Interchange: Legacies of the Vietnam War

The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950 (2000) and is the coeditor, with Marilyn B. Young, of Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars (forthcoming), a collection that brings together leading scholars to explore the local, national, and transnational dimensions of the Vietnam conflict. In an echo of t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of American history (Bloomington, Ind.) Ind.), 2006-09, Vol.93 (2), p.452-490
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bush, George W
Cold wars
Communism
Emotions
International relations
Legacies
Memory disorders
Military history
Military strategy
Occupations
Postwar reconstruction
Soldiers
Southeast Asian culture
United States history
Veterans
Vietnam War
War
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Summary:The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950 (2000) and is the coeditor, with Marilyn B. Young, of Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars (forthcoming), a collection that brings together leading scholars to explore the local, national, and transnational dimensions of the Vietnam conflict. In an echo of the structure of Michel Foucault's "repressive hypothesis," Americans talked incessantly about the war by complaining about the amnesia into which they had fallen.46 But even if there was a lapse of attention in the immediate postwar period, this ended in 1980 not only with the acceptance of PTSD in psychiatric vocabulary, but with the signing of legislation authorizing construction of a Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Washington Mall, which in turn set off a great wave of memorial construction in the 1980s. Veterans of the "good war," World War II, returned to a jobs-rich economy and received more practical help from the government in the form of the G.I. Bill of Rights, which provided educational benefits and lowcost housing loans; on the emotional front, though, they were silent veterans who never achieved recognition of the emotional and psychological burdens they suffered after service.
ISSN:0021-8723
1936-0967
1945-2314
DOI:10.2307/4486244