“The ones you sent”: American veterans and legacies of the Vietnam War

This dissertation analyzes prominent political mobilizations of Vietnam War veterans between the 1960s and the post-9/11 U.S. military interventions to reveal how their organizing efforts have been fundamentally informed by the social and institutional relationship between the Vietnam-era military and the nation that sent it to war. The existing literature on the Vietnam War’s legacies often underscores the historical influence of political elites and the explanatory value of popular culture to the extent that it elides less prominent historical actors. By contrast, this dissertation provides a more contested and contingent narrative of the Vietnam War’s repercussions by demonstrating how veterans mobilized the different lessons they derived from their experiences to engage their society. Rather than relying primarily on analysis of the speeches of political officials, or the films and music of commercial artists, this social historical study is grounded in sources produced by veterans—their own oral history interviews, correspondence, organizational papers, public statements, and literary production—to expose their attempts to communicate the consequences of their war experiences to their fellow Americans. It reveals connections between ideologically disparate political projects, and traces the ways that those efforts have influenced changes in American ideas about military service since the Vietnam War. Exploring veterans’ attempts to build communities and engage the larger society, this study argues that while political ideology often divided veterans, the social context of their military service generated common concerns. Most significantly, military manpower policies that buffered the war’s impositions on middle-class domestic life contributed to a perception among veterans that Americans at home were disengaged from the burdens of the war they fought. While the troubling implications of U.S. intervention in Vietnam turned popular opinion against the war by the late 1960s, Americans responded with quiet, conflicted apprehension more than active opposition. Veterans often interpreted the consequent silence as indifference, and this observation compelled them to come to terms with their war experiences in a position of social and moral distance from their society. This social estrangement contradicted prevalent assumptions that war was a matter of exigency that entailed shared sacrifice. Vietnam War veterans’ ideological diversity reflected their need to give individualized meaning to their experiences, given the limits of their society’s collective assimilation of the war’s consequences. Yet the ideas and activism that drove their mobilizations in the decades since the 1960s reflected in different ways a common yearning for social and moral reciprocity that was rooted in the inequities of the Vietnam War mobilization, and which remains pertinent to the contemporary relationship between the armed forces and the society it serves.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference