Vietnam War (and Antiwar) Literature

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 28, 2025

Literature of the Vietnam War crosses genres, appearing in poetry, fiction, drama, memoir, and other nonfiction literary forms. The complex and varied literary images in these works match the public’s complicated and conflicting views of the war with representations echoing the changes in American popular and political culture. No monolithic version of the Vietnam War exists in literature. Depicted instead are a wide variety of experiences and equally diverse perspectives offered by both combatants and noncombatants. Despite their differences, literary works about the conflict in Vietnam try to make sense of, and come to terms with, the war as it progressed and changed over time. Through writing, authors, often veterans themselves, hope to convey the experiences of those involved while also understanding the cultural and political reasons behind the war and the reactions to it at home.

As the number of American troops began to increase in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, writers began using their work to protest the war, denouncing it on moral, political, and social grounds. Norman Mailer’s novel Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) answers the title’s question in its depiction of a character’s unfair hunting tactics and obsessive desire to kill a grizzly bear; the war for him reflects the nation’s arrogance and immorality. Robert Bly, who helped found American Writers against the Vietnam War in 1966, used poetry to decry what he considered America’s unjust participation in the war. The Teeth-Mother Naked at Last (1970), one of Bly’s best-known collections, captures the chaos and violence of combat while questioning the authority that condones it. Bly was joined by other poets who actively protested the war in their writing and participated in antiwar groups on and off college campuses; these poets include Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, W. S. Merwin, and Denise Levertov.

Those who served in Vietnam also began publishing before the last troops came home on 29 March 1973. Like those of novelists and poets who did not serve, the works of veterans provide an alternative to official accounts and explanations. Deriving from the writers’ service “in country,” they tend to refrain from making explicit political statements about the war. Michael Casey’s collection Obscenities (1972), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, displays frightening images from the war zone inspired by his experience as a military police officer in Quang Ngai province but without moral judgments or comments. Similarly, David Rabe, who also served in Vietnam, did not write his plays to make a political statement about the situation there but rather to highlight the struggle of individuals faced with powers beyond their control and to question the incongruity of idealism and war in general. His Vietnam War trilogy includes Sticks and Bones (first produced as Bones, 1969; revised, 1971), The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (produced, 1971; published, 1973), and Streamers (produced, 1976; published, 1977).

Works written by veterans continued to appear after the war ended with the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. Using a variety of genres and experimenting with style, voice, and narrative structure, writers continued to seek the truth about America’s role in Vietnam. Several writers used memoir to convey personal experiences and the effects of the war on individuals to the American public, who, they felt, did not understand what veterans had gone through. Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in the Combat Zone (1973) explores the conflict the author faced between his moral objections to war and reluctance to ignore his draft notice. In Born on the Fourth of July (1976) Ron Kovic explains his progression from innocent and idealistic teen soldier, to wounded and wheelchair-bound veteran, to social activist. Philip Caputo’s autobiographical A Rumor of War (1977) provides an account of his 1965–1966 tour of duty as a marine lieutenant. Characterizing the work as “a story about war, about the things men do in war and the things war does to them,” Caputo describes events leading to his court-martial (charges were eventually dropped) and confronts the notion that moral decay is a by-product of war. In the fast-paced Dispatches (1977) journalist Michael Herr moves beyond reportage to convey the terror, violence, and senselessness of war, memories he brought to the screenplays for Apocalypse Now (1979) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), on which he collaborated.

US Army helicopters pour machine-gun fire into a tree-line to cover the advance of South Vietnamese ground troops in an attack on a Viet Cong camp near the Cambodian border, March 1965.

Much of the fiction and poetry published after the war also deals directly with combat and its effects. In The 13th Valley (1982) John M. Del Vecchio uses meticulous battle details, maps, and historical reports to re-create war operations in a realistic fashion. Just as significant are the emotional responses of his characters, which he contrasts with historical reports about battles. Indeed, veteran writers became equally, if not more, interested in conveying subjective, rather than objective, experience. In Paco’s Story (1986), for example, Larry Heinemann uses flashback and the narrative voices of members of the title character’s dead platoon to convey Paco’s guilt and the haunting memory of war for survivors.

