ow great was the cultural impact of America's involvement in Indochina?
''Well,'' says John Newman, curator of Colorado State University's Vietnam War Literature Collection, ''I've heard it said that every book published in America between 1965 and 1990 was in some sense about the Vietnam War.''
Nor is the war's impact limited to those books and that quarter century. ''To this day,'' says John Baky, director of libraries at La Salle University in Philadelphia, whose Connelly Library has 10,000 items in its Imaginative Representations of the Vietnam War special collection, ''people don't realize what a cultural presence [the war] is.''
It's estimated that 700-750 novels and at least 100 short-story collections have been published in English about the war. Some 1,400 personal narratives have reached print: everything from Robert McNamara's ''In Retrospect'' to paperback originals by former Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets whose combat memoirs have become a thriving subgenre. Those narratives are but a fraction of the approximately 12,000 nonfiction titles the Library of Congress catalogs under the umbrella heading ''Vietnam Conflict, 1961-1975.''
There have been more than 250 feature films relating to the war. Many are thoroughly obscure. Baky estimates, for example, that there are 30 biker movies centering on Harley-riding Vietnam veterans.
In other films, the war figures peripherally (Travis Bickle, the main character in Martin Scorsese's 1976 film, ''Taxi Driver,'' is a Vietnam vet) or is allegorized (as in the 1986 science-fiction film ''Aliens''). Yet Vietnam is central to some of the most celebrated, and/or reviled films of the last quarter century: ''The Deer Hunter'' (1978), ''Apocalypse Now'' (1979), ''Rambo: First Blood Part II'' (1985), ''Platoon'' (1986).
The war has served as the primary inspiration in the work of the playwright David Rabe, the authors Tim O'Brien and Robert Olen Butler, and the filmmaker Oliver Stone. Even leaving aside his Vietnam trilogy of ''Platoon,'' ''Born on the Fourth of July'' (1989), and ''Heaven and Earth'' (1993), Stone's work, with its furious distrust of authority and predilection for violence and lives led in extremis, is unthinkable without his experience as a combat infantryman during the war.
Most notable of all, the war inspired what has come to be considered the nation's greatest work of either public or funerary art: Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
One indication of how great a shock Vietnam posed to the American imagination is that the predominant cultural response to the war initially took the form of journalism, rather than literature or film. Just as the debate over the war did so much to create a culture of protest in the United States during the second half of the '60s, so did the reporting from Vietnam during the first half of the decade by such journalists as Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam (both of whom later wrote important books about the war), and Peter Arnett do so much to frame the terms of that debate.
Perhaps because they shared its views, writers and filmmakers initially focused more on the peace movement than the war proper. Norman Mailer's account of the 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night'' (1968), was an enormous critical and popular success, for example, and Arlo Guthrie's ''Alice's Restaurant'' was first an LP recording (1967), then a film (1969).
Opposition to the war in cultural circles was very nearly unanimous. Those few figures who did support US involvement, such as the novelists John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac, found themselves ostracized. When John Wayne directed and starred in an unapologetically hawkish adaptation of Robin Moore's best-selling novel ''The Green Berets'' (1968), the film was ferociously attacked (which didn't prevent it from pulling in the year's tenth-best grosses).
Even those books and films that were seen as the most eloquent statements about the war addressed it indirectly. Such Vietnam-era touchstones as Joseph Heller's ''Catch-22'' (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut's ''Slaughterhouse Five'' (1969), or the films ''Bonnie and Clyde'' (1967), ''M*A*S*H'' and ''Little Big Man'' (both 1970) were all ostensibly about other subjects and other wars.
Seen from a practical standpoint, this made perfect sense. How could products of the imagination compete with the reality of the Mekong Delta? More than just a theater of war, Vietnam was itself a kind of theater - a point made explicitly and stirringly by the Wagner-scored helicopter assault in ''Apocalypse Now.'' Vietnam, Michael Herr writes in ''Dispatches'' (1977), ''was a place where no drama had to be invented, ever.''
