The Ethnicization of Veteran America: Larry Heinemann, Toni Morrison, and Military Whiteness after Vietnam

In Nov 1987, Larry Heinemann's Vietnam War novel Paco's Story won the National Book Award for Fiction over Toni Morrison's Beloved. Left out of the conversation surrounding the book awards is Heinemann's novel itself, which, in contrast to Morrison's Beloved, has received limited critical attention. Paco's Story has gone unexamined in accounts of the event, outside of being characterized as an antiwar novel by a white male author who had served in the Vietnam War. Darda wishes to consider Heinemann's novel as something more than a standard-fare, white-authored text that has endured as a footnote to one of the most read and admired American novels of the last thirty years. Here, he scrutinizes the distinct and new-form of whiteness embodied by Heinemann's novel, a form constructed in relation to blackness and Asianness in the post-civil rights, post-Vietnam War era.