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The article focuses on the reconstruction of white male identity within the films "The Deer Hunter" and "Coming Home." The author discusses the notions of masculinity and male anxiety, explores the impact of the Vietnam War on American men, and analyses the critical perspective of gender within film.

The article presents an essay which examines he post-war chapters of Lew Pulle's autobiography "Fortunate Son". It cites on the effect of trauma to a survivor's understanding of self in relation to things around him. The article also discusses the memoirs of Vietnam War era which emphasizes the demonstration the problems of resolution.

President Richard M. Nixon and his staff intended his 3 November 1969 Address to the Nation on Vietnam to counteract the growing strength of the antiwar movement. Its appeal to a "Silent Majority" of Americans inspired an impressive outpouring of support, but this response owed as much to White House planning as to public opinion. Drawing on internal White House documents, this article traces administration efforts to secure this response and, then, to claim and promote this new Silent Majority. It demonstrates that White House public-opinion campaigns were designed to maximize control, and not necessarily to change attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most U.S. scholarship on the political history of the First Persian Gulf War covers the general debate between the branches of government or among the international community. Several works address the length and quality of the legislature’s deliberation. The few studies examining veteran’s demographics in Congress mostly do so from a macro perspective. None meaningfully scrutinize the personal military service of individual congressmen or how the sheer quantity of veterans in the 102nd Congress influenced the debate. Correcting this oversight, this article shows how politically influential the personal experiences of so many legislators actually were. I argue that the quantity of veterans in the 101st and 102nd U.S. Congresses demonstrably influenced the character and quality of the debate preceding the war in two ways. First, veterans rendered arguments in the context of military experiences and reached conclusions from a veteran’s as much as a legislator’s perspective. Second, their common wartime participation generated a collegial atmosphere of mutual respect and serious deliberation largely free from normal partisan pressure—which stands in stark contrast to contemporary congressional gridlock. In doing so, I show that permeating this discourse and the emotional, yet civil, debate was a powerful source of historical memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and its effects on the society in the Southern U.S. Topics discussed include the life of Vietnamese people in the U.S. after the war, the process of recruitment to the army during the war, and the works on Vietnamese American studies. Also mentioned is the movie "Mai's America," which focuses on a Vietnamese boy living in the U.S.

The article offers the author's insights on the geography of the Vietnam war. Topics discussed include author's experience teaching courses about development issues in East and Southeast Asia, which treated the Vietnam War as a brief historical interlude, the impact of the Vietnam War on the development and industrial transformation in South Korea, and his hope to widen the connotations of Vietnam to include the impacts of the Vietnam War across Asia.

The article discusses the Vietnamese political party the Vietnamese Communist Party's international relations with revolutionaries and anti-Vietnam War movements in the U.S.during 1960s and 1970s, including in regard to the musical relations between antiwar activist and folk singer Pete Seeger and Vietnamese songwriter Phạm Tuyên. An overview of the Vietnam's role international cooperation between women in the Vietnam War peace movement and national liberation struggles, including to the Vietnamese people's diplomacy in this regard, is provided.

The article offers the author's insights on the case of Chai Soua Vang, Hmong American, and how it depicts in the film "Gran Torino" and racial violence. Topics discussed include the racism on Asian people, the effects of social violence, and the Asian history. Also mentioned are the fight on communism and the effects of Vietnam War to society.

