American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  “Rose Garden strategy”: Godfrey Sperling Jr., “‘Hostage’ in Rose Garden? Carter Rethinking Strategy,” Christian Science Monitor, April 28, 1980.

  “Debacle in the Desert”: Time, May 5, 1980.

  “We’re paying you back for Vietnam”: New York Times, January 27, 1981.

  yellow ribbons: Gerald E. Parsons, “How the Yellow Ribbon Became a National Folk Symbol,” Folklife Center News, vol. 13, no. 3, Summer 1991, http://www.loc.gov/folklife/ribbons/ribbons.html; McAlister, Epic Encounters, pp. 198, 344.

  “patriotic bath”: Time, February 23, 1981.

  “so in need of self-esteem”: Ibid.

  “spat upon vet” is a postwar myth: Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

  there might have been . . . collective acknowledgment: Charles R. Figley and Seymour Leventman, eds., Strangers at Home: Vietnam Veterans Since the War (New York: Praeger, 1980).

  Kojak: Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory, pp. 67–68.

  Vietnam Veterans of America: Scott, Vietnam Veterans Since the War, pp. 75–76, 92–94, 111–14; Edwin A. Martini, Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), pp. 148–49, 174–75.

  Bobby Muller . . . Bundy: Willenson, The Bad War, pp. 374–75.

  a firestorm of controversy: Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 51–58.

  “to promote the healing”: Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory, pp. 82–83.

  “makes no political statement”: Ibid., p. 234.

  “Today I’m not ashamed”: New York Times, May 7, 1985.

  “like some dark family secret”: The tape-recorded comment of one of my students during a class discussion at MIT in 1995.

  Denver survey: Alexander Cockburn, Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1991. The study was conducted by Sut Jhally, Justin Lewis, and Michael Morgan, “Public Knowledge and Misconceptions,” in H. Mowana et al., eds., The Triumph of the Image: The Media’s War in the Persian Gulf—An International Perspective (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992).

  POW/MIA flag: H. Bruce Franklin, M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), pp. 3–5, 180.

  “a symbol of our Nation’s concern”: http://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title36-section902&num=0&edition=prelim.

  Americans still missing: Franklin, M.I.A., p. 11.

  no closure until every last man was accounted for: Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home, pp. 137–78; on the ways representations of actual U.S. POWs help explain shifts in American family life from the 1960s to the 1970s, see Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 25–70.

  “the highest national priority”: Franklin, M.I.A., pp. 138–45.

  “barbaric use of our prisoners”: Nixon speech, April 7, 1971, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=2972; Schell, Time of Illusion, p. 231.

  great political use: Martini, Invisible Enemies, pp. 21–24, 163–68, 193–203.

  69 percent of Americans believed: Franklin, M.I.A., pp. xv, 180.

  photograph of three men: Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home, pp. 269–70.

  POW films: Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), pp. 28–41; Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), especially pp. 116–43; Martini, Invisible Enemies, pp. 121–28; Franklin, M.I.A., pp. 140–64; John Carlos Rowe and Rick Berg, The Vietnam War and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 290.

  electric shock: A judicious account is offered in Darius Rejali, Democracy and Torture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 174–80.

  shrunken and defeated: For a brilliant analysis of Rambo and actor Sylvester Stallone, see Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: William Morrow, 1999), pp. 359–406.

  CHAPTER NINE: “THE PRIDE IS BACK”

  “not a smidgen of androgyny”: George Will, “A Yankee Doodle Springsteen,” Washington Post, September 13, 1984; Marc Dolan, Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), pp. 218–20.

  strenuous bodybuilding: Peter Ames Carlin, Bruce (New York: Touchstone, 2012), pp. 301–2.

  they were politely rejected: Jack Doyle, “Reagan and Springsteen, 1984,” PopHistoryDig.com, April 14, 2012, http://www.pophistorydig.com/?tag=ronald-reagan-bruce-springsteen.

  Reagan . . . campaign appearance: http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1984/91984c.htm.

  “The President was mentioning my name”: Louis P. Masur, Runaway Dream: Born to Run and Bruce Springsteen’s American Vision (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), p. 157; Jim Cullen, Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), pp. 19–20. Music critic Greil Marcus described Nebraska as “the most convincing statement of resistance and refusal that Ronald Reagan’s U.S.A. has yet elicited from any artist or any politician.” Cited in Dave Marsh, Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 380.

  “It’s morning again in America”: Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 161–63; Will Bunch, Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy (New York: Free Press, 2010), p. 101.

  “it’s not morning in Pittsburgh”: Cited in Craig Hansen Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), p. 247.

  These lyrics are about suffering and shame: For an insightful historical contextualization of the song, see Jefferson R. Cowie and Lauren Boehm, “Dead Man’s Town: ‘Born in the U.S.A.,’ Social History, and Working-Class Identity,” American Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 2, June 2006, pp. 353–78.

  “He wants to find something real”: Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2012), p. 360.

  Reagan . . . in an inaugural address: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=43130.

  “Remembering Vietnam”: This advertorial appeared in Atlantic, May 1985, p. 9.

