the Elite and Class can kiss my...

scrawny pale backside.


From what I am able to glean from the criticism, it is simply this, while O'Brian's The Things They Carried is an excellent example of postmodernism and literary art, that postmodern and aesthetic bent weakens the need to re-write Vietnam's history. The issue with re-writing the history is that the current historical interpretation is, according to Jim Neilson, that it is too favorable to the United States. There's a lot of truth in how we do not recognize Vietnam as it was. This Link explains certain limits placed on the troops in Vietnam. Even with those limits 1,100,000-1,900,000 Vietnamese "casualties" occurred during the war. This was the direct result of the pentagon's policy of established quotas. In one sense we attempted what was a WWI strategy of "bleeding the enemy white" And that is not only morally wrong but tactically unsuitable for a country like the united states which was able to defeat Germany and the central Powers, Nazi Germany and the axis, and North Korea, more or less in the same amount of years as the whole of the Vietnamese conflict from the perspective of the Vietnamese. here's a Link to a website about twentieth century conflicts that I used to confirm death tolls, combat years, ETC. However I do not think that all of the direct politics of the historiography