In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

notes Introduction 1 When aboard the USS Lincoln on May 1, 2003, President Bush declared the cessationofmajormilitaryoperationsinIraq,hedubbedthemilitarycampaign that ousted Saddam Hussein the Battle for Iraq to emphasize its place within the ongoing larger war against terrorism (and also to maintain the wartime status for reasons of international law). Callingthisactionabattle,incontrasttothePersianGulfWar,raisesthe issue of classifying combat events. Entire wars, John Keegan reminds us, have sometimes become wars only after the stroke of the historian’s pen (Face 74, 79). Churchill conceived the two world wars really as constituting a single war, a twentieth-century Thirty Years’ War (Fussell, Great War 317–318), a conception shared by the contemporary historian Eric Hobsbawm :“Theperiodfrom1914to1945canberegardedasasingle‘30years’ war’ interrupted only by a pause in the 1920s — between the final withdrawal of the Japanese from the Soviet Far East in 1922 and the attack on Manchuria in 1931 (“War and Peace”).” Perhaps future historians might make the postcolonial wars of the late 1940s into the 1970s as multiple campaigns of an essentially coordinate effort. 2 One of the symposium’s participants, Jamie Owen Daniel, expressly objects to the compulsion to impose necessarily arbitrary “periods” on literary history at all (in Hoberek, 20). 3 See also Rumsfeld. 4 That these tax benefits are similar to those granted to families of U.S. military personnel is perhaps the first official act that blurs the line between soldier and civilian. 5 One historical argument maintains that President Kennedy, had he not been assassinated, would not have allowed the nation to become drawn into the war any further. 6 Thieu was preceded in death on August 6, 2001, by his chief rival among South Vietnamese politicos, Duong Van Minh, the man who briefly held power after Thieu fled (until North Vietnam took over the country). 7 The only significant difference involves artillery, but it must be remembered that the artillery abandoned in the nineteenth century consisted of direct-fire cannons, weapons effective only in open fields across which their projectiles could travel unimpeded and cumbersome to use even in open terrain, whereas the American artillery of Vietnam was exclusively indirect-firehowitzers,effectiveinmostterrainandmademobilethrough helicopter transport (air-to-ground weaponry might be considered a class of indirect-fire artillery). 8 O’Brien has made a similar argument in an interview when Eric Schroeder asked if the success of his Going After Cacciato and Michael Herr’s Dispatches, and the relative failure of so many more realistic fictional treatments of the Vietnam War, proves that the war requires a more unreal or surreal treatment. O’Brien answers no: Those books have failed not because of their realism but because of their authors’ inability to stray from the strict facts of their experience and let imagination rework it into a more powerful narrative (146). 9 See Linda Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) for a discussion of modernism and postmodernism that would fit nicely with Kellner’s argument about Dispatches. Herr’s book far from qualifies as Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction. Kellner also makes an excellent political argument for Vietnam as a thoroughly modern war: Vietnam was a guerilla war carried out as part of a national liberation movement that had the support of the majority of its citizens and was fought on a terrain familiar to the guerilla army and foreign to the invaders. Wars of national liberation are prototypically modern, producing modern nation-states and identities — beginning with the American revolution. Because of the intense nationalism generated by such struggles, it is difficult to defeat these movements. . . . Although postmodern theory has appropriated the metaphor of the guerilla for its political strategies, one could argue that the war of national liberation in Vietnam was a form of modern warfare and thus it is problematical to describe the war as ‘postmodern’ tout court. (202–203) 10 Literary scholars who stray into commentary about military history too often reveal their own lack of understanding and appreciation (a problem in which this study doubtless participates). One example is the wholehearted , uncritical use of James William Gibson’s 1986 The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (1987 paperback edition subtitled The War We Couldn’t Lose and How We Did). Gibson is, for example, the most cited critic in Bibby’s essay collection The Vietnam War and Postmodernity, ahead even of Jean Baudrillard (of all authors cited, only Herr receives more attention). Yet Gibson’s is a sensationalist work that fails to contextualize Vietnam adequately within military and even...

Share