| Zusammenfassung: | The Vietnam War is a particularly traumatic and confusing chapter of American history. This paper deals with the impressive and ever growing body of poetry by Vietnam veterans. While the discourse of technological warfare has prevailed over the representation of war in American culture, thereby covering the complex human dimension of the war, veterans' poetry resists easy answers and undermines the dominant cultural discourse. Following their urge to bear witness, veteran-poets create a discourse of trauma that communicates their virtually incommunicable experience of death, fear, guilt, and loss. Transcending earlier war poetry, their works address the otherness of the nightmarish natural surroundings and the sense of a formless guerilla war that refused order and progress. Veterans' poetry works through human-centered images, the soldiers' sober speech patterns, and, above all, its incoherent, fragmentary character which resists linear understanding. In contrast with the discourse of technology which continues to romanticize the myth of the American machine, these poems stand as disturbing, nonlinear memories of war and works of art. Collectively, veteran-poets capture the complex trauma of the Vietnam experience that not only keeps haunting a generation of soldiers but has also affected American society to the present day.
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