The Literary Legacy of the Vietnam War More books have been
written about the Vietnam war than about any other American war.
The "official" version of the war lost credibility early and
individuals had to make sense of it for themselves. A large
number wrote books based on their experiences, many of which
were published by small presses or by the authors themselves and
received no distribution to speak of. Even books from large
publishers came and went as if they were written on air. And
tracking down the literature of Vietnam is doubly difficult
because, in an era which declared the "novel" dead and saw the
birth of the "new journalism," it is not easy to decide just
what constitutes "literature" and what is simple history or mere
reporting. Just as the Vietnam war stretched our definitions of
warfare--with such memorable lines as "we had to destroy the
town in order to save it"--the literature of the war wants its
own categories, and falls uneasily into the standard ones. That
said, there clearly is a liter