- Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the
- night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you
- are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to
- remember except the story. — Tim O'Brienn
Introduction
Wars are stories of a kind, sequenced action driven by plot and character however misguided or profoundly mistaken. Therefore war stories - the personal accounts of soldiers and civilians - are a small part of the overarching, and often all-consuming, narrative of a war itself.
It is also important to recognize that war stories occupy a unique position between fiction and history. War stories and history are not the same, though they are deeply related. There is a tension here between what can be told - the story - and what is recorded - which becomes over time the history.
The battles, offenses, strategies and lasting effects of war are among the most documented events in human history. In epics and histories we read about the generals, rulers, and tactics that defined nations, fortified religions and drew the boundaries of our world. Martial tales fill the pages of many of the most enduring ancient texts - The Iliad, the Mahabharata, the works of Thucydides and Sun Tzu. Even the Sundjata of Mali was the oral account of a military leader. These war stories, like the war stories of the 200th and 21st century serve a critical cultural purpose. The stories of a war move from personal narrative into history, and in many ways serve a foundational purpose for peoples and nations. Yet despite all that is written of war, we so often hear that the experience of war - especially recent wars - is somehow unspeakable.
So what are war stories then, if not the telling of the untellable? What kinds of stories are these? Why are they told? How do they relate to the making, writing, revising of history?
Though addressing these general questions of war and historicity, this unit of study will focus specifically on the Vietnam War. In film and in fiction, the stories of Vietnam tell us volumes about both stories and history.
The stories of Vietnam have been told many times in many ways, and often they are told in films. For war stories are not just the stuff of tale and text, they are often taken up by screenwriters and directors as compelling narrative material fit for the big screen. In the case of Vietnam, film has long been a powerful vehicle for us to recount, sanitize, celebrate, witness, and reckon with the events of the war.
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