The Other Side of Grief: The Home Front and the Aftermath in American Narratives of the Vietnam War (review)

Maureen Ryan's The Other Sided of Grief is an ambitious project that attempts to draw together the entire range of the Vietnam War experience under the umbrella term "cultural narratives." Ryan doesn't spend much time explaining what she means by this but her point becomes clear: the Vietnam War and "Era" still permeates the American cultural imagination and the mass media that has, since the late 1970s, fed back to us a steady stream of visions and revisions in a variety of narrative forms. Ryan quotes Ward Just's "The American Blues" to set up her subsequent chapters that do their best to lay out the full measure of what was wrought by the U.S. war in Vietnam. Just begins his narrative with a confession that while not intending to write a "story of the war," nevertheless "everything in my unsettled middle age seems to wind back to it." Moreover, whereas the war itself is still "essential to the story," the more pressing need is to express something about "the peace that followed the war." In this sense, all Vietnam narratives are cultural because they are about the aftermath, the representations and stories that continue to flow in the difficult period of adjusting to a lost war and to the millions of people who were lost to it in so many ways. But rather than offer another survey of writings about men at war, which neglects the larger story of the Vietnam War's aftermath, Ryan focuses on "women's roles in the Vietnam experience, as well as the anti-war movement…the Vietnamese diaspora, and the larger relationship between the conflict in Vietnam and the social upheavals on the 1960s and '70s home front." (10)

Ryan begins her survey on familiar ground, with the title "MIA in America" that suggests the state of mind that prevailed among many veterans upon returning from the war. Beginning with the fictional Rambo as an early example of the alienated and potentially lethal veteran who is, as the franchise morphed throughout the 1980s, transformed into a hyper-masculine American hero, Ryan moves on to review the standard literature (Tim O'Bryan, Philip Caputo, Michael Herr, Larry Heinemann, and so forth) as well as lesser known narratives. While many of the latter may not demonstrate much in the way of compelling aesthetic literary value, they are nevertheless of interest to Ryan for their "thematic insights" and bring to the fore often overlooked and marginalized narratives. (12) In this way, Ryan tracks through the lived experiences of many of the distinct communities that lived through the war and now live with the war's aftermath. Further chapters on women writers, POWs, the hippies, anti-war activists, and the Vietnamese exiles are included as voices in what Ryan terms a "Sad Song." In many ways, the U.S. Vietnamese communities are much like the other lost souls of the Vietnam War, condemned to live in a culture of optimism and future thinking while continually driven back into a haunting past in search of a stable social identity.

Ryan's book manages to carve out a space for itself within the extensive library of Vietnam War studies where it might be read alongside, for example, Patriots: The War Remembered from All Sides (Penguin, 2003). In the contested terrain of the Vietnam War era, however, Ryan's The Other Side of Grief will most certainly garner its share of readers and students.