The Remains of War: Bodies, Politics, and the Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted For in Southeast Asia
298
The Remains of War: Bodies, Politics, and the Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted For in Southeast Asia
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Overview
Hawley combines the theoretical insights of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Emmanuel Levinas with detailed research into the history of the movement to recover the remains of soldiers missing in Vietnam. He examines the practices that constitute the Defense Department's accounting protocol: the archival research, archaeological excavation, and forensic identification of recovered remains. He considers the role of the American public and the families of missing soldiers in demanding the release of pows and encouraging the recovery of the missing; the place of the body of the Vietnam veteran within the war's legacy; and the ways that memorials link individual bodies to the body politic. Highlighting the contradictions inherent in the recovery effort, Hawley reflects on the ethical implications of the massive endeavor of the American government and many officials in Vietnam to account for the remains of American soldiers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822335382 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/13/2005 |
| Series: | Politics, History, and Culture Series |
| Pages: | 298 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.62(d) |
About the Author
Thomas M. Hawley is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington.
Read an Excerpt
the remains of war
Bodies, Politics, and the Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted For in Southeast AsiaBy THOMAS M. HAWLEY
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2005 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3538-2
Chapter One
Body Trouble
Prospects for successful recovery and identification of remains of U.S. personnel in Southeast Asia diminish significantly with the passage of time. -U.S. Congress, House, 1976: 204
We have an absolute, sacred obligation to do whatever we can to look for our missing in action. We will do that and not fail in that effort. We place the return of our missing in action as the very highest of our priorities. -U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, in Kozaryn, 2000
On May 14, 1998, at Arlington National Cemetery just outside Washington, D.C., the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from the Vietnam War was opened and the remains removed for purposes of forensic examination. With the assent of the Department of Defense and the support of organizations dedicated to advancing the cause of families with relatives still unaccounted for in Southeast Asia, that examination was performed at the request of the family who had come to believe the remains in the tomb might be those of its loved one. Ever since its interment in 1984, speculation had grown that the identity of the body in the tomb, though for the moment unknown, might notnecessarily be unknowable. Improvements in forensic identification procedures, for example, had made even the most minute and highly fragmentary quantities of human remains potentially identifiable, while the increasingly refined technique of DNA analysis enabled scientists to determine the identity of such remains in the absence of the unique morphological or dental characteristics normally used for such purposes. Indeed, in June 1998, the Department of Defense announced that the unknown soldier from the Vietnam War was in fact U.S. Air Force First Lieutenant Michael J. Blassie of St. Louis. The identification thus ended a lengthy period of uncertainty in the Blassie family as to Michael's fate and whereabouts after his plane was shot down in 1972 near An Loc in South Vietnam.
While the identification of Michael Blassie's remains may have put an end to the episode for his family, it marked both a chronological and a conceptual continuation of efforts by the United States to account for soldiers still missing in Southeast Asia as a result of the Vietnam War. Chronologically, that effort began well before the war was over with attempts in the late 1960s to ensure the humane treatment and eventual release of American prisoners of war and the repatriation of the remains of those killed in action. Now in its fourth decade, the search is primarily concerned with recovering and positively identifying the remains of just over eighteen hundred American servicemen killed during the Vietnam War whose bodies were not recovered at the time of their deaths. As in previous American wars, however, a certain number of those killed in Southeast Asia were not identifiable, and so an unknown soldier from the Vietnam War eventually found a place beside his compatriots amid the symbols of the nation at Arlington National Cemetery. Such commemoration has been a long-standing tradition in Western nations, a means of symbolizing and honoring the sacrifice of one for the good of the democratic whole (Mosse, 1990; Inglis, 1993). It was thus remarkable that the nameless body of the Vietnam War unknown soldier later became a problem to be solved, one so serious that it ultimately trumped the symbolic value that had for so long attached to precisely that anonymity. At the same time, the problem was unique in that the concern shown for the identity of the Vietnam unknown soldier was not extended to the anonymous soldiers with whom he had shared sacred space for the previous fourteen years. Indeed, no one has seriously proposed that the representational innards of the other tombs dedicated to unknown warriors be eviscerated in the manner that eventually became the only possible course of action for the Vietnam War unknown. That Michael Blassie managed to make it out of the Tomb of the Unknowns and into a marked grave at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in Missouri thus represented the apotheosis of the peculiar logic that animates efforts by the United States to account for missing Vietnam War soldiers, an effort unlike any undertaken by any nation in history.
