SOURCE: Kinney, Katherine. “‘Humping the Boonies’: Sex, Combat, and the Female in Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country.” In Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature, edited by Philip K. Jason, pp. 38–48. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Kinney examines how In Country metaphorically depicts the relationship between women and war.

Sex and war are the oldest of metaphorical bedfellows. Since World War II, writers of war literature have become increasingly explicit in using the language and imagery of sexuality to define their emotional and moral relationships to war. In the final chapter of The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell celebrates Thomas Pynchon's portrayal of the masochistic desire with which veterans will relive their combat experiences. Fussell argues that in Gravity's Rainbow, “for almost the first time the ritual of military memory is freed from all puritan lexical constraint and allowed to...