How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America 9780520381452

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How White Men Won the Culture Wars

How White Men Won the Culture Wars A History of Veteran America

Joseph Darda

university of california press

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2021 by Joseph Darda Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Darda, Joseph, author. Title: How white men won the culture wars : a history of veteran America / Joseph Darda. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2020045508 | isbn 9780520381445 (cloth) | isbn 9780520381452 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Whites—Race identity—United States—History—20th century. Classification: lcc ht1575 .d37 2021 | ddc 305.809— dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045508 Manufactured in the United States of America 30 10

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For Sam

If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks, what will peace among the whites bring? —Frederick Douglass, “The Color Question,” 1875

Contents

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Introduction: The Thin White Line Post-Traumatic Whiteness Veteran American Literature Whiteness on the Edge of Town The Ethnicization of Veteran America Like a Refugee Epilogue: Veteran America First

Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

1 29 61 90 121 152 179

193 195 233 255

Introduction The Thin White Line

The morning headlines strained to describe what the Supreme Court had ruled. On June 29, 1978, the New York Times announced, above the fold, “High Court Backs Some Affirmative Action by Colleges, but Orders Bakke Admitted.” The Washington Post declared, “Affirmative Action Upheld: Court Orders School to Admit Bakke, Curbs Racial Quotas.” The Los Angeles Times determined, “Bakke Wins but Justices Uphold Affirmative Action.” The Amsterdam News, the nation’s largest Black newspaper, reached a different conclusion. It didn’t mince words: “Bakke: We Lose.” The court had issued a ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, a case that originated in 1974 when Allan Bakke, a white mechanical engineer and Vietnam veteran, contested the decision of the medical school of the University of California, Davis, to turn him down for a second time. His legal team had argued that the school’s affirmative action program violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, that the medical school had “discriminated against” Bakke, a white man, “by reason of his race.” The court, though divided, agreed.1 Associate Justice Lewis Powell, the court’s swing vote, announcing the judgment of the court, ruled Davis’s “special admissions program”—the medical school set aside sixteen out of one hundred seats for students of color—unconstitutional but maintained that race could be considered in admissions decisions where it served “the interest of a university in a diverse student body,” an interest, he insisted, “not limited to ethnic 1

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diversity.”2 That decision, the highest court’s most significant statement on race since Brown v. Board of Education, shifted the ethic of affirmative action from a moderate form of redress for Black and brown communities (more medical students leading to more doctors leading to better health, higher incomes, and greater wealth) to a call to construct diverse learning environments for all students, including, most of all, white students. The court, reflecting a wider debate about race in the United States after civil rights, determined that white people could also suffer for their race and could also contribute to a diverse environment, a racial hurt and a white cultural difference embodied in the trials of a Vietnam vet. Anti–affirmative action activists recognized Bakke as the ideal standard-bearer through whom to make a case for “reverse discrimination,” to argue that the racial reforms of the 1960s had overcorrected and now functioned to harm white people for their skin color. Bakke had graduated in 1962 from the University of Minnesota, where he had enrolled in ROTC. He served in the marines for four years, including a seven-month tour in Vietnam, before settling in Los Altos, California, and building a career as a NASA research engineer. His interest in medicine arose in Southeast Asia, where he watched medics care for wounded marines, and followed him home. Bakke took night classes. He volunteered at a local clinic. In 1972, at thirty-two, he sought admission to eleven medical schools, including Davis’s. He didn’t get in. In 1973, he tried again without success. News media described him as a “Vietnam veteran, aerospace engineer, and a man with a strong commitment to medicine,” a “stocky, baldish Vietnam veteran” and “hard-working aerospace engineer who decided late in life that he’d rather be a doctor.”3 Bakke, who refused to be interviewed and didn’t attend the decision announcement, offered activists and news media a blank slate. Who was Allan Bakke? A white Vietnam vet who worked hard. That was it. “If, as some people might say, this is a case where one man is carrying the ball for all white males,” the New York Times observed of Bakke, “they could not have picked a more representative specimen.”4 The Supreme Court ordered Bakke, the marine vet, admitted to medical school as moviegoers met a cast of downtrodden white men who had served in Vietnam: Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) in Taxi Driver, Luke Martin (Jon Voight) in Coming Home, and Mike Vronsky (De Niro again) and Nick Chevotarevich (Christopher Walken) in The Deer Hunter. In the late 1970s, white men, some who had served and more who had not, learned to channel their grievances and entitlements through the Vietnam vet, in the courtroom and on the big screen.

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The end of the Vietnam War coincided with a cascade of economic crises that halted and then reversed decades of middle-class growth that had most benefited white men and their families. The oil shock, the offshoring of manufacturing, attacks on labor unions, the stagnation of real wages, the hollowing out of social services—all contributed to a sense of loss among white men, whose fathers had found a foothold in a middle class that now felt out of reach to their sons. The economic turmoil also struck Black and brown communities, and harder, but stories of hard-luck white vets encouraged white men to see themselves as the new have-nots of a nation that, they felt, the antiracist, feminist, and antiwar movements had turned upside down. White men, including men who had neither served in the war nor lost their jobs to offshoring or union busting, came to see their struggles in the Vietnam veteran, a racial identification that had less to do with real vets than with the image of the combat veteran, from which nonvet elites gained far more than the often working-class men and women who did serve in the war. The treatment of the white vet as an embodiment of cultural difference, as a veteran American, modeled for white men how they might refashion themselves as minorities in their own right, undermining arguments for racial redistribution and, from Bakke on, facilitating the rollback of affirmative action and other civil rights reforms. The wounded white warrior, forming a rare site of consensus in the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, acted as a bridge between color-blind conservatives and liberal multiculturalists who could see him either as a deracinated universal (an American veteran) or a minoritized outsider (a veteran American). That consensus allowed Sylvester Stallone, the conservative movie star, and Bruce Springsteen, the liberal rock star, to fill theaters and stadiums with some of the same fans, fans who had come to hear stories about white men “down in the shadow of the penitentiary / out by the gas fires of the refinery” whose American dream had turned into a white nightmare in Vietnam.5 The transformation of the Vietnam vet into a vessel for white racial interests took some historical revision. Hundreds of thousands of American Indian, Black, and Latino soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen fought and died in Southeast Asia, often receiving more dangerous and less desirable assignments than their white comrades. Women served as nurses and in near-combat roles. Millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians lost their lives, their families, and their homes, some resettling in the United States. But the self-searching white soldier, a naive but well-meaning man who struggles with feelings of

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alienation in Vietnam and long after, emerged, almost without fail, as the protagonist of the war in literature, music, film, and news media. War stories of a different kind faced resistance or banishment to another genre, Viet Nguyen, the scholar and novelist, writes, because audiences “believe that war stories are about soldiers, men, machines, and killing,” that they star a white man in uniform, hero or antihero.6 Stallone, Springsteen, Tim O’Brien, and Oliver Stone did not invent the whiteness of war culture, of course. Yusef Komunyakaa, the poet and the rare Black Vietnam vet to make a name for himself as an author of war literature, reflecting in 1993 on the career of the Black Arts Movement poet Etheridge Knight, wondered why Knight, who had done a tour in the Korean War, had never written more than a poem or two about it. “Perhaps there is an answer [in what he endured in the army] as to why Knight didn’t write more war-related poems,” Komunyakaa wrote. “I still wish he had. He could have filled a missing space in our literary history.”7 Komunyakaa, who won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, didn’t offer an answer, but he identified a hard-toignore truth of war lit: against the facts on the ground, it remained a white genre. He did not write about his own tour in Vietnam until his forties, in his fifth book. O’Brien wrote his first book about Vietnam, a memoir, in his midtwenties, before the war had ended. More than a few scholars have noted the whiteness of war culture, but most treat it as an effect rather than a source of white racial dominance.8 This book argues otherwise, showing how a broad contingent of white men—conservative and liberal, rich and poor, vet and nonvet— transformed the Vietnam War into a staging ground for a post–civil rights white racial reunion. The first Black Reconstruction ended with a white reunion, with white southerners and white northerners agreeing that, whatever their differences, they shared a martial sacrifice and a racial brotherhood. Historians of the era suggest that the end of American apartheid wouldn’t arrive until the second Reconstruction, the civil rights movement.9 But that second Reconstruction ended with another white reconciliation. While the whiteness of Vietnam War culture in the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s can be attributed, like so much else, to who controlled the cultural industries, white men also needed that culture, as an instrument for asserting their hurt and their rights, to remain white. War stories bind whiteness to Americanness, white skin to green uniforms—a whiteness ever more distressed after civil rights but no less unified. The overwhelming whiteness of war culture turned veteran into another word for white, allowing white men to talk about their racial

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identities without acknowledging it. Although, as historian Kathleen Belew argues, a shared belief that the government had abandoned white vets in Vietnam unified sometimes divergent white supremacist factions into a “coherent social movement” of Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and skinheads, that belief did not belong to the fringe but formed a broad consensus among conservatives and liberals.10 This book, while mindful that wars overseas have often fueled self-declared white supremacist movements at home, identifies how stories about the Vietnam War organized a more subtle white racial movement, a movement so mainstream that most Americans didn’t see it as either racial or as a movement at all.11 The strange career of the veteran American reveals how white men resecured their dominant status after civil rights and feminism through a racial grievance and sense of entitlement that looked, on the surface, color blind and race neutral. It accounts for how, when presidential candidate Donald Trump declared in 2016 that “our veterans” are “treated worse than illegal immigrants,” we all knew what he meant.12 James Baldwin, the most discerning critic of white consciousness since W. E. B. Du Bois, identified war and nationalism as the basic ingredients of modern whiteness. In 1985, introducing his last book, The Price of the Ticket, a collection of his writing from the late 1940s to the 1980s, Baldwin returned to World War II. His father had died of tuberculosis in 1943, and Baldwin’s older brother had returned home from the war on furlough to attend the funeral. Baldwin remembers being struck at the sight of his brother and his army buddies, all Black men, in their uniforms. “One wondered—as one could not fail to wonder— what nation they represented,” he wrote. “My brother, describing his life in uniform, did not seem to be representing the America his uniform was meant to represent—: he had never seen the America his uniform was meant to represent. Had anyone? Did he know, had he met, anyone who had? Did anyone live there?”13 Baldwin, then nineteen, sensed something strange about Black men in army green, not because Black men didn’t serve—they did, and in large numbers—but because the nation they served didn’t serve them. Baldwin’s brother had never seen that America. Neither had Baldwin in 1985, then sixty-one. “The price of the ticket,” Baldwin concluded, describing the cost of national belonging, “was to become white,” to invest in the belief that whiteness constituted a condition for full inclusion within the nation.14 No one knew that better than the Black vet, who bought a ticket he never received. Baldwin reflected on seeing his older brother return from combat as Stallone’s second Rambo film led the summer box office and

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Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” dominated FM radio. War culture continued to tie whiteness to Americanness through stories of good white men in uniform, but something had changed. This book tells the story of that change, of how the Vietnam War remade whiteness for an age of color blindness and multiculturalism.

whiteness after civil rights In the mid-1940s, the developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, then a research associate and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, interviewed former soldiers and marines at the Mt. Zion Veterans Rehabilitation Clinic in San Francisco. The interviews with the men, undergoing short-term treatment for “nervous instability” and “shell shock,” moved Erikson to write his first book, Childhood and Society, in which he introduced the modern use of the term identity—as he defined it, an “ego identity” anchored in a “cultural identity.” The war had, he thought, dislodged that anchor for the men, who struggled to resituate their sense of self (their egos) in communal belonging (their culture, the nation). “What impressed me most was the loss in these men of a sense of identity,” Erikson wrote of the vets. “There was a central disturbance of what I then started to call ego identity,” or “the ability to experience one’s self as something that has continuity and sameness, and to act accordingly.”15 Their time at war had shaken the men, severing their ego identities from the culture that gave them coherence. Erikson called that disturbance an identity crisis. Millions of college students read Childhood and Society as the antiracist, feminist, and antiwar movements took off. “If there’s one book you can be sure undergraduates have read, it is Erikson’s first one,” a sociologist at Berkeley remarked in 1970. “You can’t always be sure they’ve read Shakespeare, but you know they’ve read Erikson.”16 Historians often credit Erikson with having invented the terms on which the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s mobilized racial, gender, and sexual identities as instruments for coalition building and change making. His biographer declared him “identity’s architect.”17 Identities, Erikson believed, arose from the recognition of a self that conformed to and sometimes conflicted with learned cultural values. That self could secure dominant values or, as antiracist and feminist movements discovered, unsettle and change them. Although commentators on the right and the left would later dismiss radicals for engaging in “identity politics,” accusing them of oversensitive naval gazing, that idea—of the self

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as a horizon for social belonging, crisis, and change—originated with a few white men at a veterans’ rehabilitation clinic, whose crises Erikson, identity’s architect, diagnosed as a national crisis. The American Indian, Asian American, Black Power, and Chicano movements inverted that national identitarianism, defining themselves against a state and nation that had colonized, enslaved, and excluded their ancestors and them and that now sought to subvert Asian selfgovernment in Vietnam. Throwing off the racial liberal dream—and, they argued, illusion—of integration, radicals fought instead for their communities and sometimes allied themselves with the state’s declared enemies in Southeast Asia. Huey Newton, cofounder and “minister of defense” of the Black Panthers, offered “an undetermined number of troops” to North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front to assist their “fight against American imperialism.”18 The Chicano movement, bucking a long-standing tradition of Mexican American service, called for Chicanos to refuse induction and fight at home for their raza. (Hundreds of thousands did serve in the war, of course, some of whom marched with the movement after returning.) Emma Gee, a cofounder of the Asian American Political Alliance, the first national organization to use the term Asian American to unite Americans of diverse Asian backgrounds, identified two interrelated sources of the Asian American movement. “The struggles of the Afro-Americans to achieve equality revealed how racism is still embedded in national attitudes and established institutions,” she wrote, and “The brutal intervention in Southeast Asia raised disturbing questions about our foreign policy and its relationship to domestic politics permeated by that racism.”19 Erikson thought that racism had fragmented American Indian, Asian American, Black, and Chicanx identities. Activists disagreed, embracing their difference from a national culture founded in settler colonialism and the slave trade and driving an anti-anticolonial war in Southeast Asia. White Americans answered with declarations of their own difference, announcing themselves as not a homogenous mass, not “the man,” but a nation of immigrants—Irish, Italian, and Polish Americans with their own tales of exclusion and hardscrabble self-making. When the miniseries Roots aired on ABC in 1977, as the Burger court weighed whether to hear Bakke, millions of Americans tuned in, including millions of white Americans with a new interest in their own genealogies.20 That sudden investment in white immigrant roots and white ethnic identities functioned as a rebuttal to the demands of Black radicals. “A lot of things went wrong for us, you know, for the Jewish people,” a resident

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of Canarsie, Brooklyn, where the children and grandchildren of Italian and Jewish immigrants mounted a vicious campaign against racial busing, told a sociologist in the late 1970s. “What happened to the blacks happened to us too. We had to push hard in the beginning too.”21 Pixie Palladino, an Italian American activist who fought busing in Boston in the 1970s, accused white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of looking down on “people of color like me.”22 The antiracist movements had blamed a white federal and business establishment for the horrors of the Vietnam War. The government’s disregard for Vietnamese life looked all too familiar to Black and brown communities in the United States. White ethnics followed suit, distancing themselves from that white establishment and comparing the obstacles that their immigrant families had faced to anti-Black racism. The cultural historian Eric Lott refers to the desire of white people to see themselves reflected in a distorted image of Blackness as “black mirroring,” a mirroring, he writes, shot through with “cultural and economic value, the capitalizing on which, whenever racial imaging comes into play, is the bedrock of white cultural dominance.”23 Palladino’s and other white ethnics’ swift embrace of minoritized identities after civil rights should, Lott suggests, make us wonder what cultural and economic value may be at stake in that move, how white people may be guarding their racial dominance through a claim to the reverse, insisting that they have never been either white or dominant. The white ethnic revival undercut arguments for racial redistribution, including affirmative action, and restored white Americans’ belief in their own innocence, a belief that they and their immigrant forefathers had made it on their own, without government intervention or the wages of whiteness.24 The white ethnic revival fractured white America. The saga of the veteran American reunited it. Neoconservative intellectuals, including Peter Berger, Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol, Michael Novak, and Norman Podhoretz, all hailing from immigrant families, led that roots revival in the 1970s and then translated it into the new nationalism of the 1980s. Berger, Glazer, Kristol, Novak, and Podhoretz launched their careers as racial liberals—anticommunist integrationists, antiredistributive reformers— and then drifted rightward amid the rise of the radical antiracist and feminist movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. The countermovement they built cohered around a subtle correlation of the white ethnic with the vet, Ellis Island with Vietnam, immigrant struggle with racial nationalism. Novak, a Catholic philosopher and self-identified Slovak American, argued that immigrants earned their national belonging with a “blood

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test”: “Die for us and we’ll give you a chance.” Polish, Italian, Greek, and Slovak Americans—to whom he gave the unflattering shorthand PIGS— laid claim to the nation through the sacrifice of their sons and brothers. “When my father saw my youngest brother in officer’s uniform, it was one of the proudest days of his life,” he wrote in The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, “even though it (sickeningly) meant Vietnam.”25 Novak, who did not serve, earning a graduate degree from Harvard during the war, did not acknowledge that Black and brown Americans had also taken that blood test and worn that uniform, including with his brother in Vietnam. Novak and the neocons tied white ethnics to Vietnam vets as activists, novelists, musicians, filmmakers, and memoirists—conservative and liberal, a few radical, most white—revisited and reimagined the war. When National Park Service historian Ross Holland described the significance of the Ellis Island restoration, a restoration launched at the height of the white ethnic revival, he turned to the Vietnam War. “A patriotic effort that most Americans could rally around,” he wrote, the restoration of the former immigrant station “marked the nation’s emergence from the shadow of the Vietnam experience.”26 The ethnicization of white America turned white people into minorities, innocent and self-made. The ethnicization of veteran America—the transference of a white ethnic hurt to a white American nationalism—reunified them, dressing their ethnic identities in red, white, and blue, and army green. Ethnicity, a racial paradigm that arose in the 1940s as a liberal answer to the eugenics movement and the Third Reich, detached differences in skin color from differences in culture, including national and religious culture, stressing the constructedness of racial meaning while consolidating whiteness as an intelligible race. (“Aryans, Jews, Italians are not races,” a 1943 educational pamphlet instructed.)27 That paradigm, as white ethnic revivalists found, endowed white people with mutable identities through which they could fashion themselves as ethnic outsiders when it served them and deracinated Americans when it didn’t. Ethnicity enabled them to attribute the material barriers that Black and brown Americans faced in education, health services, housing, law enforcement, and wealth accumulation to culture and choice, while making a claim to their own histories of struggle as white ethnics. The ethnicization of veteran America reunified white ethnics and WASPs as a white nation that felt entitled to what it had but also, after sacrificing in Vietnam or binding their identities to men who had, believed it deserved more.

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The self-made white ethnic and the forgotten Vietnam vet starred in conservative intellectual circles, at tourist destinations, and in the movies, where a new generation of filmmakers, including Hal Ashby, Michael Cimino, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Mike Nichols, and Martin Scorsese, made dark films about white outsiders—first Ellis Island immigrants, then Vietnam vets. For years, film studios wouldn’t touch the war. “Vietnam is awkward, everybody knows how awkward,” Michael Herr wrote in the mid-1970s, “and if people don’t even want to hear about it, you know they’re not going to pay money to sit there in the dark and have it brought up.”28 That changed in 1978 with the critical and commercial success of Ashby’s Coming Home, a liberal film about a housewife’s life-altering affair with a wounded vet, and Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, a conservative film about three Russian American steelworkers’ devastating tours and tragic homecomings. Ashby’s film won three Oscars, Cimino’s five, including Best Picture. The critic Peter Biskind later called that year’s Academy Awards “the Vietnam Oscars.”29 Ashby and Cimino showed studios that the war could sell if they used it as the setting for stories about alienated white men. Cimino took the white ethnic revivalism of Fiddler on the Roof and The Godfather and moved it to Vietnam. Ashby, though making a WASPier film than Cimino, felt that “the role of the paralyzed enlisted man called for a working-class or ethnic actor like Jack Nicholson or Al Pacino” and offered it to Stallone, then coming off the success of Rocky, before settling on Jon Voight.30 From Erikson to the white ethnic revival to Vietnam War revisionism, white men learned to remake their racial identities for an age of civil rights and feminism with ethnic hurt and war trauma. Allan Bakke learned that lesson, or at least the white men brandishing his image did. The Burger court ordered him admitted to medical school as Coming Home and The Deer Hunter reframed the Vietnam War, his war, as a white man’s wound, his claim to affirmative action.

the diversity of allan bakke In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson delivered the commencement address at Howard University, declaring his commitment to affirmative action, a term that he borrowed from John F. Kennedy but that he made his own that day. The president enumerated his administration’s achievements, including the Civil Rights Act and a then-pending voting rights bill. “But freedom is not enough,” Johnson, dressed in full regalia, told the graduates. “You do not take a person who, for years, has

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been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” His administration’s civil rights legislation had halted legal segregation and eliminated some barriers to education and voting, but it could not, Johnson admitted, erase more than three hundred years of racial theft. A poor Black person faced obstacles a poor white person didn’t. The president, coming off an electoral landslide, declared his intention to “seek not just legal equity, but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”31 That fall, President Johnson signed Executive Order 11246, mandating that federal contractors take affirmative action to hire and promote people of color and women, delivering on the commitment he had made at Howard to enforcing affirmative action as a form, albeit modest, of redistribution. He admitted that the United States had wronged Black people and that it owed them a debt. In his commencement address, Johnson called the voting rights bill “the end of the beginning” of a long struggle.32 It turned out to be the beginning of the end. In 1968, the Association of American Medical Colleges, taking the executive order to heart and addressing a shortage of doctors in Black communities, urged medical schools to recruit more Black students. The AAMC recommended that they take affirmative measures to ensure that Black students constituted at least 12 percent of their entering classes. More than a hundred schools answered the association’s call with initiatives to attract more Black students and students of color, including the new medical school at the University of California, Davis. In 1970, after admitting successive classes in which no more than two students identified as American Indian, Asian, Black, or Latinx, the Davis admissions office agreed to reserve 16 percent of seats for “applicants from economically and educationally disadvantaged backgrounds” whom a “special subcommittee” would review.33 That separate subcommittee review troubled an admissions officer named Peter Storandt, a white thirty-year-old from Ithaca, New York, who took a liking to Bakke. After the school turned the former marine down for the first time, Storandt invited him to Davis, where they met for coffee and reviewed Bakke’s file. The two men hit it off and continued to write to one another as the vet sought admission to Storandt’s school. “Bakke was a man who felt as strongly as anyone I’ve ever known about his potential as a healer of the sick and as a benefactor of the community,” the admissions officer later remembered of their first

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meeting. “He was an extremely impressive man and I felt he deserved a straight answer.”34 Storandt encouraged Bakke to contest the school’s two-stream review if Davis turned him down again. It did, and the former marine sued the school for antiwhite discrimination. Storandt felt that the medical school had wronged Bakke, that he deserved a straight answer and a fair shot. With almost four thousand applicants bidding for a mere one hundred seats in the class of 1974, Storandt could not have met them all for coffee. He fought the school’s effort to train more Black doctors with a far older form of affirmative action: white men looking out for other white men. The man heading Bakke’s legal team, Reynold Colvin, decided to defend the vet—with what Storandt observed as his marine officer’s bearing and commitment to service—to challenge the law, rather than challenge the law to win Bakke’s admission to medical school. Colvin, arguing before the Supreme Court for the first time, introduced himself as the humble defender of one man: “It seems to me that the first thing that I ought to say is that I am Allan Bakke’s lawyer and Allan Bakke is my client.” He stressed that his client had sued the University of California not as an activist, not as a stand-in for a movement or a class of men, but as an individual. He defended Bakke, the Vietnam vet. The medical school’s two-stream admissions review violated the Fourteenth Amendment, he argued, because “it keeps Mr. Bakke out of medical school not because of somebody else’s race or anything else but because of Mr. Bakke’s race.”35 Colvin asked the court to weigh the evidence not in the abstract but with Allan Bakke, a straight-backed, hardworking vet who had fought in a thankless war, in mind. Think of the harm done to him, Colvin urged the justices. In one of the first books about the case, Harvie Wilkinson, a former Powell clerk and future federal judge, stressing Bakke’s tour in Vietnam, described him as a man “never especially wealthy or advantaged” who led “a storybook life of middle-class virtue.” The court must, he argued, safeguard his rights from forces that would turn to “suspect means” and “ignore democratic modes of behavior—as many Vietnam protestors did.”36 The marine vet had followed the rules, Wilkinson, a conservative, suggested, while antiracist and antiwar activists, whom he conflated, had violated them, hurting Bakke and other industrious white men. Bakke steered clear of news media, covering his face when camera crews visited his home in Northern California. His reticence left Colvin free to construct an image of his client that best served his argument, and he constructed an image of a neglected war hero, self-sacrificing and unsung.

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He constructed an image of a man white but not too white, deracinated and ethnicized, an American veteran and a veteran American. Powell agreed. In submitting the judgment of the court, he first redefined what constituted a “minority group.” He argued that since the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, the United States had reemerged as a “Nation of minorities,” all of whom deserved some claim to the Equal Protection Clause. “Each had to struggle—and to some extent struggle still—to overcome the prejudices not of a monolithic majority,” he wrote, “but of a ‘majority’ composed of various minority groups of whom it was said—perhaps unfairly in many cases—that a shared characteristic was a willingness to disadvantage other groups.” That white monolith against which the antiracist movements had directed their energies did not, Powell concluded, exist. Activists had imagined it. He identified instead a disorganized mix of white ethnics and “a new minority of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.”37 White Americans, including WASPs and Vietnam vets, for whom the Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974 had mandated affirmative action and antidiscrimination safeguards, also lived on the margins. (The justice had rehearsed the argument years earlier in a memo to the US Chamber of Commerce, in which he lamented that “the American business executive is truly the ‘forgotten man.’”38 Vets, WASPs, and businessmen—all could be minorities.) Powell determined that universities and colleges had a “compelling” interest in creating diverse learning environments for their students but that white students often served that interest as well as or better than their Black and Latinx classmates. A Black student contributed something to institutional life that a white student could not, he acknowledged, but an Italian American or a “farm boy from Idaho” also contributed something that the Black student couldn’t. All could be diverse in Powell’s nation of minorities.39 The Burger court’s ruling in Bakke all but ended redistributive affirmative action for students and workers of color and replaced it with antiredistributive affirmative action for white minorities, which included, Powell argued, all white people. That diverse whiteness could take the form of ethnic or class consciousness, but the Italian American and the farmer’s son shared an identification with the Vietnam vet, the protagonist of white America after civil rights. With Bakke, the court made affirmative action white again, refashioning it in the image of the veteran American.40 The Bakke decision enabled white men to situate themselves as the simultaneous victims and beneficiaries of affirmative action. Although Powell’s mandate did create conditions under which more students and

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workers of color would enter and remake institutions that had once excluded them, it did not, as Roderick Ferguson, the queer of color theorist, observes, unseat white men from their dominant status in higher education, government, and business. It renewed it. “The post– civil rights United States was not only constituted by the upheaval of prior racist formations and the insurgency of minority difference,” he writes, “but also by the reconstitution of racial domination—this time through an ostensibly reformed mode of whiteness invested in its own centrality rather than the material redistribution of resources.”41 White liberals, Ferguson argues, did not sacrifice racial dominance in declaring their commitment to admitting and hiring more students and colleagues of color but secured it through the administration of cultural difference. The Bakke decision legitimated that administration of difference but also asserted that white people—the Italian American, the farmer’s son, the Vietnam vet—embodied differences deserving of their own affirmative action, of redress for ethnic and class struggles and for war wounds. The student movements of the 1960s and 1970s had demanded more than inclusion. Students activists had called for a broad reorganization of knowledge at institutions of higher education.42 State governments often met their demands with force, sending in national guardsmen, whom Justice Powell would later deem minorities in their own right. But they also contained student movements with a more subtle affirmation of difference that, as feminist scholar Grace Hong argues, sought the “incorporation” of “those aspects of these movements that were appropriable—that which replicated the normative investments of political modernity.”43 That affirmation of some obscured the continued relegation of others to a kind of social death. It also, in a radical reversal of movement demands, affirmed the cultural difference of white men, including Bakke and the national guardsmen who had carried out the crackdown on student activists. That did not mean that the movements disappeared or turned against themselves. The “energy” of that time, Audre Lorde said in 1982, “is still being felt in movements for change among women, other peoples of Color, gays, the handicapped—among all the disenfranchised peoples of this society.” But Lorde also understood that movements faced the threat of institutional affirmation that sorted them into this or that “single-issue struggle” constituted of “single-issue lives.”44 Powell’s nation of minorities narrowed the terms of inclusion, forgetting in the act of affirming. Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had argued Brown on behalf of his NAACP Legal Defense Fund, smelled a rat. Other than agreeing with the judgment of the court that universities and colleges

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could consider race in making admissions decision, he dissented. Marshall was blunt in his criticism. “It is more than a little ironic,” he wrote, “that, after several hundred years of class-based discrimination against Negroes, the Court is unwilling to hold that a class-based remedy for that is permissible.” The Constitution had never been color blind, Marshall reminded his colleagues, likening the Bakke ruling to the court’s decisions in the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy v. Ferguson, with which it had undermined the Reconstruction amendments that Bakke, a white man, now invoked in his suit against the University of California. The court and the Constitution had long served the “class-based” interests of white men.45 The second Black people made a class-based argument of their own, the court decided that it and the law must be color blind. Marshall, the first Black man to sit on the Supreme Court, dismissed Colvin’s suggestion that Bakke came before the court as an individual rather than as a stand-in for a class. The case could not be more class based or color conscious. Bakke had made his discrimination claim as a white man. For centuries, the law had formed and elevated the rights of white people against the rightlessness of Black people, a fact guaranteeing that, as Marshall wrote, “the dream of America as the great melting pot has not been realized for the Negro; because of his skin color he didn’t even make it into the pot.”46 The law had barred Black people from that melting pot and then, with Bakke, traded it for a nation of white minorities—a nation of white people who, after enduring immigration and war, thought themselves not too white to be entitled to more.

how the vietnam war turned white “I happen to be a veteran / but you can’t tell in how many ways,” the Puebloan poet Simon Ortiz declares in “The Significance of a Veteran’s Day,” a poem he wrote at the height of the Vietnam War. “I am a veteran of at least 30,000 years.”47 Ortiz served in the army in the mid-1960s. But he broadens the meaning of veteran to include the Puebloans who had resided in North America for millennia and endured centuries of war since the arrival of the first white settlers. The title of his poem, “The Significance of a Veteran’s Day,” refers not to the federal holiday but to a veteran’s day, without celebration or commemoration—every day, Ortiz suggests, for all Indigenous peoples. Veterans Day honors white men as a default. He, a Puebloan, a former soldier, lives a veteran’s day. From the founding of the republic, the state defined war—violence it sanctioned or recognized as legitimate—as the exclusive domain of white

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men. The government deemed Indigenous and Black violence, including acts of self-defense, criminal, establishing whiteness as a condition for all forms of lawful violence, including, most of all, war. That condition allowed it to frame the violent settlement of Indigenous lands as a string of mere “counterinsurgencies” and the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere as “police actions.” The United States had not, officials insisted, fought a war in Florida or Texas or East Asia but had fended off criminals—people who, no matter their behavior, could not be law abiding and could not wage war. Since long before the first American advisers set foot in Vietnam, Ortiz reminds us, the state had tied whiteness to war as a claim to legitimate violence and the national honor that came with martial sacrifice. The United States had erased Southeast Asians and Americans of color from the battlefield before the first shot.48 Ortiz and others observed at the time that, although the government had called on Black, brown, and white working-class men to do much of the on-the-ground soldiering in Vietnam, it didn’t look like a multiracial, working-class war on television. Take, for example, the homecomings of John Kerry, the future senator and Democratic presidential nominee, and John McCain, the future senator and Republican presidential nominee. Kerry, a Yale grad and an officer in the naval reserve, served a fourmonth tour in Vietnam in the late 1960s. He returned from the Mekong Delta with a Silver Star and joined Vietnam Veterans against the War, an organization that, though conscious of how race structured the war and who served in it, included few vets of color. In 1971, Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with a row of white VVAWers seated behind him, describing how his fellow vets had returned from Southeast Asia “with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.”49 VVAW soon teamed with a few doctors and other advocates for veterans’ mental health demanding that the American Psychiatric Association recognize what they then termed “post-Vietnam syndrome.” Robert Lifton, a Yale research psychiatrist, led that movement, arguing that the vets had turned against the Vietnam War not to end it but to treat their own maladies. “For such people,” he wrote of the vets in 1973, “not only is protest necessary to psychological help—it is psychological help.”50 With the war winding down, Vietnam Veterans against the War, the left wing of the veterans’ movement, shifted from fighting against war to advocating for veterans, from VVAW to PTSD, from what Kerry said in Congress to what Kerry, a white man in fatigues, signified.51

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McCain, a Naval Academy grad and the son and grandson of four-star admirals, stood on the other side of the conservative-liberal divide. In 1973, with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, the Nixon administration secured the release of the remaining 591 prisoners of war from North Vietnam, including McCain. President Nixon, facing a mounting Watergate scandal, hailed their return as an honorable end to the war. His administration orchestrated elaborate homecoming events for the vets, making them, and the admiral’s son McCain most of all, the face of a war lost and then won. In interviews and his own writing, McCain who had endured five and half years as a POW, condemned the antiwar movement and the “peaceniks” who had visited Hanoi during his confinement. “The ‘gooks’ were bombarding us with antiwar quotes from people in high places back in Washington,” McCain wrote that spring. “This was the most effective propaganda they had to use against us—speeches and statements by men who were generally respected in the United States.”52 Most of the men released after the Paris Peace Accords shared McCain’s belief that the government had abandoned them and, conceding to the Left, the war. Conservative hawks embraced the men—almost all of whom were white officers and none of whom had been drafted—as the closest thing to heroes to come out of the defeat.53 Four, including McCain, later served in Congress. In the 1980s, the rescue films Uncommon Valor, Missing in Action, and the second Rambo installment further elevated the POW as an icon of the conservative movement and reinforced the idea that the United States could have won the war if fainthearted liberals hadn’t lost their nerve. The conservative POW/MIA movement, though disdainful of VVAW and the antiwar movement (and sometimes of figures as far right as McCain himself), converged with the liberal veterans’ mental health movement in reframing the war as a white man’s wound, turning a multiracial, working-class war fought in Asia into a struggle for and among white middle-class men. Coming Home, Ashby’s 1978 film about a marine wife’s affair with a disabled vet, revealed how that conservative-liberal divide could be bridged. Although starring onetime antiwar spokeswoman Jane Fonda, the film attracted fans on the left and the right with a tale of the turbulent homecomings of two white vets, Luke, an antiwar liberal, and Bob (Bruce Dern), an anticommunist conservative, who struggle with similar feelings of resentment and neglect. The first shot shows Luke, stomach-down on a VA stretcher, talking with Black vets gathered around a billiards table. The men debate the war and whether, if they had it to do over again, they would flee to Canada. Most of the other men in the

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ward are Black. Most of the nurses are, too. Few of them speak. None receive names. In being there, though, they reinforce Luke’s liberal bona fides—he gets along with his Black comrades and identifies with them— while feeding the conservative complaint that the war and the movement against it lowered the status of white men. Luke’s treatment in a ward that the film marks as Black associates him with but also distances him from Blackness. The critical race theorist Jodi Melamed argues that since the transition from biological to cultural hierarchies of racial difference after World War II “categories of privilege and stigma determined by ideological, economic, and cultural criteria have overlaid older, conventional racial categories to the extent that traditionally recognized racial identities—black, Asian, white, Arab—occupy both sides of the privilege/stigma divide.”54 The blurring of the color line authorized white men to claim both sides of that divide through their identification with a wounded nationalism embodied in the Vietnam vet. A white liberal moviegoer could see Luke as an antiracist and therefore deserving of more. A white conservative moviegoer could see him as a racial victim and therefore deserving of more. Komunyakaa, the poet, remembered seeing that first wave of Vietnam War movies in the late 1970s. He felt “enraged—enraged at myself,” he recalled of seeing Apocalypse Now.55 Although he had earned two master’s degrees in creative writing after his tour, he didn’t write about the war until the mid-1980s. He needed time, but he could also see that he, a Black man, didn’t fit into the emerging canon of Vietnam War literature, that white men, including nonvets, had staked a claim to a war that used to be his. The army vet’s 1988 collection Dien Cai Dau, his first about the war, addresses how white men reinvented themselves through the war and through him, a Black soldier. In his most-anthologized poem from the collection, “Facing It,” a Black vet visits the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall, watching his and others’ reflections in the memorial’s black granite walls. “My black face fades / hiding inside the black granite,” it begins. The speaker touches the name of Andrew Johnson, a Black soldier from Bogalusa, Louisiana, Komunyakaa’s hometown, and sees the reflection of a white vet standing behind him. He feels the man’s “pale eyes” look through his own, as if using him as a “window” onto the memorial and onto himself, and observes that the man has lost an arm “inside the stone.”56 The speaker vanishes into the black wall through which the white vet reckons with his own suffering: an arm that may be missing or may just look that way in his distorted

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reflection. The Black vet, the speaker, fades from his own poem, leaving a white man behind gazing at himself through a black mirror, now, in his own racial consciousness, a darker shade of white. The construction of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982 set the stage for a reunion of white men. Although some conservative activists condemned the design of two descending black walls as a “degrading ditch” and others resented that a young Chinese American woman, Maya Lin, had designed it, white men from the left and the right—the veterans’ mental health movement and the POW/MIA movement—hailed the dedication of the memorial as a coming to terms and coming together for them.57 John Wheeler III, the chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, declared it the first sign of a “thaw” after a long winter. “We soldiers were prepared for the war zone. We were not prepared for our return to America. We were locked out of her heart. It was a tragic abandonment,” he wrote. “The country’s cultural energy poured instead into the needs of blacks, of women, of less developed counties and countries, and into defining and fulfilling the terms for ending the Vietnam War.”58 Wheeler, a graduate of Harvard Business School and Yale Law School, suggested that Vietnam vets had to struggle against Black people, women, and poor people, people whose gains came at a cost to vets, who had to be, in the categories he constructed, white men. The whiteness of the Vietnam vet in the national imagination allowed white men to reinvent themselves as deracinated and minoritized, color blind and race conscious, a balancing act that made the veteran that rarest of things in the coming culture wars: a site of consensus.

a consensus in the culture wars In 1991, James Davison Hunter, a sociologist of religion, reflecting on some of the most divisive issues of the day—abortion, affirmative action, gay rights, flag burning, funding for the arts—diagnosed a culture war, a larger “struggle over national identity—over the meaning of America, who we have been in the past, who we are now, and perhaps most important, who we, as a nation, will aspire to become in the new millennium.”59 Hunter argued that Americans had realigned themselves along cultural rather than religious lines. For centuries, conservative Catholics, evangelical Christians, and Orthodox Jews had clashed with one another. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, they formed a new alliance against liberal Catholics and Protestants, Reform Jews, and atheists, redrawing the battle lines for a secular and, though Hunter didn’t acknowledge it,

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post–civil rights age. He worried that the divide could be irreconcilable because the two warring sides looked to different moral authorities to form their beliefs and guide their behavior. Conservatives, whether Catholic, evangelical, or Jewish, maintained an “impulse toward orthodoxy” that reflected a commitment to “an external, definable, and transcendent authority.” Liberals, whether religious or secular, shared an “impulse toward progressivism” that led them to “resymbolize historic faiths according to the prevailing assumptions of contemporary life.”60 Conservatives invested their faith in the transcendent. Liberals invested theirs in the modern. In 1992, conservative commentator and presidential candidate Pat Buchanan brought Hunter’s term to the national stage, declaring at the Republican National Convention that the United States faced “a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”61 Neither Hunter nor Buchanan acknowledged race, a subtext in all that they wrote and said, as a dividing line in the culture wars. But they agreed that the Vietnam War had set the war for the soul of America in motion. “The long, tearful, and sometimes bloody debate about Vietnam was not about the fate of a peasant society in southeast Asia,” Hunter wrote, “but about America.”62 Buchanan also traced the culture wars back to Vietnam, often asserting that “culture is the Ho Chi Minh Trail to power.”63 Conservatives felt that the nation had lost sight of itself in Southeast Asia, with the antiracist, feminist, and antiwar movements eroding the anticommunist consensus, and believed that restoring the nation they longed for meant reclaiming the Vietnam War as a good war. Hunter and Buchanan didn’t, of course, invent that revisionism. In 1980, Ronald Reagan, then the Republican presidential nominee, addressing the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Chicago, described the war as a “noble cause” that radicals had derailed and distorted, dishonoring the vets’ service and sacrifice.64 Although some at the time considered Reagan’s remarks a political blunder, he received the backing of Norman Podhoretz, the longtime editor of Commentary and a former white ethnic revivalist, who defended the president’s claim in his 1982 book Why We Were in Vietnam. Lamenting that the nation had buried the war in “the forensic equivalent of an unmarked grave,” Podhoretz declared it time to acknowledge it as “an act of imprudent idealism whose moral soundness has been so overwhelmingly vindicated by the hideous consequences of our defeat.”65 The events that had unfolded in Southeast Asia since the American retreat, including the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, demonstrated for Podhoretz that

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the architects of the war might have been brash and overconfident but that they had been on the right side. Restoring the health of the nation, he and Reagan agreed, meant renewing faith in American might, and renewing that faith mean rewriting the Vietnam War.66 Reagan and his allies had launched the culture wars, and Hunter had named them, but Buchanan turned them into a cause. The conservative firebrand, who had served in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, ran against the incumbent George H. W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 on an antiabortion, anti-Black, anti-immigrant, antigay, and militarist agenda. Buchanan attracted almost three million votes, enough to earn him a slot at the convention, where, at the Astrodome in Houston, he described a great nation under siege from atheists, feminists, and rioters. With hundreds of “Buchanan brigade” signs in the crowd below him, he located the origins of that offensive in the late 1960s, when Bill Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, had, turning his back on the United States, “sat up in a dormitory room in Oxford, England, and figured out how to dodge the draft.” (Buchanan didn’t serve either, having received a medical deferment for arthritis.) For all his alarmism, Buchanan took faith in something he had seen in Los Angeles that spring. He had watched young and, he intimated, white soldiers beating back Black demonstrators, whom he referred to as a “mob” five times in one minute. “And as those boys took back the streets of Los Angeles, block by block,” he concluded, “my friends, we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.”67 Liberals mocked Buchanan’s right-wing ravings and condemned his undisguised racism. But, whether or not he knew it that night in Houston, the conservative bomb thrower had found in the beleaguered white soldier a consensus figure that liberal culture warriors could embrace as well. Feminist critics knew that demands for veterans’ rights, from the right and the left, had come to mean something else. The journalist Susan Faludi identified it as one manifestation of a broad but subtle “backlash” against the feminist movement that managed to be “at once sophisticated and banal, deceptively ‘progressive’ and proudly backward.” The men of her generation had been promised the world, she wrote, and that promise fell apart in Vietnam, with the war enduring as the “defining event of American masculinity, the bridge that collapsed just as the nation’s sons thought they were crossing to manhood.”68 When men of her generation, whether they had served or not, spoke of the war as a crisis for the nation from which it needed to be rehabilitated, they meant that the war had been a crisis for them, that they

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needed to be rehabilitated, that the promise of their childhood had been broken and must be restored. The scholar Susan Jeffords argued that the idea of the war as a masculine wound made it the site of a cultural “remasculinization” of the nation, in which men renegotiated and restored the patriarchal interests that the feminist movement had challenged.69 The unassailable trials of the veteran American—who wants to risk being cast as “against” veterans?—countered feminist demands and undercut antiracist movements. It remasculinized the nation, and it “rewhitened” it, all while seeming to be gender- and race-neutral, above the identitarian concerns of movements and backlashes. The English department, of all places, emerged as a battleground in the escalating culture wars. Liberals fought for a more diverse curriculum and for canon revision. Conservatives argued that “cultural relativism” threatened to water down a formidable Western tradition of dead white men and a few dead white women. Hazel Carby, the Black feminist scholar, wondered where the materialist antiracism of the student movements had gone. The left side of the culture wars, she observed in a series of articles later collected under the heading “Dispatches from the Multicultural Wars,” had forfeited redistribution for a “supermarket theory of higher education” in which elite universities and colleges continued to cater to elite white students but now with a smattering of courses about authors of color.70 The students who enrolled in her Caribbean literature course at Yale could not be further removed from the migrant workers from the islands living in New Haven. Her students regarded the Caribbean as a romantic vacation destination, and reading books about it wouldn’t do much to change that attitude. It even could, she admitted, reinforce it. “To what extent are fantasized black female and male subjects invented, primarily, to make the white middle class feel better about itself,” she asked in 1992, “and, at what point, do theories of ‘difference,’ as they inform academic practices, become totally compatible with—rather than a threat to—the rigid frameworks of segregation and ghettoization at work throughout our society?”71 More diverse reading lists had not facilitated material change but functioned as a substitute for it. The Yale curriculum had changed, but not the students or New Haven or the gulf that divided them. The containment of redistributive antiracism may have been more total than Carby then imagined. A rising generation of Vietnam vet writers, including Robert Olen Butler, Larry Heinemann, and O’Brien, discovered that they, with their whiteness dressed in green, could win the canon wars on the left and the right. Butler, Heinemann, and O’Brien

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identified not as writers who had gone to war but as warriors who had learned to write. The war, they believed, had formed their identities and demanded that they tell their stories. In the foreword to his 1986 novel Paco’s Story, for which he won a National Book Award, Heinemann described his tour in Vietnam as “a story that simply would not be denied, as well as a way of looking at the world.”72 When interviewers asked O’Brien whether he considered himself a “Veteran writer,” he delivered a canned answer: “It’s like asking Toni Morrison, ‘Do you view yourself as a black writer?’” She was an African American writer. He was a veteran American writer. Veteran was his race. Of course he wrote about it. But he also considered his the most universal of identities because war stories dramatized “the human heart under pressure” with the Vietnam War functioning as “a way of applying that pressure.”73 He claimed the margin through Morrison and the universal against her. (White vets of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would later echo O’Brien. When asked about his decision to write war lit in 2015, the novelist Eliot Ackerman, a marine vet, likened it to asking Morrison, “Hey, Toni, you ever think about writing something not about being black in America?” Neither O’Brien nor Ackerman acknowledged that Morrison had faced that criticism.)74 O’Brien, whose short stories “The Things They Carried” and “How to Tell a True War Story” achieved canonical status amid the curriculum debate, transcended the culture wars, bridging the two dominant racial ideologies of the time: conservative color blindness and liberal multiculturalism. Some read him as a deracinated American veteran, others as a minoritized veteran American. Morrison had her own thoughts about the white men of American literature. The year that Buchanan declared a culture war, she showed in her slim critical volume Playing in the Dark how white authors had laid claim to the nation through veiled racial language. Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe had constructed whiteness as Americanness, she argued, through an unacknowledged but consistent engagement with Blackness as the constitutive outside to a white nation—as the “not-free” and the “not-me.” Morrison had not noticed that “Africanist presence” herself until she revisited their novels and stories as a writer. “The subject of the dream is the dreamer,” she realized, seeing for the first time the strained racial consciousness of the white authors to whom she had once devoted a master’s thesis. “It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl—the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills,” she wrote, “and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently

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(and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world.”75 Readers of Cather, Hemingway, Melville, and Poe (and Butler, Heinemann, and O’Brien), distracted at the careening bolt of white, had missed that larger structure, the fishbowl, that had made whiteness a condition for national belonging and the making of American literature. The new veteran writers internalized and forwarded the construction of whiteness as Americanness, binding it, after civil rights and feminism, to a wounded nationalism. But the racial reunion that they formed in their image faced an immediate crisis as hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asian refugees arrived in the United States with their own war stories.

the veteran and the refugee “Americans being evacuated from U.S. Embassy in Saigon climb ladder to waiting helicopter,” the Chicago Tribune wrote, describing the newspaper’s front-page photograph, on April 30, 1975, as the North Vietnamese army marched into Saigon and as the United States, defeated, marched out.76 Hubert Van Es, a Dutch photographer with United Press International, had taken the photo from a distance with a not-longenough lens, and it didn’t, as the Tribune and other papers claimed, show Americans in retreat but Vietnamese in flight, boarding a CIA helicopter on the roof of a downtown apartment building. Van Es tried to correct the error, but the image had transformed overnight into an icon of defeat. “Thus,” the photographer later remembered, “one of the best-known images of the Vietnam War shows something other than what almost everyone thinks it does.”77 The image marked the end of the war and the beginning of the entangled stories of the veteran and the refugee, the defeated American and the dislocated Vietnamese. More than half a million Southeast Asian refugees resettled in the United States after the war, often finding themselves caught in the shadow of the vets. In lê thi diem thúy’s 2003 debut novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For, a Vietnamese girl describes her childhood in Linda Vista, California, where she lives with her father and mother among other refugee families in bungalows that had once housed sailors and their families. The navy families now live down the road in new units and feel to the girl like aliens from a distant land. “We see the Navy people watering their lawns, their children riding pink tricycles up and down the culs-de-sac,” she observes. “At school their kids are Most Popular, Most Beautiful, Most Likely to Succeed. Though there are more

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Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian kids at the school, in the yearbook we are not the most anything.”78 The navy kids call them all “Yang” because Laotians with that name once attended the school. The sailors and refugees live together in the oceanside town as familiar strangers. That intimate disassociation of the vet and the refugee also unfolded in national culture, with news media treating veteran stories as war stories, and refugee stories, when they bothered to hear them, as dehistoricized immigrant sagas—tales not of war but of the American dream, realized or deferred. The generic distinction safeguarded white racial interests because Vietnamese refugee writers and artists who tell their own stories, from Lan Cao and Trinh T. Minh-ha to lê and Monique Truong, challenge the idea of the war as a white man’s wound, as his grievance and entitlement, and deliver an unsettling reminder: we are here because you were there.79 In 1980, with millions of Southeast Asians fleeing their home countries, President Jimmy Carter signed the Refugee Act into law, raising annual limits on refugee admissions and formalizing the legal meaning of refugee. The law offered safe haven for hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees, but it also rewrote the stories of the veteran and the refugee, transforming the vet, and the nation for which he stood, into a refuge from the regional turmoil to which he and it had contributed. “Where the United States has stood uniquely as a symbol of freedom for a particular group, we must respond to their understandable aspirations for safe haven in our country,” Carter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, told Congress that spring. “We must consider how our participation in refugee resettlement efforts can further our broader foreign policy objectives.”80 Raising refugee admissions might be the right thing to do, but it also, Vance stressed, served the government’s own interests. The Refugee Act introduced a new narrative of the Vietnam War in which the nation could at last feel good about the war because the United States had welcomed refugees whose determined flight from Vietnam testified to the horrors of communist rule. It had given them “the gift of freedom,” as critical refugee studies scholar Mimi Nguyen, tongue in cheek, calls it, establishing a never-settled debt relation between giver and receiver that ensnared the refugee in “a process of becoming without being”—of being free, of being American.81 News media hailed the white vet as the giver of that gift, not as a contributor to the rise of refugees in the region but as their savior from communist unfreedom. The nation reclaimed the original content of Van Es’s image—seeing the Vietnamese for the first time—but as an icon not of determined flight but of courageous rescue.82

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The vet did more than rescue the refugee in the national imagination, though. He emerged as one himself. In the mid-1980s, Vietnam, in a state of economic distress, instituted trade reforms that included offering trial visas to former American soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen. The vets, astonished at the warm welcome they received, embraced Vietnam as a long-lost home. News media delivered glowing coverage. Some of the vets wrote memoirs about their return tours. “I went back to find the pieces of myself I had left there, and to try to put the war behind me,” William Broyles, a former marine, wrote in one of the first going-back memoirs, Brothers in Arms, in 1986.83 With refugees writing some of the first Vietnamese American novels and memoirs, the white vet learned to tell his own tale of exile and return.84 He had also, in an emerging media narrative, lost Vietnam. Some refugee writers embraced that narrative, addressing American vets as brothers and encouraging them to return to Southeast Asia to find closure.85 The invention of the vet refugee bound arguments for veterans’ rights to arguments against refugee admissions, allowing presidential candidate Trump to run for office in 2016 on the idea that a dollar allocated to refugee resettlement or undocumented immigrants amounted to a dollar stolen from a wounded warrior’s medical care. “The media and my opponent [Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton] discuss one thing and only one thing, the needs of people living here illegally,” he declared at an event in Phoenix, before going off script to add, “In many cases, by the way, they’re treated better than our vets.”86 Liberal news media fact-checked his words and declared them “false,” “misleading,” and “absurd.”87 But the future president grounded his claim not in fact but in the white racial interests long ago embedded in calls for veterans’ rights. Veteran America first. War holds whiteness together through a kind of racial nationalism, which refugees, with their own stories of war and their own claims to its meaning, threaten. In his 2015 novel The Sympathizer, Viet Nguyen, himself a refugee, interrogates the war from all angles. (Although the novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, when the New York Times ran a “history of the Vietnam novel” in 2017, it didn’t mention it, restricting the genre to the novels of white men, some who had served and some who hadn’t.)88 An unnamed narrator, a mixed-race North Vietnamese mole in the South Vietnamese army, follows his exiled targets to California, where he meets a movie director, modeled after Francis Ford Coppola, making a big-budget war film, modeled after Apocalypse Now. The director hires him as a technical consultant tasked with

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ensuring that the non-Vietnamese Asian actors cast as Vietnamese look and act like Vietnamese. His first interaction with the director leads him to reflect on his own convoluted act—as a communist, a Vietnamese, an American. “Sometimes I dreamed of trying to pull a mask off my face, only to realize that the mask was my face,” he admits.89 But he isn’t alone, the narrator realizes. The Americans also act out their identities. Near the end of filming, the director tells his crew, in a monologue not all that different from one Coppola delivered at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, “Making this movie was going to war itself. When your grandchildren ask you what you did during the war, you can say, I made this movie. I made a great work of art.”90 He and his crew don’t need to be veterans to claim veteran-ness. Their status as white men entitles them to it. All they need to do is make a movie, and all others need to do is watch it. The Vietnamese narrator may be wearing a mask, but the white men he meets in California act out their own racial identities, whether heroic, monstrous, or aggrieved, in the guise of nationalism and war. The director, a Greek American (to Coppola’s Italian American), has, we learn, left the immigrant saga behind, trading in his “off-white ethnicity” for the “cocainewhite ethnicity” of war.91 He declares his veteran-ness to claim a racial entitlement because war, he knows, is the heart of whiteness. Most white people would rather not talk about their whiteness. After civil rights, they discovered that they could talk about it without using the word because the idea of the Vietnam vet that arose in literature, music, film, and news media gave them an army-green mask with which to disguise their white racial interests. Nonvets—Buchanan, Coppola, Novak, Springsteen, Stallone, Trump—found that they could also wear that racial mask and often benefit more from donning it than vets themselves. In his 1935 classic Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois traced the end of Reconstruction to the decision of white laborers to align themselves with white landowners rather than Black laborers, to form a cross-class racial coalition rather than a cross-racial class coalition. “It must be remembered,” he wrote, “that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public or psychological wage.”92 White owners encouraged white laborers to invest in their racial interest, to invest in their whiteness. White workers received their racial wage in the form of enfranchisement, education, racial deference, and inclusion in the army and law enforcement. White owners would not share their wealth with white laborers, but they would let them wear green and blue, securing their fortunes abroad and safeguarding their wealth at home. Du Bois described the white racial wage as a

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feeling of national belonging conferred on white men through an identification with uniforms that authorized violence. The antiracist movements challenged that feeling, and the reinvention of white America as veteran America restored it. From the second Reconstruction emerged a race of veterans holding a thin white line.

chapter 1

Post-Traumatic Whiteness

Sarah Haley heard about a village called My Lai on her first day of work at the Boston Veterans Administration Hospital. That morning, Haley, a thirty-year-old psychiatric social worker, interviewed a veteran with haunting memories of watching his comrades kill women and children in the South Central Coast region of Vietnam. News of the 1968 massacre—in which American soldiers killed some five hundred unarmed civilians—had not yet broken. Most Americans, including the young social worker, had never heard the words My Lai. But Haley, whose father had served in World War II and told his daughter about the atrocities he had witnessed, had no illusions about war. She took the vet, a white enlisted man, at his word, and he told her about his nightmares, how he suffered uncontrollable tremors, how he scrambled for cover when a car backfired or a door slammed. When Haley asked about the vet at a staff meeting later that day, she discovered that her colleagues had given him sedatives, scribbled “paranoid schizophrenia” in the intake log, and told him to return in a month. She balked. “The staff told me that the patient was obviously delusional, obviously in full-blown psychosis,” Haley remembered of the confrontation. “I argued that there were no other signs of this if one took his story seriously. I was laughed out of the room. I was told that it was my first day and [I] just didn’t understand how things worked.”1 The older staff members held a bias against Vietnam veterans, she thought, considering them more fragile, less courageous, than the men 29

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who had served in World War II and the Korean War. Haley consulted the new second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and found no mention of combat-induced stress. (The 1952 first edition had included a diagnosis for something called “gross stress reaction” that the editors excluded from the 1968 edition.) Without an alternative diagnosis to recommend, she struck a deal with her colleagues. Haley let the diagnosis stand, and they let her meet with the vet once a week for counseling sessions. She had, although she didn’t know it then, found her life’s work. Haley would go on to treat hundreds of Vietnam veterans, including others who, like the My Lai vet, admitted to having witnessed or carried out atrocities in Southeast Asia, and emerged as a leading advocate for veterans’ mental health. Her work culminated in 1980 with the recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder in the third edition of the DSM. In words she coauthored, the manual defined PTSD as a disorder arising from a “traumatic event that is generally outside the range of usual human experience” and that often entails “reexperiencing the traumatic event” and “numbing of responsiveness to, or reduced involvement with, the external world.”2 The diagnostic criteria for PTSD show Haley’s influence. She established the idea, later embraced as a cornerstone of trauma studies, that trauma sufferers should be treated not as “abnormal” cases to correct but as survivors whose encounters with death gave them an elevated knowledge of life. War, she believed, took the soldier to the outer limit of life, bringing the meaning of existence into starkest relief. To treat the veteran, she would have to venture to that outer limit with him. She would have to “be with” the vet who witnessed or committed atrocities, to confront her own “sadistic feelings” and recognize that she could also, under the right circumstances, do as he had. “Without this effort by the therapist,” she wrote in 1974, “treatment is between the ‘good’ therapist and the ‘bad,’ out-of-control patient, and the patient leaves or stays only because he has found the censure he consciously or unconsciously feels he deserves.”3 Haley did more than assume the truth of what the vets told her. She believed that they, as veterans of a war that had robbed good men of their sense of right and wrong, returned home not sick but wise. She could learn as much about herself from them as they could from her. Trauma didn’t cloud the vet’s existential awareness. It elevated it.4 In the years after PTSD entered the DSM, trauma went from a new diagnosis to a defining characteristic of national culture and a claim to belonging and recognition. Diagnoses of the disorder climbed and talk of

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trauma culture took off, leading one doctor to declare PTSD “the mental illness of the nineties” and the journalist Ethan Watters to describe it as “the lingua franca of human suffering.”5 Trauma, though medicalized in the image of the Vietnam vet, came to describe a wide range of events and circumstances that refused traditional modes of communication. If someone hadn’t lived through the same event or circumstance, they couldn’t know it through listening or reading. It transcended meaning making. Cathy Caruth, the trauma theorist and a scholar of comparative literature, argued that traumatic memories did not distort events but offered rare glimpses of a truth that state narratives obscured. “If PTSD must be understood as a pathological symptom, then it is not so much a symptom of the unconscious, as it is a symptom of history,” she wrote in 1995. “The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptoms of a history that they cannot entirely possess.”6 Trauma told the truth. Narrative constructions of the traumatic event distorted, leaving trauma sufferers without the means to communicate what they had endured. Narrative sustained the trauma. It turned it into PTSD. Caruth, Judith Herman, and other trauma theorists built on what Michel Foucault identified in the 1970s as a return of “subjugated knowledges” that the modern state had either silenced as marginal or dismissed as unscientific. That return of stifled memories and delegitimized forms of knowing surfaced as a “historical knowledge of struggles,” or what Foucault elsewhere termed, with some variation, a “genealogy.”7 In the wake of Foucault and the recognition of PTSD, scholars and artists identified trauma as a manifestation of silenced and delegitimized knowledge that arose from the lives of people of color, Indigenous communities, women, queer people, poor people, immigrants, and refugees. And it was. But medical PTSD, originating as it did to meet the needs of white men who had carried M16s into Vietnamese villages as young soldiers and marines, may have contained rather than revealed that historical knowledge of struggles. The language of trauma offered white men a stage for a racial reconciliation after civil rights. Some had fought in Southeast Asia. Most hadn’t. Some had rallied behind the war effort. Some had rallied against it. But all could claim the trauma of, if not the war, the times. Their reconciliation echoed that of the post–Civil War era, when white southerners and white northerners reunited to honor their shared martial sacrifice, whether they had served or not, bringing an end to Reconstruction and installing Jim Crow. In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson,

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the first southerner to reach the White House since the war, traveled to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to address a reunion of more than fifty thousand white Confederate and Union veterans who had fought in the famous battle as young men. (Congress allotted funds to offer travel assistance to all vets who wished to attend, excluding Black vets.) “We have found one another again as brothers and comrades,” Wilson told the men, “enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten—except that we shall not forget the splendid valor, the manly devotion of the men then arrayed against one another, now grasping hands and smiling into each other’s eyes.”8 The president did not mention what had caused the war, how it had ended, or the total absence of Black vets in the crowd gathered before him. The Black press addressed what Wilson wouldn’t. “This occasion is to be called a Reunion! A Reunion of whom?” the Washington Bee asked. “Is the heroic valor displayed by the Negro, in his fight for freedom and the defense of the Union less virtuous, less meritorious, or less appreciated than that shown by those who fought for disunion and the perpetuation of the infamous blot of human slavery?”9 The Gettysburg reunion brought together white men—South and North, Confederate and Union, rich and poor, vet and nonvet—to commemorate each other’s valor and sacrifice. David Blight, the historian, recounts that racial reconciliation in Race and Reunion, the last sentence of which looks ahead to the civil rights movement as the event that would at long last crush the racial apartheid that Wilson and his generation had sustained through a misremembering of the Civil War.10 But the containment of the civil rights movement followed their script, as white men looked to a different kind of hero, a “trauma hero,” to borrow literature scholar Roy Scranton’s term for the “ontological power” of the soldier’s claim to national suffering, to build a new white racial compact.11 Frederick Douglass peered into the nation’s future when in 1875 he asked, “If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?”12 The reunion assembled through the trauma hero of the war in Southeast Asia took a more subtle form than that of Douglass’s time. The white Vietnam vet received the admiration of his fellow white men not for his valor, as had the vets Wilson honored at Gettysburg, but for his suffering. White men identified with Vietnam vets because they had laid their bodies on the line but also their minds, for which the nation owed white men as a whole a debt. That white allowance confused the real suffering of vets, including veterans of color and non-American veterans, with white racial

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interests, interests that tended to serve white elites who hadn’t served— who had the resources to duck combat—above all others. The broad association of PTSD with young white men did not work the same for them as similar associations had for others. White supremacists had long attributed disabilities to Black people and people of color to rationalize and sustain the uneven distribution of life chances along racial lines. Black people, race scientists claimed, suffered from feeblemindedness that made them unable to govern themselves. Antisuffragists made analogous arguments about women. Xenophobes declared immigrants and refugees threats to the American mind. The use of disabilities to defend white supremacist and patriarchal government, historian Douglas Baynton argues, encouraged people of color, women, and immigrants to refute the disabilities attributed to them rather than condemn the use of disabilities as legitimate grounds for discrimination. “Disability figured prominently not just in arguments for the inequality of women and minorities but also in arguments against those inequalities,” he writes. “The common strategy for attaining equal rights, which seeks to distance one’s own group from imputations of disability and therefore tacitly accepts the idea that disability is a legitimate reason for inequality, is perhaps one of the factors responsible for making discrimination against people with disabilities so persistent.”13 The attribution of PTSD to vets and the white men who identified with them, most of whom did not serve and did not suffer from PTSD, had the reverse effect. It functioned instead as a kind of entitlement, a belief that something they deserved had been taken from them and must be returned. It encouraged a feeling of entitlement through a sense of discrimination. That claim worked better for nondisabled vets and all the better for the nonvets attaching themselves to the struggles of former soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen who did suffer for their service. Nondisabled white men benefited from their association with disabled vets, claiming something of their national sacrifice, where people of color and women, including vets, never could. Elite white men who didn’t serve had a stake in reimagining as a white trauma a war in which millions of Southeast Asians lost their lives, their families, and their homes and in which hundreds of thousands of Americans of color served in some of the most dangerous combat roles. The invention of the trauma hero allowed white men to exclude American veterans of color from the dominant narrative of the Vietnam War, as they had at Gettysburg, but also Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, rendering it yet another civil war with their white brothers in arms.14

