What Remains: Bringing America's Missing Home From the Vietnam War by Sarah Wagner (review)

The Vietnam War, writes one of its foremost historians, "compelled millions of citizens to question the once widely held faith that their country is the greatest force for good in the world, that it always acts to advance democracy and human rights, that it is superior in both its power and its virtue," and that it "ended without resolving the conflicting lessons and legacies of America's first defeat" (Appy 2015:xii). The war's questions and divisions are perhaps most visible than in the enduring effort to account for the thousands of service members who did not return alive from Southeast Asia. From the Nixon administration's attempts to discredit the antiwar movement by mobilizing the plight of American prisoners of war through Reagan-era political activism that indicted the government for not determining the fate of the missing and popular culture premised on the notion that American prisoners were still alive in Vietnam, abandoned by their government; to the contemporary ubiquity of the black and white POW/MIA flag, the notion that the United States must provide the "fullest possible accounting" of those who did not return from the war was a novel, deeply politicized response to a war that "provoked a profound national identity crisis" (Allen 2009:64, Appy 2015:xii).¹ It is a cultural history that has been thoroughly researched, with fine monographs by scholars including H. Bruce Franklin and Michael J. Allen standing as definitive works.

Sarah E. Wagner's excellent book, What Remains: Bringing America's Missing Home From the Vietnam War, should be placed alongside these works. Accessibly written and raising issues that should provoke lively discussion in advanced undergraduate and graduate seminars, What Remains has a different focus. Whereas earlier works emphasized national organizations, presidential administrations, and popular culture, Wagner takes readers inside Department of Defense efforts to locate, identify, and return remains; the political and cultural forces that have shaped those efforts, and the communities to which remains are returned. Highlighting the tensions between the scientific and the political and the local, national, and transnational, she adds complexity and nuance to the history of an issue central to the Vietnam war's legacy.

As Wagner explains from the outset, the notion that missing service members' remains be located, identified and "come home has become the expected end, the final act in the nation's proper response to its missing fallen" (12). This expectation, which she terms a discourse of "exceptional care," is deeply tied to resolving the war's divisiveness, as "the return of remains also offers a chance to correct past injury; 40 or 50 years later, long-absent war dead are welcomed home in ways never thought possible by those who survived and returned to their country during the war" (13). What Remains illuminates how this discourse, which intersects with larger questions about citizenship, service, and obligation, shapes the scientific efforts to locate the missing, the political processes that oversee them, and the community practices that surround the return of remains.

Wagner does so in fascinating detail. What Remains is divided into three sections, separated by vignettes that detail one community's efforts to grapple with the loss and, eventually, return of the war dead from the Vietnam era to the present. The first three chapters detail the emergence of the "exceptional care" discourse and scientific and political debates that surround it, while the fourth chapter details a recovery mission to Vietnam in which she participated. The final two chapters return to the United States, exploring how families and communities have responded to recovery efforts, the return of remains, and, in some cases, enduring loss.

Among the book's strengths are Wagner's ethnographic accounts from these various locations. Accompanying Department of Defense researchers to Vietnam, for example, she highlights the difficulty of the work and the fragmentary nature of any remains that are recovered, but importantly does not shy away from highlighting that these efforts are...