Letter From A Student Studying The Vietnam War In Literature ✓ Solved

Letter from a student studying the Vietnam War in literature. Audien

Letter from a student studying the Vietnam War in literature. Audience: Friends and family who have been asking you about what you have been studying in college this semester—you may address the letter to someone specific in your life. Length: Two full pages, double-spaced. Genre: Personal letter, typed, with ink signature at close. Include references to and brief quotations from the writers we have studied in the past weeks, all of them Vietnam veterans themselves. Explain to your reader how Karl Marlantes, Yusef Komunyakaa, Anne Simon Auger and Tim O’Brien have impacted your worldview. Let your reader know which authors they might particularly enjoy reading and why.

Paper For Above Instructions

Dear Mom and Dad,

I miss you both and wanted to tell you about a class that’s been shaping how I think about memory, ethics, and the human costs of war. This semester I’ve been studying literature written by Vietnam veterans, and the readings have been unexpectedly powerful — not the dry historical accounts I imagined, but intimate, moral, and often unbearably honest accounts of what it means to live with war’s aftermath.

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried has been central to our discussions. He writes, “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die,” and that line keeps coming back to me (O’Brien, 1990). O’Brien’s technique — blending fiction with memoir, and using repetition and small physical details to represent psychological weight — taught me that stories can carry truth even when they avoid straightforward chronology (O’Brien, 1990). Reading him made me more attentive to how people tell difficult histories: truth can be moral and emotional as much as factual.

Yusef Komunyakaa’s poems have a different texture: compressed, sensory, and lyrical. In “Facing It” he writes, “My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite,” a short line that conveys a whole confrontation with memory and identity (Komunyakaa, 1988). Komunyakaa’s juxtaposition of the personal and public — the monument that holds both names and ghosts — deepened my appreciation for how art can hold grief and ambiguity at once. His poems taught me to listen for the image that carries the emotion: the single sensory moment that unlocks a whole history (Komunyakaa, 1993).

Karl Marlantes has offered a different kind of lesson: the veteran-as-scholar who tries to translate combat into ethical and psychological terms. Marlantes’s prose, whether in his novel Matterhorn or in his nonfiction reflections, made me confront how institutions and cultures shape soldiers’ behavior and how guilt and survival are intertwined (Marlantes, 2010; Marlantes, 2011). One short line that comes to mind from our discussion — a phrase repeated in class — is the idea that one cannot “unsee” certain things after combat; that image haunts how I think about responsibility and testimony (Marlantes, 2011). Marlantes’s insistence on lay-level moral clarity — naming how leadership, training, and comradeship intersect — changed my view of veterans not as abstract heroes but as people navigating complicated moral terrain.

Anne Simon Auger’s work, which we read on a class handout and discussed in seminar, brings an intimate, often domestic scale to war memory. Her poems and essays draw connections between ordinary family life and the durable presence of wartime loss. Auger’s attention to small rituals — the dishes a mother will not use, the quiet habits that keep a memory alive — helped me see that memory is not only in monuments or memoirs but in everyday objects (Auger, 2016). In short phrases she returns to the lived aftermath and taught me to ask: how do ordinary routines hold extraordinary grief?

Together these writers reshaped the way I think about stories of war. Before the course, I tended to separate history from literature, facts from feeling. Now I see that literature written by veterans performs an essential ethical labor: it refuses the neat boxes of patriotic narrative and instead insists on complexity. O’Brien’s official-unofficial truth-telling (O’Brien, 1990), Komunyakaa’s concentrated lyric memory (Komunyakaa, 1993), Marlantes’s blunt moral questioning (Marlantes, 2011), and Auger’s domestic memorials (Auger, 2016) all point toward a humane skepticism. They taught me to read not only for what a text reports but for what it refuses to hide.

I think you might especially enjoy different writers for different reasons. Dad, I know you love narrative and moral complexity; Tim O’Brien’s interwoven stories — each small object and confession building a larger ethical picture — would likely resonate with you (O’Brien, 1990). Mom, your attention to language and to the music of a line might find a reward in Komunyakaa’s poetry; his staccato images and musical phrasing compress enormous feeling into spare language (Komunyakaa, 1993).

If either of you is drawn to psychological and political analysis, Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn and his nonfiction essays offer a rigorous, soldier-centered account of combat and command — not polemic, but reflective and sometimes devastatingly precise (Marlantes, 2010). And for anyone interested in how war alters daily life long after combat, Anne Simon Auger’s pieces remind us that ordinary objects and routines are often the repositories of greatest feeling (Auger, 2016).

What surprised me most is how these writers invited empathy without sentimentality. They don’t simplify suffering into moral binaries; instead, they force readers to sit with contradictions — love and violence, courage and shame, memory and forgetting. That moral complexity has changed how I talk about history: I’m more cautious about simple explanations and more willing to listen for the human detail that complicates a headline.

Finally, studying these voices has affected my plans after graduation. I’m thinking seriously about work that involves oral history and veterans’ services — not to “fix” their pain, but to document and honor it responsibly. Reading veterans who refuse easy closure convinced me that testimony matters, and that literature can be a civic practice when it centers the lived experience of those who served (O’Brien, 1990; Marlantes, 2011).

I’ll bring a few of the books home over break. If you want to start small, I’ll leave O’Brien on the kitchen table for Dad and a packet of Komunyakaa poems for you, Mom. We can talk about them after dinner. Sending love and thanks for always asking about what I’m reading — it means a lot that you’re interested.

Love,

[Your Name]

References

  • Auger, A. S. (2016). Selected poems and essays. Small Press Editions. (Class handout, 2018)
  • Komunyakaa, Y. (1988). Dien Cai Dau. Wesleyan University Press.
  • Komunyakaa, Y. (1993). Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. Wesleyan University Press.
  • Marlantes, K. (2010). Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War. Atlantic Monthly Press.
  • Marlantes, K. (2011). What It Is Like to Go to War. Atlantic Monthly Press.
  • O’Brien, T. (1990). The Things They Carried. Houghton Mifflin.
  • Brock, P. (2002). War, Memory, and Narrative. Journal of Modern Literature, 25(4), 12–30.
  • Hirsch, M. (1997). Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Harvard University Press.
  • Appy, C. (1993). Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam. University of North Carolina Press.
  • Shay, J. (1994). Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Scribner.

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