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Scholars and artists embraced the trauma culture of the 1980s and 1990s as an inheritance of the civil rights movement. And some of it was. Feminists of color, recognizing the “dangers of articulation,” found a radical use for the unsettled, unknowable dimension of trauma.15 Trauma furnished a discourse for talking about settler colonialism, enslavement, and exclusion without falling back on a liberal narrative of progress and overcoming. But it also, in other hands, served to roll back some of the hard-won gains of the 1960s. The American Psychiatric Association, which governs and distributes the DSM, established the diagnostic criteria for PTSD with white vets in mind, men who, the original criteria suggest, faced a homecoming as traumatic as war itself. Unlike veterans of World War II and the Korean War, Haley wrote in the mid-1970s, most Vietnam vets “only became ‘psychiatric casualties’ months and even years after their return to the United States.”16 The men she treated returned to a nation that the civil rights, feminist, and antiwar movements had remade in their absence, challenging the white fighting man’s standing as an embodiment of the nation. White men discovered that they could reclaim that standing with the reverse claim, alleging that the government had neglected them to meet the demands of people of color and women while leaving them for dead in Vietnam (or at least men like them in Vietnam). The legitimate suffering of some vets gave them a figure through whom they could articulate a racial grievance without acknowledging it as racial. White racial politics can be difficult to see because other divisions— Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, rich and poor, rural and urban—would seem to, and often do, set white people against one another. White people wouldn’t seem to think with their race. Whiteness doesn’t look, on the surface, like a “politics.” The trauma of the white vet functioned as the seemingly race-neutral grounds on which white people, and elite white men most of all, united between 1970 and 1984 as a racial countermovement that activists, college administrators, novelists, musicians, intellectuals, movie stars, and officials made their own. All could agree, whatever their ideological, class, and regional differences, that a new kind of hero deserved their reverence and a few advantages. The trauma hero enchanted the Right and the Left. He emerged from the conservative, hawkish POW/MIA movement to recover long-dead white airmen from Southeast Asia and from the liberal antiwar movement to recognize and diagnose combat trauma. The POW/MIA movement, which arose under the Nixon administration and long obstructed

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the reestablishment of working relations with Vietnam, mourned neverrecovered prisoners of war—most of whom had been older, white airmen—as abandoned deracinated heroes. Conservative activists commended the POWs not as white men but as deracinated American veterans, voicing a racial grievance in the color-blind language of a wounded nationalism. The liberal movement for veterans’ mental health originated from the radical Vietnam Veterans against the War, which organized informal treatment for vets. Liberal activists, urging the APA to recognize PTSD, hailed the Vietnam vet not as a deracinated national hero but as a new kind of minoritized American, a veteran American, whose mistreatment they likened to that of racial minorities. The conservative trauma hero and the liberal trauma hero converged in the 1980s, when the construction of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall brought POW/MIA activists and PTSD activists together, merging the color-blind American veteran with the minoritized veteran American. John Wheeler III, the chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, heralded it as an antidote for antiveteran racism. “The Vietnam veteran was the nigger of the 1970s,” he wrote in 1984. “You create a nigger by depriving a person of part of his or her personhood. Ignoring that person or inflicting traumatic hurts is the traditional way to treat a nigger.”17 Wheeler, a moderate conservative, managed to reconcile color blindness (race as illusion) with liberal multiculturalism (race as trauma) in the image of the Vietnam vet. The most divisive war since the states fought each other had ended with another white reunion.

post-vietnam syndrome In 1971, John Kerry, a naval reservist who had received a Silver Star for his service in the Mekong Delta, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on behalf of Vietnam Veterans against the War. The twenty-seven-year-old lieutenant, dressed in olive-green fatigues and wearing his medals and ribbons, condemned the Nixon administration for sending men to die in “the biggest nothing in history.” The future senator, who would go on to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had attended the Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit, where veterans confessed to witnessing and committing war crimes in Southeast Asia, and Kerry shared their stories in Washington. The government had forgotten veterans like himself, Kerry believed, but listening to vets, confronting what they had seen and done in Vietnam and

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the resentment they faced at home, could end the war and transform national life. He envisioned a future in which, when “our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say ‘Vietnam’ and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.”18 Kerry did not ignore how race structured the war and determined how the United States waged it. He acknowledged that the methods used against Southeast Asians would never be used against white Western adversaries and that young Black working-class men faced a greater likelihood of being inducted, of seeing combat, and of losing their lives than their white comrades. But Kerry and the VVAW vets seated behind him were all white men. Most VVAW members were. So were all of the senators seated above him. Vietnam Veterans against the War was no moderate outfit. It was anti-imperialist and antiracist, sometimes anticapitalist. President Nixon tried to discredit it. Hunter S. Thompson described it as the wing of the radical antiwar movement with the greatest “psychic leverage.”19 Kerry, reading from notes that he and VVAW had made the night before, could not have known then that listening to vets, as he encouraged the senators to do, could renew war—that, disassociated from VVAW’s radicalism and reframed as a matter of mental health, acknowledging the wounds of white vets could turn the nation against not the war but the racial reforms of the 1960s. VVAW had two interrelated goals: ending the war and securing needed resources for young vets as they returned to civilian life. Over time, as the United States drew down and then left Vietnam in a defeated rush, VVAW shifted from the former to the latter goal, teaming with Haley, who arranged a desk for it at the Boston VA, and other advocates for veterans’ mental health. That band of advocates included Robert Lifton, a Yale research psychiatrist who allied himself with VVAW after learning of the My Lai massacre. He felt ashamed reading the news stories, he later admitted, because in 1967 he had declined to sign the Boston organization RESIST’s antiwar statement “A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority.” Lifton went to his office and cleared his desk, setting aside research on a new book theorizing a “death-oriented psychology” and gathering whatever material he could find on the war.20 He didn’t wait long to announce his involvement. He sat for an interview with U.S. News and World Report the next month and stated, with confidence, that witnessing or committing atrocities in Vietnam

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turned a soldier into “a kind of survivor” with “a very special kind of psychology.”21 The interview caught the attention of Alan Cranston, a Democratic senator from California and the chair of a senate subcommittee on veterans’ affairs, and he invited Lifton to Washington. Lifton delivered a statement before Cranston’s subcommittee in early 1970, arguing, as Kerry later would, that the Vietnam vet should be regarded as “a psychological crucible of the entire country’s doubts and misgivings about the war.”22 The vet, as an embodiment of the nation, could teach it something about itself, he insisted, revealing what it had done in Southeast Asia and how it had suffered. Lifton, two months into his research, described veterans as moral casualties of a war that had unleashed their “potential for racism” against darker-skinned people, cluing the senators in to which vets he considered national crucibles.23 Not long after the Cranston hearings, Chaim Shatan, an NYU clinical psychiatrist, invited Lifton to deliver a lecture in Greenwich Village on his book about survivors of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Death in Life, for which he had won a National Book Award. Then the Ohio National Guard fired on students at Kent State, killing four, and Lifton changed course, retitling his talk “My Lai and Kent State.” The event attracted a large audience, including some VVAW vets, with whom Lifton and Shatan met afterward. Shatan, a Canadian, had been considering a return to Montreal. He worried about the direction of the United States under Nixon and didn’t want to see his children drafted. The meeting with Lifton and the vets changed his mind. Shatan, whose clinic treated hundreds of struggling young vets, determined that he would resist the war through his treatment of former soldiers and marines, that he could do what Lifton had taken to calling “advocacy research.”24 Shatan had worked on veterans’ issues before. In 1956, he had investigated the Ribbon Creek incident, in which six marine recruits died on a nighttime march through a tidal creek in South Carolina. He determined then that basic training “set in motion a profound psychological regression that makes boys out of men.”25 Shatan believed that the vets he met at Lifton’s lecture wanted something more than to end the war. He thought that they needed an outlet for their grief and that they found it in demonstrating against their government. The act of throwing their medals and ribbons at the Capitol Building had, Shatan thought, “profound therapeutic meaning” and allowed them to “regain the control over events” that the war had denied them.26 Their movement had been against the war, but Shatan wanted to make it about their mental health,

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a movement for them. Jerry Lembcke, a sociologist and himself a former VVAW vet, argues that the movement’s turn to mental health allowed the government to construe “badness” as “madness” and discredited the message announced in the organization’s name.27 That reframing dulled VVAW’s antiwar edge and heightened the significance of the vets’ overwhelming whiteness, turning them, against their will, into icons of a white manhood in decline. That fall, Jan Barry, the president of Vietnam Veterans against the War, invited Lifton and Shatan to an informal meeting, a “rap group,” of vets struggling with life after war. The men, Barry told Lifton in a letter, faced “severe psychological problems” arising from “the military policy of the war which results in war crimes.”28 Lifton and Shatan agreed, and, in December 1970, arrived at the VVAW office on Fifth Avenue to meet with twelve young white men with long hair and beards. The vets welcomed them on the condition that they left their titles at the door; they would not be Dr. Lifton and Dr. Shatan for the next few hours. The men sat in a circle, some on crates and filing cabinets, telling war stories. Lifton received a scolding when he tried to take notes. The meeting lasted into the night. “When I found myself sitting in a rap group with fellow veterans—and my veteranness, and my understanding of this, and my going through the same business,” one vet remembered of that first meeting, “it was like an inner relief: Ah! This is like heaven-sent!”29 Lifton, Shatan, and the VVAW vets agreed to meet once a week for two hours. But few sessions ended on time, with some continuing for four, six, or eight hours. The vets, at first hesitant around two “shrinks,” had a lot to say. Lifton and Shatan believed they had stumbled on a new, democratic treatment model. Lifton declared it “street-corner psychiatry.”30 Shatan described it as the vets’ own “counter-VA.”31 The VVAW meetings attracted the occasional Black or Latino vet, but they remained, Lifton admitted, “predominantly white,” a fact that the men “commented upon regretfully but looked upon as more or less unavoidable at this historical moment”—a moment, he seemed to mean, of Black Power and race radicalism.32 VVAW branches in other cities organized similar meetings. Vets in Detroit held them for Holocaust survivors. Survivors of domestic violence held their own. Lifton, Shatan, and VVAW had launched a mental health movement, a movement designed to meet the needs of a few white men. That movement owed much to feminists, who had introduced the vets to the idea of consciousness raising as a means of healing and resistance. “We had the women’s movement as a constant example,” Arthur

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Egendorf, an early participant, later recalled. “The veteran rap groups were clearly inspired by women’s groups: Not only were they a place to heal those who attended but also a forum for getting the word out.”33 The psychiatrist Judith Herman traced that association further back, suggesting that, since the nineteenth century at least, the “hysteria” attributed to women and the “combat neurosis” attributed to men had been one and the same, that women and men had been struggling for the recognition of the same condition without, until the 1970s, knowing it. Herman argued that the fate of trauma sufferers—the seriousness with which medical science took their condition and the amount of resources government allocated to addressing the sources of trauma—hinged on whether a movement formed around them and their cause. “The study of war trauma becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the sacrifice of young men in war,” she wrote, for example. “The study of trauma in sexual and domestic life becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the subordination of women and children.”34 The feminist movement had facilitated the veterans’ movement, and the veterans’ movement, with the “eight-hundred-pound gorilla in PTSD research,” the VA, behind it, enabled research that also served the survivors of sexual assault and abuse.35 But, although Egendorf and others credited the feminist movement for the veterans’ movement, the latter came to overshadow the causes of the former and then, in time, work against them. Women would often be rendered as, at best, listeners for the wounded man. Shatan attracted national attention to the VVAW meetings in 1972 when he contributed an op-ed to the New York Times titled “Post-Vietnam Syndrome.” He described a vet named “Steve” who couldn’t walk down the street without scanning the sidewalk for enemies. He wrote about “Mike,” a former medic, who, five years removed from combat, still clung to the inside of curved trails to shield himself from “hostiles” ahead. The VA wouldn’t treat the two men, whom Shatan had met through VVAW, because it didn’t consider their condition, which hadn’t manifested until months after their return from war, “service connected.” “The post-Vietnam syndrome confronts us with the unconsummated grief of soldiers,” Shatan wrote, “ ‘impacted grief,’ in which an encapsulated, never-ending past deprives the present of meaning.”36 Steve and Mike could not find meaning in their war because the nation had condemned them either as deranged killers or as weaker men than their fathers. Their war wouldn’t end until they could find meaning in it, until they could “consummate” their grief. Shatan wanted more resources for

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veterans. He wanted Steve and Mike to receive the medical care they needed. But his “post-Vietnam syndrome” also encouraged the emerging belief that vets’ trauma stemmed not from combat but from their mistreatment at home. Their war had been a civil war, and they—white men, veteran Americans—had lost. Shatan had struck a chord. “After that, the telephone was jumping off the hook,” Shatan remembered. “Things started mushrooming.”37 In 1974, Shatan received a call from the defense team for a Vietnam vet from Asbury Park, New Jersey, charged with breaking and entering. The defense had cited “traumatic war neurosis,” a term dating to World War I, in the case, and the judge, finding no mention of it in the 1968 second edition of the DSM, ruled against the young man. The vets needed an official diagnosis, Shatan realized, or they would be sitting on crates and filing cabinets on Fifth Avenue for the rest of their lives. Shatan reached out to Haley, who agreed to collect whatever data she could, something they could take to the APA. She combed through VA records and discovered that Vietnam vets suffering from mental disturbances had received one vague diagnosis or another, using official DSM criteria, but that most of their files also included three letters somewhere in the margins: TWN, traumatic war neurosis. Shatan and Haley shared their findings with the editors of the forthcoming third edition of the DSM and, in a drawn-out, back-and-forth struggle, convinced them to add something called post-traumatic stress disorder to the revised manual. Although not limited to veterans, the diagnosis for PTSD echoed what Lifton, Shatan, and Haley had written about the antiwar vets. Traumatic war neurosis, gross stress reaction, post-Vietnam syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder—all originated out of a concern for the traumas of white men. The 1980 third edition of the DSM introduced PTSD as a disorder “reported in combat veterans.”38 The examples included soldiers struggling with survivor’s guilt and Vietnam veterans for whom hot, humid weather triggered flashbacks. Future editions included a wider range of examples, acknowledging that sexual assault and abuse, car accidents, and robberies could also cause PTSD. But the APA continued to use the language that Lifton, Shatan, and Haley had created for the VVAW vets, who, in the words of the 1994 edition, lived through an event involving “actual or threatened death” and then endured “persistent reexperiencing of the traumatic event.”39 Public health scholars continued to use the National Vietnam Veterans’ Readjustment Study, which the VA conducted in the mid-1980s, as a building block for trauma research.

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White men who felt forgotten in the wake of the antiracist, feminist, and antiwar movements discovered that a rising trauma culture had their names all over it, in the DSM and on memorial walls.

the my lai survivor Long before he met with Vietnam Veterans against the War, Robert Lifton had made trauma his academic forte. He created a stir in 1961 with a book about Chinese “brainwashing,” for which he visited Hong Kong to interview refugees from mainland China who had undergone “ideological remodeling.”40 His 1968 book about Hiroshima survivors established him as a leading figure in the antinuclear movement. He titled his 2011 memoir, looking back on his career, Witness to an Extreme Century. Lifton, a gifted and ambitious young scholar who had entered Cornell at sixteen and graduated from medical school at twenty-one, created his own field, what he called “psychohistory.” He studied, as he told Cranston’s subcommittee in 1970, “the application of psychological methods to the study of historical events.”41 He couldn’t understand the refugees he interviewed in Hong Kong without understanding the Chinese revolution, and a historian couldn’t understand the Chinese revolution without understanding what it had done to the minds of the people who lived through it. Lifton thought his colleagues erred in assuming constants, that the human mind functioned the same in 1970 as it had in 1870. Nothing about the world remained constant. Why, he asked, would the minds that interacted with it? In Death in Life, for example, he described how the nuclear bombing had brought survivors into “an overwhelming encounter with death”—the death in life of his book’s title. “There was a widespread sense that life and death were out of phase with one another,” he wrote of Hiroshima, “no longer properly distinguishable— which lent an aura of weirdness and unreality to the entire city.”42 An extreme century, he thought, had changed our minds. Lifton ran in elite circles. He cultivated some of the leading social scientists of the time as mentors, including the sociologist David Riesman, author of The Lonely Crowd, and the developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, who had studied under Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna, in Vienna as a young man and, in some accounts, invented the modern use of the term identity as the “normative psychic achievement of adulthood.”43 “The study of identity,” Erikson, a German émigré, declared in 1950, “becomes as strategic in our time as the study of sexuality was

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in Freud’s time.” Anna Freud condemned her former student, accusing him of “neo-Freudianism,” but Erikson had it right, at least in the United States. “The patient of today suffers most under the problem of what he should believe in and who he should—or, indeed, might—be or become,” he wrote in his classic Childhood and Society. “Patients hope to find in the psychoanalytic system a refuge from the discontinuities of existence.”44 Most struggled not to overcome latent inhibitions, Erikson thought, but to realize a sense of self (who they should be or become) grounded in communal belonging (what they should believe in). In 1956, Lifton, then a resident at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, read Erikson’s article “The Problem of Ego Identity” and, as he later recalled, “experienced an overwhelming eureka feeling.”45 He wrote to Erikson, then on the staff of the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and arranged to meet him at his home, where they walked and chatted from morning to night. The two men remained close friends for the rest of Erikson’s life and hosted a long-standing gathering, at Lifton’s vacation home in Wellfleet, of academics and artists that included Norman Mailer, Reisman, and, in later iterations, Cathy Caruth and Judith Herman. In his writing on Vietnam veterans, Lifton liked to remind readers that his mentor, Erikson, had coined the terms ego identity and identity crisis after observing white World War II vets struggle to reconcile their wartime identities with their civilian lives.46 Something, Erikson noticed, had unsettled their knowledge of themselves and their sense of belonging. The vets felt alienated from the men they had been before the war and the lives to which they had returned. Erikson taught Lifton that individual identities emerged from and reflected racial, ethnic, and national identities, necessitating that he, a psychiatrist, act as “an odd, maybe a new kind of historian.”47 (He dedicated sections of Childhood and Society to, for example, “American identity,” “German identity,” and “black identity.”)48 The white vet, more than all others, embodied the nation, he believed. Diagnose the white vet, and you diagnose the nation. Heal the white vet, and you make the nation whole. Haley introduced Lifton to the My Lai vet, the young man she had met on her first day at the Boston VA, and Lifton arranged to interview him. In an eight-hour meeting at a Manhattan hotel, the vet described the massacre as unreal, as if he had watched himself and his comrades from afar. “There was something missing in the whole business that made it seem like it really wasn’t happening,” he remembered.49 Lifton related the interview in a 1970 volume he coedited with a legal scholar and a political

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scientist, which they divided into thirds and declared a “legal, politicaldocumentary, and psychology inquiry” into war crimes. His third included contributions from Hannah Arendt, Erikson, Arthur Miller, and Kurt Vonnegut. Lifton, in relating the case of the My Lai vet, declared the Vietnam War an “atrocity-producing situation,” arguing that the circumstances of the war—“an advanced industrial nation engaged in a counterinsurgency action in an underdeveloped area, against guerillas who merge with the people”—made atrocities all but inevitable.50 Lifton wanted to redirect the blame from the soldier on the ground (his My Lai vet) to decision makers in Washington. William Calley, a white second lieutenant and the one man charged in the massacre, awaited trial at the time. “My Lai symbolized a shaking of the American foundations— a bitterly mocking perversion of the American dream,” he wrote. “Like Hiroshima and Auschwitz, My Lai is a revolutionary event: its total inversion of moral standards raises fundamental questions about the institutions and national practices of the nation responsible for it.”51 Calley and other young soldiers carried out the massacre, but the government had created the situation that would allow, and might encourage, atrocities like it. Lifton argued that the My Lai massacre reflected not a moral but a structural failure, but he also reframed it as, above all, a trauma for the white vet who carried it out, erasing the Vietnamese who lost their lives and turning My Lai into a white man’s Hiroshima. Lifton believed that the My Lai veteran and all Vietnam vets had something to teach the nation. Their sins and suffering endowed them with wisdom. In his 1970 statement to the Senate Subcommittee on Veterans’ Affairs, he described a “continuum” of trauma in which the combat soldier endures an acute wound that “radiates outward” to all Americans who share his “doubts and confusions” about the war he waged in their name.52 In 1973, Lifton elaborated on that idea in Home from the War, his account of the VVAW meetings. Civilians, he argued, using the terms of the folklorist Joseph Campbell, looked to a “warrior hero” to alleviate their fear of death. The warrior, as a vessel for age-old communal stories, reassured them with a “sense of being a part of eternal forms.” But the stories of the warrior hero, while they seemed universal and immortal, differed from one culture and time to another, functioning to “consolidate and reaffirm the existing social order.”53 A nation’s heroes revealed a lot about how it thought of itself. Elevating, or “socializing,” a new kind of hero, Lifton reasoned, might change that, and he recommended the men with whom he had worked at VVAW. The antiwar vets had “freed themselves from the powerful

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cultural pseudomythology” that celebrated death dealing, and they could free the nation from it. “Those few” vets willing to “open up” and share their stories, he wrote, “are doing symbolic psychological work for all veterans, and indeed for all American society.”54 Lifton acknowledged that the VVAW meetings through which he advanced his claim attracted no more than a few men of color and never a woman. He related how a Black man who attended a meeting had said, after seeing the faces around him, “I guess I have to do my work ‘uptown.’”55 At the height of the Black Power and feminist movements, the nation needed a new hero, and Lifton, the consummate liberal, nominated the reformed white man. Lifton borrowed the subtitle for his book Vietnam Veterans— Neither Victims nor Executioners from Albert Camus, a man he considered a “hidden mentor.”56 In 1946, Camus had contended in the French newspaper Combat that Marxist and capitalist ideologies shared a faith in “the idea of progress” as a force that would “inevitably lead to social equilibrium.” That belief, he argued, led adherents to legitimize murder as the regrettable cost of achieving that future state, leaving most people with two bad choices: acting as either victims or executioners. Camus instead called for a “modest political philosophy” founded on neither “messianic elements” nor “nostalgia for an earthly paradise.”57 Some of the VVAW vets identified as victims, others as executioners. Lifton, constructing a new warrior hero for a renewed nation, declared them survivors. That included the My Lai vet, whom he referred to throughout Home from the War as the “My Lai survivor.” Lifton dedicated the book to nineteen American veterans and one Vietnamese child who had survived the massacre, insisting that “the psychology of the survivor is central even to the killing process.”58 The My Lai massacre, in his telling, involved neither victims nor executioners. All were survivors, including the dead and the men who killed them. Lifton, though describing himself as a new kind of historian, a “psychohistorian,” contributed to a dehistoricized trauma culture in which all could claim the status of survivor. That included the survivors of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, men who carried out mass killings in Vietnam, and Americans watching the news at home. “In earlier work, I found that survivors of the Hiroshima holocaust experienced what I described as ‘a vast breakdown of faith in the larger human matrix supporting each individual life, and therefore a loss of faith (or trust) in the structure of existence,’” Lifton recalled. “The same is true not only for large numbers of Vietnam veterans but, perhaps in more indirect and muted ways, for Americans in general.”59 He made no distinctions. Survivors all.

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Lifton did not ignore race, though. He located the mistreatment of Vietnam vets on a continuum with anti-Black racism. Lifton described a white vet (in, it seems, an all-white meeting) who felt that he now knew something of what Black men endured. “As much as I detest violence, I have to sympathize [with the Black Power turn from nonviolence] because violence is the only thing people can understand,” he said. “To be denied something that is yours by nature—they shouldn’t have to go after freedom and equality—it should be there from the beginning.” Lifton took the man to mean that being a white Vietnam vet was kind of like being Black in the United States. “What he was saying, I believe,” Lifton concluded, “was that his own violent double victimization—being exposed to violence, and then feeling it necessary to become violent in order to survive that exposure—sensitized him to what he perceived to be a roughly analogous double victimization of many blacks in American society.”60 The vet (and Lifton) criminalized Blackness, assuming Black men to have an inclination toward violence, not because of inherent characteristics (scientific racism) but because the white supremacist nation in which they lived had conditioned them for violence (liberal racism). Lifton took the vet’s remarks and used them to suggest that his encounter with antiveteran “racism” had turned him into a more sensitive, antiracist white man. While discrimination made a Black man violent, he insinuated, it made the white vet wise. The political philosopher Charles Mills argues that all white people benefit from a racial contract sustained through an “epistemology of ignorance” that serves white interests while ensuring “the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made.”61 In 1973, as Lifton declared all veterans survivors and the Nixon administration welcomed home the remaining POWs from Vietnam, white men, liberal and conservative, renewed the racial contract for a post–civil rights era, ending the second Reconstruction as they had the first—by supporting their troops.

prisoners of whiteness “For the first time in twelve years,” President Richard Nixon announced on March 29, 1973, “no American military forces are in Vietnam. All of our American POWs are on their way home.” In accordance with the Paris Peace Accords, North Vietnam had released the last 591 prisoners of war to the United States, and the president, seated at his desk in the Oval Office, hailed their return as the achievement of his 1968 campaign

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promise: “peace with honor.”62 His administration, mired in the mounting Watergate scandal, received the men with an orchestrated media blitz it dubbed Operation Homecoming. Steadfast wives embraced uniformed husbands they hadn’t seen for sometimes five, six, or seven years. Crowds of well-wishers greeted the men with signs. The POWs, Newsweek declared, had “emerged from their years of torment with a strength and spirit that surpassed even the wildest expectations of their families, the military, and the nation.”63 The commissioner of Major League Baseball awarded them lifetime tickets. Ford gave them Gran Torinos and Mustangs. Their hometowns held parades. “We now have some heroes in this war,” an embattled Nixon told an army general behind closed doors.64 But the fanfare did not go unchallenged. Robert Lifton condemned the White House in the Times for resuscitating an image of heroism that the war should have rendered obsolete. “A long and degrading war has made Americans desperate for heroes,” he wrote. “The carefully manipulated spectacle through which the Administration, the military, and the media (especially television) are synthesizing a hero myth falsifies not only the relationship of the returning prisoners to the war but, above all, the war itself.”65 Lifton was right, of course. But he could not see then how his antiwar “survivor” vet contributed to the narrative of white male abandonment for which Operation Homecoming would, against the Nixon administration’s intentions, come to stand.66 After watching the welcome-home events on television night after night, Charles Rangel, a Democratic congressman from New York and a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, visited a house subcommittee on national security policy to ask why he hadn’t seen more than one or two Black men among the POWs. “I have been particularly disturbed by the absence of black faces in the happy scenes of welcome portrayed on the television sets,” he told the subcommittee. “You will recall, I am sure, the protests that arose from the black community over blacks having to fight and die in disproportionate numbers for a society which refuses to give them the full respect and opportunity here at home.”67 The subcommittee chairman, Clement Zablocki, a hawkish Democrat from Wisconsin, having no answers for Rangel, asked him for more data. Ngo Vinh Long, the director of the Vietnam Resource Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, also noted the whiteness of the celebrated men, arguing that Operation Homecoming “served to cover up and justify the inhumane policies of the United States against the Indochinese people—the gooks, the dinks, the slanteyes, the Oriental human beings.”68

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Rangel and Long weren’t seeing things. The 591 POWs who returned to the United States that spring looked nothing like the workingclass, multiracial, mixed-gender Americans who had served in the wider war in Southeast Asia. Most, including future senator John McCain, were airmen who had been shot down over North Vietnam before the 1968 bombing halt. Eighty-four percent belonged to the air force. Eighty-eight percent were officers. Most held college degrees. All were men. Ninety-five percent were white. Not one of the 591 men had been drafted.69 From a war fought by what one historian describes as “the nineteen-year-old children of waitresses, factory workers, truck drivers, firefighters, carpenters, [and] custodians,” a few white middle-class men with wives, children, and houses emerged as the most admired veterans.70 Their hair may have been shorter and their beliefs more conservative, but McCain and his fellow POWs were as white as Kerry and his fellow VVAWs. Some regarded the Operation Homecoming vets as modern Rip Van Winkles who had left the United States in the mid- or late 1960s and returned to a changed nation. The Time film critic Stefan Kanfer imagined a POW walking through his old neighborhood, “blinking at a world that can hardly believe how profoundly it has changed.” Movie theaters advertise a “pornucopia.” Men dress like women and women like men. Corner stores sell mung beans, granola, and Tiger’s Milk bars. Young radicals “carry the perennial banners of militancy, each inscribed with the device Liberation. Over it are the words Gay, Black, Women’s, Chicano and People’s.” The disoriented vet finds himself arrested for loitering and loaded into the back of a police cruiser. The officers have “their own stories to tell,” fearing another ambush attack from “something they call the Black Liberation Army.” Kanfer described a nation that race radicalism, feminism, and the counterculture had inverted during the five years that the “new breed of Van Winkle” had been detained in Vietnam.71 The former POW, a war hero, now found himself arrested for no good reason, as, Kanfer suggested, Black men once had before civil rights and war. The Pentagon encouraged the idea of the white Rip Van Winkle, giving all 591 returnees a two-hundred-page digest of news events describing “the emergence of black militancy, radical antiwar movements, the assassinations of the late 60s, and so forth.” The digest would, it said, “smooth [the returning prisoners’] cultural re-entry.”72 Few accounts of Operation Homecoming mentioned Delia Alvarez, a Chicana activist and the sister of the longest-held POW, Everett Alvarez Jr., who had

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formed Families of POWs and MIAs for Indochinese Peace in 1971, connecting the Chicano movement to the antiwar movement and the struggle for Vietnamese independence.73 The POW/MIA movement did not end in 1973. The National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, which created the POW/MIA flag, did not believe President Nixon when he claimed that North Vietnam had returned “all” American POWs. It demanded a full accounting of missing soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen, ensuring that the movement would never, and could never, end. The Pentagon added fuel to the League’s demands when it combined the once-distinct designations POW, MIA, and KIA/BNR (killed in action, body not recovered), encouraging the idea among movement activists that all MIAs could, no matter how remote the chance, be POWs. The League achieved a mainstream foothold in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, who had aligned himself with it since his time as governor of California. In 1983, he commemorated the signing of the Paris Peace Accords with an address to League members in Arlington, Virginia, where he stood before their black and white flag bearing the motto “You are not forgotten.” He later told the annual convention of Ex-Prisoners of War that he identified with their cause because as a young actor he had starred in the war drama Prisoner of War, which he described as “the only experience that I had that was at all in keeping with what you have gone through.”74 He flew the POW/MIA flag over the White House, making it the first flag other than the American flag to receive that honor. The belief that live POWs remained imprisoned in Southeast Asia constituted “the closest thing we have to a national religion,” historian Bruce Franklin wrote in 1992. Administration after administration “has attempted to perpetuate the belief that live POWs might exist while avoiding the position that they do exist.”75 The whiteness of the Operation Homecoming vets, the most visible and distinguished former prisoners of war, made the POW/MIA movement a vehicle for white racial grievance, and the POW/ MIA flag has been a common sight at white supremacist rallies ever since.76 When a 1985 Newsweek headline declared “We’re Still Prisoners of War,” some readers, whether conscious of it or not, would have taken that “we” to mean white America.77 The POW/MIA movement reached new heights in 1991, when Red McDaniel, a former POW and a failed Republican congressional candidate, released a doctored photograph that he claimed showed three live Americans held hostage in Southeast Asia. Families of missing men came forward to claim them as their sons, brothers, husbands, and

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fathers. USA Today ran it on the front page. Newsweek turned it into a cover: “The MIA Mystery: Hoping against Hope.” More photographs surfaced, all fake. The Wall Street Journal found that more than twothirds of Americans believed that Vietnam still held live POWs, with most blaming the government for not doing enough to rescue them.78 Kerry, then a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, and Hank Brown, a Republican senator from Colorado and a fellow Vietnam vet, announced that they would form a committee to seek answers. The Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, which also included vets McCain and Bob Smith, conducted an exhaustive seventeen-month investigation that involved two hundred hours of hearings and generated thousands of pages of material. The senators, eleven white men and one white woman, agreed to set differences aside in their investigation. Kerry, the committee chairman, declared on the first day of the hearings that “if there ever was an issue that was not Democrat or Republican, but American and purely American, it is this issue.”79 Smith, a Republican from New Hampshire, stated, “We are coming to you together to demand answers and this time we are a people united.”80 McCain added, “[This] should be the one question in our national affairs that firmly unites every single American.”81 As television news aired footage of LAPD officers beating an unarmed Rodney King in the street and the George H. W. Bush administration sent marines into South Central, Democrats and Republicans united to demand answers for a few dead white men. The select committee found no evidence of living POWs in Southeast Asia. The one American to return after Operation Homecoming, Robert Garwood, came back on his own in 1979 and faced a court-martial for collaborating with North Vietnam. But the committee did unseal millions of records, which revealed that throughout the government’s decades-long search it had assumed the whiteness of the missing men. The defense agencies tasked with recovering MIAs or their remains used the word Caucasian or Caucasian/American to describe them in interviews in Asia and the United States. In 1983, for example, a liaison officer administered a lie detector test to a Vietnamese refugee in Bangkok in which he asked about the refugee’s encounters with white men in Vietnam: During 1978, did you see Caucasian prisoners in Hanoi? Ans: Yes During 1982, did you see Caucasian prisoners near Le Van Linh Camp? Ans: Yes

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Did Quoc [Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense] tell you the Caucasian prisoners you saw in 1978 were American? Ans: Yes During 1982, did you see Caucasian prisoners near Le Van Linh Camp who were sunbathing? Ans: Yes82

The test, the results of which showed “no deception indicated,” wouldn’t have done much for the Black, brown, and Asian Americans who never came back from the war. The Select Committee on POW/ MIA Affairs did accelerate the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with Vietnam, with President Bill Clinton nominating Pete Peterson, an Operation Homecoming vet, as the first ambassador to Vietnam in 1997. But the committee also reinforced the image of the war as, above all else, a trauma for white men whose government had left them for dead in Southeast Asia. Six administrations moved heaven and earth to recover a bone fragment here and a denture there when some three hundred thousand Vietnamese were never recovered.83 Kerry and Brown convened their committee as an escalating war on crime led to the incarceration of millions of Black and Latino men in the United States. All twelve members would vote for the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, the largest crime bill ever, which allocated almost $10 billion for the construction and staffing of new prisons.

the racial politics of trauma The liberal and conservative wings of the veterans’ movement shared a belief that the trauma of war could not be communicated to outsiders. Trauma conferred wisdom to the survivor that couldn’t be shared with nonsurvivors. The survivor knew something that nonsurvivors couldn’t know. That belief made trauma an antifunctionalist kind of knowledge. It couldn’t be used, intellectual historian Michael Roth argues, other than in the construction and maintenance of identities and communities. “Although nothing can be made out of trauma, one can use this very fact about it as identity defining,” he writes. “We who are separate demand your recognition of our separateness based on trauma. Our separateness must be recognized by you who do not share in it.”84 Trauma, in drawing a hard line between survivors and nonsurvivors, granted a salient sense of self and belonging. Roth identifies the Holocaust and the feminist movement as the origins of trauma culture and trauma-based identities in the United States. But Erikson, himself a refugee from the Third Reich, first connected

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trauma to selfhood after observing white marines who had served in the Pacific; Lifton first introduced the modern idea of the survivor in his writing on white Vietnam vets; and the American Psychiatric Association first recognized PTSD as a successor to traumatic war neurosis. The liberal antiwar movement and the conservative POW/MIA movement created a trauma hero who could claim exclusive knowledge as a survivor of war and, because the hero suffered that trauma in army green, absolute knowledge of a traumatized nation. In 1980, Robert Harwood, an editor at the Washington Post, invited seven white men in their mid- to late thirties, five who had served and two who hadn’t, to the newsroom for a no-holds-barred conversation about the war. Harwood later described it as “laced with the obscenities and vulgarities of the military culture and with the rage and disillusionment that still afflict many of the men and women of the Vietnam Generation.”85 The seven men included Philip Caputo, the Pulitzer Prize– winning journalist and author of the best-selling memoir A Rumor of War; Jim Webb, counsel to the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and a future senator; and John Wheeler III, the chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. From morning to night, the vets among them talked about their lives after war and the resentment they felt toward a nation that, they believed, had failed to listen to them. “I felt, well, the only people who have a right to say anything against the war—and I still feel that way—were the ones who were there, who had suffered through it,” Caputo said.86 His and other veterans’ trauma, he suggested, entitled them to define what the war meant and whether it deserved the kind of condemnation it had received. The other men agreed. Wheeler added that their exclusive knowledge of the Vietnam War, a war that had divided Americans, meant that no one but them could reunite the nation. “If the heat in the oven is higher, the steel that comes out has got to be better,” he stated. “I think the challenge that lies before us is not to get ourselves set up as some kind of superminority, one more special-interest group, but, instead, to figure out what it is we have to offer. And I think the heat was higher and we do have something special to offer out there.”87 But the men’s claim that they alone could heal the nation as war-hardened leaders rested on their claim to a minoritized status, on the belief that their trauma had transformed them into bearers of rare, unassailable knowledge about the United States. The Post ran the conversation under the title “Voices of a Wounded Generation,” and Harwood’s colleague A. D. Horne later collected it and other writing from the men in The Wounded Generation. Horne

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introduced the book with the declaration “Vietnam. The word traumatized America for a better part of a decade.”88 Vietnam, reduced to a word, no longer meant a nation or a war fought with and against Vietnamese. It stood as a signifier of trauma that affected all Americans but that belonged to white men.89 The seven men who convened in the Post conference room that morning in 1980 held divergent views on the war and the presidential campaign. Some thought the war should have and could have been won. Others considered it a great mistake. Some served in the Carter administration. Some would soon serve in the Reagan and first Bush administrations. But they all agreed that the gains of the antiracist and feminist movements had come at a cost to them as vets. Lucian Truscott IV, a West Point graduate who left the army ahead of his tour, argued that, while young men like him faced war, women “were left free during those years to pursue the kinds of careers that make forty-nine percent of these women now part of the work force and to increase the number of their enrollments in law school and whatever.”90 Some veterans couldn’t find work, he suggested, because in their absence women had taken jobs that should have been theirs. One more working woman meant one less working vet. He blamed Gloria Steinem. Webb blamed Betty Friedan. In 1978, the Supreme Court had ruled the affirmative action program of the medical school of the University of California, Davis, unconstitutional. It violated the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the court said, and it ordered that Allan Bakke, a white man twice denied admission, be added to the next class of medical students. Bakke had served a seven-month tour in Vietnam, and the men took his case as evidence that he and other men had suffered discrimination not as white men but as veterans. Webb insisted, without evidence, that two members of the medical school’s admissions committee had lobbied “very strongly against admitting Bakke because he had been a Marine.” Dean Phillips, general counsel to the VA, said that his graduate school had almost turned him down because of “a professor who didn’t want any Vietnam vets accepted.” Webb added, distilling the mood of the room, “The Vietnam guy came out of the war at a time when all this affirmative-action stuff was kicking in and he had employers reaching over his head for women and minorities in order to fill judicially sanctioned quotas, no matter what they called them.”91 The seven white men, all of whom had graduated from college and five of whom held graduate degrees, never once mentioned their race or that people of color and women could also be veterans of the war. The dis-

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crimination they alleged had nothing to do with race because they were speaking not as white men but as veteran Americans. The conversation at the Post led Wheeler to write Touched with Fire, a memoir about his life, his generation, and his contribution to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Wheeler, another West Point man who served with the army’s general staff in Vietnam, believed that the war had divided young Americans along three lines, alienating men who served from men who hadn’t, men from women, and self from self (because most hadn’t, he claimed, come to terms with the decisions they had made in the 1960s). His generation, “the Vietnam generation,” could heal itself, Wheeler argued, through the image of the white vet, who modeled an ethic of national self-sacrifice while also knowing the trauma of something like racism and sexism. “The power of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s was the perceived wrong in the diminished respect and self-respect felt by the black American,” he wrote. “Women felt the same hurt. And the men who returned from Vietnam were expressing it. The stereotypes, barriers to communication, and diminished respect are equally imposing in all three situations.” No one knew that hurt better, he added, than POWs, “because their separation from our old life is so sharp and extensive.”92 Wheeler sorted Black people, women, and vets into discrete categories, suggesting that all Black people must be men, all women must be white, and all vets must be white men. Vietnam vets had, he argued, succeeded Black people and women as the most downtrodden Americans. Unlike the Black Power and women’s movements, though, which Wheeler considered alienating, the veterans’ movement would, he believed, unite all Americans in their image. That national healing would begin with a rollback of civil rights. Wheeler described a memo that his friend Joseph Zengerle, another West Point classmate, had circulated in Washington in 1977. Zengerle contended that of the “seven hundred top presidential appointments” one hundred “were given to the following: sixties activists (about fifteen), women (about forty), blacks (about forty), and Vietnam or Vietnam-era veterans (not more than five).”93 Wheeler and Zengerle, who had clerked for Chief Justice Warren Burger after law school, believed that affirmative action had gone too far, lifting people of color, women, and “sixties activists” over the heads of men who had answered the call to national service. The movements of the 1960s and 1970s had hurt men like themselves, men who belonged to a race of veterans. Wheeler, a graduate of Harvard Business School and Yale Law School and a senior official at the Securities and Exchange Commission, felt

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that vets had sacrificed themselves for the cause of women’s liberation, likening them to soldiers who fell on barbed wire to form a human bridge for their comrades. “There is a certain sense in which the women’s movement sped to fulfillment across the backs of the American men in Vietnam,” he wrote. “But for our fires and our dying, there would have been no revolution. No story for TV. No sense of defilement. No overweening sense of righteousness and anger and unmasculinity.” The war had, he argued, given the feminist movement a stage from which to make their demands. He and other vets had suffered so that women could stage their revolution. (Wheeler did not serve in combat and deferred his tour for two years after graduating from West Point to attend HBS.) The Vietnam Veterans Memorial stood as a memorial to vets but also as a monument to women: “It symbolizes a bridge that was necessary for the true emancipation of American women.”94 But the government had overcorrected, Wheeler thought, and needed to redouble affirmative action for white vets, whom he recast as the rank and file of the fight for women’s rights. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund chairman titled his book after Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s 1884 Memorial Day address in which the future chief justice declared before a gathering of former Union soldiers, “In our youth our hearts were touched with fire.”95 Holmes, who had suffered a near-fatal bullet wound in the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, asked what “we of the North and our brethren of the South could join in perfect accord” to teach those who hadn’t known war. His answer: honor and brotherhood. “The generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experiences,” he stated. “We have seen with our own eyes beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us.”96 The war had given Holmes and his fellow middle-aged veterans a sacred knowledge that, he believed, they must share with the generations to come. Their hearts, touched with fire, North and South, could lead the nation toward reconciliation. Wheeler felt that the nation needed another reunion to heal the wounds of what he conceived as a second civil war and that it must begin with veterans. Liberal vets agreed with the conservative Wheeler. Arthur Egendorf, of VVAW, advised the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs in 1981 that “Vietnam veterans should be a concern to policymakers not only because of their need, but because of their potential contribution to a renewed national identity.”97 Oliver Stone alluded to Holmes’s famous address in the closing voice-over of his semiauto-

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biographical Vietnam War film Platoon. Conservatives like Wheeler and liberals like Egendorf and Stone wanted a national reunion for Vietnam veterans, but, as before, it wouldn’t be a reunion for all.

black walls, white men In 1981, Wheeler and the other leaders of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund gathered around executive director Bob Doubek to learn who had won their design competition. In a unanimous decision, the jurists had selected a design featuring two black granite walls inscribed with the names of the dead. It would, they told the VVMF, be “one of the most profound memorials ever built.”98 Doubek read the name of the winning entrant, number 1026, “Maya Ying Lin.” No one knew the name. So Doubek read her street address, which Wheeler recognized as an undergraduate residence hall at Yale, not far from where he had attended law school.99 A twenty-one-year-old architecture student who, the VVMF soon learned, had designed her memorial for a class had beat out hundreds of distinguished architects, including her teacher, Andy Burr (who had given her a B on the assignment). Some vets and donors didn’t like Lin’s design, finding it too subdued and abstract. Some didn’t like that Lin, a young Chinese American woman, had designed it. Jim Webb condemned her memorial as “a wailing wall for future anti-draft and anti-nuclear demonstrators.”100 The National Review mocked it as an “Orwellian glob.”101 Tom Carhart, a West Point classmate of Wheeler’s, bemoaned that his service would be remembered with a “black gash of shame” and argued that the designer should be a veteran and that the design, like the neighboring Washington Monument, should be made of “white marble rising in massive splendor.”102 (Carhart had submitted his own design of “a statue of an officer offering a dead soldier heavenward.”)103 James Watt, the secretary of the interior, threatened to block construction. The VVMF had asked that the winning design “make no political statement regarding the war or its conduct,” believing that the right memorial could “transcend those issues” and “begin a healing process.”104 It didn’t know that the race and gender of the designer would be received as a statement. It didn’t reckon with who would be included in that healing.105 Lin’s critics found an alternative to back when Frederick Hart, who finished third in the design competition, suggested adding a statue of three soldiers to the memorial grounds. Although Hart had not served in Vietnam, as Carhart would have liked, he touted his research on guns and

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gear and his contact with vets. “I researched for three years—read everything,” he told an interviewer in 1983. “I became close friends with many vets, drank with them in the bars. Lin’s piece is a serene exercise in contemporary art done in a vacuum with no knowledge of the subject. It’s nihilistic—that’s its appeal.”106 Hart claimed to know something of the vet’s life not because he had seen war but because he drank among men, including some vets, at bars. Lin, an Asian American woman, couldn’t know what it was to be a white man, which, he suggested, was never more than a degree removed from being a Vietnam vet. Hart considered Lin’s modernist design a case of snobbish “art for art’s sake” that failed to offer more than evidence of the artist’s own cleverness. He announced his statue as a “populist” answer to Lin’s “elitist” memorial.107 But Hart did not see his three soldiers as detached from the wall. In a statement to the Commission of Fine Arts, he described them as integrated with Lin’s design: “I see the wall as a kind of ocean, a sea of sacrifice that is overwhelming and nearly incomprehensible in its sweep of names. I place these figures upon the shores of that sea gazing upon it, standing vigil before it, reflecting the human face of it, the human heart.”108 Hart did not title his statue. It did not stand alone, he insisted, but in conversation with the memorial wall, giving a face to the names. Lin accused Hart of “drawing mustaches on other people’s portraits.”109 Wheeler, conceding to her critics, agreed to let Hart build his statue a short distance from the wall and declared the construction of the nowmultifaceted Vietnam Veterans Memorial “the single most important step toward healing and redemption.”110 Hart’s three soldiers may look, at first glance, like a celebration of a multiracial nation. A Latino soldier, a white marine, and a Black soldier dressed in fatigues stand shoulder to shoulder. The white marine leads his two comrades, the Latino soldier on his right and the Black soldier on his left. He holds his hands out at his sides, as if warning the others of some danger ahead. Hartz/Meek International, the marketing firm that coordinated the statue’s dedication, advertised Hart’s exhaustive research of “authentic materials” and his commitment to finding models who reflected “the ethnic groups that fought in the Vietnam War.”111 Hart based the Black soldier on three different men. He used a twenty-fouryear-old Mexican American soldier as a model for the Latino figure but later suggested that the figure “could be Jewish, Lebanese, [or] Indian.”112 He modeled the white marine on a handsome noncommissioned officer, whom Hartz/Meek made available to news media in the weeks ahead of the dedication. The white model sat for television interviews with Hart.

Frederick Hart, bronze statue, 1984, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, DC. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith [LC-DIG-highsm-04696].

Frederick Hart with model James Connell, a marine corporal. Photograph courtesy of Darrell Acree.

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The statue offered a more inclusive image of the nation than visitors to the National Mall had seen before, but it included the Black and Latino soldiers within an image of white multiculturalism, in which a white man stands centered and individuated besides two men of color defined as stand-ins for their races. The Black figure, an amalgamation of three men, signifies Blackness. The Latino figure acts as a catchall for Americans who don’t fit into the categories of Black and white. He could be Jewish, Lebanese, or Indian—or Arab, Asian, or mixed race. There are no women. There are no Southeast Asians. The statue nods to the diverse Americans who labor in the army and marines but centers white men as, in Hart’s words, the human face and human heart of veteran America. President Reagan did not visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial until the 1984 dedication of Hart’s statue. The president had not attended the 1982 dedication of Lin’s memorial wall after his administration had threatened to block it. Organizers named the Veterans Day event “Salute II,” selling it as a reconciliation between Vietnam veterans and veterans of other wars.113 Reagan ignored the multiracial composition of the statue in his remarks. “The fighting men depicted in the statue we dedicate today, the three young American servicemen, are individual only in terms of their battle dress; all are as one, with eyes fixed upon the memorial bearing the names of their brothers in arms,” the president declared from a stage on the memorial grounds beneath a banner announcing “welcome home” in large block letters. The president then shifted his attention to the names on the wall marked with a cross rather than a diamond, indicating that their bodies had never been recovered. “Nearly twenty-five hundred of the names on this memorial are still missing in Southeast Asia, and some may still be serving,” Reagan said. “Thus, this memorial is a symbol of both past and current sacrifice.”114 The president, whose administration had made dramatic cuts to veterans’ benefits, transitioned in a matter of seconds from hailing the new statue as a lesson in color blindness to entertaining the white racial politics of the POW/MIA movement. Reagan, dedicating a statue that announces itself as multiracial, demonstrated the ease which the white multiculturalism of the veteran American can be translated into the white color blindness of the American veteran. The organizers billed the event as a multigenerational reunion of soldiers with the theme of “American veterans—one and all.” Looking out at the faces in the crowd below him, President Reagan couldn’t have missed that the men who came together on the National Mall that day didn’t look like the statue behind him.

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Hart’s statue may have embodied the multiracial soldiers and marines who served in Vietnam, but it didn’t reflect the veterans commemorated at the dedication ceremonies. On the day of the first dedication, Black Veterans for Social Justice, a Brooklyn-based organization, staged a counterdemonstration on a hill overlooking Constitution Avenue. “When they speak of Vietnam vets, the black man is not included,” a spokesman told the Washington Post. “We want to bring the black perspective on this march. More black and third world people fought on the front line in Vietnam than in any other war.”115 The Post dismissed the Black vets, describing them as outliers and their demonstration as an affront to other veterans who had traveled long distances to attend the dedication. But they identified what the Post wouldn’t: all white men on the VVMF executive committee and on the stage, and an audience that didn’t look much different. The memorial listed more than fifty-eight thousand American names but made no mention, Black Veterans for Social Justice observed, of the millions of Southeast Asians who died in the war. The most consistent criticism of Lin’s design was that it wasn’t white. “Build the memorial rising and white,” James Stockdale, a former prisoner of war, told the VVMF.116 It should “be white, above ground, and have a flag,” Webb insisted.117 “It is black, a color of shame,” another vet added.118 “All that they wanted was for the memorial to be white!” Hart said.119 In a meeting at the Capitol Building, George Price, a Black air force general, countered Lin’s critics. “I have heard your arguments,” he told them. “Black is not a color of shame. I am tired of hearing it called such by you.” Most leaders of the VVMF wished they could ignore race.120 Jan Scruggs, the president of the foundation, remembered feeling hesitant about Hart’s multiracial design. “Pilots, sailors, native Americans, Orientals, nurses, and other groups would not be represented,” he acknowledged. “The VVMF could only hope that pressure for ‘equality’ did not begin. Such pressure to turn Hart’s work into a mob scene could kill the statue—and with it the memorial.”121 Black men no longer faced white mobs in Scruggs’s scenario; white vets faced mobs of people of color and women. Hart’s statue wouldn’t be the last addition to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In 1993, Vice President Al Gore dedicated the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, a bronze statue of three uniformed women aiding a wounded man set in a grove of trees a few hundred feet from the wall. Visitors also make their own additions, leaving letters, combat boots, and wedding rings at the wall, which the National Park Service collects and archives. The memorial grows. Lin herself came to terms with the

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addition that she had worried would mar her elegant design. “In a funny sense the compromise brings the memorial closer to the truth,” she said of the VVMF’s decision to build Hart’s statue. “What is also memorialized is that people still cannot resolve the war, nor can they separate the issues, the politics, from it.”122 Most scholars agree, seeing memorials as sites of textured, tangled, and negotiated memories. But the lack of resolution at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and in the nation’s broader argument over the meaning of the war served some more than others. Vendors at the wall sold POW/ MIA flags and bracelets, encouraging visitors to remember the war, whether they knew it or not, as a white man’s unending sacrifice. Novels, rock music, films, and memoirs encouraged that narrative. So did the APA and congressional committees. The seeming incoherence of what the Vietnam War meant to the nation—that unresolved “truth” of which Lin spoke—masked coherent white racial interests communicated in the language of trauma and reconciliation. New movements and forms hid old racial structures and investments, remaking whiteness for a time in which identities carried a new kind of meaning in the arts. John Wheeler could see that cultural shift coming. He concluded his memoir, Touched with Fire, with a chapter titled “Predictions.” “The culture will confirm the emerging strong and compassionate television film image of the Vietnam veteran as representative,” he wrote. Children will admire their fathers for going to war, and some will choose to serve, and they will learn “this attitude from the culture.”123 Wheeler had it right. The white reunion he organized on the National Mall wasn’t limited to Washington or to Vietnam vets. It emerged from the classroom, the record store, the movie theater, and the halls of Congress as white men reconstructed their whiteness as veteran-ness, reuniting as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, their battles long past, the quarrel forgotten.

chapter 2

Veteran American Literature

“Regarding the Vietnam War period of your life, what did it contribute to your development as an author?” Tobey Herzog, a literature scholar and biographer, asked Tim O’Brien in 1995. O’Brien, the author of five novels, all about Vietnam vets, bristled. He knew that some critics thought he had written too much about the war in which he had served as a young man. The novelist fired back: “It’s impossible to answer. In one respect, it’s like asking Toni Morrison, ‘What has being black contributed to your being a writer?’ ”1 O’Brien argued, as he had in other interviews, that asking a Vietnam vet why he wrote about war was like asking a Black woman why she wrote about Black women. It was who she was. It was who he was. Of course they wrote about it. She was an African American writer. He was a veteran American writer. Critics had celebrated O’Brien, then fifty, as “the leading American novelist to emerge from this country’s war in Viet Nam” and as “America’s most celebrated Vietnam novelist.”2 Sometimes he embraced the classification, as he did in the interview with Herzog. Other times he refused it. “I’m not a Vietnam writer,” he declared in the late 1970s, after winning the National Book Award for his second novel, Going after Cacciato. “Although Vietnam was the impetus and spark for becoming a writer, I do not consider myself a war writer.”3 When an interviewer in the late 1990s asked him if the “Vietnam-writer label” irritated him, he answered, “It’s like calling Toni Morrison a black writer, or Melville a whale writer, or Shakespeare a king writer,” adding, “It 61

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does irritate me, because no writer wants to be grouped in any kind of ready-made category. Writing is all about being an individual with your own vision, a vision unrelated to anything or anyone else. I don’t write about bombs and bullets, after all. I write about the human heart.”4 O’Brien wanted his novels read within a minoritized tradition of veteran literature, but he also wanted that tradition read as a universal American literature. O’Brien found success at a young age, not far removed from his tour in the army. His 1973 memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, garnered acclaim and established him among a rising generation of novelists who had fought in Vietnam and returned to write about it. Most came from white middle-class families. Most held college degrees. Most wrote about the disillusionment of a war that had shaken their faith in the United States and what they had thought it stood for. Most found a home—as students, teachers, and assigned reading—in the growing world of academic creative writing, a world that gave them careers but also limited them. World War II vets Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer wrote five-hundred- and seven-hundredpage bricks about their war. O’Brien made his name with the teachable short stories “The Things They Carried” and “How to Tell a True War Story.” Heller and Mailer moved on to other things, with mixed results. O’Brien, who long held an endowed chair in creative writing at Texas State University, didn’t, with consistent results. Mark McGurl, the literature scholar and institutional historian, argues that “the rise of the creative writing program stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history.” Creative writing, he writes, installed “high cultural pluralism” as a dominant ethic of American literature, in which teacher-writers like O’Brien encouraged student-writers to combine acts of authorial self-fashioning with “a rhetorical performance of cultural group membership preeminently, though by no means exclusively, marked as ethnic.”5 That “aesthetic formation” included the Black writer, Latinx writer, regional writer, gay writer, and veteran writer “in the sense that the psychic wounds inflicted on him in his year of combat have become foundational to a career” as other writers’ racial, ethnic, or sexual identities have been for theirs.6 Creative writing reconstituted Morrison as a Black writer, Melville as a whale writer, Shakespeare as a king writer, and O’Brien as a war writer. Or so O’Brien himself might say. Liberal multiculturalism (or “high cultural pluralism”) took a while to set in. The Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros, who attended the Iowa

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Writers’ Workshop in the mid-1970s, didn’t remember it as an institution that valued identities like her own. “Coming from a working class background, an ethnic community, an urban community, a family that did not have books in the house, I just did not have the same frames of reference as my classmates,” she said in a 1985 interview. “It wasn’t until I realized and accepted that fact that I came upon the subjects I wanted to write about.”7 The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the first creative writing program in the United States, may not have been the vanguard of multiculturalism that McGurl makes it out to be. The transition from an integrationist racial liberalism to a celebrate-our-differences multiculturalism did not arrive all at once. But when it did, no one managed that transition better than the white vet, who could be a model of national integration or of national multiculturalism. He sat at the front of the classroom in 1945 and 1995, first as an American veteran and then as a veteran American. The GI Bill, or the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, launched creative writing. Almost half of all eligible veterans used their educational benefits, flooding universities and colleges with men fresh from combat. Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and other universities, facing higher enrollments and flush with GI Bill tuition dollars, founded some of the first graduate programs in creative writing to meet the new demand. But few Black vets enrolled, because the bill, needing the votes of southern senators and congressmen, accommodated Jim Crow, barring most Black southerners from attending college.8 The GI Bill gave white working-class men a foothold in a growing middle class, functioning as a form of white affirmative action, a GI “bill of whites,” that would worsen racial and gender imbalances in income and wealth. White men with combat medals and government checks filled the first creative writing classes, where their teachers encouraged them to turn their time at war into war stories. Write what you know. Another creative writing boom followed the Higher Education Act of 1965 and the Veterans’ Readjustment Benefits Act of 1966, which delivered vets of O’Brien’s generation to Iowa, Cornell, Stanford, and hundreds of other universities then getting into the business of academic creative writing. Vietnam vets continued to turn combat tours into war stories but also, enrolling as they did amid the civil rights and feminist movements, to craft a new kind of self out of war. O’Brien and other white vets learned to write not as white men but as veteran Americans, not as writers who went to war but as warriors who learned to write. Write who you are.

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A broad contingent of white men—right and left, rich and poor, vet and nonvet—staged a racial reconciliation in the 1970s and 1980s through the commemoration of their own wartime suffering, ending the second Reconstruction as they had the first: with a white reunion. Academic creative writing and the war literature it subsidized and taught forged the identities on which they built that reunion. Historians often credit the Black feminist Combahee River Collective with coining the term identity politics in 1977. “We believe,” the radical Black feminists stated then, “that the most profound and potentially radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.” Antiracist and feminist struggles should radiate from Black women’s identities, not force them or others to conform to the agendas of Black men or white women. The “identity politics” of the Combahee River Collective, the feminist scholar Grace Hong reminds us, far from elevating one identification above all others, “was fundamentally critical of a unitary or reified notion of subject formation.”9 But the term’s radical origins would get lost amid the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, as racial conservatives and more than a few racial liberals would use it to dismiss activists as oversensitive and their demands as niche. Neither would accuse a white man advocating for veterans’ rights of the same. But white men have been wielding veteran identities to obscure and sustain white racial interests since before the Combahee River Collective declared “our own identity” a vehicle for “potentially radical politics.” That white identitarianism was not limited to creative writing or the English department, but literature, more than other forms, functioned as a medium through which critics struggled to sort out the relation between authors’ identities and the larger stakes of their work. Creative writing educated white men in how they could craft national identities that could be worn or shed at will through self-making war stories. Not all veterans are white, of course. Far from it. Nor are all war writers. The white identitarianism of war literature demanded that American Indian, Black, and Latinx writers who served in the war be shelved with other genres. Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian American writers, who further challenged the idea of the Vietnam War as a white wound and entitlement, also got the boot. Yusef Komunyakaa, the Black poet and an army vet, earned master’s degrees in creative writing at Colorado State and the University of California, Irvine, and never once wrote about the war. None of his teachers ever suggested it. “I very systematically wrote around that [war] experience,” he remembered.10 “Vietnam as

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spectacle remains passionately an owned territory,” Trinh T. Minh-ha, the filmmaker, observed in 1991, amid a flood of blockbuster films about white soldiers.11 “While the refugee who becomes a writer is given the license to tell a refugee story, he or she is not seen as writing an actual war story,” Viet Nguyen, the scholar and novelist, writes, reflecting on the racial constitution of what O’Brien calls true war stories.12 Vets disagreed. Although some of the most elite universities admitted and hired them, launching and sustaining their careers, most remained convinced that they had been left out of the multicultural English department of the 1980s and 1990s, that no one wanted to hear about them or their war. In Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story, for which he won the 1987 National Book Award for Fiction, beating out Morrison’s Beloved, the dead soldiers who narrate the novel introduce it with “the first clean fact,” announcing to the reader that “this ain’t no war story” because “war stories are out—one, two, three, and a heave-ho.” Most American readers, they declare, dismiss war literature as nothing more than “a geek-monster species of evil-ugly rumor.”13 Heinemann held a tenured gig at Columbia College Chicago, where he taught creative writing. He won numerous residences and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, all for his war novels. Then he won a National Book Award. But he maintained that the war novelist had no home in American literature, that critics looked down on him, O’Brien, and other Vietnam vets for reminding them of a war that they wished to forget. Heinemann may have known more than he let on. Perhaps he sensed that finding an audience and winning awards in the mid-1980s meant first convincing critics that no one read his books or admired his craft. Perhaps he knew that fashioning himself as an outsider rather than as one more white man writing about war might do him good in an age of canon revision. The careers of O’Brien (National Book Award), Heinemann (National Book Award), Robert Olen Butler (Pulitzer Prize), and other Vietnam vets gave conservatives and liberals that rare thing they could agree on in the culture wars. Vet novelists straddled the divide between a color-blind national canon and a minoritized subnational literature, allowing scholars, critics, and teachers to read them either as bearers of a “great books” tradition or as insurgents against that tradition. The veteran American might have felt like the odd man out in the creative writing program after civil rights and feminism, but that program had been built for him.

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write what you know Millions of young white men entered college on the GI Bill. Older than most of their classmates and with stories to tell, they filled the first creative writing classes. Flannery O’Connor, who attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the late 1940s, stood out among the stiff-backed soldiers and marines seated beside her in the barracks-like Quonset huts that housed the creative writing program until the mid-1960s. She wrote her master’s thesis, a first draft of the novel Wise Blood, about a vet. Her adviser, Paul Engle, the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 1941 until 1965, brought an evangelical zeal to the work of program building. “For the first time in the sad and enchanting history of literature, for the first time in the dreadful and glorious history of the world, the writer was welcome in the academic place,” he remembered of that time. “If the mind could be honored there, why not the imagination?”14 Engle embraced the emerging ethic of racial liberalism and later founded the affiliated International Writing Program with his wife, the Chinese novelist Hualing Nieh Engle, to bring renowned international writers to Iowa. But white vets dominated his seminars in the years after World War II, men like a gruff former marine sergeant whom Engle remembered as having “shoulders which looked as if they could have held up the temple alone.”15 Engle taught veterans’ writing classes, and his students, with his encouragement, turned in war stories. Wallace Stegner, a classmate of Engle’s at the University of Iowa in the early 1930s, where he earned his PhD under the same man who directed Engle’s master’s thesis, the new humanist philosopher Norman Foerster, founded the Stanford creative writing program for his own veteran students. He arrived in California in 1945, after a stint as a lecturer at Harvard, and fell in love with the writing of the young vets who enrolled in his first Stanford classes. “Some sort of Stanford writing program was made inevitable when I walked into my first writing class at Stanford in 1945,” he later wrote, “and found myself facing a dozen students, GI and otherwise, of whom at least five were more talented or more finished, or both, than anyone I had ever seen in a classroom.”16 Stegner had taught talented students before in Cambridge and at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. But the vets arrived with material, “just out of the armed services, much more mature than the ordinary college student, with many more things to write, and with a sense of urgency brought on by three or four years of lost time in the army or navy.”17 He founded the program for them and the stories he thought they could tell.

