The generation lost: Vietnam and the new expatriate

In the 1920s, a group of American writers expatriated themselves to Europe in an attempt to escape the disillusionment they felt after WWI. Gertrude Stein labeled these wandering souls "the lost generation." Similarly, the Vietnam War produced a group of writers, both American and Vietnamese, who can also be called a "lost generation" or "new expatriates" because of their cultural disconnection after the war.; Following Michael Herr's novel Dispatches, this study defines the Vietnam War as "the country that was the war," a country constructed by shared experience, whose "native" writers are "expatriated" from their previous homelands. Thus becoming natives of the combat landscape, they find themselves strangers in their own countries after the war. In order to give a composite account of the Vietnam experience, American texts by and about the white soldier, African American soldier, correspondent, and female nurse are discussed. The Vietnamese texts include those written by and about the NVA soldier, Viet Cong guerrilla, and Viet Kieu or refugee.; To understand "the country that was the war," two landscapes are visited: the American and the Vietnamese combat landscapes. Within each discussion, certain elements of the combat landscape are explored, such as the geography, the construct of time, the language, and the native inhabitants. Ultimately, a third landscape emerges through the texts of the war where the American and Vietnamese landscapes converge---a landscape of the mind, which produces a national exile narrative from "the country that was the war."...