Recent debates about oral historiography have questioned whether oral narratives should be thought of primarily as providing factual knowledge about the past, on the one hand, or the meanings invested in the past by individuals and cultural groups, on the other.2 This examination of published oral narratives about the Vietnam War takes the latter approach a step further by asking not just about the meaning of the content of these narratives, but about the rhetorical force of the oral narrative form itself. A dozen collections of oral narratives about the Vietnam War were published in the 1980s, several became best-sellers in the United States, and some, such as Bloods and Everything We Had, are widely used in school and university courses about the war.3 How can we account for their proliferation and popularity?4 The Vietnam War was America's most deeply divisive military experience since the Civil War, whose spectre has continued to haunt the United States since the withdrawal of American forces in 1973 and the capture of Saigon in 1975. The legacy of the war is the continuation of antagonisms between those who supported the US war effort and those who opposed it; a mutual mistrust by the public and policy-makers regarding the degree to which sustained foreign military intervention would be supported (the 'Vietnam Syndrome'); the military's loss of prestige in the eyes of Americans and others, both because of its defeat, and because of widespread stories about atrocities, defoliation, the bombing of civilians, drug-taking and 'fragging' (killing of officers) by the troops. In an attempt to come to terms with these fraught issues, the public has been compulsively feeding on media treatments of the war since the mid-1980s. Debates about the war continue to be highly charged and acrimonious. One of the,characteristics shared by several is the disrepute into which official military and governmental sources of information about the war have fallen. Allegations that American service personnel have suffered illness and death as a result of exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange during the war are widely believed, but, apart from two malignancies, are denied by the Veterans Administration. The belief that the government has knowingly abandoned prisoners of war and soldiers declared missing in action in Vietnam symbolizes the sense of betrayal that many veterans feel they suffered at the hands of the public and of their superiors. The