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  • Wall-Gazing:Memorializing Vietnam Veterans While Distorting and Disremembering the War
  • Michael Kammen (bio)
Patrick Hagopian . The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of Healing. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009. xv + 553 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00.

Patrick Hagopian, Lecturer in the Department of Media, Film, and Cultural Studies at Lancaster University in the U.K., has produced an extraordinary book that has been in the making for nearly two decades. Because his name may be unfamiliar to most readers of RAH, and this work is important, his background should be of interest. His B.A. in American studies is from the University of Sussex, his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in history, and he has affiliations with several research centers at Lancaster: one titled Dynamics of Memories and another called The Center for Gender and Women's Studies. He teaches courses concerning the American family, the Vietnam War and after, and a graduate seminar titled "Sites and Sights of Memory."1

The Vietnam War in American Memory is a significant contribution to the field of memory studies and also to understanding recent American politics, society, and culture. The book also illuminates state and local history in intriguing ways. There have been 461 Vietnam War memorials erected in the past four decades, most of them during the 1980s and early '90s, with the first in 1966 and some fairly recent. In many instances, design issues have sparked controversy—sometimes quite bitter—and while the story of Maya Lin's 1981 design for the Memorial on the Mall is now well known to many, the much less familiar state and local memorials also reveal complex issues that have not previously been explored in anything like the thorough manner that Hagopian presents. His research is exhaustive, his narratives are compelling—particularly the protracted dispute involving Kentucky's memorial (1983-92), which is skillfully contextualized and compared with various other state memorials in chapter eight.

The book is sensibly organized. Topical chapters move it forward while preserving chronological clarity. Indeed, the book reads ever more swiftly as it unfolds. A substantial introduction provides a point of departure by illuminating [End Page 569] one of the most symptomatic buzzwords of the postwar period: the illusory effort by partisans to depoliticize the war by redefining it as a "noble cause." An early memorial situated near Angel Fire, New Mexico, privately erected in 1968-71, provides a preliminary case study that sets the tone for much that follows: how best to honor those Americans who gave their lives in Vietnam, yet do so without taking a stand for or against the morality of U.S. policies there. Although consensus would never be fully achieved, significant momentum was reached in 1983-84 when custody of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) in Washington, D.C., was transferred from its private organizers (the VVMF) to the federal government and became the model (modified as needed) for a preponderant number of state and local memorials that followed: a burnished wall inscribed with individual names of those who died.

Chapter one, "The Vietnam Syndrome in American Foreign Policy," introduces a major issue that surfaces later in various contexts: how presidential administrations during the final decades of the twentieth century sought to reestablish American clout in world affairs without appearing to bog down in another "quagmire" that would alienate public opinion the way Vietnam did after 1968. Hagopian's principal illustration is Ronald Reagan's unpopular and semi-covert intervention in Nicaragua and Honduras during the mid-1980s. His administration did not want to allow socialist governments to develop in the Americas but faced Congressional and popular opposition because the Vietnam experience remained so vividly problematic in many minds. The effort to justify support for the Nicaraguan contras required a redefinition of what Vietnam had been all about. That in turn prompted back-door support for approving and proceeding with the VVM as a "neutral" statement, initially honoring the "warriors but not the war"—yet subsequently regarding the conflict as a "noble cause" despite the earnest intentions of those who initiated the VVM as a depoliticized remembrance devoted solely to those who lost their lives...

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