Put briefly, that logic is one in which the body is invested with the sole power of adjudicating the many questions comprised in the contentious legacy of the Vietnam War. Not simply a moment of relief and closure for his family, positive determination of Blassie's identity answered a series of questions that have become an integral part of the post-Vietnam War era in the United States and that, until the moment of his identification, could not be laid to rest. In particular, the question of precisely what had happened to Lieutenant Blassie (he was killed in action) was now resolved, thus definitively refuting the possibility that the Vietnamese had held him back as a prisoner of war. Further, Blassie's identified body indicated the veracity of the U.S. government's attempts to account for missing Vietnam War soldiers, attempts whose sincerity has long been called into question by family organizations, members of Congress, various intelligence services, and the public. Still more, identification of the Vietnam unknown soldier was a victory of sorts and not an insubstantial one given the sense that the defeat in Vietnam has lingered with the United States in all sorts of unpleasant ways in the years since the withdrawal of American forces in 1973. Broadly, Blassie's body generated certainty, for his family in the form of a body that could be properly interred and mourned and for the nation as confirmation of its ability to resolve, if only incrementally, one of the major ambiguities of the Vietnam War.
Yet the quest for certainty in the form of the identified body itself marks a dramatic change from previous wars, in which circumstantial evidence often sufficed to account for missing soldiers. The prior sufficiency of such evidence marked the acceptance of an unavoidable, if unwelcome, side effect of mechanized warfare, namely, the permanent obliteration of the bodies of some combatants. The uniqueness of the current accounting standard that requires the identified body is further dramatized by the United States government's own admission that those soldiers who failed to return from Southeast Asia in any form are in fact deceased and that no credible evidence exists to suggest otherwise. Thus, rather than expressing uncertainty concerning a given soldier's fate, unaccounted for in this context refers strictly to the absence of the body, meaning in turn that to account for missing Vietnam War soldiers requires the repatriation and positive identification of their remains. These circumstances are still more significant when the numbers of those missing from other American wars-roughly eight thousand from the Korean War and approximately seventy-eight thousand from World War II-are borne in mind. Were it a question of overall quantity, one might expect that the bulk of American personnel recovery efforts would be directed toward those missing from these two wars. Yet such an expectation would fail to account for the vast political, cultural, and ontological significance assumed by the body of the absent Vietnam War soldier. Among other things, that body has come to stand for deceit on the part of both the Vietnamese and U.S. governments, who have allegedly prolonged its absence in ways large and small. Further, it indicates the failure of the United States to truly end the war in Vietnam: some of its warriors, after all, have failed to return home. Perhaps still more compelling, the absent body stands as the most material indication of the defeat that occurred in Southeast Asia, an ever-present reminder of the catastrophe that continues to afflict the American body politic. Its recovery, therefore, functions materially in the resolution of these many ambiguities and ontologically through what it indicates about the United States. As President George H. W. Bush once claimed, "The POW/MIA [Prisoner of War/Missing in Action] issue is a question of honor, of oath-sworn commitment kept. It's a Nation's test of its own worth, measured in the life of one lone individual" (U.S. President, 1993: 1933). That the body of the Vietnam War unknown could not rest in peace until its identity as Michael Blassie had been positively determined speaks to the intensity of the interpretive battles that have been waged over the meaning of missing and unidentified military bodies in the years since the end of the Vietnam War.
Such battles are an initial confirmation of this book's central premise, namely, that the contentious legacy of the Vietnam War is first and foremost one of bodies and that this circumstance can be most clearly observed in U.S. attempts to account for soldiers still missing from that war. And while the body of the unaccounted-for soldier obviously figures prominently in that effort, the search for the missing implicates other bodies as well, in particular the identified body that occasionally results from forensic examination of remains, the body of the Vietnam veteran, and the American body politic. The significance of these bodies, however, is not simply given in the nature of postwar things; neither is it an expression of antecedent truth about them. These bodies are not to be understood as substantives to which "we," in some equally substantive sense, enjoy unambiguous recourse in our effort to make sense of what happened to those who never came home. Rather, the bodies at issue in the search for missing soldiers are better understood as effects of the various practices that enable them to assume intelligible meaning. They are the result of particular ways of representing the post-Vietnam War era and one of the ways in which the intelligibility of that era-and, by extension, the Vietnam War itself-is made possible.
KNOWING THE ABSENT BODY
In view of these considerations, this book adopts a genealogical perspective as a means of exploring more thoroughly how the body has come to assume such significance within the accounting for American soldiers missing as a result of the Vietnam War. In the context of this study, genealogy forestalls the quest to arrive at the truth of the missing, some unambiguous claim as to what "really happened" to those who never returned from the war in Vietnam. The reasons for this forbearance include the absence of any single explanation concerning the fate and whereabouts of those soldiers still unaccounted for in Vietnam or why these particular soldiers became so important while those missing from other wars did not. Indeed, one of the greatest difficulties in analyzing the accounting effort is the sheer quantity of theories, explanations, accusations, and counteraccusations concerning the fate of the missing. Moreover, evidence in support of these theories, while in some cases plausible, often must be believed in order to be seen. As a result, the quest for truth has not infrequently been complicit in the very problem its pursuit is allegedly intended to solve. About the only conclusion that can be reached with any degree of certainty is that the absent bodies of Vietnam War service personnel have beguiled the United States like no other absent bodies in the history of the republic.
