History absorbs more easily those events which take the shape of narrative. It took only a few weeks for Gallipoli to find a central place in Australian culture, largely because it is a simple tale of innocence cruelly defiled; it has a beginning, a middle, and an end; you can tell it to your children. But twenty years on and our culture still struggles to assimilate our involvement in Vietnam. The Vietnam Story defies such mythologising. To speak with any justice to its complexity and ambiguity is to ramble like a fretful dream; to simplify it is to lie.
It is not surprising, then, that the best written accounts of Vietnam have not been the usual cause-and-effect histories, but anthologies of personal testimonies. It is as if the truth about that war is not of a single piece but has been shattered into a million fragments and embedded in the innumerable recollections of those who took part.
Similarly the exhibition, Dog Tags, gained its power to involve the viewer from its all-inclusive anecdotal nature. The curators, Peter Daly and Archiv Zammit-Ross, selected on the broadest of bases: all the works deal directly or indirectly with the artists' experience of the Vietnam war and its aftermath. This extends the concept of "veteran 's art" to include wives of veterans and, more controversially, Vietnamese artists. Nor was artistic merit an excluding criterion: the artists range from practiced post-modernists appropriating imagery with cold calculation to patently ungifted amateurs scrabbling to encompass an elusive experience.
Perhaps the only stable myth allowed to emerge from Vietnam, propagated by Apocalypse Now and The Deerhunter, is that of the traumatised victim, the veteran who years later