narrow space of time between 1959 thru 1975 during what the West calls the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese People refer to as the American War defines what many consider the US-Vietnam Narrative. In 2011 the United States signaled to the world an unprecedented shift in strategic focus to the Pacific. The rebalancing of American National Power into a region devoid of the level of American Diplomacy, Information, Military, and Economic (DIME) resources applied to other regions of the world has forced the reset of regional strategic norms. This paper will explore why it is in both the United States' and Vietnam's national interest to improve their cooperation and partnership. Understanding Vietnamese history, geography, and culture is critical to truly understand its impact this emerging relationship. The core of this paper documents the coordinated application of the elements of National Power focusing predominantly on the military. This includes what has been implemented to date as well a strategy to enhance cooperation and stimulate meaningful engagement with Vietnam and conversely within the greater Southeast Asia Region.

A narrow space of time between 1959 thru 1975 during what the West calls the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese People refer to as the American War defines what many consider the US-Vietnam Narrative. In 2011 the United States signaled to the world an unprecedented shift in strategic focus to the Pacific. The rebalancing of American National Power into a region devoid of the level of American Diplomacy, Information, Military, and Economic (DIME) resources applied to other regions of the world has forced the reset of regional strategic norms. This paper will explore why it is in both the United Statesâe(tm) and Vietnamâe(tm)s national interest to improve their cooperation and partnership. Understanding Vietnamese history, geography, and culture is critical to truly understand its impact this emerging relationship. The core of this paper documents the coordinated application of the elements of National Power focusing predominantly on the military. This includes what has been implemented to date as well a strategy to enhance cooperation and stimulate meaningful engagement with Vietnam and conversely within the greater Southeast Asia Region.

Although the Vietnam conflict ended two decades ago, a fierce cultural war over how its literature is to be perceived continues to be waged. Warring Fictions accuses American critics of twenty years of whitewash and reminds us that Vietnam was not just an American anguish and its fiction a rock-and-roll acid trip. From the blind patriotism of The Green Berets to the postmodern hip of Dispatches this book brings history and politics back to the Vietnam War novel.It is a brilliant case study of canon formation and of the role commercial and academic literary institutions have played in assessing Vietnam War fiction; it exposes their complicity in the writing of recent American history and rebukes academic literary culture that speciously purports a radical calling for itself. Beyond an academic audience, this book will challenge all who are piqued by studies of the war and of Vietnam War fiction. And it raises important questions about the interlocking interests and ideologies of literary culture, the publishing industry, the mass media, and the academy.With its exemplary command of actual history and its well-documented investigation of the Vietnam fiction canon, this book throws a probing light on a literary culture whose tastes and attitudes have helped enforce a conservative interpretation of the war. In extraordinary readings of The Quiet American, The Ugly American, The Prisoners of Quai Dong, The Laotian Fragments, Dispatches, The Things They Carried, and In Country, Warring Fictions provides a radical historical perspective on the fiction that emerged from the Vietnam War.

Essays explore the truth inside soldier talk about the Vietnam War

With his first book, American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam, Philip Beidler offered a pioneering study of the novels, plays, poetry, and "literature of witness" that sprang from the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Reviewing the book, the journal American Literature declared, "[It is] more than just an introductory act. It also sets forth what are sure to be lasting types of American literary response to Vietnam, and of the scholarly response to the emerging literature of the war." In Re-Writing America, Beidler charts the ongoing achievements of the men and women who first gained public notice as Vietnam authors and who are now recognized as major literary interpreters of our national life and culture at large. These writers--among them Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, Winston Groom, David Rabe, John Balaban, Robert Stone, Michael Herr, Gloria Emerson, and Frances Fitzgerald--have applied in their later efforts, says Beidler, "many of the hard-won lessons of literary sense-making learned in initial works attempting to come explicitly to terms with Vietnam." Beidler argues that the Vietnam authors have done much to reenergize American creative writing and to lead it out of the poststructuralist impasse of texts as endless critiques of language, representation, and authority. With their direct experience of a divisive and frustrating war--"a war not of their own making but of the making of politicians and experts, a war of ancient animosities that cost nearly everything for those involved and settled virtually nothing"--these writers in many ways resemble the celebrated generation of poets and novelists who emerged from World War I. Like their forebears of 1914-18, those of the Vietnam generation have undertaken a common project of cultural revision: to "re-write America," to create an art that, even as it continues to acknowledge the war's painful memory, projects that memory into new dimensions of mythic consciousness for other--and better--times. Beidler fills his book with detailed, illuminating analyses of the writers' works, which, as he notes, have moved across an almost infinite range of subject, genre, and mode. From David Rabe, for example, have come innovative plays in which overt statements on the traumas of Vietnam (The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Streamers) have made way for broader commentaries on sex, power, and violence in American life (In the Boom Boom Room, HurlyBurly). Winstom Groom has moved from Better Times Than These, a rather traditional (even anachronistic) war novel, to further reaches of rambunctious humor in Forrest Gump. And journalist Michael Herr, whose Dispatches memorably defined a Vietnam landscape at once real and hallucinatory, carried his vision into collaborations on the films Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. As Beidler notes, the immense price that Vietnam exacted from the American soul continues to draw a plethora of interpretations and depictions. Vietnam authors remind us, in Tim O'Brien's words, of "the things they carried." But as Beidler makes clear, they now command us not only to remember but to imagine new possibilities as well.

This third edition is greatly expanded with over 600 new entries to reflect the growing number of imaginative writings about the Vietnam War.

Within the last ten years a vast library of books has appeared on the Vietnam war and the events that surrounded the conflict. This compilation presents succinctly annotated entries arranged by genre (novels, poetry, short stories, etc.). A section on teaching materials is included. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

“The diversity of voices and songs reminds us that the home front and the battlefront are always connected and that music and war are deeply intertwined.” —Heather Marie Stur, author of 21 Days to Baghdad For a Kentucky rifleman who spent his tour trudging through Vietnam’s Central Highlands, it was Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” For a black marine distraught over the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., it was Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools.” And for countless other Vietnam vets, it was “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die” or the song that gives this book its title. In We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Doug Bradley and Craig Werner place popular music at the heart of the American experience in Vietnam. They explore how and why U.S. troops turned to music as a way of connecting to each other and the World back home and of coping with the complexities of the war they had been sent to fight. They also demonstrate that music was important for every group of Vietnam veterans—black and white, Latino and Native American, men and women, officers and “grunts”—whose personal reflections drive the book’s narrative. Many of the voices are those of ordinary soldiers, airmen, seamen, and marines. But there are also “solo” pieces by veterans whose writings have shaped our understanding of the war—Karl Marlantes, Alfredo Vea, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bill Ehrhart, Arthur Flowers—as well as songwriters and performers whose music influenced soldiers’ lives, including Eric Burdon, James Brown, Bruce Springsteen, Country Joe McDonald, and John Fogerty. Together their testimony taps into memories—individual and cultural—that capture a central if often overlooked component of the American war in Vietnam.