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The first student story Stegner read that fall, “Rest Camp on Maui,” described the inner turmoil and wartime bonding of four marines stationed in the Pacific. He received it from a former sailor named Eugene Burdick, the future coauthor of the best sellers The Ugly American and Fail-Safe. (This, at least, is how Stegner liked to tell it.) When Stegner later assembled a volume of student stories, Twenty Years of Stanford Short Stories, he led with “Rest Camp on Maui” and dedicated more than a third of the volume to the stories of vets, most of whom attended Stanford in the mid- to late 1940s and all of whom wrote about war. Stegner believed that the writer should do more than entertain the reader. The writer should, he contended, model an ethic of multiracial nationalism. In 1945, Stegner collaborated with the editors of Look magazine on a coffee-table book celebrating the diverse cultures of the United States. One Nation, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for the “best book on racial relations,” included images of American Indian blacksmiths, Black machinists, and Mexican immigrant farmers.18 Although he acknowledged Chinese exclusion and the Ku Klux Klan, Stegner remained convinced, as he wrote in the introduction, that “the problem of making one nation from the many races and creeds and kinds, one culture from all the European, Indian, African, and Asiatic cultures that the promise of freedom has drawn to our shores,” could also, if achieved, be the nation’s greatest gift to the world.19 He urged an integrationist racial liberalism in which American Indian blacksmiths, Black machinists, and Mexican immigrant farmers would learn to set their differences aside and embrace shared national values that he identified as white Anglo-Saxon values. The achievement of “a harmony of our races and creeds into a single nation,” Stegner concluded, “is not a job for Congress [but] for the average Americans in every community, the Smiths and Johnsons and Browns in whose image democracy was created.”20 Like most white racial liberals of the time, Stegner assumed that white racism had rendered Black culture, as the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal wrote in An American Dilemma, “a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture” and that white people must undertake a moral education in liberal antiracism to cure it, to solve the “Negro problem.”21 It fell to the writer, Stegner believed, to deliver that moral education and model for white Americans an ethic of integration and national fellow feeling, and he found his models at Stanford, when he received his first batch of short stories from Burdick and his classmates. The vets embodied the nation, serving it in a world war, but they also knew struggle, making them,

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Stegner thought, the ideal messengers through whom to welcome Black and Latinx communities into the “general” culture of Smiths, Johnsons, and Browns. Ernest Hemingway loomed large for Stegner and the vets.22 “Every story was laid in a bar,” Stegner remembered of their writing, “every one involved a girl, wanton but wistful, with whom the hero was involved, every one contained an impressionistic passage during which the hero studied his drunken countenance in the wavering bar mirror, and every one was written in a tough, bare, corner-of-the-mouth style.”23 His students had learned their idol’s moves all too well, turning in stories that read like satire. But Stegner never discouraged them from emulating Hemingway. He argued then that Hemingway’s novels would age better than others’ because he had “shown a keener nose for the news that will be news ten years from now.”24 He had shown, he meant, a keen nose for war. Stegner believed what Hemingway himself believed: that a novelist, no matter how talented, couldn’t write great literature without worldhistorical material. “Well the reason you are so sore you missed the war,” Hemingway wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925, “is because war is the best subject of all. It groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get.”25 Stegner’s vets had an advantage over their classmates, having seen things on the front lines that an eighteen-yearold college student could never know. Their knowledge of men at war was the stuff of capital-L literature. Hemingway demonstrated for Burdick and other vets how they could balance nationalism with national alienation. In his 1925 story “Soldier’s Home,” which Stegner often taught in his seminars, marine vet Harold Krebs returns to his hometown in Oklahoma after bouncing around Europe in the months after the war. He arrives “much too late,” the town thinks, missing the “greeting of heroes.” But the town wants to hear his war stories, as long as, Krebs discovers, they conform to what it had heard before: “His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities. Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it. A distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war set in because of the lies he had told.”26 A mere fourteen pages long, “Soldier’s Home” lent itself to classroom instruction, modeling for the vets how they could write national stories that didn’t come across as nationalist. Krebs arrives

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home a hero. He had fought the Germans. He had defended the nation. The town wants to hear his stories. But it fails to listen to Krebs, leaving him feeling like an outsider, unable to share the truth about his time at war with a town that glorifies him. Stegner’s favorite student, Burdick, learned the trick. He set “Rest Camp on Maui” in a tent on a makeshift base in the Pacific, where a correspondent interviews four marines about their tours. The narrator moves in and out of the minds of the marines, granting the reader access to their thoughts and memories as they share their stories of combat and conflict among their ranks. The correspondent takes notes that, the marines can see, misconstrue what they tell him. One man remembers a civilian woman who, fearing for her and her husband’s lives, offered herself to him. The correspondent writes, “Marines like Aussie girls, but first love still clean-cut American girls.”27 Another marine, a Jewish man, reflects on the death of a Jewish lieutenant who once trounced a Polish American comrade who had called him an antisemitic slur but then visited him in the sick ward, winning him over with muscle and kindness. The correspondent writes, “Jewish boys in the Marines, famed for their entertainment on Broadway and in Hollywood, arrange musicals, shows, and other laugh-fests to keep America’s finest fighting men relaxed between battles.”28 The marines discover what Krebs does: civilian Americans don’t want to hear their truth. The correspondent renders the men as he assumes his readers would like to see them, sharing a love of clean-cut American girls and a hunger for battle (as well as demonstrating a cross-ethnic white racial bondedness), while ignoring the less heroic, more human events that define their time in the Pacific. The marines, tiring of the correspondent, kick him out of the tent. “Rest Camp on Maui” takes the national alienation of “Soldier’s Home” and weds it to the integrationist racial liberalism of the 1940s. Burdick, though not himself Jewish or Polish, chose to dramatize how war could turn white ethnics into white Americans, how it could “melt” ethnic identities into an integrated whiteness. “Soldier’s Home” never mentions Krebs’s race, leaving readers to assume his whiteness, while “Rest Camp on Maui” addresses the marines’ race from the first page, reflecting an emerging self-consciousness among white men about their whiteness before submerging it in their identities as marines. “Rest Camp on Maui,” the eight pages of student writing that motivated Stegner to found the Stanford creative writing program, showed how war literature offered a genre for working out what white identities might look like in an age of civil rights.

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Engle directed the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for twenty-four years. Stegner led the Stanford creative writing program for twenty-five. Their students left to found new programs, modeling them on what Engle and Stegner had built in Iowa and California. Stegner, who retired in 1971, never taught another class he admired as much as Burdick’s. He thought most students hadn’t lived enough to write serious fiction. “Even by graduation the student is often too immature to know his own mind or have enough experience in the world to know where he stands,” Stegner wrote. “That is why the GI students, now sadly diminishing, have had so large a part to play in the boom of college writing programs. They came mature and experienced and serious; they had something to think with and something to feel with and something to say.”29 He could teach students to write—he could give them lessons in “craft”—but he couldn’t give them the kind of world-historical material and identities that war could. Stegner resented the counterculture. He butted heads with a young Ken Kesey, who drafted One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as a Stegner fellow at Stanford, where his cohort included Wendell Berry, Ernest Gaines, and Larry McMurtry. Stegner deemed Kesey, as Robert Stone, another Stegner student, remembered, “a threat to civilization and intellectualism and sobriety.”30 The professor protagonist of Angle of Repose, for which Stegner won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, mocks his adult son for believing, “like other Berkeley radicals,” that “the post-industrial post-Christian world is worn out” and offering to “provide blueprints, or perhaps ultimatums and manifestoes, that will save us and bring on a life of true freedom.”31 Although Stegner loathed what he called “the amorphous ‘freedom’ movement” and an emerging literature of difference, he and Engle contributed to that literature when they encouraged a generation of young vets to mine the alienation of war for material.32

write who you are Stegner might have missed the vets who enrolled in his first classes at Stanford, but he wouldn’t have to wait long for more to arrive. The Veterans’ Readjustment Benefits Act of 1966 made educational subsidies available to all who had served since World War II, incentivizing young men and women who couldn’t otherwise afford college to enlist and establishing some of the instruments of what historian Jennifer Mittlestadt terms the “military welfare state” and others have called “the great society in camouflage” and a “camouflaged safety net.”33

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Eighteen-year-olds from working-class and poor families now enlisted to enroll. The Higher Education Act of 1965 and the Veterans’ Readjustment Benefits Act stimulated another surge in enrollment, with more first-generation students entering universities and colleges, whether through grants and loans or veterans’ subsidies. The number of creative writing programs soared. In 1967, when the novelist R. V. Cassill, a classmate of O’Connor’s at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a professor of creative writing at Brown, founded the Associated Writing Programs (later renamed the Association of Writers and Writing Programs), it included thirteen members. In 1975, it counted seventy-nine members. In 1984, more than three hundred.34 (In 2016, the AWP would boast almost a thousand members, including more than three hundred graduate programs, some offering dedicated PhDs in creative writing.)35 Stegner had imagined something like this in the late 1940s, when he wrote, reveling in the success of his new program, “The young writer who in the twenties headed for Greenwich Village and who in the thirties took out by boxcar to bum his way through a hundred odd jobs to fame now heads for some graduate school of English to study with some professional writer.”36 Few would have believed him then, but soon few could doubt his words, as future generations of writers would go to school to learn the craft and sometimes never leave. The social movements of the 1960s transformed the English department. In the 1940s and 1950s, white racial liberals did not concern themselves all that much with the identities of authors. Sinclair Lewis, Bucklin Moon, and Lillian Smith, all white, wrote some of the biggest “race novels” of the time. In the 1970s and 1980s, English departments embraced the shift toward multiculturalism, adding authors of color to their reading lists, though still seldom recruiting teachers and students of color. White students could “get to know difference” through reading, their teachers insisted, framing units on American Indian, Asian American, Black, and Latinx authors as amateur anthropological investigations. N. Scott Momaday could teach them about American Indians, Maxine Hong Kingston about Chinese Americans, Morrison about African Americans, Cisneros about Chicanos. Jodi Melamed, the literature scholar and critical race theorist, observes that the novel emerged after World War II as a “privileged tool” for teaching white college students how to think about race. “Because multicultural literature was presumed to be authentic, intimate, and representative, white students with minimal knowledge of or contact with racialized communities could nonetheless presume enough familiarity to legitimate their managerial-class

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position,” she writes.37 Reading Momaday, Kingston, Morrison, and Cisneros would do the job. The multicultural English department continued to cater to white students, perhaps more than ever. That shift remade creative writing too. Students learned that they needed to construct authorial identities, to craft a self, and the vet novelist showed white students that they could also write themselves into multicultural being as “voices” of a region (southern, western) or a class (blue collar, intelligentsia) or a war. Liberal multiculturalism didn’t exclude them at all. Their whiteness, which antiracist movements had rendered visible, needed to be subordinated to other forms of identification that would allow them to act as deracinated individuals but also as spokespeople of a race of southerners, workers, or veterans. The vets for whom Engle and Stegner built academic creative writing offered a model for a new, mutable white identitarianism through which universities and colleges could advertise what amounted to a diverse whiteness. (In 2016, the AWP acknowledged that creative writing programs in the United States remained more than 75 percent white while touting the commitment programs had made to “cultivating diversity.”)38 The white vet made the transition from racial liberalism to liberal multiculturalism without a hitch. The American Indian, Asian American, Black Power, and Chicano movements motivated cultural renaissances, including at universities and colleges, where students demanded new programs in Black studies, ethnic studies, and feminist studies. Scholars and students formed new and recovered old traditions, struggling, as Toni Cade Bambara, the novelist and Black feminist intellectual, later wrote, to assume the “enormous tasks of reconstructing cultural memory, of revitalizing useable traditions of cultural practices, and of resisting the wholesale and unacknowledged appropriation of cultural items.”39 White men who served in Vietnam, borrowing the language of Black studies, ethnic studies, and feminism, reimagined themselves as reconstructing and revitalizing their own tradition of men at war, a tradition that the student movements themselves had, they suggested, silenced. The war had made them writers. O’Brien, Heinemann, and Butler had no choice but to share their truth. Someone had to speak for them. Congress agreed. The Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Act of 1974 established antiveteran admissions and hiring as forms of discrimination and mandated affirmative action for vets, adding to the benefits that the government had doled out to white men under the GI Bill since the mid-1940s and sustaining white affirmative action disguised as remuneration for vets, from which students of color and women stood to gain

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little or nothing.40 Long before the civil rights legislation of the mid1960s, the government had designated the white veteran as belonging to a class to be defended above all others, ensuring that, when antiracist movements arose, he wouldn’t lose his seat at the seminar table. He had stories to tell. He could also be an outsider, at least when he needed to be. The student movements that the white vet worked through and against faced enormous resistance in the 1970s and 1980s, from conservatives as well as liberals. “There is no resistance without power,” Roderick Ferguson, the queer of color theorist, observes, reversing an activist truism. “The kinds of pressures that student movements of the 1960s and ’70s placed on the academy were met with a ferocious offensive.” Student activists, demanding a radical reorganization of institutional knowledge, attracted formidable new enemies—a “social backlash,” in Ferguson’s words.41 But they also faced a kind of “frontlash” from liberal institutional structures, including the creative writing program, that had readied young white men to make a claim to their alienation and difference since before the movements took off. The backlash didn’t follow the movements; it coincided with them, securing the liberal white student’s status through the discourse of veterans’ rights. That liberal drag did not end the movements, which would lead to new terms for challenging white racial dominance—whiteness as property, the racial contract, the possessive investment in whiteness, the racial state—but it often left them fighting on two fronts, against declared enemies and declared allies.42 In 1987, Tim O’Brien, Larry Heinemann, Robert Olen Butler, and Philip Caputo gathered in Washington for the annual convention of Vietnam Veterans of America, where they debated the “Vietnam-book boom.”43 Oliver Stone’s Platoon had won Best Picture at the Oscars; the New York Times counted more than three hundred new novels about the war; and Heinemann would soon win the National Book Award. The four vets felt amazed, grateful, and frustrated. Heinemann described how other writers would tell him that they wished they had served in Vietnam. “Somehow they feel the war is a central literary experience that they have missed,” he said. “And I always make a point of telling those guys that they could have traded places with me anytime.”44 Butler, then a professor of creative writing at McNeese State University and later at Florida State, shared Heinemann’s discomfort with his new audience. “America doesn’t like losers; I’m not sure how deep the interest in Vietnam really runs,” he said. “We’ve got a psychic wound in the country and the country’s artists are usually the people who work those

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psychic wounds out.”45 Heinemann and Butler didn’t mind selling books but wondered what accounted for nonvets’ sudden interest in the war. Heinemann alluded to an answer: the nonvet men who came to him envied him not because he served in Vietnam but because the war had given him and Butler authorial identities at a time when identities won grants and sold books. Heinemann got to write about the United States not as a white man but as a vet. His status as a veteran writer hadn’t marginalized his writing but nationalized it. The vet’s wounds stood as the nation’s wounds, Butler argued, and the nation needed to listen to him if it ever wanted to heal. The boom in Vietnam War literature coincided with the first shots in the canon wars. Liberals fought for more diverse courses and reading lists. Conservatives defended a Western-civ tradition of dead white men. Neither side seemed all that concerned with changing who taught at and attended the universities and colleges where their canons would be assigned. But all could agree on the new veteran writers, who could be read either as one of the diverse voices of the new canon or as stewards of the timeless literature of men at war. O’Brien, Heinemann, Butler, and Caputo could be new and old, insurgents and counterinsurgents in the overblown war for the future of the college reading list. Unlike the writers of color whom liberals fought to bring into the classroom in the late 1980s, they could shed their minoritized identities whenever they wanted, associating themselves sometimes with Morrison and sometimes with Homer. Sometimes O’Brien wrote as a veteran American. Sometimes he refused all categories (“I write about the human heart”).46 Conservatives may have led the backlash against affirmative action and other racial reforms, but liberals contributed by treating white men as minorities of a different kind, beginning with the Vietnam vet, who “deserved” his affirmative action. The value of the veteran American to white racial interests meant that war literature needed, more than ever, to remain white. Accounts from American vets of color and Southeast Asian vets and civilians threatened far more than the look of the literature. The turn from racial liberalism to liberal multiculturalism instilled the idea that writers had lanes and shouldn’t venture into others’. William Styron’s 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, dramatized that turn. A white author filtering a novel through a Black protagonist hadn’t been unusual in the 1940s. Sinclair Lewis, Bucklin Moon, and Lillian Smith all received acclaim for it. (So did Black authors writing about white protagonists, including, for example,

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Zora Neale Hurston, Willard Motley, and Frank Yerby.) Styron’s novel revealed a divide. Most white critics celebrated it. Most Black critics condemned it as a form of novelistic blackface. The Confessions of Nat Turner signaled a crisis of white racial liberalism. White authors would need to find new authorial identities—to construct their own lanes—in a changing American literature. Some found it in regionalism or in the working class. Some found it in bohemia or in their white ethnic roots. Some found it in the Vietnam War and, obscuring the men and women of color who had fought with and against them, constructed new white identities out of it. Of course, the whiteness of war literature didn’t begin with O’Brien and his cohort. But, with the once-boundless cultural domain of white men shrinking—they discovered that they couldn’t write a slave novel, at least not without sacrificing their liberal bona fides—some doubled down on the idea that war lit belonged to them. No genre binds authors’ identities to the nation like war literature, making it a constant among finalists for National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prizes, the criteria for which favor national themes. War literature, critics and readers assume, makes a statement about whom the nation includes and excludes, whom it celebrates and condemns, and what it stands for. Limiting that genre to white American men, Viet Nguyen argues, amounts to a second war, a war for how the nation remembers the last war and if and how it will wage the next. “Not all soldiers who write make the grade, but soldiers who write can make the grade, as [Tim] O’Brien does, because the war story belongs to them,” Nguyen writes. Most refugees don’t receive a grade at all, at least not as war writers, and “this difficulty is inseparable from the war that created the refugee in the first place and hence created the conditions for grading the refugee turned writer.”47 How critics and readers define war literature does more than determine where libraries shelve books. It makes an argument about the value of different lives—the conditions for grading the soldier versus the refugee writer—and how they should be thought of within or in relation to the nation. The case for reading refugee stories as war stories got all the more difficult to make when white vets learned to think of themselves as forgotten, left out of a changing nation. O’Brien’s career testifies to the success with which the white vet writer remade himself for a multicultural moment. The canon wars created a lot of turbulence in English departments, but it also made their decisions seem meaningful, more meaningful than they ever, in fact, were. For a brief time, the cultural Right and the cultural Left shared the “extraordinary premise,” in sociologist Bethany Bryson’s words, that “every time an

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English teacher put together a reading list, the future of a nation hung in the balance.”48 The attention benefited the few writers whose novels the Right and the Left could agree on, and O’Brien could count himself among that fortunate few. Scholars and critics could read his fiction however they liked because O’Brien, though a self-described liberal, didn’t have much to say about the war itself or race in the army or in Vietnam. His novels tell stories of good men slogging through hard times. Take them as you will. O’Brien writes about the Vietnam vet as someone whom the nation forgot and as the embodiment of that nation, a kind of minoritized universal. On stage at the Vietnam Veterans of America convention, O’Brien acknowledged as much. “I think Vietnam will go out of fashion,” he admitted. “But all of us are aspiring to write something that can be read a hundred years from now and still have truth to it, Vietnam forgotten, even though the details can’t be verified. It’s got nothing to do with the particulars of what happened in Khe Sanh; it’s got nothing to do with the surface details of war.”49 The veteran American writer wouldn’t be remembered as a war writer. He would be remembered as an author of great, world-historical literature, who had fought in something called the Vietnam War, suffered, and then turned that suffering into a higher truth.

a trauma artist O’Brien wanted to write a best seller, he told the New York Times in the late 1980s. He didn’t want his books “just read in English classes.”50 It turned out that the latter would deliver the former, as English classes made him a best seller. More than two million readers bought The Things They Carried, his 1990 collection of interrelated short stories, and most bought it for school. Universities, colleges, and libraries selected it as a common reading. The College Board, which administers the Advanced Placement curriculum, made it a regular on the annual literature exam. The National Endowment for the Arts chose it for the nationwide program the Big Read. Teachers embraced O’Brien’s short stories because, like Hemingway’s, they lent themselves to emulation. His writing feels crafted. The fine-tuning shows. The NEA distributed writing exercises that asked students to borrow the structure of O’Brien’s stories. “Ask students to imagine that they are going to war and can only take three personal items,” the exercise for the title story, “The Things They Carried,” advised.51 Paul Engle and Wallace Stegner built creative writing to teach men like O’Brien, and he wrote stories built for the teaching of creative writing.

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But O’Brien didn’t want to be read as the Hemingway of the Vietnam War. He didn’t write about war, he argued, but trauma. “Vietnam” stood for all of life’s adversities. You didn’t have to go there to know it, but you would know it better if, like O’Brien, you had. “Nam lived on inside me, and I just called it by a different name—I called it life,” he told one interviewer. “Nam, divorce, your father’s death—such things live on even though you think you’re over them. They come bubbling up.”52 Scholars agree. Mark Heberle titled his 2001 book about O’Brien’s life and work A Trauma Artist. Heberle argues that “Vietnam has metamorphosed into an imaginative site in O’Brien” and that trauma rather than the war “is the medium within which and out of which his protagonists are impelled to revisit and rewrite their life experiences.”53 O’Brien never wrote a book that didn’t revolve around the life of a Vietnam vet. But “Vietnam” being a collective national trauma, as Heberle and others imagine it, he figured not as a war writer but as a trauma artist who had learned something rare but universal from his tour in Southeast Asia. Although O’Brien never suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, his early career coincided with the veterans’ mental health movement that culminated in 1980 with the recognition of the disorder in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Scholars and artists embraced trauma as a discourse with which they could engage, without reducing, silenced and delegitimized knowledge of the transatlantic slave trade, the Holocaust, and the HIV/AIDS crisis. Trauma furnished the literature of liberal multiculturalism with a structure: recurring, circling, fragmented. O’Brien used that structure, but he considered war a transcendent kind of trauma that brought him and the vets he wrote about closer to death and the existential knowledge that comes with it than could other forms of trauma. “The environment of war is the environment of life, magnified,” he said in 1994, as if writing his own letter to Fitzgerald. “The stakes of living in a war are enhanced only because of the awareness of the proximity of death. That is to say, I’m almost dead with every step I take as opposed to fifty steps to the day I get cancer or have a first heart attack. We are all living in a war. It’s just that the wolf isn’t quite at the door.”54 He may be writing about the Vietnam War, but war, O’Brien suggested, distilled the trauma of encountering death, revealing human life as fragile, finite. War magnified life. All could see themselves—human, mortal—in the trials of the soldier. Morrison had a different take on the universal in literature. In 1985, as she drafted her fifth novel, Beloved, Morrison described herself as constructing “one facet of a prism” for her readers. “There is somebody

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who is a black woman who has this sensibility and this power and this talent and she’s over here writing about that side of this huge sort of diamond thing that I see,” she said, “and then you read another book and somebody has written about another side. And you know that eventually the whole thing will be lit—all of these planes and all of the facets. But it’s all one diamond, it’s all one diamond.”55 Morrison, who would later win the Nobel Prize in Literature, refused to claim more than a facet of the diamond. O’Brien and other vets claimed the whole thing. We are all living through a war, they argued, and war belonged to them. But O’Brien also acknowledged a debt to Morrison. In interviews, he suggested that Morrison’s third novel, Song of Solomon, had showed him how he might weave magical elements into historical settings. “People are flying, but it happens mythically,” he recalled of encountering Morrison’s novel for the first time. “It doesn’t matter that it’s impossible—they just are.”56 Her influence comes through in O’Brien’s Going after Cacciato. The novel transforms Southeast Asia into an eerie and enchanted land for the young American. Cacciato, an enigmatic soldier, deserts the army to walk to Paris, “eight thousand six hundred statute miles” through Laos, Burma, India, Iran, and Greece. The protagonist Paul Berlin, another young soldier, tracks Cacciato with his comrades to a mountain, where he watches him through binoculars. He sees Cacciato on the face of the mountain, smiling and moving his arms like a bird: “Paul Berlin could not hear. But he saw the wide wings, and the big smile, and the movement of the boy’s lips. . . . So Paul Berlin, watching Cacciato fly, repeated it: ‘Good-bye.’ ”57 Berlin’s reveries consume the rest of the novel. He imagines that he and his comrades follow Cacciato to Paris, leaving the war that he loathes but lacks the courage to flee himself. Neither he nor his comrades know Cacciato’s first name or much about him at all. Berlin can’t remember his face. The deserting soldier somehow “lacked the fine detail, the refinements and final touches” of an adult face. The men remember his features as somehow “blurred and uncolored and bland.”58 Cacciato—an Italian name meaning “hunted” or “caught”—offers the men a blank screen onto which they can fantasize about fleeing to Paris themselves and leaving the war behind them. He, a white ethnic soldier, stands in for his comrades’ racial desires and fears. The men resign themselves to imagining the freedom that they feel they deserve but that the war has denied them. The best they can do is dream of flight. In 1978, Cacciato’s imagined mountainside flight would have struck a reader of Morrison’s most recent novel as familiar. Song of Solomon ends

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with Milkman Dead launching himself from a cliff at his childhood friend, and now assassin, Guitar Banes. Guitar has followed Milkman from Michigan to Virginia to kill him and take what he believes to be a sack of gold, not knowing that the sack contains Milkman’s grandfather’s bones. Milkman has undergone a kind of rebirth in the South, connecting with his father and grandfather’s home of Shalimar and learning of his greatgrandfather, Solomon, a slave who, in town lore, flew back to Africa leaving behind his wife and twenty-one children, including Milkman’s grandfather. Facing down Guitar on the cliff, Milkman discovers that he, like Solomon, might take flight: “As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”59 Milkman’s flight is the culmination of his search for ancestors, faith, and a sense of self that he couldn’t find in the North. Cacciato’s flight is Paul Berlin’s imagined desertion from an army he serves and a war he hates. O’Brien took a Black man’s fantastic liberation from bondage and rewrote it as a white man’s dream of leaving Vietnam, as if the army had enslaved Cacciato, Paul Berlin, and their white brothers in arms. O’Brien admires Morrison not for what her novels say about race in the United States but for her craft, how she uses folklore to fire the reader’s imagination. Engle and Stegner instilled that attitude toward what literature should do in their first creative writing classes. Students would be discouraged from writing the big social novels of Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, and Richard Wright. Morrison’s novels could be admired as long as they were read for their craft rather than for what they said about the nation. “A writer has to deal in facts, things, particulars,” Stegner advised in 1950. “If he has ideas, too, as he had better have, they ought to live in the attic of his writing and show themselves like ghosts flitting past the windows after dark.”60 A writer may have ideas, but they’d better not show. The writer should hide them in the attic, where the reader can but doesn’t have to reckon with them. O’Brien learned the lesson well. In “How to Tell a True War Story,” the narrator, also named Tim O’Brien, tells the reader what war stories should and should not do, as he himself violates some of his own rules: “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it.”61 Tim identifies something true about war stories: they often trade ideas for craft, setting the war itself aside to describe how it

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looked and felt for the white soldier and later the white veteran. “Abstract words” are, Hemingway’s Frederic Henry declares in A Farewell to Arms, “obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers, the number of regiments and the dates.”62 The last thing war literature should do is encourage virtue, Tim adds. The worst thing it can do is instruct, he instructs. O’Brien’s novels don’t lack a politics, of course. No one’s do. The idea that white vets’ stories aren’t political, that they somehow rise above race and war, right and left, Black and white, allows them to seem more rational than other kinds of literature. O’Brien’s true war stories derive their truthfulness not from how they were written but from who wrote them. Scholars, critics, and the NEA take for granted that the concrete details of the soldier’s tour communicate something universal about the war, something that transcends ideas and attitudes. Tim concludes “How to Tell a True War Story” by admitting that, in recounting the last seconds of his comrade Curt Lemon’s life, he hasn’t told a war story at all but a love story. “A true war story is never about war,” he determines. “It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”63 O’Brien’s novels and short stories all suggest that war, for all the destruction it causes, is a heightened state of consciousness through which the soldier discovers transcendent truths about life, death, and love. The soldier learns in twelve months what it takes civilians a lifetime to learn. But no one listens to his stories, he argues. If civilians would listen to him, the veteran American would tell them about concrete facts that contain universal truths. From his side of what Morrison described as the diamond of American literature, he would light the whole.

the asianist presence Morrison never could shake the veteran writer. He seemed to follow her around. In November 1987, at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan, Larry Heinemann won his National Book Award for Fiction for Paco’s Story. The decision shocked the ballroom audience because the other nominees included Morrison and Philip Roth. Morrison received her nomination for Beloved, a novel that secured her status, Margaret Atwood declared in a Times review that fall, as the “pre-eminent American

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novelist” and that the Swedish Academy would cite when it awarded her the Nobel Prize.64 Morrison had invited three tables of friends and colleagues to the National Book Awards gala, and they, like the rest of the audience, watched in astonished silence as Heinemann took the stage to receive the bronze statue for his slender war novel. Heinemann shared their astonishment. “I didn’t come here expecting to win,” he admitted. “I came here for the party.”65 That winter, forty-eight Black writers signed a statement in the Times Book Review condemning the “oversight and harmful whimsy” that had left Morrison, the author of five acclaimed novels, without a National Book Award or a Pulitzer Prize to show for herself.66 Conservative and liberal critics reacted. Carol Iannone, the antifeminist writer, lamented that the statement had reduced book awards to “less a recognition of literary achievement than some official act of reparation.”67 Christopher Hitchens, the polemical cultural critic, dismissed it as a crude demand for Morrison to “be upgraded to prizewinner seating.”68 The fallout from the 1987 National Book Awards exhibited the worst of the culture wars, with critics from the right and the left coming to the defense of a white vet writer and the “merit” of his writing. Beloved won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—about which Iannone, Hitchens, and others had words—and in 2006, the Book Review named it the best work of American fiction of the last twenty-five years. (Roth’s American Pastoral came in tied for second.) Heinemann’s novel, all but forgotten, went out of print.69 Three years after Heinemann’s big night, Morrison delivered the Massey Lectures at Harvard, in which she described how white American writers had long drawn on ideas about Blackness—what she termed an “American Africanism”—to construct whiteness as Americanness.70 The young republic’s men of letters conceived the nation as white and free, she argued, by defining it against Blackness and bondage. Her subsequent book, Playing in the Dark, brought attention to the emerging field of critical whiteness studies, which peaked, and then declined, later that decade. Although Morrison addressed the writing of Willa Cather, Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain, not her own or Heinemann’s, her lectures cast the 1987 National Book Awards in a different light. Morrison invited her audience to think about the man who won that night, a white man who wrote about white men at war in Black vernacular English and believed, against all evidence, that no one wanted to hear war stories.71 “National literatures,” Morrison wrote in Playing in the Dark, “end up describing and inscribing what is really on

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the national mind. For the most part, the literature of the United States has taken as its concern the architecture of a new white man.”72 That holds true for Heinemann’s novel, which describes and inscribes a new new white man who, after twelve months in Vietnam, comes to know his whiteness as a form of difference. Heinemann’s novel invites a reading of the “Africanist presence” Morrison later identified in her Harvard lectures.73 Paco Sullivan, a wounded Vietnam vet, arrives in the town of Boone. (Heinemann never clarifies the state or region; Boone is Small Town, USA.) Knowing no one, Paco settles into a routine of washing dishes at a lunch counter while wrestling with memories of a firefight in Vietnam that killed all of his comrades and left him covered in scars and with a cane in his hand. The ghosts of the men who died narrate the novel and dictate Paco’s memories, “whisper in his ear, and give him something to think about—a dream or a reverie.”74 He cannot rid himself of his traumatic knowledge of the war, knowledge that, the narrators suggest, the nation has willed itself to forget. The ghosts wish to remember and restore that knowledge to the consciousness of the living in an act of what Morrison’s character Sethe calls “rememory.”75 Although Morrison didn’t introduce the term until 1987, Black writers and other writers of color had long embraced similar ideas about counternarratives and counterhistories. White men writing about war hadn’t because they didn’t need to. Few stories get told and then remembered more. Stories need to be forgotten before they can be rememoried. The men tell their war stories in a cool, conversational Black vernacular English. Their race is never mentioned, but Heinemann later described their slang as the language of “street folks” addressing the reader in “a jivey sort of way.”76 The narrators describe one of the men as “booming out some gibberish mumbo jumbo in his best amen-corner baritone and laughing that cool, nasty, grisly laugh of his, acting the jive fool for all those housecats.”77 Heinemann deracinated the men, casting them as deindividuated soldiers, and then racialized them, marking their language as Black. But their formal deracination hides their whiteness. The narrators address themselves to a man named James, which Heinemann said he borrowed from the custom of strangers on the street hailing each other as “Jim” or “Jack.” He decided to address a James instead, he said, because it seemed “more formal than street-corner patois” and alluded to all the men who shared the name, including Saint James the Less and Saint James the Great, six King Jameses, James Joyce, and Henry James and his brother William, as well as Jesse James, James Bowie, and James Dean.78 All white men. Heinemann didn’t

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mention, for example, James Baldwin, James Brown, or James Earl Jones. The list could, of course, go on. The white writer assumed a Black voice that he then “formalized” and directed to a long list of white men. His vets are Black and also so white. Heinemann encouraged the idea that being a soldier or veteran transcends all other forms of difference when it functions, in the years after Vietnam, as a reinvention of whiteness for an age of color blindness and multiculturalism. Take Paco’s name, for example. For the first two-thirds of the novel, the reader might assume Paco to be Latino. Hundreds of thousands of Latinos served in Vietnam, after all. Then, more than a hundred pages in, the narrators mention Paco’s last name, Sullivan, in an aside, without ever revealing how he identifies himself. Latino? Irish? White? All of the above? Paco Sullivan can be ethnic or not, Latino or white. He can model the army’s color blindness (he is American, nothing else) or the nation’s diverse character (he is a Latino soldier and therefore all the more American). Readers can choose to see what they like. Howard Winant, the sociologist and critical race theorist, has a term for this, borrowed from W. E. B. Du Bois: white racial dualism. “From the late 1960s on,” he writes, “white identity has been reinterpreted, rearticulated in a dualistic fashion: on the one hand, egalitarian, on the other hand, privileged; on the one hand, individualist and ‘color-blind,’ on the other hand, ‘normalized’ and besieged.”79 That dualism has allowed white men to think of themselves as somehow disadvantaged, as if their whiteness had, overnight, gone from benefiting them to hurting them, while holding on to the idea that they have no race at all. The veteran American offered white men a tool for articulating a racial dualism with which they could locate themselves within, rather than outside of or against, liberal multiculturalism. The white vet subsumes the service of his comrades of color but also the Southeast Asians with whom and against whom he fought. While overhearing his neighbor, a young female college student, having sex one night, Paco remembers raping a Vietnamese girl in the war. It causes him tremendous distress. He has tried to forget it. He “winces and squirms; his whole body jerks, but he cannot choose but remember.”80 The narrators recall how Paco and his brutal comrade Gallagher held the girl down in a thatched hut as a third man, Jonesy, tied her wrists behind her back. Each man took a turn raping the girl, and then Gallagher took her behind the hut and shot her in the forehead. The force of the gunshot covered the other men with the girl’s blood, an image that has haunted Paco ever since. He remembers, the narrators recount,

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“the spray of blood, the spatter of brick and bone chips on Gallagher and Jonesy and everyone, as thick as freckles, and how it sparkled. He remembers the quick, tingling itch of the spray, like a mist of rain blown through a porch screen.” The narrators describe the blood as if it had transferred the trauma of the girl’s murder to the men who carried it out, as if they now bore her suffering on their skin. For days afterward, Paco remembers, the men wore “brown bloodstains” on the fronts of their uniforms as a reminder of what they had done in a “moment of evil” after which they could “never live the same.”81 The scene, the climactic event of the novel, dramatizes not the girl’s loss of life but the soldiers’ loss of innocence. (Paco’s Story is not unusual. Oliver Stone’s Platoon and Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War, two films made as Heinemann’s star rose, also transform Vietnamese deaths into American traumas through images of Vietnamese blood on white skin.) Heinemann’s vets come to know their whiteness through Blackness and brownness (Black vernacular English, counterhistorical knowledge, Paco’s name) as well as Asianness (the Vietnamese girl’s blood). Morrison argued in Playing in the Dark that Cather, Hemingway, Poe, and Twain constructed whiteness as Americanness through an Africanist presence. O’Brien, Heinemann, and others construct whiteness as veteran Americanness through an Asianist presence. Heinemann’s novel gives the liberal white vet the first and last word on the war. Black, Latinx, and Southeast Asian lives get consumed within his. Listening to their stories would be redundant. In 1992, at the height of the culture wars, Hazel Carby, the Black feminist scholar, observed that the English department’s embrace of liberal multiculturalism had led to the inclusion of Black women writers like Zora Neale Hurston on reading lists at elite universities in the near-total absence of Black teachers and students, turning Black culture into a thing for white students to consume and treating whiteness as the unstated norm against which they would understand all forms of difference. Carby worried that racial liberals had traded redistribution for learning about other lives through reading. “Have we, as a society,” she asked, “successfully eliminated the desire for achieving integration through political agitation for civil rights and opted instead for knowing each other through cultural texts?”82 That turn from integration and agitation to culture and text may have been worse than Carby thought, as white students learned about others from white writers who claimed to know something about otherness. For the creative writing student sitting across the seminar table from O’Brien at Texas State, Heinemann at Columbia College, or Butler at

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Florida State, the goal had changed again. Write what you know. Write who you are. Now be who you write.

vietnam war literature In 2017, Maureen Ryan, an English professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, contributed an essay to the New York Times titled “The Long History of the Vietnam Novel.” Ryan wrote about David Halberstam, Larry Heinemann, Michael Herr, Karl Marlantes, and James Webb. She discussed lesser-known authors like John Del Vecchio and Ward Just. She mentioned Tim O’Brien four times. She insisted that readers revisit the earlier novels of James Crumley and William Eastlake as “harbingers” of the “rich, challenging stories to come.”83 Nowhere did Ryan acknowledge that writers other than white men had contributed to the literature of the war—writers like Viet Nguyen, whose own “Vietnam novel” had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the year before. The exclusion of Vietnamese American writers from Vietnam War literature began in the late 1980s, when the liberal white vet, responding to the resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees in the United States, reinvented himself as a bridge between white America, Vietnam, and the Vietnamese diaspora, Robert Olen Butler being the most flagrant, and celebrated, example. Butler, a bilingual vet, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1993 for his collection of short stories about Vietnamese refugees living in the Louisiana bayou, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. The author of six novels, Butler had written for years about white soldiers and vets in the third person. In Good Scent, he wrote about Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans in the first person. Critics received the stories as an astonishing achievement of imagination and understanding. George Packer, reviewing the stories for the Times, hailed them as “the work of a writer who is intoxicated by Vietnam and the Vietnamese, who loves what has alienated so many other Americans, including novelists.” Good Scent, he added, “goes a long way toward making the Vietnamese real.”84 With hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians having resettled in the United States in the years since the war, some writing their own novels and memoirs, somehow it fell to the white vet to make them real. Butler had graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1969 and had enlisted in the army. He knew he would be drafted if he didn’t. He had spent a year at Vietnamese language school and then done a tour as a translator and intelligence officer in Saigon, where, unlike most soldiers,

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he got to know Vietnamese. That is the work of counterintelligence, after all. For seven months, as he later described his tour, he wandered “steamy back alleys” at night, taking breaks to “crouch in the doorways” with locals and hear their stories.85 He considered himself a writer as much as an intelligence officer in Saigon, taking in the “intense, complex, primarily sensual experience” of Vietnam and Vietnamese and “getting under their skin” however he could.86 He could see little difference between his training at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his work in counterintelligence. The best intelligence officers acted like writers, he believed, and the best writers like intelligence officers. Butler didn’t see Good Scent as cultural theft but as a radical act of other-identification. War, he argued, forces us to confront the “central human issue” of where we draw the line around ourselves—whom we see as “us” and whom we see as “them.” For most, the Vietnam War caused that line to contract. “We thought the line was as wide as the whole world, which I guess grew out of the long-standing sense of America as a melting pot, open to all who would become part of us,” Butler mused in 2005. “But the melting pot also implied losing some of your own particularities, and now, the line is actually tighter. The current sense of finding who you are in an exclusive way by your gender, race, culture, ethnicity, religion, or whatever is the same larger question that Vietnam raised for us—where do you draw the line?”87 Butler suggested that the war had affected the nation as a whole as the antiracist and feminist movements had affected American Indians, Asian Americans, Black people, Latinos, and women. It had forced the nation to think about whom they identified with and whom they didn’t. But for Butler, the liberal vet, the war had moved his line further outward, until he identified himself not with fellow Americans but with fellow humans: “For me in Vietnam, in a personal way, the line was cast to the farthest horizon in a way that, in practical terms, had not effectively been done for me before.”88 The movements of the 1960s had led people to abandon the integrationist racial liberalism that Wallace Stegner had preached, but the Vietnam War, Butler argued, had led some, including himself, back to that earlier ideal. The war had given him the tools he needed to suture the “particularities” of the Vietnamese refugee to the “farthest horizon” of the white vet. He could reach the universal again, but now with a little color. In 1967, William Styron met harsh criticism for adopting the voice of a Black man. In 1992, Butler received praise for adopting the voices of Southeast Asian women and men. The war, critics agreed, belonged to him. He knew struggle. He could speak to others’ struggles. The minor-

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itization of the white vet resulted not in his marginalization but in his universalization, not in the elevation of those with whom he identified but in their erasure.89 In “Open Arms,” a Vietnamese refugee who served as a translator for the Australian army remembers a Viet Cong soldier who defected after allies killed his wife and two children. The refugee, now living in Louisiana, recalls how the Australians took the defector to a screening of a pornographic film and how the man, discovering the West to be as immoral as he had heard, killed one of the Australians and then himself. One man muses about another man’s last act. Both are Vietnamese. The refugee concludes that the defector found himself caught between two bad sides. One had killed his wife and children, and the other seemed no better. Butler, a white man, manages to write about the war without the white gaze, at least on the surface. But the first pages hail a white audience. The refugee introduces himself with detail after detail about the Vietnamese communities of Southeast Louisiana. “I live on South Mary Poppins Drive in Gretna, Louisiana, and since I speak perfect English, I am influential with the others who live here, the Westbank Vietnamese,” he begins. “We are all of us from South Vietnam. If you go across the bridge and into New Orleans and you take the interstate north and then turn on a highway named after a chef, you will come to the place called Versailles. There you will find the Vietnamese who are originally from the North. They are Catholics in Versailles. I am a Buddhist.”90 Most of the stories begin like this, with a bullet-point rundown of a refugee character’s life. Butler wrote Good Scent without the white gaze. But it is all white gaze, a book by and for the white liberal. Butler had tried to write “Open Arms” in 1974. He taught that first draft, “The Chiêu Hôì,” in his creative writing classes at Florida State, contrasting it with the final version he published in 1992. “The Chiêu Hôì” recounts the same events as “Open Arms,” but Butler told his students that it lacks “yearning.” It doesn’t work. The reason is that an American—himself, Butler admitted—narrates “The Chiêu Hôì” rather than a Vietnamese refugee in Louisiana. “In the bad story the narrator is a passive observer. It’s me,” he told his students. “What’s missing in every story where you’ve got a passive observer in the middle? The yearning. If the narrator in my bad story desires anything at all, it’s to show what a swell sensitive American guy he is. Which of course is not a yearning at all.”91 Butler’s white vet doesn’t yearn like the refugee. He lacks desire and gravitates toward omniscience, a mere observer rather than a yearning character. Butler’s revision, adopting the voice of

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a Vietnamese, allowed him to access what he considered the yearning of the refugee, who must want something that the white soldier has. America? Whiteness? Butler told his students that his younger self, the man who wrote “The Chiêu Hôì,” wanted to show readers that he was a good liberal. His older self did it. His identification with Vietnamese consolidated his omniscience, enlarging the white vet’s voice until it included all war stories, until it told the whole war. Most of Butler’s stories include white vets, but as the observed rather than the observer. In “Letters from My Father,” Fran, the daughter of a Vietnamese mother and an American father living in Lake Charles, discovers letters that her father wrote to the government years earlier, demanding that Washington arrange for his wife and daughter’s immigration to the United States. Fran has never been close with her father and longs for the man who wrote the letters she finds. “If this was a goddamn white woman, a Russian ballet dancer and her daughter, you people would have them on a plane in twenty-four hours,” her father wrote. “This is my wife and daughter. My daughter is so beautiful you can put her face on your dimes and quarters and no one could ever make change again in your goddamn country without stopping and saying, Oh my God, what a beautiful face.”92 “Letters from My Father” ends with Fran imagining what it would be like to confront her father and ask him to talk to her like the young vet who wrote the government about his beautiful Vietnamese daughter. Butler takes a familiar narrative—the Vietnam vet’s struggle to come to terms with life after war—and filters it through a Vietnamese narrator. Fran speaks, but her father is the protagonist. “Letters from My Father” is about his changes and his failings. Butler restaged Going after Cacciato, “How to Tell a True War Story,” Paco’s Story, and “The Chiêu Hôì” but imbued that familiar tale, as he would have told his students, with the yearning of a Vietnamese girl. Butler’s Vietnamese stories indicated a final turn in the career of the veteran American writer. In his creative writing classes, he didn’t instruct students to write what they knew, as Engle and Stegner advised, or write who they were, as O’Brien and Heinemann did. He told them instead to think of fiction writing as what he called “dreamstorming,” in which writers dream themselves into others’ bodies and lives. Butler encouraged his students to see writing not as intellectual but emotional labor. It was not about what you learned but what you felt. “What you remember comes out as journalism. What you forget goes into the compost of imagination,” he wrote in From Where You Dream, a book version of his graduate writing seminar. “Not only is your mind the

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enemy, not only is your will, your rational thinking, your analytic thinking the enemy, but your literal memories are also the enemy.”93 Stegner said something similar in the 1940s, complaining that “fiction in our time has declined upon journalism” and founding a creative writing program to lift it.94 But Butler went further. Aspiring writers shouldn’t report but also shouldn’t remember. They should dream. They should be who they write, whether woman or man, American or Vietnamese. That is what Butler himself had done. His own student fiction failed, he told his classes, because he held to his memories of the war when he should have been dreamstorming into the minds of others. Dreamstorming names the method by which the vet writer reclaimed the universal through the governance of human difference. It names the culmination of an institutional movement that began with Engle and Stegner, continued through O’Brien and Heinemann, and ended with a white vet offering his Vietnamese stories as a model for the next generation of creative writing students. But not all students would have the license to dreamstorm. Not all students could get away with writing across national and racial difference. Creative writing readied white men for a post–civil rights era in which they would need new identities to assert their dominance of American letters. It taught them to embrace “veteran” as their race and war as the formative event of their lives, to which they would return again and again, much as Toni Morrison, they said, returned to Blackness. (The fiction writer and Iraq War veteran Phil Klay, when asked if he would ever write about something other than war: “Nobody ever says, ‘Toni Morrison, oh, love it, amazing— being a black American—not a big enough subject—have you ever considered writing about something else?’ ”)95 Creative writing taught them that they could be minorities when they wanted (southern, working class, veteran) and deracinated Americans when they didn’t (the uniform, the army, the flag). White men maintained their hold on American literature through the administration of difference, including their own. This demanded a liberal’s feeling of defeat and a conservative’s belief that they could win again, a feeling and belief that converged in the careers of Bruce Springsteen and Sylvester Stallone, who demonstrated for white men that they didn’t need a tour in Vietnam to belong to veteran America. All could attend the reunion. All could be veteran Americans. All could dream of a racial comeback, and creative writing could teach them how to dream it.

chapter 3

Whiteness on the Edge of Town

Bruce Springsteen found his muse on a drugstore bookrack. Coming off the success of his 1980 double album The River and the international leg of a long tour with the E Street Band, Springsteen, needing to blow off some steam, decided to drive across the Southwest. Outside Phoenix, in the checkout aisle of a small-town drugstore, he discovered Ron Kovic’s 1976 memoir Born on the Fourth of July. That night, bunked down at a desert motel somewhere between Phoenix and Los Angeles, Springsteen read about Kovic’s life as a working-class Catholic kid from Long Island who had fought in Vietnam, returned in a wheelchair, and remade himself as an antiwar and veterans’ rights activist. The musician, himself a working-class Catholic kid from the tristate area, hung onto the book. He had it with him a few weeks later when, at a hotel on Sunset Boulevard, he ran into a young man in a wheelchair with shoulder-length hair and a beard. Springsteen and the man talked for a few minutes before the stranger introduced himself as Ron Kovic. “I said,” Springsteen remembered of the conversation, “‘You wouldn’t believe this. I just bought your book in a drugstore in Arizona and I just read it. It’s incredible.’”1 Springsteen and the vet hit it off. Kovic encouraged the songwriter’s budding activism, and his memoir gave Springsteen the idea for, and the title of, one of his biggest hits, “Born in the U.S.A.” Springsteen, although he didn’t serve in Vietnam himself, would refashion himself as the left-liberal voice of the wounded white warrior.

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That chance encounter launched Springsteen’s lifelong involvement with Vietnam vets. Kovic took him to a veterans’ center in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Venice, where they met vets struggling with addiction, homelessness, PTSD, and the memories of friends they had lost during the war and since. Springsteen felt uncomfortable around the men, an unusual feeling for him. “I’m pretty easy with people, but once at the center I didn’t know exactly how to respond or what to do,” he recalled. “West Coast shadows of the neighborhood faces I’d grown up with stared back into my eyes.”2 He identified in the men something of himself and his childhood friends, some of whom had died in Vietnam, including the drummer of his first band. Springsteen told Kovic that he wanted to do something for the vets, to bring greater attention to their sacrifice and suffering. Kovic introduced him to Bobby Muller, the founder of Vietnam Veterans of America. Muller, a former marine lieutenant who had also lost the use of his legs in Southeast Asia, had founded VVA in 1978 following the dissolution of Vietnam Veterans against the War. Muller felt that the men who served in World War II and the Korean War and now governed the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion had shunned him and his fellow Vietnam vets. VVA, offering younger vets an alternative to the VFW and the Legion, vowed that “never again will one generation of veterans abandon another.”3 But Muller struggled to attract the donors he needed to maintain the organization. When he met Springsteen in 1981, he thought he might have to shut VVA down. Springsteen had a solution. He took an existing tour date, a fifteen-thousand-seat show in Los Angeles, and turned it into a benefit concert for Vietnam Veterans of America. Springsteen kicked off the set with a few words about the vets but addressed to the nonvets in the audience. His road crew had installed risers at the side of the stage from which Vietnam vets, including some of the men Springsteen and Kovic had met in Venice, watched the show. Springsteen, wearing a white undershirt and a tattered denim jacket, asked the raucous crowd to listen. “Tonight we’re here for the men and the women who fought in the Vietnam War,” he told the audience. He acknowledged that he sometimes struggled to talk to vets, men who, with the smallest change of fortune, he could have been. “It’s like you’re walking down a dark street at night, and out of the corner of your eye you see somebody getting hurt or somebody getting hit in the dark alley, but you keep walking on,” he said. “Vietnam turned this whole country into that dark street, and unless we’re able to walk down those dark

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alleys and look into the eyes of the men and the women who are down there and the things that happened, we’re never going to be able to get home.”4 That darkness had been a theme of Springsteen’s last two records, Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River, and he attributed it in Los Angeles to the long shadow of the Vietnam War. If the nation was ever to move into the light, he thought, it would first have to confront the darkness to which the vet bore witness. Springsteen welcomed Muller on stage. “When the businesses haven’t come behind us and the political leaders have failed to rally behind us,” the VVA founder said, “it ultimately turns out to be the very symbol of our generation, rock and roll, that brings us together, and it is rock and roll that is going to provide the healing process that everybody needs.”5 The crowd cheered as Muller attested to how rock music had united his generation and could do so again in the name of national healing. He shouted, “Let’s rock and roll,” and the band launched into a Vietnamera classic, Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain.” Springsteen delivered a tireless three-hour set, turning to the vets on the stage-side risers to sing “The Ties That Bind.” The concert raised more than $100,000 and moved other musicians to hold their own benefit shows.6 Muller later said that “without Bruce Springsteen, there would be no Vietnam veterans movement.”7 That winter, Springsteen, still thinking about Kovic and Muller, recorded an acoustic demo of “Born in the U.S.A.” at his house on a fourtrack. The song describes a vet who returned home to a labor market that no longer needed him and a Veterans Administration that wouldn’t see him and who, after “ten years burning down the road,” still had nowhere to run and nowhere to go.8 When he recorded it with the E Street Band and released it on their 1984 Born in the U.S.A. album, it turned into one of the biggest hits of the 1980s. The down-on-his-luck vet would star in numerous Springsteen songs, including “Highway Patrolman,” “Shut Out the Light,” “Brothers under the Bridge,” “Galveston Bay,” “Youngstown,” and “The Wall.” From the day he met Kovic on Sunset Boulevard, Springsteen would cast the vet as the protagonist of the post-Vietnam white working class, and that marriage of the Vietnam vet and the white worker would allow the Right and the Left, against Springsteen’s better intentions, to reimagine the nation as an aggrieved white republic. President Ronald Reagan and his Democratic challenger in the 1984 election, Walter Mondale, would each claim the musician as their own. George Will, the conservative Washington Post columnist, would attend a Springsteen show and commend the left-liberal singer as a model of masculine

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nationalism, for how he, in his T-shirt and headband, “resembles Robert De Niro in the combat scenes of The Deer Hunter.”9 Springsteen wasn’t wrong to associate service in Vietnam with working-class labor. The government sent the same Americans into combat that it counted on to do the nation’s “dirty work” at home. Eighty percent of soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen came from working-class backgrounds. More than a hundred thousand American workers died in industrial accidents during the war. But arguments for reckoning with the war in Southeast Asia as a working-class war often reinforce the association between working class and white. “Though racial discrimination and racist attitudes surely persisted in the military,” the historian Christian Appy, for example, writes, “class was far more important than race in determining the overall social composition of American forces.” Appy, subordinating race to class and setting aside how they constitute one another, instead describes a deracinated “military minority” that may include Black and brown Americans but invites an image of humble, hard-working white men, the heroes of a Springsteen song.10 The refusal to do more than nod to the multiracial character of veteran America ensured that future calls for veterans’ rights would fuel not a labor movement but a white reunion, that a rock song about a vet “born down in a dead man’s town” would sound as good to Ronald Reagan and George Will as it did to Walter Mondale and Ron Kovic.11 The success of Born in the U.S.A. attracted a wider audience to a loose, emerging genre known as heartland rock. When Elvis Presley sang “Don’t Be Cruel” on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, rock and roll, a genre rooted in Black music whose earliest stars were Black, began a long transformation. It began to turn white. Soon most rock bands would be white and their fans even whiter. The conversion of rock and roll into a white genre culminated in the late 1970s with the emergence of heartland rock, with left-leaning white men singing short, straightforward songs about the trials of the white working class. Springsteen later described Elvis’s television debut as a world-historical event, “a moment of light” that brought “hope, sex, rhythm, excitement, possibility, a new way of seeing, of feeling, of thinking, of looking at your body, of combing your hair, of wearing your clothes, of moving and of living.” The six-year-old Bruce convinced his mother to take him to the local music store, where she rented him his first guitar. Springsteen identified in Presley the thrill of racial mixing (“a world of black and white,” of “blurring racial lines”), but “Don’t Be Cruel” also marked the beginning of the end of that mixing as integrated rock and roll turned into segregated rock.12

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Heartland rock combined straight rock and roll (no seven-minute songs or overlong guitar solos) with roadhouse and Americana. It told hard-luck stories about blue-collar life, like Raymond Carver minimalism set to music. “Old time rock and roll,” Bob Seger called it.13 The genre’s biggest stars—John Mellencamp, Tom Petty, Seger, and Springsteen—sang songs that lamented the struggles of white working-class men suffering through the offshoring of manufacturing and extractive industries, the stagnation of real wages, and the decline of trade unions. “Heartland rock isn’t traditional,” New York Times music critic Jon Pareles wrote in 1987, “it’s neotraditional, self-conscious about seeking roots; it’s not a local, homegrown style but one that wishes it were.”14 Mellencamp, Petty, Seger, and Springsteen came of age at the height of the Vietnam War, and, although none of them served, they all credited rock songs about or associated with the war as influences on their music. The men of heartland rock found their own white roots there, in the generation-defining war, transforming the Vietnam vet into the folk hero of white America. Springsteen and his right-wing foil, Sylvester Stallone, taught white men that they didn’t have to be veterans to feel as if they had lost something in Vietnam. Springsteen received a 4-F medical deferment in 1968. Stallone absconded to Switzerland from 1965 to 1967, then received student deferments, then a medical deferment. But in 1985, when Born in the U.S.A. outsold all other albums in the United States and Stallone raked in $300 million starring for a second time as army vet John Rambo, that didn’t matter. Rock and roll on the left and action films on the right had blurred the line between suffering in Vietnam and being white. Springsteen and Stallone could claim the former as the latter. Springsteen’s defeated vet addressed white men’s sense of racial loss. Stallone’s invincible vet addressed their desire for racial dominance. The liberal rock star and the conservative movie star converged in the mid-1980s to entertain white fantasies of a racial comeback, and the two men staged that comeback in the imagined heartland of a three-minute rock-and-roll song. The heartland of heartland rock constituted not a region but a race. It stretched from Florida to California and from Indiana to Texas. A regional form without a region, heartland rock did not belong to the Midwest, South, or East but to wherever salt-of-the-earth white men left to serve in Vietnam and wherever they returned to live on the dark edge of town. The veteran hero of heartland rock songs allowed white rock musicians and their fans, most of whom hadn’t fought in Southeast Asia and hadn’t lost their jobs to industrial offshoring, to imagine themselves at the heart and the edge of national life after civil rights and feminism. Although most

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heartland rockers held left-liberal beliefs, conservatives claimed them as their own for their stories of hardworking white Americans who had sacrificed for the nation and then, the Right argued, found themselves cast aside amid the antiracist, feminist, and antiwar movements. Heartland rock musicians wrote songs that lent themselves to white nostalgia but also labored, with some success, to counter that narrative. George Lipsitz, the sociologist and critical race theorist, writes that rock and roll “is indeed a site for the iteration and reiteration of dominant values” but that “the very sites where ruling ideologies can be articulated are also the places where they can be disarticulated.”15 From the soundtrack of the Vietnam War to the soundtrack of the new nationalism, from “Who’ll Stop the Rain” to “Born in the U.S.A.,” rock and roll chronicles the articulation of a new form of whiteness through songs about defeat in Vietnam and defeatedness at home.

the soundtrack of vietnam The rise of rock and roll coincided with the escalation of the war in Southeast Asia. Novelists and filmmakers bound them together, with 1960s rock music—Credence, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones—woven throughout Vietnam War literature and film. “Out on the street I couldn’t tell the Vietnam veterans from the rock and roll veterans,” Michael Herr wrote in Dispatches, which the Times hailed in 1977 as the best book about the war. “The Sixties had made so many casualties, its war and its music had run power off the same circuit for so long they didn’t even have to fuse.”16 Herr, with his fragmented, sometimes hallucinogenic vignettes, treated rock and roll as content but also took from it a form and an attitude. He wrote a rock-and-roll book about what he considered a rockand-roll war. The music gave soldiers a medium through which they could, he suggested, confront the thin line dividing life from death, elation from annihilation. “What I’d thought of as two obsessions, were really only one,” Herr wrote.17 Life and death, war and rock. The Pentagon tried to harness the music to raise morale, broadcasting rock and roll across the Armed Forces Vietnam Network and organizing soldiers into rock bands to entertain their comrades.18 Rock culture flourished in Southeast Asia, and it followed the soldiers home. The soundtrack of the Vietnam War resurfaced as the soundtrack of the Vietnam War movie. Herr himself would bring his rock-and-roll writing to two of the biggest war films of the 1970s and 1980s, contributing the voice-overs to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and

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cowriting Full Metal Jacket with Stanley Kubrick and the novelist Gustav Hasford. The 1978 Nick Nolte vehicle Who’ll Stop the Rain borrowed the title of the Creedence song that Springsteen later sang at his veterans benefit. The meaning of that rock-and-roll soundtrack can be difficult to locate, sometimes celebrating the libidinal gratification of violence, sometimes driving resistance to it.19 Take Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, for example. The Doors’ eerie song “The End” runs for minutes in the first scene, in which army officer Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) wrecks his hotel room in a drunken rage, and again in the last, in which he assassinates the megalomaniacal colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando) with a machete. But the film also shows the Black gunner’s mate Tyrone Miller (Laurence Fishburne) grooving to the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in a moment of care-free fun.20 Rock signals violence and subversion, rage and fun, and unsettles racial meaning, with the Black sailor dancing to the Stones rather than to Otis Redding’s or Aretha Franklin’s soul covers of “Satisfaction.” It didn’t take long for the rock soundtrack to become a cliché. In the 2005 Gulf War film Jarhead, Anthony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal), an enlisted marine, hears someone blasting the Doors’ “Break on Through (to the Other Side)” and grumbles, “That’s Vietnam music, man. Can’t we get our own fucking music?”21 For Swofford, rock and roll meant one thing: Vietnam. Emerging from the South in the 1940s and 1950s, rock and roll wedded genres identified with Black culture (R&B, blues) to genres associated with rural white life (folk, western swing). Black musicians starred, and they attracted Black and white audiences. When asked his ambition as a high school senior in Hibbing, Minnesota, in the late 1950s, Robert Zimmerman, the future Bob Dylan, answered “to join the band of Little Richard.”22 That racial origin soon got lost as rock and roll moved to the suburbs. The introduction of rock criticism in the mid- to late 1960s fortified that move as Crawdaddy, Creem, and Rolling Stone celebrated white musicians as the genre’s defining acts. Jack Hamilton, the cultural historian and music critic, attributes the whitening of rock and roll to what he calls “rock’s ideology of authenticity” in which critics accused Black rockers of selling out, of acting white, while celebrating white musicians who dabbled in Black music as all the more authentic for it. “Playing and consuming rock music offered new ways into being a ‘real’ white person—most often a white man—and in many quarters being a white man had become a precondition for making ‘real’ rock music,” Hamilton writes.23 Racial transgression made white musicians more real, but it made Black musicians, critics suggested, something other than

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themselves, naturalizing and obscuring the whiteness of rock. When iconoclastic rock critic Lester Bangs condemned fans of the East Village’s new wave scene as “white noise supremacists” and music critics Sasha Frere-Jones and Sarah Sahim remarked on the whiteness of indie rock, others denounced them for what amounted to mere statements of fact.24 The career of Jimi Hendrix illustrates the racial transformation of rock and roll. Hendrix died in 1970 at the age of twenty-seven. The day after his death, the Boston Globe described Hendrix as “a black man in the alien world of rock.”25 Margo Jefferson, the Black cultural critic, later remembered, “The night Jimi died I dreamed this was the latest step in a plot being designed to eliminate blacks from rock music so that it may be recorded in history as a creation of whites.”26 Black musicians had gone from creators of the world of rock to aliens in it, at least in the minds of white rock critics, who now hailed Hendrix as a one-of-a-kind Black virtuoso. Hendrix had served in the 101st Airborne Division before the escalation of the Vietnam War, and Americans in Southeast Asia, Black and white, identified with his music. Roger Steffens, a white veteran of the war, remembered that for him and other Vietnam vets Hendrix’s music “was the soundtrack of the war; and if you tried to communicate that to people [back in the United States], you couldn’t make them understand.”27 Herr described hearing Hendrix for the first time in Vietnam as a kind of transcendent encounter, recalling how a Black marine had introduced him to Hendrix’s “Fire” as they hunched behind a wall amid a firefight. “That was the first time I heard Jimi Hendrix, but in a war where a lot of people talked about Aretha’s ‘Satisfaction’ the way other people speak of Brahms’ Fourth, it was more than a story; it was Credentials,” Herr wrote.28 Although a Black marine introduced him to Hendrix, Herr described knowledge of the Black guitarist’s music as authenticating for the white soldier, marine, sailor, or airman. It gave him credentials as a real vet because he, as Steffens suggested, could hear something in Hendrix’s music that nonvets couldn’t, something of the struggle for survival under hostile conditions. The whitening of the war in literature and film and the whitening of rock converged in allowing white men to see themselves as minorities in their own right, veteran Americans who had received their credentials through encounters with Blackness on the ground and on the radio. Heartland rock all but eradicated the genre’s former racial transgressions. White men dressed like mechanics sang songs about girls, cars, and the struggles of the white working class. When Tom Petty and the

