Smetak, Jacqueline R. “The (Hidden) Antiwar Activist in Vietnam War Fiction.” Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature. Ed. Philip K. Jason. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. 141-165.

This article questions why there is relatively little antiwar activist writing from the home-front. Informative distinctions between protest and antiwar writing. Addresses the political implications and contexts of Vietnam antiwar writing. Provocative vantage point and usefully identifies a gap.

“The war story, as such, is a very old form, highly conventionalized and relatively easy to tell. The story of political opposition is more difficult because it has no convenient a priori structure to appropriate” (Smetak 142).

“The [antiwar] movement was in many ways a mirror image of the war itself, dependent on the war for its very being” (Smetak 142).

“to undermine what can be called ‘the ideology of individualism,’ the notion that the individual, not the system or the circumstances, is responsible for whatever happens” (Smetak 145).

“Tim O’Brien’s autobiography, If I Die in a Combat Zone, is more successful in establishing identification primarily because he sidesteps the issues of placing blame or defending either the war or anyone who participating in it. The war simply was and, for him, the issue is not the war but courage” (Smetak 149).

“Given that men writing of their own experiences in that war tend to construct themselves, as did Ron Korvic in Born on the Fourth of July and Philip Caputo in A Rumor of War, as youths whose decisions were made for them . . . one can conclude that a passive narrator or main character is as much a convention of Vietnam War fiction as the trenches are of World War I literature” (Smetak 156).

“All of these writers—O’Brien, Caputo, Fuller, even Webb—rail against this war in those terms. It was a massive exercise in stupidity that left two and a half million people dead and the survivors damaged in ways difficult for those who did not live through that war to understand. The survivors are condemned to tell it to uncomprehending listeners just as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner was condemned to collar a horrified wedding guest” (Smetak 163).

“It was not a clean war, not on any level, with participants to be neatly divided between them and us, between the good and the bad. Such distinctions break under the weight of the concrete particularities, and the role of the constructed activist as soldiers is to show us that” (Smetak 164).