Heinemann’s novel begins with the assertion that “War stories are out,” setting the stage for the novel’s overt critique of idealistic stories about war and those who believe in these simplistic versions. Also focusing on subjective experience and storytelling are O’Brien’s Going after Cacciato (1978), considered by many the definitive Vietnam War novel, and The Things They Carried (1990). The interplay between fact and imagination is evident in O’Brien’s work as he explores the ways historical events are transformed by memory, imagination, and retelling. His work highlights the relevance of storytelling as a way not merely to recount events but to “save” those who tell and listen. Through stories, survivors cope with traumatic events such as war.

Other writers sought to depict the war through poetry while also trying to make sense of, and recover from, their experiences. In the war poems in Caliban in Blue (1976) and After the Noise of Saigon (1988) Walter McDonald spares readers sentimental and moral interpretations of war; the later book, especially, includes darker and more-disturbing imagery than his previous works as he seeks recovery from wartime violence. Bruce Weigl’s poems, collected in A Romance (1979), The Monkey Wars (1985), and Song of Napalm (1988), provide the conflicting images and emotions faced by soldiers from their military induction to their return home from the war. His poems also expose, and attempt to exorcise, wartime experiences, as do those by poet W. D. Ehrhart, whose collections include A Generation of Peace (1975). While conveying the brutality of war, Kevin Bowen’s collection Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong (1994) is deeply sympathetic toward those affected by war, soldier and civilian alike. Like Bowen, John Balaban offers a more complex look at the Vietnamese. His experience as a conscientious objector, working as a teacher and humanitarian in Vietnam, provides him a perspective unavailable to soldier veterans. The poems collected in After Our War (1974) stand out for their sympathetic portrayals that contrast the beauty of Vietnam village life with the war’s disruption of it.

Other writers explore the often unseen or untold aspects of war, presenting perspectives influenced by race, ethnicity, and/or gender. The poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa shows the complexity of emotions felt by African American servicemen. An established poet by the time he published his first war poems, collected in Dien Cai Dau (1988—the title is taken from a Vietnamese expression roughly meaning “crazy”)—Komunyakaa explores experiences with racism and relationships with Vietnamese civilians that lead to complex responses ranging from identification and ambivalence to abhorrence. Other voices that often go unheard include those of female veterans such as Lynda Van Devanter, whose memoir Home before Morning (1983) recounts her one-year service as a nurse in Vietnam. Also important are the perspectives of those who did not serve but were deeply affected by war. In the novel In Country (1985) Bobbie Ann Mason reflects on the legacy of the war for younger generations. Taking place during the summer of 1984, In Country features teenager Samantha Hughes’s attempt to deal with her father’s death in Vietnam—which happened when she was in the second grade. Sam’s attempts to understand the war through popular culture and interaction with her veteran uncle, Emmett, dramatize the importance of the Vietnam War on the national and personal history of all Americans. Maxine Hong Kingston also dramatizes this importance in The Fifth Book of Peace (2003), which combines memoir and fiction in its exploration of loss and healing.

Recent writings about America’s involvement in Vietnam pay more attention to Vietnamese and Vietnamese immigrant perspectives. Each of the stories that make up the Pulitzer Prize–winning collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992) by veteran Robert Olen Butler features a Vietnamese immigrant living in Louisiana. Vietnamese immigrant writers have not remained silent about the war either. Expressing a wide range of personal reasons and perspectives, Vietnamese immigrant writers recount life in war-torn Vietnam, immigration to the United States, and postwar returns to Vietnam in memoir, fiction, and poetry. These writers include Lan Cao, Le Ly Hayslip, Andrew Lam, Christian Langworthy, lê thi diêm thúy, Aimee Phan, Andrew X. Pham, and Dao Strom. For Vietnamese who left their homeland or whose parents left, Lam notes, the conflict “is long over, yet hasn’t, in many ways, ended. It continues to divide as well as claim us.” The imaginative literature about the Vietnam War seeks to heal this divide by allowing those who experienced the war to tell their stories, thus creating connections between them and all affected, directly and indirectly, by war.

Students interested in the literature of the Vietnam War should first develop a solid understanding of the political, social, and military aspects of the conflict. Frances Fitzgerald’s award-winning sociological study of the war, Fire in the Lake (1972), had a significant impact on writers reacting to American involvement in Vietnam; it should be read along with Stanley Kranow’s more traditional history. A survey of periodicals of the period, beginning with popular newsmagazines such as Time and Newsweek and extending, perhaps, to publications that span the political spectrum, such as the right-wing National Review and the left-wing Ramparts, will provide a reliable sense of the emotionalism of the period. Stewart O’Nan’s The Vietnam Reader is an excellent anthology of fiction and nonfiction about the war, prepared specifically for students.

