The Remains of War

“The Remains of War deserves an important place on the Vietnam War shelf of any library. It is probably the definitive empirical work on the accounting of America’s Vietnam POWs and MIAs. It also offers some provocative insights on the role of this issue in our culture and on the continued irresolution about what has been the great agony of the Baby Boom generation: the Vietnam War.” - Timothy J. Lomperis, Perspectives on Politics

“The Remains of War is a valuable addition to the growing literature on the American accounting effort. Its conclusions will influence related scholarship for the foreseeable future.” - Bradley Lynn Coleman, Journal of Military History

“Hawley’s astringent analysis of a strange collective obsession is not only fascinating in its own terms but also clarifies American disorders that continue to disturb the body politic today.” - Joan Cocks, Political Theory

“Hawley's study is provocative, yet raises important concerns. . . . To show the complexity and difficulty of resolving these issues, Hawley presents recent repatriation cases and legislative attempts. His study does much to explain how impressions-whether or not well grounded in fact-when mixed with emotion, cultural practices and power politics, can become hardened policy.” - Deborah Kidwell, Vietnam

Hawley’s use of bodies to bring meaning to the Vietnam War is interesting and thorough. . . . The Remains of War . . . succeeds in forcing the reader to think hard about the Vietnam War and its impact on our society.” - Leonard Wong, Armed Forces and Society

“As someone who has read numerous books on the Vietnam War, I found much new and helpful information in The Remains of War. What is most helpful, however, is not simply the information Thomas M. Hawley presents but his theoretical framework for thinking through the mechanisms by which the very idea of an ‘unaccounted-for body’ comes into being. Hawley makes a first-rate argument that will reshape the ways in which we talk about bodies in the Vietnam War.” - Susan Jeffords, author of The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War

“Thomas M. Hawley combines theoretical dexterity and voluminous research in a first-rate book on America’s tortured Vietnam legacy. By cataloguing the manifold practices that keep the bodies of the absent dead alive, he enables us to understand the nation’s obsession with a political and cultural war it continually invents and reinvents at home and abroad.” - Steven Johnston, author of Encountering Tragedy: Rousseau and the Project of Democratic Order