Why Lake > Hearts & Minds (rhetorically speaking)

I must have a penchant for saying controversial things. Oh well.

As the title says, I found O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods (Lake) more powerful, rhetorically speaking, than Hearts & Minds (H&M). While part of this is probably some lingering resentment for Davis' attempts at manipulation (however grounded in reality they might be), the larger part comes from how much more accessible O'Brien's story is.

Under all the disjointed narrative, newspaper clippings, and ambiguous endings, Lake is about keeping secrets, both from one's self and from those you love. While not to the extent John and Kathy take it, most readers can relate to secrecy in the most intimate of relationships. We've experienced someone keeping that little white lie from their significant other and watched it grow from a harmless fib to a festering wound. It happens all the time. That's why, as I see John dip in and out of madness from his My Lai experience and his suppression of it, I reflect not on how much of a lunatic he is but on how vilely destructive war is that it can turn a (relatively) happy relationship into this sprawling mess. By contrasting John and Kathy's pre and post-war relationship, O'Brien introduces a disquietingly personal element into our view of the Vietnam War.

H&M, on the other hand, deals more with the overarching human suffering that happened during the war. While it does this very well, you never get emotionally attatched to any of the Vietnamese in there because the majority of them are presented as faces in quick, 30-90 second shots. You feel an overarching pang of sorrow as an audience, but nothing personal, because as Floyd said we really can't relate to the devestation. Unless you were intimately connected in some way to New Orleans-era Katrina or 9-11, you haven't even begun to experience the horrors these people went through. While still very gut-wrenching, H&M just doesn't have the personal punch a narrative is able to provide.