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“History’s Heavy Attrition”: Literature, Historical Consciousness and the Impact of Vietnam

In America's bicentennial year, Friendly Fire author C.D.B. Bryan lamented that "there just haven't been many books written by Vietnam vets about their experiences over there. I suspect this might have less to do with their inability to achieve the objectivity necessary to come to grips with experiences in that war than it does with the fact that the Norman Mailers and Thomas Heggers who were capable of writing the Vietnam era's equivalent to a Naked and the Dead or a Mister Rogers were also capable of avoiding the draft."2 Apart from Bryan's exaggeration of the mediocrity of Vietnam literature a decade ago, for which he was rebuked by more than one indignant vet-turned-author, both the quantity and the quality of published novels, poetry, personal narratives and oral histories have lately elevated fictional and quasi-fictional writing on the American war in Vietnam to the level of a genre.3 The literature inspired by a generation of involvement in Indochina has spawned a significant, though not overwhelm...