The Tainted War: Culture and Identity in Vietnam War Narratives

(Hardback)

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Lewis thoroughly analyzes the processes through which social reality is constructed and subjectively appropriated by individuals. Step-by-step he shows precisely how a war in Southeast Asia became a young man's reality, how Americans found themseles compelled to scrap the cultural knowledge they had been taught, how an individual went from civilian to combat soldier and back again and was flung into a cultural twilight zone. To reconstruct their world view, Lewis dips into the minds, hearts, and souls of the young men who witnessed the Vietnam War firsthand. As they tell their own stories he focuses on the socio-psychological consequences.

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Using 19 accounts by enlisted men and company-grade officers, Lewis concludes that American culture failed to prepare its young men for the reality of the war in Vietnam. According to Lewis, American males had accepted ideas, based on their fathers' W.W. II experiences, that wars pit virtue against evil in clearly defined battlefield situations with individual actions modeled on John Waynes's movie heroics. But the Vietnam War was unlike any war fought by this generation's fathers. Lewis's perceptive study in the sociology of knowledge offers many original insights into the Vietnam War. College and universtiy libraries.-Choice
"Using 19 accounts by enlisted men and company-grade officers, Lewis concludes that American culture failed to prepare its young men for the reality of the war in Vietnam. According to Lewis, American males had accepted ideas, based on their fathers' W.W. II experiences, that wars pit virtue against evil in clearly defined battlefield situations with individual actions modeled on John Waynes's movie heroics. But the Vietnam War was unlike any war fought by this generation's fathers. Lewis's perceptive study in the sociology of knowledge offers many original insights into the Vietnam War. College and universtiy libraries."-Choice

Author Bio

wis /f Lloyd /i B.