SOURCE: Bates, Milton J. “The Generation War.” In The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling, pp. 174-213. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

In the following excerpt, Bates explores the father-son relationships at the heart of Tobias Wolff's memoir In Pharoah's Army and Walter Howerton's story “The Persistence of Memory.”

[There is a] kind of Vietnam war story in which the son feels initially superior to his father because he has the courage either to go to Vietnam or to resist the war. Two narratives of this type, Tobias Wolff's memoir In Pharoah's Army (1994) and Walter Howerton's short story “The Persistence of Memory” (1991), represent dramatically different versions of the father-son relationship but engage several of the same issues. Both testify to loss, though neither could be called an “obituary for the war itself.” On the contrary, they suggest that those who survived the Vietnam War may...