Topics For Research and Discussion

In Visions of War, Dreams of Peace: Writings of Women in the Vietnam War (1991)
Lynda Van Devanter recalls the response she got when trying to publish an account of her one-year service as a wartime nurse: “What could a woman have to say about the Vietnam War?” Like their male counterparts, women who served “in country” risked their lives and health and suffered post-traumatic stress disorder. They also endured sexual harassment, lack of veteran services, and the insult of having their wartime contributions doubted, ignored, or forgotten because of their gender. Students exploring gender issues will be interested in Van Devanter’s memoir Home before Morning (1983) and A Piece of My Heart (1986), edited by Keith Walker, which includes the narratives of twenty-six women who served in Vietnam. Le Ly Hayslip’s memoir, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989), coauthored with Jay Wurts, provides a Vietnamese woman’s perspective on war and its aftermath. To identify women writers, students can consult Deborah Butler’s American Women Writers on Vietnam: Unheard Voices: A Selected Annotated Bibliography (1990). Also useful for its discussion of strategies used in female literary representations of the war is Carol Acton’s “Dangerous Daughters: American Nurses and Gender Identity in World War One and Vietnam.” Students may alternately wish to consider images of women in literature about the Vietnam War and/or the construction of “masculinity” and its connection to definitions of heroism. See Kali Tal, and Gina Weaver’s “The Vietnam War Film, Victimized Veterans, and the Disappearing Woman” (in Mark A. Heberle, pp. 42–52).
Representations of the war by nonwhite writers offer complex attitudes that challenge stereotypical accounts about the war and race.
Students interested in investigating African American perspectives might consider the poems of Yusef Komunyakaa, especially those collected in Dien Cai Dau (1988), and the narratives in Wallace Terry’s BLOODS: An Oral History of the Vietnam War (1984). The narratives of Chicano vets in Charley Trujillo’s Soldados: Chicanos in Viet Nam (1990) offer a variety of responses to the war. For help identifying narrative strategies in African American and Chicano Vietnam War literature, students can consult, respectively, Shirley A. J. Hanshaw’s “Refusal to Be Can(n)on Fodder: African American Representation of the Vietnamese War and Canon Formation” and Catherine Calloway’s “In Their Own Voices: The Chicano Experience in Vietnam War Literature” (in Heberle, pp. 123–141, 142–158).
After the Vietnam War ended, it became a popular topic at the box office.
For inspiration, filmmakers looked to books. Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) is based on Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers (1979); Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989) adapts Ron Kovic’s 1976 memoir of the same name; Ted Kotcheff’s First Blood (1982), starring Sylvester Stallone, is based on David Morrell’s First Blood (1982); and Norman Jewison’s In Country (1989) is adapted from the 1985 novel by Bobbie Ann Mason. Students might consider comparing a film to its original source, paying particular attention to changes in plot and how they affect overall representations of, and perspectives on, war. Students might also consider whether Hollywood versions are more or less effective than their literary counterparts in conveying the experience of war. A thematic approach to film and literature would also be worthwhile. The induction of soldiers in films such as Platoon (1986), Apocalypse Now (1979), and Hamburger Hill (1987) could be examined alongside Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War (1977). Images of the returning soldier in Hal Ashby’s film Coming Home (1978) could be compared to those from its source, George Davis’s 1975 novel of the same name, or works such as Paco’s Story (1986), by Larry Heinemann. Good starting points for identifying additional works and critical approaches are offered in Mark Taylor and Catherine Calloway.
In “Novels about the ‘Other Side’” (in Marc Jason Gilbert, pp. 115–120)
Gilbert W. Berkley notes that most works about the Vietnam conflict feature “Vietnamese characters [who] are either absent, peripheral, or drawn from Western stereotypes.” This observation can serve as the starting point for examining the representations of the Vietnam conflict in works by Vietnamese American writers. By echoing the work of Tim O’Brien, Andrew Lam’s essay “The Stories They Carried,” included in Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora (2005), suggests that the experiences of “boat people” are no less important than those of former American soldiers. They, too, have survived war. Other Vietnamese immigrant works that depict the war and its aftermath from a bicultural perspective include Andrew Pham’s memoir Catfish and Mandala (1999), Lan Cao’s autobiographical novel Monkey Bridge (1997); Dao Strom’s Grass Roof, Tin Roof (2003); lê thi diêm thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003); and Aimee Phan’s short-story collection We Should Never Meet (2004). Students might also compare these depictions to those in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992) by Anglo-American veteran Robert Olen Butler. In addition, students might consider how the perspectives of those who left Vietnam contribute to a larger understanding of the war and its aftermath.
Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Fifth Book of Peace (2003)
juxtaposes a section about the fictional war protester and draft dodger Wittman Ah Sing and his experiences living in Hawaii with a section describing Kingston’s own writing workshops, in which participants include Vietnam veterans from both sides of the conflict and those who, like herself, protested the war. Similar workshops, such as those hosted by the William Joiner Center Writers’ Workshop at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, have allowed veterans to practice the process of writing in order to promote healing and peace. Examining prose and poetry written by veterans, students might consider how writing about and retelling war experiences promote healing and peace. Works by amateur writers are included in the anthologies edited by Kevin Bowen and Bruce Weigl and by Kingston. For a discussion about the connection between writing and healing from war, students can also consult Tal.

