The Scar That-Binds: American Culture and the Vietnam War.

Anderson, David L.

The Scar That-Binds: American Culture and the Vietnam War, by Keith Beattie. New York, New York University Press, 1998. x, 230 pp. $40.00.

The Scar That Binds is a vigorous intellectual and ideological assault on Vietnam War revisionism, which has sought to recast the American memory of the war in an "ideology of unity." Keith Beattie argues that healing and unity are a historical constructions. This interdisciplinary, post-modernist cultural analysis of changing representations of the Vietnam War employs the specialized language of literary deconstruction (the words "privilege" and "foreground" used as verbs appear every three pages).

Beattie crafts a provocative argument around three metaphors -- the wound, the voice, and the home -- through which the dominant culture of "white, middle class, politically conservative, heterosexual males" (p. 154) obscured diversity and created an ideologically constructed unity -- an artificial "we." The popular characterization of the Vietnam War as a "wound" created an imperative to heal the wound by transforming the traumatic memory of loss and recrimination into a less painful image. Part of this transformation was to give the Vietnam veteran a "voice." In the early seventies, the veteran of movies and novels was inarticulate and dangerous, but in the 1980s the veteran could be heard in movies like Platoon appealing to the public to overcome division and to embrace unity. The representation of "home" also changed. During, and immediately after the war, the "war at home" divided the nation. By the Reagan era, home had become in political rhetoric and movie portrayals a place of refuge. Through the power of language and imagery, the war that had fragmented the nation became paradoxically the vehicle for uniting America. The scar no longer hurt. The war had ended. It was a therapy purchased, according to Beattie, at the price of historical truth.

This analysis is not entirely new. Others have noted the rehabilitation of the image of war veterans, the decline in domestic acrimony over the war, and the self-deception behind the feel-good revisionist thesis (rejected by most historians) that a united America could have won the war. Beattie brings these cultural trends into sharp focus, however, through new and effective use of lesser-known plays, novels, movies, and other artifacts that "talked back" to the palliative images. The book provides a socially healthy examination of myths and troths, but on several individual points its theoretical preoccupation departs from historical evidence. Much of what Beattie views as constructed since 1969 by the arbiters of American popular culture has its own historical roots in the war and domestic turmoil of the 1960s.

Beattie links healing, unity, defense of the status quo, and Reagan conservatism and thus makes healing appear to be an ideological creation alone. Physical and emotional wounds are real, and their associated suffering is real for victims of post-traumatic stress disorder (a debilitating condition affecting 800,000 veterans but given only passing reference in the book) and for the families and comrades who touch the names on the Vietnam Memorial wall. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton declared in Home from the War that healing occurred in the veteran rap groups with whom he worked in the 1970s. Those men wanted what they had experienced in Vietnam to be remembered. They did not want to be told that what they had done was noble or good. They knew much of it was shameful and bad. They wanted the fear, pain, and evil affirmed as a way of keeping contact with their own sense of humanity and morality. They could reconnect with a positive moral identity by confessing that what they had done or witnessed was not what they knew was good or acceptable in the kind of society in which they wanted to be part. In Achilles in Vietnam, psychiatrist Jonathan Shay describes the reintegration of the warrior into civil society as absolutely essential to the well being of the veteran and of democracy. It is an act of healing and of unity, and it is painfully real, not constructed.

Beattie asserts correctly that popular culture has caricatured the 1960s, but the cultural upheaval that flowed from that decade is even more complex than his study acknowledges. Youth, women, and minorities challenged cultural authority before the U.S. military escalation in Vietnam, and the cultural legacy of the decade is a product of many forces. The author argues that America has experienced a conservatively constructed, hence false, healing since the Vietnam War. In fact, the political cynicism, neoisolationism, and lack of agreement on what the United States stands for in the world demonstrates a lack of closure. The public's rejection of the conservative-led impeachment of Bill Clinton revealed deep cultural division in the country. The unwillingness of national leaders to risk a single American casualty in Kosovo in defense of historic American humanitarian values indicated no agreement on what principles are worth American lives. Instead of cultural hegemony in America, there is evidence of drift, ambiguity, and doubt.

David L. Anderson University of Indianapolis