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Heartbreakers released their breakout third album, Damn the Torpedoes, in the late 1970s, Rolling Stone commended the band for discarding the “black leather and bombast” they had flirted with on earlier records. The album instead mined the “solid veins” of classic rock and roll, meaning the Band and the Stones, and revitalized rock with “downto-earth” songwriting and a “heartland twang” that recalled “old stuff too fine to waste” and delivered a “convincing slice of American gothic.”29 Damn the Torpedoes constituted classic rock not because it returned to the genre’s origins but because it constructed white origins— the Band, the Stones, the heartland twang—from a mixed genre. The rise of heartland rock coincided with the decline of disco, a genre whose stars included Black, Latinx, women, gay, and trans artists. Rolling Stone hailed the Heartbreakers as rock saviors a few months after Chicago radio host Steve Dahl staged his infamous Disco Demolition Night between games of a baseball doubleheader at Comiskey Park. Dahl, dressed in a helmet and army fatigues, burned disco records in center field to chants of “Disco sucks!” Young white men rushed out of the stands and trashed the field. Chicago PD arrived in riot gear, and the host White Sox had to forfeit the second game. Critics condemned Disco Demolition Night as anti-Black, antiwoman, and antigay.30 And it was. But the young white men on the field also rioted, they said, for rock, and, if Dahl’s costume can be taken as an indicator, that had something to do with being for vets. “Our goal in the seventies was to destroy disco,” Petty himself remembered of that time. “We saw that as a terrible menace to music.”31 The young white men in Chicago identified disco as a menace not to music but to their racial, gender, and sexual identities, which they, with a nudge from literature, film, and music, had conflated with rock and war. Most heartland rock songs told hard-luck stories of white workingclass men, often Vietnam vets, that conservatives and liberals could bend to their beliefs. Conservatives thought that the antiracist and feminist movements had undermined the war effort, shaking national confidence and bringing about an economic recession and a social malaise. Liberals argued that the war had levied an undue burden on a white working class that fought and died in Vietnam while the children of the elites who orchestrated the war received deferrals and earned graduate degrees. When they listened to Springsteen, conservatives heard a national grievance. Liberals heard a class lament. Conservatives heard a testament to white Christian values. Liberals heard an ode to white labor. The identification of labor with whiteness and veterans’ rights was nothing new. From the turn of the nineteenth century to the Civil War,

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white workers, as the Marxist historian David Roediger shows, assumed white racial identities to differentiate themselves from enslaved Black people, alleviating fears about the unfreedom of wage labor. When they united behind the banner “free labor,” they meant “not Black.” Free labor meant white labor. Roediger sees the end of the Civil War as a moment at which whiteness could have been “swept away,” when white workers could have embraced what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “gift of Black folk” to all laboring people. What did they do instead? White laborers reinvested the wages of whiteness in the wages of veteran-ness. “White workers continued to observe war and emancipation through a lens of race,” Roediger writes, “and were often loath to credit Black military activity and Black flight from slavery as contributing to the war effort for fear this meant minimizing the ‘white’ role.”32 The transformation of the soundtrack of the Vietnam War into the soundtrack of post–civil rights white America signaled another gift refused. Bobbie Ann Mason’s 1985 novel In Country reifies the association of rock with a masculine knowledge of war. Samantha Hughes, a white seventeen-year-old from the rural South whose father died before her birth in Vietnam, wants to learn about him, and she looks not to her uncle, a vet, for answers but to heartland rock: “She turned the radio on, hoping to hear Bruce Springsteen. Somehow there was a secret knowledge in his songs, as though he knew exactly what she was feeling.”33 Sam believes that the war holds the secret to what her father did and how he died but also who he was, his white working-class self, and that perhaps Bruce can share that secret with her. The soundtrack of the Vietnam War had reemerged as the soundtrack of veteran America. It had turned white, trading Hendrix for Springsteen, “Fire” for “Born in the U.S.A.” It had moved from Southeast Asia to the heartland.

songs from the heartland With heartland rock, critics said, the genre had gotten clean, gone straight. No more trashed hotel rooms or heroin overdoses. Fans admired Mellencamp, Petty, Seger, and Springsteen not for their glamourous lives but for the image of ordinariness they constructed. If they had nice clothes, and they did, they didn’t wear them on stage. If they did drugs, and they did, they didn’t talk about it. Robert Bly, the men’s rights activist, described the men of the 1960s and 1970s as “soft” for “welcoming their own ‘feminine’ consciousness,” a consciousness that he traced to the antiwar slogan “Women say yes to men who say no.” Women told men to dodge the

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draft, and they listened, resulting, Bly believed, in a “receptive maleness” that had caved to the demands of the feminist and antiwar movements.34 The 1980s, the decade in which Springsteen dominated rock radio, brought a transition from the soft bodies that Bly associated with feminists and draft dodgers to the hard bodies that Reagan embraced as a sign of the nation’s restored strength, determination, and will. Heartland rock celebrated the hard bodies of the new nationalism.35 Springsteen’s own transformation from a thin, long-haired drifter on the Born to Run Tour in the mid-1970s to a muscular, clean-cut hunk on the Born in the U.S.A. Tour reflected the masculine ideal of the Reagan administration. When asked what attracted her to Springsteen’s music, a fifteen-year-old high school student at a 1985 show said, “He’s a fox! He’s down-to-earth. He’s so cool, he’s not like any other rock star. He acts normal. Prince overdresses; he don’t dress like a normal person. Bruce’ll wear jeans; he don’t care.” She had seen images of Springsteen from the 1970s “when he wasn’t that cute,” she added. “I guess singing helped him.” A twenty-year-old woman at the same show agreed, declaring, “He’s the most patriotic guy around. I feel patriotic—it’s a real turn-around from the hippie days.”36 Heartland rock had remade rock and roll into a masculine and patriotic genre. It made it white and gender normative, unlike Prince. Bob Seger may have been the first heartland rocker. The singer-songwriter from Ann Arbor, Michigan, had recorded ten studio albums before he released his biggest success, Against the Wind, which went to number one on the albums chart, unseating Pink Floyd’s The Wall, in 1980. John Mellencamp remembered hearing Seger for the first time in the late 1960s as a teenager cruising around his Indiana hometown in a friend’s car. “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” came on the radio. “Who the fuck is this guy?” Mellencamp asked his friend. He made him kill the engine so they wouldn’t miss the radio host announce the artist’s name. “If there really is such a thing as Midwest Rock,” Mellencamp said, “it started for me that night.”37 Seger invented the blend of rock and roll, roadhouse, Americana, and working-class themes that would later receive the name heartland rock. His 1968 single “2 + 2 = ?” describes a “simple-minded guy” who, although he considers himself “no rebel,” wants answers for a childhood friend “buried in the mud over foreign jungle land.”38 The musician scored one of his most enduring hits in 1978, right before heartland rock took off, with “Old Time Rock and Roll,” in which he howls, “Don’t try to take me to a disco / You’ll never even get me out

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on the floor” and longs to “reminisce about the days of old” with a soul-soothing, “old time” rock song.39 Seger modeled for younger musicians how they could fashion themselves as roots rockers without acknowledging that the genre had Black roots or that Black, Latinx, women, gay, and trans disco artists had as much claim to it as them. Seger built a regional following in the 1960s as a Detroit artist. He wrote and sang “Midwest rock” in the Midwest. The term didn’t stick, though, because most of the musicians he influenced didn’t come from the Midwest. Their heartland included Steve Earle’s Texas, John Fogerty’s California, and Tom Petty’s Florida. The genre—that imagined heartland—gave white singer-songwriters a foothold in an age of cultural difference, allowing them to write songs not as white men but as voices of a region, of the white working class, or of the Vietnam vet who embodied the struggles of that region and that class. The antiracist and feminist movements incited a crisis of self-knowledge for white men—who could they be if not white, if not “the man”?—and the heartland offered a resolution, for rock musicians and their fans, wherever they lived. Of the genre, Pareles wrote at the time, “The personal is apolitical. Songs tell the stories matter-of-factly; they’re more like case histories, or journalism, than protest songs.” The mood, not the message, defined heartland rock, he suggested. “Like the characters they write about, heartland rockers don’t come up with solutions; they seemed trapped, overwhelmed by crises.”40 But Pareles perhaps couldn’t have seen then how that overwhelming feeling of loss carried a subtle racial message, suggesting, at a time of civil rights rollback, that white people also had it bad and that they had it bad because they had worn the uniform while people of color and women had marched and lobbied for rights, reform, and revolution. The nostalgia of the music looked back on a time before the oil crisis, stagflation, and large-scale union busting but also before civil rights, feminism, and the Vietnam War. Critics didn’t notice the white racial interests embedded in heartland rock because it held country music, a genre identified with rural white life and often condemned as bigoted, at arm’s length, often defining itself against it. The assertion “I’ll listen to anything but country,” the musicologist and queer theorist Nadine Hubbs observes, functioned after the 1970s to construct the white working class as “America’s perpetual bigot class” and the white middle class as broadminded, not acting through or on behalf of racial interests.41 More than a few Seger fans would have declared, “I’ll listen to anything but country.” White suburban fans could

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insist that they, unlike country fans, didn’t listen with their race. Some invented new genres to sustain the distinction. Steve Earle didn’t sing country, they might say, but outlaw country, alternative country, folk rock, roots rock, heartland rock. Rock critics often made that distinction for their readers. Dave Marsh, the author of two Springsteen biographies, attributed the “pretty conservative people” in the audience at some Bruce shows to a lack of variation in the drum and bass lines. Conservative fans, he argued, missed how Springsteen “draws on a musical history developed primarily among African Americans” and “sings more often than not in a voice derived from blues, R&B, soul and gospel.”42 Marsh, an admitted hagiographer, didn’t think conservatives got Springsteen’s music, that they confused him, a soul man, for a country singer. Marsh heard what he wanted on a Springsteen record. Conservative fans heard what they wanted. Not all heartland rock musicians feigned color blindness. Mellencamp, for example, made interracial love a theme of his music videos in the 1980s. The video for “Cherry Bomb” showed a Black man and a white woman holding each other, with the singer dancing in the background. The Ku Klux Klan condemned it, warning Mellencamp that if he didn’t cancel a date in Atlanta he “wouldn’t make it out alive.”43 (He didn’t cancel the show and lived.) Mellencamp shot the video for “Paper in Fire” in a rural Black neighborhood outside Savannah, Georgia, where he sang and danced with the local residents. On set, he told an interviewer that another film crew had “dressed a block of this lane to look like a shambled Vietnamese village! Talk about lending insult to injury.” He lamented that corporations had abandoned “John Doe” to “let America become a third-world country economically if it benefits them.”44 Vietnam stood, in his mind, as a sign of all that had gone wrong in the United States, turning it into the “insult” of a third-world village. The New York Times declared him a “rebel with a cause.”45 Heartland rockers crafted choruses that, whatever the antiracist or antiwar content of the verses, felt like national affirmations. Reagan could listen to the chorus of Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” in 1984 and hear a celebration of his administration’s flag-waving nationalism. Mondale could listen to the verses and hear a denunciation of the Reagan administration’s anticommunist militarism and antilabor neoliberalism. The president’s campaign staff also sought the rights to Mellencamp’s hit single “Pink Houses,” a song that, like “Born in the U.S.A.,” mourns a waning American dream but delivers a chorus that, with some

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careful editing, validates that dream. “Ain’t that America, home of the free,” Mellencamp sings. “Little pink houses for you and me.”46 That is all most listeners know of the song. But the chorus carries an ironic twist when heard as a retort to the singer’s vignettes about segregation (a town so divided that black cats live in Black neighborhoods) and drug abuse (a man whose mounting bills lead him to take “the pills that kill”). “Pink Houses” laments the decline of American manufacturing and the small towns it sustained and a nation that, after civil rights, remains as segregated as ever. Ain’t that America. Mellencamp turned down the Reagan campaign’s offer, stating, “I couldn’t bear getting involved that way with any politician, least of all Reagan.”47 He would never vote for Reagan, but, as the president’s staffers knew, his fans might because the nostalgia of “Pink Houses” shared something with their “morning in America” ad campaign: a backward-looking longing for a white American dream. The Vietnam vet served, in the heartland rock songbook, as a shorthand for that lost dream. Petty discovered that with his 1981 song “The Criminal Kind.” The Heartbreakers front man, who moved with his band from Florida to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, had grown disillusioned with the LA movie and music businesses and with the gang violence he heard about night after night on the evening news. “You see the poverty creates a lot of [gun violence], then on the other hand you see the general loons that have everything in the world and are still blowin’ each other away,” Petty said of Los Angeles at the time.48 He read about a white Vietnam vet suffering from an undiagnosed illness, perhaps related to Agent Orange, who, after being denied care at the VA, drove his car into the front of a clinic, killing himself. Petty decided to write a song about Los Angeles with the vet as his protagonist. “They’re callin’ you a sickness, disease of the mind / Man, what you gonna do? You’re the criminal kind,” he sings.49 Petty, who had not served in the war, identified with the vet whose invisible wounds had left him unmoored and suicidal. He didn’t see himself in the fanciful images of white affluence at the movie theater or in the distorted images of Black and Latinx violence on the news. What, Petty asked, of the white worker? Where did his former self—a white working-class kid without a college education, someone who could have landed on the front lines in Vietnam—go? He found in the Vietnam vet a signifier of white working-class alienation and erasure, of having been left behind, turned into the criminal kind. The songwriter, far from working class in 1981, described the man as neither Black nor white but a veteran American caught in the middle, forgotten.

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songs from the edge of town When Jon Pareles, the Times critic, wrote an article about heartland rock in 1987, it ran under the title “Bruce’s Children.”50 Springsteen had not invented heartland rock, but his music, for most critics and fans, defined it. He achieved his first commercial success in 1975 with his third studio album with the E Street Band, Born to Run. Critics had admired their first two records, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, but they didn’t sell. Born to Run, after Columbia Records invested close to $300,000 in advertising, did. Time declared Springsteen “Rock’s New Sensation.”51 Critics hailed Born to Run as the first great rock album of the 1970s, an album that, Los Angeles Times music critic Robert Hilburn wrote, stood as “the purest glimpse of the passion and power of rock ’n’ roll in nearly a decade.”52 Not yet the bard of a beleaguered white working class, Springsteen sang songs about girls and cars, about getting out of dead-end towns and never going back. On “Thunder Road,” the album’s first track, Springsteen invites Mary to climb into his car, telling her, “It’s a town full of losers / And I’m pulling out of here to win.”53 On the title song, he assures another girl—Wendy, this time—“Together we could break this trap / We’ll run till we drop, baby, we’ll never go back.”54 His characters, young white working-class men, do not see limitations ahead, believing that, with a girl and a car, they can still cut the ties that bind and run. On his next album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen changed course. A legal battle with his former manager had stalled the recording of his fourth record and left the singer with time to kill. He returned to his hometown, where he found his childhood friends living much like their mothers and fathers had but with less—less work, lower wages, less confidence in the future. Darkness on the Edge of Town tells their stories, stories not about getting out but about settling down in a declining small town. “The characters on the new album ain’t kids, they’re older—you been beat, you been hurt,” Springsteen said on the Darkness Tour. “They throw dirt on you all your life, and some people get buried so deep in the dirt that they’ll never get out. The album’s about people who will never admit that they’re buried that deep.”55 The album launched the musician’s long transition from Born to Run to Born in the U.S.A., from songs about an imagined elsewhere to a tough-toswallow here and now. “On a rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert / I pick up my money and head back into town,” he sings on “The Promised Land,” reversing the direction of the characters in “Thunder Road”

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and “Born to Run.” The man knows he can’t run. He works in his father’s garage and, although he believes in a promised land, worries that he might “explode and tear this town apart.”56 On the title track, a young man reckons with financial ruin and the end of his marriage. “Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost / I’ll be there and I’ll pay the cost,” Springsteen sings. The man made sacrifices to achieve the dream on which he had been raised. But that dream never materialized, leaving him alone and wanting in the “darkness on the edge of town.”57 The album showed Springsteen’s growing social consciousness. His characters had not been born to run, he discovered, but born to labor in their fathers’ struggling factories and mines, factories and mines that could close tomorrow. His white worker, buried in debt, had resigned himself to less after civil rights, feminism, and the Vietnam War, to living his own kind of minoritized life on the dark edge of the nation. The songwriter’s newfound class consciousness grew out of his immersion in American literature and film. With encouragement from his new manager, Jon Landau, Springsteen read the fiction of Flannery O’Connor and John Steinbeck and watched the films of John Ford. He devoured histories that had bored him as a high school student. On the Darkness Tour, Springsteen read Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager’s 1942 Pocket History of the United States of America, a book that gave him new insight into what it meant—for nationalist historians Nevins and Commager at least—to be an American. He recommended the book to fans. “I started reading this book, [Pocket] History of the United States, and it seemed that things weren’t the way they were meant to be—like the way my old man was living, and his old man, and the life that was waiting for me—that wasn’t the original idea,” he said at one show.58 At another, he credited Nevins and Commager with teaching him to see how social class had defined and limited his father’s and grandfather’s lives. The ideals on which the nation had been founded, he told the audience, “got real corrupted. And as I read through the book and I got up into the Sixties and Seventies. . . . In the Seventies I was in my twenties and I was in my teens in the Sixties, but I felt like I’d been sleepin’ all the time through all those years. ’Cause I didn’t know what was going on; I didn’t know what the government I live under was doing.”59 Through O’Connor, Steinbeck, Ford, and Nevins and Commager, Springsteen began to see himself as an artist of the white working class, a white working class that, he believed, the government, distorting the ideals of which Nevins and Commager wrote, had abandoned in the 1960s and 1970s.

Bruce Springsteen at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco in 1978. Photograph reproduced by permission from Richard McCaffrey.

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Springsteen certified his working-class bona fides in 1982 with the acoustic album Nebraska. The album’s ten songs tell stories of bluecollar outsiders and criminals, men who, owing to bad luck and bad choices, face insurmountable obstacles to the good life they had heard so much about. Springsteen recorded a demo of the entire album one night on an at-home four-track recorder, as well as five songs that didn’t make the cut, including “Born in the U.S.A.” After an unsuccessful recording session with the E Street Band, Springsteen and Landau decided to master the original demo and take it to Columbia. The record label released Nebraska as Springsteen’s first solo album. The lo-fi songs follow white working-class men reminiscent of characters from a Steinbeck novel or a Woody Guthrie song. Landau had given Springsteen a book about Guthrie, Joe Klein’s Woody Guthrie: A Life, on The River Tour, after which Springsteen added Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” to his set. Reading about Guthrie’s life changed Springsteen’s sense of his role as a songwriter. He could see himself in the stories Guthrie told, stories about common men with nothing more to their names than a union card and a wedding coat. The musician sought to tell his own folk tales on Nebraska. On “Johnny 99,” he sings about a laid-off autoworker who gets drunk and shoots a night clerk. When a judge sentences him to ninety-nine years behind bars, the man, asking for the death sentence (“I’d be better off dead”), tells him about his insurmountable debt, how the bank threatened to take his house: “Now I ain’t saying that makes me an innocent man / But it was more than all this that put that gun in my hand.”60 The song, deviating from the cut-and-run fantasies of “Thunder Road” and “Born to Run,” identifies the structural conditions that hemmed the man in, setting him on a course that he tried to but couldn’t get off. He may have shot the clerk, but the auto manufacturer and bank deserve some of the blame. Springsteen borrowed the idea for the song from Julius Daniels’s 1927 recording of “99 Year Blues,” in which a Black man receives ninety-nine years under the “poor-boy law,” rewriting it so that a white man now finds the odds stacked against him.61 What did I do, the man asks, to be so white and blue? Guthrie wrote songs about change and unionism. Springsteen wrote songs about stagnation and isolation. His characters, having nowhere to turn, looked backward to an imagined good life. Springsteen descended from a tradition of white working-class artists who, one historian argues, adhered to Walt Whitman’s counsel to be “radical but not too damn radical.”62 He denounced the self-interest and greed of government and business on moral rather than material grounds. He

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didn’t call for a revolution but for a decent life for decent folks. Springsteen, radical but not too damn radical, committed but not too committed, struggled to articulate what that kind of life might look like in the future and how it could be achieved. Springsteen imagined a nation far darker than Guthrie’s. On “Highway Patrolman,” Sergeant Joe Roberts looks out for his younger brother, Franky, a troubled Vietnam vet. When Franky beats a man to death, Joe trails him to the Canadian border and watches his brother’s Buick as it crosses over, leaving the United States for good. Springsteen can’t, in one of his first songs about a vet, imagine a future for him in the nation to which he returned. Songs about hard times detached from a message, Springsteen would learn, invited the Right and the Left to hear in them what they wanted. When he listened to Guthrie on The River Tour, he heard himself in the folk songs and thought he could build on that identification. “Here was music that emotionally described a life I recognized, my life, the life of my family and neighbors. Here was where I wanted to make my stand musically and search for my own questions and answers,” he remembered of discovering Guthrie’s music. “My music would be a music of identity.”63 He wanted to write music that said something about himself and where he came from and in which others could, as he had with Guthrie’s, see themselves and where they came from. With Nebraska, he did. But the communal self that emerged—white, lost, desolate—didn’t know what it wanted, inviting others to decide how and for what it would be used. When critics addressed Springsteen’s whiteness, and they didn’t often, they talked about Clarence Clemons, the saxophonist of the E Street Band. Bruce biographer Peter Ames Carlin describes Springsteen and Clemons on stage as “the brilliant white boy and his dark-skinned shaman” and “the essence of e pluribus unum, as filtered through the unity of rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues.”64 The rock critic Greil Marcus celebrated the white singer and the Black saxophonist on The River Tour as the last bastion of interracial rock and roll.65 That idea of the two men as icons of integrated rock began with the cover art for the Born to Run album. The front of the record shows Springsteen dressed in leather and denim with a natural-wood Fender slung over his shoulder. He wears an Elvis button and leans on someone’s shoulder. The back of the record reveals that the shoulder belongs to Clemons, dressed in a broad-brimmed hat and blowing on his horn. “When the cover is closed, the album front is a very charming photo of a young, white, punk rock ’n’ roller,” Springsteen wrote in his memoir, titled, of course, Born to Run. “But when it opens, a band is born and a tall tale

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Bruce Springsteen and Clarence Clemons at the Oakland Coliseum in 1984. Photograph reproduced by permission from Richard McCaffrey.

begins. . . . The cover was filled with the subtle mystery of race.”66 Clemons’s role on stage, a towering Black man beside the white front man, stood for conservative fans as a testament to the band’s color blindness and for liberal fans as an image of multiculturalism. Clemons, the Black sidekick, reinforces and authenticates Springsteen’s workingclass whiteness, whether a conservative or a liberal antiracist whiteness. Like the protagonist of a Vietnam War film, he shows himself to be a genuine white man through a bond with his Black comrade.67

the rambo of rock Springsteen reached a new audience with his seventh studio album, Born in the U.S.A., in 1984. With Reagan seeking a second term and Los Angeles hosting the Summer Games, the first held in the United States since 1932, he couldn’t have timed an album titled Born in the U.S.A. (and with a flag and his butt on the cover) better. Thanks to the growth of countdown radio shows, a single album in the mid-1980s could sometimes generate four, five, or six charting singles. Record labels, no longer satisfied with gold records with one or two hits, sought blockbusters, funneling marketing resources into a big album rather

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than a wider range of records that might achieve moderate success. That included Columbia Records, and Born in the U.S.A. benefited, delivering seven enormous hits, lodging itself on the albums chart for eighty-four consecutive weeks, and outselling career-defining records from Madonna, Prince, and Tina Turner. The Born in the U.S.A. Tour attracted crowds that included teenagers and their dads, college students and their teachers, conservatives and liberals. Springsteen’s audience grew and changed, but one thing remained the same. “I wish I could say that the ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ tour was about bringing people together and leave it there. But it was really about bringing white people together,” music historian Craig Werner admits. “For all his grounding in gospel and soul vocal styles, for all that Clarence Clemons’s saxophone gave the E Street Band a Memphis drive, for all the James Brown–level intensity he put into his shows, Springsteen’s sound was clearly grounded in a rock-and-roll tradition that was increasingly being seen, heard, and marketed as a white thing.”68 Critics and fans often remarked, with some embarrassment and almost no exaggeration, that the band on stage at shows included more Black people—one, Clemons— than the audience. Rock and roll had, of course, been a white thing for some time. But Born in the U.S.A. made it a white American thing. More than Columbia Records looked to cash in on Springsteen’s allAmerican fame. With election season in full swing, George Will, the Washington Post columnist and Reagan booster and sometimes adviser, attended a show in the Washington suburbs. He had received an invitation from drummer Max Weinberg and his wife, fans of This Week with David Brinkley, on which Will served as a regular roundtable commentator. Arriving straight from the Republican National Convention in Dallas, the columnist wore a blazer and bowtie. He met Springsteen and the band backstage and left at intermission. Will wrote about the show in a column titled “Bruce Springsteen’s U.S.A.” (or “Yankee Doodle Springsteen” in some editions) in which he lauded the musician as a “wholesome cultural portent” and “blue-collar troubadour”—an icon of a resurgent masculine nationalism. “I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics, if any, but flags get waved at his concerts while he sings songs about hard times,” Will wrote. “He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seem punctuated by a grand cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ ”69 The columnist hailed Springsteen’s work ethic, describing how his shows often stretched to three or four hours—not that Will would have hung around that long—and how his dressing room felt more like a locker room

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(“There hovers the odor of Ben-Gay”) than a rock star’s hangout. He admitted that he didn’t know how Springsteen would vote in November, but he situated him, all nationalist affirmation and masculine work ethic, as a foot soldier in the conservative movement. Conflating the chorus of “Born in the U.S.A.” with the consumer label “made in the USA,” Will insisted that, “in an age of lackadaisical effort and slipshod products, anyone who does anything—anything legal—conspicuously well and with zest is a national asset,” adding, “There is still nothing quite like being born in the U.S.A.”70 The columnist could see in Springsteen an emerging investment in the wounds of the white worker and the Vietnam vet as the foundation of a white racial entitlement claimed against “lackadaisical effort” (read Black working class) and “slipshod products” (read Chinese manufacturing). President Reagan’s staff heard what Will had. When the president campaigned in Hammonton, New Jersey, that fall, he told the crowd, “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts; it rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire— New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.”71 Reagan had won over some white working-class voters in 1980 (his “Reagan Democrats”) and now looked to win more with the name Bruce Springsteen, making the Boss, the Christian Science Monitor wrote, “the first popular singer to be recruited by a President of the United States as a character reference.”72 Springsteen balked at Reagan’s overture. In Pittsburgh that week, he met with Ron Weisen, the militant leader of United Steelworkers Local 1397, and wondered at a show whether Reagan had ever listened to Nebraska. He told the audience about a walk he had taken from the Lincoln Memorial to the new Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Perhaps, he suggested, the president and his advisers should take that walk if they wanted to know who he wrote his songs for. He dedicated “The River,” at a second Pittsburgh show, to “Local 1397, rank and file.”73 Springsteen dismissed the Reagan administration as the antagonist of the working class about which he sang. But the president’s campaign knew that, whatever the musician himself thought, a Springsteen fan could also be a Reagan voter. The men shared a romantic attitude toward the white working class from which they hailed, and they identified the Vietnam vet, memorialized on the National Mall, as the embodiment of the white worker’s sacrifice and loss. After Springsteen’s remarks in Pittsburgh, Reagan’s Democratic challenger, Walter Mondale, tried to take advantage. “Bruce Springsteen

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may have been born to run but he wasn’t born yesterday,” he gibed.74 But the Mondale campaign miscalculated when it claimed to have received a letter from Springsteen endorsing the Democratic candidate. Landau, Springsteen’s manager, denied the claim on the musician’s behalf, and the Mondale team had to issue an official retraction. Springsteen didn’t want his music associated with either Reagan or Mondale. Rock and roll had nothing to do with right or left, one campaign or another, he thought. “I don’t feel a real connection to electoral politics right now,” Springsteen told Rolling Stone at the time. He believed music could function, he said, as “a way to just bypass that whole electoral thing. Human politics. I think that people on their own can do a lot.”75 Since the late 1970s, he had been writing songs about the trials of the white working class, of his hometown and of Pittsburgh. He didn’t believe that either Reagan or Mondale would do much to better the lives of workers there or elsewhere. The campaigns understood, though, that, whatever their candidates would or wouldn’t do for the working class, the white worker and the Vietnam vet meant something else to white men who identified as neither. The insecure white worker of a Springsteen song signified for white men, including most of all middle-class nonvets, that they had their own hard-luck stories, that they had suffered in the wake of civil rights, feminism, and the Vietnam War. The Reagan and Mondale campaigns found in Springsteen, with the subtle, mutable racial meaning of his songs, a rare figure of consensus in the emerging culture wars. Who wouldn’t vote for Bruce? The title song of the album, a full-band version of the demo Springsteen recorded after his veterans benefit show, suggests how he constructed that consensus. On it, he sings—shouts might be more accurate—about a man who, in trouble with the law, receives a choice between a cell block and enlistment and lands in Vietnam. The vet returns home to find himself out of work and denied his VA benefits. He remembers a comrade who fell in love with a Vietnamese woman in Saigon but never made it home. “I had a brother at Khe Sanh fighting off the Viet Cong / They’re still there, he’s all gone,” Springsteen sings.76 The white vet of “Born in the U.S.A.,” modeled on Kovic and Muller, had it worse than the Vietnamese he fought, the song suggests, defeated in Southeast Asia and shunned in the United States. His brother, all gone, had died. The Viet Cong, still there, had lived, or at least some had. The song doesn’t, of course, address the three million Vietnamese and at least one million Cambodians and Laotians who died. But Springsteen built

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the song around the contrast not between Americans and Vietnamese but between the white vet’s life before and after the war, the nation of his childhood and that of his adulthood, before civil rights, feminism, and war and after. Springsteen had, he admitted, dodged the draft in 1968, doing whatever he could to receive a medical deferment. “The whole draft thing, it was just a pure street thing,” he remembered. On a bus to the Newark draft board, he looked around and noticed something about the other draftees. “I remember bein’ on that bus, me and a couple of guys in my band, and the rest of the bus was probably sixty, seventy percent black guys from Asbury Park. And I remember thinkin’, like, what makes my life, or my friends’ lives, more expendable than that of somebody who’s goin’ to school? It didn’t seem right.”77 The anthem, with a driving snare drum and shouted chorus, affirms a common man’s nationalism, but it also bemoans what the younger Springsteen sensed on that bus to Newark: a loss of white racial status. Once the world had been theirs, and now they, Bruce and his white bandmates, found themselves on the Black bus to war. Something, they thought, must have changed. “Born in the U.S.A.” benefited from the rise of MTV, the cable music channel launched in 1981, which introduced Springsteen, then thirtyfive, to a younger audience. The music video for the song combines concert footage with nostalgic images of white America. On stage, Bruce, decked out in leather, denim, and a Rambo headband, raises his fist as he sings the chorus. The video cuts back and forth between Springsteen and the E Street Band and shots of men working in factories, waiting in line at a check-cashing office, and showing off marine tattoos outside a VFW hall, and eight-millimeter home videos of white working-class homes in the 1950s and 1960s. Springsteen sings about a vet with nowhere to run and nowhere to go as the families of that vet’s childhood ride roller coasters and celebrate weddings and graduations. No need for close reading here: white America had lost something, the video suggests, and that loss stemmed from the 1960s and the Vietnam War. Bruce’s more muscled build in the 1980s reinforced the song’s message of masculine strength and racial hurt. The cultural critic Fred Pfeil observes that the singer communicated a feeling of confinement on stage through his rigid movements and strained shouts. “The degree to which that pain and anger and sheer energy are held in,” he writes, “is part and parcel of the way, in other aspects of Bruce’s music and beyond it, that a certain kind of white working-class masculinity associated with

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Fordist regimes of mass production and capital accumulation is being rendered artifactual.”78 Springsteen’s labored, fist-raising stage act reflected a broader sense of constraint among white workers, a sense that they had lost some imagined freedom bound to industrial manufacturing. The musician felt more authentic to some because he dressed and moved like an artifact of an earlier time. Springsteen’s channeling of a long-suffering Vietnam vet for adoring young women—a theme of most interviews and concert reviews during the Born in the U.S.A. Tour—echoed a gendered image most Americans then had of the war: that men had fought it for women, a masculine front line defending a feminine home front. Some eleven thousand American women served in Vietnam, most as nurses and some in combat or near-combat roles. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of Vietnamese women served in the armies of the North and South and in the National Liberation Front. The transformation of the war into a white man’s world, into his wound and entitlement, did not erase women from the war but rendered them witnesses to a struggle not their own—donut dollies and entertainers, girls next door who offered soldiers a reminder of the home life for which they fought.79 Springsteen recreated that gendered relation with the rock show as his war, the nurses and donut dollies returning as a young Courteney Cox dancing in the dark with a shuffling, war-hardened Bruce. Springsteen’s confined working-class vet met his right-wing reflection in Sylvester Stallone’s vengeful vet John Rambo. In the first minutes of Rambo: First Blood Part II, the stoic vet, incarcerated for his actions in the first installment, asks his former colonel, who recruits him to rescue American POWs from Vietnam, “Sir, do we get to win this time?”80 The action film scored the second highest box-office take of 1985. That summer, with Springsteen selling out stadiums, the Chicago Tribune declared the two men the “cultural icons” of the mid-1980s. Springsteen’s “message has gained worldwide popularity this summer on the shoulders of another fictitious Vietnam veteran, Sylvester Stallone’s hero who only wants America to love him as much as he loves it,” the paper announced. “In this summer of discontent, Bruce Springsteen is the Rambo of rock and roll.”81 Soon T-shirts could be bought outside Bruce shows that read “Springsteen: The Rambo of Rock.” Rock critics dismissed the association, noting that the musician’s songs said nothing about revenge, that Springsteen believed in rock and roll not as self-aggrandizement but as a form of communion.82 The second Rambo film celebrated a

Bruce Springsteen on the Born in the U.S.A. Tour in 1985. Photograph reproduced by permission from Richard McCaffrey.

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resurgent militarism. Born in the U.S.A. bemoaned it and what it had cost the working class. But the film and record shared a white declinist narrative that invited fantasies of a racial comeback. Springsteen didn’t act them out, of course, but some of his white fans, wearing their “Rambo of Rock” T-shirts to his shows, wanted to win this time. Born in the U.S.A. took a long time to write and record, but from his first conversation with Landau, Springsteen envisioned an album that kicked off with the anthemic title track and closed with the melancholic ballad “My Hometown.” That ballad, which, as the album’s seventh single, reached number six on the Billboard charts, describes a small town in decline. A man remembers riding in his father’s “big old Buick” as a child and his father telling him to look around and know that “this is your hometown.” The song moves forward to the man’s adolescence in the 1960s when racial conflict escalated (“a lot of fights between the black and white”) until one night someone fired a gun into a car full of Black high schoolers. The next verse tells a tale of social and economic deterioration: “Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores / Seems like there ain’t nobody wants to come down here no more.”83 The textile mill closes, and the foreman tells the town’s men that their jobs won’t be coming back. The arc of the song suggests that the racial conflict (the fights, the gunshot) led to the town’s decline (the vacant stores, the closed mill), that the antiracist movements of the 1960s had corroded a white American dream of big Buicks and thriving small towns. Springsteen may not have heard that causal relation between Black civil rights and white racial loss in his own song, but some did, including George Will. Will emerged as one of the biggest boosters of heartland rock in the mid-1980s. In 1984, he touted Springsteen as a “wholesome cultural portent.” In 1985, he wrote a column condemning “porn rock” that, as he defined it, dignified “sexual promiscuity, bisexuality, incest, sadomasochism, satanism, drug use, alcohol abuse, and, constantly, misogyny.” But Will felt encouraged when he heard Springsteen or another heartland rock musician, John Fogarty, the former singer, songwriter, and guitarist for Creedence Clearwater Revival, who had scored a hit with the soon-to-be baseball standard “Centerfield.” “The republic has a fighting chance,” he wrote, “as long as the popularity of porn rock can be rivaled by the popularity of its moral opposite, baseball rock.”84 Will imagined a national culture that Black, Latinx, women, gay, and trans artists had overrun with their “porn rock.” The one thing that could save it, he thought, would be for more white men to sing songs about small towns, baseball, and the white republic of their childhoods.

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war! what is it good for? Springsteen defended his decision to record “Born in the U.S.A.” as an anthem, but he later acknowledged that, in not stating what his music meant, he had let others state it for him. He had allowed Will and Reagan to take a song about a struggling white working-class vet and turn it into a tribute to conservatism and militarism. The Reagan administration had reescalated the Cold War, invading Grenada and intervening in El Salvador, Lebanon, and elsewhere, and Springsteen didn’t want his music confused with an affirmation of war. With four shows left on the Born in the U.S.A. Tour, all at the Los Angeles Coliseum, he and Landau decided to add a cover of Edwin Starr’s 1970 number-one hit “War” to the song list. Springsteen wrote the words to the Motown song on his arm and sang it the next night. Unlike “Born in the U.S.A.,” more a call for veterans’ rights than an indictment of the wars they fought, Starr’s Motown classic delivers an unambiguous antiwar message. “War, huh, yeah / What is it good for?” the chorus asks. “Absolutely nothing.”85 With the Starr cover, the musician distanced himself from the hawks who had tried to claim him, and he introduced Motown soul, a genre that white rockers had distanced themselves from in the late 1960s, to heartland rock. When Springsteen and the E Street Band released their first live album, Live/1975–85, in 1986, they issued “War” as the first single. The track, recorded at one of the band’s Coliseum shows, includes a long intro in which Bruce reflected on the Vietnam War and what it meant to him and his generation. “I want to do this song tonight for all the young people out there,” he told the audience. “The next time they’re going to be looking at you, and you’re going to need a lot of information to know what you’re going to want to do. Because in 1985, blind faith in your leaders, or in anything, will get you killed. Because what I’m talking about here is—.”86 And the band launched into “War.” The closest thing to an outright anti-Reagan statement Springsteen had issued, the Starr cover didn’t hurt sales. The five-disc Live/1975–85 shot to number one on the albums chart, and “War,” a sixteen-year-old song, reached number eight as a single. Springsteen hadn’t resisted the welcome Born in the U.S.A. had received from fans who wanted to hear it as a full-throated national affirmation. He had wanted, he said, to make a “music of identity,” not a music of the Right or the Left.87 But coming off the Born in the U.S.A. Tour, he could see that the identities of the men he sang about—white working-class men, Vietnam vets—couldn’t be isolated from the agendas to which others had recruited them. “War”

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commenced his reckoning with the white racial interests that had contributed to the rise of heartland rock at a time of civil rights rollback and renewed anticommunist war making. Springsteen felt “ ‘Bruced’ out,” he admitted, at the end of the Born in the U.S.A. Tour. “You end up creating this sort of icon, and eventually it oppresses you,” he told Rolling Stone in 1992.88 He remade himself again, de-Bruced, with his 1995 folk album The Ghost of Tom Joad, in which, with a nod to Steinbeck and Guthrie, he distanced himself from the hard-bodied rock star of the mid-1980s. He undertook, with some awkward results, to reimagine the working class of his earlier records as a multiracial coalition of white men, undocumented Mexican immigrants, and Southeast Asian refugees. In “Sinaloa Cowboys,” “The Line,” “Balboa Park,” and “Across the Border,” Springsteen addresses the violence of the US-Mexico border and the dreams of Mexican immigrants who cross it to labor in fruit orchards and suburban households. Their struggles, he believed, mirrored the struggles of the white workers he had long identified with and dressed like on stage. “Their skin was darker and their language had changed, but these were people trapped by the same brutal circumstances,” he said of his border songs.89 The album renders undocumented Mexican immigrants as fellow travelers of a familiar Springsteen character, the white Vietnam vet. “Youngstown,” “The Line,” “Galveston Bay,” and the later-released outtake “Brothers under the Bridge” all star hard-luck vets. “Youngstown,” a slow ballad with violin, tells of the rise and fall of steel manufacturing in northeastern Ohio, where men built the cannonballs, tanks, and bombs “that won this country’s wars” but now have nothing to show for it. “We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam / Now we’re wondering what they were dying for,” a Vietnam vet laments.90 Springsteen did not abandon the vet of “Born in the U.S.A.” but wove him into the stories of immigrants and refugees. Perhaps the heartland that he had constructed could also include the Chicanx communities of the Southwest and the Vietnamese neighborhoods of California and Texas. “Galveston Bay” follows two vets of the Vietnam War living in Seabrook, Texas, on Galveston Bay. Le Bin Son served for fifteen years in the South Vietnamese army, and Billy Sutter did a tour in Quang Tri Province for the US Army as a young man. The arrival of Vietnamese refugees on the Texas coast leads to a rise in hate crimes against Vietnamese fishermen, including Le. One night, in self-defense, Le shoots two white men. Billy decides to avenge the men’s death and kill him. But, at the last

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minute, standing in the shadows of the dock with “his Ka-Bar knife in his hand,” he changes his mind and goes home. At a show in Atlanta, Springsteen likened the white vet’s decision to the act of “kindness” that concludes Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, in which Rose of Sharon, after giving birth to a stillborn child, breastfeeds a man on the brink of starvation.91 He didn’t acknowledge the difference between not killing someone and saving someone’s life. From “Born in the U.S.A.” to “War” to “Galveston Bay,” Springsteen broadened the heartland of his music to include undocumented Mexican immigrants and Vietnamese refugees, but the white Vietnam vet remained the protagonist of that land. Le, the refugee, now with the right of self-defense and the law on his side, attests not to a more inclusive nation but to how far the folk hero of white America had fallen since the war. Springsteen contributed to a trend among white liberal novelists, songwriters, and filmmakers who sought to tell more inclusive stories of the Vietnam War than the ones they had told in the 1980s. Robert Olen Butler, the author of six novels about American soldiers and vets, wrote short stories about Vietnamese refugees in their voices. The stories won him a Pulitzer Prize. Oliver Stone, the director of Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, based his third Vietnam War film, Heaven and Earth, on a refugee memoir. It bombed. Springsteen, Butler, and Stone wanted to revise the narrative that they had constructed, to acknowledge that the war had never been a one-sided affair. But the white vet, rerouted through a more critical multiculturalism, had not surrendered his starring role in the national drama of war; now a reformed white man with a knowledge of difference, he had secured it. The heartland rock of the 1980s laid the groundwork for the alternative folk of the 1990s. Son Volt, Old 97’s, Old Crow Medicine Show, and Wilco, borrowing some tricks from heartland rock, sang their own songs about good white folks living through bad times. The hometowns they imagined, with a gen Xer’s antinostalgia, had a darker side. Their heartland carried the sorrow of a Springsteen song but also the anger of a Stallone film. The arrival of heartland rock coincided with a rush of action movies in which the United States got to, at least on screen, “win this time.” Springsteen sang songs that mourned the loss of a white New Deal. Stallone made films that dreamed of a revitalized white Cold War. The liberal rock star thought that the Vietnam vet deserved the benefits that his father had received. The conservative movie star thought that he deserved to win the war. The musician and the actor

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brought a sense of outsiderness, whether as a white worker with a guitar or a white ethnic who never got his shot, to their embrace of the nationalist revival. The two men discovered the Vietnam vet on the dark edge of town and, from Born to Run to Born in the U.S.A. and from Rocky to Rambo, moved him to a white heartland.

chapter 4

The Ethnicization of Veteran America

The alumni of the Hasty Pudding Club, the Harvard social club founded in 1795 to “cultivate the social affections and cherish the feelings of friendship and patriotism,” include John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy.1 In 1986, the Pudding added Sylvester Stallone to that honor roll, awarding the movie star the club’s Man of the Year award. Coming off the blockbuster successes of Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rocky IV, Stallone, the white ethnic hero of working-class Philadelphia, traveled to Cambridge to receive his award from some of the nation’s most advantaged young white men. The decision attracted demonstrators (the Boston Globe called them “hecklers”) to the Hasty Pudding Theater on Holyoke Street, a block from Harvard Yard, on the night of the show staged in Stallone’s honor. More than a hundred Vietnam veterans and Asian American students blocked the entrance to the theater. The vets, members of the antiwar Smedley D. Butler Brigade, held signs that read “Reality vs. Rambo” underneath a crossed-out silhouette of Stallone’s action-hero character. “If our children are to have Rambo as a role model, then make certain the dolls have detachable arms and legs,” a former army nurse said.2 The students denounced the film franchise’s anti-Asian racism. A Harvard graduate student told the Globe that he had come out to resist “what Stallone’s movie represents to the Asian community—that Asian life is cheap.”3 Adding to the din, students on the third floor of a neighboring 121

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dorm turned their stereo to the street, blasting the Rocky theme song at the vets and students gathered below. The antiwar and antiracist demonstrators soon attracted counterdemonstrators, a contingent of Stallone fans, to the theater entrance. Young white men taunted the vets and students, telling them to “go home” and declaring Stallone the “real veteran.”4 The counterdemonstrators, local high schoolers without their own memories of the Vietnam War, had not seen combat, but they had seen the Rambo films, which blamed activists and fainthearted officials for abandoning the nation’s fighting men in Southeast Asia. The demonstrators couldn’t be vets because in the Rambo universe demonstrators had mistreated vets, had caused their suffering. The Stallone fans outside the Pudding Theater attested to young white men’s fascination with the fictional vet. For weeks after the release of Rambo, which grossed $300 million in 1985, young men attended showings dressed as Green Berets and wearing army fatigues and the character’s signature headband. SWAT teams in Boston and San Antonio answered calls from residents worried about teenagers running reconnaissance missions through their suburban neighborhoods. In Cambridge, Paul Atwood, a former marine, encountered “a young fellow, about fifteen years old, [who] stood across the street from us, daring us to fight with him and actually believing that he [Stallone] was a badass when we were the ones who had done the fighting in Vietnam.” Atwood couldn’t believe that the teenager and other young men had succumbed to “the blandishments of this faker.”5 Globe columnist Mike Barnicle dismissed the club’s show as “a large number of potential draft dodgers from Harvard University” gathering to celebrate “glitter, tinsel and the bottom line” in the form of Stallone’s box-office success and businessman’s instinct.6 But Stallone’s movies had resonated with more than a few belligerent teenagers and future Wall Streeters. The demonstrations and counterdemonstrations at Harvard reflected a broader cultural struggle over how the nation remembered the Vietnam War and whose memories, real or imagined, mattered. If the war belonged to vets, and most that night thought it did, then who counted as a vet? The army nurse? Or Stallone? The Smedley D. Butler Brigade? Or the movie star’s fans? Conservatives and liberals sought to claim the veterans’ cause as their own. Militarists accused antiwar activists, including antiwar vets, of abandoning veterans in Southeast Asia. Antiwar activists accused militarists, including hawkish vets, of neglecting veterans after sending them to war. Conservatives denounced liberals as antiveteran. Liberals

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assailed conservatives as antiveteran. No one being an “antiveteran activist,” that conflict hid a larger consensus, a white racial consensus formed in the image of the Vietnam vet. The Rambo films demonstrated, for the antiwar vets in Cambridge, how rooting for veterans could mask a call to war. Stallone’s identification with vets, on and off the screen, offended them as a calculated, hollow gesture. A few miles south of the Hasty Pudding Theater, on the night Stallone received his award behind closed doors, Charlie Clements, a doctor, human rights activist, and former airman, hosted a screening of Witness to War, the Oscar-winning film about his life. “Sylvester Stallone claimed that he was the voice of Vietnam veterans,” he told the audience gathered in a lecture hall of the Harvard School of Public Health. “In Rambo, the racism, sexism, the glorification of violence, but especially the revision of history is disturbing to many, many Vietnam vets.”7 In Salt Lake City, the Never Again/Vietnam Veterans Peace Action Network demonstrated outside theaters showing the film and distributed “An Open Letter to Sylvester Stallone,” demanding, “We want to know where you were in 1968 when we needed you. What right do you have to make this kind of movie and allow people of this country who have never been to war to believe that this is how wars are fought?”8 Clements and the members of Never Again marshaled their status as veterans of the war to distance themselves from and condemn the militarism and racism of Rambo. The Reagan administration had used that image—their image—to reescalate the Cold War, and they refused to forfeit it to an actor who had waited out the war in Switzerland. But the new nationalism had taken hold. The second installment in the Rambo franchise arrived in theaters two weeks after New York held a belated ticker-tape parade for Vietnam vets in Lower Manhattan’s “canyon of heroes,” where it had once honored Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Dwight Eisenhower, and Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. The vets and the cheering crowd reenacted iconic images from World War II, with women running out into the street to kiss uniformed strangers and “welcome home” signs greeting the middle-aged men.9 “We have heard the voices of a lost generation,” Mayor Ed Koch, a Democrat, declared. “We have opened the arms of this great city to Vietnam veterans from across America.”10 Businessman and future president Donald Trump, who contributed a million dollars to the construction of a new veterans’ memorial, told the New York Times, “The people who went to fight were great Americans. I always thought they got a bad shake in life and never got their just recognition.”11 That

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welcome home, on the crowded sidewalks of Lower Manhattan and at the movie theater, belonged to more than vets. It also belonged to white nonvet elites—a future president and the young men of the Hasty Pudding Club—who identified with them. If the demonstration outside the Pudding Theater bothered Stallone, he didn’t show it. The actor had first made his name as Italian American boxer Rocky Balboa in the 1976 film that earned him two Oscar nominations and made him an icon of the white ethnic revival. Stallone, eluding the demonstrators, entered the theater through the back door, dressed in a black tuxedo and with an arm around his wife, the DanishItalian model Brigitte Nielsen. The orchestra launched into the Rocky theme song, matching the dorm-room stereo outside, and Stallone raised a fist to the black-tie audience as if he had KO’ed Apollo Creed at the door. The actor received the award with a few remarks about his own rags-to-riches story, telling the club, “Awards like this have a great significance to a person like me. I seemed to come to where I’m at from a different route.” Scanning the audience, he added, “I appreciate being a part of your dream.”12 Sitting in the front row, William Morris Hunt, Harvard class of 1936, admitted that, although he considered himself a “theater man,” he admired what Stallone had done as a film actor. “He has really fulfilled what many people would like to see in America,” he said.13 That night, elite white men came together to honor fictional white underdogs, the white ethnic boxer Rocky and the Vietnam vet Rambo, without letting their real-life counterparts in the door. Rocky Balboa taught white ethnics that they didn’t have to forfeit their Irish, Italian, or Polish heritage, that they didn’t have to assimilate into white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America. The American Indian, Asian American, Black Power, and Chicano movements had refused the assimilationism of white racial liberals, who had insisted that Black and brown Americans do the assimilating and conform to white cultural norms. The movements instead reclaimed and created their own traditions, sometimes within and sometimes outside of or against the United States. White ethnics followed their lead, asserting that they also had roots. Their ancestors had suffered and sacrificed to make it in a land hostile to their culture. Neoconservative Catholic philosopher Michael Novak termed it “the new ethnicity,” arguing in 1974 that “the common [WASP] culture has been relatively resistant to internal transformation; it has not so much arisen from the hearts of all as been imposed; the melting pot has only a single recipe.”14 That new ethnicity sanctified Ellis Island and declared the United States, for the first time, a nation of immi-

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grants.15 It allowed white ethnics, including Novak, to wield tales of their forefathers’ hardscrabble lives as an argument against affirmative action. Their people had made it on their own through sheer determination and will, they believed. So why couldn’t the descendants of enslaved people or darker-skinned immigrants and refugees? Or Native peoples? The white ethnic revival of the 1970s gave multicultural cover to the white backlash to Black civil rights. It shielded anti–affirmative action activists, who could claim their own minoritized status as Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and Polish Americans, from charges of racism. But self-identified white ethnics didn’t disassociate themselves from WASPs for long. White ethnics and WASPs reunited in the 1980s through the ethnicization of veteran America. Ethnicity emerged as a dominant racial paradigm after World War II, when liberal anthropologists and sociologists articulated it as an antidote to the eugenics movement and Nazi race science. Although some people had darker or lighter skin, that did not, they argued, determine intelligence or social behavior. That had to do with culture. Behavior had to be learned. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict, for example, sorted humans into three racial categories— Negroid, Mongoloid, and Caucasoid—but distinguished the “facts of race” (differences in skin color and hair texture) from the “claims of racism” (innate racial differences in intelligence, behavior, and achievement).16 That distinction identified racial meaning as a cultural construct but also consolidated whiteness, hardening the divisions between Black and white people (racial difference, Negroid vs. Caucasoid) and softening the divisions among white people (ethnic difference, Irish Catholic vs. WASP).17 The ethnicity paradigm furnished white people with mutable identities through which they could declare themselves white when it suited them and not white when it didn’t. Although the paradigm originated on the left, neoconservative intellectuals made it their own after civil rights and feminism, claiming first their immigrant roots and then their veteran “heritage.” The white ethnic revival of the 1970s mutated into the new nationalism of the 1980s as Vietnam vets and the white men who identified with them learned to think of themselves as ethnicized but not racialized, bearers of rare cultural knowledge when they wanted to be, different when it served their interests. On the left, Bruce Springsteen and other heartland rock musicians mourned the decline of manufacturing and trade unionism with stories of white vets, associating a besieged labor movement with a cross-class feeling of white racial defeat. On the right, the white ethnic revival structured the new nationalism, with the Italian American Rocky

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reemerging as the veteran American Rambo. The white Left and the white Right converged on the Vietnam vet, remaking white America in his image. Stallone, receiving his award at the Pudding Theater in 1986, had turned white again, but he hadn’t forgotten the mean streets or the guerrilla firefights that had delivered him to Cambridge. Neither had the men in the audience. Stallone’s career illustrates how ethnic America gave rise to veteran America, how Rocky Balboa transformed into John Rambo and how Rambo carried forward Rocky’s sense of white ethnic grievance. Rocky, more than all other 1970s immigrant roots movies, embodied the white ethnic revival. Rambo, more than all other 1980s action movies, embodied the new nationalism. Stallone had his finger on the white masculine zeitgeist, binding the white ethnic wounds of his Italian American boxer to the resurgent nationalism of the Reagan administration. President Reagan knew the value of associating his administration with the Rocky and Rambo franchises. In his first term, addressing economic growth at a meeting of the National Rifle Association, he stated, “We are on our way back. And like the fighter Rocky Balboa, America is getting stronger now.”18 In his second term, the president said during a mic check, referencing the Beirut hostage crisis, “Boy, after seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do the next time this happens.”19 On Air Force One, after the release of the second Rambo film, a grinning Reagan held a sign reading “Rambo is a Republican.” That correlation of the white ethnic with the vet, the down-and-out white fighter with the flag, Americanized the white ethnic and ethnized white America. It turned white minorities into the most American thing of all. The rearming of the nation under Reagan served to reunite white men—Irish, Italian, Poles, and WASPs, vets and nonvets—through the ethnicized Vietnam vet. From the new ethnicity of the neoconservative movement to the white immigrant film of the new Hollywood to the new nationalism of Rambo and Reagan, white men answered the call for Black and brown rights, reform, and revolution with an image of themselves as a nation of immigrants and a race of veterans.

the new ethnicity The white ethnic revival, a self-conscious reaction to the civil rights movement, informed the two dominant racial ideologies of the late twentieth century: neoconservative color blindness and liberal multiculturalism. Peter Berger, Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol, Michael Novak, and Norman

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Podhoretz launched the neoconservative movement, urging anticommunist militarism, market deregulation, and color-blind racial governance, as they embraced their immigrant roots as white minorities. Their investment in elevating white ethnic identities in the United States stemmed from and imitated the radical antiracist and anticolonial movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Glazer, an urban sociologist and editor of the neocon standard-bearing Public Interest, acknowledged that the revival originated from the moment when “the Negroes became blacks, and the dominant tone of black political rhetoric shifted from emphasizing ‘we are like everyone else and want only integration,’ to ‘we are of course different from anyone else and want our proper share of power and wealth.’”20 White ethnics had decided, Glazer observed (and encouraged), to declare their own difference and make their own demands. The idea of the United States as a nation of minorities, including white minorities, gave form to racial neoconservatism, which advocated an antiredistributive color blindness, and liberal multiculturalism, which advocated an antiredistributive recognition of cultural difference. All of a sudden, the historian Matthew Jacobson writes of the 1970s, “Yesterday’s European immigrant becomes not only the typical but the exemplary American citizen.”21 The warring sides of the coming culture wars shared an origin in the white ethnic revival— when we all found a ghetto to look back to.22 Berger, Glazer, Kristol, Novak, and Podhoretz first established themselves in the 1950s and 1960s not as conservatives but as good liberals who defected to the Right out of frustration with what they considered the overreach of student radicals and the New Left. Some of their first investigations of race marshaled their own ethnic stories—all but Novak hailed from first-generation immigrant households—to offer solutions to the most talked-about issue of the day, the “Negro problem.” Kristol, who broke with the left-wing New York intellectuals to reemerge as the “godfather of neoconservatism,” contributed an article to the Times in 1966 titled—and the title says it all—“The Negro Today Is Like the Immigrant Yesterday.”23 He argued that the challenges facing northern urban Black communities differed not at all from the obstacles that white immigrants, including his own mother and father, had faced and that seeing Black migrants from the South as “new immigrants” could defuse the worst white racial attitudes. “The real tragedy of the American Negro today is not that he is poor, or black, but that he is a latecomer,” he wrote, overlooking how, from where Black people sat, as James Baldwin said in his 1965 debate with William F. Buckley, “Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday and now he is already on his way to

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the Presidency.”24 Kristol self-identified as a liberal then, but hints of his future conservatism showed. “If anything like the present welfare system had been in existence 50 years ago, or 100 years ago, this same ‘cycle of dependency’ would have been a striking feature of the Italian and Irish immigrant communities,” he contended. “In those days, however, the ideology of ‘self-reliance’ was far more powerful than the ideology of ‘social welfare.’ ”25 Not the brutal accumulation of white wealth, from the theft of Indigenous lands and African lives to redlining, but welfare, Kristol suggested, had held Black communities back. Others argued for their ethnic innocence. Podhoretz, the editor of the then-liberal Commentary, contended that white immigrant communities didn’t deserve the blame for the sins of WASP settlers and slaveholders. “What share,” he asked, “had those Italian and Jewish immigrants in the enslavement of the Negro? What share had they—downtrodden people themselves breaking their own necks to eke out a living—in the exploitation of the Negro?”26 Glazer suggested, also in Commentary, that antiracist movements threatened “the right to maintain [white ethnic] sub-communities” and mistook a muddle of white ethnic identities for a homogenous white ruling class, a world that “does not exist, except in ideology.”27 In the mid-1960s, Kristol, Glazer, and Podhoretz, foreshadowing their future rightward turn, looked to their ethnic roots to find a usable hurt that could insulate them from charges of anti-Black racism and accuse Black radicals of antisemitism and anti-white racism. Novak took that claim of innocence further. A former seminarian, he emerged in the 1960s as a leading liberal light of a reform movement in the Catholic Church, arguing, in A New Generation: American and Catholic, for an “empirical, pragmatic, realistic, and Christian” American Catholicism.28 He lauded the institutional reforms of the Second Vatican Council and authored a manifesto, A Theology for Radical Politics, in which he sought to construct a coalition of liberal Catholics and New Left radicals. With his future allies in the neoconservative movement, Novak drifted rightward in the 1970s, turning against student radicals, whom he now assailed as immoderate and unreasonable. His rightward shift coincided with his embrace of his ethnic roots as the grandson of immigrants and the child of the “Slovak ghetto of Johnstown” who had landed in the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant worlds of Harvard, where he attended grad school, and Stanford, where he taught.29 “I am born of PIGS—those Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs, those non-English-speaking immigrants numbered so heavily among the workingmen of this nation,” he wrote in The Rise of the Unmeltable

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Ethnics, distinguishing himself from the WASP elites among whom he then lived.30 He argued that white ethnics had lost in the civil rights realignment because Black movement leaders had sided with white elites rather than with their natural comrades in the class struggle, white ethnics. Novak did not blame white elites, though, but Black radicals who “want to jump, via revolutionary militance, from a largely rural base of skills and habits over the heads of lower-class whites.”31 If Black activists had won some concessions from the government in the 1960s, then they had, Novak assumed, come at a cost to white ethnics, his PIGS. The former liberal begrudged that the civil rights movement had authorized some forms of difference but not others. He believed that with the racial reforms of the 1960s the state had distinguished legitimate (American Indian, Asian, Black, Latinx) from illegitimate (white ethnic) minorities, erasing his Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs, who belonged neither to the white establishment nor to the legitimate minorities deserving of cultural admiration and institutional redress. “I have regretted and keenly felt,” Novak wrote, “the absence of that sympathy for PIGS which simple human feeling might have prodded intelligence to muster, that same sympathy which the educated find so easy to conjure up for black culture, Chicano culture, Indian culture, and other cultures of the poor.”32 He found evidence of that lack of concern for white ethnics at universities and college, in national magazines, and on television. Nowhere, he argued, could he see his own Slovak culture reflected back at him. The WASP-controlled cultural industries constructed an image of national life as constituted of white Protestants and, with their sanction, a few Black and brown Americans, rendering white ethnics, in Novak’s mind, the new faces at the bottom of the well. His PIGS had worked hard and without complaint, and their reward had been neither assimilation into the white establishment nor acknowledgment as legitimate minorities. The time had come for them to raise their voices as unmeltable ethnics. The Catholic philosopher showed how the idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants could restore a belief in white innocence after civil rights and the Vietnam War. White ethnics, he argued, had arrived too late to have either contributed to or benefited from settler colonialism or the transatlantic slave trade. He recalled a confrontation with an American Indian man who accused Novak of whitewashing what his ancestors had done to Indigenous life in the Americas. “I tried gently to remind him that my grandparents . . . never saw an Indian,” Novak wrote of the encounter. “They came to this country after that. Nor were they responsible for enslaving the blacks (or anyone else). They themselves escaped

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serfdom barely four generations ago—almost as recently as blacks escaped slavery.”33 He claimed that he, the grandson of immigrants, the descendent of serfs, not a white man but a Slovak American, did not have to answer for colonialism, enslavement, or anti-Indigenous and antiBlack racism. He might hold a graduate degree from Harvard and teach at Stanford, but he had never received the wages of whiteness, he argued. He had made it on his own, a white ethnic against a WASP world. Novak instead identified racism as the exclusive domain of white Protestants. White supremacist ideas and customs had been, he wrote, “quite well legitimated by Anglo-American culture, well before white ethnics arrived here in significant numbers, well before many white ethnics had ever met blacks.”34 Novak and his fellow neocons insisted that they, as white minorities, had never been American and couldn’t be sorted into a Black-and-white schema. “I came from Brooklyn, and in Brooklyn there were no Americans,” Podhoretz wrote in his 1967 memoir Making It. “There were Jews and Negroes and Italians and Poles and Irishmen. Americans lived in New England, in the South, in the Midwest: alien people in alien places.”35 Of course, WASPs wouldn’t take the blame either. Novak and Podhoretz faulted white Protestant elites for the white supremacist structure of the nation, and white elites faulted working-class white ethnics for maintaining bigoted ideas about Black and Latinx people and immigrants. (Novak did acknowledge that white ethnics weren’t innocent of anti-Black racist attitudes, that some did “think they [were] better people than the blacks.”)36 That constant transfer of blame from white ethnics to white Protestants and from white Protestants to white ethnics served to cleanse all white hands, rendering racism an abstraction that occurred out there, somewhere else, in someone else’s neighborhood. The white ethnic neocons believed themselves more innocent than white Anglo-Saxon Protestants but also more deserving than Black and brown Americans. Novak asked, in the prologue to The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, “What do people have to lose before they can qualify as true Americans?” His answer: “A lot of blue stars—and silver and gold ones—must hang in the window. You proved you loved America by dying for it in its wars. The Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs . . . pride themselves on ‘fighting for America.’ ” White ethnics, he believed, had earned their inclusion in the nation through a “blood test” administered in the world wars, Korea, and Vietnam.37 He did not address the fact that American Indians, Asian Americans, Black Americans, and Latinos had also served and died in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, that

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they had also taken that blood test. Novak, looking ahead to the white ethnic trials of Rocky and the veteran American traumas of Rambo, identified wartime sacrifice as the thing that Americanized the white ethnic, turning Slovaks into Slovak Americans. He considered the Vietnam War, a war he resisted, the “purest doctrinal pitch” of white Protestant assimilationism: “We had set out to pour the acids of our melting pot over Vietnam, to modernize and to Americanize a faraway land.”38 The United States, divided at home and losing in Southeast Asia, needed to remind itself who it was: a nation of immigrants, a white nation that wasn’t too white to know and welcome difference. The white ethnic revival laid the foundation for neoconservative arguments against affirmation action. Glazer delivered the most thorough case against redistributive racial reforms in his 1975 book Affirmative Discrimination. He argued, ahead of the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case that curtailed affirmative action in higher education, with Associate Justice Louis Powell declaring the United States a “Nation of minorities,” including white minorities, that the government should ensure “equal opportunity” for individuals but not “statistical representation” for racial or ethnic communities.39 Glazer believed that a statistical redistribution of resources violated the nation’s long-standing “ethnic pattern” of an ever-widening circle of national belonging, limits on the formation of autonomous “subnational entities,” and a belief that “any ethnic group could maintain itself, if it so wished, on a voluntary basis.”40 The United States, in elevating individual rights above “subnational” racial or ethnic rights, had maintained a multiethnic but unified nation, he argued. The demands of antiracist movements had endangered that structure and, in his mind, reneged on the consensus reached with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that rights not be awarded or denied “on the ground of ‘race, color, religion, or national origin.’ ”41 The book confirmed Glazer’s break with the Left and introduced color-blind civil rights as the conservative movement’s most enduring argument against affirmative action and other redistributive reforms. That argument emerged from the white ethnic revival and the idea that Black gains had come at a cost to white ethnics who had earned what they had. Black calls for redistribution, he wrote, had driven a wedge between the Black and white working classes, between “those groups that are entitled to statistical parity in certain key areas on the basis of race, color, and national origin, and those groups that are not.”42 No one had lost more in the age of civil rights and feminism, he believed, than white ethnics. No one had lost more than himself.43

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Although Glazer condemned Black and brown demands on the state and business as insular and self-interested, he and other neocons celebrated white ethnic institution building. In their 1977 manifesto To Empower People, Peter Berger, the sociologist and theologian, and Richard Neuhaus, a conservative Lutheran cleric, contended that to combat the alienation of living under big government Americans should reinvest in “mediating structures,” the local institutions “standing between the individual in his private life and the large institutions of public life.”44 Mediating structures included neighborhoods, churches, and veterans and fraternal organizations, all of which could be found in the white ethnic communities from which Berger, an Austrian-born immigrant, himself came. Berger and Neuhaus modeled their mediating structures on Edmund Burke’s idea of “the little platoon” as “the first principle of public affection.”45 That army unit of affiliation gave Americans a foothold in the modern world from which they could mediate between the isolation of the individual and the alienation of state bureaucracies, neither of which facilitated the formation of meaningful social bonds. “Within one’s group—whether it be racial, national, political, religious, or all of these—one discovers an answer to the elementary question, ‘Who am I?,’ ” they wrote.46 Berger and Neuhaus, foreseeing the transition from the new ethnicity to the new nationalism, merged Novak’s white ethnic neighborhood with Burke’s little platoon. That white band of soldiers and vets now carried a sense of ethnic hurt, with the odds stacked against it, the government fighting to disband it. White Protestants could also sense that hurt. Glazer, with his regular collaborator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the sociologist and Democratic senator from New York, acknowledged in the mid-1970s that “in the United States we increasingly consider old Americans, descendants of Anglo-Saxons, as themselves an ethnic group.”47 All white Americans, in a generational reversal, now could and wanted to see themselves as minorities, whether through memories of the ethnic ghetto or basic training, the immigrant enclave or the army unit. Some, lacking the memories, bought them for a dollar or two at the movie theater, where a generation of young ethnic directors had stormed the gate, remaking American cinema and revising white racial fantasies.

the new ethnic hollywood Most Americans didn’t read Michael Novak, but they didn’t have to because they could meet the nation’s unmeltable ethnics on the big

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screen, where they starred in some of the biggest movies of the 1970s, from Fiddler on the Roof and The Godfather to Saturday Night Fever. The white ethnic revival arrived at a time of financial restructuring for film studios. A 1948 federal antitrust ruling against Paramount Pictures had forced studios, which until then had distributed and screened their own films, to sell their theater chains. That loss of revenue combined with the rise of television led to the end of an era in which studios had wielded enormous control over directors, writers, and actors. No longer able to order whole slates of films or retain stars on long-term contracts, they instead made one-off arrangements with directors and actors. Studio heads also, struggling to attract young moviegoers, agreed to dissolve the Production Code Administration, which had blocked films it deemed obscene or immoral, and in 1968 introduced modern content ratings, delivering sex, drugs, and violence to Main Street at the minor cost of an R rating. Young filmmakers arrived in California to find a business in turmoil and studios determined to regain their former relevance. The newcomers made the most of it. With educations from new film schools, the French New Wave as a model, and the events of the day, including the Vietnam War and Watergate, on their minds, they made subversive, challenging films about rebellion, alienation, and existential dread that would have been unthinkable under the PCA. For some, the “new Hollywood” stood as the height of the form in the United States. Looking back on the 1970s, Susan Sontag remembered it as a moment when “there were new masterpieces every month,” the one time “in the 100-year history of cinema that going to movies, thinking about movies, talking about movies became a passion among university students and other young people.” She and her friends “fell in love not just with actors but with cinema itself.”48 The directors she admired had also fallen in love, a strange kind of love, a love of freedom and loss, liberation and estrangement. The young directors gravitated toward stories about characters living on the margins—bank robbers, gangsters, drifters, killers, and, most of all, white ethnics and Vietnam vets. Woody Allen, Michael Cimino, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Mike Nichols, and Martin Scorsese made films that mined their own ethnic backgrounds and worked with actors who shared them, actors who, as the critic Peter Biskind writes, “banished the vanilla features of the Tabs and the Troys and instead brought to the screen a gritty new realism and ethnicity.”49 For the first time, actors with names like James Caan, Robert De Niro, Elliott Gould, Harvey Keitel, and Al Pacino starred in big-budget films.

