Until the Last Man Comes Home
POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
Fewer Americans were captured or missing during the Vietnam War than in any previous major military conflict in U.S. history. Yet despite their small numbers, American POWs inspired an outpouring of concern that slowly eroded support for the war. Michael J. Allen reveals how wartime loss transformed U.S. politics well before, and long after, the war's official end.
Throughout the war's last years and in the decades since, Allen argues, the effort to recover lost warriors was as much a means to establish responsibility for their loss as it was a search for answers about their fate. Though millions of Americans and Vietnamese took part in that effort, POW and MIA families and activists dominated it. Insisting that the war was not over "until the last man comes home," this small, determined group turned the unprecedented accounting effort against those they blamed for their suffering. Allen demonstrates that POW/MIA activism prolonged the hostility between the United States and Vietnam even as the search for the missing became the basis for closer ties between the two countries in the 1990s. Equally important, he explains, POW/MIA families' disdain for the antiwar left and contempt for federal authority fueled the conservative ascendancy after 1968. Mixing political, cultural, and diplomatic history, Until the Last Man Comes Home presents the full and lasting impact of the Vietnam War in ways that are both familiar and surprising.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Allen, an assistant professor of history at Northwestern, presents a perceptive analysis of the history of the Vietnam War POW/MIA issue: paradoxically, the most extensive study ever attempted, despite the startling fact that the number of those missing in action is comparatively small (about 1,800, compared with 8,000 in Korea). In an ambitious book, Allen meticulously traces the history of the movement to account for the missing, concentrating on the group that became the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia. He captures the sense of bitterness and betrayal that motivated the families and shows how the league morphed from a wives-led lobbying effort into a political phenomenon that has had a significant impact on the body politic through six presidential administrations, from Nixon to George W. Bush. Allen also makes a convincing case that the MIA issue was an important factor in the political rise of Ronald Reagan, which "marked the start of nearly three decades of Republican rule." Allen lapses into needless academic jargon on occasion, but otherwise writes clearly and cogently in this valuable look at what he accurately calls a "strange" story. 28 illus.