This research note makes the case that if the US and its international allies are to successfully use ‘Local Defence Forces’ (LDF) to overcome counterinsurgency constraints in Afghanistan, current initiatives need to be significantly modified. A key issue is that the Village Stability Operations/Afghan Local Police (VSO/ALP) LDF program is unlikely to be effective in filling security gaps in rural Afghanistan because, much rhetoric to the contrary, it is essentially focused on militarily combating the insurgency rather than fully developing local communities as counterinsurgency resources by winning their support for the Afghan central government. The CIA's Village Defense Program in South Vietnam, a counterinsurgency program that has thus far received cursory attention in current LDF literature, provides a useful counterpoint. Through a comparison of the VDP and VSO/ALP operational patterns, implications are drawn for current and future US counterinsurgency practice employing LDF components. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Nixon Doctrine, which devolved US troops from direct involvement in Asian conflicts but gave priority to military sales and economic assistance, was considered by some commentators to be an inefficacious foreign policy approach that did little to serve US interests in Asia during the Cold War. Using Singapore as a case study, this article demonstrates that Richard Nixon's foreign policy approach improved US-Singapore relations significantly from 1970 onwards. After a period of flirtation with the Soviet Union during 1968-72, Singapore came to be labelled a 'good Nixon Doctrine country' by the US government in 1973. Through the sale of US military equipment and economic assistance, Singapore and the US cultivated bilateral ties that endured after the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam in 1973 and the fall of Saigon two years later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Afghanistan was Australia's longest war, yet the consensus between Australia's major political parties on the commitment never wavered over 12 years. The bipartisan unity held even as the nature of the war changed and evolved, Australian casualties rose and popular support fell away. The enduring centrality of the US alliance explains much—probably almost all you need to know—about the unbroken consensus of the Australian polity. Afghanistan was an example of the Australian alliance addiction, similar to Vietnam. As with Vietnam, the Australian military left Afghanistan believing it won its bit of the war, even if the Afghanistan war is judged a disaster. As Australia heads home it finds the USA pivoting in its direction; with all the similarities that can be drawn between Vietnam and Afghanistan, this post-war alliance effect is a huge difference between the two conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In late 1960s a powerful myth developed in the United States that Vietnam veterans were spat on when they returned home. A parallel myth survives in Australia with widespread claims that paint or even blood was routinely thrown at returning soldiers. In a 1966 incident, red paint was thrown on Lieutenant Colonel Alex V. Preece as he led the First Battalion through Sydney. The Australian myth remains central to perceptions of Australian Vietnam veterans as despised outsiders and feeds into contemporary demands that Australians support their soldiers and the wars in which they are involved. This paper explores connections between cultural politics in the Unites States and Australia, particularly as they pertain to the contentious legacies of the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new perspective has begun to challenge both the conventional portrayal of the Vietnamese revolution and the communist account of its success. This essay takes stock of new research that presents revolutionary Vietnam in a more complex and less triumphal way. It is argued that Vietnam's nationalist revolution (1945–46) should be conceptually distinguished from the subsequent socialist revolution (1948–88). The former had a distinctly urban and bourgeois character, was led by a coalition of the upper and middle classes, and lacked ideological intensity. The latter was imposed from above, based on socialist visions, and dependent on foreign assistance. The failure to disentangle the two revolutions in existing narratives assigns little agency to Vietnamese actors and leads to triumphs being exaggerated while tragedies are overlooked. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Alterations in the spending habits of country people constitute one thread in the history of Vietnamese society in the 1960s. Some welcomed and others objected to mass-produced consumer goods and especially to new forms of dress. The ensuing controversy played out amidst the violent crosscurrents of the Vietnam War and led to dissension within the ranks of the National Liberation Front and in the Sài Gòn milieu. The last word belongs to villagers who, in trying to sort out the meanings of new commodities, were trying to decide what sort of future they wished for their country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the poem "Tu Do Street" by Yusef Komunyakaa is presented. It explores the themes of racism, imperialism and war through a prostitute during the Vietnam War. It discusses the possible association between war and prostitution considering the prostitute in the poem as an emblem of war and the country.

In the latter half of the twentieth century thousands of Khmer people were displaced from their homes along the freshwater rivers of Vietnam's Mekong delta. Their pattern of settlement along freshwater tidal rivers was an ecological adaptation unique in the Khmer-speaking world, of which only vestiges remain. Drawing upon oral histories and ethnographic observations of O Mon, a district in the central Mekong delta, this paper reconstructs a picture of the traditional river-based livelihoods, social structure and religious life of Khmers in this region in the 1940s. It describes how these Khmers were driven from their villages early in the First Indochina War. Experiencing ongoing dislocations in subsequent periods of war and peace, most have been prevented from returning to their former homes or reclaiming their land. Relying on testimony by elderly Khmers, who witnessed the disintegration of their riverside communities, the account challenges existing depictions of the ecology and history of the Mekong delta, offering new insights into the complexity of the Indochina wars and the severity of their consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a history of the group of men known as the Morenci Nine, who left their copper mining town of Morenci, Arizona in 1966 to train as Marines and ultimately to serve in the Vietnam War. The author explores how the men, only three of whom returned to Arizona alive, came to represent the effects of the Vietnam War not only on Morenci but on the American Southwest as a region. Particular attention is given to the memorial rituals and remembrances enacted by the Morenci community and how those efforts to honor and remember the fallen soldiers were eventually reflected in the country's need to address the trauma and loss inflicted on the nation as a result of the war.

