ABSTRACT
This chapter includes memoirs, novels, and poetry written by male and female participants as well as observers and civilians to understand the impact of the war and the range of written expression it evokes. The literature of the American soldier in Viet Nam focuses on the individual experience, including his frustration that military policies prevent them from winning and the trauma caused by witnessing and perpetrating violence. Like the literature of the Vietnam War, literature from the Korean War increasingly includes voices of immigrants and refugees and their children who now live in the United States and seek to understand the impact, legacy, and memory of the war. Fiction writers have attended to the Vietnamese experience of the war, particularly of those who immigrated to the US like John Balaban, Robert Olen Butler became fluent in Vietnamese, working as a translator during the war.