In lieu of a quest for truth, genealogy begins with the present and works backward. This does two things. First, it encourages a view of the present as peculiar and therefore in need of explanation rather than as the realization of an immanent essence whose determining features lie outside the realm of human cognition. Second, working backward from a distinctive present requires inquiry into the (often obscure) conditions that enabled the emergence of a given thing in the first place. Accordingly, genealogy is uninterested in the sort of boilerplate historiography that seeks to trace the evolutionary arc of history. Instead, it looks for moments of discontinuity, focuses on the production rather than the discovery of knowledge, and inquires into the interpretive categories upon which the very possibility of the present rests (Foucault, 1977). In light of the complicated twists and turns taken by the search for missing soldiers in Southeast Asia, a genealogical perspective helps to situate the political, cultural, and historical events that contributed to the production of this entirely peculiar present.
In virtue of these analytical commitments, genealogy's relationship to the body is especially clear; it is "situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body" (Foucault, 1977: 148). Accordingly, the genealogical insight perhaps most central to this analysis is the admonition that, short of a suspect process of abstraction, there is no such thing as "the body" per se. In virtue of this, all claims about the body must be rendered provisionally. Such caution stems from the observation that, when treated as given or beyond the purview of critical reflection, invocations of the body all too often deny gendered or racialized elements of embodiment, the importance of materiality to an understanding of bodies, or the epistemic conditions required to speak of the body at all. Genealogy thus explicitly foregrounds these circumstances in the act of directing attention to the conditions of possibility under which bodies come to be and the various practices through which corporeal intelligibility is secured.
If, in light of this epistemological discretion, there is no such thing as the body apart from the interpretive conditions that enable its emergence as such, then an analysis of the bodies at issue in U.S. efforts to account for missing Vietnam War soldiers must explain how those bodies have been represented in the years since the end of the war. A genealogical perspective is helpful once again because it emphasizes discourse as a way of assessing how the body has assumed meaning and value within that effort. Discourse can be thought of here as the rules and procedures that condition the meaningfulness of the things to which any given language refers (Shapiro, 1992). For this reason discourse is often said to be productive. Absent some means by which the things of this world can be intelligibly represented, those things remain, quite literally, non-existent. The study of discourse in the context of the search for missing soldiers can therefore be understood as something of a first-order analysis, an effort to determine what has to happen before the objects, categories, and identities comprised in the search can even be talked about, much less understood.
On this basis, analyzing the bodies at issue in the search for absent soldiers in terms of their discursive antecedents entails the acceptance of two closely interrelated and by now quite familiar claims. First, language is not a transparent tool to be used in representing a pre-given reality but is instead opaque. Hence, the process of ascribing words to things is never neutral. It must be scrutinized with a view toward the power relations and authority structures that not only permit the appearance of meaningful statements but also secure their meaning. J. L. Austin's (1975) well-known example of the phrase "I now pronounce you man and wife" illustrates the point. The very possibility of this phrase depends at one level on the authority of (in this case) the priest to back it up. Not just anyone can utter it and have it mean the union of one man and one woman in matrimony. On another level, our ability as listeners to draw this particular meaning from the phrase depends on our understanding of the individual words that compose it, understanding that is by no means automatic but always dependent on some process of acquisition. Both elements here (that is, the authority of the priest and the meaning of the individual words) are thus never given in the nature of things. Instead, they are produced-the authority of the priest via the investiture, the meaning of words via the agreement of some group of speakers. This underscores the importance of focusing on discourse rather than on language, since the genealogical concern is with the production of meaning and value rather than with the relationship between words and things (Shapiro, 1989: 14).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from the remains of war by THOMAS M. HAWLEY Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix1. Body Trouble 1
2. From Unrecoverable to Unaccounted For 39
3. The Body of the Accounted-For Soldier 81
4. "Our Stateside MIAs": The Body of the Vietnam Veteran 115
5. Practices of Memorialization: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Tomb of the Vietnam War Unknown Soldier, and the POW/MIA Flag 158
6. The Ethics of Accounting 211
Epilogue. Same as It Ever Was 242
Notes 253
Bibliography 261
Index 277