Vietnam World War II Gravity's Rainbow

[Paul Nightingale]

Ref the passage on 739:

'The two "station marks" that the narrator mentions bracket the years in
which the Johnson administration committed fully to a long-term U.S.
military presence in South Vietnam (1966) to the publication of the
so-called Pentagon Papers, which revealed the extent to which several
administrations had misrepresented the U.S.'s Vietnam policy and the
prosecution of the war (1971).'

From: Shawn Smith, Pynchon and History: Metahistorical Rhetoric and
Postmodern Narrative Form in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Routledge, 2005,
59).

An interesting study. Smith continues:

'But why narrate GR from the perspective of the veteran of a war which
escalated nearly twenty years after the end of World War II ...?' (ibid)