Dear America Letters Home From Vietnam Analysis

The text “Dear America: Letters home from Vietnam”, edited by Bernard Edelman, is a collection of letters and poems from serving soldiers written home during their tour of duty.Edelman aimed to bring an understanding of the war on those who served and the profound effect it had on them to life for the readers of the text. Within it we read commentary on the pressures and atrocities of the war in letters that are both stark in their reportage and emotionally charged in their reflections. The text presents a multitude of narratives describing within the true horrors of war, highlighting the raw reality of their combat experience to heighten the reader’s awareness of the physical and psychological toll this war exacted. And yet through all the desperation and trepidation of battle, there is an underlying hopefulness that somehow they will be the lucky ones, the ones to make it out alive and return home once more. Sometimes these hopes were false, and the soldiers who penned them never made it back home. Yet for others these hopes and dreams would soon become reality, and they one again were able to leave this nightmare place behind and return to their homes, Edelman has created a powerful text, reflecting within it not only the horrors of war, but the individual hope for the future.

In Dear America the soldiers’ letters and …show more content…
The public is beginning to doubt the integrity and integrity of the incumbent officials because of their previous experience with war statistics and reporting on the situation in Vietnam. This sluggishness of faith also undermines America's image of itself as a world superpower. If the well trained, well-supplied and well-compensated army can’t defeat an untrained guerrilla warfare group without training in military tactics, what can it do? The suspicion of US supremacy was made when the US tried to intervene militarily in other international conflicts such as the Iraq