“How to Write a True War Story”: Two Sides of the Vietnam War 

In this course we will read two postmodern novels written by veterans of the Vietnam War: one American and the other North Vietnamese. Bao Ninh was one of ten survivors of the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade, originally a corps of 500 young North Vietnamese students, decimated during the years of “The American War.” Tim O’Brien was drafted right out of college and served from 1969 to 1970 as part of the 23rd Infantry Division, which had been identified in a 1969 New Yorker exposé as responsible for the 1968 massacre at My Lai. Each man has written an iconic novel about the traumas, both personal and national, experienced because of their shared war. Each has eschewed memoir, finding instead that the novel as an art form presents a Truth that the facts do not. To quote from O’Brien’s short story entitled “How to Tell a True War Story”: ‘Happeningness is irrelevant.  A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.’

Required Reading:

Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War, ISBN 978-0525562849; Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, ISBN 978-0618706419. Both works are available to order secondhand from thriftbooks.com, abebooks.com, and alibris.com.

Michele Lettiere has taught a course on the Vietnam War in Film and Literature to high school juniors and seniors several times.