ABSTRACT
Generations of Vietnamese people endured years of war, first against the French and later against the Americans, and consequently war literature constitutes a significant part of the modern Vietnamese literary canon. The American war2 in Vietnam, the poetry of which is the focus of this chapter, was one of the most important conflicts of modern times, with a significance that reaches far beyond the dimensions of the military hostilities between the warring sides. It has become a symbol of the polarized ideological struggle of the Cold War and has generated many myths and great controversy. Given the war’s impact on global history, and the wide-ranging and frequently studied spectrum of American literary responses to the war, the Vietnamese perspective is surprisingly under-explored in academic scholarship. As I aim to demonstrate, while American writing reflects a multiplicity of experiences, the primary role of Vietnamese propaganda was ‘to paint
the society as having a single will’,3 making the Vietnamese representation of the war more monolithic.