  “The two men epitomize”: New York, May 16, 1988, p. 23; Peter Wyden, The Unknown Iacocca (New York: William Morrow, 1987), p. 180.

  “This jeep is a museum piece”: Harry Haines, “‘They Were Called and They Went’: The Political Rehabilitation of the Vietnam Veteran,” in Dittmar and Michaud, From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film, p. 81.

  unifying tribute to military service: David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001).

  “The Pride Is Back”: Marsh, Bruce Springsteen, pp. 624–26; Cullen, Born in the U.S.A., pp. 76–77.

  spot for the Plymouth Reliant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w81hypmDFvo.

  “best original music” award: Dave Marsh, Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s (New York: Pantheon, 1987), p. 426.

  All negative thoughts must be purged: Anthony Robbins, Unlimited Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), pp. 75, 85, 93 for examples.

  “Born in East L.A.”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OwPPOu1yk4.

  “model minority”: Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Rosalind S. Chou and Joe R. Feagin, The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008).


  Vincent Chin: Frank H. Wu, “Why Vincent Chin Matters,” New York Times, June 22, 2012.

  Japan-bashing: Newsweek, February 2, 1987. Also, Time ran a cover featuring a grotesquely fat sumo wrestler squaring off against a muscular Uncle Sam under the title “Trade Wars: The U.S. Gets Tough With Japan,” Time, April 13, 1987.

  “we’ll have to drop another bomb”: Michael Crichton, Rising Sun (New York: Knopf, 1992), p. 258.

  appropriated the countercultural zeitgeist: Thomas Frank, Conquest of the Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 137, 166, 169.

  Unsell the War: Mitchell Hall, “Unsell the War: Vietnam and Antiwar Advertising,” Historian, vol. 58, issue 1, September 1995, pp. 69–86.

  “I used to be really proud of this country”: Susan A. Brewer, Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 222.

  Jane Fonda: Mary Hershberger, Jane Fonda’s War: A Political Biography of an Antiwar Icon (New York: New Press, 2005); Jerry Lembcke, Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).

  Bush branded Michael Dukakis: John Balzar, “Bush Says Dukakis Is ‘Far Outside’ Mainstream on Defense,” Los Angeles Times, August 5, 1988.

  “America is flag city”: New York Times, September 17, 1988, p. 8.

  [George H. W. Bush’s 1988] acceptance speech: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25955.

  Dukakis’s wife, Kitty, burning an American flag: Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover, Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars?: The Trivial Pursuit of the Presidency, 1988 (New York: Warner Books, 1989), p. 402.

  “Swift-boaters” declared Kerry “unfit”: Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home, pp. 296–99.

  A study of twelve . . . history textbooks: James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Touchstone, 1996), pp. 246–49.

  students said the shooter: Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, pp. 14–17.

  “the side of the police state”: Malcolm Browne, The New Face of War (New York: Bantam, 1986), p. 7.

  the book’s original 1965 cover: Malcolm Browne, The New Face of War (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).

  Top Gun: Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine: U.S. Militarism and Popular Culture (Paradigm, 2006).

  sabotage and protest by active-duty sailors, and . . . pilots: Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, pp. 65–70.

  The A-Team backstory: Alasdair Spark, “The Soldier at the Heart of the War: The Myth of the Green Berets in the Popular Culture of the Vietnam Era,” Journal of American Studies (British Association for American Studies), April 1984, pp. 29–48.

  “We could . . . hold our ground”: Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang—The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1992), pp. xviii–xx, 345.

  CHAPTER TEN: NO MORE VIETNAMS

  “Each train that goes by here”: S. Brian Willson, Blood on the Tracks (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), p. 211.

  “If we ignore the malignancy of Nicaragua”: Jonathan Power, “This Time, Stay Out of Nicaragua’s Affairs,” Los Angeles Times, November 2, 2001; Christian Smith, Resisting Reagan: The U.S. Central America Peace Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 23, 262.

  “just two days’ driving time”: see http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=36939&st=&st1=, March 3, 1986, “Remarks at White House Meeting.”

  a broadly popular revolution: Thomas W. Walker and Christine J. Wade, Nicaragua: Living in the Shadow of the Eagle (Boulder: Westview Press, 2011); Stephen Kinzer, Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1991).

  no more than 40 percent of the public ever agreed: David Thelen, Becoming Citizens in the Age of Television: How Americans Challenged the Media and Seized Political Initiative During the Iran-Contra Debate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 39.

  “If the American people could have talked”: Cited in Roger Peace, A Call to Conscience: The Anti-Contra War Campaign (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), p. 2.

  An estimated 100,000 U.S. citizens: Ibid., p. 3; Smith, Resisting Reagan, p. 158.

  “this is just like Vietnam”: Willson, Blood on the Tracks, p. 156.

  “teetotaling fundamentalist”: Ibid., p. 8.

  “He was the first Eagle Scout I had known”: Ibid., pp. 24–25.