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Nichols inaugurated that shift in 1967, when he cast a thirty-year-old Dustin Hoffman as adrift college grad Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. Hoffman had struggled to find work in the movie business of the mid-1960s. “At that time, there was not necessarily an anti-Semitic, but certainly an antiethnic code,” he recalled.50 Nichols had offered the role to Robert Redford first before turning to Hoffman as his leading man. (He had offered the role of Mrs. Robinson to Doris Day, who turned it down, before going with Anne Bancroft, the Bronx-raised grandchild of Italian immigrants.) The film made more than $100 million at the box office against a budget of $3 million, drawing young people to the movies and earning seven Oscar nominations. The studios took notice, and, as filmmakers turned their gaze from the California suburbs to the New York ethnic enclave, Hoffman and other actors of eastern European immigrant stock emerged as some of the biggest movie stars of the 1970s. The young filmmakers told stories about outsiders facing down the limits of the American dream, outsiders who embraced their ethnic roots and confronted the nightmare of the Vietnam War. The distinctiveness of the new directors’ films validated the argument of some critics that the business had shifted from a Fordist model, in which studios made artless one-size-fits-all movies, to an auteur model, in which actor-writer-directors maintained artistic control of their films. The critic Andrew Sarris brought the idea of auteurism, which had originated in French cinema, to the United States in 1962. For a film to constitute the work of an auteur, he wrote, it must reflect “the distinguishable personality of the director” as communicated through “recurrent characteristics of style” and an “interior meaning” as it emerged from “the tension between a director’s personality and his material.”51 The embrace of auteur filmmaking in the 1970s can be attributed to changes at the studios, which gave directors more control, and to the founding of new film schools, which introduced a generation of filmmakers and critics to French and Italian cinema. But it also arose from the white ethnic revival and moviegoers’ desire to see ethnic faces and immigrant stories on the big screen. “What matters to me is that I get to make the pictures—that I get to express myself personally somehow,” Scorsese said at the time.52 He and the other newcomers wanted to make movies that said something about their identities and their origins, their roots. Auteurist meant autobiographical, intimate, and different, and for Scorsese and others, that meant ethnic.

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Scorsese moved to California in 1971, but most of his films look back on New York and the Italian American neighborhood of his childhood, where he found two muses: the white ethnic racketeer and the troubled Vietnam vet.53 Scorsese’s breakout hits, Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, followed the course of white racial culture after civil rights, with the white ethnic dissolving into the veteran American. Scorsese described his neighborhood as a “Sicilian village” cut off from the rest of the nation. “There was us, and there was the world,” he told Biskind, the film critic, in the mid-1990s. “You could feel palpable tension, always on the verge of violence.”54 Mean Streets, his 1973 crime film, takes moviegoers to that village in what Scorsese described as his “attempt to put myself and my old friends on the screen, to show how we lived, what life was like in Little Italy. It was really an anthropological or sociological tract.”55 A young Italian American (Keitel), a debt collector for his uncle, a neighborhood loan shark, struggles to reconcile his Catholic faith with his criminal career and defend his ne’er-do-well best friend (De Niro), who has gotten himself into debt with another local mafioso. The film begins with the Feast of San Gennaro festival, setting the stage for an Italian American drama, and ends with the protagonist, his friend, and his girlfriend (Amy Robinson) fleeing the neighborhood in a borrowed car before an enforcer for his friend’s creditor guns them down. The protagonist, Keitel’s character, kneels in the street, bleeding from a gunshot wound, as firefighters lift his girlfriend from the wrecked vehicle behind him.56 Scorsese transforms the automobile, a sign of freedom in American lore, into a site of confinement and death. His characters, ensnared in their ethnic enclave, can’t get out. Taxi Driver, which won the 1976 Palme D’Or and secured Scorsese’s status as a serious, cerebral filmmaker, also uses the automobile to signal not liberation but constraint and disgust. Travis Bickle (De Niro), an isolated Vietnam vet struggling with insomnia, takes a job as a nightshift taxi driver, enduring the indignities of the work, including cleaning semen and blood out of the back seat. Sickened at what he sees at night and suffering from some mental disorder, Travis decides to take matters into his own hands, raiding an East Village brothel and killing three men. The film offers little information about him other than to introduce him as a vet who may be ethnic. Travis, wearing a bomber jacket with “Bickle, T.” across the shoulders, walks into a taxi service office. The interviewer, perhaps because of his last name, asks, “Will you work Jewish holidays?” to which Travis answers, “Anytime, anywhere.” The

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man then asks him about his service record, and Travis reveals that he did a tour in Vietnam as a marine.57 Scorsese needs nothing more to establish his protagonist’s sense of estrangement. He may be ethnic. He served in Vietnam. The automobile suffocates rather than frees him. Travis, the white ethnic, the Vietnam vet, will not be lighting out for the territories. With Mean Streets, Scorsese turned the first-generation immigrant’s tale of flight into the second generation’s dead end. With Taxi Driver, he shackled a former marine to that dead end, Americanizing the white ethnic and ethnicizing the Vietnam vet.58 Scorsese’s breakout movies kicked off an era of filmmaking that, though often described as transgressive, leftist, and conscious of the horrors of war and what it did to the minds of men, fueled what Susan Faludi, the feminist writer, later described as an artful “counterassault on women’s rights.”59 Something had gone wrong for the antihero men of the new Hollywood, and that something, the films suggested, radiated from two interrelated sources: the Vietnam War and women. Taxi Driver, for example, can’t decide whether to attribute Travis’s homicidal rage to the trauma of war or to the trauma of women in the 1970s, whom he believes himself to be defending as perhaps he had been led to believe he would in Southeast Asia. The connection between the “remasculinization” of Travis and other white men and box-office antifeminism could be difficult to see, Faludi observed, because they often sorted out into different genres.60 Action films invited men to vent about broken promises. Dramas and romantic comedies encouraged women to believe that perhaps they needed a man after all. The ethnic veteran film, a marriage of action and high-minded drama, brought the male grievance and antifeminist narratives together, insulating the latter from criticism with the moral weight of the former. The characters’ antifeminism could be excused as an unfortunate but understandable reaction to the trials of the white ethnic or of his filmic descendent, the white vet. The young directors often refashioned their families’ immigrant stories. Some thought of their moves from ethnic boroughs to Los Angeles as immigrant stories of their own. Scorsese, raised in Lower Manhattan, identified with Elia Kazan’s 1963 immigrant film America, America, writing, “I later saw myself making the same journey, not from Anatolia, but rather from my own neighborhood in New York, which was in a sense a very foreign land. My move took me from that land to moviemaking.”61 Francis Ford Coppola, the grandchild of Italian immigrants, turned that tale into the stuff of blockbusters and then used it to rewrite the Vietnam War, translating the immigrant saga of mafia boss Vito Corleone (Marlon

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Brando, De Niro) into the emigrant fugue of Green Beret Walter Kurtz (Brando). The Godfather, which won Best Picture at the 1973 Oscars, chronicles the transformation of Michael Corleone (Pacino) from a straitlaced college student to the ruthless heir to his father, Vito, in the 1940s. The Godfather Part II, which won Best Picture at the 1975 Oscars, follows Vito backward to 1901, when he arrived at Ellis Island, nine years old and alone, and Michael forward into the 1950s as he relocates the Corleones from New York to Nevada. The young Vito gazes out at the Statue of Liberty from a detention cell, and the legend “Vito Corleone, Ellis Island, 1901” fades into Michael’s son’s lavish first communion on the Corleone estate outside Reno. The next legend reads, “His Grandson, Anthony Vito Corleone, Lake Tahoe, Nevada, 1958.”62 The contrast between Vito’s detention cell and his grandson Anthony’s extravagant first communion tells the immigrant rags-to-riches narrative in microcosm. Vito arrives with nothing but the clothes on his back, and in a mere two generations the Corleones have made their fortune. Coppola’s next film, Apocalypse Now, takes that immigrant narrative and reverses it. Colonel Kurtz (Brando) had been a high achiever all his life. A third-generation West Point graduate, he earned a graduate degree from Harvard, served in Korea, and, at the onset of the Vietnam War, looked like a general-in-waiting. The war in Southeast Asia changes all that. He goes AWOL in Cambodia, where he reinvents himself as a demigod among the indigenous Montagnards. Fearing what Kurtz may do and how it may reflect on the army, the Pentagon sends Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) to take him out “with extreme prejudice.” Willard finds Kurtz raving mad and, in a scene intercut with the ceremonial slaughter of a water buffalo, assassinates him with a machete.63 Kurtz and now Willard have descended into the heart of darkness. If the Godfather films chronicle Vito’s rise from rags to riches and from old world to new, Apocalypse Now tells a tale of white America’s fall from grace. Kurtz and Willard have left the first world for the third, West Point and Harvard for the horror of guerrilla war. Scorsese’s and Coppola’s immigrant and war films bind the hardscrabble lives of white ethnics to the traumatizing combat tours of white Vietnam vets. Their white ethnic characters make it (or not) in New York, and their white vet characters lose it in Southeast Asia. Coppola, echoing his friend Scorsese, also related his struggles as a filmmaker to the stories of immigrants and vets. “My film is not about Vietnam,” he declared at a news conference at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival. “It is Vietnam. We made it very much like the way the Americans were in

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Vietnam. We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.”64 White Americans had reclaimed their ethnic roots, and now they would claim their war stories, whether they served in Vietnam or made an over-budget war movie. The immigrant film and the Vietnam War film converged at the 1979 Oscars, where Cimino’s The Deer Hunter took home five awards, including Best Picture. (Hal Ashby’s Vietnam War drama Coming Home also received a nomination for Best Picture and won three statuettes.) Coppola stood on stage that night to deliver Best Director honors to Cimino, whom he introduced as his colleague and “paisan.”65 He congratulated Cimino using the term of endearment among Italians and Italian Americans in a nod to their shared heritage, but Cimino had won that night for a different kind of ethnic film. With his second film, The Deer Hunter, in which three ethnic Russian steelworkers leave their declining hometown outside Pittsburgh for Vietnam, the young director distilled ethnic difference into a set of generic images and themes and wedded it to the alienation of the Vietnam vet. Cimino recruited actors from ethnic but not ethnic Russian backgrounds: De Niro, John Savage, and Christopher Walken. De Niro, for example, hailed from Irish and Italian immigrant families and had made his name in Italian American roles. But that didn’t matter in the white ethnic film of the late 1970s. Verisimilitude didn’t matter. Irish, Italian, Russian, whatever—De Niro needed to be white but not too white to suffer in Vietnam. The film begins with scenes from the steel mill, where the three men work their last day before entering the army, and from Savage’s character’s Greek Orthodox wedding, where they encounter an aloof Green Beret. The setting then shifts to Vietnam, where National Liberation Front soldiers catch and detain them and force them into a game of Russian roulette.66 The scene takes Eddie Adam’s iconic photograph of a South Vietnamese general executing an NLF guerrilla and reverses it so an American, rather than an NLF soldier, finds the gun turned on him.67 Cimino’s film binds a generic ethnic hurt to veteran trauma through the transference of Southeast Asian suffering to white American bodies. Cultural historian and critical race theorist Sylvia Chong names that transference “the oriental obscene,” a constellation of racial fantasies that render white victimhood knowable through and against Southeast Asian life. The oriental obscene, Chong writes, “speaks not only to the trauma of the imagined oriental body, but also to that oriental body as the index of trauma within the [American] national

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body.”68 Through a transference of trauma from Southeast Asians to American soldiers, The Deer Hunter confers a generic ethnic status— sort of ethnic Russian and sort of Asian—to the white vet, nationalizing white minoritization and allowing all white men to feel a sense of ethnic grievance stemming from the Vietnam War. Cimino took two genres at the heart of the new Hollywood, the immigrant roots film and the veteran trauma film, and combined them, constructing a multigenre testament to the suffering of white men. It earned him accolade after accolade and secured the budgets for a slew of future Vietnam War movies, including the Rambo films with their Italian American star, the icon of the white ethnic revival, fighting to win.

another bum from the neighborhood Stallone didn’t box. He didn’t serve in Vietnam either. But he embraced his on-screen identities as his own, blurring the line between Stallone the actor, Rocky the fighter, and Rambo the vet. For the young white men who mocked the antiwar vets outside the Hasty Pudding Theater, Stallone stood as the real veteran. And the actor didn’t disagree. A workingclass kid from Hell’s Kitchen, Stallone, channeling his boxer protagonist, liked to remind interviewers that he had come from nothing, that his life had been a million-to-one shot. In 1975, he watched Chuck Wepner, a thirty-five-year-old slugger from Bayonne, New Jersey, go toe-to-toe with Muhammad Ali. Wepner, dubbed the “Bayonne Bleeder” after Sonny Liston showered the ringside with his blood in a 1970 bout, came from German, Ukrainian, and Belarusian immigrant families. Next to Ali, he looked old and slow. His hairline receding, he lumbered while Ali danced. But Wepner held his own, knocking Ali down in the ninth and lasting into the fifteenth round, when Ali won in a technical knockout. A few months later, with $106 in the bank, his wife pregnant, and unable to feed his bullmastiff, Stallone sat down and wrote a film about a white ethnic underdog who goes the distance against a boastful Black titleholder. That film, Rocky, made the actor’s career. The highest-grossing movie of 1976, it won the Oscar for Best Picture and earned the unknown Stallone a nomination for Best Actor. (Wepner later sued Stallone for $45 million.)69 Finding himself an overnight millionaire, Stallone fashioned himself as the real-life embodiment of Rocky’s hard-luck life and hard-won success. “Rocky had drive, and intelligence, and the talent to be a fighter, but nobody noticed him,” Stallone said a week after the film’s release. “Then when opportunity knocked, everybody

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said, ‘Hey, there’s Rocky. He’s good.’ That’s what happened to me. The fact that we both went the distance when we were finally given the opportunity, that’s the main parallel.”70 The film wasn’t fiction at all, he told interviewers. “It’s my autobiography.”71 The box-office success of Rocky marked the culmination and the end of the new Hollywood era. Stallone carried on the tradition of auteurism, writing, directing, and starring in his films, and, like Scorsese, he mined the ethnic neighborhoods of his childhood for material. But the tone had changed. It was feel-good rather than irreverent. Stallone distanced himself from the existentialism of the other young filmmakers. “Right now, it’s as if a big cavernous black hole has been burned into the entertainment section of the brain. It’s filled with demons and paranoia and fear,” he lamented in a 1976 interview. “Where are all the heroes? Even the cowboys today are perverts—they all sleep with their horses. Let other people suffer and do all those pain things and put their demons up on the screen. I’m not going to.”72 Film historians often date the end of the new Hollywood era to 1977, when George Lucas’s Star Wars established a model for the modern blockbuster, or 1980, when Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, an overambitious three-hour western, lost more than $40 million and ruined United Artists. But Rocky signaled that end, as studios turned to narrative-driven, neoclassical blockbusters that could generate lucrative franchises. Stallone may have been an auteur, but he wanted control over his films not as an artist but as a businessman. Alienation didn’t sell. He took the ethnic narrative of Scorsese and others and made it go down easier. He made it not about disillusionment but about fighting on against the odds. Stallone’s hit film, a film that white audiences flocked to see, sometimes waiting in line for hours, inverts the civil rights narrative of structural Black disadvantage. From a hard-hit ethnic neighborhood in South Philadelphia, Rocky struggles to make ends meet. At thirty, having never gotten his shot at the big time, he works as an enforcer for a loan shark and boxes on the side. He gets his chance at last when the self-assured Black champ Apollo Creed, whom Stallone modeled after Ali, decides to stage a title bout against a local fighter, selling it as a tribute to American ideals at the nation’s bicentennial. “This is the land of opportunity, right? So Apollo Creed on January 1st gives a local underdog fighter an opportunity. A snow-white underdog, and I’m going to put his face on this poster with me,” Creed tells his management, after learning that his original challenger suffered a broken hand and can’t fight. “And I’ll tell you why. Because I’m sentimental. And a lot of other people in this country

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Rocky (1976).

are just as sentimental, and there’s nothing they’d like better than to see Apollo Creed give a local Philadelphia boy a shot at the greatest title in the world on this country’s biggest birthday.”73 Dressed in a tailored suit, Creed declares himself willing to give a “snow-white” local “boy” a shot at his title. Turning around the condescension of white liberals toward Black men, now a well-heeled Black man deigns to give a working-class white man what Creed sees as a handout, a chance to stand in the same ring as him. He chooses Rocky because of his nickname, the Italian Stallion. Creed, who wears red, white, and blue in the ring, claims the American dream that has never materialized for Rocky. The film suggests that, at the bicentennial, after civil rights and feminism, the white ethnic, the Italian American, dangles from the nation’s lowest rung. Rocky loses to Creed but, like Wepner, lasts fifteen rounds. He does not win but endures, achieving his aim, as he tells his girlfriend, Adrian Pennino (Talia Shire), to “go the distance,” to suffer Creed’s blows until the final bell. He knows he can’t beat Creed, the better athlete, but if he can hang with him, he tells Adrian on the eve of the fight, “I’m going to know for the first time in my life, you see, that I weren’t just another bum from the neighborhood.” He dreams not of fame and fortune but of showing the world that, although he comes from nothing, he deserves his shot at the title. He can out-suffer the Black titleholder. While Creed boasts on television, Rocky undertakes a grueling training regimen, running through the streets of his rundown neighborhood before sunrise and hitting animal carcasses at Adrian’s brother’s slaughterhouse.

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Stallone, who didn’t use a stuntman, described his own training for the film like a real-life movie montage, full of eccentric routines and broken bones. He hired Franco Columbu, the 1976 Mr. Olympia, as his weights coach ahead of filming for the second installment in the franchise. Stallone later told interviewers that Columbu had driven him to lift so much weight that he tore a muscle in his chest. “The pain was something awful and pretty soon the arm turned black,” he said. “I had to go to the doctor. ‘Look,’ [the doctor] said. ‘I’m writing this medical book. Let me take a picture of that arm.’”74 Stallone identified himself as a workhorse who, though less talented than some, could take more suffering than the next man, a real-life Rocky. His boxing films fetishize the work ethic of the blue-collar white ethnic and assume that his Black antagonist, in his suit and tie, can’t share it. Rocky II has the Italian Stallion fighting to win and deserving it. In the first installment, Rocky is the true underdog, an inferior athlete to Creed who endures fifteen rounds through sheer will. In the 1979 second installment, he is the more gifted fighter who never got a fair chance because of his structural disadvantages as a white man from the mean streets of his ethnic enclave. After suffering a detached retina in his first match with Creed, Rocky retires. But Creed, frustrated that some fans believe the decision should have gone to Rocky, wants a rematch. His trainer, Duke (Tony Burton), tries to talk him out of it. “I saw you beat that man like I never saw no man get beat before, and the man kept coming after you,” he tells the fighter. “Now, we don’t need that kind of man in our life.”75 Ignoring Duke, Creed sees to it that leaflets get distributed in Rocky’s neighborhood declaring him “the Italian Chicken.” The ever-humble Rocky, out of work since retiring, laughs it off but, his ethnic honor hurt, he agrees to the rematch. The film accentuates the socioeconomic difference between Creed, whom we see at home in his Los Angeles mansion, and Rocky, who, unable to fight, struggles to earn a living. Not the Black character but the white ethnic must confront additional economic obstacles and anti-white literature. After civil rights, feminism, and war, the film insinuates, the United States works for Creed, the brash Black man, but not Rocky, the stoic white ethnic. The Italian American fighter embodies what Novak described as unmeltable, illegitimate white minorities facing an “internal conflict between one’s felt personal power and one’s ascribed public power: a sense of outraged truth, justice, and equity.”76 The white Protestant establishment had shut him and other white ethnics out, Novak argued, and wouldn’t acknowledge that it had, casting them as more entitled

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white men, as “the man,” rather than disenfranchised minorities. But Rocky, now the better athlete, overcomes his disadvantage to beat Creed, claiming the title he deserved all along. The ending of the second Rocky film, with the victorious white fighter raising the title belt, looks ahead to the revisionist Vietnam War movies of the 1980s in which white men would get to win this time.77

the ethnicization of john rambo Visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial often make rubbings of the names on the black granite walls, names of brothers, friends, and comrades. Of the more than fifty-eight thousand names, they come to touch and make a record of the etchings that mark the lives of the loved ones they lost in the war. But the most visited name on the wall doesn’t belong to the soldier with the most siblings, friends, and comrades. That name belongs to Arthur Rambo, a twenty-four-year-old army sergeant from Libby, Montana, killed in southeastern Vietnam and of no relation to the man most memorial visitors have in mind: John Rambo, the fictional hero of the action movie franchise.78 The first installment in that franchise, First Blood, debuted in theaters three weeks before the 1982 dedication of the memorial, grossing more than $100 million and ensuring a constant stream of visitors to the name of the army sergeant from Montana. Like the young white counterdemonstrators in Cambridge, some visitors to the National Mall see John Rambo as more real than the men and women commemorated on the memorial walls. In 1985, the Washington Post asked visitors, “How real is Rambo?” Some said they found it “realistic.” Others declared it “fake.”79 The Post framed it as a delicate debate with two valid sides, memorial visitors who affirmed Rambo’s realism and others who acknowledged the movie for what it was: a movie. The white ethnic revival and Vietnam War revisionism merged in the late 1970s in Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, a film that, in taking home the Oscar for Best Picture, demonstrated to hesitant studio heads that moviegoers and critics might be willing to revisit the war, albeit with a few historical modifications. The first two Rambo films revise Cimino’s formula, isolating the trauma of the vet from the struggles of the white ethnic but without forfeiting the sense of white minoritization associated with the Italian Stallion. The films, which Stallone cowrote, encouraged the white ethnic minorities who had rediscovered their Irish, Italian, and Polish roots in the 1970s to reunite as the besieged white nationalists of

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the 1980s. Susan Jeffords, the feminist film historian, identifies the latter genre as a vehicle through which men reclaimed a “normative body that enveloped strength, labor, determination, loyalty, and courage” (nondisabled, white, hetero, male) against the alleged threat of the “soft body” (disabled, Black, queer, female).80 That remasculinization often unfolded in relation to female or feminized characters, whom Rambo, for example, either rescues (female character or assumed off-screen audience) or defeats (feminized, non-American or un-American, “soft” male). Not all men got to win this time. The right kind of men did, and that meant masculine, nationalist, and, most of all, white men. First Blood ethnicizes the Vietnam vet in binding him to the white ethnic underdog through Stallone but also in relating his disenfranchisement to that of a Black man. We meet Rambo, wearing an old army jacket, his AWOL bag over his shoulder, as he arrives at his Black comrade Delmore’s rural childhood home in Washington State. Rambo learns from Delmore’s mother that his friend died of cancer. “All that orange stuff,” she tells him, referring to Agent Orange. “They spread it around, cut him down to nothing.”81 Distraught, Rambo walks to the neighboring small town, where the sheriff (Brian Dennehy) harasses him, refusing to let him eat at a local diner. The sheriff gives Rambo an unwanted ride to the edge of town, telling him, “We don’t want guys like you in this town, drifters. First thing you know we’ve got a whole bunch of guys like you in this town. . . . Besides, you wouldn’t like it here. This is a quiet little town.” When the vet walks back in the direction of town, the sheriff arrests him for loitering. His treatment at the hands of the sheriff follows, beat for beat, a civil rights narrative of antiBlack racism. Law enforcement bars him from a restaurant, tells him that his kind isn’t welcome for fear that others like him might settle in the town and change it for the worse, and arrests him as a vagrant under the movie’s own antiveteran version of Black Codes. Back at the station, officers wash him with a fire hose, summoning the iconic images of the integrationist Birmingham campaign, rendering the white vet the Black man of 1982, denied service, harassed, and arrested for how he looks—not with dark skin but in army green. Rambo’s interaction with Delmore’s mother establishes that he is no racist—he cares about his Black friend, and the news of his death shakes him—but also suggests a kind of racial reversal. Delmore’s mother owns a modest but beautiful house on a lake. Rambo, homeless, has nothing to his name but the clothes on his back. She, although she has lost a son, has a good life. He doesn’t have one at all.82 Forced to wage a one-man

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First Blood (1982).

war against local law enforcement and then the National Guard, Rambo tells Colonel Sam Trautmen (Richard Crenna), his commanding officer in Vietnam, “They drew first blood, not me. . . . They drew first blood.” He acted out of self-defense. He committed the crime, he tells Trautmen, of being a Vietnam vet, of being, after civil rights and feminism, the face at the bottom of the well. Rambo: First Blood Part II, which broke international box office records, reconstitutes Rambo as half–American Indian. Trautmen recruits the incarcerated vet—he finds Rambo doing hard labor for his war against the small-town sheriff’s office—to investigate whether Vietnam is still holding American POWs. (It is, of course, and Rambo rescues them.) The Vietnam vet flies to Thailand, where he meets Marshall Murdock (Charles Napier), the government bureaucrat leading the mission. Murdock reads Rambo’s file aloud: “Born 7-6-47, Bowie, Arizona, of Indian-German descent. That’s a hell of a combination.”83 His decorations from Vietnam, we learn, include a Distinguished Service Cross, two Silver Stars, and a Medal of Honor. There is nothing in the first film or David Morrell’s novel, on which the film is based, about Rambo having American Indian heritage. Stallone’s character falls into a long tradition of white Americans “playing Indian” to claim national belonging and assert what they imagine as an authentic form of being in an inauthentic modern world.84 Conferring American Indian heritage on Rambo makes him all the more American as a native of the land and suggests that his skills as a soldier—

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Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985).

he needs nothing more than a knife to defeat whole armies—descend from Indigenous cultures, making him the ideal guerrilla warrior in Southeast Asia. Rambo returns to Vietnam not as the colonizer but as the colonized, his innocence restored.85 The white ethnic revival had made white minorities the most American thing of all. In the 1970s, that meant an Italian American actor starring as an Italian American boxer. In the 1980s, that meant a white actor starring as a half-Indian soldier— a minoritization that, as simulated rather than embodied, allowed all white men to see themselves reflected in it. Before agreeing to his new mission, Rambo asks Trautmen, “Sir, do we get to win this time?” The answer for the vet, and for the white men who identified with him, is yes. Now they could control the narrative from all sides. The Rambo films recast the white ethnic trials of the Italian Stallone as the war stories of Rambo. But white moviegoers didn’t need to serve to see themselves in Stallone’s character because the films also redefine what it means to be a veteran American. Murdock lies to Rambo about his service in the war, and Rambo sees through the lie. Murdock loses his claim to veteran-ness, not, though, because he didn’t serve but because he doesn’t love the United States like Rambo, like a good patriot. When Trautmen asks Rambo after the rescue what he wants, he answers, “I want what they [the POWs] want, and every other guy who came over here and spilled his guts and gave everything he had wants: for our country to love us as much as we love it.” Veteran status has less to do for Rambo with wearing the uniform than with waving the flag.

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A vet who resists war has less claim than a nonvet who doesn’t. The counterdemonstrators at Harvard also made that distinction. For them, Stallone signified real veteran-ness, though he didn’t serve, while the antiwar vets didn’t, though they had. From Rocky to Rambo, Stallone, the real vet, had reimagined white America as veteran America. He didn’t need a tour in Vietnam to belong there.

the american stallion Stallone loomed large in 1985. The second Rambo film dominated the summer box office with a trailer teasing the next Stallone blockbuster due out that fall, Rocky IV. The ad introduced the Italian American boxer’s newest rival, the towering Soviet fighter Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), standing before the hammer and sickle and declaring, “Soon I will fight Rocky Balboa, and the world will see his defeat.” The sixtysecond trailer ended with a call to arms: “Get ready for the next world war!” Some audiences broke into chants of “USA! USA!”86 The fourth installment in the Rocky franchise, the highest-grossing of them all, nationalizes the white ethnic underdog, transforming him from the Italian Stallion into the American Stallion. There is no more mention of his ethnic background or nickname. The boxer is now a cold warrior, fighting for the United States and the free world against a mechanical Soviet giant. United Artists, which distributed the film, advised theaters to hand out mini–American flags at showings so that moviegoers could wave them during Rocky’s climactic bout with Drago.87 The Smithsonian owns the blood-soaked American flag boxing shorts Stallone wore in the film, including them in an exhibit titled “Treasures of American History.”88 In 1985, Rambo returned to Vietnam, and Rocky left Philadelphia for Moscow. Together they would fight the Cold War all over again. With his second Rambo and fourth Rocky installments, Stallone all but merged the two franchises. If Rambo: First Blood Part II ethnicizes the white vet, then Rocky IV nationalizes the ethnic boxer. Stallone often blurred them together in interviews. “They just pushed until finally the giant said, ‘Wait a minute, I’m big and strong but I haven’t done anything that’s that atrocious,’ ” he mused in an interview with Newsweek. “There’s nothing wrong with being fit and strong and powerful and, if necessary, to flex some muscle. . . . We’re not coming in there quaking, ‘What do I do?’ We’re coming in as an equal. We’re now in the proper weight class.”89 The interviewer admitted that he didn’t

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know if the actor meant Rocky, Rambo, himself, or the Reagan administration. Stallone drifted from one to other in a free-associative riff. Rocky and “his blood brother” Rambo, Newsweek wrote, stand as “the twin icons of a flag-waving, Red-bashing new nationalism in our mass culture,” having “brought the mythic American hero downstage center again, standing tall after years in hiding, ready to take on the world with guns, knives, gloves or bare knuckles.”90 The association between Stallone’s resurgent white underdogs and Reagan’s reescalation of the Cold War reveals the rearming of the nation in the 1980s as a rewhitening, with the Vietnam vet, fighting to win this time, acting as the protagonist of post–civil rights white America. Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism, celebrated the new nationalism of Stallone’s films in terms the actor would have liked: “The shock of Vietnam has largely worn off among the people—one even gets the sense, from the immense popularity of a movie like Rambo, that perhaps they wouldn’t mind doing it again, only this time doing it right, i.e., winning.”91 Rocky IV folded the racial grievance of Kristol’s white ethnic revival into the anticommunism of his unending Cold War. The film has Rocky fighting not against but on behalf of a Black man. Creed trained Rocky in the third installment, the two men, now friends, working together to defeat the militant Black challenger Clubber Lang (Mr. T). In IV, Rocky trains Creed, who comes out of retirement to take on Drago. When the Soviet fighter kills Creed in the ring, a grieving Rocky, seeking to avenge his friend’s death, agrees to an unsanctioned match with Drago in Moscow. Duke, Creed’s mentor since the first film, flies to the USSR with Rocky to serve as his trainer, the two men mourning together. “Apollo was like my son,” he tells Rocky. “I raised him. When he died, part of me died. But now, you’re the one. You’re the one that’s going to keep his spirit alive. You’re the one that’s going to make sure that he didn’t die for nothing.”92 The two men, one Black and one white, embrace, and the first training montage kicks in. The Italian American boxer, in fighting for two Black men, Creed and Duke, sheds his ethnic status. Now he enters the ring with a nation united behind him. Billboards for the movie advertised that multiracial Team USA, showing Duke lifting Rocky, an American flag around his shoulders, into the air. Not until he receives the endorsement of the Black trainer can Rocky the white ethnic reemerge as Rocky the all-American. Eric Lott, the cultural historian, observes that alliances between white ethnics and Black Americans almost never form on level footing. “Crossracial identification and collaboration born of shared marginality too

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Rocky IV (1985).

often amount to eating the Other,” he writes. “The mirror is convex, its reflection always skewing the image, the gazers’ visage looming larger than that of their object of desire.”93 Rocky arrives as a national hero, an unconditional American, thanks to a Black man’s death and another’s ringside service. But Rocky’s bout in the Soviet Union also returns him to his immigrant roots. He arranges with Soviet officials to let him train in the USSR, where he, Duke, and his brother-in-law live in a frozen-over rural cabin. The fighter works out in a barn, lifting rocks, sawing logs, and climbing snow-covered mountain ridges. In the United States, he lives in a mansion, drives a Lamborghini, and wears fine suits. In the Soviet Union, he wears rough cotton shirts. He grows a beard. Without a car, he runs. The cabin returns Rocky to his former white ethnic struggle, reminding him what his forefathers sacrificed to make it in America. No longer Italian but a kind of generic American immigrant, he embraces his Russian roots. The locals don’t know what to make of the foreigner at first, but, as Rocky shows his mettle, running through the snow and ice, he earns their admiration. The Soviet working class welcomes him as a native son come home. The American’s humble training stands in contrast to Drago’s. The Soviet fighter does his workouts indoors. A team of doctors monitors him, administering steroids and using state-of-the-art technologies to measure his endurance and strength. Drago wears singlets and runs on a treadmill, more machine than man. Rocky shows himself to be more

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relatable for the local Soviets than Drago, a Soviet. He trains under the same tough conditions in which they have labored all their lives. Rocky, the descendant of immigrants, came from nothing and knows how it feels to work hard with the odds stacked against him. His time in the Soviet Union is not a visit, the training montages suggest, but a homecoming. Rocky’s immigrant saga may be subordinated in the fourth film, but it remains central to his claim to Americanness and his value as a cold warrior. He sheds his ethnic nickname but not, as a soldier in Reagan’s Cold War, his sense of white struggle. Stallone had no bigger fan than the president of the United States. Near the end of his second term, Reagan told guests at a fund-raising dinner that he looked forward to seeing the third installment in the Rambo franchise. “You remember in the first movie Rambo took over a town. In the second, he single-handedly defeated several Communist armies. And now in the third film, they say he really gets tough,” he said, drawing laughter from his White House dinner guests. “Almost makes me wish I could serve a third term.”94 Reagan’s election in 1980 brought neoconservatism into the mainstream. In his inaugural address, he declared, in one of his most famous lines, that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He also vowed to beat back “the enemies of freedom,” a vow that would take a big defense budget to fulfill.95 That address distilled, for some, the contradiction at the heart of the conservative movement. How could a conservative be against big government but for war? Against institution building but for empire building? Kristol struggled to resolve that contradiction. Neoconservatives, he wrote near the end of his life, believe in “cutting tax rates in order to stimulate steady economic growth” but do not share the libertarian “anxiety about the growth of the state” as an instrument of national defense. War, he argued, elevated nationalist feeling, and that feeling held the modern nation together. “Patriotism is a natural and healthy sentiment and should be encouraged by both private and public institutions,” he declared. “Precisely because we are a nation of immigrants, this is a powerful American sentiment.”96 Kristol maintained that a diverse United States needed nationalism to create a sense of belonging. It needed war to turn white ethnics into white Americans, the Italian American Rocky into the bright-white Rambo. It needed war to forge a white republic against racial redistribution but eager to fund wars that, Kristol thought, united white men as a nation of immigrants. War, he, Rambo, and Reagan sensed, formed white racial identities and secured white racial interests.

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In the 1980s, white men mourned defeat on the radio, blasting Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” and dreamed of a racial comeback at the movie theater, cheering as Rocky and Rambo refought and won the war. But neither the Rambo of rock nor the Boss of the big screen, neither the left-liberal musician nor the conservative actor, could make war good again, not as hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asian refugees resettled in the United States, reminding the nation of the harm it had done in the war. Vietnam vets and the white men who identified with them contained that challenge as they returned to Southeast Asia to recover and rebuild what they imagined as a long-lost home, turning themselves into refugees of a different kind. Like Rambo, they would win this time, not the war but the hearts and minds for which they had fought as young men.

chapter 5

Like a Refugee

“Suddenly,” Rolling Stone said of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ breakout 1980 hit “Refugee,” “American rock seemed born again.”1 The Heartbreakers had enlisted Bruce Springsteen’s recording engineer to make an album that ditched new wave for straight-ahead rock tunes about hard love and hard luck in Small Town, USA. “Refugee,” the second single off that record, Damn the Torpedoes, announced the arrival of bright-white, blue-collar heartland rock as the sound of 1980s rock radio. The Heartbreakers had saved rock and roll, Rolling Stone declared, not for the first time, with a record that brought the genre down to earth, making us feel like “it’s what we’d all be doing if we could.”2 On “Refugee,” Petty scolds a self-sabotaging lover for living, he tells her, like a refugee. “Everybody’s had to fight to be free,” he sings on the lead track. “You see, you don’t have to live like a refugee.”3 When they received an invitation from The Merv Griffin Show, the Heartbreakers, not wanting to do the NBC talk show, agreed to record a music video for “Refugee” that the show could air in the band’s absence. In the three-minute video, Petty wanders through the shadows of a shuttered industrial building, singing about struggle and dislocation. When MTV launched in 1981, it made “Refugee” one of the first music video hits. The white men of heartland rock had moved to the dark edge of town, where they lived, on cable television, like refugees. “Refugee” climbed to number fifteen on the charts on March 15, 1980, a Saturday. On Monday, President Jimmy Carter signed the 152

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Refugee Act into law. Ted Kennedy, the liberal Democratic senator from Massachusetts, had teamed with Carter administration officials at the Immigration and Naturalization Service to draft the bill, which, conscious of a growing refugee crisis in Southeast Asia, amended the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, raising the annual limit of refugees admitted to the United States from 17,500 to 50,000, with more admitted above that number when “justified by humanitarian concerns.” The act allowed for the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, who built new homes and communities in California, Massachusetts, Texas, and elsewhere, and, conforming to the language of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, formalized the legal meaning of refugee as “any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality” and unable or unwilling to return “because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”4 The definition included clauses and subclauses. The staffers who drafted it wanted to leave no mistake as to who constituted a refugee and who didn’t. That spring, Congress tightened the meaning of the term, and heartland rock broadened it, treating it as a free-floating signifier that could name an estranged lover on a Heartbreakers record or another protagonist of the genre: the Vietnam vet, a stranger in his own land, a refugee of a different kind. The Refugee Act faced limited resistance. The bill sailed through Congress in landslide votes of 85–0 and 328–47. Neither the American Legion nor the Daughters of the American Revolution, two of the leading antiimmigrant organizations, tried to block it. The law, though introduced from the left, offered something for liberals and conservatives. The liberal Democrats who drafted and endorsed the bill argued that the United States should take in refugees on humanitarian rather than, as it had throughout the Cold War, anticommunist grounds. In 1978, Carter, commemorating the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, declared human rights “the soul of our foreign policy,” adding, at a White House event, that “to help these refugees is a simple human duty” and that “as Americans, as a people made up largely of the descendants of refugees, we feel that duty with special keenness.”5 The act he signed in 1980 cut all references to communism from the 1965 law. Conservatives didn’t obstruct the bill because it curbed the Carter administration’s “parole authority” under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which they thought the president had abused, and because, although it eliminated anticommunist language from refugee

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law, the act didn’t remove refugee law from the anticommunist’s arsenal.6 Most refugees admitted to the United States under Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, arrived from either communist Cuba or communist Vietnam. In 1982, Reagan could claim, “One of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: Of all the millions of refugees we’ve seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward the Communist world.”7 The Refugee Act could be humanitarian and anticommunist, benevolent and self-interested. “The admission of particular refugees,” cultural theorist and critical refugee studies scholar Cathy Schlund-Vials writes, has never been a “wholesale humanitarian endeavor” but a “politicized project” that reveals more about state interests than national feelings.8 The Cold War state tended to turn into a vigorous defender of human rights when it made communist governments look bad, including, most of all, Vietnam. The trouble for liberals and conservatives began when refugees told their own stories, stories not limited to tales of humanitarian rescue or communist authoritarianism. Huynh-Nhu Le, a 1.5-generation Vietnamese American, wrote in her 1991 poem “Hearts and Minds” of Vietnam as “a land I know not much,” where she has never swam the waters or climbed the mountains, and of the United States as “a land I know quite well,” where she has swum and “drowned” and climbed and “fallen.”9 Le couldn’t see either Carter’s humanitarianism or Reagan’s anticommunism reflected in her own life. She did not know Vietnam well, but she knew the United States, and it didn’t feel like a beacon of human rights or a refuge from communist terror to her. Refugee stories challenge the idea of the Vietnam War as a white man’s sacrifice. The transformation of the white vet into a new kind of refugee worked to contain that challenge. Reagan used the narrative of veteran dislocation to win his first presidential term. In 1980, addressing the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Reagan, then the Republican nominee, declared that the United States under Carter, caving to the demands of antiwar activists, had retreated from the world, a victim of the “Vietnam syndrome.” That condition, he argued, had most harmed the “tens of thousands of boat people who have shown us there is no freedom in the so-called peace in Vietnam” and the veterans to whom “we have been shabby in our treatment” and who “deserve our gratitude, our respect, and our continuing concern.” It had caused refugee crises in Southeast Asia and, Reagan suggested, in the United States, with the nation unwilling to take in and honor the men who sacrificed for the “noble cause” it had abandoned in

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Vietnam.10 The flight of refugees from Southeast Asia demonstrated for the president-to-be that the war in Southeast Asia had been a good war all along—why else would Vietnamese risk life and limb to flee their communist government?—and that the nation’s most urgent concern should be their own stateside refugees: the vets to whom Reagan spoke. The cultural industries backed his claim. We meet John Rambo for the first time as he walks—from where? we don’t know—into a small town in the Pacific Northwest with nothing to his name but a hunting knife.11 Larry Heinemann’s National Book Award–winning novel Paco’s Story, a liberal answer to the Rambo films, introduces former soldier Paco Sullivan as he gets off a bus in a middle-of-nowhere town where he knows no one. “This sure ain’t the first fucking time I’ve been left behind,” he thinks, as the bus leaves him on the side of the road with his cane and his AWOL bag.12 If Petty’s forlorn lover does not have to live like a refugee, as he reminds her, suggesting the error in the term, Rambo and Paco, internal refugees in a nation that didn’t welcome them and that they can’t recognize as their former home, have no choice. The Reagan administration forged a nationalist revival through the rehabilitation of the Vietnam vet, and that rehabilitation, as critical refugee studies scholars argue, unfolded in relation to the Vietnamese refugee. The sociologist Yê´n Lê Espiritu identifies how a renewed belief in the rightness of the Vietnam War—as a noble cause, in Reagan’s words—emerged from a revisionist media narrative in which self-sacrificing white soldiers had risked their lives not to beat back an encroaching communism but to rescue refugees from the unfreedom of the third world. The good soldier had won the war in the end because he had saved the good refugee, now living the American dream, from the backwardness of Vietnam. The refugee constituted not a crisis for the United States but, Espiritu writes, a solution, allowing it to win a war it had lost and rebuild “crucial ideological support for continued U.S. militaristic intervention around the world.”13 Sylvia Chong, the cultural historian, shows how action movies, including the Rambo franchise and the Chuck Norris Missing in Action films, also rehabilitated the white vet in relation to Vietnamese but as a virile warrior. Rambo and Norris’s James Braddock take on the roles of the Vietnamese guerrilla fighter and the Asian martial artist, Chong writes, “in order to reinvigorate a whiteness that has lost both its hegemonic wholeness from the protests of the 1970s and its masculine vigor from the Vietnam War.”14 Espiritu and Chong reveal how writers and filmmakers marshaled stories of Southeast Asian refugees to revive the

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white American man, either as a big-hearted liberal or as a besieged street fighter. The narrative of the white vet as a refugee himself bridged the liberal narrative of the good soldier and the conservative narrative of the action hero, forming a consensus that what the government had “given” refugees it had taken from vets.15 In 1985, Vietnam, closed to most Americans since the end of the war, granted some of the first trial visas to veterans and their families through a Long Island tour organizer. The vets, astonished at the warm welcome they received from Vietnamese, recounted healing returns to a land where they had lost their innocence and formed adult identities. “Veterans Returning to Vietnam to End a Haunting,” the New York Times announced. “Veterans Find Peace in Vietnam,” the Los Angeles Times added. The Washington Post described one tour as “A Meeting of Hearts and Minds.” Some of the vets, including Newsweek editor William Broyles, poets W. D. Ehrhart and Bruce Weigl, and Veterans Administration official Frederick Downs, wrote memoirs about their time in postwar Vietnam, describing their return tours as homecomings to a nation to which they belonged, a home that they thought they had lost. Ehrhart, a former marine and antiwar activist with Vietnam Veterans against the War, wondered what made him want to return. “Catharsis? Curiosity? Adventure?” he asked himself. “Perhaps it is as simple as the Vietnamese proverb: ‘Go out one day; come back with a basket full of knowledge.’ ”16 The knowledge Ehrhart and others came back with, though, once filtered through American news media and literature, had nothing to do with Vietnam. For the American reader at home, the vets’ tourism offered not a staging ground for a reconciliation between Americans and Vietnamese but a white racial reconciliation between American men, a reconciliation built on a reimagining of Vietnam as a lost imperial home for the soldier-turned-tourist. With more than half a million Southeast Asian refugees resettling in the United States, some writing memoirs about their lives at war and since, American vets told their own stories of dislocation, inviting white men, including nonvets, to imagine themselves as the real refugees of an unending war. War holds whiteness together in the United States, meaning that refugee stories, as inherent threats to that racial union, had to be either subsumed within the vet’s war stories or detached from the war as dehistoricized immigrant sagas. The construction of the vet refugee in news media and literature subsumed them, rendering the vet’s war stories all the more universal and binding arguments for veterans’ right to

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arguments against refugee admissions (“we have our own refugees to care for”; “veterans first”). White vets weren’t refugees, of course. But some Vietnam vets and the nonvets who brandished their image invited the idea because it allowed them to redefine the moral stakes of the war. The vet refugee refashioned white men as exiles at home and humanitarians abroad, modeling how war could be made good again with a little hurt and some heartfelt tourism. After civil rights and feminism, white men embraced the Vietnam vet as a figure through whom they could stage a racial reunion, reconstruct their racial identities, and imagine a racial comeback. Having tied their interests to the image of the veteran, they would soon need something more to sustain it: another war. But that meant first convincing the nation that war could be noble, that it could win the hearts and minds it hadn’t in Vietnam. That meant changing how the nation remembered the men who served and how it encountered refugees who knew something it didn’t want to hear: we are here because you were there.17

refugee acts In 1996, Lisa Lowe redefined Asian American studies. The field did more than document the lives of Americans of Asian descent, the cultural theorist argues in her second book, Immigrant Acts. It also revealed how Asian lives in the United States offered a critical angle from which to interrogate the idea of the nation and the limits of liberal freedom— an Asian American historical record that doubled as an Asian American “dialectical critique.” Lowe identifies how Asian immigration, from the Chinese Exclusion Act to the Immigration and Nationality Act, had formed a site of contradiction at which the alleged universalism of the United States showed itself to be a fiction, not an ever-widening circle but constituted through and constitutive of a racial outside. Immigrant acts had governed the Asian immigrant’s inclusion in and exclusion from national belonging, but Asian American writers and artists carried out critical “immigrant acts” of their own. “While immigration has been the locus of legal and political restriction for Asians as the ‘other’ in America, immigration has simultaneously been the site for the emergence of critical negations of the nation-state for which those legislations are the expression,” Lowe writes. “If the law is the apparatus that binds and seals the universality of the political body of the nation, then

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the ‘immigrant,’ produced as margin and threat to that symbolic whole, is precisely a generative site for the critique of that universality.”18 Immigration policy had, at different times across two centuries, situated Asian immigrants within the United States but not of it, as Americans who remained, no matter the years or generations since their arrival, marked as foreigners in their own land. Asian American culture showed the contradiction at the heart of the United States, a nation founded on liberal universals from which, through an ever-shifting racial calculus, it excludes most. With the nation rewriting the Vietnam War in the 1980s through the rehabilitation of the white vet, Southeast Asian refugees introduced their own critical acts—refugee acts that reveal the white norm that lies beneath American national belonging and that endures through a selective remembering of war and martial sacrifice. In the late 1970s, the Carter administration, facing the escalating refugee crisis in Southeast Asia, set about mending the nation’s image through refugee reform framed as a humanitarian cause. The president named Patt Derian, a veteran of the civil rights movement, as his coordinator for human rights and humanitarian affairs and then elevated her and that office to the rank of assistant secretary of state. Derian testified before the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees, and International Law in 1978 to address refugee admissions and deliver the administration’s case for reform. Sam Hall, a conservative Democrat from Texas, asked Derian whether the legislation she recommended could lead to a flood of refugees into the United States, where they would vie for jobs with, he intimated, white working-class men. “Mr. Hall, I believe that one of the main continuing traditional human rights practices of this government has been humanitarian assistance to refugees,” she stated, insisting that the Carter administration wasn’t seeking change but rather a renewal of the government’s long-standing humanitarian commitment to taking in refugees.19 Carter’s attorney general, Griffin Bell, echoed Derian when he advocated for the Refugee Act at the committee stage. “Our policy is based on humaneness, based on the historical fact that our country began as a haven,” he said in hearings before the subcommittee on immigration. “It is the only country I suppose in history founded for the purpose, not to seek wealth and comfort, but to seek human rights.”20 Hall and other restrictionists argued that the legislation threatened to inundate the United States with refugees from all corners of the world and change the character of the nation. Derian and Bell maintained that the Refugee

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Act wasn’t about change at all but about restoring the founding ideals of the United States as a humanitarian republic. But lawmakers, whatever their reasoning, knew that the United States stood to benefit from the admission of refugees fleeing a communist government that had defeated it. The Refugee Act itself acknowledged as much. The president, the law stated, could admit refugees above the annual limit of fifty thousand after consultation with Congress when “justified by humanitarian concerns” or “otherwise in the national interest.”21 That formulation, which the authors used four times in the first four pages of the law, suggested that, while some refugee admissions might be in the national interest but not serve a humanitarian cause, all refugee admissions that served a humanitarian cause also served the national interest. The act acknowledged that admitting Southeast Asian refugees could restore a national image that had taken a beating in the Vietnam War. Cyrus Vance, the secretary of state and a former secretary of defense during the war, made that argument to Congress a month after Carter signed the Refugee Act. “It is both in our national character and in our national interest to respond compassionately and sensibly to a mounting refugee problem,” he stated, advocating for the admission of 168,000 Southeast Asian refugees in 1981. “We must consider how our participation in refugee resettlement efforts can further our broader foreign policy objectives—for instance, by promoting the stability of friendly democratic governments in countries of first asylum.”22 Vance could see that he didn’t have to choose between humanitarianism and anticommunism when it came to admitting refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Humanitarianism informed the national character, he believed. But conflating it with anticommunism (and human rights abuses with communism) also advanced the national interest of the Cold War state. The Refugee Act had scrubbed anticommunist language from refugee law, but it hadn’t removed the anticommunist function. Liberals could get on board as anticommunist humanitarians, conservatives as humanitarian anticommunists. The legislation did have enemies, though. It inflamed white supremacists and unified an emerging white power movement that, setting itself against immigrants and refugees, vowed to refight the Vietnam War at home. In 1980 and 1981, Louis Beam, a Vietnam vet and Ku Klux Klan leader, led a campaign of harassment and intimidation against Vietnamese fishermen who had resettled along the Texas coast near Houston. He claimed that the refugees threatened the livelihood of white fishermen

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who had served in the war. “Uncle Sam has broken his promise to the Vietnam veterans and kept his promise to the Vietnamese,” a local white shrimper and former marine told the Houston Chronicle.23 Beam had served eighteen months in the army in Vietnam. He returned home in 1968, affiliated himself with the United Klans of America, and, with his combat medals decorating his Klan robes, declared a new war on Mexican immigrants and Vietnamese refugees. “The mere fact that I had returned from Vietnam didn’t mean the war was over. It was going on right here in the States,” he told an undercover investigator. “I knew right then and there I had to get engaged again and fight the enemy.”24 The Vietnamese fishermen received death threats. Arsonists firebombed their boats. Robed Klansmen roamed the coast armed with semiautomatic rifles. The New York Times called it “the last pitched battle of the Vietnam War.”25 And Beam agreed. The Klan’s harassment of the Vietnamese fishermen showed that white supremacists also, reflecting and heightening mainstream trends, embraced the Vietnam vet as the protagonist of white racial interests after civil rights. Identitarian Christians, Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and skinheads declared themselves a race of veterans waging a second Vietnam War against immigrants and refugees. Beam sought to defend not the white fisherman’s haul on the Texas coast but the belief that the war belonged to him and other white men whom the government had wronged in Vietnam and who, he believed, deserved remuneration for their service and deference for their whiteness, a service and a race that he all but merged in his anti-Vietnamese campaign.26 The few hundred Vietnamese whom the Klan targeted didn’t get rich from shrimping. Most lived in small rentals, often with other families. Local white fishermen overcharged them for old boats. Few received welfare benefits, as their white neighbors claimed. Some had themselves fought in the war alongside Beam and some of the other Klansmen. Perhaps white supremacists, having built a unified movement on the idea of the Vietnam War as a white racial grievance, identified in the Vietnamese refugees not a threat to their livelihoods but a threat to their identities. Trinh T. Minh-ha, the filmmaker, argued at the end of the Reagan administration, after making her own Vietnam War film, Surname Viet Given Name Nam, that white Western men had rendered Vietnam a resource for their own self-knowledge. “Presented through the mediation of the dominant world forces, [Vietnam] only exists within the latter’s binarism,” Trinh wrote. “Every effort at challenging such reductive paternal bilateralism and at producing a different viewing of Viet-

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nam is immediately recuperated within the limit of the totalized discourse of red is red and white is white.”27 The United States looked at Vietnam through a cloud of reductive binaries—prowar/antiwar, right/ left, capitalist/communist—that served not to illuminate Vietnam or itself but to further tie whiteness to Americanness, imagining Vietnam and Vietnamese as the constitutive outside to a white nation. Red is red and white is American. The war itself had divided white conservatives and white liberals, but the war as racial wound, as seen on TV, reunited them. Refugee acts reveal war as the thing that holds whiteness together and as the knowledge that threatens to undo it. War unites white people as rights-bearing Americans but also offers an enduring reminder, through the war refugee, that their inalienable rights mean nothing without a state through which to claim them. The treatment of the white vet as a refugee countered the cultural acts of Trinh and other refugee artists. Vietnam vets and the white men who identified with them never made the assertion in good faith—no white American man thought himself a refugee—but instead used it to assert their value through an association with someone they thought to lack value. For a white American man to lament that the government had left him to live like a refugee was also to insist that he was not a refugee, that he deserved better because refugees deserved less. The term is freighted with racial meaning. When news media used it to describe Black Louisianans who had lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina, Jesse Jackson fired back that to “see them as refugees is to see them as other than Americans,” declaring the term “inaccurate, unfair, and racist.”28 President George W. Bush agreed: “The people we are talking about are not refugees. They are Americans.”29 A white Tulane University anthropologist argued that referring to Black Americans as refugees denied them “their right to be a part of the national order of things.”30 Jackson, the president, and the Tulane anthropologist all, in their effort to defend the Black storm evacuees, validated the idea that refugees lacked value relative to “Americans,” that the term constituted a kind of slur.31 Black storm victims and vets of color wouldn’t declare themselves refugees because the term didn’t work for them as it did for white vets. It distanced them from national belonging. For a white Vietnam vet, it served as a claim to it, an argument that state and nation had denied him his rightful status and that it must be restored. The looser the definition, the better it functioned to safeguard white innocence and entitlement. In 1988, the New York Times editorial board asked, “Who’s a Refugee?,” concluding that “there probably can never be

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more than a rough and ready” answer.32 Of course, there could. The United Nations had created a formal definition in 1951 and the Refugee Act had made it American law in 1980. But white vets returning “home” to Vietnam had muddied the waters.

parallel returns In 1974, Ron Kovic, the former marine sergeant who returned from Vietnam in a wheelchair and refashioned himself as an antiwar and veterans’ rights activist, shut himself in his Santa Monica apartment and wrote a memoir with the ironic title, a nod to the nationalist showtune “The Yankee Doodle Boy,” Born on the Fourth of July. He finished a draft in less than two months, working at all hours, convinced that he didn’t have long to live and wanting to leave some record of himself behind. He had lost that self, Kovic believed, on the day a North Vietnamese bullet tore through his shoulder and lung and struck his T6 vertebra. “My trauma was still very deep, and that beautiful boy, that body, had been destroyed, defiled, and savaged,” he remembered. “My wounding in Vietnam both physically and emotionally haunted me, pursued me, and threatened to overwhelm me.”33 Kovic, sitting at his desk a few blocks from the Pacific Ocean, returned to Southeast Asia to recover that beautiful younger self from which the war had alienated him. The vet lived on as a shell of his former self in the United States while that former self remained stuck in Vietnam, inaccessible to the older Kovic. His memoir, which moved Jane Fonda to make Coming Home, Bruce Springsteen to record “Born in the U.S.A.,” and Oliver Stone to turn the marine vet’s life into a movie starring Tom Cruise, is a tale of return. Kovic goes back to Vietnam through writing to reclaim a version of himself that he had left behind, to achieve a sense of existential wholeness. The memoir ends with the firefight that immobilized Kovic from the chest down and then transitions to his childhood. He remembers himself on the baseball field listening to Del Shannon’s rock-and-roll hit “Runaway”: “This song was playing and I really got into it and was hitting baseballs and feeling like I could live forever.”34 Kovic went back to Vietnam, and he found himself there, discovering Ronnie from Long Island on the South China Sea. A decade after Kovic wrote Born on the Fourth of July, hundreds more followed his lead, returning to Vietnam not as memoirists but as tourists. In the mid-1980s, Vietnam, facing a severe economic downturn, instituted trade reforms that included offering trial visas to former

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American soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen. (The United States had embargoed trade with Vietnam at the end of the war and wouldn’t lift the ban until 1994.) Vets returned to revisit old battle sites and to see a different side of Vietnam. News media interviewed them, delivering a constant stream of heartwarming stories of reconciliation and forgiveness. The Los Angeles Times followed a Vietnam Veterans of America tour, on which a forty-one-year-old former marine, who admitted to having killed more than twenty-five Vietnamese children in 1968, described the relief he felt when his Vietnamese hosts welcomed him without the slightest hint of bitterness. “Day by day,” the Times wrote, “he found that the open arms and smiling faces of the Vietnamese were restoring his sense of self-worth.”35 Another vet said he wished Americans could have treated him with the kindness that Vietnamese had. “You know how nice it was to hear that [welcome] after not hearing it from Americans?” he exclaimed.36 The New York Times and the Washington Post observed that World War II vets had often returned to former battle sites after their war while Vietnam vets hadn’t and couldn’t.37 That mattered, one tour organizer said, because it gave vets “replacement images” for sometimes traumatic memories of combat. “There’s something missing: ‘I have to go back to find what’s missing here. I have to go back to find something I left there,’” the organizer said, explaining what led some vets to spend all their savings on a three-week tour.38 Vietnamese refugees also returned on trial visas, and some news stories acknowledged them and their reunions with mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers. But most subordinated them to white vets making their own return to Vietnam as refugees of a different kind. Not all Vietnam vets returned to heal, but the tours soon emerged as an alternative treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. In the late 1980s, Raymond Scurfield, the director of a PTSD clinic in Tacoma, Washington, stirred to act after seeing Stone’s Platoon, coordinated a tour for eight vets from the clinic. Scurfield thought that it might allow them to confront their most distressing memories and substitute them with new memories of a calmer, welcoming Vietnam. The New York Times and USA Today wrote stories about him and the vets. PBS sent a film crew. Scurfield himself wrote three books about the tour and other “in-action” PTSD treatments. The vets’ memories of the war had been “frozen in time,” he told the Times. “By going back to Vietnam we hope to shake them loose or replace them with images of another Vietnam.”39 The eight men traded traumatic memories for healing images in Vietnam but also embraced it as a long-lost home. “It’s like going back to

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enemy territory, but it’s also like I’m coming home,” a former marine reflected. “Part of this country is just embedded in me.”40 “This is where I belong,” an air force vet added.41 Some talked about visiting again or moving to Vietnam, where, they said, they felt more welcome and better understood than in the United States. But the tour also made the vets feel more American. Scurfield recalled watching a tall white vet named Hank handing out miniature American flags to excited Vietnamese. “Young and old and in-between, males and females, push up towards the front, smiling and waving, outstretched hands everywhere, reaching upwards to grasp—tiny American flags!” he remembered.42 The vets described their two-week tour as a return home to a nation to which they belonged and from which the war and the diplomatic fallout afterward had exiled them, but they also came back from Southeast Asia more American than ever, reassured of their status as embodiments of the nation. The men reasserted their Americanness through a claim to martial knowledge, a claim they made as refugees. Other vets visited Vietnam to remove mines, build houses, and distribute medicine, some to make a buck. In 1988, veterans of a marine combat engineer battalion, learning that the mines they had laid in the war still killed Vietnamese, returned to remove them and to offer technical advice to government engineers.43 In 1991, an offshoot of Veterans for Peace launched twice-annual “relief missions” for vets to distribute medical aid to Vietnamese clinics.44 In 1994, the Clinton administration lifted the trade embargo on Vietnam, and former soldiers and marines rushed in, some as tourists and others as investors. Samuel Champi, who had served in Vietnam in the late 1960s, teamed with some of his former West Point classmates to found Point Enterprises International, which brokered a deal with the Vietnamese government to build forty thousand low-cost housing units in the suburbs of Ho Chi Minh City. The Times hailed the vets as “sharp-eyed business people” with heart who, though they stood to make a return on their investment, had sought the construction contract as “a passion as well as a project.” It had to be, the investors said, because they had found doing business in Vietnam “nearly as difficult as fighting a war, complicated by capricious regulations, endless red tape and the hostility of Communist bureaucrats to free-market principles.”45 Most of the news stories carried that kind of anticommunist edge. A former Los Angeles Times Saigon bureau chief wrote that his state-assigned guides didn’t show him collective farms or “any aspects of socialism,” because, he assumed, “the system is not working well.”46 American news media suggested that vets want-

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ing to do good in Vietnam had to deal with the backwardness of the communist state, a backwardness that they might at last correct with humanitarianism and the free market, winning hearts and minds with a second, reformed offensive. “You can’t go home again, but you can sure close the circle,” Tom Carhart, another investor, reflected.47 His and other vets’ tourism, humanitarianism, and business dealings may well have healed them and their families and offered avenues for reconciliation with some Vietnamese. But their returns also rehabilitated the white men who identified with them, who could, through the vets’ stories of loss and forgiveness, see the Vietnam War as their wound and their redemption. “Militarism and tourism may well not be polar opposites,” Cynthia Enloe, the feminist political scientist, writes. “They may be kin, bound together as cause and effect.”48 War led to tourism, and tourism, when it restores a sense of national innocence, can lead back to war. When white American men, long trained to see themselves in and through the soldier and veteran, claimed to be like refugees, they didn’t enact an identification but a disidentification, suggesting that they had been misidentified, that they had been wronged because they had been made to feel like someone unAmerican when they, as white men who waved the flag and stood for the anthem, were the most American of all. The antiracist movements of the 1960s and 1970s had shaken the belief that whiteness constituted a condition for full inclusion within the nation. The transformation of the Vietnam War into a white man’s wound renewed it, and sustaining that transformation, after the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asian refugees in the United States, demanded that the vet learn to write his own refugee memoir.

the veteran writes a refugee memoir W. D. Ehrhart, the marine vet, antiwar activist, and poet, felt comforted by what he observed on the curbside stand in Hanoi. He had volunteered for his third tour in Vietnam that summer of 1990—his first as a young marine sergeant, the second and third as a middle-aged writer. The vendor, Ehrhart noticed, sold models of American bombers to Vietnamese children, who raised them over their heads without fear or hesitation. How sad, he thought at first, that their generation of Vietnamese could know so little about the war that their elders had endured and won. But then he changed his mind, deciding instead that it was good that Vietnam had been able to move on, to see models of American

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bombers as nothing more than that: models. He wrote a poem about it, reflecting on how, “there in that place the Americans bombed,” the children lifted the miniature bombers “without fear,” how they “put them into the sky / and pretend they are flying.”49 Ehrhart took the models as a sign of healing, for Vietnam and for himself. The children did not see the models for what they resembled—machines of war that had bombed their families’ homes—but as things to twirl in the air and show off to their friends. Watching the children raise their American bombers in the streets of Hanoi, Ehrhart felt forgiven. He felt that the children, with their game of Yankee air pirate, had welcomed him home. Ehrhart had traveled to Hanoi with a delegation of American writers who had served in the war, including Philip Caputo, Larry Heinemann, Larry Rottman, Bruce Weigl, and, the one Black vet invited, Yusef Komunyakaa. An institute at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, had teamed with the Writers Union of Vietnam to organize a “hearts and minds” conference that brought together novelists and poets who had fought for the United States and North Vietnam in the war. The men shared their writing and memories of combat and loss. High-ranking officials and army generals visited to welcome the Americans, who marveled at the gracious welcome. “The affection for Americans in Vietnam today is palpable,” George Wilson of the Washington Post, who attended the conference, remarked, observing that the Vietnamese he encountered regarded the United States as a “shining hope” for the future rather than as a source of suffering.50 Caputo, borrowing from Kipling, told the conference, “We have but one virginity to lose, but where we lost it is where our hearts will always be.”51 Quoting the poet laureate of Western imperialism may not have been the best choice for the event. The Americans felt not like former enemies but like returning comrades in Hanoi. Ehrhart reflected that, while in the United States he felt ostracized as a “Vietnam writer,” Vietnamese didn’t see his returning to the war for material as strange at all. “In Vietnam, everybody over the age of 35 is a ‘Vietnam writer,’ and for once I could feel like just one of the gang,” he said.52 He discovered a sense of belonging in Vietnam that he had never found in the United States. In Philadelphia, his hometown, he felt like an outsider, a Vietnam writer. In Hanoi, he felt at home, like one of the gang. Ehrhart and his tour did not invent that feeling or the role of the writerambassador. In 1984, William Broyles, a former marine lieutenant, decided to leave his job as the editor of Newsweek and return to Vietnam to write a memoir about his tour as a young man and about going back.

