The term "friendly fire" was coined in the 1970s but the theme appears in literature from ancient times to the present. It begins the narrative in Aeschylus's and Larry Heinemann's . It marks the turning point in Homer's , Virgil's , the , Stephen Crane's and Tim O'Brien's . It is the subject of transformative disclosure in Jaan Kross's , Ron Kovic's , O'Brien's and A.B. Yehoshua's . In some stories, events propel the characters into a friendly-fire catastrophe, as in Thomas Taylor's and Oliver Stone's 1986 film . This study examines friendly fire in a broad range of literary contexts.