No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968-1980

1. Homeward Unbound: Prisoners of War, National Defeat, and the Crisis of Male Authority

25 On 6 March 1970, the House of Representatives Committee on Armed Services gathered to hear the testimony of a small group of military wives whose husbands had disappeared over the jungles and waters of Southeast Asia.1 The purpose of the hearing was to call attention to the failure of the North Vietnamese to comply with the guidelines for prisoners of war laid out in the 1949 Geneva Accords. The accords, which the North Vietnamese had signed in 1957, required that the names of all captured prisoners of war be released, that all prisoners receive adequate medical care and food, that camps be inspected by a neutral third party, and that captives and their families be allowed to exchange mail. The United States accused North Vietnam of flagrantly violating these requirements, but the North Vietnamese countered that because the United States had never formally declared war against North Vietnam, the 1949 Geneva Accords did not apply. In their estimation, the men being held captive were not prisoners of war but were war criminals.2 The women who appeared before the House committee hoped to remind the public that these captured men, regardless of their official, wartime status, were also husbands, fathers, and sons. What made the North 1 Prisoners of War, National Defeat, and the Crisis of Male Authority H o m e w a r d U n b o u n d h o m e w a r d u n b o u n d 26 Vietnamese violation of the Geneva Accords so egregious, both the wives and the committee members agreed, was that by failing to release vital information about the condition of the prisoners, the North Vietnamese were drawing innocent women and children into the fold of war. According to the chairman of the House committee, the North Vietnamese were “a bunch of heathens” and were guilty of “toying with these ladies’ tender feelings.”3 In a phrase that would be repeated over and over again, these women wanted to learn whether they were “wives or widows,” and they needed to be able to tell their children, many of whom had “never seen their fathers,” the truth.4 By depriving them of information, angry committee members charged, the North Vietnamese were engaging in a form of sadistic psychological warfare that blurred the boundaries between public and private, soldier and civilian, war front and home front. For their part, these women, most of them newcomers to political mobilization, recognized that the only weapon at their disposal was public opinion. As one pow wife told the committee, “I am a wife and a mother. I have no accoutrements of modern warfare at my disposal, no rifle, no ammunition. The only weapon which I have is opinion—public opinion here in this country, and throughout the world.”5 The mounting public anxiety surrounding the status, treatment, and eventual repatriation of American prisoners of war in Southeast Asia brought together a number of international and domestic themes that had come to the fore in American cultural and political life by the early 1970s. The first and most obvious theme was the specter of American military defeat in Vietnam. By the late 1960s, public revelations that American fighting men were being tortured and placed in solitary confinement by their Vietnamese captors emblematized the growing perception that U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia was failing—and failing badly. This is not to say that pows were identified solely with failure or powerlessness; on the contrary, as this chapter will show, the pow was often portrayed as the lone hero in a war devoid of heroism. But there is no question that as the war dragged on, the American prisoner of war, reportedly tortured at the hands of his Vietnamese aggressor, became a powerful metaphor for the growing intractability and futility of the war itself. The anxiety over the pows also reflected the widespread fear that the private realm of the family was being absorbed by the public world of war and politics. This fear had surfaced first in 1968, when the Nixon administration prepared to launch a full-blown campaign to call attention to Hanoi’s alleged refusal to comply with the rules for prisoners of war laid out in h o m e w a r d u n b o u n d 27 the 1949 Geneva Conventions. At...