Combat's implacable allure: Reading Vietnam amid the War on Terror

The Vietnam War presents a grave challenge to American national myth, which is to say our culture's sacralization of the political and politicization of the sacred within the frame of a narrative that renders the state capable of disseminating "freedom" across the globe. In the years leading up to the war, and even in the first two or three years of the conflict itself, Americans as a whole had a relatively clear sense of purpose relative to Vietnam--understanding the defense of liberty against Communism to be not only a just cause or a cause in keeping with the national myth, but a duty. Of course, inherent in such a view is a deeply assimilatory and hierarchical reading of American culture relative to the cultures of other nations; yet, such a reading is at the root of American myth, is embodied in the nation's exceptionalist desire to become a "City on a Hill." Armed with a narrative that occludes difference, then, America entered the war in Vietnam only to find itself embroiled in a quagmire that exploded its sharply drawn dichotomies and forced Americans to ask nothing less than whether the nation is, in fact, exceptional at all. It is for guidance and insight into this experience of mass cultural disjunction, then, that critics traditionally have turned to the Vietnam War's literature.;In part, my dissertation does just this--seeks guidance in understanding contemporary difficulties related to constructions of American purpose from the literature of Vietnam. However, the study also points to an aspect of the war and its literature almost entirely obscured in the relevant scholarship. My dissertation asks why America now finds itself in open-ended wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, if indeed the Vietnam War forced Americans to confront the limits of their national myth's assimilatory energy. I contend that we can shift the focus of critical investigation into the literature of Vietnam so as to analyze both the disintegration and reemergence of Americans' desires to export their national myth. I further claim that this shift can be one that allows for the articulation and narration of an alternative understanding of American purpose.