"All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true."
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Vietnam, the "first terrible postmodernist war [that] cannot be told in any of the traditional paradigms of the war novel or movie....the breakdown of any shared language through which the veteran might convey such experience."
-- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (44)"

O'Brien quotations from a lecture at Brown University: “I carried Vietnam with me for a long time, the physical wounds and the spiritual burdens and so on, but so do you. If your parents have been divorced or your boyfriend has just dumped you, um, you know a little bit of what it's like to be in a war. Uh, maybe even a lot. You know what it is to have time just stopped - those late hours on guard when you're just staring into the dark, and you look at your watch and it's 2 am, and you wait an hour and you look again, and it's 2:01, and you wait an hour and you-you know what that is like, and it's a little bit like Vietnam, where the time just went by in little droplets of now-now-now-just forever.”

“The thing is, you have to, though, when you return from a war, you have to assume responsibility. I was there, I took part in it, I did pull the trigger, and whether I literally killed a man or not is finally irrelevant to me. What matters is I was part of it all, the machine that did it, and do feel a sense of obligation, and through that story I can share some of my feelings, when I walked over that corpse that day, and looked down at it, wondering, thinking, 'dear God, dear God, please don't let it have been my bullet, Dear God, please.'”