Recovering, but Not Healing: America's Vietnam War Thirty-Five Years On

Abstract

Michael J. Allen has written the best book to date on the impact of the Vietnam War POW/MIA issue on American diplomacy, domestic politics, and national culture. His careful archival work, his easy familiarity with the existing historical and critical literature on the subject, and his illuminating interviews with participants in the controversies—most notably Anne Mills Griffiths, President of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia—provide a firm foundation for his larger claims about the influence a relatively small group of activists exerted upon American foreign policy, and upon the national memory of the conflict. Until the Last Man Comes Home successfully argues that the prominence of POW/MIA issues in any discussions of the South East Asian conflict has profoundly shaped those attitudes that have created “The Unending Vietnam War.” Allen begins with some remarks on why his work offers a more informed and suggestive analysis of the war's aftermath. He first notes that many historians have simply avoided the topic, because of “their interests in origins and causes, and their reliance on archival records that are slow to open” (9). Allen then praises the work of cultural studies scholars, who have written extensively on the war's impact on America's imagination. These studies have helped to move discussion away from a key players approach to political and cultural history—the stuff of Bob Woodward's books—and toward the investigations of how a small group of highly focused “nobodies” came to influence American domestic and diplomatic politics. But for Allen, most of this cultural studies scholarship lacks the archival grounding—that mixture of “government records, unpublished sources from MIA activist groups, popular reporting, and published scholarship” which historians bring to their work (10). Allen therefore presents himself as a historian who will do the difficult but necessary work of integrating the “local, national, and transnational dimensions of POW/MIA activism” into a nuanced study of his primary subject—“the politics of loss” (11).