Until The Last Man Comes Home, by Michael J. Allen

Until The Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs and the Unending Vietnam War, by Michael J. Allen
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2009
305 pages plus notes, Bibliography and Index. A few photos scattered throughout book
Library: 959.70437 ALL

Description
Fewer Americans were captured or missing during the Vietnam War than in any previous major military conflict in US history. Yet despite their small numbers, American POWs inspired an outpouring of concern that slowly eroded support for the war, while the ceaseless search for MIAs perpetuated American doubts and divisions into the 21st century. Bringing exhaustive archival research to the one arena where Americans consistently struggled over the causes and consequences of their nation's defeat in Vietnam - the recovery of lost warriors - Michael J. Allen reveals how wartime loss transformed US politics well before, and long after, the war's official end.

Throughout the war's last years and in the decades since, Allen argues, the effort to recover lost warriors was as much a means to establish responsibility for their loss as it was a search for answers about their fate. Though millions of Americans, and a surprising number of Vietnamese, took part in that effort, POW and MIA families dominated it. Insisting that the war was not over until "the last man comes home," this small, determined group turned the unprecedented accounting effort against those they blamed for their suffering.

Allen demonstrates that POW/MIA activism prolonged the hostility between the United States and Vietnam even as the search for the missing became the basis for closer ties between the two countries in the 1990s. Equally important, he explains, POW/MIA families disdain for the antiwar left and contempt for federal authority fueled the conservative ascendancy after 1968 even as it made it difficult for conservative leaders to resurrect prewar visions of national unity or to wield military power with the ease of an earlier era. Mixing political, cultural, and diplomatic history, Until the Last Man Comes Home presents the full and lasting impact of the Vietnam War in ways that are both familiar and surprising.

Table of Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction. The Politics of Loss
1. Go Public: The Construction of Loss.
2. For Us the War Still Goes On: The Limits of Homecoming
3. As it has in the Pas: A Short History of Oblivion
4. Fullest Possible Accounting: The Persistence of the Past
5. The Wilderness Years: Life after Death
6. Highest National Priority: Resurrection and Retribution
7. Not to Close the Door, But to Open It: The Ambiguity of Recovery
Conclusion: This Thing Has Consumed American Politics for Years
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

Photos
--1967 North Vietnamese postage stamp commemorating capture of US POWs (Nguyen Thi Kim Lai escorting sergeant William Robinson)
--President Nixon with wives and mothers of US POWs: Carole Hanson, Louise Mulligan, Sybil Stockdale, Andrea Rander (black), Mary Mearns. White House aide Alexander Butterfield
--VFW magazine cover, "I hope those withdrawal plans include us" May 1971
--Life Sept 29, 1972 cover of POW wife Valerie Kushner
--Three unidentified women waiting for released POWs at Camp Pendleton
--Arthur Burer and Nancy Burer embrace after 7 years
--President Richard Nixon greets returning POW John McCain, with unidentified man
--Bodies of Confederate dead gathered for burial, Antietam 1862
--Unburied Confederate lying on Union soldiers grave
--Crowd observes burial of Unknown Soldier from WWI
--John Fischetti cartoon, Chinese soldier sitting atop American soldier's grave, 1953
Douglas Borgstedt cartoon
--National League of Families Chairman EC Mills, President Gerald Ford, unidentified man
--Unidentified soldiers carrying coffins of returning dead from Vietnam off plane, Travis AFB, 29 Mar 1977
--Lt. Col James Lindbergh Hughes led through streets of Hanoi, 1967 by 2 North Korean guards
--Several unidentified Iranians and blindfolded American hostage, Tehran November 1979
--President Ronald Reagan, 28 Jan 1983
--Soldier of Fortune magazine, Bo Gritz on cover
--President Reagan, unidentified men and soldiers, burial of Vietnam War unknown soldier
--President Bill Clinton, Capt Lawrence Evert, Daniel and David Evert, 2 unidentified North Vietnamese women
--Hanoi Army Museum Director Colonel Nguyen Trong Dai, Senator John Kerry
George Bush July 1992
--President Clinton, John Kerry, John McCain, VP Al Gore, SoS William Christopher, --Defense Secretary William Peery, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake



Ann Mill Griffiths, President Ronald Reagan