Patrick Hagopian. The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of Healing. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009. xv + 553 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-55849-693-4.

Reviewed by Laura Jones (Louisiana State University)
Published on H-Disability (July, 2010)
Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison (University of Glasgow)

The Discourse of Healing as an American Rite of Assent

For a book based on such a vast amount of research, one that is so broad in its scope, Patrick Hagopian’s The Vietnam War in American Memory remains remarkably focused on two central arguments: that the putatively apolitical rhetoric of “healing trauma” at the heart of Vietnam War memorials was in fact deeply political, and moreover that “the memorials played a part in the hegemonic politics of Reaganism” (p. 17). The discourse of “healing,” he demonstrates, operated in complex ways. On the one hand, advocates of memorials hoped to help to heal the psychological wounds of veterans, including the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that was first diagnosed in the wake of the war and was believed to be exacerbated by their often hostile reception back home. On the other hand, it was aimed at a traumatized American public that was suffering from what Ronald Reagan and others called “the Vietnam syndrome,” a reluctance to engage in military operations abroad that they feared enervated a once-strong nation and, more immediately, hindered the Reagan administration’s desire to intervene in Central America. Ultimately, he claims, “memorials promoted ‘healing’ by evading some of the crucial moral and political questions” that were raised by the war (p. 16).

Hagopian makes his arguments by meticulously tracing and analyzing the rhetoric of key figures and organizations in the memorialization process--veterans’ groups with various takes on the war as well as government officials. He includes cogent rhetorical analyses of the memorials themselves; among the readings he offers that resonate with the scholar of disability is his analysis of wounded soldiers in Vietnam War memorial statuary. Although soldiers injured in the fighting often lost limbs or sustained serious, and very visible, injuries, “most of the wounded GIs in Vietnam War statuary are oddly whole--they suffer and die decorously, without so much as a tiny bullet hole” (p. 273).

Such readings are one point of interest for the scholar of disability, for whom Hagopian offers multiple entries on the topic. Chapter 1 focuses on the Vietnam syndrome experienced by the American public as a result of the war and its political and social fallout. Hagopian examines attempts to “rehabilitate” the public to restore the nation’s military strength. This discourse is often characterized by the vocabulary of wounds, disability, and trauma, a phenomenon that the author explores but not comprehensively; here and throughout the book, he offers generative possibilities for disability scholars.

Chapter 2 offers a particularly relevant history of PTSD in the context of the “cultural construction of Vietnam veterans” (p. 49). For Hagopian, veterans were saddled with a complex of disability and disabling forces: both the trauma of war itself and their role as “the psychological crucible of the entire country’s doubts and misgivings about the war” (quoting Robert Jay Lifton [p. 53]). He considers various attempts by psychologists and psychiatrists to treat veterans and the complex political implications of their approaches. Among his most cogent and complex readings is of PTSD itself, a diagnosis that was at once instrumental in obtaining treatment for vets and insidious on a number of levels: not only did it have the potential to “pathologize the normal grieving process,” but it also transformed “veterans’ moral repugnance at the war” into illness, functioning as disability scholars know diagnoses often do, by ensuring that “dissidence became pathology” (p. 77). Moreover, he notes, the view of veteran as victim effaces the victimization of Vietnamese civilians, along with the possibility of soldiers’ culpability in civilian suffering. This is one way in which Hagopian demonstrates how the discourse of healing operated to evade difficult questions, questions that his book excavates and asks readers to consider.

In chapters 3 through 6, Hagopian traces the construction of the national Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington DC, offering detailed accounts of the struggle that centered, at bottom, on the question of how to remember a war like this. Hagopian offers an astute reading of Maya Lin’s design, considering it in terms of gender, nationality, and class; he interestingly, and persuasively, identifies an “anxiety about contamination” in many reactions to Lin’s design (p. 104). Not all of his analyses are as satisfying as this one; perhaps they could not possibly be, given the sheer volume of speeches, editorials, films, and back room conversations that he is working with. Still, Hagopian’s interpretation of The Deer Hunter (1978) and of Reagan’s 1988 Veteran’s Day speech, among others, seem to beg for a closer reading, for the same kind of acumen he offers in other places throughout the book.

Chapter 7 focuses on one veterans’ group aimed at countering the discourse of antiwar veterans’ groups and PTSD. Hagopian reads the Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program as part of the Reagan administration’s rehabilitation program for a traumatized public, an effort to get past the Vietnam syndrome that hindered support of military commitment in South and Central America. Again we see here how dissent is discursively constructed as pathology: antiwar sentiment becomes the target of “rehabilitation.” In chapters 8 to 10, he offers close readings of state memorials, focusing on the depiction of gender, ethnicity, and nationality in statuary and the ways in which a putatively inclusive approach to ethnicity functioned ideologically. In chapter 11, he circles back (in a way that is somewhat disorienting but ultimately logical) to “the wall” and traces modifications to the national memorial in the past two decades since its construction.

While Hagopian only occasionally considers people with disabilities here, he consistently focuses on the language of disability and its deployment in public discourse. That language, he argues, characterizes the way we remember the Vietnam War in the United States; it has allowed us to depoliticize it and to consider U.S. soldiers as passive victims. Used in this way, he demonstrates such language distorts and ill-serves veterans themselves, civilian victims of war, and our collective understanding of history. The “plaintive discourse of wounds and healing” represents “a flight from critical judgments of the war” that ultimately evades the question of national policy and silences dissent (pp. 400-402). Hagopian’s conclusion--that what is cast as rehabilitation and healing is in fact social and political hegemony at work--resonates powerfully with the work of many disability scholars. He retraces this argument with remarkable clarity and depth in the conclusion to the book, which for that reason is worth reading first. It reveals the book’s powerful and generative argument, one that will benefit from further development and exploration from the perspective of disability studies.

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Citation: Laura Jones. Review of Hagopian, Patrick, The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of Healing. H-Disability, H-Net Reviews. July, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30607

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