It still hurts. Though it is over forty years since the last troops came home to the United States, a single word still conjures up years of misery, an unwinnable war misguidedly conceived, national division, shame and rage: Vietnam. The wound in the national psyche refuses to heal: what they did or did not do as young men in the 1960s and 1970s still sways the careers of senior politicians – John Kerry's Bronze Star and Purple Heart questioned by some Swift Boat veterans; John McCain's record attacked by Donald Trump on the grounds that war heroes don't get captured.Footnote ¹

In Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War, John A. Wood, a Massachusetts-based historian, aims to correct some misconceptions. His evidence base is fifty-eight “of the most prominent memoirs and oral histories published between 1967 and 2005” (5), supplemented by accounts by Vietnamese civilians, African American GIs and women veterans. Unsurprisingly, Wood finds that these most prominent memoirists were white, college graduates and former junior officers. Not your “average American combat soldier” (6), then, but they did, nevertheless, share those average soldiers’ combat experiences. Few of them stopped to consider the Vietnamese people's point of view – indeed, they rarely portray Vietnamese people as anything other than “one-dimensional caricatures” (6) – but then they were ignorant of Vietnamese language, history and culture. The few nonwhite memoirists either show pride in the combat performance of their own racial/ethnic group or, influenced by the black power movement, focus on incidents of white racism – plenty of material there. Women, particularly Asian women, are treated with eye-watering misogyny. Incidents in which ex-soldiers were spat on after returning home from Vietnam are rarer than the American public was led to believe; equally, the degree to which veterans have struggled with long-term psychological and economic problems has been underestimated. On the whole, Vietnam veterans “thought the war was a mistake” but remained “patriotic and proud of their military service” (8). Memoirs of service in Vietnam show “amazing similarities” with accounts of service in the Second World War, the First Gulf War and post-9/11 wars (8).

Wood's findings are unambiguous enough to summarize succinctly: full marks for pithiness. But every now and then, a detail or a quotation is striking enough to give pause. Wood quotes a New York Times reviewer who speculated in 1976 that the reason so few Vietnam vets had produced memoirs or novels by that point was that those most capable of writing the Vietnam equivalent of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948) “were also capable of avoiding the draft” (11). That's quite some catch-22 (wrong war, I know): if you could write about it, you wouldn't be in it; if you were in it, you couldn't write about it. In another chapter, in the middle of a fascinating discussion of American troops’ use of prostitutes, Wood makes the delicately perceptive point that, while there is plenty of criticism in the memoirs of the “foulness of brothels” or “the physical appearance” of the whores, no one thinks about the “deleterious effects on society and the lives of the sex workers” (66). He also usefully highlights the kind of doublethink that allows veteran memoirists simultaneously to have “enjoyed” the war and feel hatred for it. Lewis Puller Jr. thought about joining those Vietnam Veterans against the War activists who threw their medals over the fence of the US Capitol in 1971 but couldn't do it. What they represented “was still too dear to throw away” (102).

In Wood's final chapter, “Those Who Came Before and After,” he remarks that the Vietnam War “is the historical conflict most referenced in IA [Iraq and Afghanistan] narratives” (109). It seems that movies such as Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), Platoon (dir. Oliver Stone, 1986) and, particularly, Full Metal Jacket (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1987) have influenced not only the memoirists of post-9/11 conflicts, but also the conduct of those conflicts themselves. Here, then, are members of American forces in the 2000s and 2010s stencilling “Born to Kill” on their helmets and referring to the native population as “gooks” or “Charlie.” War is what those who wage it think war looks like, that is; and it is difficult to know whether there is more that is heart-sinking in that thought or in the realization that the wars of these benighted years of the early twenty-first century already have an acronym. IA: Iraq and Afghanistan.