Thoughts and Conclusions

Bissell writes, “The war had not ended for [my dad], and now it is in me” (2004, 64). His comment conveys the subtle density that the gift of trauma hands to the second generation. Vietnam is in Bissell as it is in my interviewees, but its specific mass and weight is felt in a variety of diverse ways. The fractured pieces of the traumatic history of the Vietnam War cannot be read as a linear series of events that progress into a cumulated story of the past. There is no clearly marked beginning, middle, and end. Instead, in this research, we have moved through a social monad that resembles a palimpsest of layered narratives merging and separating to reveal an incomplete and shifting story of a history of the present. The layers I explored in this research remind us that the historically traumatic event of the Vietnam War is still being lived out, is still in-formation. The tangled intersections of the Vietnam Veteran Narrative, individual Vietnam Veteran narratives, and the narratives of my interviewees remind us that the social world is founded on the continual negotiation and renegotiation of social forms and intersubjective relationships. For the second generation, the gift of trauma passed on to them is not founded solely in the historical event of the Vietnam War; it is a lived presence animated by their fathers’ lives, not only as Vietnam Veterans but as men—fathers—who live their own unique social existence.