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The American war story is often the tale of the individual white male heterosexual soldier, a story of his personal experience of disillusionment and loss. In these narratives, war functions as a mirror for American masculine selfhood and nationhood. Since the Vietnam War, however, this tradition has been questioned in conjunction with the late twentieth-century concern over multicultural identity: that is, with increasing attention to the importance of knowing and listening to the other, particularly nonwhite others who are the victims of American military aggression. In "Remembering War, Dreaming Peace," Viet Thanh Nguyen calls for literature of the Vietnam War that includes the experience of Vietnamese citizens in order that "our discourse about the war be transformed from an American monologue into a conversation among many equals" (141). As the United States faces the aftermath of two wars with and among nonwhite, non-Western populations, American war fiction continues its formal evolution. In one vein is the literature of what Roy Scranton calls the "trauma hero," a tradition he traces from Stendahl and Leo Tolstoy through Ernest Hemingway and Tim O'Brien to Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds, Phil Klay's Redeployment, and the movie American Sniper, in which the white male soldier goes off to war only to come home having learned bitter lessons that he cannot share. Yet some American authors have felt it necessary to attend to Iraqi and Afghan civilian experiences and in so doing to critique the trauma hero tradition. Through the formal strategy of multiple first-person narrators, several novels about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan shift the authority to define values and interpret events away from American soldiers. These multivoiced novels decenter American experiences, link soldiers' voices to those of the other, and open up the question of who matters in war to include civilians, refugees, and other noncombatants.
Because recognizing the humanity of the enemy and even civilian populations often conflicts with the experience of the soldier—often, indeed, it must, in order for the soldier to do his job—the American war story tradition tends to reify the individual soldier's experience over a broader representation of the causes and consequences of violent conflict. As Nguyen puts it, American war stories, particularly those of the Vietnam War, are "melodramas...