A story doesn't just happen from the neck up. I began with the ambition to write a parody of Naked Lunch . That didn't happen, of course, but that was the impulse that got me going. Otherwise you're writing history. At the same time a story is also a reflection, a meditation, or a reminiscence.
Battles can be quite compact but they can also spread out over hundreds of meters or many miles.
I don't know anyone in Vietnam, including helicopter pilots, who saw a battle in the same way. Fictionalizing a topic as politically volatile as the Vietnam war is not an innocuous pursuit. I'm definitely on the side of sticking with the documents and am morally and emotionally opposed to the mythopoeticization of those events in any form or genre. However, Ozick finds herself continuing to write a great deal of Holocaust fiction. The war has been like a nail in my head, like a corpse in my house.