REFLECTIONS OF VIETNAM VETERANS

The events depicted in this dissertation--an organizational meeting in the banquet room of a restaurant, conversations in a newly created storefront office, a conversation in the bar of a Polish American Vets club, and three visits to see a patient on the locked ward of a VA Hospital--illustrate dilemmas and tensions, concerns and characteristics, insights and frustrations manifest in the struggle of particular Vietnam veterans to understand themselves and their experience. Alternating between narrative and analysis, the text proceeds from events to explication, from renderings to interpretation, all the while conditioned by a process of selection which at once informs the significance of the words and actions and is informed by them. Vietnam veterans risk what they would gain in their attempt as individuals to come to terms with their war experience not in and of itself, but in its relation to who they are now, that is, as a reflection of life composed of fearful consequences, assumed responsibilities, a fledgling humanity, and limited powers which they are only now beginning to apprehend with an ambivalent but determined openness