Critical consensus agrees that Slaughterhouse-Five, forty-three years old this year, remains Vonnegut's canon masterpiece. In the 1960s and '70s, the novel was perceived as commenting on World War II, America's putative “good” war, through the lens of the controversial Vietnam War and proving that no war is ever fully righteous. Billy Pilgrim's story, an Everyman saga, condemns American apathy and the defeatist notion that the lone individual is the helpless plaything of juggernaut forces. Vonnegut vehemently argues that individual agency can still influence events in humanistic ways. Currently, in post-September 11, 2001, America, Billy's static meekness may be even more representative of the nation's mood than it was forty-one years ago. If America's current fascination with apocalyptic scenarios is any indication, the psychological exhaustion of the two-front War on Terror, the economic crisis, and disillusion with a new President's inability to reverse everything overnight has led to a near national death wish. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines industrial and stylistic aspects of the cult soap opera Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966–71), whose protagonist was a vampire. The series addressed two distinct audiences simultaneously: the traditional daytime target of housewives and a juvenile cohort of both sexes enthralled by its gothic horror format. In 1970, a plotline described the threat of a supernatural cult called the Leviathans that tangentially acknowledged the tumult of the Vietnam era. That year, too, the series was adapted into a feature film soon after the Motion Picture Association of America's censorship had ended, creating new stylistic and thematic negotiations regarding the juvenile audience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented that discusses the book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," by Thomas Kuhn. Topics include the Cold War space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the role of technology in the Vietnam War, and the relation of Kuhn's thought to that of philosopher of science Karl Popper.