  “criminal and immoral beyond comprehension”: Ibid., pp. 47–49.

  immolated themselves: Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up?, pp. 1–5; Robert J. Topmiller, The Lotus Unleashed: The Buddhist Peace Movement in South Vietnam, 1964–1966 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006); Willson, Blood on the Tracks, p. 381n67.

  Charlie Liteky: The Medal of Honor was officially awarded to Angelo J. Liteky, the ordination name of Charles James Liteky. When Liteky left the priesthood in 1975, he reassumed his birth name.

  “I pray for your conversion”: Willson, Blood on the Tracks, p. 173; http://www.democracynow.org/2004/6/8/congressional_medal_of_honor_winner_reagan.

  “Central America is another Vietnam”: “Veteran Gives Up Medal of Honor in Nicaragua Protest,” Los Angeles Times, July 29, 1986; Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory, p. 369.

  twenty-one soldiers killed . . . in El Salvador: “Public Honors for Secret Combat,” Washington Post, May 6, 1996.

  Assassination Manual: “Excerpts From Primer for Insurgents,” New York Times, October 17, 1984, p. A12; “CIA Said to Produce Manual for Anti-Sandinistas,” New York Times, October 15, 1984, p. A7; “Reagan Now Says Manual Was Mistranslated,” New York Times, November 4, 1984, p. 22.

  World Court suit against the United States: Peace, A Call to Conscience, pp. 44–45, 160–61, 189.

  five hundred demonstrations in support: For example, on the fortieth day of the fast, a group of veterans went to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to participate in a medal renunciation ceremony. They had collected more than eighty-five military medals from veterans around the country who wanted them returned to the Wall in protest of Central American policy. See Carl M. Cannon, “Veterans Leave Medals at Memorial in Protest of Central America Policy,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 10, 1986.

  the four men ended their fast: Joel Brinkley, “Four Veterans Ending Fast on Policy in Nicaragua,” New York Times, October 17, 1986.

  the train accelerated: Willson, Blood on the Tracks, p. 221; “Weapons Train That Maimed Pacifist Was Under Navy Orders Not to Stop: Reports Revealing Order Not Shared With Congressional Investigators,” National Catholic Reporter, January 29, 1988.

  the crew claimed it had orders . . . not to stop: David Humiston, the engineer, reported to investigators “he was told by his supervisor, when going on duty that morning, not to stop outside the base area. This was to prevent anyone from boarding the locomotive or the cars it was pulling.” Ralph Dawson, one of the two spotters, confirmed the order. Willson, Blood on the Tracks, p. 221. For further documentation, see “Weapons Train That Maimed Pacifist Was Under Navy Orders Not to Stop.”

  “domestic terrorist suspects”: FBI, Chicago Office, “Domestic Security/Terrorism Sabotage,” Memorandum to the Director and All Offices of the FBI, October 31, 1986. Cited in Willson, Blood on the Tracks, p. 397.

  “totally non-violent”: Anthony Schmitz, “The Spy Who Said No,” Mother Jones, April 1988, pp. 16–19; Wes Smith, “Act of Conscience Ends Career of ‘Peacemaker’ FBI Agent,” Chicago Tribune, February 1, 1988.

  a permanent occupation: Willson, Blood on the Tracks, p. 241.

  persistence of dissent: See, for example, Bradford Martin, The Other Eighties: A S
ecret History of America in the Age of Reagan (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012); Donald R. Culverson, Contesting Apartheid: U.S. Activism, 1960–1987 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999); Robert Surbrug Jr., Beyond Vietnam: The Politics of Protest in Massachusetts, 1974–1990 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009); Fred Pelka, What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012).

  “the Vietnam syndrome”: Arnold R. Isaacs, Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghosts, and Its Legacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1997), pp. 65–102; Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory, pp. 23–48.

  “post-Vietnam syndrome”: Boyce Rensberger, “Delayed Trauma in Veterans Cited,” New York Times, May 3, 1972, p. 19.

  “The Decline of U.S. Power”: Business Week, March 12, 1979. Also cited and discussed by Michael T. Klare, Beyond the “Vietnam Syndrome”: U.S. Interventionism in the 1980s (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 1981), pp. 4–8.

  a “national crusade to make America great again”: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25970.

  Speaking before the Veterans of Foreign Wars: Ronald Reagan, “Restoring the Margin of Safety,” Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, August 18, 1980, http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/8.18.80.html.

  The infrastructure of a global military empire: Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2011).

  On October 23, 1983, in Beirut: New York Times, October 24, 1983.

  “I haven’t seen carnage like that since Vietnam”: Ibid.

  “Let terrorists be aware”: “Remarks at the Welcoming Ceremony for the Freed American Hostages,” January 27, 1981, http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1981/12781b.htm.

  U.S. “neutrality” was compromised: Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, pp. 388–393; Colin Powell, My American Journey (New York: Ballantine, 2003), p. 291.

  possible car-bomb attacks: Lou Cannon, President Reagan: Role of a Lifetime (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), pp. 339–401 (warnings on p. 383 and embassy attack on pp. 358–59). Cannon gives full and acute coverage to this much overlooked subject.