Mary Ann Vecchio kneels beside the body of Jeffrey Miller minutes after he was fatally wounded by the National Guard, one of four American students shot and killed by US soldiers on the campus of Kent State University, Ohio, on 4 May 1970. Photo: PBS

Resources

Primary Works

Kevin Bowen and Bruce Weigl, eds., Writing between the Lines: An Anthology on War and Its Social Consequences (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).
Includes works by veterans from both sides of the battle lines.
Maxine Hong Kingston, ed., Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (Kihei, Hawaii: Koa Books, 2006).
Autobiographical accounts and fictional writing collected from Kingston’s healing workshops; written by veterans and victims of other trauma (substance abuse and gang and domestic violence).
Stewart O’Nan, ed., The Vietnam Reader: The Definitive Collection of American Fiction and Nonfiction on the War (New York: Anchor, 1998).
An essential collection with works written mostly by veterans. The introductions to each section provide a useful chronology of war literature that charts changes in thematic and stylistic interests.

Criticism

Carol Acton, “Dangerous Daughters: American Nurses and Gender Identity in World War One and Vietnam,” War, Literature, and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities, 13, 1–2 (2001): 87–113.
Discusses the way female writers challenge the marginalization of women in literary accounts of war.
Ronald Baughman, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series, volume 9: American Writers of the Vietnam War: W. D. Ehrhart, Larry Heinemann, Tim O’Brien, Walter McDonald, John M. Del Vecchio (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman/Gale, 1991), pp. 275–340.
Provides unique perspectives on the work and lives of five veteran-writers through previously unpublished material documenting their military service, including letters, drafts for published works, and service records.
Deborah Butler, American Women Writers on Vietnam: Unheard Voices: A Selected Annotated Bibliography (New York: Routledge, 1989).
An exhaustive list of entries with informative annotations identifying works featuring the perspective of women.
Catherine Calloway, “Vietnam War Literature and Film: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources,” Bulletin of Bibliography, 43 (September 1986): 149–158.
A useful and exhaustive resource for locating reviews and critical essays about film and literature.
Marc Jason Gilbert, ed., The Vietnam War: Teaching Approaches and Resources (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991).
Part of the Contributions in Military Studies series, this unique collection of essays examines the Vietnam conflict from multiple disciplines, including history, literary analysis, and military studies.
Mark A. Heberle, ed., Thirty Years After: New Essays on Vietnam War, Literature and Film (Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).
Excellent collection of essays, including pieces on the Vietnamese diaspora and on African American and Chicano representations in Vietnam War literature.
Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History, revised edition (New York: Penguin, 1997).
A well-written and comprehensive overview of the war that will help students familiarize themselves with history of America’s involvement in Vietnam.
Kali Tal, “The Mind at War: Images of Women in Vietnam Novels by Combat Veterans,” Contemporary Literature, 31 (Spring 1990): 76–96; also available at http://www.kalital.com/Text/Articles/womenvn.html [accessed 19 March 2025].
Essay that examines the connection between healing and images of women in novels written by veterans.
Mark Taylor, The Vietnam War in History, Literature, and Film (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003).
An excellent overview of trends in depicting the Vietnam conflict in various media.