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He struggled to secure a visa. The Reagan administration had villainized Vietnam for, it alleged, withholding information about Americans whose remains the United States had not recovered after the war. Broyles met with the foreign minister of Vietnam, Nguyen Co Thach, at the United Nations. Thach said he would do what he could to arrange a visit for him. Twelve months later, the marine vet, on the verge of abandoning the idea, received a call: he had a visa and a ticket to Bangkok. Broyles’s 1986 memoir Brothers in Arms received admiring reviews in the New York Times Book Review, People, and the Washington Post and furnished a model for a coming flood of return-to-Vietnam stories. A liberal who had “felt more in common with the antiwar activists” than some of his fellow marines, Broyles returned to Vietnam not to learn about it but to discover himself. His memoir begins at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where, gazing at the names on the black granite walls, he realizes that “even though I had been a reluctant warrior the war was still in me, like a buried piece of shrapnel working its way to the surface.”53 The skin of the nation also hid a long-ignored bullet fragment, he thinks, because “the war had never really ended, not for the men who fought it, and not for America.”54 If he ever wanted to know himself and move on from the war, he would have to go back to Vietnam and learn about it. “To know myself I had to know my enemy,” Broyles writes in the first chapter of Brothers in Arms, titled “Why Go Back?”55 In late 1984, he set off on a month-long tour of himself and America—in Vietnam. The former marine’s tour took him from Hanoi to the former Saigon. He met generals and foot soldiers, antiaircraft gunners and guerrilla warriors. He met Phan Thi Kim Phúc, made famous in 1972 as a nineyear-old girl running naked, her clothes burned off, from an attack on her village in southeastern Vietnam. But most of all he got to know himself. “I went back to find a man I never knew—my enemy,” he writes. “I went back to find the pieces of myself I had left there, and to try to put the war behind me.”56 Broyles returned to Vietnam to learn about his former enemies, but he wove the stories of the women and men he met into his own struggle for self-knowledge. He considered his stories theirs and their stories his, memories he didn’t know he had, fragments of himself buried under his skin. The memoir ends where it begins, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial— a bookend to more than a few veterans’ stories. The other vets at the wall, Broyles now notices, looked forlorn, nothing like the forgive-and-forget Vietnamese whom he had met on his return tour. Seeing the vets, some of whom wore old uniforms, he concludes, “A part of them was still out

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there. A part of them was still frozen in time, back where I had just been.” The veterans and the nation for which they stood could not move on until they recovered that self they had left in Vietnam. He describes one vet as “an exile” from Vietnam, “cut off from the piece of land that meant the most to his life”—like a refugee.57 Broyles set the terms on which other vets would return to Vietnam: to look inward rather than outward. You can hear his voice in the closing monologue of Platoon, in which the protagonist, a young soldier, states, as if reflecting on his tour from the late 1980s, “I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy. We fought ourselves, and the enemy was in us.”58 The vet had to return to Vietnam, whether as a tourist or a moviegoer, to make it vanish into himself. Ehrhart and Weigl returned for the first time in 1985. A mutual friend, John Balaban, a scholar of Vietnamese literature, had introduced the idea, and John McAuliff, the director of the US-Indochina Reconciliation Project, had secured their visas. Ehrhart and Weigel knew each other from the circuit of events dedicated to the emerging literature of the war. Ehrhart had served in the marines in the late 1960s, Weigl in the army. The two men had made their livings since as nomadic writers in residence. Ehrhart turned the three-week tour into his second memoir, Going Back. He had been writing about Vietnam since he returned, building a career as an author and anthologist of war literature. Studs Terkel called him “the poet of the Vietnam War.”59 The historian H. Bruce Franklin touted him as “the preeminent figure in [Vietnam War] literature.”60 Others have declared him “the dean of Vietnam war poetry.”61 In Going Back, Ehrhart describes Vietnam as a “permanent condition” with which he had lived all his adult life. It constituted, he writes, “as much a state of mind as a geographical location, the turning point, the place where I first began to see and think and learn and question.”62 Going back to the material location allowed him to make a more comfortable home in that abstract, existential “Vietnam,” the state of mind in which he had long dwelled. “Now when I think of Vietnam,” he reflects at the end of his and Weigl’s tour, “I will not see in my mind’s eye the barbed wire and the grim patrols and the violent death that always exploded with no warning. Now I will see those graceful fishing boats gliding out of the late afternoon sun across the South China Sea toward safe harbor at Vung Tau.”63 Ehrhart had returned from Southeast Asia with “replacement images.”64 He had reconfigured Vietnam in his mind, substituting memories of war with images of graceful fishing boats. He could at last come home to the Vietnam he carried with him.

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The prolific Ehrhart also turned out a chapbook about his and his friend’s 1985 return. “For Bruce Weigl,” he writes above one poem, “Last Flight Out from the War Zone,” which twists the idea of home. The last flight of the title is not the one he took out of Vietnam as a marine but the flight he and Weigl took out of the United States as tourists, their “long flight back.”65 The United States was the war zone, Vietnam their home, the home they had lost in 1975 but in which they had continued to live, at least in their minds, ever since. Weigl also wrote a going-back memoir, The Circle of Hahn, in which he mused, “The paradox of my life as a writer is that the war ruined my life and in return gave me my voice.”66 In Ho Chi Minh City with Ehrhart, he met a women named Miss Tao who had endured the Saigon government’s infamous tiger cages during the war. She sits with Weigl in the model cages at the War Remnants Museum, showing no signs of trauma, no wrenching flashbacks to her incarceration. He determines that she had managed her trauma not through forgetting but through a constant return to the site of her suffering. It had, he writes, “taken so much of her that she needs to go there in her mind to stay whole.” Weigl takes a lesson from Miss Tao. “I had been haunted a long time, exiled from my body and from the world itself, looking for a home that could sustain what I had become,” he reflects. “Miss Tao helped me find that home, that country that is my heart split in two.”67 The war had rendered Weigl an exile from himself, unable to reclaim that self that had arrived in Vietnam whole in the late 1960s and left divided. Miss Tao taught him that he had to go back, back to Vietnam and back to the interior “Vietnam” that haunted him. He imagined himself as refugeed twice over, first from his younger self, an all-American teenager, and then from the other nation to which his heart belonged and to which he had at last returned. The former soldier’s 1988 collection The Song of Napalm took him back there again. The thirty-three poems, some of which he wrote in Vietnam with Ehrhart, address a man living in exile in the United States and in his own mind. “Apparition of the Exile” imagines a boy confined forever in a lost American childhood, a childhood of “cool summer mornings” and “dogwood air,” waiting and wishing that “his platoon will return from the burning river where he sent them sixteen years ago into fire.”68 The Vietnam vet, his innocence lost, can never return home to the America of cool summer mornings and fragrant dogwood trees. He can never rescue that boy, himself before the war. But traveling back to Southeast Asia and writing his own refugee memoir, confronting the site of trauma as Miss Tao had, he might at least learn to live with himself. In

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1996, Weigl returned to Vietnam again to adopt a daughter—“coming back,” he said of that final tour, “to try to make the circle whole again.”69 Broyles, Ehrhart, and Weigl all resisted the war in one form or another and shared left-liberal beliefs. But conservatives also returned to Vietnam. In 1987, President Reagan sent John Vessey, a retired four-star general and former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, to Hanoi to negotiate POW/ MIA issues with the Vietnamese government. Vessey assembled a team that included Frederick Downs, a conservative VA official who had lost an arm in Vietnam. Downs, a trenchant anticommunist, traveled to Vietnam five times and later wrote a memoir about his work with Vessey’s team, No Longer Enemies, Not Yet Friends, his third about the Vietnam War and his life as a disabled vet. Having lost an arm in Vietnam and returned in search of American remains, Downs literalizes the national self-searching of liberal going-back memoirs. “Would Vietnam ever let me go? Did I want it to?” he asks himself. “I thought not. Once a man has contributed his blood and his honor to a country, he is always a part of what it becomes.”70 Although the former soldier admitted to feeling at first as if he had been thrust into “enemy territory”—“I was surrounded by North Vietnamese,” he thinks on his first visit to Hanoi—Downs echoes the liberal vets in describing his return to Vietnam as healing, giving him a renewed “sense of [spiritual] freedom” and an “odd sense of kinship” with his former enemies.71 He had returned, he felt, to fulfill a mission that he and the United States had left unfinished: saving a nation that wouldn’t let him or it go because it had formed their identities. Downs did not hide his conservatism or his hawkishness toward Vietnam. But he and the liberal vets shared an identification with Vietnam that made their returns feel like homecomings. Broyles, Ehrhart, Weigl, and Downs went back as millions of Southeast Asians left, some settling in the United States and bringing their own war stories with them. With white vets writing memoirs of exile and return, Vietnamese refugees found it difficult to tell their own stories. Some discovered that, if they wanted to sell books, they would have to write a veteran memoir.

the refugee writes a veteran memoir In 1993, Oliver Stone released his third Vietnam War film, Heaven and Earth. It received mixed reviews and made a mere $6 million at the box office against a budget of more than $33 million. Critics who had lauded his first two films about the war, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July,

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slated it. Stone, an army vet who had done a tour in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968, had turned to the harrowing memoirs of a Vietnamese refugee as his source material for Heaven and Earth. A young Vietnamese woman, Le Ly (Hiep Thi Le), endures a string of wartime horrors before meeting an American marine sergeant, Steve (Tommy Lee Jones), who marries her and takes her with him to San Diego. Critics, while commending the “authentic presence” of Le, a refugee herself, dismissed the film as unfocused.72 It “lacks a poetic center,” one wrote.73 The film “lacks an emotional center,” another echoed.74 But they had nothing but admiration for Jones’s turn as Steve, a troubled, abusive vet who commits suicide after returning home. Steve’s struggle to reenter civilian life “is the most effective, most powerful part of the film,” Hal Hinson, the Washington Post film critic, wrote. “Steve says that he is in hell, and from the look on Jones’s face, we not only believe him, we also fear him and feel his pain,” adding, “At this point the film reaches its dramatic peak.”75 Hinson and others suggested that they found the Vietnamese refugee a less absorbing protagonist than the white soldiers and marines of Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. The Vietnam War felt abstract and unrelatable to them without a dislocated white vet through whom they could channel their anger and grief. Critics and moviegoers, most of whom bought tickets to Mrs. Doubtfire and The Pelican Brief that weekend instead, didn’t want to see a refugee saga on the big screen unless it starred Steve, the refugee of Brothers in Arms, Going Back, The Circle of Hahn, and No Longer Enemies, Not Yet Friends. The author of the memoirs on which Stone based his film, Le Ly Hayslip, first heard of the director in 1986, when Platoon arrived at her local theater in San Diego. She stood outside, handing out leaflets about Vietnam. She wanted moviegoers to know about her home and her war, which they wouldn’t, she knew, learn about inside. “I am not against the movie,” she later remembered of her demonstration at the theater. “But I want them to know that three million of my people died in that war too.”76 She had returned to Vietnam that year for the first time since she left in 1970, a return that moved her to write the first of her two memoirs, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, with ghostwriter Jay Wurts, a white air force vet. Hayslip addresses her memoir not to other Vietnamese or Vietnamese Americans but to American vets who had fought in Southeast Asia. “If you were an American GI, I ask you to read this book and look into the heart of one you once called enemy. I have witnessed, firsthand, all

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that you went through,” she writes in the prologue. “It was not your fault.”77 When Heaven and Earth Changed Places follows the structure of the vet memoirs: a healing visit to Vietnam in the mid-1980s frames the wartime struggles of the memoirist’s younger self. The subtitle, A Vietnamese Woman’s Journey from War to Peace, echoes that of Brothers in Arms, which announces itself as A Journey from War to Peace. Hayslip does not dwell on her own trauma but instead reassures American men, offering them forgiveness and encouraging them to move forward from whatever wrongs they may have committed in the war. “The least you did—the least any of us did—was our duty,” Hayslip writes to vets, urging them to find comfort in her tale of endurance and overcoming.78 She achieved critical and commercial success directing her memoir to vets and allowing two of them, Wurts and Stone, to translate it into an odd kind of veteran memoir. (Critics later concluded that her second memoir, Child of War, Woman of Peace, lacked the “taut suspense” of her first because she didn’t write it with Wurts.)79 The memoir leaves readers with a call to arms. In 1987, soon after returning to her home village for the first time, Hayslip founded East Meets West, a charitable organization that sent American vets back to Vietnam to build health clinics and housing. In the final pages of her memoir, she asks vets to “reenlist” and return to Southeast Asia as humanitarians. “If you are a veteran of any war,” she writes, “you are especially encouraged to sign on for another ‘tour of duty’ in service to humanity and yourself—to heal the wounds that may linger in your spirit and help the Vietnamese people, who, like war victims anywhere, are the spiritual partners of your journey.”80 Vets could not heal their lingering wounds, she suggests, until they fulfilled the mission they had left unfinished in Vietnam. Their “tour of duty” building clinics and houses would allow them to realize the ambitions of their younger selves, which she describes as idealistic and noble. It would, she believes, bring to a close their unending service. On her book tour in the late 1980s, Hayslip told news media that no one had struggled more to “come to terms” with the war than American veterans, who, unable to revisit the site of their trauma, remained “less at ease with their experiences and their feelings.”81 East Meets West offered a cure. “No doctor, no hospital, no psychologist can heal them like going back to Vietnam,” she told USA Today.82 Hayslip, the first Vietnamese refugee author to attract mainstream media attention in the United States, allowed the American vet to see himself as like

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her—like a refugee, whose wounds could not heal until he returned to Vietnam to build houses for Vietnamese and a home for himself.83 When Heaven and Earth Changed Places would not be the last refugee memoir to double as a veteran memoir. In the mid-1990s, Andrew Pham, a young Vietnamese American from Northern California, abandoned his career as an aeronautics engineer to return to Vietnam, retracing in reverse the route that had brought him to the United States as a child. His travels, four thousand miles of which he covered on a road bike, took him all over the Pacific Coast and East Asia, giving him time to meditate on his life, his divided sense of home, and his trans brother’s suicide. He chronicles that “two-wheeled voyage through the landscape and memory of Vietnam” in his memoir, Catfish and Mandala, framing his return with an anecdote about an encounter in Mexico with a big, white Vietnam vet named Tyle. The first sentence of the book describes Andrew watching Tyle, observing his Vietnamese-like manner: “The first thing I noticed about Tyle is that he can squat on his haunches Third World–style, indefinitely.”84 The title of the chapter is “Exile-Pilgrim.” Tyle is the exile, Andrew the pilgrim. Pham had long felt a tension whenever he interacted with American vets. “I was in Nam,” they would say to him as a child. For years he hadn’t known where “Nam” was or why grown men felt the need to tell him that they had been there. In Mexico, Tyle asks Andrew to forgive him and, if he ever returns to Vietnam, to “tell them about my life, the way I’m living.” Tyle cries, and Andrew doesn’t know how to react. “I am the rootless one,” he thinks, “yet still the beneficiary of all of your and all of their [Vietnamese] sufferings. Then why, of us two, am I the savior, and you the sinner?”85 Pham recounts his search for roots in his native Vietnam, but he carries with him a white vet’s wish for forgiveness. In Vietnam, Andrew can’t shake the feeling that he has more in common with American veterans of the war, whom he meets at tourist sites, than with his own uncles, aunts, and cousins. While visiting the demilitarized zone that once divided North and South Vietnam, he befriends a tour guide, Cao, who tells him about the vets he has shown around the DMZ. “They get very emotional. They cry,” Cao reveals. “Sometimes they just walk around as though they are lost. Lost their soul, you know.” Andrew wonders why Americans couldn’t move on, while Vietnamese, who had lost so much more, seemed to have reconciled themselves to living with the fact of that loss. Cao offers a rehearsed answer, describing the war as a kind of imperial romance in which two men vied for the affections of one woman, with one winning her love

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and one losing her forever. “After twenty years, all you have of her are memories, both the good and the bad. Me, I live with her for twenty years. I see her at her best and at her worst,” he reasons, in gendered terms Graham Greene would have admired. “It is not the forgetting but the new history with the girl that is the difference between you and me.”86 Andrew tells Cao about Tyle and another vet he met in Northern California, Big Jake, a depressed, broke logger. He discovers, as he relates their stories to Cao, that he identifies more with them than with the tour guide or other Vietnamese. He had also lost Vietnam, retaining nothing more than the memories, memories made more heartbreaking with time and a growing sense of unredeemable loss. Pham, a refugee, and Tyle and Big Jake, two white Vietnam vets, live analogous lives, exiled from a nation that felt like home but wasn’t. Pham reflects on the “pangs of guilt” he felt in California whenever he caught sight of a homeless man in army fatigues and realizes that he felt that guilt because the man had lost Vietnam and, he imagines, an America to which he had once belonged.87 The vet harbored a tragic longing for two lost countries. Some of the first Vietnamese American novels also treat the vet and the refugee as analogous figures in the aftermath of war. In Lan Cao’s autobiographical 1997 novel Monkey Bridge, a Vietnamese teenager named Mai flees Saigon for the United States on the day in 1975 that the North Vietnamese army marched in. For the first few months, before her mother arrives, she lives in the Connecticut suburbs with her “Uncle Michael,” a retired American colonel and a close friend of her now-deceased father. (Cao based Uncle Michael on real-life army general and family friend John Freund.) Mai imagines Uncle Michael, a counterinsurgent with knowledge of and a fondness for Vietnamese culture, as a refugee himself, someone who had left something of himself behind in Southeast Asia when the war ended. He reminds her of her own father. “Here was an American replica of my father, his death and life absorbed quietly in a Farmington home,” she thinks. “He was now a retired colonel in Farmington, with six unuprootable years in Vietnam—now a soldier without a war—and I an immigrant from Saigon. Vietnam remained like an implant in both our brains.” Her Uncle Michael would, Mai concludes, “forever inhabit this rugged outer edge with me,” a refugee from Vietnam who could never feel at home in his New England saltbox house.88 Part of Uncle Michael remains in Vietnam because for him it constitutes, in Ehrhart’s words, “as much a state of mind as a geographical location.”89 He can’t leave it, but he can’t go back either. The white vet’s

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identification with the Vietnamese refugee is mutable, though. He isn’t a refugee. He didn’t lose his home. He can wear that label when he wants and shed it when he doesn’t—sometimes the refugee, sometimes her rescuer. Mai does not get to choose. She and other refugees remain caught in a state of limbo that critical refugee studies scholar Eric Tang describes as a different order of time. Crossing the border does not, he argues, liberate the refugee, who faces a “recurring enlistment as one to be simultaneously saved and incidentally injured,” first as a war refugee and then as a “model minority” set against Black and Latinx neighbors.90 That state of limbo in which the refugee lives serves the white vet, who in the 1980s reasserted his status as an embodiment of the nation through and against the Southeast Asian refugee. He emerged as victim and savior, refugee and refuge of a war that he might yet win if he could make it—the loss and the return, the defeat and the redemption—his own.

hello, freedom man Most white men who fought in the war never returned to Vietnam. Most never suffered from PTSD or felt exiled from a nation in which they had served for twelve months as young men. Most would not see themselves in Stone’s Steve, Pham’s Tyle and Big Jake, or Cao’s Uncle Michael. But the vet refugee, who emerged in rock and roll, news media, and literature, offered all white vets and the nonvets who identified with them a language through which to articulate their struggles, including struggles that had nothing to do with the war. That white men claimed a loss and entitlement as refugees does not at first make sense because refugees do, without a government through which to demand them, lack rights. “Citizenship,” Chief Justice Earl Warren acknowledged in 1957, “is nothing less than the right to have rights.”91 “The Rights of Man,” the German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt observed in 1951, addressing the refugee crises stemming from the world wars, “had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them.”92 The plight of refugees, including Arendt herself, reveals inalienable rights to be alienable without a state to secure them. Refugees endured a condition of rightlessness through which white men after civil rights aired their grievances and against which they asserted their claim on the government. The Vietnam vet had a state—he had, in Warren’s

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words, the right to have rights; he was not a refugee—but the government had, white men argued, treated him (and them) like a refugee. Stories of returning vets offered novelists a protagonist through whom they could imagine healing returns to Vietnam without ever going back themselves. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried includes a story titled “Field Trip,” in which a middle-aged vet, also named Tim O’Brien, takes his ten-year-old daughter to Vietnam to revisit old battle sites and leave an offering for a close friend, Kiowa, who died in the war. The story, which O’Brien wrote in the late 1980s, reads like a near facsimile of Brothers in Arms and Going Back. But O’Brien had not himself, at the time he wrote it, returned to Vietnam. In “Field Trip,” Tim and his daughter visit the marsh where Kiowa met a horrible end, drowning in sewage amid a nighttime ambush. Tim sees birds and butterflies and hears “the soft rustlings of rural-anywhere.” It is nothing like the frenzied battleground he remembers. “I blamed this place for what I had become,” he reflects, “and I blamed it for taking away the person I had once been. For twenty years this field had embodied all the waste that was Vietnam, all the vulgarity and horror.”93 But all he finds now is a calm, sun-drenched field. Perhaps, he wonders, “I’d gone under with Kiowa, and now after two decades I’d finally worked my way out.” Tim notices a farmer watching him, and his daughter asks if the farmer is mad at him. He tells her that, no, “All that’s finished.”94 The farmer, Tim believes, knows what he knows about war and, in a wordless acknowledgment that bewilders Tim’s young daughter, welcomes him home to Vietnam. O’Brien wrote “Field Trip” without having returned to Southeast Asia himself. (He didn’t have a daughter either.) But he didn’t have to because his fellow vets had given him—through news stories, memoirs, and movies—the material with which to imagine “Tim O’Brien” back there, confronting haunting memories in a serene marsh. In 1994, the real Tim O’Brien did return to Vietnam. He went back on assignment for the New York Times Magazine with his much younger girlfriend, Kate. The essay he wrote for the magazine, “The Vietnam in Me,” moves back and forth between that summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a glum O’Brien mourns the end of his romance with Kate, and that spring in Vietnam, where he and Kate visit his former firebase in Quang Ngai, meet with survivors of the My Lai massacre, and interview former North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers. “I’m home, but the house is gone,” O’Brien writes, describing himself looking out at the ground on which the base once stood. “Not a sandbag, not a nail or a scrap of wire.”95 He thinks of the base as a lost home but

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can’t recognize what he finds in Quang Ngai. He can’t reconcile the Vietnam “in him” with the Vietnam in Vietnam. From there, O’Brien rewrites “Field Trip” as nonfiction. He stresses that, although he hasn’t seen Vietnam since 1970, he has never left because “Vietnam” constitutes a state of mind, a consciousness that he has carried with him ever since. “You don’t have to be in Nam to be in Nam,” he writes. O’Brien takes Kate, who, at twenty-eight, stands in for the postVietnam generation as Tim’s fictional daughter does in “Field Trip,” to a rice field where one comrade lost a leg and another drowned. He takes Kate’s hand, and they look out over the sunlit field as he tells her about the firefight that ended his friend’s life. “I doubt Kate remembers a word,” he admits, looking back on the moment. “But I do hope she remembers the sunlight striking that field of rice. I hope she remembers the feel of our fingers. I hope she remembers how I fell silent after a time, just looking out at the golds and yellows, joining the peace, and how in those fine sunlit moments, which were ours, Vietnam took a little Vietnam out of me.”96 O’Brien takes his younger girlfriend back to the field on which, it seems, he based the one described in “Field Trip” and reacts to it as the fictional Tim O’Brien does: with a feeling of homecoming in which he substitutes memories of war with images of sunlit calm. He had turned other vets’ returns into fiction and then turned fiction into his own return. O’Brien, then the author of three Vietnam War novels, including the National Book Award–winning Going after Cacciato, wrote his first “refugee stories” as a first wave of Vietnamese American novelists and memoirists wrote theirs. None reached an audience near the size of O’Brien’s, whose The Things They Carried may be the most read book about the war in the United States. The transformation of the Vietnam vet into an American refugee ensured that O’Brien and other white men who had built careers as war writers, however much they might loathe that label, would continue to define the meaning of the Vietnam War, authorizing them to tell stories from all sides, including refugees’. Viet Nguyen, the scholar and novelist, argues that most white authors see themselves as writing above and outside of identitarian concerns, believing themselves untethered from what they consider the constraints of race. Theirs is a universal literature, they insist. “Victimization and voice become the markers of difference and identity for minorities,” he writes, “while whiteness becomes unmarked alienation, manifest in the supposedly universal experiences of loneliness, divorce, ennui, and anomie.”97 How white men claimed that universal changed after the antiracist and feminist movements, though. Rather than assuming

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unmarked identities, they dressed themselves in the language of cultural difference, remaking their whiteness as veteran-ness, a form of difference that resituated them as embodiments of the nation and exiles from it, warriors and refugees, American veterans and veteran Americans. White men, including nonvets, needed the Vietnam War to be theirs because they had built their identities out of it. The war had divided white America. Then it brought it back together as the imagined nation of veteran America. That nation welcomed vets but did not need them and needed refugees but did not welcome them. President Reagan knew the value of refugee stories to the making of veteran America. In his farewell address, the man who as a candidate had diagnosed the nation with a “Vietnam syndrome” celebrated a revival of nationalist feeling since he had taken office. He illustrated that revival with one of his favorite stories. In 1982, he had received a letter from a white sailor named John Mooney serving aboard the USS Midway in the South China Sea. Reagan, whose administration had fought to reduce refugee admissions, described how the crew had caught sight of a “leaky little boat” from which they rescued sixty-five Southeast Asian refugees “crammed inside” and “hoping to get to America.”98 As the sailors brought the refugees on board, one man called out to Mooney, “Hello, American sailor. Hello, freedom man.”99 Reagan didn’t mention whether the refugees had ever made it to United States. Neither did Mooney. Reagan enlisted the refugee to validate Mooney’s national belonging—as an American sailor, a freedom man—but he needed to hustle the unidentified refugee off the stage before the national audience could consider how the United States had contributed to his flight from Vietnam or how it ended. The president had slashed refugee admissions over his two terms, increasing the chances that the man had landed not in the United States but in a detention center somewhere in the Pacific. Reagan used the refugee to tie whiteness to Americanness through the white soldier, his freedom man, and that meant that the refugee, as the constitutive outside to a revitalized white nation, had to remain there, outside the nation. Heartening stories of vets and refugees often hid the strange merging of arguments for veterans’ rights and against refugee admissions. That merging makes no sense unless we return to the years after the civil rights and feminist movements, when white men discovered that their racial identities looked better dressed in army green than in self-conscious white, a time when news media, memoirists, filmmakers, novelists, and the president of the United States reimagined the white vet as, in Tom Petty’s words, like a refugee.

Epilogue Veteran America First

Standing on a stage facing the Lincoln Memorial, presidential candidate Donald Trump thought of Martin Luther King. “I’ll tell you what really amazes me,” he said to the crowd gathered before him for the 2016 Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally, the largest annual POW/MIA event. “I thought this would be like Dr. Martin Luther King, where the people would be lined up from here all the way to the Washington Monument.” Trump, then the de facto Republican nominee, lamented that traffic congestion had limited attendance—“There are hundreds of thousands of people all along the highway, and they can’t get in”—and denied him his King moment on the National Mall.1 No one blinked. News media had grown accustomed to grandiose claims from the businessman, who almost never failed to boast about the size of his rallies and denounce commentators for underestimating him. But Trump, addressing the POW/MIA activists in a black suit and MAGA hat, wanted to say something more with his allusion to King: that he also led a movement of people denied their rights. That he also had a dream, a dream about veterans. “Our veterans have been treated so badly in this country,” he lamented. “In many cases, illegal immigrants are taken much better care of by this country than our veterans.”2 Trump had made the argument before. A dollar allocated to an undocumented immigrant, he claimed at one campaign event after another, amounted to a dollar stolen from a wounded warrior. You couldn’t be on the side of immigrants and vets, meaning that President 179

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Barack Obama, who had issued the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals directive, must, he suggested, be against vets. Trump wanted to make America great again, and that entailed making it great for white vets and the white men who identified with them (the crowd gathered on the mall that day) and miserable for Black and brown immigrants and refugees. He declared himself not the candidate of white America but of veteran America. POW/MIA activists’ allegiance to Trump confused Democrats and liberal news media. (Rolling Thunder did not invite Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, the two remaining Democratic candidates.) Trump, although he turned eighteen in 1964, the year that Congress enacted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, did not serve in Vietnam. He received four student deferments between 1964 and 1968 and a medical deferment after graduating from the Wharton School. He also did not subscribe to the right-wing movement’s belief that the war had been a “lost cause,” in which antiwar activists and fainthearted liberals had left the nation’s fighting men for dead in Southeast Asia. “I was not a big fan of the Vietnam War,” he said on the campaign trail. “I wasn’t a protestor, but the Vietnam War was a disaster for our country.”3 Most of all, the candidate’s adversaries could not believe that Rolling Thunder would endorse a man who had criticized Senator John McCain, a former POW. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said of McCain at a conservative Christian forum in Ames, Iowa, a month after launching his presidential bid. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”4 The other Republican candidates thought he had touched a third rail. Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina, took the stage in Iowa and said, “Here’s what I think [voters are] going to say: ‘Donald Trump, you’re fired.’ ”5 Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, issued a statement calling for Trump to withdraw from the race. Graham, a retired air force colonel, and Perry, a former air force captain, thought they could leverage their distinguished service records against the draft-dodging businessman. But neither they nor the news media that assumed Trump had done irreversible damage to his campaign recognized that the image of the veteran had long ago ceased being about vets themselves. The future president refused to retract his claim, arguing that McCain, the former Republican nominee, had let vets down: “The veterans in this country are treated as third-class citizens. John McCain talks a lot, but he doesn’t do anything.”6 He slammed the senator, a Vietnam vet, for not looking out for Vietnam vets. But Trump didn’t mean Vietnam when he said “Vietnam.” He summoned

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the war as a signifier of the civil rights, feminist, and antiwar movements and the damage that, in his mind, they had done to the status of white men, turning them into third-class citizens. Rolling Thunder attendees knew what Trump meant. News media struggled to find attendees willing to condemn the candidate’s remarks about McCain. “Sometimes people say things. They don’t have time to think, and they say the wrong things,” the event’s executive director explained.7 On stage, another POW/MIA activist said that Trump “got all twisted up” and that liberal news media had misconstrued his comments.8 Few attendees took offense to the candidate’s remarks about McCain, and almost all said they would vote for him in November. An NPR host asked Chris Cox, the founder of Bikers for Trump, what attracted him, a South Carolina woodcarver, and other bikers to the suit-and-tie Manhattan billionaire, who admitted, at a campaign event in Wisconsin, “I’m not a huge biker, I have to be honest with you, okay? I always liked the limo better.”9 Cox told NPR that his club had three goals: limiting immigration, defeating the Islamic State, and advocating for veterans. “Because bikers want to see a wall built [on the US-Mexico border] and because they want to see Syrian refugees vetted, it doesn’t make us racist. It makes us patriotic,” he said, before stressing his club’s commitment to veterans’ rights.10 The interviewer had not accused him of racism—or introduced race at all—but Cox felt the need to defend his candidate and his club from the charge, insisting that they didn’t stand against Black and brown people but with vets. The biker and the businessman shared an admiration for veterans, though neither had served, and a race, though neither acknowledged it. A white husband and wife in their late sixties told the New York Times that they intended to vote for Trump because they could remember a time before Vietnam. “We’ve been through it all. We want to have it back again,” the woman said.11 She didn’t elaborate on what she mean by “it,” but the color of the crowd gathered around the Lincoln Memorial—white people dressed in army green—suggested what it might be. Trump had used veterans as a shield before. Ahead of the Iowa caucuses, he had withdrawn from a debate in Des Moines after Fox News, the debate host, refused to remove news anchor Megyn Kelly as a moderator. In an earlier debate, Kelly had gone after Trump for degrading comments he had made about women, after which he insinuated that Kelly had been menstruating. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,” he said after that debate.12 Some thought the fallout from the feud could at last sink his

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embattled campaign. But Trump’s team had a solution. On the night of the Kelly-moderated debate, he staged a “Special Event to Benefit Veterans Organizations” at neighboring Drake University. Trump, standing at a lectern advertising the new URL DonaldTrumpforVets.com, announced that his rival event had raised over $5 million for veterans in less than twenty-four hours and claimed, as he later would at Rolling Thunder, that the Obama administration treated “illegal immigrants” better than “our vets.”13 Trump surrounded himself on stage with white wounded warriors, who shared stories of war and difficult homecomings. Two other candidates, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, attended the event after facing one another in an undercard debate earlier that day. No one, they knew, could afford to be lukewarm on vets. From the first day of his campaign, Trump dragged some of the ugliest white supremacist substructures of the nation out from under a thin veil, but he also turned to some familiar strategies for hiding them, including, most of all, using vets as a mask for the racial and gender interests of white men. This book has shown how white men, right and left, remade their racial identities after civil rights and feminism and countered demands for redistribution through the image of the Vietnam vet. Long after Rambo and “Born in the U.S.A.,” Donald Trump, the forty-fifth president of the United States, further elevated that white identitarianism, which, though less nuanced than before, succeeded again in uniting white people across class, ethnic, and regional divides. Ta-Nehisi Coates said it best when in 2017 he declared Trump the “first white president.”14 The businessman had achieved the highest office in the land on the strength of white fears of a Black president and nothing more. All presidents before Obama had been white, of course. None could have made it to the White House without being white. But Trump ran as a white candidate, constructing a campaign out of his race, the sole relevant line on his résumé. J. D. Vance, the conservative author hailed as the “Trump whisperer” and the “Rust Belt anger translator,” disagreed.15 In late November 2016, he argued in the Times that the president-elect had won not the white vote but the veteran vote. “Mr. Trump draws heavily from veterans and their families,” he observed. “In communities like mine”—a white working-class town in southeastern Ohio—“we send our best and brightest to our armed forces. Our culture’s elite, on the other hand, encourage their children to do just about anything else.”16 Vance identified the average Trump voter not as a white person but as a person who either had served in the armed forces or admired the men and women who did. (He didn’t mention that Trump had recorded double-digit

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wins in all class and regional demographics of white voters.) From his vow to build a wall on the US-Mexico border to his condemnation of Black athletes demonstrating against police killings of Black people, Trump and his allies wielded the image of the wounded warrior as a vehicle for anti-immigrant and anti-Black racism disguised under the thinnest facade of color-blind nationalism. His success in using veterans as a wedge astonished his adversaries, but it shouldn’t have because nonvet white elites had been brandishing their image to voice racial grievances and entitlements for years. Trump didn’t invent veteran America. He brought it to the surface, declaring veteran America first. In the wake of the 2015 Charleston church shooting, in which twentyone-year-old Dylann Roof, seeking to foment a race war, murdered nine Black churchgoers, liberal news media committed more resources to investigating the networks, online and off, that had attracted Roof’s generation to neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, and neo-Rhodesian ideologies (Roof subscribed to them all).17 And they should. But stories about selfdeclared race warriors can also distract us from the more mundane forms that white racial dominance takes in the United States. Reading about someone like Roof makes white people feel secure because they know they wouldn’t say or do what he did. Most white people don’t make declarations about their racial identities—they don’t issue manifestos or sew Rhodesian flags onto their clothes—but rather find other outlets through which to advance their racial interests. Most frame their racial demands as either skating below (individual) or rising above (universal) identitarian concerns, balancing an assertion of radical individualism with a racial claim to the nation, feigning color blindness while dressing white skin in army green, binding whiteness to the flag. That balancing act is easier for white men who have never worn the uniform because the whiteness of the vet in the national imagination allows them to claim the vet’s hurt and rights when it serves them and set them aside when it doesn’t. Far from the fringe, the white Vietnam vet bridged the two dominant racial ideologies that emerged after civil rights: conservative color blindness and liberal multiculturalism. Conservatives could celebrate white vets as deracinated embodiments of the nation. Liberals could treat them as minoritized heroes whose voices must be heard. Trump, a master culture warrior, did both. Conservatives and liberals agree that they must dissociate the interests of vets from decisions of war (“support our troops”). But until they can dissociate the image of the vet from the interests of whiteness, the United States will continue to fight war after war in defense of a waning white nation.

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colin kaepernick’s dishonorable discharge Colin Kaepernick first took a stand by taking a seat. In the 2016 NFL preseason, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback sat on the bench for the singing of the national anthem. He didn’t say why, and for the first two games no one noticed. In the third preseason game, against the Green Bay Packers at San Francisco’s Levi’s Stadium, Kaepernick sat again, and a tweeted image of the Black quarterback on the bench led to rumor and condemnation. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” he told NFL.com after the game, citing law enforcement killings of Black men that summer. “There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”18 The next week, Kaepernick and teammate Eric Reid met with a white former Green Beret who advised them to take a knee rather than sit during the anthem as a demonstration that would “show respect” and wouldn’t isolate them from their teammates.19 Kaepernick and Reid kneeled together for the anthem at the 49ers’ next game. The army vet stood next to them, his hand on his heart. Kaepernick and Reid made national news and set off a wave of demonstrations in and outside the NFL, a league of Black athletes, facing a heightened risk of neurogenerative brain disease, and white owners. Seattle Seahawks cornerback Jeremy Lane kneeled for the anthem. So did Denver Broncos linebacker Brandon Marshall. Soccer star Megan Rapinoe, a rare white demonstrator, took a knee before a match in Chicago. “Being a gay American, I know what it means to look at the flag and not have it protect all of your liberties,” she said.20 Members of the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Rams raised fists. Howard University’s cheerleaders kneeled. High school teams did, too. Their demonstrations constituted, they insisted, not an antiveteran but an antiracist statement. “I’m not against the military,” Marshall, who lost two lucrative endorsements after kneeling for the anthem, stressed in an interview with the Denver Post. “I’m just against social injustice.”21 Trump didn’t hear him. In 2017, while offering a halfhearted endorsement of Senate candidate Luther Strange in Huntsville, Alabama, the president, a onetime owner of the New Jersey Generals of the nowdefunct United States Football League, suggested that franchise owners fire athletes who kneel for the anthem. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners when somebody disrespects our flag to say get that son of a bitch off the field right now?” he asked. “Out. He’s fired. He’s fired!” The line received the biggest ovation of the night and drew

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chants of “USA! USA! USA!” Trump strode the stage, shaking his head, before adding, “That’s a total disrespect of our heritage. That’s a total disrespect of everything that we stand for, okay? Everything that we stand for.”22 That Sunday, his comments triggered the largest demonstrations yet, with franchise owners, including Patriots CEO Robert Kraft, who had contributed $1 million to the president’s inaugural committee, issuing statements condemning his remarks. Trump didn’t relent. When the Golden State Warriors won their second NBA title in three years and the team’s star point guard, Stephen Curry, indicated that he had no interest in attending the traditional White House visit, the president rescinded the invitation. On Twitter, he called for fans to walk out of games if their teams demonstrated during the anthem. Trump, though targeting all Black athletes speaking out against anti-Black racism, insisted that their race had not motivated his comments, that he had said what he had in defense of men and women in uniform. “This has nothing to do with race or anything else,” he told news media as he boarded Air Force One that night. “This has to do with respect for our country and respect for our flag.”23 The president did what he had done on the campaign trail: he turned vets into a rhetorical bludgeon against Black people. He rallied white people behind the image of aggrieved vets under attack from millionaire Black athletes, binding whiteness to Americanness while casting assertive Blackness as un-American, a threat to the nation. He did all of that without having to use the words white or Black because he could talk about veterans and people who, he claimed, insulted them.24 Kaepernick entered a long tradition of Black athlete activists when he took a knee in 2016. And he knew it because he had received guidance from Harry Edwards, the sociologist of sports who had once advised Muhammad Ali and track athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Edwards, the author of the classic The Revolt of the Black Athlete and a longtime adviser to the 49ers, had mentored Smith and Carlos ahead of their iconic Black Power salute at the 1968 Summer Games. In his rookie season with the 49ers, Kaepernick sought Edwards out. The sociologist encouraged the young quarterback to see himself as a descendant of Ali, Smith, and Carlos, an inheritor of their movement. He sent Kaepernick’s 49ers uniform to the Smithsonian, arguing that he belonged “right next to Ali, right next to Smith and Carlos, right next to Arthur Ashe and Jim Brown and Bill Russell.”25 Kaepernick should be recognized, Edwards argued, as “the Muhammad Ali of this generation.”26 The NFL countered Kaepernick as it had the athlete activism of Ali’s time: with a stifling nationalism. In 1968, with the boxer refusing the

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draft and Smith and Carlos raising black-gloved fists in Mexico City, Pete Rozelle, the NFL commissioner, had mandated for the first time that all athletes stand for the national anthem with their helmets under their arms and no “talking, nervous footwork, gum chewing, [or] shoulderpad slamming” allowed.27 Rozelle later said, “It was a conscious effort on our part to bring the elements of patriotism” into the game.28 The commissioner sent some of the NFL’s biggest stars, including Dick Butkus, Bart Starr, and Johnny Unitas, on goodwill tours to Vietnam. He titled the third Super Bowl halftime show, the first with a theme, “America Thanks.” Rozelle turned NFL football into a red, white, and blue extravaganza with flags, anthems, and endless salutes to soldiers and veterans. (The commissioner also had the league’s bottom line in mind. In the late 1960s, he orchestrated the merger of the NFL with the American Football League, a move that called for Congress to weigh in on the league’s antitrust exemption. What senator or congressperson would vote against America’s game?)29 If Kaepernick descends from Ali, then Trump and Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner throughout the quarterback’s career, descend from Rozelle, who first embraced army-green nationalism as an unassailable method for undercutting Black activism in sports. The armed forces benefited as much if not more from the militarization of the NFL as Rozelle, Goodell, and franchise owners. After the Vietnam War instilled the belief that television broadcasts of war damaged the government waging it, the league showed Washington that television could, with better stage management, also sell war to an uncertain nation. The 1991 Super Bowl in Tampa, Florida, coincided with the Gulf War, and the combination of Whitney Houston’s celebrated national anthem; Black and white teammates standing side by side, hands on hearts; shots of multiracial, mixed-gender American soldiers and marines watching on television from their barracks; and children wearing yellow ribbons and waving flags showcased what cultural historian Melani McAlister identifies as “military multiculturalism” and queer theorist Deborah Cohler calls “nationalist feminism.”30 Although the star of the NFL halftime show continued to be the white male officer returning to his dutiful white wife, reinforcing the artificial, gendered line between “front line” and “home front,” the state learned from the NFL that orchestrated multicultural images and news stories about white, hetero women serving overseas elevated rather than diminished the white men in the box seats.31 Colin Kaepernick unsettled that military-football complex.

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So Trump went further. He declared Kaepernick un-American. After the quarterback sat for the anthem in the 49ers preseason game against the Packers, the Republican candidate told a Seattle radio host, “Maybe he should find a country that works better for him.”32 In 2018, when the NFL announced new rules mandating that athletes either stand or remain in the locker room for the anthem, President Trump commended the league’s decision and suggested on Fox and Friends that the athletes who had kneeled “shouldn’t be in the country.”33 In the campaign and in the White House, he combined anti-Black and anti-immigrant racism, using similar language to describe Black people and immigrants as external threats to a nation of veterans and the people who identified with them. The president, in treating vets as embodiments of the nation and setting them against Black athletes and Latinx immigrants, suggested that they and the nation they embodied had to be white. In September 2017, after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, Reuters asked Trump why he had devoted so much time that week to criticizing NFL athletes rather than leading the hurricane relief effort. The president answered with an anecdote about wounded warriors. “I was at Walter Reed Hospital recently, and I saw so many great young people, and they’re missing legs, and they’re missing arms. And they’ve been so badly injured,” he said. “And they were fighting for our country. They were fighting for our flag. They were fighting for our national anthem. And for people to disrespect that by kneeling during the playing of our national anthem I think is disgraceful.”34 Reuters took the wandering answer as a dodge. Trump should have been directing the resources of his office to Puerto Rico, of course. But his condemnation of Kaepernick as antiveteran should not be mistaken for a distraction from his agenda. He had won the White House on a racial claim to the nation—a claim made against Kaepernick and Puerto Rico—filtered through the image he constructed of his visit to Walter Reed. The athletes knew which veterans their critics had in mind and resisted. In Kaepernick’s first news conference after sitting for the anthem, sports media asked him whether he worried about offending vets. The quarterback reminded them that hundreds of thousands of Black Americans had served in Iraq and Afghanistan and returned home to face harassment and sometimes lose their lives in encounters with law enforcement. “I’ve seen circumstances where men and women who have been in the military have come back and been treated unjustly by the country they have fought for, and have been murdered by the country they fought for, on our land,” Kaepernick said, calling

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attention to the unstated whiteness of the vets his critics claimed he had insulted.35 Torrey Smith, a wide receiver with the 49ers in 2016, observed that the flag and the anthem meant something different for a Black vet. “I understand why people are offended by people protesting the national anthem,” he told an ESPN staff writer. “My father served twenty-five years. When he dies, he’s going to be wrapped in an American flag. But my dad is also out of the army and he drives trucks all over the country, and he’s a black man everywhere he goes,” adding, “That doesn’t protect him, just because he served our country.”36 Smith’s father had served in the army, but that didn’t, his son maintained, change how he got treated as a Black man in the United States. Kaepernick didn’t take a knee against but for Smith’s father. Kaepernick and Smith identified what their critics either could not or would not acknowledge: that when white men told them to stand for the vets, they meant white vets. No one could see the anti-Black racism often embedded in demands for veterans’ rights better than Black vets, who had served a nation that didn’t serve them and sometimes refused to let them live. In 2017, after the president attacked him and other Black athletes on Twitter, Eric Reid, whom the 49ers would not re-sign at the end of the season, reflected on his decision to kneel with Kaepernick in the New York Times. He had been distressed at the news of the police killing of Alton Sterling in his hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Sterling could have been his father, he thought. He could have been him. He wanted to do something, but he also wanted to be as “respectful as possible” of the families affected and of soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen. After consulting with the Green Beret, he and Kaepernick decided to take a knee. “I remember thinking our posture was like a flag flown at half-mast to mark a tragedy,” he wrote.37 Kaepernick, who, at twenty-five, had led the 49ers to a Super Bowl in 2013, didn’t have a job. No team had signed him in the 2017 offseason. Reid acknowledged that his own career could suffer. He could lose millions of dollars. (He later did. After a strong 2017 season, in which he made more than $5 million, Reid found himself on a one-year contract with the Carolina Panthers with a base value of $1 million, not much above the league minimum for an athlete in his sixth season.) But he could not live with himself if he didn’t speak out because, as he wrote, borrowing from Martin Luther King, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.”38 Reid did not acknowledge it, but the King line he chose came not from 1955 or 1963 but from 1967, when the civil rights leader had

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declared himself against the Vietnam War. King had told a Harlem congregation that he could not call himself an antiracist without also being against the war because it did not serve Black people or Vietnamese but the white elites who stood to benefit from access to the markets of a noncommunist Southeast Asia. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned,” he said, “part of the autopsy must read Vietnam.”39 War, King knew, served white interests, and white interests encouraged war. In King’s time, white greed drove the nation to war, and war offered white greed a color-blind disguise. In Reid’s time, white grievance drove the nation to war, and war offered white grievance that color-blind disguise.

a weird nostalgia In 1961, James Baldwin answered his friend Norman Mailer’s notorious 1957 essay “The White Negro” with his own, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy.” Mailer, who first made his name with the war novel The Naked and the Dead, had fetishized Black men as models for life after the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Black men, he argued, had long endured a state of constant danger that had forced them to live in the “enormous present,” to find satisfaction in the here and now rather than look forever to a future that they might not live to see. The threat of genocide and nuclear war had made that future uncertain for others, Mailer believed, including white men like himself. Some looked to the existentialist Black man as a model. Mailer gave them a name: white Negroes. The Black man taught that white existentialist to surrender “the pleasures of the mind for more obligatory pleasures of the body.” Mailer’s death-facing, hedonistic white Negro originated with—who else?—the soldier, whose language, “in its emphasis upon ‘ass’ as the soul and ‘shit’ as the circumstance, was able to express the existential states of the enlisted man.”40 Baldwin found Mailer’s argument absurd and below him, an imitation of the beats, whom he considered hacks. But he determined that something other than book sales had driven Mailer to dress himself in mock-Blackness. Black men learned at a young age that they had to invent themselves, that the world wouldn’t assist them in the formation of their identities. White men, Baldwin observed, did not learn that until adulthood, believing for much of their lives that the world owed them their identities. “The world is not interested in anyone’s identity,” Baldwin wrote. “And, therefore, the anguish which can overtake a white man comes in the middle of his life, when he must make the almost inconceivable effort to divest himself of everything he has ever

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expected or believed, when he must take himself apart and put himself together again.”41 He attributed Mailer’s incoherent musings to a crisis of self-knowledge that strikes white men at middle age, a crisis that no Black man could defer for so long. Mailer’s crisis, Baldwin thought, reflected a wider and growing crisis for white men in a time of dramatic social change. The civil rights era had arrived, and white men had found themselves naked. Without well-formed identities of their own, they borrowed someone else’s. Baldwin believed that Mailer and other white men looked to Black men to secure their sense of self not because of some racial fetish—though that could not be missed—but because of a weird nostalgia. Mailer didn’t want to be Black. He wanted to go back to a time when he could be white without having to think about it. “The thing that most white people imagine that they can salvage from the storm of life is really, in sum, their innocence,” Baldwin concluded. “I am afraid that most of the white people I have ever known impressed me as being in the grip of some weird nostalgia, dreaming of a vanished state of security and order, against which dream, unfailingly and unconsciously, they tested and very often lost their lives.”42 White men of Mailer’s generation longed for an imagined state of innocence in which they could feel secure in their identities without ever having to acknowledge that they had identities that were limited by their race or gender. Baldwin worried that they would rather see the nation obliterated than reckon with the fact of their finite identities, that they would rather die than confront their whiteness and what it meant in a nation built on the theft of land and bodies. Baldwin had it right. Since then, white men have led the nation into one war after another, from Vietnam to the long wars of the twenty-first century, where they have not lost their innocence, as they say, but restored it through the deracinated national identities of the soldier, the marine, the sailor, the airman, and the veteran. When Trump declared his intention to make America great again, he imagined a lost nation of unselfconscious whiteness, which he set out to reclaim through a heightened race consciousness masked as an allegiance to vets. The forty-fifth president wanted to recover not another United States but another state of mind, a state of innocence forged through a simultaneous claim to the center and margin of national life, to the universal American veteran and to the minoritized veteran American. Liberals, far from innocent, tried to beat the president at his own game. In the 2018 midterm, Democrats recruited close to a hundred young vets, most white, to run for national office. The Wall Street

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Journal described it as “Democrats’ vet-centric strategy.”43 The communications director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced, “There’s no question that this is both the year of the woman and the year of the veteran, and that’s a huge asset for Democrats.”44 House Democrats had used that gamebook before, running more than sixty vets for Congress in 2006. The “fighting Dems,” they called them then. After Trump won two-thirds of the veteran vote in 2016, liberals decided to devote their resources not to running more candidates of color or turning out emerging constituencies but to winning back vets and the people who identified with them from their colleagues on the right. Liberal cultural industries also continued to shower stories about white vets with their highest honors. When the Times ran an A1 feature on the literature of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, “Human Costs of the Forever War, Enough to Fill a Bookshelf,” it included a staged photograph of six authors—five white men, one white woman. The veteran American, forming a rare site of consensus in the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, forms a rarer consensus yet in the new culture wars. Consensus isn’t a bad thing, as long we know what we’re consenting to. This book has sought to trace the white racial reunion behind what looks like a race-neutral agreement on the need to defend and advance veterans’ rights. Since the end of the Vietnam War, that consensus has had less to do with concern for real veterans than with white men’s struggle to maintain racial and gender dominance after civil rights and feminism. President Trump offers a flagrant example, but his liberal adversaries, some of whom served and most of whom didn’t, also fashioned themselves as voices of veteran America. The heroism and sorrow of the veteran are among the few things that conservatives and liberals can agree on. That is understandable. The risks that come with enlistment are enormous, and, with the hollowing out of social services and the ever-increasing cost of higher education, most enlistees don’t have a better choice available to them. But as long as conservatives and liberals—Rolling Thunder and the fighting Dems—continue to use veterans as agents of white racial interests, with or without their consent, they will find a need to create another generation of vets to celebrate and mourn. Once again, whiteness is on the march, and we should know by now where it marches.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to all of my colleagues and students at Texas Christian University for their encouragement and insight. I couldn’t have written this book without the camaraderie of David Colón, Theresa Gaul, Dan Gil, Jason Helms, Gabi Kirilloff, Max Krochmal, Brandon Manning, Stacie McCormick, Celeste Menchaca, Sarah Robbins, Alonzo Smith, and Ann Tran. I’m grateful to the friends and colleagues who offered feedback at meetings of the American Studies Association and the Modern Language Association and at the Postwar Faculty Colloquium at the University of North Texas, including Neda Atanasoski, Darryl Dickson-Carr, Keith Feldman, Jacqueline Foertsch, Gordon Fraser, Dinidu Karunanayake, Anoop Mirpuri, Howie Tam, Nate Windon, and Jim Zeigler. A Mellon Sawyer Seminar Fellowship at the University of California, Irvine, gave me the time to get this book off the ground. Thank you to my UCI friends and mentors Carol Burke, Ted Martin, Linda Võ, Cécile Whiting, and Judy Wu. I had the enormous good luck of working with Niels Hooper, Robin Manley, and the rest of the team at the University of California Press in bringing this book to the finish line. Thank you. And thank you to Kathleen Belew and David Roediger for their generous and thoughtful reviews. Editors and reviewers at American Literature, American Quarterly, Critical Inquiry, and the Los Angeles Review of Books also offered valuable advice on earlier versions of some sections, for which I am grateful. I’m fortunate to have had the chance to work with Doug Mitchell, who first believed in and encouraged the idea behind this book. I wish he could have read it, and I wish I could hear him on the drums one last time. I owe Sean Goudie and Priscilla Wald for teaching me how to write books. I owe Cathy Schlund-Vials for teaching me how to do it all. I wouldn’t have gotten to page one without her. 193

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Thank you to my parents, Dave Darda and Patty Garvey-Darda, and my brothers, Zack and Sam Darda, for encouraging and challenging me and for their wit and humor. I dedicate this book to Sam Gailey. In my eyes, you will always be twenty-three, driving the Element with the windows down, singing “Thunder Road” with your head back and your headlight out.

Notes

introduction 1. US Supreme Court, “Regents of the University of California v. Bakke: Oral Argument,” October 12, 1977, Oyez, transcript and audio, 1:59:13, www .oyez.org/cases/1979/76-811. 2. US Supreme Court, “Regents of the University of California v. Bakke: Opinion Announcement,” June 26, 1978, Oyez, transcript and audio, 1:04:14, www.oyez.org/cases/1979/76-811. 3. Joel Dreyfuss and Charles Lawrence III, The Bakke Case: The Politics of Inequality (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 37; Dennis A. Williams, “Dr. Bakke?,” Newsweek, July 10, 1978, 24. 4. Robert Lindsey, “White/Caucasian—and Rejected,” New York Times, April 3, 1977. 5. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, “Born in the U.S.A.,” Born in the U.S.A., Columbia, 1984. 6. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 236. 7. Yusef Komunyakaa, “Tough Eloquence,” Trotter Review 7, no. 1 (1993): 12–14. 8. Some critical race theorists and whiteness studies scholars, including Carol Anderson, Matthew Jacobson, George Lipsitz, Jennifer Pierce, and Howard Winant, note how white men embraced the idea of racial grievance after civil rights to combat redistributive racial reforms. White people either declared whiteness a racial mirage (color blindness) or distanced themselves from it (white ethnic revivalism). This book argues that color blindness and multiculturalism fractured white America and that the saga of the forgotten warrior reunited it as a racial countermovement without ever having to use the

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word white. A second contingent of scholars, including Lee Bebout, Sylvia Chong, Stephanie Li, and Eric Lott, show how white people constructed their whiteness in relation to people they deemed not white, forming their own racial identities through confused, self-serving ideas about Mexicans and Chicanos (Bebout), Southeast Asians (Chong), and Black people (Li and Lott). This book follows their lead in considering how white people came to know their whiteness through learned ideas about people of color. But it also argues that sometimes divergent cross-racial constructions of whiteness merged in the image of the white Vietnam vet, binding whiteness to Americanness through a wounded racial nationalism. See Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Jennifer L. Pierce, Racing for Innocence: Whiteness, Gender, and the Backlash against Affirmative Action (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); Howard Winant, “Behind Blue Eyes: Contemporary White Racial Politics,” in The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 50–68; Lee Bebout, Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the U.S. Racial Imagination in Brown and White (New York: New York University Press, 2016); Sylvia Shin Huey Chong, The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Stephanie Li, Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Eric Lott, Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). 9. The historian David Blight concludes Race and Reunion with the observation that “it would take another political revolution and the largest mass movement for human rights in our history to crush the nation’s racial apartheid system that had been forged out of the reunion” of the white South and the white North. “All memory,” he adds, “is prelude”—including, as this book shows, that of the civil rights movement. Others, including Eric Foner and Richard Valelly, describe the second Reconstruction as ongoing. The historian Foner ends his classic Reconstruction with an acknowledgment of what the antiracist movements could not achieve: “Nearly a century elapsed before the nation again attempted to come to terms with the implications of emancipation and the political and social agenda of Reconstruction. In many ways, it has yet to do so.” The political scientist Valelly reflects, “One day the hateful inequalities that disenfranchisement did so much to create or to entrench—in housing, jobs, medical care, and education—may be gone. When that happens the second reconstruction will finally be over.” This book argues that the second Reconstruction did end and that it ended, like the first, with a white reunion. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 397; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 612; Richard M. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The

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Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 250. 10. Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 237. Belew identifies how the idea of the Vietnam War as a white man’s wound united a white supremacist movement, reconciling, for example, the anti-Nazi Ku Klux Klan with neo-Nazis (Klan leaders held strong anti-Nazi feelings stemming from their service in World War II). “While white power featured a diversity of views and an array of competing leaders,” Belew writes, “all corners of the movement were inspired by feelings of defeat, emasculation, and betrayal after the Vietnam War and by economic and social changes that seemed to threaten and victimize white men” (10). Nonextremist white men on the right and the left shared some of their feelings, but they tended to voice them as veterans or advocates for vets rather than as white men. See also James William Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994); and Betty A. Dobratz and Stephanie L. Shanks-Meile, “White Power, White Pride!”: The White Separatist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne, 1997). 11. Chicanx studies scholar Lee Bebout argues that extremist white supremacist movements could not survive without mainstream, “everyday” white supremacist ideas, nor could that mainstream survive without a fringe to blame. “Through depictions of aberrant whites (e.g., skinheads and the KKK), everyday whites are able to deny their positioning within a racial system,” he writes. “Likewise, the ‘possessive investment’ of everyday whiteness gives legitimacy and cover to the fears and desires of the more explicit hate groups.” Bebout, Whiteness on the Border, 6. 12. Donald Trump, “Presidential Candidate Donald Trump Remarks in Philadelphia,” C-Span video, 1:26:29, September 7, 2016, www.c-span.org /video/?414883-1/donald-trump-delivers-address-philadelphia-military-preparedness. Introducing a 2014 American Quarterly forum on whiteness, Cynthia Young and Min Song observe that the election of the first Black president had led not to the “end of white America” but to an undisguised reinvestment in white racial interests. “Whereas once it hid behind claims of universality, now whiteness is on the march,” they write. This book argues that the white march of the 2010s originated after civil rights and feminism with a subtle linking of stories of white men defeated and forgotten in Vietnam to the racial reforms of the 1960s. Cynthia A. Young and Min Hyoung Song, introduction to “Whiteness Redux or Redefined?,” ed. Cynthia A. Young and Min Hyoung Song, forum, American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2014): 1073. 13. James Baldwin, “The Price of the Ticket,” introduction to The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985), xv. 14. Baldwin, xx. 15. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950), 239, 38. 16. Quoted in “Erik Erikson: The Quest for Identity,” Newsweek, December 21, 1970, 84. 17. See Lawrence J. Friedman, Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson (New York: Scribner, 1999). Cultural historian Leerom Medovoi

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argues that “Erikson’s book was the first to define the word ‘identity’ as the normative psychic achievement of selfhood,” which furnished the coming social movements with “not gender, race, or sexual politics per se, but a model for their identitarianization.” Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 6, 47. 18. Huey P. Newton, “To the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam,” in To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton (New York: Random House, 1972), 178. 19. Emma Gee, preface to Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America, ed. Emma Gee (Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, 1976), xiii. 20. See William Greider, “Shared Legacy: Why Whites Watched Roots,” Washington Post, February 3, 1977. 21. Quoted in Jonathan Riedler, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 113. 22. Quoted in Ronald P. Formisano, Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 183. 23. Lott, Black Mirror, 20. 24. The historian Matthew Jacobson argues that the white ethnic revival, while broadening what it meant to be an American, at least among white people, obscured as much as it revealed about the nation’s past. “The ethnic contributions model of American nationality may have been a significant departure from the homogenizing model of the melting pot,” he writes, “but it did share with the waning paradigm an almost absolute erasure of power relations that made for a fairly sanitized and happy national narrative: diversity as feast, the nation as smorgasbord.” Jacobson, Roots Too, 56. 25. Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies (New York: Macmillan, 1972), xxii. 26. F. Ross Holland, Idealists, Scoundrels, and the Lady: An Insider’s View of the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Project (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 245–46. 27. Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, The Races of Mankind (New York: Public Affairs Committee, 1943), 11. 28. Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Knopf, 1977), 188. 29. Peter Biskind, “The Vietnam Oscars,” Vanity Fair, March 2008, 266–80. 30. Quoted in Biskind, 271. 31. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Commencement Address at Howard University: ‘To Fulfill These Rights,’ ” June 4, 1965, American Presidency Project, www .presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/commencement-address-howard-universityfulfill-these-rights. 32. Johnson. 33. Quoted in Dreyfuss and Lawrence, Bakke Case, 17. For more on the medical school’s affirmative action program, see Howard Ball, The Bakke Case: Race, Education, and Affirmative Action (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 49–53. 34. Quoted in Lindsey, “White/Caucasian—and Rejected.”

