P's Fathers and Vietnam

[Terrance]

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> The Oedipal situation in GR seems to have far more to do with the Father
> trying to kill the Son, and while the literary roots of this story go deep,
> in GR this may also have an origin a bit closer to home, as Pynchon sits
> there writing that novel in the 60s, watching fathers send their sons off
> to die in Vietnam for no good reason at all apart from lining the coffers
> of multinational corporations and paying homage, in blood, to windy
> rhetoric of "freedom" and "democracy" and "justice" that certainly don't
> apply to the regime that the U.S. was then propping up in Vietnam, rhetoric
> which applied only a bit less tenuously to the regime here at home.  

But the fathers in GR don't and can't kill the sons or send them off to
war to die for 
multinational corporations. 

This Vietnam reading doesn't have any textual support. There is a
Vietnam connection. 
But this Vietnam reading misses it. 

Take Slothrop for example. His father doesn't send him off to vietnam.
His father sells him to the multinationals (Father Imago)  when he is
but an infant. 

Big difference.