Thirteen-thousand miles from home, it provided a stunningly exotic setting, at once gorgeous and menacing (''The land is your true enemy,'' a Viet Cong major tells a squad of American soldiers in Tim O'Brien's novel, ''Going After Cacciato''). This war, more than any before, turned the surreal into the mundane, and vice versa, something most memorably depicted in the writing of Herr and O'Brien.
The war coined its own language - ''grunt,'' ''frag,'' ''DMZ,'' ''fire base'' - words of shocking force and rude vigor that no dramatist could have bettered. ''Beware of having too good a speechwriter,'' Frances FitzGerald once wrote of John F. Kennedy's role in US involvement, ''- your phrases may be remembered.'' It was only fitting that this least heroic of wars should be more memorable for the language of its participants than the prose of any of its writers.
Above all, there was the music. The first war to come with its own soundtrack, Vietnam was rock 'n' roll made flesh - and blood. Songs overtly about the war, either pro (like Barry Sadler's ''Ballad of the Green Berets,'' which sold 8 million copies in 1966) or con (Country Joe and the Fish's ''I-Feel-Like-I'm Fixin'-to-Die Rag,'' released in 1967), were relatively few. It was the sheer power of rock, the way it could simultaneously provoke and console, be anthem and escape, that embedded it so deeply in the experience of the war. Rock and the war ''had run power off the same circuit for so long they didn't even have to fuse,'' Herr writes. ''What I'd thought of as two obsessions were really only one.''
Seen in this light, Vietnam was nothing so much as the '60s' ground zero (the war, not Altamont, was the other side of Woodstock). It's no coincidence that the era's songs are integral to so many Vietnam narratives.
This is especially so for the movies: the Rolling Stones' ''Out of Time'' in ''Coming Home'' (1978), the Doors' ''The End'' in ''Apocalypse Now,'' the Miracles' ''Tracks of My Tears'' in ''Platoon,'' the Stones' ''Paint It Black'' in ''Full Metal Jacket'' (1987). Indeed, it's a mark of the anomalousness of ''The Deer Hunter'' that its signature song should be a throwback like Frankie Valli's ''Can't Take My Eyes Off You.'' That wasn't a record likely to get banned from Armed Forces Radio Vietnam (something that happened to the Animals' ''We Gotta Get Out of This Place'').
The most famous instance of how volatile could be the mixture of Vietnam and music came two decades after the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, when the title and driving beat of Bruce Springsteen's ''Born in the USA'' led Ronald Reagan to try to appropriate it for his reelection bid in 1984. In fact, the lyrics were not about morning in America, but mourning:
Had a brother at Khe Sanh
fighting off the Viet Cong
They're still there, he's all gone
In meaning, if not mood, Springsteen's song would seem more at home in the mid-'70s, which saw the cultural peak of disgust with the war. Representative works include Robert Stone's novel ''Dog Soldiers'' (1974); Gloria Emerson's book of reportage ''Winners and Losers'' and Ron Kovic's autobiography, ''Born on the Fourth of July'' (both 1976); and ''Coming Home,'' which won an Academy Award for Jane Fonda, whose forceful opposition to the war had earned her the sobriquet ''Hanoi Jane.''
Yet that same Oscar ceremony heralded a new era in the cultural response to the war. That year's Best Picture winner was ''The Deer Hunter.'' Michael Cimino's movie, with its story of three steelworkers who fought in Vietnam, the effect the war had on their lives, and, by extension, all American society, displayed an unprecedented ambivalence to the war. The war itself was bad, the film seemed to say, but America was not. In the context of the times, this was a not-unexceptional point of view. Almost as controversial as the film's xenophobic portrayal of the Vietnamese and its use of Russian roulette as a plot device, was its ending with an unironic rendition of ''God Bless America.''
If for no other reason, ''The Deer Hunter'' has a crucial place in the war's cultural legacy because it was after seeing Cimino's film that Vietnam veteran Jan Scruggs was moved to begin a campaign for a memorial to those who had served in the war. And with the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in 1982, the cultural climate surrounding the war changed decisively.
