Abstract
Using Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War films (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, and Heaven and Earth) as a prototypical example of the Vietnam Veteran Narrative, I read the Vietnam Veteran Narrative as a narrative of trauma.
I think [Born on the Fourth of July] is about America. I think it takes America from the 1950s to the ’60s and into the ’70s…. What we tried to do is—the boy and America are linked. It’s my generation. The way we grew up. We bought certain beliefs in the 1950s; they were tested—hard. In the 1960s losses were incurred and I think a sense of wisdom we learned in the ’70s and we’re still, obviously, trying to apply it to our lives. We’re still struggling. It’s our generation (Stone, film commentary).
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Notes
This assessment is from my readings of Vietnam Veteran Narratives (see Christina Weber, “Conceptualizing a Vortical History: Narrative Negotiations of Vietnam Veterans,” Department of Sociology, Buffalo, SUNY—University at Buffalo, 2001), but can also be found in works such as Lloyd Lewis’s The Tainted War: Culture and Identity in Vietnam War Narratives (Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1985) and Jeffrey Loeb’s unpublished dissertation, “After the Flood: Survivor Literature of the Vietnam War” (Department of English, University of Kansas, 1995). In Lewis’s book, he organizes his analysis around the following themes. He first looks at the initiation process and the idealism instructing the boys’ worldview as they entered the war. He then looks at the war experience and the way it breaks that worldview, ending the book with the way that break affected their return home.
As Michael Klein comments in his article, “Historical Memory and Film,” in From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film, ed. G. M. Linda Dittmar (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1990, 24), “The advertisements for Platoon stressed that the film was authentic as its director was ‘a decorated infantryman who spent fifteen months in Vietnam.’” Richard Corliss’s review of the film in Time magazine is titled “Platoon: Viet Nam, the Way it Really Was, On Film.” (January 26, 1987, 55–61; my emphasis). The liner notes on the DVD state, “Platoon is the Vietnam War as it really was: mean, ferocious, deadly, real. And, in the hands of filmmaker and Vietnam combat veteran (decorated with a Bronze Star) Oliver Stone, it is … a landmark of battle authenticity seen from the viewpoint of ordinary foot soldiers.” The Motion Picture Guide writes, “Platoon has no equal when it comes to capturing the reality of men in combat.” Sheila Benson in the Los Angeles Times writes, “War movies of the past, even the greatest ones, seem like crane shots by comparison. Platoon is ground zero” (cited in DVD liner notes—my emphases).
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© 2015 Christina D. Weber
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Weber, C.D. (2015). Conceptualizing the Vietnam Veteran Narrative as a Narrative of Trauma. In: Social Memory and War Narratives. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137496652_3
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