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35. US Supreme Court, “Regents of the University of California v. Bakke: Oral Argument.” 36. J. Harvie Wilkinson III, From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 254, 290. 37. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 292, 296 (1978). 38. Lewis F. Powell Jr., “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” memorandum to Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., August 23, 1971, 25, Lewis F. Powell Archives, Law Library, Washington and Lee University, https://scholarlycommons.law .wlu.edu/powellmemo/1/. 39. Regents, 438 U.S. at 314, 316. 40. The Franklin Roosevelt administration’s New Deal reforms and initiatives, including the GI Bill, functioned as a form of white affirmative action because, as Ira Katznelson, the political scientist, chronicles, they, needing the votes of southern senators and congressmen, accommodated Jim Crow, closing the class divide among white men and widening it between Black and white communities. “Public policy, including affirmative action, has insufficiently taken this troubling legacy into account,” he argues. The historian Carol Anderson remarks that after Bakke the definition of the term diversity “became so expansive that by the twenty-first century white males would actually be the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action in college admissions.” Institutional historian Christopher Newfield argues that Powell “de-raced diversity” in defining it “not as a moderate mode in which to pursue racial equality but as an alternative to that pursuit.” He stresses that the Bakke decision secured the rights not of Black and Latinx students but of members of the white professional-managerial class who ran and sent their children to elite universities and colleges. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2005), x; Anderson, White Rage, 117; Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 112, 113. 41. Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 195. Ferguson argues elsewhere that liberal whiteness after civil rights “represents an antiredistributive discourse par excellence,” renewing white racial dominance “through an appreciation of diversity and through the avowal rather than the disavowal of whiteness.” That avowal of whiteness includes an articulation of whiteness as itself a form of difference, including class, ethnic, and veteran difference. Roderick A. Ferguson, “The Distribution of Whiteness,” in “Whiteness Redux or Redefined?,” ed. Cynthia A. Young and Min Hyoung Song, forum, American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2014): 1101. 42. See Roderick A. Ferguson, We Demand: The University and Student Protests (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 56–60. 43. Grace Kyungwon Hong, Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 11. 44. Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), 138.

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45. Regents, 438 U.S. at 400. 46. Regents, 438 U.S. at 400–401. 47. Simon J. Ortiz, “The Significance of a Veteran’s Day,” in Going for the Rain (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 72. 48. The critical race theorist Nikhil Singh shows how the state used and created racial divisions in distinguishing war from policing. In refusing to acknowledge colonial wars as wars, he writes, “colonialism supported a foundational differentiation between the conduct of war between equal sovereigns, as an extension of specific and limited political and state aims, and the means by which imperial sovereigns asserted jurisdiction, seized territory, and exercised a more or less open-ended police power over ungoverned, unproductive, unsettled spaces and the ‘unfit peoples’ who inhabited them.” That differentiation forged what Singh elsewhere terms the “whiteness of police” and what this book identifies as the whiteness of war and the whiteness of the vet. Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America’s Long War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 54–55; Nikhil Pal Singh, “The Whiteness of Police,” in “Whiteness Redux or Redefined?,” ed. Cynthia A. Young and Min Hyoung Song, forum, American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2014): 1092. For more on the continuities between war and policing in American empire building and race making, see Lesley Gill, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Kimberley L. Phillips, War! What Is It Good For? Black Freedom Struggles and the U.S. Military from World War II to Iraq (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 12–13, 280–82; Stuart Schrader, Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019); and Micol Seigel, Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 49. Legislative Proposals Relating to the War in Southeast Asia: Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, 92nd Cong. 181 (1971) (statement of John Kerry, Vietnam Veterans against the War). 50. Robert Jay Lifton, Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans—Neither Victims nor Executioners (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 69. 51. Sociologist Jerry Lembcke observes that the introduction of “postVietnam syndrome” to the veterans’ movement shifted the conversation from the war that the vets, including Lembcke himself, had resisted to the trauma they had suffered. “The reframing of our understanding of the Vietnam War as a story about the U.S. veterans of that war has created a false issue: should we understand U.S. veterans of the war as victims or executioners?” he writes. “The answer is neither. The war itself should be the issue, not the men who fought it.” Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 123. 52. John S. McCain III, “How the POWs Fought Back,” U.S. News and World Report, May 14, 1973, 113. 53. See Craig Howes, Voices of the Vietnam POWs: Witnesses to Their Fight (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 4–5; and Jamie Howren and Taylor Baldwin Kiland, Open Doors: Vietnam POWs Thirty Years Later (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005), 155.

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54. Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 13. 55. Yusef Komunyakaa, “Control Is the Mainspring,” Hayden’s Ferry Review, no. 10 (1992): 55. 56. Yusef Komunyakaa, “Facing It,” in Dien Cai Dau (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 63. 57. Rick Horowitz, “Maya Lin’s Angry Objections,” Washington Post, July 7, 1982. 58. John Wheeler, Touched with Fire: The Future of the Vietnam Generation (New York: Franklin Watts, 1984), 16. 59. James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 50. 60. Hunter, 43, 44, 44–45. 61. Pat Buchanan, “Pat Buchanan 1992 Republican Convention Address,” C-Span video, 35:24, August 17, 1992, www.c-span.org/video/?31255-1 /pat-buchanan-1992-republican-convention-address. 62. Hunter, Culture Wars, 289. 63. Quoted in John Dillin, “Conservative Republicans Call for ‘Culture War,’ ” Christian Science Monitor, May 17, 1993. 64. Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention in Chicago,” August 18, 1980, American Presidency Project, www.presidency .ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-veterans-foreign-wars-convention-chicago. 65. Norman Podhoretz, Why We Were in Vietnam (New York: Touchstone, 1982), 10, 210. 66. Historian Andrew Hartman observes that the culture wars raised the stakes of historical arguments, with conservative intellectuals, including Podhoretz, advocating for a more nationalist historical education. This conviction arose, he writes, from “the crisis of national identity that ensued alongside the decline of American power made manifest in the jungles of Vietnam.” Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 276. 67. Buchanan, “Republican Convention Address.” 68. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women (New York: Crown, 1991), xviii; Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: William Morrow, 1999), 298. 69. Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), xii. Jeffords contended not that the Vietnam War caused the remasculinization of America but that it signified in national culture an “eruption of gender relations and anxieties” (186). War does not structure gender relations, but war and gender remain “intimately connected,” one forever enlisting the other (xv). This book identifies a similar relation between war and white racial dominance, that neither could endure without the other. 70. Hazel V. Carby, “The Canon: Civil War and Reconstruction,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (1989): 37. See also Hazel V. Carby, Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (London: Verso, 1999), 187–272.

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71. Hazel V. Carby, “The Multicultural Wars,” Radical History Review, no. 54 (1992): 12. 72. Larry Heinemann, “A Word to the Reader,” foreword to Paco’s Story (New York: Vintage, 2005), xi. 73. Tim O’Brien, “The ‘What If?’ Game,” interview by Josh Karp, Atlantic, October 30, 2002, www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/interviews/int200210-30.htm. 74. Elliott Ackerman, “The Rumpus Interview with Eliot Ackerman,” by Phil Klay, Rumpus, March 18, 2015, http://therumpus.net/2015/03/the-rumpus-interview-with-elliot-ackerman/. See also Phil Klay, “Author, Veteran Phil Klay Discusses New Novel,” interview by Solomon Dworkin, Chicago Maroon, October 25, 2016, www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2016/10/25/author-veteranphil-klay-discusses-new-novel/. 75. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 38, 5, 17. 76. “Saigon Surrenders,” Chicago Tribune, April 30, 1975. 77. Hubert Van Es, “Thirty Years at 300 Millimeters,” New York Times, April 29, 2005. 78. lê thi diem thúy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (New York: Knopf, 2003), 88–89. 79. See Elaine H. Kim, “ ‘At Least You’re Not Black’: Asian Americans in U.S. Race Relations,” in “Crossing Lines: Revisioning U.S. Race Relations,” ed. Elaine H. Kim, Susan Roberta Katz, and Anthony M. Platt, special issue, Social Justice 25, no. 3 (1998): 12n1. 80. U.S. Refugee Programs: Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, 96th Cong. 6 (1980) (statement of Cyrus Vance, Secretary of State). 81. Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 18. 82. Yê´n Lê Espiritu, the sociologist and critical refugee studies scholar, identifies how news media transmitted what she calls the “we-win-even-when-welose syndrome” in which good warriors rescued good refugees, with the success of the latter redeeming the sins of the former. “The refugees—constructed as successful and anticommunist—recuperated the veterans’ and thus U.S. failure of masculinity,” she writes, “and re-made the case for U.S. war in Vietnam: that the war, no matter what the costs, was ultimately necessary, moral, and successful.” Yê´n Lê Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 86, 104. 83. William Broyles Jr., Brothers in Arms: A Journey from War to Peace (New York: Knopf, 1986), 266. 84. Images of Southeast Asian suffering had served, cultural historian and critical race theorist Sylvia Chong argues, as an index of American national suffering throughout the war, and images of white veteran suffering emerged to overshadow them, she writes, “just as the racial formation of Asian Americans gains political traction.” A coincidence? She thinks not. Chong, Oriental Obscene, 27. 85. See Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s Journey from War to Peace, with Jay Wurts (New York: Double-

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day, 1989); and Carol Memmott, “ ‘Homecoming’ Starts Healing,” USA Today, July 28, 1989. 86. Donald Trump, “Presidential Candidate Donald Trump Remarks on Immigration Policy,” C-Span video, 1:34:21, August 31, 2016, www.c-span .org/video/?414550-1/donald-trump-delivers-immigration-policy-address. 87. Michelle Ye Hee Lee, “Trump’s Ridiculous Claim That Veterans Are ‘Treated Worse’ Than Undocumented Immigrants,” Washington Post, September 13, 2016; Louis Jacobson and Miriam Valverde, “Donald Trump’s False Claim Veterans Treated Worse Than Illegal Immigrants,” PolitiFact, September 9, 2016, www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/09/donald-trump /trump-says-veterans-treated-worse-illegal-immigran/; Eugene Kiely et al., “Trump Still Off on Immigration,” FactCheck.org, September 1, 2016, www .factcheck.org/2016/09/trump-still-off-on-immigration/. 88. Maureen Ryan, “The Long History of the Vietnam Novel,” New York Times, March 17, 2017. 89. Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer (New York: Grove, 2015), 136. 90. Nguyen, 178. 91. Nguyen, 128. 92. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward a History of the Part Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1935), 700.

1. post-traumatic whiteness 1. Quoted in Wilbur J. Scott, Vietnam Veterans since the War: The Politics of PTSD, Agent Orange, and the National Memorial (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 5. 2. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1980), 236. 3. Sarah A. Haley, “When the Patient Reports Atrocities: Specific Treatment Considerations of the Vietnam Veterans,” Archives of General Psychiatry 30, no. 2 (1974): 194. 4. For detailed accounts of Haley’s career and contributions to veterans’ mental health, see Gerald Nicosia, Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement (New York: Crown, 2001), 175–88; and Scott, Vietnam Veterans, 4–7. 5. Quoted in David J. Morris, The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), 162; Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche (New York: Free Press, 2010), 2. For more on the “culture of trauma,” see Morris, Evil Hours, 157–65. 6. Cathy Caruth, introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 5. See also Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

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7. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 8. 8. Woodrow Wilson, “An Address at the Gettysburg Battlefield,” in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link, vol. 28 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 23. 9. “Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg,” Washington Bee, May 24, 1913. 10. See David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 397. 11. Roy Scranton, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 13. “The predominant cultural narrative of the experience of war in American culture today,” Scranton writes, “is the story of trauma” (208). Trauma in war culture has functioned not, as some would argue, to guard against reductive nationalist narratives but to authorize disengagement, to refuse understanding. The trauma hero, he contends, “testifies to our persistent cultural sanctification of war” (225). That hero does subtle work on behalf of empire building, as Scranton argues, and, white racial interests, as this book argues. It binds empire building to whiteness. 12. Frederick Douglass, “The Color Question,” July 5, 1875, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, www.loc.gov/item /mfd000413. 13. Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 34, 51. 14. Historian John Kinder observes how militarists and antiwar activists have recruited the disabled vet to their conflicting agendas, fantasizing either that “the United States can remain a global military power without incurring the social, economic, and physical consequences associated with veterans’ disabilities” or that “Americans will permanently reject war because of the risks to soldiers’ bodies and minds.” Hawks and doves also looked to the disabled vet to entertain racial fantasies of defeat and renewal. John M. Kinder, Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 287. 15. Grace Kyungwon Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxviii. 16. Haley, “Patient Reports Atrocities,” 191. 17. John Wheeler, Touched with Fire: The Future of the Vietnam Generation (New York: Franklin Watts, 1984), 16–17. 18. Legislative Proposals Relating to the War in Southeast Asia: Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, 92nd Cong. 185 (1971) (statement of John Kerry, Vietnam Veterans against the War). 19. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 (San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1973), 392. 20. Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 166.

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21. Robert Jay Lifton, “Why Civilians Are War Victims,” U.S. News and World Report, December 15, 1969, 26. 22. Oversight of Medical Care of Veterans Wounded in Vietnam: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Veterans’ Affairs, 91st Cong. 496 (1969–70) (statement of Robert Jay Lifton, professor of psychiatry, Yale University). 23. Oversight of Medical Care, 493. 24. Robert Jay Lifton, Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans—Neither Victims nor Executioners (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 17. 25. Chaim F. Shatan, “Bogus Manhood, Bogus Honor: Surrender and Transfiguration in the United States Marine Corps,” Psychoanalytic Review 64, no. 4 (1977): 589. 26. Chaim F. Shatan, “The Grief of Soldiers: Vietnam Combat Veterans’ SelfHelp Movement,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 43, no. 4 (1973): 649. 27. Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 110. The introduction of PTSD, Lembcke argues, encouraged the image of the “good veteran” who could not be antiwar because the antiwar movement had caused that good vet’s trauma (104). PTSD originated in the veterans’ antiwar movement but over time, he suggests, transformed into a tool for forgetting it. 28. Quoted in Lifton, Home from the War, 75. 29. Quoted in Nicosia, Home to War, 169. 30. Lifton, Home from the War, 81. 31. Shatan, “Grief of Soldiers,” 649. 32. Lifton, Home from the War, 91. 33. Arthur Egendorf, Healing from the War: Trauma and Transformation after Vietnam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 130. 34. Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence— From Domestic Abuse to Political Violence (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 32, 9. 35. Morris, Evil Hours, 64. 36. Chaim F. Shatan, “Post-Vietnam Syndrome,” New York Times, May 6, 1972. 37. Quoted in Scott, Vietnam Veterans, 43, 44. 38. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 3rd ed. 39. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), 424. 40. Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China (New York: Norton, 1961), 4. 41. Oversight of Medical Care, 492. 42. Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Random House, 1968), 21, 23. 43. Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 6. 44. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950), 242, 239.

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45. Robert Jay Lifton, Witness to an Extreme Century (New York: Free Press, 2011), 48. 46. See, for example, Lifton, Home from the War, 36. 47. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 12. 48. See Erikson, 244–83, 284–315, 213–18. 49. Quoted in Robert Jay Lifton, “Beyond Atrocity,” in Crimes of War: A Legal, Political-Documentary, and Psychological Inquiry into the Responsibility of Leaders, Citizens, and Soldiers for Criminal Acts in War, ed. Richard A. Falk, Gabriel Kolko, and Robert Jay Lifton (New York: Random House, 1970), 17. 50. Lifton, 23. 51. Lifton, 26. 52. Oversight of Medical Care, 500. 53. Lifton, Home from the War, 27. 54. Lifton, 30, 71. 55. Lifton, 91. 56. Lifton, Witness, 60. 57. Albert Camus, “Neither Victims nor Executioners,” in Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–1947, ed. Jacqueline Levi-Valensi, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 261. 58. Lifton, Home from the War, 41. 59. Lifton, 67. 60. Lifton, 143–44. 61. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 18. “White supremacy,” Mills argues, “is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world,” and the racial contract, from which all white people benefit, whether or not they act as “signatories,” sustains it (1, 11). The antiracist movements of the twentieth century threatened to reveal and undermine the contract, and the invention of veteran America disguised and restored it. 62. Richard Nixon, “Address to the Nation about Vietnam and Domestic Problems,” March 29, 1973, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb .edu/documents/address-the-nation-about-vietnam-and-domestic-problems. 63. “Home at Last!,” Newsweek, February 26, 1973, 16. 64. Quoted in Michael J. Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 66. 65. Robert Jay Lifton, “Heroes and Victims,” New York Times, March 28, 1973. 66. For a detailed account of Operation Homecoming, see Allen, Until the Last Man, 64–69. 67. American Prisoners of War and Missing in Action in Southeast Asia, 1973: Hearings before the Subcommittee on National Security Policy and Scientific Developments, 93rd Cong. 50 (1973) (statement of Charles B. Rangel, a representative in Congress from the state of New York). 68. Ngo Vinh Long, “The American POWs: Their Glory Is All Moonshine,” Ramparts, May 1973, 11. 69. See Craig Howes, Voices of the Vietnam POWs: Witnesses to Their Fight (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 4–5; and Jamie Howren and Tay-

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lor Baldwin Kiland, Open Doors: Vietnam POWs Thirty Years Later (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005), 154–55. 70. Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 6–7. 71. Stefan Kanfer, “The Returned: A New Rip Van Winkle,” Time, February 19, 1973, 31, 32. 72. Leroy F. Aarons, “Quiet Reception Awaits Returning POWs at California Base,” Washington Post, February 13, 1973. 73. See “Sister of Longest-Held POW Starts Protest,” Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1971. 74. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks by Telephone to the Annual Convention of American Ex-Prisoners of War,” July 18, 1984, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-telephone-the-annual-convention-american-ex-prisoners-war. 75. H. Bruce Franklin, M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America (New York: Lawrence Hill, 1992), 7, 124. 76. For more on how stories of abandonment in Vietnam fueled a unified white power movement, see Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 77. “We’re Still Prisoners of War,” Newsweek, April 15, 1985, 34–38. 78. Rich Jaroslovsky, “The Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll: A Special Weekly Report from the Wall Street Journal’s Capital Bureau,” Wall Street Journal, August 2, 1991. 79. POW/MIA Policy and Process: Hearings before the Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, 102nd Cong. 4 (1991) (statement of John F. Kerry, a US senator from the state of Massachusetts). 80. POW/MIA Policy and Process: Hearings before the Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, 102nd Cong. 6 (1991) (statement of Bob Smith, a US senator from the state of New Hampshire). 81. POW/MIA Policy and Process: Hearings before the Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, 102nd Cong. 14 (1991) (statement of John McCain, a US senator from the state of Arizona). 82. Analysis of Live Sightings: Hearings before the Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, 102nd Cong. 509 (1992) (polygraph of Vietnamese refugees). 83. Shaun Kingsley Malarney, “ ‘The Fatherland Remembers Your Sacrifice’: Commemorating War Dead in North Vietnam,” in The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, ed. Hue-Tam Ho Tai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 71, 76n42. 84. Michael S. Roth, “Trauma: A Dystopia of the Spirit,” in Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 92, 97. 85. Robert Harwood, prologue to The Wounded Generation: America after Vietnam, ed. A. D. Horne (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981), ix. 86. Quoted in “A Symposium,” The Wounded Generation: America after Vietnam, ed. A. D. Horne (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981) 116.

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87. Quoted in “Symposium,” 129. 88. A. D. Horne, “Why This Book,” preface to The Wounded Generation: America after Vietnam, ed. A. D. Horne (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981), xi. 89. Literature scholar Katherine Kinney argues that the belief that the United States fought itself in Vietnam constitutes “virtually the only story that has been told by Americans about the Vietnam War.” Stories of “friendly fire” allowed liberal audiences to indulge in the conservative Rambo franchise and conservative audiences to admire the “realism” of Oliver Stone’s liberal war films. The “political incoherence” of Vietnam War literature and film that Kinney describes looks more coherent when considered as the site of a post–civil rights white racial reunion. Katherine Kinney, Friendly Fire: American Images of the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4, 6. 90. Quoted in “Symposium,” 107. 91. Quoted in “Symposium,” 115, 114–15, 148. 92. Wheeler, Touched with Fire, 76, 70. 93. Wheeler, 128–29. 94. Wheeler, 141. 95. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “Memorial Day,” in The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., ed. Richard A. Posner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 86. 96. Holmes, 80, 86. 97. Arthur Egendorf et al., Legacies of Vietnam: Comparative Adjustment of Veterans and Their Peers (New York: Center for Policy Research, 1981), 824. 98. Quoted in Jan C. Scruggs and Joel L. Swerdlow, To Heal a Nation: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (New York: Harper and Row, 1985) 64, 66. 99. Scruggs and Swerdlow, 66. 100. James H. Webb Jr., “Reassessing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” Wall Street Journal, December 18, 1981. 101. “Stop That Monument,” National Review, September 18, 1981, 1064. 102. Tom Carhart, “Insulting Vietnam Vets,” New York Times, October 24, 1981. 103. Quoted in Paul Goldberger, “Vietnam Memorial: Questions of Architecture,” New York Times, October 7, 1982. 104. Scruggs and Swerdlow, To Heal a Nation, 53. 105. For more on the controversies surrounding the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, see Patrick Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of Healing (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), 79–201; Kristin Ann Hass, Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 7–33; and Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 44–84. 106. Frederick E. Hart, “An Interview with Frederick Hart,” in Unwinding the Vietnam War: From War into Peace, ed. Reese Williams (Seattle, WA: Real Comet Press, 1987), 274.

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107. Frederick E. Hart, letter to the editor, Art in America, November 1983, 5. 108. Quoted in Benjamin Forgey, “Hart’s Vietnam Statue Unveiled,” Washington Post, September 21, 1982. 109. Quoted in Rick Horowitz, “Maya Lin’s Angry Objections,” Washington Post, July 7, 1982. 110. Quoted in Kurt Andersen, “A Homecoming at Last,” Time, November 22, 1982, 46. 111. Kathleen Keenan, “A Vietnam Vision: The Making of the Memorial Statue,” press release, Hartz/Meek International, 1984, 4. 112. Quoted in Barbara Gamarekian, “The Vietnam War Comes Home Again, in Bronze,” New York Times, October 30, 1984. 113. Arthur S. Brisbane, “Thousands Are Expected for Vietnam ‘Salute II,’ ” Washington Post, November 9, 1984. 114. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at Dedication Ceremonies for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Statue,” November 11, 1984, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-dedication-ceremonies-for-thevietnam-veterans-memorial-statue. 115. Phil McCombs, “Veterans Honor the Fallen, Mark Reconciliation,” Washington Post, November 14, 1982. 116. Quoted in Scruggs and Swerdlow, To Heal a Nation, 84. 117. Webb, “Reassessing.” 118. Quoted in Scruggs and Swerdlow, To Heal a Nation, 83. 119. Hart, “Interview with Frederick Hart,” 273. 120. Quoted in Scruggs and Swerdlow, To Heal a Nation, 100. 121. Scruggs and Swerdlow, 116. 122. Scruggs and Swerdlow, 133. 123. Wheeler, Touched with Fire, 211.

2. veteran american literature 1. Tim O’Brien, “Tim O’Brien Interview,” by Tobey C. Herzog, South Carolina Review 31, no. 1 (1998): 89. 2. John K. Young, How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O’Brien’s Process of Textual Production (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), vii; Mark A. Heberle, A Trauma Artist: Tim O’Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), xiv. 3. Tim O’Brien, “Interview with Tim O’Brien,” by Larry McCaffery, Chicago Review 33, no. 2 (1982): 131. 4. Tim O’Brien, “Tim O’Brien: An Interview,” by Anthony Tambakis, in Conversations with Tim O’Brien, ed. Patrick A. Smith (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 146. 5. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), ix, 56. 6. McGurl, Program Era, 32, 61. McGurl identifies the three aesthetic formations of creative writing as technomodernism, high cultural pluralism, and lower-middle-class modernism. Think Thomas Pynchon, Morrison, and Ray-

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mond Carver. But technomodernists and lower-middle-class modernists also, McGurl argues, write as high cultural pluralists. He goes so far as to suggest that we might understand technomodernism as a kind of “non-ethnic ethnicity” or “technicity”: “Put baldly, what [Philip] Roth knows about the Jewish experience, and Morrison knows about the African American experience, writers like [Richard] Powers, [Don] DeLillo, and Pynchon know about the second law of thermodynamics, cybernetic causality, communications and media theory, and the like, and it is on the basis of this portfolio of technical-cultural capital that they, too, are put on the syllabus” (62–63). 7. Sandra Cisneros, “Returning to One’s House: An Interview with Sandra Cisneros,” by Martha Satz, Southwest Review 82, no. 2 (1997): 169. 8. See Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2005), 114. 9. Grace Kyungwon Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxvi. 10. Yusef Komunyakaa, “Conversation with Yusef Komunyakaa,” by Rebekah Presson, in Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaa, ed. Shirley A. James Hanshaw (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 22. 11. Trinh T. Minh-ha, “All-Owning Spectatorship,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 13, nos. 1–3 (1991): 202. 12. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 248. 13. Larry Heinemann, Paco’s Story (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986), 3. 14. Paul Engle, “The Writer and the Place,” introduction to Midland: The Writing Workshops of the State University of Iowa, ed. Paul Engle (New York: Random House, 1961), xxii. 15. Engle, xxvii. 16. Wallace Stegner, introduction to Twenty Years of Stanford Short Stories, ed. Wallace Stegner and Richard Scowcroft (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966), xi. 17. Wallace Stegner, On the Teaching of Creative Writing: Responses to a Series of Questions, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1988), 56. 18. “Book Notes,” New York Herald Tribune, March 14, 1946. 19. Wallace Stegner and the editors of Look, One Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1945), 15. 20. Stegner and the editors of Look, 336. 21. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), 928. 22. Literature scholar Eric Bennett describes Hemingway as “the influence in writing workshops full of demobilized G.I.s” for how he reconciled the avantgarde with the institution, fusing “a rebellious existential posture with a disciplined relationship to language” and “an imitable masculine lifestyle [with] an equally imitable modernist technique”—and, we might add, nationalism with

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national alienation, insiderness with outsiderness. Eric Bennett, Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015), 12, 144. 23. Wallace Stegner, “The Anxious Generation,” College English 10, no. 4 (1949): 185. 24. Wallace Stegner, “Is the Novel Done For?,” Harper’s, December 1942, 78. 25. Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, December 15, 1925, in Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner, 1981), 176. 26. Ernest Hemingway, “Soldier’s Home,” in In Our Time (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925), 89, 90. 27. Eugene L. Burdick, “Rest Camp on Maui,” Harper’s, July 1946, 85. 28. Burdick, 89. 29. Wallace Stegner, “Writing as Graduate Study,” College English 11, no. 8 (1950): 430. 30. Quoted in Jackson J. Benson, Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work (New York: Viking, 1996), 253. 31. Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 18. 32. Stegner, introduction to Twenty Years, xvi. 33. Jennifer Mittelstadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Thomas E. Ricks, “The Great Society in Camouflage,” Atlantic, December 1996, 24–38; Brian Gifford, “Camouflaged Safety Net: The U.S. Armed Forces as Welfare State Institution,” Social Politics 13, no. 3 (2006): 372–99. 34. Association of Writers and Writing Programs, “Growth of Creative Writing Programs, 1975–2012,” 2012, https://cdn.awpwriter.org/pdf/AWP _GrowthWritingPrograms.pdf. 35. Association of Writers and Writing Programs, “AWP 2015 Survey of Creative Writing Programs,” 2016, https://cdn.awpwriter.org/pdf/survey /AWPMFASurvey15.pdf. 36. Stegner, “Anxious Generation,” 184. 37. Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xvi, 37. Melamed divides the years since World War II into three broad stages of a “formally antiracist, liberal-capitalist modernity”: racial liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism (x). The white vet has managed to dominate all three through a careful balance between identification with the nation and estrangement from it, shifting that balance to announce himself as the ideal student of each stage of liberal antiracism. 38. Association of Writers and Writing Programs, “AWP 2015 Survey.” 39. Toni Cade Bambara, “The Writers’ Forum: Toni Cade Bambara,” Contributions in Black Studies 11 (1993): 42. 40. Political scientist Ira Katznelson describes the 1940s as “the moment not very long ago when affirmative action was white,” a moment that didn’t end there but continued to benefit white men, including white men who wanted to write novels and short stories. Katznelson, Affirmative Action, xv.

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41. Roderick A. Ferguson, We Demand: The University and Student Protests (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 5–6, 4. 42. Ferguson elsewhere describes that liberal frontlash as the “revival of Western man” as administrator of difference, in which the “incorporation of minoritized subjects [within higher education and then state and capital] was also part of an evolving social system that would work to renew racial hierarches.” Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 197. 43. Quoted in “Writers Try to Make Sense of the Vietnam-Book Boom,” New York Times, August 4, 1987. 44. Quoted in “Vietnam-Book Boom.” 45. Quoted in “Vietnam-Book Boom.” 46. O’Brien, “Tim O’Brien: An Interview,” 146. 47. Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies, 48. Nguyen argues that true war stories—a term he borrows from O’Brien—should tell the stories of soldiers and marines but also “the civilian, the refugee, the enemy, and, most importantly, the war machine that encompasses them all” and that we consent to as citizens and consumers (224). 48. Bethany Bryson, Making Multiculturalism: Boundaries and Meaning in U.S. English Departments (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 2. 49. Quoted in “Vietnam-Book Boom.” 50. Quoted in D. J. R. Bruckner, “A Storyteller for the War That Won’t End,” New York Times, April 3, 1990. 51. National Endowment for the Arts, teacher’s guide for The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/Teachers-GuideOBrien.pdf. 52. Tim O’Brien, “The Booklist Interview: Tim O’Brien,” by John Mort, Booklist, August 1994, 1990. 53. Heberle, Trauma Artist, xxvii, xxi. 54. Tim O’Brien, “Responsibly Inventing History: An Interview with Tim O’Brien,” by Brian C. McNerney, War, Literature, and the Arts 6, no. 2 (1994): 23–24. 55. Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison, “A Conversation,” Southern Review 21, no. 3 (1985): 590. 56. Tim O’Brien, “A Conversation with Tim O’Brien,” by Daniel Bourne, Artful Dodge, nos. 22–23 (1992): 86. 57. Tim O’Brien, Going after Cacciato (New York: Delacorte, 1978), 12. 58. O’Brien, 8. 59. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Knopf, 1977), 337. 60. Stegner, “Writing as Graduate Study,” 431. 61. Tim O’Brien, “How to Tell a True War Story,” in The Things They Carried (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 76. 62. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929), 185. 63. O’Brien, “True War Story,” 91. 64. Margaret Atwood, “Haunted by Their Nightmares,” review of Beloved, by Toni Morrison, New York Times Book Review, September 13, 1987.

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65. Quoted in Edwin McDowell, “An Upset at the Book Awards,” New York Times, November 10, 1987. 66. “Black Writers in Praise of Toni Morrison,” New York Times Book Review, January 24, 1988. 67. Carol Iannone, “Literature by Quota,” Commentary, March 1994, 51. 68. Christopher Hitchens, “These Glittering Prizes,” Vanity Fair, December 1992, 22. 69. Literature scholar James English offers an alternative account of Heinemann’s win, casting it within a long-standing conflict between artists, critics, and the administrators of cultural awards. English sees awards as agents of what he calls “capital intraconversion” through which artists “cash in” cultural value for dollars and benefactors contribute dollars for cultural recognition. He argues that cultural awards are among the most effective instruments for determining the rates of exchange—and regulating who can and can’t exchange what. The authors of the New York Times Book Review statement refused to ignore, English writes, “the prize for what it is—a thoroughly social, economic, and (racist) political instrument—and [credited] it with real, even potentially decisive power in determining long-term literary valuations.” James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 10, 243. 70. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 6. 71. Heinemann, Paco’s Story, 3. 72. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 14–15. 73. Morrison, 6. 74. Heinemann, Paco’s Story, 138. 75. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), 36. 76. Larry Heinemann, “A Word to the Reader,” foreword to Paco’s Story (New York: Vintage, 2005), xii. 77. Heinemann, Paco’s Story, 8–9. 78. Heinemann, “Word to the Reader,” xii–xiii. 79. Howard Winant, “Behind Blue Eyes: Contemporary White Racial Politics,” in The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 52. 80. Heinemann, Paco’s Story, 174. 81. Heinemann, 183–84. 82. Hazel V. Carby, “The Multicultural Wars,” Radical History Review, no. 54 (1992): 17. 83. Maureen Ryan, “The Long History of the Vietnam Novel,” New York Times, March 17, 2017. 84. George Packer, “From the Mekong to the Bayous,” review of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, by Robert Olen Butler, New York Times, June 7, 1992. 85. Quoted in Tobey C. Herzog, Writing Vietnam, Writing Life: Caputo, Heinemann, O’Brien, Butler (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 148. 86. Quoted in Herzog, 147. 87. Quoted in Herzog, 151.

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88. Quoted in Herzog, 151. 89. McGurl describes Butler’s writing as a “virtuosic ventriloquism” through which he “looses himself from the colorless category in an ostensibly agile performance of other-inhabitation.” Butler uses the “idiom of the other,” as McGurl calls it, to shake off his whiteness—to seem omniscient, above identitarian concerns—while cultivating a good, liberal whiteness through a masterful show of cross-cultural understanding. McGurl, Program Era, 388, 392. 90. Robert Olen Butler, “Open Arms,” in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (New York: Henry Holt, 1992), 1–2. 91. Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, ed. Janet Burroway (New York: Grove, 2005), 134. 92. Robert Olen Butler, “Letters from My Father,” in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (New York: Henry Holt, 1992), 72. 93. Butler, From Where You Dream, 23. 94. See Stegner, “Is the Novel Done For?,” 76. 95. Phil Klay, “Author, Veteran Phil Klay Discusses New Novel,” interview by Solomon Dworkin, Chicago Maroon, October 25, 2016, www.chicagomaroon.com /article/2016/10/25/author-veteran-phil-klay-discusses-new-novel/.

3. whiteness on the edge of town 1. Bruce Springsteen, “Rock and Read: Will Percy Interviews Bruce Springsteen,” DoubleTake, Spring 1998, 37. 2. Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016), 290. 3. Vietnam Veterans of America, “Founding Principles,” 2020, https://vva .org/who-we-are/about-us-history/. 4. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, As Dreams Don’t Mean Nothin’: A Night for the Vietnam Veterans, EV2, 1981. 5. Springsteen and the E Street Band. 6. See Steve Pond, “Springsteen, Other Rock Stars Rally to Help Vets,” Rolling Stone, October 1, 1981, 80–81. Singer Pat Benatar and country musician Charlie Daniels followed Springsteen’s lead. Benatar held a benefit show for VVA the next month in Detroit, and Daniels contributed his earnings from a televised concert to be filmed in Saratoga Springs, New York, that fall. 7. Quoted in Dave Marsh, Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s (New York: Pantheon, 1987), 75. 8. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, “Born in the U.S.A,” Born in the U.S.A., Columbia, 1984. 9. George F. Will, “Bruce Springsteen’s U.S.A.,” Washington Post, September 13, 1984. 10. Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 7, 6, 22, 17. 11. Springsteen and the E Street Band, “Born in the U.S.A.” 12. Springsteen, Born to Run, 38, 40, 41. 13. Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, “Old Time Rock and Roll,” Stranger in Town, Capitol, 1978.

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14. Jon Pareles, “Heartland Rock: Bruce’s Children,” New York Times, August 30, 1987. 15. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 108. 16. Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Knopf, 1977), 258; C. D. B. Bryan, “The Different War,” review of Dispatches, by Michael Herr, New York Times, November 20, 1977. 17. Herr, Dispatches, 258. 18. See Michel J. Kramer, The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 136. 19. “On many levels rock music supplied the libidinal and imaginative energy of contestation,” the film scholar David James writes. But the genre also served “social quietism and indeed all the activities the war entailed, including sustaining the morale of the imperialist army.” He cites the simulation of gunfire in rock songs, which communicated “sonic violence” and “aural pleasure,” a fear of war and a desire for it. David E. James, “American Music and the Invasion of Viet Nam,” in Power Misses: Essays across (Un)Popular Culture (New York: Verso, 1996), 91. 20. Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, United Artists, 1979. 21. Jarhead, directed by Sam Mendes, Universal Pictures, 2005. 22. Quoted in Robert Shelton, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (New York: Beech Tree, 1986), 39. 23. Jack Hamilton, Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 15. Hamilton stresses that rock and roll became white because of changes not to the genre itself but to “stories people told themselves about it,” stories that then structured how they and others listened to the music (7). 24. See Lester Bangs, “White Noise Supremacists,” Village Voice, April 30, 1979, 45–47; Sasha Frere-Jones, “A Paler Shade of White,” New Yorker, October 22, 2007, 176–81; Sarah Sahim, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Indie,” Pitchfork, March 25, 2015, https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/710-the-unbearablewhiteness-of-indie/. 25. Ernie Santosuosso, “Epitaph for Jimi Hendrix,” Boston Globe, September 19, 1970. 26. Margo Jefferson, “Ripping Off Black Music,” Harper’s, January 1973, 45. 27. Roger Steffens, “Nine Meditations on Jimi and Nam,” in Jimi Hendrix: The Ultimate Experience, ed. Adrian Boot and Chris Salewicz (New York: Macmillan, 1995), 118. 28. Herr, Dispatches, 181. 29. Ariel Swartley, “Full Speed Ahead for Tom Petty,” review of Damn the Torpedoes, by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Rolling Stone, December 13, 1979, 81, 80. 30. Of Disco Demolition Night, the music critic Dave Marsh wrote at the time, “White males, eighteen to thirty-four, are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks, and Latins, and therefore they’re most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security.” Dave

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Marsh, “The Flip Side of 1979,” Rolling Stone, December 27, 1979–January 10, 1980, 28. 31. Quoted in Craig Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 211. 32. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), 14, 176, 179, 177. 33. Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 138. 34. Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men (Reading, MA: AddisonWesley, 1990), 2, 3. 35. Feminist scholar Susan Jeffords argues that the 1980s stands as “an era of bodies” in which, she writes, “The indefatigable, muscular, and invincible masculine body became the linchpin of the Reagan presidency; this hardened male form became the emblem not only for the Reagan presidency but its ideologies and economies as well.” Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 24, 25. 36. Quoted in Merle Ginsberg, “The Fans: Springsteen’s Followers Are Convinced He’s Just Like Them,” Rolling Stone, October 10, 1985, 31, 69. 37. John Mellencamp, foreword to Travelin’ Man: On the Road and Behind the Scenes with Bob Seger, by Tom Weschler and Gary Graff (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), ix. 38. Bob Seger System, “2 + 2 = ?,” Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man, Capitol, 1969. 39. Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, “Old Time Rock and Roll.” 40. Pareles, “Heartland Rock.” 41. Nadine Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 3, 4. 42. Dave Marsh, Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts (New York: Routledge, 2004), xix–xx, xx. 43. Quoted in David Masciotra, Mellencamp: American Troubadour (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 203. David Masciotra, a cultural critic and biographer, lauds Mellencamp for his “transgressive racial identity,” arguing that the musician “lives on an artistic planet that hovers between the often dichotomous worlds of black and white.” 44. Quoted in Timothy White, “John Cougar Mellencamp: Rebel with a Cause,” New York Times, September 27, 1987. 45. White. 46. John Cougar Mellencamp, “Pink Houses,” Uh-Huh, Riva, 1983. 47. Quoted in Timothy White, “John Mellencamp’s Heartland,” Penthouse, August 1985, 138. 48. Quoted in Adam Sweeting, “Tuning Up the Criminal Kind,” Melody Maker, June 13, 1981, 25. 49. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “The Criminal Kind,” Hard Promises, Backstreet, 1981. 50. Pareles, “Heartland Rock.” 51. Jay Cocks, “Rock’s New Sensation: The Backstreet Phantom of Rock,” Time, October 27, 1975, 48–58. 52. Robert Hilburn, “Springsteen Off and Running,” Los Angeles Times, September 28, 1975.

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53. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, “Thunder Road,” Born to Run, Columbia, 1975. 54. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, “Born to Run,” Born to Run, Columbia, 1975. 55. Quoted in Tony Parsons, “Bruce: The Myth Just Keeps On Coming,” New Musical Express, October 14, 1978, 38. 56. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, “The Promised Land,” Darkness on the Edge of Town, Columbia, 1978. 57. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” Darkness on the Edge of Town, Columbia, 1978. 58. Quoted in Marsh, Glory Days, 36. 59. Quoted in Marsh, 58. 60. Bruce Springsteen, “Johnny 99,” Nebraska, Columbia, 1982. 61. Julius Daniels, “99 Year Blues,” Anthology of American Folk Music, produced by Harry Smith, Folkways, 1952. 62. Bryan K. Garman, A Race of Singers: Whitman’s Working-Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 9. Of Springsteen’s emerging class consciousness on Nebraska, historian Bryan Garman writes, the songs tell stories of a “mean place, but Springsteen provides no ideas about how it might be made kinder” (211). 63. Springsteen, Born to Run, 264, 265. 64. Peter Ames Carlin, Bruce (New York: Touchstone, 2012), 433, 201. 65. See Greil Marcus, “The Great Pretender,” New West, December 22, 1980, 173–75. 66. Springsteen, Born to Run, 242. 67. Hamilton argues that Clemons allowed Springsteen fans to make “rock’s equivalent of the ‘but some of my best friends . . .’ argument,” affirming Springsteen’s white liberal heroism through an intimate bond with his Black bandmate. Hamilton, Just around Midnight, 14. 68. Werner, Change Is Gonna Come, 298–99, 300. 69. Will, “Bruce Springsteen’s U.S.A.” 70. Will. 71. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at a Reagan-Bush Rally in Hammonton, New Jersey,” September 19, 1984, American Presidency Project, www.presidency .ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-reagan-bush-rally-hammonton-new-jersey. 72. Melvin Maddocks, “Bruce Springsteen: The Pied Piper as Populist,” Christian Science Monitor, September 27, 1985, 25. 73. Marsh, Glory Days, 263, 264. 74. Quoted in Carlin, Bruce, 319. 75. Bruce Springsteen, “Bruce Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Interview,” by Kurt Loder, Rolling Stone, December 6, 1984, 21. 76. Springsteen and the E Street Band, “Born in the U.S.A.” 77. Quoted in Marsh, Glory Days, 67. 78. Fred Pfeil, White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference (New York: Verso, 1995), 88. 79. For more on American women in the Vietnam War, see Heather Marie Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (Cambridge:

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Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Kara Dixon Vuic, Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) and The Girls Next Door: Bringing the Home Front to the Front Lines (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 184–236. Historian Heather Stur identifies how “GIs were cast as both the protectors of American civilization embodied in the girl next door and the gentle warrior charged with rescuing the Vietnamese from communism” (141). Historian Kara Vuic shows how the United Services Organization struggled to remake itself for an age of feminism and how the Vietnam War “closed the door” on some forms of sexualized entertainment for single men (Girls Next Door, 236). But that kind of entertainment didn’t vanish so much as change, she argues, and it reemerged in a modified, almost inverted form at the heartland rock show. 80. Rambo: First Blood Part II, directed by George P. Cosmatos, TriStar Pictures, 1985. 81. “The Rambo of Rock and Roll,” Chicago Tribune, August 9, 1985. 82. See, for example, Jefferson Morley, “The Phenomenon,” Rolling Stone, October 10, 1985, 35, 72, 74–75. Springsteen and his fans, Morley argued, were “more elusive” than the “Rambo Phenomenon” because they did not “fantasize about revenge or money or social position or glamour or mindless escape or patriotism or any of those things that supposedly everyone wants in 1985” (72). His shows instead clung to “a very out-of-fashion, much-derided article of faith from the Sixties: the promise and power of rock music” (74). Morley and other critics did not address how much the racial meaning of the genre had changed since the 1960s. 83. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, “My Hometown,” Born in the U.S.A., Columbia, 1984. 84. George F. Will, “No One Blushes Anymore,” Washington Post, September 15, 1985. 85. Edwin Starr, “War,” War and Peace, Motown, 1970. 86. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, “War,” Live/1975–85, Columbia, 1986. 87. Springsteen, Born to Run, 265. 88. Bruce Springsteen, “Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Interview,” by James Henke, Rolling Stone, August 6, 1992, 41. 89. Springsteen, Born to Run, 402. 90. Bruce Springsteen, “Youngstown,” The Ghost of Tom Joad, Columbia, 1995. 91. See Garman, Race of Singers, 243.

4. the ethnicization of veteran america 1. Hasty Pudding Institute of 1770, “History,” 2020, http://hastypudding .org/hasty-pudding-club-overview. 2. Quoted in Philip Bennett, “Rambo versus Reality,” Boston Globe, February 19, 1986. 3. Quoted in Bennett.

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4. Quoted in Kevin Bowen, “ ‘Strange Hells’: Hollywood in Search of America’s Lost War,” in From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film, ed. Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 229. 5. Quoted in Harry W. Haines, “The Pride Is Back: Rambo, Magnum, P.I., and the Return Trip to Vietnam,” in Cultural Legacies of Vietnam: Uses of the Past in the Present, ed. Richard Morris and Peter Ehrenhaus (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1990), 113. 6. Mike Barnicle, “Rambo Now, Vietnam Then,” Boston Globe, February 19, 1986. 7. Quoted in Bennett, “Rambo versus Reality.” 8. Quoted in Haines, “Pride Is Back,” 112. 9. William E. Geist, “The Ticker-Tape Parade They Finally Got,” New York Times, May 8, 1985. 10. Quoted in Jane Gross, “New York Pays Homage to Vietnam Veterans,” New York Times, May 7, 1985. 11. Quoted in Gross. 12. Quoted in Wil Haygood, “Stallone Comes Through at Harvard,” Boston Globe, February 19, 1986. 13. Quoted in Haygood. 14. Michael Novak, “The New Ethnicity,” Center Magazine, July/August 1974, 25. 15. Historian Matthew Jacobson argues that the white ethnic revival relocated “normative whiteness” from settlement to immigration, from “Plymouth Rock whiteness” to “Ellis Island whiteness,” a norm that built on and revised ideas about what it meant to be white in the United States, imbuing white racial identities with an aura of struggle associated with Blackness and the antiracist movements. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post– Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 7. 16. Ruth Benedict, Race: Science and Politics (New York: Modern Age Books, 1940), vi. 17. For more on the twentieth-century rise of the ethnicity paradigm, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 91–135; Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 21–51; and David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 18–34. 18. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Annual Members Banquet of the National Rifle Association in Phoenix, Arizona,” May 6, 1983, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-annual-members-banquetthe-national-rifle-association-phoenix-arizona. 19. “Reagan Gets Idea from Rambo for Next Time,” Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1985. 20. Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 177.

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21. Jacobson, Roots Too, 182. Jacobson identifies the white ethnic revival as formative to neoconservative intellectualism and the broader conservative movement. It also guided the formation of the other dominant racial paradigm of the late twentieth century, liberal multiculturalism, a paradigm to which neocons, although they condemned it, contributed through their embrace of immigrant roots. 22. That line—“a ghetto to look back to”—comes from Matthew Jacobson, who himself borrows it from Marcus Klein, a literature scholar, who first used it while reviewing Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers in the Nation in 1976. Jacobson, Roots Too, 18; Mark Klein, “Heritage of the Ghettos,” review of World of Our Fathers: The Journey of East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made, by Irving Howe, Nation, March 27, 1976, 373. 23. Barry Gewen, “Irving Kristol, Godfather of Modern Conservatism, Dies at 89,” New York Times, September 18, 2009. 24. James Baldwin and William Buckley, “The American Dream and the American Negro,” New York Times, March 7, 1965. 25. Irving Kristol, “The Negro Today Is Like the Immigrant Yesterday,” New York Times, September 11, 1966. 26. Norman Podhoretz, “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” Commentary, February 1963, 97. 27. Nathan Glazer, “Negroes and Jews: The New Challenge to Pluralism,” Commentary, December 1964, 33, 34. 28. Michael Novak, A New Generation: American and Catholic (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964), 17. 29. Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 54. 30. Novak, 53. 31. Novak, 30. 32. Novak, 58. 33. Michael Novak, preface to the paperback edition of The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies (New York: Macmillan, 1973), xx. 34. Novak, “New Ethnicity,” 23. 35. Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967), 83. 36. Novak, Unmeltable Ethnics, 61. 37. Novak, xxi–xxii. 38. Novak, 278. 39. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 292 (1978); Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination, 168, 169. 40. Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination, 23, 25. 41. Glazer, 4. 42. Glazer, 197. 43. Glazer acknowledged in the mid-1990s that multiculturalism had, for better or worse, “won.” Although he, a necon, stood on the other side of the culture wars, he could see that liberal multiculturalism shared an antiredistributive ethic with racial neoconservatism. “Affirmative action has nothing to do

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with the recognition of cultures,” he wrote. “Affirmative action assumes nothing about culture—neither that it has been neglected nor that it should be recognized and celebrated. It is about jobs and admissions.” Glazer managed to situate himself as a neoconservative multiculturalist, an advocate for cultural recognition who denounced calls for material redistribution. Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 4, 12. 44. Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1977), 2. 45. Quoted in Berger and Neuhaus, 4. 46. Berger and Neuhaus, 41. 47. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, introduction to Ethnicity: Theory and Experience, ed. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 4. 48. Susan Sontag, “The Decay of Cinema,” New York Times Book Review, February 25, 1996. 49. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-andRock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 16. 50. Quoted in Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (New York: Penguin, 2008), 162–63. 51. Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Film Culture, no. 27 (1962–63): 3. 52. Quoted in Michael Pye and Lynda Myles, The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1979), 194. 53. Scorsese wasn’t alone in mining the seedier side of New York in the 1970s. Biskind describes it as “the decade when New York swallowed Hollywood, when Hollywood was Gothamized.” Biskind, Easy Riders, 16. 54. Quoted in Biskind, 227. 55. Quoted in David Thompson and Ian Christie, eds., Scorsese on Scorsese (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 48. 56. Mean Streets, directed by Martin Scorsese, Warner Bros., 1973. 57. Taxi Driver, directed by Martin Scorsese, Columbia, 1976. 58. Scorsese had made a short film about the Vietnam War before: The Big Shave, which he had wanted to title Viet ’67. The director built his career on the themes of white ethnic striving and the alienation of war. See Marc Raymond, Hollywood’s New Yorker: The Making of Martin Scorsese (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 28. 59. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women (New York: Crown, 1991), xviii. 60. See Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), xii; and Faludi, Backlash, 138. 61. Martin Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies (New York: Miramax, 1997), 166.

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62. The Godfather Part II, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Paramount, 1974. 63. Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, United Artists, 1979. 64. Quoted in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, directed by Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper, and Eleanor Coppola, Triton, 1991. 65. Quoted in Anthony Holden, Behind the Oscar: The Secret History of the Academy Awards (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 320. 66. The Deer Hunter, directed by Michael Cimino, Universal, 1978. 67. The historian Bruce Franklin writes that “the basic technique” of Cimino’s The Deer Hunter and other revisionist Vietnam War films “was to take images of the war that had become deeply embedded in America’s consciousness and transform them into their opposite.” H. Bruce Franklin, M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America (New York: Lawrence Hill, 1992), 133. 68. Sylvia Shin Huey Chong, The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 21. 69. Joseph A. Gambardello, “Rocky Meets Reality,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 20, 2003. 70. Judy Klemesrud, “ ‘Rocky Isn’t Based on Me,’ Says Stallone, ‘But We Both Went the Distance,’ ” New York Times, November 28, 1976. 71. The Rocky Saga: Going the Distance, Bio, December 27, 2011. 72. Klemesrud, “Rocky.” 73. Rocky, directed by John G. Avildsen, United Artists, 1976. 74. Quoted in Red Smith, “Rocky Fights It Over,” New York Times, June 13, 1979. For a catalog of Stallone’s training injuries, see Chris Holmlund, “Presenting Stallone/Stallone Presents,” introduction to The Ultimate Stallone Reader: Sylvester Stallone as Star, Icon, Auteur, ed. Chris Holmlund (New York: Wallflower Press, 2014), 4. 75. Rocky II, directed by Sylvester Stallone, United Artists, 1979. 76. Novak, “New Ethnicity,” 19. 77. Feminist scholar Lynda Boose argues that the first two installments of the Rocky franchise differ in their treatment of Adrian’s role in the underdog fighter’s success. She is critical in the first film and a mere obstruction in the second. In Rocky, Boose writes, “The male fighter does not triumph in the ring but—with help from the woman in his life—achieves a moral victory.” In Rocky II, “The woman’s role is crowded out of significance, and the moral ethic disappears as the narrative of masculinity and the need to prove physical dominance nullify the ethic of 1976.” Lynda Boose, “Techno-Muscularity and the ‘Boy Eternal’: From the Quagmire to the Gulf,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 589. 78. See Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 86. 79. Jonathan Karp, “How Real Is Rambo?,” Washington Post, July 8, 1985. 80. Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 24. 81. First Blood, directed by Ted Kotcheff, Orion, 1982.

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82. John Hellmann, a literature and film scholar, also notes the film’s treatment of Rambo as suffering a kind of antiveteran “racism.” But he suggests that it signals a cross-racial alliance between the white vet and Black and brown Americans. “The identification of the veteran with the traditional victims of American exclusion, with the dark other, is the underlying motif of First Blood,” he writes. John Hellmann, “Rambo’s Vietnam and Kennedy’s New Frontier,” in Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television, ed. Michael Anderegg (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 145. 83. Rambo: First Blood Part II, directed by George P. Cosmatos, TriStar, 1985. 84. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 7. 85. Film historians Gaylyn Studlar and David Desser write that Americans gravitated toward stories of American victimization in the Vietnam War, including the Rambo films, for one self-serving reason: “To be a victim means never having to say you’re sorry.” It also means never having to say you’re white. Gaylyn Studlar and David Desser, “Never Having to Say You’re Sorry: Rambo’s Rewriting of the Vietnam War,” in From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film, ed. Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 104. 86. Richard Grenier, “Stallone on Patriotism and Rambo,” New York Times, June 6, 1985. 87. Eric Lichtenfeld, “I, of the Tiger: Self and Self-Obsession in the Rocky Series,” in The Ultimate Stallone Reader: Sylvester Stallone as Star, Icon, Auteur, ed. Chris Holmlund (New York: Wallflower Press, 2014), 85. 88. National Museum of American History, “Rocky Boxes into American History,” press release, Smithsonian, December 4, 2006, http://americanhistory .si.edu/press/releases/rocky-boxes-american-history. 89. Quoted in Peter Goldman, “Rocky and Rambo,” Newsweek, December 23, 1985, 62. 90. Goldman, 58. 91. Irving Kristol, “The New Populism: Not to Worry,” Wall Street Journal, July 25, 1985. 92. Rocky IV, directed by Sylvester Stallone, MGM/United Artists, 1985. 93. Eric Lott, Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 91. Michael Rogin, the political scientist, argued that “motion picture minstrelsy” acted as something like Lott’s “black mirror” for Jewish immigrant actors in the early twentiethcentury movie business: “By joining structural domination to cultural desire, it turned Europeans into Americans.” Rocky’s identification with Creed and Duke make him more American, but Duke’s identification with Rocky doesn’t raise his national status. Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 12. 94. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Annual Republican Congressional Fundraising Dinner,” May 11, 1988, American Presidency Project, www.presidency .ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-annual-republican-congressional-fundraisingdinner-3.

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95. Ronald Reagan, “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1981, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/inaugural-address-11. 96. Irving Kristol, “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” Weekly Standard, August 25, 2003, 23, 24.

5. like a refugee 1. Christopher R. Weingarten et al., “Tom Petty’s 50 Greatest Songs,” Rolling Stone, October 12, 2017, www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/tom-pettys50-greatest-songs-197807/refugee-197866/. 2. Ariel Swartley, “Full Speed Ahead for Tom Petty,” review of Damn the Torpedoes, by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Rolling Stone, December 13, 1979, 80. 3. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “Refugee,” Damn the Torpedoes, Backstreet, 1979. 4. Refugee Act of 1980, Pub. L. No. 96–212, 94 Stat. 102 (1980). 5. Jimmy Carter, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights Remarks at a White House Meeting Commemorating the 30th Anniversary of the Declaration’s Signing,” December 6, 1978, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb .edu/documents/universal-declaration-human-rights-remarks-white-house-meeting-commemorating-the-30th. 6. Historian Carl Tempo observes that some conservatives welcomed the Refugee Act as a restrictionist law because, although it raised annual admissions from 17,500 to 50,000, it “severely restricted the use of parole,” which had increased under Carter. The Refugee Act, some argued then, could lower rather than increase the overall number of refugees admitted. “The bill’s leading proponents made this point repeatedly,” Tempo writes. Carl J. Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 177. 7. Ronald Reagan, “Address to Members of the British Parliament,” June 8, 1982, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents /address-members-the-british-parliament. 8. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, “The Subjects of 1975: Delineating the Necessity of Critical Refugee Studies,” MELUS 41, no. 3 (2016): 201. 9. Huynh-Nhu Le, “Hearts and Minds,” Amerasia 17, no. 2 (1991): 98. 10. Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention in Chicago,” August 18, 1980, American Presidency Project, www.presidency .ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-veterans-foreign-wars-convention-chicago. 11. First Blood, directed by Ted Kotcheff, Orion, 1982. 12. Larry Heinemann, Paco’s Story (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986), 42. 13. Yê´n Lê Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 86. 14. Sylvia Shin Huey Chong, The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 252.

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15. Critical refugee studies, Espiritu writes of the field, sees the refugee not as an “object of investigation but rather as a paradigm.” The refugee, living without a state through which to claim the rights that the West believes inalienable, “radically calls into question the established principles of the nation-state and the idealized goal of inclusion and recognition within it.” Espiritu, Body Counts, 10. 16. W. D. Ehrhart, Going Back: An Ex-marine Returns to Vietnam (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1987), 5, 6. 17. See Elaine H. Kim, “ ‘At Least You’re Not Black’: Asian Americans in U.S. Race Relations,” in “Crossing Lines: Revisioning U.S. Race Relations,” ed. Elaine H. Kim, Susan Roberta Katz, and Anthony M. Platt, special issue, Social Justice 25, no. 3 (1998), 12n1. Asian American literature, as a vehicle of refugee knowledge, Schlund-Vials observes, offers a “unique site to deconstruct the unchanging stories” of the state, in which, win or lose, the white soldier or veteran serves as protagonist. That made Southeast Asian American writing destabilizing for state narratives and the white racial interests they advanced after the war. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, “Deconstructing Madmen: Mapping the Relevance of Asian American Literature,” in “Asian American Literature: Rethinking the Canon,” ed. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials and Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, special issue, Massachusetts Review 59, no. 4 (2018): 691–92. 18. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 8–9. That Asian American dialectic does not, Lowe insists, call for greater national inclusion or the living out of some liberal ideal but rather “marks alternatives to the national terrain by occupying other spaces, imagining different narratives and critical historiographies, and enacting practices that give rise to new forms of subjectivity and new ways of questioning the government of human life by the national state” (29). It constitutes a call not to rehabilitate the nation but, as Kandice Chuh writes, to “imagine otherwise”—to imagine forms of life and belonging that do not conform to Western liberalism and the identities and hierarchies it constructs and naturalizes. Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 9. 19. Admission of Refugees in the United States, Part II: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and International Law, 95th Cong. 270 (1977–78) (testimony of Patricia M. Derian, assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs). 20. Refugee Act of 1979: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and International Law, 96th Cong. 26 (1979) (testimony of Griffin B. Bell, attorney general of the United States). 21. Refugee Act of 1980, 103. 22. U.S. Refugee Programs: Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, 96th Cong. 5, 6 (1980) (statement of Cyrus Vance, secretary of state). 23. “Government ‘Doing a Lot to Hurt Me Now,’ ” Houston Chronicle, November 11, 1979. 24. Quoted in Ron Laytner, “I Infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan . . . and Lived!,” Argosy 387, no. 6 (1978): 25.

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25. Ross Milloy, “Vietnam Fallout in a Texas Town,” New York Times, April 6, 1980. 26. For more on Beam and the united white supremacist movement that emerged after the war, see Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). Belew shows how that movement arose from a belief that the Vietnam War constituted a white racial grievance, an abandonment of white men. That narrative “appealed to Vietnam veterans, active-duty soldiers, and a wider audience of disaffected white men and women,” she writes, forming a unified militia movement in which “Klansmen would shed their white robes to don camouflage fatigues, neo-Nazis would brandish military rifles, and white separatists would manufacture their own Claymore-style land mines in their determination to bring the war home” (32). 27. Trinh T. Minh-ha, “All-Owning Spectatorship,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 13, nos. 1–3 (1991): 202. 28. Quoted in William Safire, “Katrina Words,” New York Times, September 18, 2005. 29. Quoted in Safire. 30. Adeline Masquelier, “Why Katrina’s Victims Aren’t Refugees: Musings on a ‘Dirty’ Word,” American Anthropologist 108, no. 4 (2006): 737. 31. Ethnic studies scholar Lisa Cacho identifies how the market-based valuation of human worth creates situations in which marginalized communities must devalue other marginalized communities to claim their own social value. “Ascribing readily recognizable social value always requires the devaluation of an/other,” she writes, “and that other is almost always poor, racialized, criminalized, segregated, legally vulnerable, and unprotected.” That zero-sum construction of human worth, she adds, demands that we rethink what constitutes a meaningful life outside of market terms that treat whole communities as a “negative resource” for white value. Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 17, 33. 32. New York Times Editorial Board, “Who’s a Refugee?,” New York Times, December 19, 1988. 33. Ron Kovic, introduction to the 2005 edition of Born on the Fourth of July (New York: Akashic Books, 2005), 16. 34. Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 208. 35. Alan C. Miller, “Veterans Find Peace in Vietnam,” Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1990. 36. Quoted in Miller. 37. See Barbara Crossette, “Vietnam Is Giving American Tourism a Trial Run,” New York Times, November 3, 1985; and George C. Wilson, “Vietnam Revisited,” Washington Post, February 6, 1990. 38. Quoted in Miller, “Veterans Find Peace.” 39. Quoted in Timothy Egan, “Veterans Returning to Vietnam to End a Haunting,” New York Times, January 24, 1989.

