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During the campaign leading to the election of 1980, Ronald Reagan referred regularly to the lessons of the Vietnam War. He insisted that the Vietnam War had been “a noble cause” in which Americans had fought and died selflessly. Instead of refraining from the use of military power in the wake of the disaster of Vietnam, Reagan recommended that the United States commit more resources to the armed forces. Reagan easily defeated Jimmy Carter, and for the first time in a generation the Republican Party had a majority in the Senate. The Reagan administration entered the fray in Central America to gain advantages in the competition with the Soviet Union in other areas of the world, while reaffirming its support of the economic embargo against Vietnam. Two problematic issues hindering improvement in diplomatic relations between the two countries were the continuing flow of refugees from Vietnam and service personnel listed as missing in action. Reagan's Vietnam policy rested squarely in the center of American politics.

This chapter examines the efforts devoted to the identification of those missing in action after the Vietnam War. It considers the tensions produced by the identification of remains as well as the manner of burial and commemoration of casualties of war—a struggle over the bodies of the dead. It argues that these struggles arise in part because of the ambiguity of citizen armies. It shows that relatives of missing in action insist on the demobilization of bodies after a conflict—the return of those lost in war to civilian status and full personhood, and the return of their bodies for burial at home. It also discusses the role of women volunteers in the search for missing in action and in setting up tracing systems.

This chapter examines the Nixon administration's 1968–1973 publicity campaign to call the public's attention to the plight of American prisoners of war (POWs) and their families and how it combined the themes of military defeat abroad and male absenteeism within the home by featuring ubiquitous images of families without fathers. It shows how these images, originally intended to sanctify the national cause with regard to the Vietnam War, took on new meanings as POW wives—influenced by the rise of feminism—became more independent in their husbands' absences and did not want to relinquish it upon repatriation. The chapter also discusses the theme of male absenteeism in relation to those missing in action, and how it translated into a critique of a supposedly weak and corrupt federal government that had “left men behind”.

The first chapter, by Lary May, begins with the familiar observation about the dramatic rise in punitiveness in late-twentieth-century America and contends that turning to popular movies offers a fresh explanation of why this political shift occurred. May concentrates on a body of crime films that emerged in the early 1970s and lasted in one form or another until the early 1990s. He calls these “backlash films” and asserts they were promoters of the Republican Party and its right wing. The films included Clint Eastwood’s five Dirty Harry movies, Charles Bronson’s eight Death Wish movies, and Chuck Norris’s movies on the same theme, Good Guys Wear Black, Missing in Action, and Code of Silence. They expressed in vivid form a narrative at once hostile to liberalism and tough on crime, while promising a rebirth of security and middle-class virtue in the wake of defeat in Vietnam, the rise of youthful countercultures, and the eruption of race riots in major American cities, all of which sparked a pervasive desire for law and order.