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Conclusion W hile working on an early draft of this study a couple of years ago, I was approached by an undergraduate student after class. Aware of my experience in the Persian Gulf War and also of my writing, he said he wanted to come by my office to talk about the effects war has on veterans who then become writers . I smiled, imagining myself having a lot to say, and told him he could come by anytime. Thankfully the student never dropped by, because I soon realized that I actually had very little to say. War profoundly affects all participants, altering their sense of themselves and the narratives by which they define their identities, including their gender constructs. Veterans must also come to terms with the society that sent them to war. Beyond these blanket conclusions , however, I found I could make no solid generalizations. Like anything else, war does not affect everyone it touches in the same ways. The homoerotic dimension of Ernest Hemingway’s fiction, and its relationship with war, for example, registers only slightly in James Salter’s work and registers not at all in Tim O’Brien’s. O’Brien’s male characters, on the other hand, share with Hemingway ’s male characters feelings of betrayal by women and some resentment toward them. So much exemplary scholarship has been written on Hemingway, on war’s legacy in his life and writing and on his gender issues, that anyone attempting a substantial rereading of the texts faces a daunting task. Though the details of my interpretation may not in all instancesbeentirelyconvincing,itsgeneralaim — therestorationof Hemingway’s experience of war and the military to discussions of his gender issues — is crucial and warrants further critical attention. So little scholarship has been written on Salter that my work should provide a point of departure for future critical work. The two cadet stories and my personal interview bring new material to the table, and the discussion of his place in U.S. literary history, including the approach to A Sport and a Pastime through the canonical modernist The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby, gives a contextual basis for additional readings. The vastly different experiences of ground soldiers and fighter pilots cannot but have a corresponding difference of impact on their sense of their own identities and their relationship with the world, and that difference must affect their writing.MyworkonSalteraspilot-turned-writershouldbenefitanyone interested in exploring similar patterns in the works of other pilot-writers. The brief discussions of the homosocial element in Salter’s texts and of his Hemingway-esque need for performance and confirmation of masculinity also could serve as entry points for other critical investigations. As for the critical attention paid thus far to Tim O’Brien’s career, I find it insightful and exciting but also a little youthful. As a contemporary author, O’Brien holds a tenuous position in the canon, and the scholarship reflects this position, with many O’Brien scholars a little too enthusiastic in their support. I sense a trend to a more mature scholarly sensibility, one that acknowledges the value (and pleasure?) of reading O’Brien while simultaneously submitting his work to serious critical scrutiny — the way criticism of Hemingway now operates, some forty years after his death. And it is this trend, this attitude, that the present study’s vision of O’Brien joins in fostering . O’Brien’s work, in my estimation, demonstrates a failure to find a satisfactory emotional resolution of his troubled relationships withtheVietnamwarandwithotherpeople — especiallywomen — as well as with his aspirations for the transformative, redemptive power of his art. As I finish this book, it is May 22, 2003. The United States has just finished the combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom, though the past week has seen terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia and Israel. Saudi Arabia expects another and a larger attack soon, and the United StateshasenteredtheOrangeterroristalertphase,thehighestphase 260 • conclusion short of intelligence of an actual target on a specific date. However much and however intensely we might hope, the dream of the end of war in whatever form altogether seems unrealistic. Studying artistic responses to war, studying the rhetoric around war and the rhetoric behind literary representations of war, studying the ideologies and psychologies embedded in the stories we tell about war and the military and in the language we opt to employ — such endeavors are as vital now as ever if we hope to understand war, if we...

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