Rethinking the Vietnam War: Orthodoxy and

Nearly four decades after its end, the Vietnam War con-tinues to divide opinion. According to one recent edited volume, Vietnam remains ‘the war that never ends’ (Anderson and Ernst, 2007). Ever since the war did in fact end, and most recently in powerful books by Allen (2009) and Hagopian (2009), historians have chronicled the pain-ful legacy of a conflict that haunts the American imagina-tion. Perhaps more than any other episode in US diplomatic history, the memory of Vietnam remains politically loaded and emotionally fraught: witness the 2000 and 2004 pre-sidential elections, in which Democrats Al Gore and John Kerry wrestled with Republican George W. Bush over the war’s meaning for contemporary America. Vietnam was not simply a metaphor for political divisions between lib-erals and conservatives; it was actually a campaign issue i