Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War - 9780821422236

Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam WarAuthor(s): John A. Wood\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Ohio University Press, United States\nImprint: Ohio University Press\nISBN-13: 9780821422236, 978-0821422236\nSynopsis\nIn the decades since the Vietnam War, veteran memoirs have influenced Americans' understanding of the conflict. Yet few historians or literary scholars have scrutinized how the genre has shaped the nation's collective memory of the war and its aftermath. Instead, veterans' accounts are mined for colorful quotes and then dropped from public discourse; are accepted as factual sources with little attention to how memory, no matter how authentic, can diverge from events; or are not contextualized in terms of the race, gender, or class of the narrators.\n Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War is a landmark study of the cultural heritage of the war in Vietnam as presented through the experience of its American participants. Crossi.