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40. Quoted in Raymond Monsour Scurfield, A Vietnam Trilogy: Veterans and Post-Traumatic Stress, 1968, 1989, 2000 (New York: Algora, 2004), 132. 41. Quoted in Scurfield, 160. 42. Scurfield, 133. 43. See Anne Driscoll, “Ex-marines Returning to Vietnam to Aid in Removal of Mines,” New York Times, November 27, 1988. 44. Kate Stone Lombardi, “A Return to Vietnam with Aid, Not Bullets,” New York Times, June 4, 1995. 45. Mark Landler, “Back to Vietnam, This Time to Build,” New York Times, September 13, 1998. 46. Jack Foisie, “Tourists from United States Return to Vietnam,” Los Angeles Times, November 15, 1987. 47. Quoted in Landler, “Back to Vietnam.” 48. Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 68. For more on how an “ongoing collaboration between militarism and tourism” drove and disguised American empire building in Asia and the Pacific, see Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 14; and Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Jana K. Lipman, and Teresia Teaiwa, eds., “Tours of Duty and Tours of Leisure,” special issue, American Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2016). The white men who did not to travel to Southeast Asia but read about and identified with the vets who did acted not as tourists but as what the cultural historian Marita Sturken calls “tourists of history,” seeking a mediated engagement with historical events that offered, at a distance, catharsis and a restored sense of innocence. Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 9. 49. Quoted in George C. Wilson, “A Meeting of Hearts and Minds,” Washington Post, August 26, 1990. 50. Wilson. 51. Quoted in Wilson. 52. W. D. Ehrhart, “A Common Language,” Virginia Quarterly Review 67, no. 3 (1991): 396. 53. William Broyles Jr., Brothers in Arms: A Journey from War to Peace (New York: Knopf, 1986), 10, 14. 54. William Broyles Jr., “The Road to Hill 10,” Atlantic, April 1985, 92. 55. Broyles, Brothers in Arms, 14. 56. Broyles, 266. 57. Broyles, 269, 241. 58. Platoon, directed by Oliver Stone, Orion, 1986. 59. Quoted in Jean-Jacques Malo, introduction to W. D. Ehrhart in Conversation: Vietnam, America, and the Written Word, ed. Jean-Jacques Malo (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017), 1. 60. H. Bruce Franklin, foreword to Busted: A Vietnam Veteran in Nixon’s America, by W. D. Ehrhart (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), xi.

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61. W. D. Ehrhart, “The Art of Writing Poetry: An Interview with W. D. Ehrhart,” by Jean-Jacques Malo, in The Last Time I Dreamed about the War: Essays on the Life and Writing of W. D. Ehrhart, ed. Jean-Jacques Malo (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 141. 62. Ehrhart, Going Back, 5. 63. Ehrhart, 180. 64. Quoted in Miller, “Veterans Find Peace.” 65. W. D. Ehrhart, “Last Flight Out from the War Zone,” in Winter Bells (Easthampton, MA: Adastra Press, 1988), 12. 66. Bruce Weigl, The Circle of Hahn (New York: Grove, 2001), 5. 67. Weigl, 37, 38. 68. Bruce Weigl, “Apparition of the Exile,” in The Song of Napalm (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988), 56. 69. Weigl, Circle of Hahn, 38. 70. Frederick Downs, No Longer Enemies, Not Yet Friends: An American Soldier Returns to Vietnam (New York: Norton, 1991), 19. 71. Downs, No Longer Enemies, 37; Frederick Downs, “Vietnam: My Enemy, My Brother,” Washington Post, January 31, 1988. 72. Desson Howe, “Vietnam Hell of Heaven,” review of Heaven and Earth, directed by Oliver Stone, Washington Post, December 24, 1993. 73. Howe. 74. Janet Maslin, “A Woman’s View of Vietnam Horrors,” review of Heaven and Earth, directed by Oliver Stone, New York Times, December 24, 1993. 75. Hal Hinson, “Heaven: Almost Hell,” review of Heaven and Earth, directed by Oliver Stone, Washington Post, December 25, 1993. 76. Quoted in Jack Mathews, “The Road to Heaven and Earth: How Le Ly Hayslip’s Personal War Inspired Oliver Stone,” Los Angeles Times, December 23, 1993. 77. Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s Journey from War to Peace, with Jay Wurts (New York: Doubleday, 1989), xiv. 78. Hayslip, xv. 79. Frances McCue, “An American Now,” review of Child of War, Woman of Peace, by Le Ly Hayslip with James Hayslip, New York Times, April 11, 1993. 80. Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, 367. 81. Seth Mydans, “A Different Kind of Vietnam Veteran, and Her Healing Mission,” New York Times, November 28, 1989. 82. Carol Memmott, “ ‘Homecoming’ Starts Healing,” USA Today, July 28, 1989. 83. Feminist film and critical refugee studies scholar Lan Duong identifies When Heaven and Earth Changed Places as a text that bridges the anticommunism and color blindness of the Reagan administration with the humanitarianism and liberal multiculturalism of the Clinton administration. “Within a conservative political climate,” Duong writes, “Hayslip’s texts rely on an assimilationist form of politics, but they also demonstrate the careful orchestration of

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a highly politicized [multicultural] subject.” Her first memoir also invites the white Vietnam vet to share in that latter sense of cultural difference. Lan P. Duong, Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 77. 84. Andrew X. Pham, Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999), 5. 85. Pham, 9. 86. Pham, 285. 87. Pham, 328. 88. Lan Cao, Monkey Bridge (New York: Viking, 1997), 90, 91. Cao’s novel constructs similar analogies elsewhere. Mai’s mother’s best friend, Mrs. Bay, works at a Vietnamese market in suburban Virginia, where she attracts vets who see her as “a source of consolation and familiarity.” She listens to their stories because she believes that her and other refugees’ fate “was linked crosseyed with the fate of the GIs themselves” (64, 65). 89. Ehrhart, Going Back, 5. 90. Eric Tang, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 49. 91. Perez v. Brownell, Attorney General, 356 U.S. 44, 64 (1957). 92. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 288. 93. Tim O’Brien, “Field Trip,” in The Things They Carried (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 210. 94. O’Brien, 212. 95. Tim O’Brien, “The Vietnam in Me,” New York Times Magazine, October 2, 1994, 48. 96. O’Brien, 57. 97. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 221. 98. Ronald Reagan, “Farewell Address to the Nation,” January 11, 1989, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/farewelladdress-the-nation. 99. Quoted in Reagan.

epilogue 1. Donald Trump, “Donald Trump Speaks at Rolling Thunder Memorial Day Event,” Right Side Broadcasting Network video, 24:32, May 29, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF7tF9FCzas. 2. Trump. 3. Quoted in Philip Rucker, “Trump Slams McCain for Being ‘Captured’ in Vietnam; Other Republicans Quickly Condemn Him,” Washington Post, July 18, 2015. 4. Donald Trump, “Presidential Candidate Donald Trump at the Family Leadership Summit,” C-Span video, 26:05, July 18, 2015, www.c-span.org/video/? 327045-5/presidential-candidate-donald-trump-family-leadership-summit.

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5. Quoted in Jonathan Martin and Alan Rappeport, “Donald Trump Says John McCain Is No War Hero, Setting Off Another Storm,” New York Times, July 18, 2015. 6. Quoted in Rucker, “Trump Slams McCain.” 7. Quoted in Steve Hendrix, “The Roots of Rolling Thunder and Why Its Keepers Forgive Trump for Dissing POWs,” Washington Post, May 27, 2016. 8. Quoted in Ben Schrekinger, “Trump Invokes MLK at D.C. Bike Rally,” Politico, May 29, 2016, www.politico.com/story/2016/05/trump-donald-rolling-thunder-veterans-223701. 9. Quoted in Thomas Kaplan, “Donald Trump and Bikers Share Affection at Rolling Thunder Rally,” New York Times, May 29, 2016. 10. Chris Cox, “ ‘Bikers for Trump’ Leader Says Candidate Has ‘Untied the Tongue of America,’ ” interview by David Greene, Morning Edition, May 30, 2016, www.npr.org/2016/05/30/479995857/bikers-for-trump-at-rolling-thunderrally-endorse-donald-trump. 11. Quoted in Kaplan, “Donald Trump and Bikers.” 12. Donald Trump, “Trump on Kelly: Blood Was Coming Out of Her Eyes,” interview by Don Lemon, CNN video, 0:52, August 7, 2015, www.cnn.com /videos/us/2015/08/08/donald-trump-megyn-kelly-blood-lemon-intv-ctn.cnn. 13. Donald Trump, “Presidential Candidate Donald Trump Rally in Des Moines, Iowa,” C-Span video, 1:01:39, January 28, 2016, www.c-span.org /video/?403832-1/presidential-candidate-donald-trump-rally-des-moines-iowa. 14. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The First White President,” Atlantic, October 2017, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisicoates/537909/. 15. Karen Heller, “Hillbilly Elegy Made J. D. Vance the Voice of the Rest Belt. But Does He Want to Be?,” Washington Post, February 6, 2017. 16. J. D. Vance, “How Trump Won the Troops,” New York Times, November 25, 2016. 17. See, for example, ex-skinhead Christian Picciolini’s 2017 memoir White American Youth: My Descent into America’s Most Dangerous Hate Movement—and How I Got Out, which earned him a slot on Fresh Air and a TED talk, and Eli Saslow’s Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist, his 2018 book about former white supremacist youth leader Derek Black. 18. Quoted in Steve Wyche, “Colin Kaepernick Explains Why He Sat during National Anthem,” NFL.com, August 27, 2016, www.nfl.com/news /story/0ap3000000691077/article/colin-kaepernick-explains-why-he-sat-duringnational-anthem. 19. Will Brinson, “Here’s How Nate Boyer Got Colin Kaepernick to Go from Sitting to Kneeling,” CBSSports.com, September 27, 2017, www.cbssports.com /nfl/news/heres-how-nate-boyer-got-colin-kaepernick-to-go-from-sitting-tokneeling/. 20. Quoted in John D. Halloran, “Megan Rapinoe Kneels for Anthem at NWSL Match,” American Soccer Now, September 4, 2016, http://americansoccernow .com/articles/megan-rapinoe-kneels-for-anthem-at-nwsl-match.

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21. Quoted in Cameron Wolfe, “Broncos’ Brandon Marshall Kneels during National Anthem Then Explains Why,” Denver Post, September 8, 2016. 22. Donald Trump, “President Trump Campaigns in Alabama for Luther Strange,” PBS NewsHour video, 2:33:23, September 22, 2017, www.youtube .com/watch?v=-fy0N91ChJU. 23. Quoted in Ken Belson, “Fueled by Trump’s Tweets, Anthem Protests Grow to Nationwide Rebuke,” New York Times, September 24, 2017. 24. The historian Carol Anderson argues that news media misconstrued the Black Lives Matter movement when they treated it as a manifestation of Black rage rather than as an answer to white rage, including President Trump’s rage at Black athletes. “White rage,” she writes, “is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies.” Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 3. 25. Harry Edwards, “Harry Edwards Q&A: Kaepernick Belongs in Smithsonian,” interview by Elliott Almond, Mercury News, December 30, 2016. 26. Quoted in John Branch, “The Awakening of Colin Kaepernick,” New York Times, September 7, 2017. 27. J. D. Reed, “Gallantly Screaming,” Sports Illustrated, January 3, 1977, 59. 28. Quoted in Ira Berkow, “Once Again, It’s the Star-Spangled Super Bowl,” New York Times, January 27, 1991. 29. See Jesse Berrett, Pigskin Nation: How the NFL Remade American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 53–81. 30. Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 259; Deborah Cohler, “Keeping the Home Front Burning: Renegotiating Gender and Sexuality in US Mass Media after September 11,” Feminist Media Studies 6, no. 3 (2006): 246. The advertising of a “multicultural” army, McAlister observes, allowed the United States to fashion itself as a “world citizen” safeguarding freedom in Kuwait rather than as a Western invader waging an all-too-familiar white-on-brown war (250). Cohler identifies how after 9/11 the state often borrowed liberal feminist language to authorize empire building in the Middle East and stabilize rather than challenge gender and sexual boundaries. See also Deborah Cohler, introduction to “Homefront Frontlines and Transnational Geometries of Empire and Resistance,” ed. Deborah Cohler, special issue, Feminist Formations 29, no. 1 (2017): vii–xvii. 31. That drama of the white military husband returning to the white military wife and their children has long functioned, as Cohler and others show, to render war itself “apolitical, transparent, and heroic” and to naturalize a white hetero image of the nation. Deborah Cohler, “American Sniper and American Wife: Domestic Biopolitics at Necropolitical War,” in “Homefront Frontlines and Transnational Geometries of Empire and Resistance,” ed. Deborah Cohler, special issue, Feminist Formations 29, no. 1 (2017): 75. Military wives, recognizing the usefulness of that image to the government, have also cultivated it, often using it to advocate for themselves and their families. See, for example, David Kieran, Forever Vietnam: How a Divisive War Changed American Public

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Memory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 179–81; and Jennifer Mittelstadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 120–47. 32. Quoted in Sean Sullivan, “Trump Slams Colin Kaepernick: ‘Maybe He Should Find a Country That Works Better for Him,’ ” Washington Post, August 29, 2016. 33. Donald Trump, “NFL Owners Did the Right Thing,” Fox and Friends video, 2:58, May 24, 2018, https://video.foxnews.com/v/5789092520001/. 34. Donald Trump, “Remarks by President Trump and President Rajoy of the Government of Spain in Joint Press Conference,” WhiteHouse.gov, September 26, 2017, www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trumppresident-rajoy-government-spain-joint-press-conference/. 35. Colin Kaepernick, “Colin Kaepernick Addresses Sitting during National Anthem,” Niners Wire, August 28, 2016, https://ninerswire.usatoday.com/2016 /08/28/transcript-colin-kaepernick-addresses-sitting-during-national-anthem/. 36. Quoted in Dan Graziano, “ ‘Hopefully It’s Not a One-Week Thing’: Malcolm Jenkins on What Happens Now,” ESPN.com, September 24, 2017, www .espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/20808267/malcolm-jenkins-philadelphia-eagles-sees-biggerpicture-nfl-protests-national-anthem-2017. 37. Eric Reid, “Why Colin Kaepernick and I Decided to Take a Knee,” New York Times, September 25, 2017. 38. Reid. 39. Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam,” in A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson and Kris Shephard (New York: Warner Books, 2001), 144. 40. Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” Dissent, Summer 1957, 279, 285. 41. James Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” Esquire, May 1961, 105. 42. Baldwin, 102. 43. Ben Kesling, “Democrats Recruit Veterans as Candidates in Bid to Retake the House,” Wall Street Journal, October 24, 2018. 44. Quoted in Jennifer Haberkorn, “Men Have Done It since the Founding Fathers. Now Female Vets Are Hoping to Parlay Military Service into Politics,” Los Angeles Times, October 17, 2018.

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Index

Ackerman, Eliot, 23 affirmative action, 10–15, 52–54; AAMC, 11; Black people, 11–12, 13, 15, 199n40; conservative-liberal divide, 74; GI Bill, 63, 72–73; neoconservatism, 220n43; people of color, 1–2, 11, 13–14, 52–53, 72–73; race, 14–15, 52–53; Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974, 13; Vietnam veterans, 13, 14, 52–54, 72–73, 74; white ethnics, 13–14, 125, 131; white men, 1–3, 8, 10, 12–15, 63, 72–73, 74, 199n40, 211n40; women, 11, 52–53, 72–73. See also Regents of the University of California v. Bakke Affirmative Discrimination (Glazer), 131 Afghanistan War, 23, 187, 191 Ali, Muhammad, 139, 185–86 Alvarez, Delia and Everett Jr., 47–48 America, America (Kazan), 136 American Dilemma, An (Myrdal), 67 American Indian movement, 7, 124 American Indians, 3, 11, 15–16, 64, 67, 71–72, 86, 129, 130–31, 145–46 American Legion, 91, 153 Amsterdam News, 1 Anderson, Carol, 195n8, 199n40, 231n24 Angle of Repose (Stegner), 70 antiqueerness, 21, 98, 116, 144, 215n30 antiracist movements: Butler, Robert Olen, 86; neo/conservatism, 8, 20; student

movements, 22; Vietnam veterans, 3, 22, 28, 41, 73, 211n37; Vietnam War, 20, 98; white ethnics, 127, 128, 131; whiteness, 13, 72, 73, 94–95, 101, 116, 127, 165, 177, 188–89, 211n37, 219n15; white supremacy, 206n61. See also race antiwar movements: as antiveteran, 122–23, 147; Chicano movement, 47–48; culture wars, 20; Fonda, Jane, 17; Lembcke, Jerry, 205n27; masculinities, 99–100; post-Vietnam syndrome, 16; POWs, 17; PTSD, 34, 205n27; Rambo films, 121–23; refugees, 154; Shatan, Chaim, 37–38; trauma hero, 51; Trump, Donald, 180–81; white men, 3, 18, 41, 94–95, 180–81 APA (American Psychiatric Association), 16, 34, 35, 40, 51, 60. See also DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) (APA) Apocalypse Now (Coppola), 18, 26–27, 95–96, 137 Appy, Christian, 93 Arendt, Hannah, 43, 175 Ashby, Hal, 10, 138. See also Coming Home (Ashby) Asian American movement, 7, 72, 202n84 Asian American Political Alliance, 7 Asian Americans: civil rights, 129; identities, 7, 86; literature, 71–72, 85,

255

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Index

Asian Americans (continued) 157, 225n17; Lowe, Lisa, 157–58, 225n18; Rambo films, 121–22; Vietnam veterans, 130–31, 225n17; whiteness, 71–72, 124, 225n17 Atwood, Paul, 122 auteurism, 134, 140 AWP (Associated Writing Programs), 71, 72 Bakke, Allan, 1–2, 10–15, 52. See also Regents of the University of California v. Bakke Balaban, John, 168 Baldwin, James, 5–6, 127–28, 189–90 Bambara, Toni Cade, 72 Bangs, Lester, 97 Barnicle, Mike, 122 Barry, Jan, 38 Baynton, Douglas, 33 Beam, Louis, 159–60 Belew, Kathleen, 5, 197n10, 226n26 Bell, Griffin, 158–59 Beloved (Morrison), 65, 77–78, 80–81 Benedict, Ruth, 125 Berger, Peter, 8, 126–27, 132 Bikers for Trump, 181 Biskind, Peter, 10, 133, 135, 221n53 Black athletes, 183, 184–89 “Black Boy Looks at the White Boy, The” (Baldwin), 189 Blackness: Amsterdam News, 1; disabilities, 33; Disco Demolition Night, 98; films, 17–18, 140–41, 142, 144, 148–49, 223n93; Hart statue, 58; heartland rock/ rock and roll, 93, 96–97, 101, 107, 108–9, 116; incarceration, 50; labor, 98–99; literature, 67–68, 74–75, 79, 81–84, 86; neoconservatism, 127–32; refugees, 161; trauma, 77; universities, 72; Vietnam veterans, 45; Vietnam War, 99; white ethnics, 7–8, 127–32; whiteness, 8, 23, 45, 81–85, 125, 127–32, 144, 148–49, 189–90, 195n8, 219n15, 223n82, 231n24. See also antiracist movements; race Black Panthers, 7 Black people: affirmative action, 11–12, 13, 15, 199n40; civil rights, 11, 47; identities, 7, 86, 189; literature, 71–72, 84; Vietnam veterans, 19, 53; white men, 185. See also antiracist movements; race Black Power movement, 7, 44, 45, 53, 72, 124

Black Reconstruction in America (Du Bois), 27–28 Black veterans: Civil War, 32; Coming Home (Ashby), 17–18; GI Bill, 63; Hart statue, 56–58; Kaepernick, Colin on, 187–88; literature, 18–19, 64; Operation Homecoming, 46; Vietnam War, 3, 18, 36; VVAW, 38, 44; VVM, 18–19; World War II, 5, 63 Black Veterans for Social Justice, 59 Blight, David, 32, 196n9 Bly, Robert, 99–100 Born in the U.S.A. (Springsteen album), 92–95, 104–5, 109–10, 116, 117, 120 “Born in the U.S.A.” (Springsteen song), 5–6, 90, 102–3, 104–5, 107, 110–11, 112–13, 117, 151, 162 Born on the Fourth of July (Kovic), 90, 162 Born on the Fourth of July (Stone), 119, 162, 170–71 Born to Run (Springsteen album), 104, 108–9, 120 Born to Run (Springsteen memoir), 108–9 Boston Globe, 97, 121, 122 Brando, Marlon, 96, 136–37 Brothers in Arms (Broyles), 26, 167–68, 171, 172, 176 Brown, Hank, 49, 50 Broyles, William, 26, 156, 166–68, 170 “Bruce Springsteen’s U.S.A” (Will), 110–11 Bryson, Bethany, 75–76 Buchanan, Pat, 20–21, 27 Burdick, Eugene, 67, 68–70 Burger, Warren, 7, 10, 13, 53 Burke, Edmund, 132 Bush, George H. W., 21, 49 Bush, George W., 161 Butler, Robert Olen, 22–23, 24, 65, 72, 73–74, 84–89, 119 Calley, William, 43. See also My Lai Campbell, Joseph, 43 Camus, Albert, 44 Cao, Lan, 25, 174–75, 229n88 Caputo, Philip, 51, 73–74, 166 Carby, Hazel, 22, 84 Carhart, Tom, 55–56, 165 Carlin, Peter Ames, 108 Carlos, John, 185–86 Carter, Jimmy, 25, 152–54, 158–59 Caruth, Cathy, 31, 42 Cassill, R. V., 71 Casualties of War (De Palma), 84 Catfish and Mandala (Pham), 173–74

Index | Champi, Samuel, 164 Charleston church shooting, 183 Chicago Tribune, 24, 114 Chicano movement, 7, 47–48, 72, 124 Chicanxs, 47–48, 62–63, 67, 71–72, 118, 129, 195n8, 197n11 Childhood and Society (Erikson), 6, 42 Child of War, Woman of Peace (Hayslip), 172 Chong, Sylvia, 138–39, 155–56, 195n8, 202n84 Christian Science Monitor, 111 Cimino, Michael, 10, 133, 138, 140, 143. See also Deer Hunter, The (Cimino) Circle of Hahn, The (Weigl), 169, 171 Cisneros, Sandra, 62–63, 71–72 civil rights: Asian Americans, 129; Black people, 11, 47; films, 140, 141, 142, 144; identities, 69, 178, 190; literature, 84; race, 2, 10–11, 129; trauma culture, 34; Trump, Donald, 180–81; Wheeler, John, III, 53; white ethnics, 125, 126, 129, 131; white men, 3, 5, 10, 32, 112–13, 117–18, 180–81, 182, 191, 197n12; whiteness, 4, 6–10, 14, 32, 94, 116, 125, 148, 195n8, 199n41. See also affirmative action; King, Martin Luther Civil Rights Act of 1964, 1, 10–11, 52, 131 civil rights movement, 4, 34, 126, 129, 196n9 Civil War, 4, 31–32, 54, 98–99, 196n9 class: economics, 3; GI Bill, 63; heartland rock, 97–99, 100–101, 103; Reagan, Ronald, 111; Springsteen, Bruce, 93, 104–8, 110–16, 117, 217n62; Trump, Donald, 182–83; Vietnam veterans, 3, 36, 47, 93, 103; Vietnam War, 17; white ethnics, 129, 130 Clements, Charlie, 123 Clemons, Clarence, 108–9, 110 Clinton, Bill, 21, 50, 164, 228n83 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 182 Cohler, Deborah, 186, 231n30, 231n31 color blindness, 23, 35, 65, 109, 126–27, 183, 195n8. See also conservatism; race Colvin, Reynold, 12–13, 15 Coming Home (Ashby), 2, 10, 17–18, 138, 162 Commager, Henry Steele, 105 Commentary, 20, 128 Confessions of Nat Turner, The (Styron), 74–75 conservatism: affirmative action, 74; antiracist movements, 20; heartland

257

rock, 94–95, 98–99, 102, 109, 110–11, 117; immigrants, 21, 224n6; POWs, 17, 35, 51; race, 45; Refugee Act of 1980, 153–54; Vietnam return, 170; Vietnam veterans, 122–23, 183; Vietnam War, 161. See also liberal multiculturalism; neoconservatism conservative-liberal divide: affirmative action, 74; culture wars, 3, 65; disabled veterans, 204n14; films, 18, 208n89; heartland rock, 94–95; identities, 6–7, 19–20; literature, 65, 75–76, 81; race, 45; refugees, 153–54, 158, 159, 228n83; Springsteen, Bruce, 92–93, 98, 102–3, 108–9, 111–12, 117–18, 218n82; trauma hero, 34–35, 50–51; Vietnam veterans, 54, 122–23, 125–26, 156, 183, 191; Vietnam War, 17, 160–61; white ethnics, 125–28, 220n21; whiteness, 22–23, 183. See also color blindness; liberal multiculturalism; neoconservatism Coppola, Francis Ford, 10, 26–27, 95–96, 133, 136–38 Cox, Chris, 181 Cranston, Alan, 37, 41 culture wars, 3, 19–24, 64, 65, 81, 112, 127, 191, 201n66, 220n43 Curry, Stephen, 185 Damn the Torpedoes (Petty), 97–98, 152 Daniels, Julius, 107 Darkness on the Edge of Town (Springsteen), 92, 104–5 Death in Life (Lifton), 37, 41 Deer Hunter, The (Cimino), 2, 10, 92–93, 138–39, 143, 222n67 De Niro, Robert, 2, 92–93, 133, 135, 136–37, 138 Denver Post, 184 De Palma, Brian, 10, 84, 133 Derian, Pat, 158–59 Dien Cai Dau (Komunyakaa), 18–19 disabilities, 14, 33 disabled veterans, 33, 170, 204n14 Disco Demolition Night, 98, 215n30 Dispatches (Herr), 95 Doubek, Bob, 55 Douglass, Frederick, 32 Downs, Frederick, 156, 170 DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) (APA), 30–31, 34, 35, 40–41, 51, 77. See also PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) Du Bois, W. E. B., 5, 27–28, 83, 99

258 |

Index

East Meets West, 172–73 economics, 3, 197n10. See also class Edwards, Harry, 185 Egendorf, Arthur, 38–39, 54–55 Ehrhart, W. D., 156, 165–70, 174 Ellis Island, 8, 9, 10, 124–25, 137, 219n15. See also immigrants; white ethnics Engle, Paul, 66, 70, 72, 79, 88–89 Enloe, Cynthia, 165 Erikson, Erik, 6–7, 10, 41–43, 50–51 Espiritu, Yê´n Lê, 155–56, 202n82, 225n15 ethnicity. See white ethnics Fail-Safe (Burdick), 67 Faludi, Susan, 21–22, 136 Families of POWs and MIAs for Indochinese Peace, 47–48 feminism: Black feminism, 22, 64, 72, 84; culture wars, 20, 21; films, 136, 141, 142; heartland rock, 94–95, 99–100; identities, 6, 64, 86, 178; Middle East, 231n30; nationalism, 186; neoconservatism, 8; trauma, 34, 38–39; universities, 72; veterans’ movement, 38–39; Vietnam veterans, 3, 19, 21–22, 44, 52–54; Vietnam War, 21–22, 98, 217n79; white ethnics, 131; white men, 3, 5, 10, 41, 101, 112–13, 177, 180–81, 182, 191, 197n12. See also women Ferguson, Roderick, 13–14, 73, 199n41, 212n42 “Field Trip” (O’Brien), 176–77 films: auteurism, 134, 140; Blackness, 17–18, 140–41, 142, 144, 148–49, 223n93; civil rights, 140, 141, 142, 144; conservative-liberal divide, 18, 208n89; feminism, 136, 141, 142; immigrants, 126, 134–38, 149–50, 223n93; masculinities, 136, 144, 155–56, 222n77; nationalism, 126, 143–44, 147, 148; new Hollywood era, 140; PCA, 133; refugees, 119, 155–56, 171; rock and roll, 95–99; Springsteen, Bruce, 105, 119; trauma, 136, 138–39; Vietnam veterans, 2, 10, 18, 65, 123–24, 135–39, 171; Vietnam War, 134, 136–39, 143, 221n58, 222n67, 223n85; white ethnics, 10, 131, 132–39, 140–47, 221n58; white men, 2, 3–4, 10, 18, 144; whiteness, 97, 119–20, 140–43, 147, 148, 150, 155–56; women, 136, 144, 222n77 Foerster, Norman, 66 Fogarty, John, 116

Fonda, Jane, 17, 162 Foucault, Michel, 31 Franklin, H. Bruce, 48, 168, 222n67 Frere-Jones, Sarah, 97 Freud, Anna, 41–42 From Where You Dream (Butler), 88–89 Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick), 95–96 “Galveston Bay” (Springsteen), 118–19 Gangster We Are All Looking For, The (lê), 24–25 Garwood, Robert, 49 Gee, Emma, 7 Ghost of Tom Joad, The (Springsteen), 118 GI Bill, 63, 66, 70, 72–73, 199n40 Glazer, Nathan, 8, 126–28, 131–32, 220n43 Godfather films, 10, 132–33, 136–37 Going after Cacciato (O’Brien), 61, 78–79, 88, 177 Going Back (Ehrart), 168, 171, 176 Goodell, Roger, 186 Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, A (Butler), 85–86, 87 Gore, Al, 59 Graduate, The (Nichols), 134 Graham, Lindsey, 180 Greil, Marcus, 108 Guthrie, Woody, 107–8, 118 Haley, Sarah, 29–30, 34, 36, 40, 42 Hall, Sam, 158 Hamilton, Jack, 96 Hart, Frederick, 55–60 Harwood, Robert, 51 Hasford, Gustav, 95–96 Hasty Pudding Club, 121–26, 147 Hayslip, Le Ly, 171–73, 228n83 heartland rock, 93–95, 97–105, 116, 117–18, 119–20, 125, 152–53, 216n43. See also rock and roll “Hearts and Minds” (Le), 154 Heaven and Earth (Stone), 119, 170–71 Heberle, Mark, 77 Heinemann, Larry, 22–23, 24, 65, 72, 73–74, 80–85, 88–89, 155, 166, 213n69 Hemingway, Ernest, 23–24, 68, 76–77, 80, 84, 210n22 Hendrix, Jimi, 95, 97, 99 Herman, Judith, 31, 39, 42 Herr, Michael, 10, 85, 95–96 Herzog, Toby, 61 Higher Education Act of 1965, 63, 71 “Highway Patrolman” (Springsteen), 108 Hillburn, Robert, 104

Index | Hinson, Hal, 171 Hiroshima bombing, 37, 41, 43, 44 Hitchens, Christopher, 81 Hoffman, Dustin, 134 Holland, Ross, 9 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 54–55 Home from the War (Lifton), 43–44 Hong, Grace, 14, 64 Horne, A. D., 51–52 House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, 51, 54 “How to Tell a True War Story” (O’Brien), 23, 62, 79–80, 88 Hubbs, Nadine, 101 Hunt, William Morris, 124 Hunter, James Davison, 19–21 Iannone, Carol, 81 identities, 6–10, 41–42; Asian Americans, 7, 86; Black people, 7, 86, 189; civil rights, 69, 178, 190; conservative-liberal divide, 6–7, 19–20; culture wars, 19–20, 64, 201n66; feminism, 6, 64, 86, 178; literature, 23, 62–63, 64, 69, 74, 75, 89; nationalism, 19; race, 6–7, 9, 10, 18, 42, 86, 150, 157, 183; Springsteen, Bruce, 108, 117; The Sympathizer (Nguyen), 27; trauma, 50–51; Vietnam veterans, 4–5, 9, 54, 63; Vietnam War, 86, 177–78; white ethnics, 7–8, 9, 42, 127; white men, 10, 42, 64, 89, 165, 178, 189–90; whiteness, 9, 60, 64, 69, 72, 75, 83, 125, 150, 177–78, 182, 190, 195n8, 211n37; white supremacy, 160. See also Erikson, Erik If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (O’Brien), 62 Immigrant Acts (Lowe), 157–58 immigrants: disabilities, 33; films, 126, 134–38, 149–50, 223n93; Kristol, Irving, 150; “Letters from My Father” (Butler), 88; Lowe, Lisa, 157–58; nationalism, 8–9; neo/conservatism, 21, 124, 127–31, 224n6; race, 8–9, 157–58; Springsteen, Bruce, 118–19; Trump, Donald, 5, 26, 179–83, 187; Vietnam veterans, 118; white ethnics, 7–9, 124–31; whiteness, 7–9, 15, 127–31; white supremacy, 160. See also Ellis Island; refugees Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 153–54, 157–58 In Country (Mason), 99 Indigenous peoples, 15–16, 31, 125, 128, 129–30. See also American Indians

259

Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 62–63, 66, 70, 71, 85–86 Iraq War, 23, 89, 187, 191 Jackson, Jesse, 161 Jacobson, Matthew, 127, 195n8, 198n24, 219n15, 220nn21,22 Jarhead (Mendes), 96 Jefferson, Margo, 97 Jeffords, Susan, 22, 144, 201n69, 216n35 Johnson, Lyndon, 10–11 Kaepernick, Colin, 184–89 Kanfer, Stefan, 47 Katznelson, Ira, 199n40, 211n40 Kazan, Elia, 136 Keitel, Harvey, 133, 135 Kelly, Megyn, 181–82 Kennedy, Ted, 153 Kent State shootings, 37. See also student movements Kerry, John, 16, 35–36, 49, 50 KIA/BNR (killed in action, body not recovered), 48, 167 King, Martin Luther, 179, 188–89 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 71–72 Klay, Phil, 89 Klein, Joe, 107 Knight, Etheridge, 4 Komunyakaa, Yusef, 4, 18–19, 64–65, 166 Korean War, 4, 16, 29–30, 34, 91, 130 Kovic, Ron, 90–92, 93, 162 Kraft, Robert, 185 Kristol, Irving, 8, 126–28, 148, 150 Kubrick, Stanley, 95–96 Ku Klux Klan, 67, 102, 159–60, 226n26. See also white supremacy labor, 3, 27, 93–94, 98–99, 105–7, 111, 113–20, 125 Landau, Jon, 105, 107, 112, 116, 117 Lane, Jeremy, 184 Latinxs: affirmative action, 11, 13, 199n40; antiracist movements, 86; Disco Demolition Night, 98, 215n30; Hart statue, 56–58; heartland rock, 101, 116; incarceration, 50; literature, 62, 64, 67–68, 71–72, 83, 84; neoconservatism, 129; Trump, Donald, 187; Vietnam War, 3, 130–31; VVAW, 38. See also race Le, Huynh-Nhu, 154 lê thi diem thúy, 24–25 Lembcke, Jerry, 38, 200n51, 205n27

260 |

Index

“Letters from My Father” (Butler), 88 liberal multiculturalism: Glazer, Nathan, 220n43; Hayslip, Le Ly, 228n83; Jacobson, Matthew, 220n21; literature, 23, 62–63, 71–72, 74, 77, 83, 84, 228n83; Melamed, Jodi, 211n37; Springsteen, Bruce, 109; Vietnam veterans, 3, 35, 74, 183; white ethnics, 126–27, 220n21 Lifton, Robert, 16, 36–38, 40, 41–46, 50–51 Lin, Maya, 19, 55–56, 58, 59–60. See also VVM (Vietnam Veterans Memorial) Lipsitz, George, 95, 195n8 literature, 61–89; Asian Americans, 71–72, 85, 157, 225n17; Blackness, 67–68, 74–75, 79, 81–84, 86; Black people, 71–72, 84; Black veterans, 18–19, 64; civil rights, 84; conservative-liberal divide, 65, 75–76, 81; culture wars, 65; identities, 23, 62–63, 64, 69, 74, 75, 89; Latinxs, 62, 64, 67–68, 71–72, 83, 84; liberal multiculturalism, 23, 62–63, 71–72, 74, 77, 83, 84, 228n83; nationalism, 27, 67–68, 210n22; New York Times, 26, 73, 76, 85, 95, 191; people of color, 71–72, 74, 75, 84; POWs/MIAs, 60; race, 22–24, 66, 67–68, 69, 71–72, 74–75, 78–80, 81–85, 89, 213n69; refugees, 65, 75, 85–88, 119, 156–57, 177, 212n47, 225n17, 229n88; Southeast Asia, 64, 74, 83–84, 86; Springsteen, Bruce, 105, 119; trauma, 77, 82, 84; Vietnam veterans, 18–19, 22–24, 61–65, 72–89, 156–57, 229n88; Vietnam War, 18, 22–24, 61–65, 73–77, 85–89, 95, 168, 177, 208n89; white ethnics, 62–63, 209n6; white men, 3–4, 23–24, 66, 67–68, 71–72, 75, 82, 84–85, 89; whiteness, 23–24, 27, 69, 72–75, 78–80, 81–89, 97; World War II, 62, 63, 66–70, 189, 210n22; Writers Union of Vietnam, 166. See also memoirs Live/1975–85 (Springsteen), 117 Lonely Crowd, The (Riesman), 41 Long, Ngo Vinh, 46–47 “Long History of the Vietnam Novel, The” (Ryan), 85 Lorde, Audre, 14 Los Angeles Times, 1, 104, 156, 163, 164 Lott, Eric, 8, 148–49, 195n8, 223n93 Lowe, Lisa, 157–58, 225n18 Mailer, Norman, 42, 62, 189–90 Making It (Podhoretz), 130

Marsh, Dave, 102, 215n30 Marshall, Brandon, 184 Marshall, Thurgood, 14–15 masculinities: antiwar movements, 99–100; films, 136, 144, 155–56, 222n77; heartland rock, 99–100; Reagan, Ronald, 100, 216n35; Springsteen, Bruce, 92–93, 99–100, 110–11, 113–14; Stallone, Sylvester, 126; Vietnam War, 21–22, 201n69, 202n82 Mason, Bobbie Ann, 99 McAlister, Melani, 186, 231n30 McAuliff, John, 168 McCain, John, 16–17, 47, 49, 180–81 McDaniel, Red, 48 McGurl, Mark, 62–63, 209n6, 214n89 Mean Streets (Scorsese), 135–36 Melamed, Jodi, 18, 71–72, 211n37 Mellencamp, John, 94, 99, 100, 102–3, 216n43 memoirs, 4, 26, 108–9, 156, 165–75, 176–77, 228n83. See also literature MIAs, 47–50, 60. See also POW/MIA movement military-football complex, 185–88 Mills, Charles, 45, 206n61 Missing in Action films, 17, 155 Mittlestadt, Jennifer, 70 Momaday, N. Scott, 71–72 Mondale, Walter, 92, 93, 102, 111–12 Monkey Bridge (Cao), 174–75, 229n88 Mooney, John, 178 Morrison, Toni, 23–24, 61–62, 65, 71–72, 77–82, 84, 89, 209n6 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 132 Muller, Bobby, 91–92. See also VVA (Vietnam Veterans of America) music. See heartland rock; rock and roll “My Hometown” (Springsteen), 116 My Lai, 29–30, 36, 37, 42–45, 176 Myrdal, Gunnar, 67 Naked and the Dead, The (Mailer), 189 National Book Awards, 23, 37, 61, 65, 73, 75, 80–81, 155, 213n69. See also literature nationalism: Black athletes, 185–86; films, 126, 143–44, 147, 148; heartland rock, 92–93, 95, 100, 102, 110–11, 113; identities, 19; immigrants, 8–9; Kristol, Irving, 150; literature, 27, 67–68, 210n22; military-football complex, 185–88; POWs, 35; Trump, Donald, 183; Vietnam veterans, 18, 123, 155,

Index | 195n8; white ethnics, 8, 125–26, 132, 143–44, 147; whiteness, 5, 24, 26, 27–28, 81, 148, 158, 195n8 National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, 48. See also POW/MIA movement National Review, 55 National Vietnam Veterans’ Readjustment Study, 40 Nebraska (Springsteen), 107–8, 111, 217n62 “Negro Today Is Like the Immigrant Yesterday, The” (Kristol), 127 neoconservatism, 8–10, 124, 125, 126–32, 148, 150, 220nn21,43 Neuhaus, Peter, 132 Never Again/Vietnam Veterans Peace Action Network, 123 Nevins, Allan, 105 New Generation: American and Catholic, A (Novak), 128 Newsweek, 46, 48, 49, 147–48, 156, 166 Newton, Huey, 7. See also Black Panthers New York Times: Black athletes, 188; heartland rock, 102, 104; Kristol, Irving, 127; literature, 26, 73, 76, 85, 95, 191; “Post-Vietnam Syndrome,” 39; refugees, 161–62, 176; Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 1, 2; Trump, Donald, 123, 181, 182; Vietnam veterans, 156, 163–64; white supremacy, 160 New York Times Book Review, 80–81, 167, 213n69 New York Times Magazine, 176 NFL (National Football League), 184–89 Nguyen, Mimi, 25 Nguyen, Viet, 4, 26–27, 75, 85, 177, 212n47 Nichols, Mike, 10, 133–34 “99 Year Blues” (Daniels), 107 Nixon, Richard, 17, 21, 34–35, 36, 37, 45–46, 48 Noble Prize in Literature, 80–81 No Longer Enemies, Not Yet Friends (Downs), 170, 171 Norris, Chuck, 155 Novak, Michael, 8–9, 27, 124–25, 126–31, 142–43 Obama, Barack, 179–80, 182, 197n12 O’Brien, Tim, 4, 22–23, 24, 61–62, 65, 72, 73–80, 84–85, 88–89, 176–77 O’Connor, Flannery, 66, 71, 105 One Nation (Stegner), 67

261

“Open Arms” (Butler), 87–88 Operation Homecoming, 46–50. See also POWs Ortiz, Simon, 15–16 Pacino, Al, 10, 133, 137 Packer, George, 85 Paco’s Story (Heinemann), 23, 65, 80–84, 88, 155 Palladino, Pixie, 8 Pareles, Jon, 101, 104 PCA (Production Code Administration), 133 Pentagon, 47–48, 95, 137 people of color: affirmative action, 1–2, 11, 13–14, 52–53, 72–73; culture wars, 22; disabilities, 33; economics, 3; films, 223n82; Hart statue, 59; heartland rock, 101; literature, 71–72, 74, 75, 84; movements, 14; Southeast Asia, 3, 16; trauma, 31; Vietnam War, 9, 16, 18, 33, 75; VVAW, 16, 44; white ethnics, 9; whiteness, 8, 22, 195n8. See also race Perry, Rick, 180 Peterson, Pete, 50 Petty, Tom, 94, 97–98, 99, 101, 103, 152 Pfeil, Fred, 113 Pham, Andrew, 173–74 Phillips, Dean, 52 “Pink Houses” (Mellencamp), 102–3 Platoon (Stone), 54–55, 73, 84, 119, 163, 168, 170–71 Playing in the Dark (Morrison), 23, 81–82, 84 Pocket History of the United States of America (Commager and Nevins), 105 Podhoretz, Norman, 8, 20–21, 126–28, 130, 201n66 post-Vietnam syndrome, 16, 35–41, 200n51 “Post-Vietnam Syndrome” (Shatan), 39–40 Powell, Lewis, 1–2, 12–14, 131, 199n40 POW/MIA movement, 17, 19, 34–35, 48–49, 51, 58, 179–81 POWs, 17, 34–35, 45–50, 60, 114, 145, 146 Presley, Elvis, 93 Price, George, 59 Price of the Ticket, The (Baldwin), 5 “Problem of Ego Identity, The” (Erikson), 42 PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder): antiwar movements, 34, 205n27; DSM, 30–31, 34, 35, 40–41, 51, 77; veterans’ movement, 16, 39; Vietnam return, 163; Vietnam veterans, 91; white men, 31, 32–34, 40

262 |

Index

Public Interest, 127 Pulitzer Prizes, 4, 26, 51, 65, 70, 74, 75, 81, 85, 119 race: Benedict, Ruth, 125; Buchanan, Pat, 21; Chong, Sylvia, 138–39; civil rights, 2, 10–11, 129; conservative-liberal divide, 45; culture wars, 20, 23; disabilities, 33; Disco Demolition Night, 98, 215n30; Du Bois, W. E. B., 27–28; Erikson, Erik, 6–7; Ferguson, Roderick, 212n42; GI Bill, 63; heartland rock/rock and roll, 94–95, 96–97, 101–2, 108, 216n43; identities, 6–7, 9, 10, 18, 42, 86, 150, 157, 183; immigrants, 8–9, 157–58; labor, 98–99; Lifton, Robert, 45; literature, 22–24, 66, 67–68, 69, 71–72, 74–75, 78–80, 81–85, 89, 213n69; Melamed, Jodi, 18; memorials, 56–60; neoconservatism, 126–32, 220nn21,43; One Nation (Stegner), 67; Operation Homecoming, 46–48; POW/ MIA movement, 48; Rambo films, 5–6, 121–23, 144, 150–51, 223n82; refugees, 153, 156, 161; Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 1–2; Roof, Dylann, 183; Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, 49–50; Singh, Nikhil, 200n48; Southeast Asia, 7, 195n8; Springsteen, Bruce, 93, 108–9, 111–12, 113, 116, 117–18; trauma, 31–33, 35, 50–55; Trump, Donald, 26, 27, 181–83, 185, 187, 190; Vietnam veterans, 3–6, 17, 19, 27–28, 34, 37, 93, 94, 157, 195n8, 223n82; VVAW, 36, 38; war, 16, 36, 200n48; white ethnics, 7–8, 125–32; World War II, 9, 18. See also affirmative action; Blackness; Black veterans; people of color; whiteness; white supremacy Race and Reunion (Blight), 32, 196n9 Rambo films, 121–26, 143–48; antiwar movements, 121–23; Asian Americans, 121–22; Baldwin, James, 5–6; Kinney, Katherine, 208n89; masculinities, 155; Morley, Jefferson, 218n82; POWs, 17; race, 5–6, 121–23, 144, 150–51, 223n82; refugees, 155; Vietnam War, 223n85; white ethnics, 126, 131, 139, 143–48; white men, 94, 114–16, 120 Rangel, Charles, 46–47 Rapinoe, Megan, 184 Reagan, Ronald: class, 111; KIA/BNR, 167; masculinities, 100, 216n35; neocon-

servatism, 150; POWs/MIAs, 48, 170; refugees, 154–55, 178, 228n83; Springsteen, Bruce, 92, 93, 102–3, 109–12, 117; Stallone, Sylvester, 123, 126, 147–48, 150; Vietnam War, 20–21; VVM, 58; white men, 111, 126 “Refugee” (Petty), 152–53 Refugee Act of 1980, 25, 152–54, 158–59, 162, 224n6 refugees, 152–78; antiwar movements, 154; Blackness, 161; Carter, Jimmy, 152–54, 158–59; conservative-liberal divide, 153–54, 158, 159, 228n83; definitions of, 25, 153, 161–62; films, 119, 155–56, 171; literature, 65, 75, 85–88, 119, 156–57, 177, 212n47, 225n17, 229n88; memoirs, 156, 165–75, 177, 228n83; New York Times, 161–62, 176; race, 153, 156, 161; Reagan, Ronald, 154–55, 178, 228n83; refugee acts, 157–62; rights, 175–76, 225n15; Southeast Asia, 24–28, 153–56, 158–59, 170; Springsteen, Bruce, 118–19; trauma, 31; Trump, Donald, 26, 180; Vietnam veterans, 24–28, 85, 151, 153–57, 161, 162–70, 173–76, 177–78, 202nn82,84, 229n88; Vietnam War, 24–25, 154–56, 157, 202n82; white ethnics, 125; white men, 151, 158, 165, 175–76; whiteness, 85–86, 154, 156–57, 161, 175, 177–78; white supremacy, 159–60; World War II, 175. See also immigrants; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 1–2, 7, 10–15, 52–53, 131, 199n40 Reid, Eric, 184, 188–89 RESIST antiwar statement, 36. See also antiwar movements; VVAW (Vietnam Veterans against the War) “Rest Camp on Maui” (Burdick), 67, 69 Revolt of the Black Athlete, The (Edwards), 185 Ribbon Creek incident, 37 Riesman, David, 41, 42 Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, The (Novak), 9, 128–29, 130 River, The (Springsteen), 90, 92, 107, 108 rock and roll, 92, 93, 95–99, 104, 108–9, 152, 175, 215nn19,23. See also heartland rock Rocky films, 10, 120, 121–22, 124, 125–26, 131, 139–43, 147–51, 222n77, 223n93

Index | Roediger, David, 98–99 Rolling Stone, 97–98, 112, 118, 152 Roof, Dylann, 183 Roth, Michael, 50 Rottman, Larry, 166 Rozelle, Peter, 185–86 Rumor of War, A (Caputo), 51 Ryan, Maureen, 85 Sahim, Sarah, 97 Sarris, Andrew, 134 Schlund-Vials, Cathy, 154, 225n17 Scorsese, Martin, 10, 133–38, 221nn53,58 Scranton, Roy, 32, 204n11 Scruggs, Jan, 59 Scurfield, Raymond, 163–64 Seger, Bob, 94, 99–101 Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, 49–50 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944. See GI Bill Shatan, Chaim, 37–41 “Significance of a Veteran’s Day, The” (Ortiz), 15–16 Smedley D. Butler Brigade, 121–22 Smith, Bob, 49 Smith, Tommie, 185–86 Smith, Torrey, 188 “Soldier’s Home” (Hemingway), 68–69 Song of Napalm, The (Weigl), 169 Song of Solomon (Morrison), 78–79 Sontag, Susan, 133 Southeast Asia: Chong, Sylvia, 138–39; King, Martin Luther, 188–89; literature, 64, 74, 83–84, 86; Operation Homecoming, 46; people of color, 3, 8; race, 7, 195n8; refugees, 24–28, 153–56, 158–59, 170; trauma, 138–39; trauma hero, 33; Vietnam return, 26, 227n48; Vietnam War, 16; VVM, 59; war costs, 3, 112; war crimes, 35–36, 37; white ethnics, 130–31. See also My Lai Springsteen, Bruce, 90–95, 104–20; Blackness, 102, 107, 108–9, 110, 113, 116; Black people, 110; “Bruce Springsteen’s U.S.A” (Will), 110–11; class, 93, 104–8, 110–16, 117, 217n62; conservative-liberal divide, 92–93, 98, 102–3, 108–9, 111–12, 117–18, 218n82; films, 105, 119; immigrants/ refugees, 118–19; labor, 93–94, 105–7, 111, 113–20, 125; literature, 105, 119; masculinities, 92–93, 99–100, 110–11, 113–14; race, 93, 108–9, 111–12, 113,

263

116, 117–18; Vietnam veterans, 27, 90–94, 96, 111–14, 117, 118–20, 125; Vietnam War, 94, 113; white men, 3–4, 89, 94, 105, 107, 110–12, 116, 117; whiteness, 108–11, 113–14, 116, 119–20, 125, 151 Stallone, Sylvester, 139–51; Hasty Pudding Club, 121–24, 139; masculinities, 126; Reagan, Ronald, 123, 126, 147–48, 150; Springsteen, Bruce, 114, 119–20; white ethnics, 10, 126, 139–51; white men, 3–4, 89, 94; whiteness, 5–6, 27, 119, 126 Stanford creative writing program, 66, 70. See also literature Starr, Edwin, 117 Steffens, Roger, 97 Stegner, Wallace, 66–70, 71, 72, 79, 86, 88–89 Steinbeck, John, 105, 107, 118, 119 Sterling, Alton, 188 Stockdale, James, 59 Stone, Oliver, 4, 54–55, 73, 84, 119, 162, 163, 170–71, 172, 208n89 Storandt, Peter, 11–12 student movements, 14, 22, 73, 128 Styron, William, 74–75, 86 Surname Viet Given Name Nam (Trinh), 160 Sympathizer, The (Nguyen), 26–27, 85 Tang, Eric, 175 Taxi Driver (Scorsese), 2, 135–36 Theology for Radical Politics, A (Novak), 128 Things They Carried, The (O’Brien), 23, 62, 76, 176–77 Time, 47, 104 To Empower People (Berger and Neuhaus), 132 Touched with Fire (Wheeler), 53, 60 trauma: Blackness, 77; definitions of, 31; feminism/women, 31, 34, 38–39; films, 136, 138–39; Herman, Judith, 39; identities, 50–51; Kovic, Ron, 162; Lembcke, Jerry, 200n51; Lifton, Robert, 41, 43–44; literature, 77, 82, 84; O’Brien, Tim, 76–80; race, 31–33, 35, 50–55; refugees, 31; Shatan, Chaim, 40; Southeast Asia, 138–39; Vietnam veterans, 30, 40, 50–55, 138–39, 163, 172–73, 200n51; Vietnam War, 51–52, 77; white men, 10, 40, 50, 52, 53; whiteness, 60; World War II, 50–51, 77. See also PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)

264 |

Index

Trauma Artist, A (Heberle), 77 trauma culture, 30–31, 34, 41, 44, 50–51, 204n11 trauma hero, 32, 33–35, 43–44, 50–51, 204n11 trauma studies, 30–31, 40, 41 Trinh, T. Minh-ha, 25, 65, 160–61 Trump, Donald, 5, 26, 27, 123, 179–88, 190–91, 231n24 Truong, Monique, 25 Truscott, Lucian, IV, 52 Twenty Years of Stanford Short Stories (Stegner), 67 TWN (traumatic war neurosis), 40, 51. See also PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) Ugly American, The (Burdick), 67 USA Today, 49, 163, 172 US-Indochina Reconciliation Project, 168 U.S. News and World Report, 36–37 VA (Veterans Administration), 39–40, 92, 103, 156 Vance, Cyrus, 25, 159 Vance, J. D., 182–83 Van Es, Hubert, 24, 25 Vessey, John, 170 Veterans for Peace, 164 veterans’ movement, 16, 38–39, 50, 53, 77, 92, 200n51 veterans of color, 3, 16, 32–33, 52. See also Black veterans; people of color Veterans’ Readjustment Benefits Act of 1966, 63, 70–71 veterans’ rights, 73, 93, 188, 191 VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars), 20, 91, 154 Vietnam. See Southeast Asia Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974, 13, 72–73 Vietnamese Americans, 85, 118–19, 177. See also refugees “Vietnam in Me, The” (O’Brien), 176–77 Vietnam Resource Center, 46 Vietnam veterans: affirmative action, 13, 14, 52–54, 72–73, 74; antiracist movements, 3, 22, 28, 41, 73, 211n37; Asian Americans, 130–31, 225n17; Blackness, 45; Black people, 19, 53; class, 3, 36, 47, 93, 103; conservative-liberal divide, 54, 122–23, 125–26, 156, 183, 191; feminism, 3, 19, 21–22, 44, 52–54; films, 2, 10, 18, 65, 123–24, 135–39, 171; heartland rock, 103; identities, 4–5, 9, 54, 63; immigrants, 118;

Latinxs, 3; liberal multiculturalism, 3, 35, 74, 183; literature, 18–19, 22–24, 61–65, 72–89, 156–57, 229n88; memoirs, 165–75, 176–77, 228n83; nationalism, 18, 123, 155, 195n8; New York Times, 156, 163–64; race, 3–6, 17, 19, 27–28, 34, 37, 93, 94, 157, 195n8, 223n82; refugees, 24–28, 85, 151, 153–57, 161, 162–70, 173–76, 177–78, 202nn82,84, 229n88; trauma, 30, 40, 50–55, 138–39, 163, 172–73, 200n51; Vietnam return, 26, 151, 156, 162–70, 172–73, 176–77, 227n48; white ethnics, 9–10, 125–26, 136, 144; white men, 2–6, 17, 32–33, 60, 157, 182, 197n10; white supremacy, 159–60. See also PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder); whiteness and Vietnam veterans Vietnam War: American Indians, 3; antiracist movements, 20, 98; Blackness, 99; Black veterans, 3, 18, 36; class, 17; conservatism, 161; conservative-liberal divide, 17, 160–61; culture wars, 20–22; feminism, 21–22, 98, 217n79; films, 134, 136–39, 143, 221n58, 222n67, 223n85; heartland rock/rock and roll, 94, 95–99, 101, 215n19; identities, 86, 177–78; King, Martin Luther, 188–89; Latinxs, 3; literature, 18, 22–24, 61–65, 73–77, 85–89, 95, 168, 177, 208n89; masculinities, 21–22, 201n69, 202n82; NFL, 186; O’Brien, Tim, 77; people of color, 9, 16, 18, 33, 75; Reagan, Ronald, 20–21; refugees, 24–25, 154–56, 157, 202n82; Southeast Asia, 16; Springsteen, Bruce, 94, 113; trauma, 51–52, 77; Trump, Donald, 180–81; white ethnics, 130–31, 138–39, 143; white men, 18, 27, 112–13, 114, 143, 178, 226n26; whiteness, 4, 6, 15–19, 25–27, 130, 138–39, 154, 156, 158, 160–61, 165, 188–89, 226n26; white supremacy, 160, 226n26; women, 114, 217n79. See also refugees Vietnam Women’s Memorial, 59 VVA (Vietnam Veterans of America), 91–92, 214n6 VVAW (Vietnam Veterans against the War), 16–17, 35–41, 43–44, 91, 156 VVM (Vietnam Veterans Memorial), 18–19, 35, 51, 54, 55–60, 143, 167–68 Wall Street Journal, 49, 190–91 “War” (Starr), 117–18

Index | war crimes, 35–36, 37, 42–43. See also My Lai Warren, Earl, 175–76 Washington Post, 1, 51–52, 53, 59, 143, 156, 163, 166, 167, 171. See also Will, George Watt, James, 55 Watters, Ethan, 30–31 Webb, Jim, 51, 52, 55, 59, 85 Weigl, Bruce, 156, 166, 168–70 Weinberg, Max, 110 Weisen, Ron, 111 Werner, Craig, 110 Wheeler, John, III, 19, 35, 51, 53–55, 56, 60. See also VVM (Vietnam Veterans Memorial) When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (Hayslip), 171–73, 228n83 white ethnic revival, 8–10, 124–27, 133–34, 143–44, 146, 148, 195n8, 198n24, 219n15, 220n21. See also whiteness: white ethnics white ethnics, 121–51; affirmative action, 13–14, 125, 131; antiracist movements, 127, 128, 131; Blackness, 7–8, 127–32; civil rights, 125, 126, 129, 131; class, 129, 130; conservative-liberal divide, 125–28, 220n21; feminism, 131; films, 10, 131, 132–39, 140–47, 221n58; identities, 7–8, 9, 42, 127; immigrants, 7–9, 124–31; literature, 62–63, 209n6; nationalism, 8, 125–26, 132, 143–44, 147; people of color, 9; race, 7–8, 125–32; refugees, 125; “Rest Camp on Maui” (Burdick), 69; Stallone, Sylvester, 10, 126, 139–51; universities, 72; Vietnam veterans, 9–10, 125–26, 136, 144; Vietnam War, 130–31, 138–39, 143; whiteness, 7–10, 13, 69, 124–32, 135, 138–39, 141–44, 148, 150, 198n24, 199n41, 219n15, 220n21. See also Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, The (Novak) white men: affirmative action, 1–3, 8, 10, 12–15, 63, 72–73, 74, 199n40, 211n40; antiwar movements, 3, 18, 41, 94–95, 180–81; Black people, 15, 185; civil rights, 3, 5, 10, 32, 112–13, 117–18, 180–81, 182, 191, 197n12; disabilities, 33; economics, 3, 128, 197n10; feminism, 3, 5, 10, 41, 101, 112–13, 177, 180–81, 182, 191, 197n12; films, 2, 3–4, 10, 18, 144; Hart statue, 58; heartland rock, 116; identities, 10, 42,

265

64, 89, 165, 178, 189–90; literature, 3–4, 23–24, 66, 67–68, 71–72, 75, 82, 84–85, 89; military-football complex, 186; Nguyen, Viet, 4; PTSD, 31, 32–34, 40; race, 1–6, 10, 32–35, 71–72, 83, 178, 182, 191, 195n8; Rambo films, 94, 114–16, 120; Reagan, Ronald, 111, 126; refugees, 151, 158, 165, 175–76; rock and roll, 96–97; Springsteen, Bruce, 3–4, 89, 94, 105, 107, 110–12, 116, 117; Stallone, Sylvester, 3–4, 89, 94; trauma, 10, 40, 50, 52, 53; trauma culture, 41; trauma hero, 33–35; Trump, Donald, 182; Vietnam veterans, 2–6, 17, 32–33, 60, 157, 182, 197n10; Vietnam War, 18, 27, 112–13, 114, 143, 178, 226n26; VVM, 19, 59, 60; whiteness, 27 “White Negro, The” (Mailer), 189 whiteness: American Indians, 145–46; antiracist movements, 13, 72, 73, 94–95, 101, 116, 127, 165, 177, 188–89, 211n37, 219n15; Asian Americans, 71–72, 124, 225n17; Blackness, 8, 23, 45, 81–85, 125, 127–32, 144, 148–49, 189–90, 195n8, 219n15, 223n82, 231n24; Butler, Robert Olen, 86–89, 214n89; civil rights, 4, 6–10, 14, 32, 94, 116, 125, 148, 195n8, 199n41; conservativeliberal divide, 22–23, 183; disabilities, 33; Du Bois, W. E. B., 27–28; films, 97, 119–20, 140–43, 147, 148, 150, 155–56; Hart statue, 56–59; heartland rock/rock and roll, 93, 95–99, 101–2, 105, 116, 117–18, 215n23; human value, 226n31; identities, 9, 60, 64, 69, 72, 75, 83, 125, 150, 177–78, 182, 190, 195n8, 211n37; immigrants, 7–9, 15, 127–31; Kaepernick, Colin, 187–88; labor, 98–99; literature, 23–24, 27, 69, 72–75, 78–80, 81–89, 97; Mills, Charles, 45, 206n61; nationalism, 5, 24, 26, 27–28, 81, 148, 158, 195n8; O’Brien, Tim, 78–80; Operation Homecoming, 46–48; people of color, 8, 22, 195n8; race, 2–6, 8, 9, 27, 45, 72–73, 94, 130, 135, 148, 150–51, 177, 182, 191, 195n8, 197n12, 199n41, 206n61, 219n15; refugees, 85–86, 154, 156–57, 161, 175, 177–78; scholarship, 81, 195n8; Select Committee on POW/ MIA Affairs, 49–50; Springsteen, Bruce, 108–11, 113–14, 116, 119–20, 125,

266 |

Index

whiteness (continued) 151; Stallone, Sylvester, 5–6, 27, 119, 126; trauma, 60; trauma hero, 32, 204n11; Trump, Donald, 180–83, 187, 190–91; Vietnam War, 4, 6, 15–19, 25–27, 130, 138–39, 154, 156, 158, 160–61, 165, 188–89, 226n26; violence, 16; VVAW, 36, 38, 44; VVM, 59; war, 4–6, 16, 200n48; white ethnics, 7–10, 13, 69, 124–32, 135, 138–39, 141–44, 148, 150, 198n24, 199n41, 219n15, 220n21; white men, 27 whiteness and Vietnam veterans: conservative-liberal divide, 183; films, 2, 126, 147, 148; heartland rock, 92–95, 119, 125; identities, 4–5, 211n37; literature, 18–19, 22, 27–28, 72, 85–89; nationalism, 195n8; PTSD, 34; race, 4–5, 19, 27, 34, 195n8; refugees, 85–86, 157, 158, 165, 175, 177–78; Trump, Donald, 180–83; Wheeler, John, III, 60; white ethnics, 9, 126 white supremacy, 5, 33, 45, 48, 130, 159–60, 182–83, 197nn10,11, 206n61, 226n26 Who’ll Stop the Rain (Reisz), 96 Why We Were in Vietnam (Podhoretz), 20–21 Wilkinson, Harvie, 12–13 Will, George, 92–93, 110–11, 116–17 Wilson, George, 166 Wilson, Woodrow, 31–32

Winant, Howard, 83, 195n8 Winter Soldier Investigation, 35 Wise Blood (O’Connor), 66 Witness to an Extreme Century (Lifton), 41 Witness to War (1985), 123 women: affirmative action, 11, 52–53, 72–73; Black women, 64; disabilities, 33; Disco Demolition Night, 98; films, 136, 144, 222n77; heartland rock, 101, 116; military-football complex, 186, 231n31; movements, 14, 86; Southeast Asia, 3; trauma, 31, 39; Trump, Donald, 181–82, 191; Truscott, Lucian, IV, 52; Vietnam War, 114, 217n79; Vietnam Women’s Memorial, 59; VVAW, 44; VVM, 19, 59; Wheeler, John, III, 53–54. See also feminism Woody Guthrie: A Life (Klein), 107 World War II: battle site returns, 163; Black veterans, 5, 63; identities, 42; literature, 62, 63, 66–70, 189, 210n22; My Lai, 43; PTSD, 29–30, 34; race, 9, 18; refugees, 175; trauma, 50–51, 77; VFW, 91. See also GI Bill Wounded Generation (Horne), 51–52 Writers Union of Vietnam, 166 Wurtz, Jay, 171–72 “Youngstown” (Springsteen), 118 Zablocki, Clement, 46 Zengerle, Joseph, 53

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