American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (56 page)

“spat upon vet” is a postwar myth
:
Jerry Lembcke,
The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam
(New York: New York University Press, 1998).

there might have been
 . . . collective acknowledgment:
Charles R. Figley and Seymour Leventman, eds.,
Strangers at Home: Vietnam Veterans Since the War
(New York: Praeger, 1980).

Kojak
:
Hagopian,
The Vietnam War in American Memory
, pp. 67–68.

Vietnam Veterans of America
:
Scott,
Vietnam Veterans Since the War
, pp. 75–76, 92–94, 111–14; Edwin A. Martini,
Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), pp. 148–49, 174–75.

Bobby Muller
 . . . Bundy:
Willenson,
The Bad War
, pp. 374–75.

a firestorm of controversy
:
Marita Sturken,
Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 51–58.

“to promote the healing”
:
Hagopian,
The Vietnam War in American Memory
, pp. 82–83.

“makes no political statement”
:
Ibid.
,
p. 234.

“Today I’m not ashamed”
:
New York Times
, May 7, 1985.

“like some dark family secret”
:
The tape-recorded comment of one of my students during a class discussion at MIT in 1995.

Denver survey
:
Alexander Cockburn,
Los Angeles Times
, March 1, 1991. The study was conducted by Sut Jhally, Justin Lewis, and Michael Morgan, “Public Knowledge and Misconceptions,” in H. Mowana et al., eds.,
The Triumph of the Image: The Media’s War in the Persian Gulf—An International Perspective
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992).

POW/MIA flag
:
H. Bruce Franklin,
M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), pp. 3–5, 180.

“a symbol of our Nation’s concern”
:
http://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title36-section902&num=0&edition=prelim.

Americans still missing
:
Franklin,
M.I.A
., p. 11.

no closure until every last man was accounted for
:
Allen,
Until the Last Man Comes Home
, pp. 137–78; on the ways representations of actual U.S. POWs help explain shifts in American family life from the 1960s to the 1970s, see Natasha Zaretsky,
No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 25–70.

“the highest national priority”
:
Franklin,
M.I.A
., pp. 138–45.

“barbaric use of our prisoners”
:
Nixon speech, April 7, 1971, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=2972; Schell,
Time of Illusion
, p. 231.

great political use
:
Martini,
Invisible Enemies
, pp. 21–24, 163–68, 193–203.

69 percent of Americans believed
:
Franklin,
M.I.A
., pp. xv, 180.

photograph of three men
:
Allen,
Until the Last Man Comes Home
, pp. 269–70.

POW films
:
Susan Jeffords,
Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), pp. 28–41; Susan Jeffords,
The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), especially pp. 116–43; Martini,
Invisible Enemies
, pp. 121–28; Franklin,
M.I.A
., pp. 140–64; John Carlos Rowe and Rick Berg,
The Vietnam War and American Culture
(New York: Columbia University Press), p. 290.

electric shock
:
A judicious account is offered in Darius Rejali,
Democracy and Torture
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 174–80.

shrunken and defeated
:
For a brilliant analysis of
Rambo
and actor Sylvester Stallone, see Susan Faludi,
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man
(New York: William Morrow, 1999), pp. 359–406.

C
HAPTER
N
INE
: “T
HE
P
RIDE
I
S
B
ACK
”

“not a smidgen of androgyny”
:
George Will, “A Yankee Doodle Springsteen,”
Washington Post
, September 13, 1984; Marc Dolan,
Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock ’n’ Roll
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), pp. 218–20.

strenuous bodybuilding
:
Peter Ames Carlin,
Bruce
(New York: Touchstone, 2012), pp. 301–2.

they were politely rejected
:
Jack Doyle, “Reagan and Springsteen, 1984,” PopHistoryDig.com, April 14, 2012, http://www.pophistorydig.com/?tag=ronald-reagan-bruce-springsteen.

Reagan
 . . . campaign appearance:
http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1984/91984c.htm.

“The President was mentioning my name”
:
Louis P. Masur,
Runaway Dream: Born to Run and Bruce Springsteen’s American Vision
(New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), p. 157; Jim Cullen,
Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), pp. 19–20. Music critic Greil Marcus described
Nebraska
as “the most convincing statement of resistance and refusal that Ronald Reagan’s U.S.A. has yet elicited from any artist or any politician.” Cited in Dave Marsh,
Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts
(New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 380.

“It’s morning again in America”
:
Gil Troy,
Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 161–63; Will Bunch,
Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy
(New York: Free Press, 2010), p. 101.

“it’s not morning in Pittsburgh”
:
Cited in Craig Hansen Werner,
A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), p. 247.

