Matthew Barnett
Dr. Charlotte Power
U.S History since 1860
November 13th, 2014
Vietnam War: Comparative Literary Analysis People, through their lifetime, will sooner or later hear the Vietnam War mentioned. Sure it was a war with great value to historians, but the average person does not even know what the war was fought over. The soldiers who fought in the war were asking the same question. The war was fought to try and combat communism from consuming South Vietnam. Most people didn’t understand why the States were involved in the conflict to begin with, considering it was not an immediate threat to the nation’s security. Those soldiers who were lucky enough to make it out of the war that America had finally lost were ridiculed on their…show more content… Both texts are about the correspondences between the soldiers and their family and friends. They differ in many ways, one begin that Shrapnel tells more of the story of the families of the lost men and their letters to the soldiers. It was a way for the families to get their message to their lost loved one, “In time, I hope we can all be together.”(Palmer, 21) Shrapnel also deals with how the families are coping with the loss of their men and the toll the war took on them. Dear America is more about the daily trial and tribulations of the soldiers who were living the hell in Vietnam. It followed the stories of the soldiers in their writing home to their families. The book tells about their first experience’s in Vietnam and the getting to “bust our Cherries”(Edelman, 33). It also told how most of the people in the Vietnam conflict were divided into two, the ones who sat back at base camp and ran the show, and the ones who were “humping the boonies”(Edelman, 63) The war in the eyes of the soldiers was based on the body count and that was all that mattered to Uncle Sam. As long as they lost more than we did at the end of the day, we won, even if we did not gain an inch of…show more content… It tore the nation apart. Nobody trusted their government anymore and they were PO’d at the soldiers for serving in the war, like they wanted to be there in the first place. The families were caught by surprise, with the war having more a numbing effect on their emotions. They just sit, day by day, and wait for their lost loved ones to once again come through doors to place they once called home. The ones that were most effected by the war were the ones who fought in it. They didn’t want to be there anymore than the right wing idiots who thought they enjoyed killing children, while they sat by and smoked their dope in their hippie peace circles. As a whole, the nation has become completely numb to the Vietnam War. Nobody knows what to think about it, just as it was stated in Dear America, “Why were we