"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War. Tom Burns

what was seen as a necessary war.

56 While only 2% of Americans in the 1960s came from towns with populations of fewer than one-thousand people, four times as many of those who died in the war (i.e. 8%) came from towns of that size. Appy, Christian G., Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill, 1993), p. 14.

57 Appy, Working-Class War, p. 12.

58 Appy, Working-Class War, p. 37

59 Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990, pp. 319-320; Appy, Working-Class War, p. 33. Appy adds that only 6% received training, mostly in elementary reading skills, as compared to the 40% trained for combat.

60 These various motives are commented on, with examples, by Appy, Working-Class War, pp. 44-85.

61 Appy, Working-Class War, p. 106.

62 Capps, Walter H., The Unfinished War: Vietnam and the American Conscience. Second Edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), p. 1. A caveat here: poet-scholar-veteran William H. Ehrhart, LaSalle University Library Director, and veteran John Baky, spent considerable time tracing the origin of that statistic, which “seems to go back to a 1976 pamphlet put out by the AFSC…that offers no basis for the assertion, no footnote, no source; the ‘fact’ is simply stated without support” (Ehrhart, personal communication).

63 Hynes, Samuel, The Soldiers’ Tale—Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 221.

64 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, p. 222.

65 Baum, Dan, “The Price of Valor,” in: The New Yorker (July 12 & 19, 2004), pp. 45-46. The findings of Marshall, in Men Against Fire (New York: William Morrow, 1947) have had considerable impact on the US Army. Marshall also wrote a widely distributed manual for soldiers in the Vietnam War. For Marshall’s influence: Frederick D. Williams, SLAM: The Influence of S.L.A. Marshall on the United States Army (Ft. Monroe, VA: US Army Training and Doctrine Command, 1990).

66 Baum, “The Price of Valor,” p. 46.

67 Baum, “The Price of Valor,” p. 46. The study referred to is a PhD dissertation (1999) by Rachel McNair on the psychological effects of violence, using data from the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study, which interviewed 1,700 veterans in the 1980s. Reanalyzed P.T.S.D. data obtained from these veterans suggested that one in five veterans suffered from the malaise, rather than one in three, as formerly believed. Baum, however, thinks that this new analysis may have been motivated by the desire of the Veteran’s Administration to cut back expenses for their treatment (p. 46).

68 Shay, Jonathan, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Scribner, 1994), pp.108-109 and 111-115.

69 Bilton, Michael and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai (New York, Penguin, 1992), pp. 120-121. This book was an outgrowth of a British TV documentary and contains the photographs of the massacre by an Army Sergeant that served as proof at Calley’s trial. Many veterans naturally resented being called “baby-killers” by American civilians, but this terrible crime was evidence that the accusation was at least true for some soldiers in some documented cases.

70 Herzog. Tobey C., Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 106.

71 Cronin, Cornelius A., “Lines of Departure: the Atrocity in Vietnam War Literature.” In: Jason, Philip K. (ed.), Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), p. 215.

72 Fussell, Paul, Wartime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 113, emphasis in the original.

73 FitzGerald, Frances, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1970), p. 359.

74 Just, To What End—Report from Vietnam, p. 71.

75 Qtd. in Appy, Working-Class War, p. 233.

76 Fox Butterfield, “Who Was This Enemy?” The New York Times Magazine (February 4, 1973), rptd. in: Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1969-1975 (New York: Library of America: 1998), pp. 408-409.

77 Roth, Robert, Sand in the Wind (New York: Miracle Books, 1974), pp. 563-564.

78 Herring, America’s Longest War; p. 243; FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 422-423. For Loren Baritz, the figure for hard-drug users is much higher: 28%. Baritz, Backfire: A History of how American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 315.

79 FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 422.

80 O’Nan, Stewart, “Introduction” to The Vietnam Reader, ed. Stewart O’Nan (New York: Anchor Books, 1998), p. 1.

81 For example, Renny Christopher’s The Vietnam War/The American War: Images and Representations in Euro-American and Vietnamese Exile Narratives (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).

82 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, The Sympathizer (New York: Grove Press, 2015). The quote is from page one.

83 O’Nan, “Introduction” to The Vietnam Reader, p. 3.

84 Hanley, Lynne, Writing War: Fiction, Gender, and Memory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), pp.103-104. The internal quotations are cited by the author from Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook (1973).

85 Hanley, Writing War, p. 105; FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, passim.

86 Tal, Kali, “Speaking