These lyrics are about suffering and shame
:
For an insightful historical contextualization of the song, see Jefferson R. Cowie and Lauren Boehm, “Dead Man’s Town: ‘Born in the U.S.A.,’ Social History, and Working-Class Identity,”
American Quarterly
, vol. 58, no. 2, June 2006, pp. 353–78.

“He wants to find something real”
:
Jefferson R. Cowie,
Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
(New York: New Press, 2012), p. 360.

Reagan
 . . . in an inaugural address:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=43130.

“Remembering Vietnam”
:
This advertorial appeared in
Atlantic
, May 1985, p. 9.

“The two men epitomize”
:
New York
, May 16, 1988, p. 23; Peter Wyden,
The Unknown Iacocca
(New York: William Morrow, 1987), p. 180.

“This jeep is a museum piece”
:
Harry Haines, “‘They Were Called and They Went’: The Political Rehabilitation of the Vietnam Veteran,” in Dittmar and Michaud,
From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film
, p. 81.

unifying tribute to military service
:
David Blight,
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001).

“The Pride Is Back”
:
Marsh,
Bruce Springsteen
, pp. 624–26; Cullen,
Born in the U.S.A.
, pp. 76–77.

spot for the Plymouth Reliant
:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w81hypmDFvo.

“best original music” award
:
Dave Marsh,
Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s
(New York: Pantheon, 1987), p. 426.

All negative thoughts must be purged
:
Anthony Robbins,
Unlimited Power
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), pp. 75, 85, 93 for examples.

“Born in East L.A.”
:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OwPPOu1yk4.

“model minority”
:
Ellen D. Wu,
The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Rosalind S. Chou and Joe R. Feagin,
The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism
(Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008).

Vincent Chin
:
Frank H. Wu, “Why Vincent Chin Matters,”
New York Times
, June 22, 2012.

Japan-bashing
:
Newsweek
, February 2, 1987. Also,
Time
ran a cover featuring a grotesquely fat sumo wrestler squaring off against a muscular Uncle Sam under the title “Trade Wars: The U.S. Gets Tough With Japan,”
Time
, April 13, 1987.

“we’ll have to drop another bomb”
:
Michael Crichton,
Rising Sun
(New York: Knopf, 1992), p. 258.

appropriated the countercultural zeitgeist
:
Thomas Frank,
Conquest of the Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 137, 166, 169.

Unsell the War
:
Mitchell Hall, “Unsell the War: Vietnam and Antiwar Advertising,”
Historian
, vol. 58, issue 1, September 1995, pp. 69–86.

“I used to be really proud of this country”
:
Susan A. Brewer,
Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 222.

Jane Fonda
:
Mary Hershberger,
Jane Fonda’s War: A Political Biography of an Antiwar Icon
(New York: New Press, 2005); Jerry Lembcke,
Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).

Bush branded Michael Dukakis
:
John Balzar, “Bush Says Dukakis Is ‘Far Outside’ Mainstream on Defense,”
Los Angeles Times
, August 5, 1988.

“America is flag city”
:
New York Times
, September 17, 1988, p. 8.

[George H. W. Bush’s 1988] acceptance speech
:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25955.

Dukakis’s wife, Kitty, burning an American flag
:
Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover,
Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars?: The Trivial Pursuit of the Presidency, 1988
(New York: Warner Books, 1989), p. 402.

“Swift-boaters” declared Kerry “unfit”
:
Allen,
Until the Last Man Comes Home
, pp. 296–99.

A study of twelve
 . . . history textbooks:
James W. Loewen,
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
(New York: Touchstone, 1996), pp. 246–49.

students said the shooter
:
Franklin,
Vietnam and Other American Fantasies
, pp. 14–17.

“the side of the police state”
:
Malcolm Browne,
The New Face of War
(New York: Bantam, 1986), p. 7.

the book’s original 1965 cover
:
Malcolm Browne,
The New Face of War
(New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).

Top Gun
:
Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard,
The Hollywood War Machine: U.S. Militarism and Popular Culture
(Paradigm, 2006).

sabotage and protest by active-duty sailors, and
 . . . pilots:
Franklin,
Vietnam and Other American Fantasies
, pp. 65–70.

The
A-Team
backstory
:
Alasdair Spark, “The Soldier at the Heart of the War: The Myth of the Green Berets in the Popular Culture of the Vietnam Era,”
Journal of American Studies
(British Association for American Studies), April 1984, pp. 29–48.

“We could
 . . . hold our ground”:
Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway,
We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang—The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam
(New York: Random House, 1992), pp. xviii–xx, 345.

C
HAPTER
T
EN
: N
O
M
ORE
V
IETNAMS

“Each train that goes by here”
:
S. Brian Willson,
Blood on the Tracks
(Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), p. 211.