In the chapter, "The Things They Carried," why is it significant that Martha never mentions the war in her letters and whom does she represent?

Martha epitomizes the alienation that soldiers of the Vietnam War felt, both during and after the war.  It was a war that many Americans rejected, and that rejection was exacerbated because it was also the first televised war, bringing its stark horrors into the very living rooms of people who preferred to glorify war at a distance. Martha represents all of us because we, as humans, struggle to connect with people who are thrust into unfamiliar, unfathomable situations. We choose, instead, to gloss over those situations or to avoid them altogether. When Martha's fails to so much as mention the war in her letters, she is grappling with her own discomfort, as well as attempting to preserve her normality. In fairness to her, she may also believe that she is preserving some sense of normality for him by focusing on daily, more frivolous topics. In the process, she only deepens his alienation. This same alienation persisted when the war was over and the men came home to a vague, ambiguous welcome by their countrymen. That detachment from their experience robbed them and us of a healing voice.