Fewer Americans were captured or missing during the Vietnam War
than in any previous major military conflict in U.S. history. Yet
despite their small numbers, American POWs inspired an outpouring
of concern that slowly eroded support for the war. Michael J. Allen
reveals how wartime loss transformed U.S. politics well before, and
long after, the war's official end.
Throughout the war's last years and in the decades since, Allen
argues, the effort to recover lost warriors was as much a means to
establish responsibility for their loss as it was a search for
answers about their fate. Though millions of Americans and
Vietnamese took part in that effort, POW and MIA families and
activists dominated it. Insisting that the war was not over "until
the last man comes home," this small, determined group turned the
unprecedented accounting effort against those they blamed for their
suffering. Allen demonstrates that POW/MIA activism prolonged the
hostility between the United States and Vietnam even as the search
for the missing became the basis for closer ties between the two
countries in the 1990s. Equally important, he explains, POW/MIA
families' disdain for the antiwar left and contempt for federal
authority fueled the conservative ascendancy after 1968. Mixing
political, cultural, and diplomatic history,
Until the Last Man
Comes Home presents the full and lasting impact of the Vietnam
War in ways that are both familiar and surprising.