Why Are We In Vietnam? (WWVN) is a 1967 novel by the American author Norman Mailer. It focuses on a hunting trip to the Brooks Range in Alaska where a young man is brought by his father, a wealthy businessman who works for a company that makes cigarette filters and is obsessed with killing a grizzly bear. As the novel progresses, the protagonist is increasingly disillusioned that his father resorts to hunting tactics that seem dishonest and weak, including the use of a helicopter and taking credit for killing a bear. At the end of the novel, the protagonist tells the reader that he is soon going to serve in the Vietnam War as a soldier. WWVN contains vivid descriptions of Alaska; polarizing, obscene, and stream-of-consciousness narration; and shifting points of view. Mailer uses the narrative to implicitly answer the question the novel's title asks: it demonstrates the attitudes and actions of America that landed it in Vietnam. Its experimental style alienated many readers, but earned the novel a nomination for the National Book Award. Background During the spring of 1966 in Provincetown, Mailer initially intended to write a novel about a gang of bikers and their girlfriends who lived in the scrub thickets of Provincetown's sand dunes. To bring "such literary horrors" to Provincetown would be a sin, so instead, he chose to write a prelude about two Texas boys hunting in Alaska, similar to Mailer's own recent trip up north. His characters would be based on members of the U.S. Army's 112th Cavalry out of San Antonio, in which Mailer served in World War II. After writing about the hunt in Alaska he planned for the story to focus on Provincetown, but by the time he finished writing the story of the hunt, he realized he had a complete story. Mailer later said of WWVN: "Sometimes I think it's the best 200 pages I've yet done. The most American, certainly the 200 pages least alienated from genius". Publication While Mailer had parted ways with Putnam's, he was contractually obligated to write them another book—the all-American "big one" he had talked about writing since The Naked and the Dead. He wrote WWVN quickly, in about half the time of An American Dream which is comparable in size. Yet, Walter Minton his editor at Putnam's, dismissed the book as too short to satisfy his commitment to Putnam's, but published it