Abstract
Vietnam War literature is a reflection of a sustained tension between politics
and history on the one hand and morality and the effect of the war on human
nature on the other hand. Although the authors under discussion urge the
reader to forget the political, moral and historical milieu of the Vietnam War, it
is impossible to separate the war from those three factors and by extension,
the literature that stems from it.
I have chosen Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War (1977) and Robert Mason’s
Chickenhawk (1983) because I think they represent, perhaps in the simplest
and least obtrusive way, the voices of 55 000 men whose names appear on a
black, granite wall in Washington. The authors chose to write their respective
memoirs for the Everyman who died in, or lived through, the aberration that
was Vietnam. Through their reconstruction of the war and their experiences,
they keep the demand for recognition of those who fought (whether morally
sanctioned or not) in Vietnam for their country. While American society tried to
force the war from its psyche because so many of them thought it was unjust,
immoral and unnecessary, authors like Caputo and Mason demanded that
the nation examine itself on the whole and reconsider its political endeavours.
But perhaps one of the starkest revelations is their portrayal of the corruption of
innocence, loyalty and idealism of those soldiers who represented their country
abroad.