The Words of the Vietnam War

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The American war effort escalated through the late '60s. The last American troops left South Vietnam in the spring of 1973, and Saigon fell two years later. More than 58,000 Americans died, and nearly 304,000 were wounded. The death toll among the Vietnamese, allies and enemies combined, is estimated at more than a million, including at least a quarter-million civilians. One disturbing effect of this collection is the realization of how limited the power of the written word is when it is pitted against war's inexorable momentum.

In The Vietnam Reader, the emphasis is on the first-person participant, the writer-soldier dealing with the realities, and later the memories, of jungle warfare. O'Nan has done a good job of identifying what seem destined to become the era's most enduring works, including what he labels a masterwork: The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien.

And yet for all the brilliant writing gathered here, readers may eventually be numbed by the repetitive tropes: the mud, the rain, the rice paddies and burning huts, the helicopter assaults, the fire fights, the war's cruel and even darkly beautiful excesses. War is a fiercely compelling subject, but also a narrow and obsessive one, as the anthology form reveals.

What's more, as O'Nan notes, America's Vietnam-era literature rarely looks beyond the war's impact on Americans. "In work after work," he writes, "Vietnam and the Vietnamese are merely a backdrop for the drama of America confronting itself." It's no surprise, then, that the most fully realized character to emerge from these works is our nation: a wounded giant gazing in a mirror, drained of its innocence, much of its youth, and quite a lot of blood.

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