Mark Baker in "NAM: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There" (1981) tells a war story, and war stories tend to elevate the masculine combat adventure as inherently more profound, and therefore more valuable, than other experiences. However, now that the emotional considerations of war are no longer being discounted, it seems appropriate that many survivor books are being written by, and focusing on, women. In "Casaulties: Death in Viet Nam; Anguish and Survival in America" (1984), Heather Brandon models her book on the veterans' oral histories and discourse with the community of families who lost one of their own in the war. Joan Didion in "Democracy" offers glimpses into the lives of her fictional "glitterati," reflecting snatches from the lives of real-life public figures, disclosing more personally the struggle to situate oneself amid the shards of contemporary American historical experience, in which Vietnam figures prominently. Writing from and representing the opposite social perspective, West Virginia native Jayne Anne Phillips'"Machine Dreams," which appeared, like "Democracy," in 1984, focuses primarily on women. Phillips' subject is history and the passage of time, the dislocations peppering the lives of her characters, and she portrays the dissolution of family life as a reflection of individual lives fragmenting, and cultural order decaying. (A chronological listing of significant dates interspersed with a list of Selected Survivor Texts are appended.) (RAE)