Are we more cautious in international relations? Are we less “quick on the trigger”? Even partially positive answers to these questions are dubious. We worry about whether we learned any lessons from Vietnam. We wonder about our loss of standing as defenders of freedom. No matter how strenuously we protested, it was our country that did this. On some level, many who opposed the war (and some who supported it) feel guilty, still. We didn’t win the war, and it didn’t represent us as either noble or idealistic. Their books had a spurt of recognition but are probably read now only by people with a special interest in the war or by high school students confronted with Tim O’Brien on their English curriculum. The soldiers and journalists who wrote about the war were close to the action they wrote of an experience they lived. Unlike great war fiction- The Red and the Black, The Red Badge of Courage, War and Peace, All Quiet on the Western Front, and A Farewell to Arms-that is read for generations, becoming part of a literary culture, the Vietnam novels and memoirs are specific to a time and place. The literature about the Vietnam War, as raw and real as it was, seems to have faded from view. If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home The Sorrow of War, A Novel of North Vietnam
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