Receptions of War: Vietnam in American Culture

This academic survey of books, movies and television series about the Vietnam War reads like a graduate thesis. Ron Kovic's book and film Born on the Fourth of July is characterized as ``a powerful indictment of the militarized mass culture of the 1950s.'' The movie The Deer Hunter reveals that male identity, ``with its rituals of drinking and hunting, has . . . been fundamentally impaired'' by the war. There is a long, pointless summary of an episode of the TV show China Beach (``Independence Day''), the theme of which ``operates simultaneously to expose and to cover over the contradictions of the war.'' Martin, who teaches English at the University of Wisconsin, notes that after Apocalypse Now (1978), Hollywood's interest in Vietnam faded and such subsequent films as Taps , An Officer and a Gentleman and Top Gun represent a more positive portrayal of the military. In the final chapter Martin makes the unstartling pronouncement that the 1990-91 Gulf war was ``a war to establish a post-Vietnam syndrome order.'' (Apr.)