Martin G. Clemis. The Control War

It now feels highly repetitive, and even trite, to write that the Vietnam War remains a subject of preoccupation in the United States. The American experience there all those decades ago has for so long been a national preoccupation (of a distinct sort) that we can both know of it and not really care all that much. The production of films, documentaries, novels, news accounts, memoirs, and books and articles of history continues unabated. Documentarian Ken Burns’s The Vietnam War, at an exhausting eighteen hours, promised to be a final word and to bring “healing.” Unsurprisingly, it did no such thing, sparking considerable debate around too many issues to relate here, especially among historians. Disappointingly, that debate unfolded along well-established political and ideological national cleavages whose origin points are the Vietnam War era. At the same time, the voluminous historiographical output has undergone needed changes in recent years. Historians are exploring new questions about the American experience in Vietnam, offering fresh insight and potentially undermining simplistic binaries of “good” versus “bad” actors during the Cold War. Meredith Lair’s Armed with Abundance (2011), for instance, is a very useful account of consumerism and the American GI in Vietnam, while Michael Kramer’s The Republic of Rock (2013) offers an ambitious analysis of the link between rock music culture’s civic capacity and the experience of the American soldier in Vietnam. While these kinds of approaches and analyses might still be in the minority, it is time Vietnam War historiography grew up and yielded insights beyond who won or lost the Tet Offensive, or whether the media sabotaged an otherwise winning war effort. I believe the best of the historiography is moving in this direction.

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