Preface -- Introduction: Vietnam as Figure and Symptom: "We've All Been There" -- A Trauma Artist -- The Fiction of Vietnam -- 1 Fabricating Trauma -- "The Vietnam in Me" -- O'Brien's Endless War -- Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Vietnam -- PTSD and Writing -- O'Brien's Art of Trauma -- Writing Beyond Vietnam -- 2 A Bad War -- Origins of "If I Die in a Combat Zone" -- Fictionalized Testimony -- O'Brien's Self-Representation: Soldier Versus Writer -- Moral Combat -- "Combat Zone" as Source for a Career -- 3 The Old Man and the Pond -- Self-Displacement in "Northern Lights" -- Literary Mimicry: Realism, Symbolism, Allegory -- Harvey's Story: Vietnam as Tragicomedy -- Paul's Story: The Feminization of Virtue -- Novel Revisions -- 4 A Soldier's Dream -- The Re-covering of Trauma: Paul Berlin as Tim O'Brien -- "Cacciato": From Short Stories to Trauma Narrative -- "Going After Cacciato": From Catalog to Breakdown -- Paul Berlin: From Breakdown to Trauma Writing -- The Quest for Cacciato: Fantasy and the Burial of the Dead -- The Observation Post: Retraumatization and Endless Fantasy -- 5 The Bombs Are Real -- An Ambitious Failure? -- The Traumatization of William Cowling -- Parabolic Fiction: Mutual Assured Destruction and Civil Defense -- "The Nuclear Age" and Vietnam -- The Failure of William Cowling -- 6 True War Stories -- Recirculated Trauma, Endless Fiction -- "The Things They Carried" as Self-Revision -- "How to Tell a True War Story": Misreading Tim O'Brien -- Other Refabrications of Trauma -- "The Lives of the Dead": Bringing Them Back Alive -- 7 The People We Kill -- Trauma, Tragedy, National Disgrace -- Metafictional Investigations -- The Breakdown of John Wade -- Tragic Revisions -- John Wade as Paradigm and Persona: Tim O'Brien's Trauma -- Psychobiography, History, and Fiction -- 8 Guys Just Want to Have Fun.

Vietnam and the Age of Clinton -- A Dictionary of Love -- In Defense of Thomas Chippering -- PTSD as Comedy/Vietnam as Parody -- Saving Tim O'Brien: "Tomcat in Love" as Countertherapy -- Conclusion: A Trauma Artist -- Posttraumatic Nation -- Academic Polemics -- Responsible Dreams -- Appendix: "Diagnostic Criteria for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, DSM-IV" -- Notes -- References -- Index.