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HISTORY AND THE TRUE WAR STORY: READING FOR MORAL INJURY IN VIETNAM VETERAN LITERATURES

OF THE THESIS History and the True War Story: Reading for Moral Injury in Vietnam Veteran Literatures by Melissa Anne Bolthouse Master of Arts in History San Diego State University, 2015 Settled on a low plateau between two rivers, Ha Nội is a city of lakes, the largest of which are surrounded by tranquil parks. The landscape is dotted, too, with myriad nondescript ponds. One of these, Hồ Hữu Tiệp—B-52 Lake—is nestled in a quiet neighborhood. Remnants of a fuselage rise from its opaque green surface. This strangely square pond was born of American bombing, which pummeled North Vietnam with hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives. In 1972, a B-52 bomber was shot down and crashed into this city block. People hauled the rubble away and stripped much of the aircraft. Eventually, rain filled the crater. A tidy wrought-iron fence now discourages further scavenging. Wildflowers encircle its banks. When cognizant of their origin, we can immediately recognize the ubiquitous lakes of Ha Nội as battle scars, analogous to the holes that trauma often leaves in human memory and, consequently, in our histories. This thesis investigates a particular absence of evidence regarding the Vietnam War, which has been lost or is inaccessible because the material is too emotionally, politically, or morally volatile to approach in the direct, nonfictional forms that history traditionally accepts as valid documentation. I shall argue that the historian able to recognize trauma in veteran fictions will uncover valuable historical information there. Borrowing the concept of moral injury from psychology and trauma narrative from literary scholarship, I will demonstrate how these interdisciplinary interpretive strategies enable us to incorporate eyewitness accounts of war in more substantive, meaningful ways. The introduction provides theoretical framing and historical background to the post-traumatic stress diagnosis and moral injury. I then locate signs of trauma and moral injury in three noted fictions by Vietnam War veterans. Chapter one introduces trauma narrative through Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell A True War Story”. In Chapter two, North Vietnamese Army veteran Bảo Nihn’s novel, The Sorrow of War, shows that fiction can simultaneously mask and express political and moral dissent. Chapter three considers the betrayal and disenfranchisement aspects of moral injury through Gus Hasford’s novel, The Phantom Blooper. A brief conclusion ends the thesis.