Abstract
This chapter considers war-related encounters, unmediated by interpreters, and represented in fictional accounts written by Vietnam War veterans, both American and Vietnamese, about the war. Examples are taken from poetry, novels, memoir, and the narratives of U.S. veterans treated for severe PTSD. What is striking about these varied accounts of the daily life and death scenarios experienced during the war, and remembered long after the war was over, is what little mention is given to any supposed cause for which they were fighting. A more prominent theme in the literature is the solders’ attempts to monitor and “self-legislate” individual or group ethical behavior during the war, while at the same time being ordered to obey a set of sanctioned naked rules granted rational legitimacy by whichever military body they served. It is this moral struggle, and how it is articulated in soldiers’ encounters with others and with themselves, that is explored here.
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Notes
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I express my thanks to Doug Anderson for giving me permission to include his poems ‘Infantry Assault’ and ‘Bamboo Bridge’ in my chapter.
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Inghilleri, M. (2019). On Encounters and Ethics in the Vietnam War. In: Kelly, M., Footitt, H., Salama-Carr, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Languages and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04825-9_3
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