Remaking the nation with purple hearts and fishing lures: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and American memory.

Abstract

This dissertation is about war and memory and bodies and things and the connections between them; it is an exploration of the thousands of offerings carried by ordinary Americans to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It argues that the liminal, contested place of the Vietnam War in American culture has disrupted the expectation that dead soldiers could be retired to a stoic, martyred memory of heroism and sacrifice, and in so doing has disrupted American memorial practices. This dissertation argues that the gifts Americans bring to the Wall are part of a continuing public negotiation about patriotism and nationalism, and that these things forge a new mode of public commemoration and a recast memory of both Vietnam and American community. The history of American war memorials, from Gettysburg to the Iwo Jima Memorial, has been shaped by the impulse to honor the sacrifices of citizen-soldiers in the name of the nation. This tradition, however, did not speak to the problems of the memory of the Vietnam War. Instead, American popular funerary practices have suggested a handful of rich traditions of grave decoration, which mirror much of what happens at the Wall, and which have shaped the ways in which people participate at the memorial. The working-class African Americans, Mexican Americans and white ethnic Americans who fought this war have been bringing their complicated traditions of grave decoration to the Wall in order to negotiate the liminal position of the dead and the unstable social position of the veterans. The people who come to speak at the Wall are not only claiming the national monument as their own, but they are taking responsibility for making a memory of the war themselves--they are making a history of the war and its legacy at the Wall that is far more complicated, more richly textured than any national memorial has ever been. This dissertation argues that the new imagining of the nation and of public memory constructed at the Wall has given Americans a powerful, particular, grassroots vernacular for negotiating the grief and the trials of this imagined community.