Publication Date
5-1974
Advisor(s) - Committee Chair
Kenneth Clarke, Mary Clarke, Lynwood Montell
Degree Program
Department of English
Degree Type
Master of Arts
Abstract
Oral narratives of Vietnam War veterans, collected at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, were paralleled to the written narratives of the Indian War soldiers abstracted from existing diaries, journals and autobiographies. A statistical analysis was applied to the Vietnam War texts to discern the attitudes of the informants as a group. Informants' attitudes towards the enemy and the enemy's guerrilla fighting style were shown to be similar to the attitudes of the Indian War soldiers in both areas. Both sets of similar attitudes resulted in high levels of frustration which produced occasional atrocities. By the application of folklore and folklore fieldwork, in the form of instruction on the enemies' rites, customs and beliefs, and a statistical analysis of the oral lore of the American soldiers, an atrocity-producing situation may be detected beforehand, and corrected.
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature | History | Military History | Oral History
Recommended Citation
Martin, Charles, "Parallelisms in Attitude of Vietnam Veterans & Veterans of the Indian Wars as Reflected in Memoirs & Oral Traditions" (1974). Masters Theses & Specialist Projects. Paper 2590.
https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/2590