This article is an investigation in the longue durée of the uneven transformation of a 'borderless land' into a 'state space' in the course of one of the most violent conflicts in the contemporary history of Southeast Asia. It focuses on a strategically important area along the Lao-Vietnamese border that was captured by communist forces in the early 1960s and targeted by intense US bombing. I argue that the process of state-making in this border region relied on two exceptional conditions: warfare and the dominance of a modern political organization, i.e. the Communist Party, able to mobilize and organize local populations by capitalizing on extreme social and material conditions. Mobilization in this context involving bombing and displacement of populations was a social process as much as a military tactic, which aimed to legitimise new political authority and structures in a space that had never known such a direct form of control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the frontispiece of his Vietnam-set novel, The Quiet American, published in 1955, Graham Greene insisted that he had written 'a story and not a piece of history', yet countless readers in the decades that followed ignored these cautionary words and invested the work with historical authenticity. By writing in the first person, and by including more direct reportage (drawn from his several visits to Indo-China in the 1950s) than can be found in any of his other novels, Greene underestimated the extent to which his readership would confuse fact and fiction. Greene did not intend his novel to function as history, but this is what happened. How, then, does it measure up as history? In addressing this question, most commentators have been concerned to establish the real-life inspiration for Alden Pyle, the quiet American of the book's title who is secretly (and disastrously) promoting a Third Force in Vietnam equidistant between the French colonialists and the communist-led Viet-Minh. In this article the focus is less on personalities than on whether the Americans were indeed covertly funding and arming a Third Force. In addition, using Greene's unpublished letters and diaries as well as Foreign Office documents recently released under the UK Freedom of Information Act, it will be seen that the British, too, were involved in Third Force plotting behind French backs and that Greene himself was a party to the kind of convoluted intrigue so often to be found in the plots of his novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theory of population-centric counterinsurgency rests upon the untenable premise that the population within a theater of operations is fixed in place. By showing that people tend to move away from contested rural areas towards the relative safety and prosperity of counterinsurgent-controlled areas, this article demonstrates that this crucial premise is empirically false. Furthermore, a theory of counterinsurgent resource deployment, population movement, and incumbent strategic ineffectiveness is presented. Ultimately, the application of counterinsurgency resources actually dislocates the population from their place of residence and causes them to move into cities. When the urban areas' ability to absorb newcomers is overwhelmed, localized negative externalities emerge and can give rise to crime and insecurity. Such increased insecurity then creates an incentive for the counterinsurgency to retrench its resource use into the cities. As more physical territory is conceded to the insurgency, the relative strategic effectiveness of the counterinsurgency declines. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses the importance of Third Worldism/tiersmondisme as a source of inspiration for European radicals on both sides of the Iron Curtain 1958-73, focusing on the cases of France, the Netherlands and Hungary. Using both oral history and archival material, it considers the decline of domestic anti-fascist traditions as a source of revolutionary identity; the emergence of new political networks both within and outside Europe based on solidarity with 'Third World' anti-imperial movements; and the way in which the Algerian anti-colonial movement, the Cuban revolution, the Chinese cultural revolution and the struggles of Vietnam provided inspiration for, and were 'domesticated' by, European activists. Finally, the article considers the decline of Third Worldism as a source of inspiration for political practice in the early to mid-1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores radical Catholic activism in Italy, France and Spain and its place within the broader protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It addresses three key aspects of activism. First, how and why did individuals become involved in Catholic activism? Second, what did it signify to be a Catholic activist? And third, how did activists situate their militancy within the wider experience of '1968'? The convergences between this activism and the greater mobilization of the 1960s and 1970s are analysed by focusing on commonalities of language, participatory formats, engagement with the working class and with the marginalized sectors of society, and the impact of global issues such as the Vietnam War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1998 the Unknown Soldier from the Vietnam War was exhumed, identified and returned to his family. This article explains that remarkable turn of events, complicating claims that it resulted from scientific advances and suggesting that it originated in a political challenge to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It shows that the grassroots activists who first named the Vietnam Unknown had long opposed his interment as a memorialized forgetting of the war and argues that their effort to open the Tomb succeeded because their claims of ongoing veteran victimization resonated with Americans in ways that the Tomb's vision of redemptive sacrifice did not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors analyze a unique data source to study the determinants of violence against civilians in a civil war context. During the Vietnam War, the United States Department of Defense pioneered the use of quantitative analysis for operational purposes. The centerpiece of that effort was the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES), a monthly and quarterly rating of 'the status of pacification at the hamlet and village level throughout the Republic of Vietnam'. Consistent with existing theoretical claims, the authors find that homicidal violence against civilians was a function of the level of territorial control exercised by the rival sides: Vietnamese insurgents relied on selective violence primarily where they enjoyed predominant, but not full, control; South Vietnamese government and US forces exercised indiscriminate violence primarily in the most rebel-dominated areas. Violence was less common in the most contested areas. The absence of spatial overlap between insurgent selective and incumbent indiscriminate violence, as well as the relative absence of violence from contested areas, demonstrates both the fundamental divergence between irregular and conventional war and the need for cautious use of violent events as indicators of conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay assesses how the leaders of the Catholic Worker Movement responded to the debate within the American Catholic Church and the American Catholic peace movement over moderate and radical protest tactics during the Vietnam War era. By appealing to their shared religious identity, the Catholic Workers retained ties with the radicals and the more conservative institution. The Catholic Worker Movement's restrained rhetoric also de-radicalized their own protest actions and positioned the Catholic Workers as the moderate voice of the American Catholic peace movement during the 1960s and 1970s. The experience of the Catholic Workers suggests that rhetorics of religious radicalism may be moderated by religious identification, prompting engagement. This engagement may facilitate opportunities for expression of difference among religious factions and, sometimes, provoke institutional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's 1971 exhibition "Art and Technology" as a case study, this essay examines a shift in attitude on the part of influential American artists and critics toward collaborations between art and technology from one of optimism in the mid-1960s to one of suspicion in the early 1970s. The Vietnam War dramatically undermined public confidence in the promise of new technology, linking it with corporate support of the war. Ultimately, the discrediting of industry-sponsored technology not only undermined the premises of the LACMA exhibition but also may have contributed to the demise of the larger "art and technology" movement in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares representations of Vietnamese and Hmong women in several Southeast Asian publications to similar depictions of their Vietnamese American and Hmong American counterparts. The publications analyzed in this context include the book "Images of the Vietnamese Women in the New Millennium," from the Vietnamese Women's Museum in Hanoi, Vietnam, the novel "Monkey Bridge," by Lan Cao, and a collection of photographic essays titled "Through H'Mong Eyes." The role of the Vietnam War in changing the nature of women's roles and in galvanizing feminist movements in Southeast Asian and the U.S. is considered as are the effects of socialist and capitalist frames of reference on gender relations in Vietnamese, Hmong, and U.S. contexts.

The author considers several issues in response to a questionnaire regarding opposition to the Iraq War by U.S. artists and intellectuals. Details of the author's traveling exhibition "The American War," which deals with the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese perspective, are offered. The role of the Internet and digital media in the distribution of protest art is also considered. The author also argues for the value of antiwar art and comments on its general lack of exposure.

We estimate the death rate of United States troops deployed to Iraq from the beginning of the US invasion through 30 September 2006. Eighty percent of the deaths in Iraq were combat-related. The death rate in Iraq is lower than that of the civilian population of the United States but substantially higher than that of young adults. It is much lower than the death rate of US troops in Vietnam, in part because a much smaller fraction die among those wounded in Iraq. We also estimate relative mortality levels for US troops according to numerous demographic variables through 30 November 2006. The risk of death in Iraq per deployment is shown to be highest for Marines; Naval and Air Force personnel in Iraq have lower death rates than the civilian population of comparable age. Other categories with above-average mortality in Iraq are enlisted troops, males, younger persons, and Hispanics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]