SOURCE: "Re-Writing America: Literature as Cultural Revision in the New Vietnam Fiction," in America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, edited by Owen W. Gilman, Jr. and Lorrie Smith, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990, pp. 3-9.

[Beidler is the author of American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam (1982). In the essay below, he argues that Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato and Stephen Wright's Meditations in Green are works of cultural revision that offer the "prospect of a new imaginative fiction of the American experience of Vietnam."]

"We can truly be transformed, and even possibly redeemed, by electing to write at times of what happened—but also of what might have happened, what could have happened, what should have happened, and also what can be kept from happening or what can be made to happen…. Words are all we have." These words happen to be mine...