The novel takes on an intensely introspective approach to the author’s mental anguish over the war, an approach that mirrors the larger cultural introspection in America after its traumatizing experience in Vietnam.
The Cold War and Vietnam. Actual fighting by United States combat forces in Vietnam lasted from 1964 to 1973, but grew out of earlier events and produced effects that continue to be felt in the twenty-first century. In fact the war itself remained undeclared, and U.S. military involvement deepened only gradually over a long period, so that historians have difficulty in fixing a starting point for what Americans know as the Vietnam War (the Vietnamese have another name for it—the American War). The end date too does not parallel U.S. withdrawal. Although U.S. forces left in 1973, the fighting in Vietnam continued until 1975, when America’s former Vietnamese allies were finally conquered by Soviet- and Chinese-backed Vietnamese communists. U.S. relations with communist Vietnam were not normalized until more than two decades later.
America’s involvement in Vietnam must thus be seen within the context of the larger struggle known as the Cold War, a global conflict that pitted the democratic United States against the communist superpowers of the Soviet Union and (to a lesser degree) China.
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