Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War by John A. Wood (review)

John A. Wood, who earned his PhD in history from Temple University, has written Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War, an analysis of how American Vietnam War memoir literature has shaped the US collective memory of the war. It examines fifty-eight veteran memoirs and oral histories published between 1967 and 2005, selected by criteria based on recognition, reception, authorship, and use in scholarship—Who reviewed them? Were they on the bestseller list? Who wrote them? And have scholars on the Vietnam War referenced them in their work? Over seven chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, he compares the veteran accounts of such topics as combat conditions, the treatment of the Vietnamese, gender and sexuality, and the public reception of returning veterans with how these topics have been treated in the historical scholarship. He concludes that these veteran narratives do not trivialize the war as was the case, he contends, with much of the popular culture of the 1980s—a period when there was an explosion in Vietnam War literature. Rather, they offer a "true" depiction of the war, depicting its "brutalities" and the "racist and sexist attitudes held by many gis in Vietnam" (128). Moreover, Wood adds, they have also allowed memoirists from other wars, like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the Korean War and World War II who wrote about their experiences in combat after the Vietnam veteran narratives began appearing, to be more forthcoming in depicting the horror and hardship of war. However, as he states in the words of the Vietnam War historian George Herring, these narratives "lack the historical perspective" required for a comprehensive understanding of the war's "outcome and consequences" (129).

The context for this study is that the Vietnam War holds a special place in the American national psyche due to the rather dubious circumstances in which the country was pushed into the war, the crisis in confidence this engendered in the people's view of the national government, and the abuse heaped upon returning veterans by an ungrateful or disillusioned public. Wood contends that all the myths and subterfuge this created surrounding the war, "primed" the general public to give veterans "special" claim to real "truth" about the war (3). While a noble exercise, the analysis is, unfortunately, rather thin. At no point does the author engage, much less consult the bountiful scholarship on collective memory. The closest Wood comes to this is in chapter six, which deals with the political content of veteran narratives. In it, Wood argues that veteran memoirs are "fully engaged" in the battle over "public memory." Here, Wood is offered a golden opportunity to use these narratives to identify not only how collective memory is constructed by a society, but how they shaped the public consciousness of the American people with regard to the war. Instead, he merely states that "all veterans who produce personal narratives… affect collective memory just by telling readers what they experienced in Vietnam," avoiding these questions altogether (97). In comparison to Wood's work, Viet Thanh Nguyen's Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016) provides an excellent example of how this can be done.

This reflects some larger problems with the book's methodology. Wood does not identify what collective memory is. He does not explain the connection between his criteria for selecting the books he examines and how collective memory is shaped. And the scholarship on the history of the Vietnam War he examines is, for the most part, rather dated. Of all the books and journal articles listed under the secondary works in his bibliography only six were published after 2010 and of those only four deal with the Vietnam War. This is unfortunate given the many new interpretations of the war that have emerged in the past decade now that scholars are gaining access...