Date of Award

5-2026

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Honors Thesis

Department

English

First Advisor

Ania Spyra

Second Advisor

Elise Edwards

Abstract

Over fifty years from the Fall of Saigon, the United States continues to question its participation in unjust warfare, both as a nation and as a people. This study examines the transmission of war stories amongst families: specifically, what becomes negotiated in the thresholds of memory and narrative, and what might become of those spaces across past, present, and future. While prior discourse has centered on the authority and authenticity of war memory through political discourse, historical narrative, and public memorialization, the role of storytelling within families remains underexplored. This research addresses that gap through interdisciplinary inquiry and qualitative ethnography with four participants, Vietnam War veterans and their sons, exploring how oral history negotiates the tensions between American individualism and collective remembrance. Findings are grounded in prior scholarship across memory and trauma studies, folklore, and anthropological ethnography, including conceptual frameworks that address the unthinkable, the unconceptualizable, and the unspeakable in oral narrative, this study defines the concept of dis/remembrance: both process and threshold through which memory is continually revealed, altered, and reimagined beyond psychological interiority, shaped by time, context, and generational distance. Dis/remembrance operates as an unyielding confrontation between forgetting and misremembering that resists simple resolution. As the nation moves toward fresh theaters of conflict and the Vietnam War’s unresolved mythos refuses total abstraction, defining dis/remembrance offers a foundation through which future generations might navigate the ongoing reckonings of war, memory, and national identity.

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