SOURCE: Ryan, Maureen. “The Other Side of Grief: American Women and the Vietnam War.” Critique 36, no. 1 (fall 1994): 41-57.

In the following essay, Ryan analyzes several works written by women on the subject of the Vietnam War.

Contemporary American society is saturated with books, movies, television shows, and college courses that offer a variety of revisionary interpretations of the Vietnam War. As Thomas Myers has noted, the Vietnam War “has become an intellectual industry in America” (“Dispatches for Ghost Country” 411). Why now? Why the almost obsessive preoccupation with a war now twenty-five years in the past? A number of commentators have suggested that inconsistencies in the official history of the Vietnam conflict and the fragmented, surreal nature of the war fought in Asian jungles by American G.I.s who were at once occupier and savior (or, in Frank Ross's words, assailant and victim) account for the ongoing effort...