Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War - Tapa dura

A fascinating examination of a long and painful chapter of American history.--General (Ret.) Wesley K. Clark|""Michael Allen's rich and beautifully written book becomes the new starting point for understanding Vietnam era POW/MIA politics and their centrality to American history over the last four decades. It is a splendid achievement and will serve as a model for the study of the cultural politics of war and memory in the twentieth century.""--Mark Bradley, The University of Chicago|""Michael Allen offers a compelling and nuanced analysis of a difficult topic, combining archival rigor with a true sensitivity to the tangled emotions of Americans in the years following the nation's loss in Vietnam.""--Beth Bailey, author of America's Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force|""Allen's first-rate analysis deals with an extremely important and much misunderstood and oversimplified subject, and it does so with authority, originality, subtlety, and nuance. It will become required reading for all students of the Vietnam War, changing the way in which the POW and MIA controversies are understood and interpreted.""--Robert McMahon, Ohio State University

Fewer Americans were captured or missing during the Vietnam War than in any previous major military conflict in U.S. history. Yet despite their small numbers, American POWs inspired an outpouring of concern that slowly eroded support for the war. Michael J. Allen reveals how wartime loss transformed U.S. politics well before, and long after, the war's official end. Throughout the war's last years and in the decades since, Allen argues, the effort to recover lost warriors was as much a means to establish responsibility for their loss as it was a search for answers about their fate. Though millions of Americans and Vietnamese took part in that effort, POW and MIA families and activists dominated it. Insisting that the war was not over ""until the last man comes home,"" this small, determined group turned the unprecedented accounting effort against those they blamed for their suffering. Allen demonstrates that POW/MIA activism prolonged the hostility between the United States and Vietnam even as the search for the missing became the basis for closer ties between the two countries in the 1990s. Equally important, he explains, POW/MIA families' disdain for the antiwar left and contempt for federal authority fueled the conservative ascendancy after 1968. Mixing political, cultural, and diplomatic history, Until the Last Man Comes Home presents the full and lasting impact of the Vietnam War in ways that are both familiar and surprising.