“Back in a World I Understood”

On True War Stories about Women in Vietnam

Abstract

In the West, we know the Vietnam War as a conflict where political, physical, and emotional borders frequently became blurred. This article focuses on the war’s role in literature as such a time and place of “in-betweeness” which requires a constant switching between fact and fiction to describe. It identifies two “unbelievable” narrative elements in Vietnam War stories—the supernatural and the female perspective—to illustrate the problem inherent in calling these narratives “true war stories.”