Soldier talk : the Vietnam War in oral narrative / edited by Paul Budra and Michael Zeitlin

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Talk the talk / Michael Zeitlin and Paul Budra -- Approaching a truer form of truth : the appropriation of the oral narrative form in Vietnam War literature / Jen Dunnaway -- Concatenation and history in Nam / Paul Budra -- "Disremembering, dísmémbering" : poetics and the oral histories of the Vietnam War / Kevin McGuirk -- Talk, write, talk : Bobby Garwood, MIAs, and conspiracy / Craig Howes -- Resolutely other : the Vietnam War, oral history, and the subject of revolutionary socialism / Thomas Carmichael -- Oral history and popular memory in the historiography of the Vietnam War / Van Nguyen-Marshall -- Queering Vietnam : Katherine V. Forrest's fictional oral history / Priscilla L. Walton -- Bloods : teaching the Afroamerican experience of the Vietnam Conflict / William M. King -- The things they saw : trauma and vision in a piece of my heart : the stories of twenty-six American women who served in Vietnam / Michael Zeitlin.

Zeitlin (English, U. of British Columbia), Budra (English, Simon Frasier U.) and contributors examine oral histories and memoirs of those involved with the war in Vietnam, whether in its jungles in-country or on the streets in America. As they do they consider what happens to personal and official memory over time, how the politics of the present influence our subjective view of the past, and how we come to believe what we call the truth. They include examinations of narratives from sources including African-American soldiers, Vietnamese warriors on both sides, women who served in Vietnam, protesters, and a famous and enigmatic MIA.