ABSTRACT
Since combat is traditionally the domain of the young, the connection between a Bildungsroman and a war story is not surprising. As suggested by Fussell’s tripartite thematic and structural paradigm-“innocence savaged and destroyed”—a recurring theme in much of modern war literature, fiction and nonfiction, is in fact soldiers’ education on the battlefield, as they lose their innocence and cope with the fundamental irony that “every war is worse than expected.” In two important works of Vietnam literary nonfiction, Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War and Michael Herr’s Dispatches, the authors use this archetypal pattern
to shape the content and structure of their war stories. Both books contain the authors’ lessons learned about war and the events and people they encountered in Vietnam. But the books differ markedly in their style and the authors’ reactions to the Vietnam experience.
