"the Hardest Game We'd Ever Played": Baseball As Metaphor in Four Vietnam War Poems (Critical Essay‪)‬

The Vietnam War has resulted in a body of creative literature written by veterans that is remarkable for its character and quantity. It is a phenomenon in American literature that this most inglorious war, fought by very young soldiers who were popularly considered to be barely literate, should have produced a volume of work with numbers rivaling that of the American Civil and World Wars. Of course, Vietnam was America's longest war, but an explanation for why it produced so much writing probably lies in its peculiar nature. Fundamentally, the American experience of Vietnam was an experience of the collapse of meaning further exacerbated by public indifference and hostility. For those who were there, Vietnam was called "The Nam," a distinct, self-enclosed universe remote from what was known as "The World." The soldiers' experience of the war is effectively summed up by Tim O'Brien in a passage from his novel, Going after Cacciato, where he describes the infantryman's perspective, or rather lack of perspective, in a daily grind that consisted of: Consequently, it seems plausible that the outpouring of veteran writing results from a compulsion to record or re-present an indelible experience, but also from the need to seek terms and contexts for relating that experience to or against the broader experience of culture and identity. The writing serves to register the "sense of entrapment" in meaninglessness that O'Brien describes but also to consider, paradoxically, what that meaninglessness means.