Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Fact and facts

1996; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/aq.1996.0014

1080-6490

Maria Damon,

Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

Fact and Facts Maria Damon (bio) M.I.A., or, Mythmaking in America. By H. Bruce Franklin. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1992. 225 pages. $17.95 (cloth). $9.95 (paper). In M.I.A., Bruce Franklin investigates a belief currently oper-ating in the United States that there are still-living American servicemen held captive in Vietnam. His aim is not simply to document the way belief or disbelief in this phenomenon has polarized the popular imagination, but to examine how and why the belief came into being, what kinds of arguments and evidence its proponents mount in its favor, how these arguments and evidence can be refuted through careful examination of alternative evidence, and what ends this belief and/or disbelief serves. This process of examination, whereby documentation and contextualization constantly and firmly buttress interpretation, is only one of the virtues of the book; much as we all love the imaginative analyses of mass cultural texts that abound in professional journals these days, Franklin wisely chooses to devote only one—the penultimate—chapter to Rambo, Deerhunter, and other aestheticized packages for prisoner of war (POW)-missing in action (MIA) discourse. Most of his book provides careful historical analysis of the construction of the myth itself and its dissemination through the mass media, grassroots organizations, governmental commissions, and federally funded councils. [End Page 360] By dissecting the literature and rhetoric of the believers, following it back to its point of origin (more often than not a federal or federally subsidized source), and pointing specifically to documentation that tells other stories, Franklin opts for the “objective evidence” mode of argumentation, and in spite of the mistrust that has developed for terms such as “objectivity,” “empiricism,” and “evidence,” his method works quite well in this particular context, in which an emancipatory/resistive reading of mass trends may not be the most felicitous way to go. One of the interesting ironies of Franklin’s method is that his documentation is often far less esoteric than that of the POW-MIA myth proponents. While they use quasi-cultish evidence such as blurry photos that demand decoding of vague numbers mysteriously wavering in the margins, Franklin uses the much more prosaic but convincing “hard” evidence of government hearing testimony, newspaper articles, military documents, and so on—sources that ostensibly would not be conducive to his antimilitary project but through which he successfully demonstrates the shakiness of the premises of the POW-MIA belief. Drawing upon such sources as Captain Douglas Clarke’s The Missing Man: Politics and the MIA, 1 Franklin shows how official military categories such as “unaccounted for,” “missing in action,” and “prisoner of war” have, in public rhetoric and in the public imagination, become interchangeably elided so that terms that initially meant “killed in action—remains unrecoverable” have been rendered ambiguous enough to imply that “unaccounted for” means “they simply disappeared,” and until proven otherwise, will be assumed to be living. In other words, the subtext in the POW-MIA myths is that the Vietnamese know something or have someone or have done something to someone, and they are not telling. The term “unaccounted for” comes to connote blame, a means of protracting conflict, of holding the Vietnamese accountable. Franklin argues, moreover, that this confusion about terms, and the entire phenomenon of belief in living captives of war, has been intermittently orchestrated (albeit not smoothly, unanimously, or without internal contradictions and dissent) and intermittently opposed by certain branches of the government as a way to keep xenophobia, anticommunism, and the memory of the war fresh in the minds and hearts of the public. This, he maintains, is a cruel manipulation of people’s emotions, a perpetuation of national and private grief, and a denial of the emotional closure that would allow widows, children, parents, and friends of those lost in action to carry on meaningfully with their lives. Indeed, holding its illusory wound open prevents the United States itself [End Page 361] from coming to terms with the ethical, political, and military transgressions that are its legacy from this war, a war so defined by its lack of definition that it cannot even officially be labeled a war: the Library of Congress...