Great Vietnam Novel

[Murthy Yenamandra]

Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt writes, among other things:
> Question: Shouldn't The Great Vietnam War Novel be written by a 
> Vietnamese author? Or are we just talking The Great (US) Vietnam 
> Novel? Or is there just a little arrogance here? Maybe TRP stayed 
> clear of Vietnam out of respect - maybe he didn't want to be just 
> another American writing another country's history. (Craig Clark's 
> post is relevant here - for most Americans Vietnam took place in the 
> US, I would think).

I think we're just talking about The Great US (Vietnam) Novel. And
we've also been discussing mostly the U.S. experience of that war,
which is an amalgam of the experiences of U.S. soldiers who made it
back alive and the domestic population that was watching it on TV.  The
far more direct and real (as opposed to read about or watched)
"experience" of the Vietnamese (not to mention the cambodians etc) is
probably still a footnote waiting to be expanded. 

There is value in any honestly told story of war, even if we realize
it's not the whole story - not even the most significant part.

Murthy

-- 
Murthy Yenamandra, Dept of CompSci, U of Minnesota. Email: yenamand at cs.umn.edu
   "I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the
    swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the
    wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour  
    to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all ..."