''The minute that wall went up, '' says Sandra M. Wittman, author of ''Writing About Vietnam: A Bibliography of the Literature of the Vietnam Conflict,'' ''it was like permission was given. What had been a trickle [of memoirs] turned into a flood. The men who had been over there just seemed to have a need to describe their experiences, and it hasn't stopped.''
Oral histories became the predominant Vietnam genre, letting the men (and women) who had fought in the war tell their own stories. Titles include Mark Baker's ''Nam'' (1981), Al Santoli's ''Everything We Had'' (1981), Wallace Terry's ''Bloods'' (1984), Bernard Edelman's collection ''Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam'' (1985), and Kathryn Marshall's ''In the Combat Zone'' (1987).
Hollywood played as great a part, or greater, in the emerging cult of the Vietnam veteran. For years, the movies had demonized the vet as, in John Baky's description, ''a drug-crazed, psychopathic, irreparable shell of a man.'' Where the grunt had been portrayed as victimized by the war, the vet was seen as contaminated by it - and in turn contaminating society back home.
In the early '80s, that changed, with a vengeance. The vet was now lionized, and none more than those who were, or had been, prisoners of war or missing in action. The POWs and MIAs were modern-day martyrs - better than that, they were martyrs who could be rescued from their martyrdom. Yes, we had lost the war, such movies as ''Uncommon Valor'' (1983), ''Missing in Action'' (1984), and ''Rambo'' seemed to say, but now we could redeem our defeat.
''Sir, do we get to win this time?'' Sylvester Stallone's Rambo asks his former commmanding officer. ''This time it's up to you.''
It was geopolitical wish fulfillment at its most potent, pernicious, and popular (the consistent success of these films at the box office suggest just how compelling was the fantasy of redemption and rematch that underlay them).
Vietnam veterans began to turn up as central characters - attractive, engaging characters - on prime-time television: Tom Selleck in ''Magnum P.I.'' (1980-88), the members of ''The A Team'' (1983-87). By the end of the decade, the war had become a safe-enough subject for the networks to devote a pair of dramas to it: ''Tour of Duty'' (1987-90) and ''China Beach'' (1988-91).
By 1990, the war was fodder to be turned into a Broadway musical spectacular - complete with its helicopter - courtesy of ''Miss Saigon,'' with its Indochinese updating of ''Madame Butterfly.'' Four years later, it provided ''Forrest Gump'' with a plot device to get Tom Hanks out of the South and into the path of history. True, his best friend (Mykelti Williamson) dies and his commanding officer (Gary Sinise) loses both legs, but Forrest wins the Medal of Honor and a happy ending is guaranteed. It's Classic History plotting in tandem with the movie's Classic Hits soundtrack.
That same year, the most shocking thing in ''Pulp Fiction'' was how it went out of its way to defile the mythic status of the POW, courtesy of a scatalogical shaggy-dog story delivered by none other than Christopher Walken, whose harrowing portrayal of an AWOL GI lost in Saigon in ''The Deer Hunter'' had won him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Ten, or even five years earlier, Walken's monologue would have elicited outrage. It was at once a sign of how firmly established the war remained in popular culture - and how drained of controversy it had become.
Then the release the next year of ''Operation Dumbo Drop'' (1995) erased any doubts. The war had become a Disney comedy, literally as well as figuratively, in which a Special Forces team bends the rules to airlift an elephant to a Vietnamese village.
''No one can dispute the rightness of what you're doing,'' Gene Hackman had told his band of fellow veterans about to rescue a group of MIAs held captive by the Vietnamese in ''Uncommon Valor.'' So, too, with the Green Berets in ''Operation Dumbo Drop.'' The wheel had completely turned. Not even John Wayne, at his most patriotically perfervid, could have imagined such a thing.
Mark Feeney is a member of the Globe Staff.
