Tag: Vietnam War

Listen: “Ending the Myth” podcast (Co-author of Dissenting POWs interviewed on ‘Mechanical Freak’)

Listen: “Ending the Myth” podcast (Co-author of Dissenting POWs interviewed on ‘Mechanical Freak’)

February 20, 2024

The podcast Mechanical Freak, recently welcomed esteemed sociologist Jerry Lembcke to talk about how the memory of the Vietnam War was both recreated and used in the 1980s and 1990s to unify public sentiment against the liberatory movements of the 1960s. Lembcke reminded the audience that even in the creation of memory, there is a political struggle for the future that needs to be waged.

Dispelling folkloric stories of “spitting” soldiers (from the co-author of Dissenting POWs)

February 20, 2024

There is no evidence that Vietnam veterans were spat on. Nor could they have been, at least not in the manner described in the most often told stories. Those stories tell of landing at San Francisco Airport and being met by groups of spitters, often hippies. But flights from Vietnam landed at military airbases like Travis outside San Francisco; protesters could not have gotten on the airbase, much less near deplaning troops.

Sure to “inspire new directions in research and debate” (“Dissenting POWs” reviewed in H-Soz-Kult, H-NET)

Sure to “inspire new directions in research and debate” (“Dissenting POWs” reviewed in H-Soz-Kult, H-NET)

February 20, 2024

Without trivializing the hardships of often several years in jail, Wilber and Lembcke dissect personal accounts by former POWs. They point out contradictions, distinguish between physical punishment measures and deliberate violence, reconstruct different phases in the history of the prisons, and conclude that brutal treatment and torture were less common and systematic than purported.

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