The following thesis interrogates representations of the enemy in three American war novels: James Jones's The Thin Red Line (1962), Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story' (1986). and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (1990). While American literary responses to the Vietnam War are the primary concern of this thesis. The Thin Red Line, a 'late' World War II novel, is interrogated as a generic benchmark against which the two Vietnam novels can be compared and contrasted, both in terms of the paradigms of Japanese and Vietnamese enemy images, and with reference to the depiction of internal enemies.