The central thesis of this book is that the unresolved issue fueling the continued divisiveness of the Vietnam War is the key legacy of the unaccounted-for remains of America's missing in action (MIAs) in Indochina. It is a thesis that Thomas Hawley propounds at several levels. His argument is empirical in its depiction of the investigative processes and results of the actual searches for these men. It is semiotic in its focus on the symbol of their bodies as “signing” for the larger issues still surrounding the war. It is an investigation into the impact on the American popular and political culture of these bodies—those of the visible veterans and of the invisible, fragmented missing soldiers—in terms of how they are depicted in the arts (Hollywood mostly) and in memorials. Finally, it aspires to a more profound philosophical level in assessing the moral and political implications of this thesis for our larger understanding of the Vietnam War itself. Although this book is well worth reading, its success at all these levels is only intermittent.

Scholarship in the social sciences has to be judged on its validity and reliability, that is, on the soundness of the thesis in the empirical and external world from which it was formulated and on the rational clarity with which the thesis is then presented in its own terms. The validity of Hawley's thesis—that “the remains of war” form the heart of the continued divisiveness over Vietnam—is hard to accept. Though America's MIAs are certainly in the mix of Vietnam's unfinished business, so also are continued controversies over the wisdom of the Containment Doctrine, the issue of the nationalism versus the communism of our Vietnamese adversaries, the still-raging battles over strategy, the question of the centrality of the Tet Offensive in 1968, the “Big Story” of media hype versus its manipulation, the ambiguous casus belli of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident of 1964, and the persons responsible for the humiliating helicopter liftoffs from the embassy rooftop in 1975. How America's two thousand MIAs rise above all this to command center stage is only asserted and not demonstrated by the author.

But if we give him this assertion, in his own terms, Hawley comes up with a mix of provocative insights and utterly obtuse explanations. In my opinion, he is at his best in his empirical account of the search for the missing. Here, his meticulous research and systematic presentation of the process whereby bodies are located, identified, formally accounted for, and repatriated amount to a definitive work on this subject. He makes clear in great detail how painstaking this effort has been. He shows how a full accounting of all of the missing will be impossible, but praises the U.S. government for the significant number of resolutions and repatriations that have been made (some 734, p. 69). He is also convincing, however, in his insistence that there probably were some left behind in 1973, and that President Richard Nixon's assertion that the 591 prisoners of war (POWs) who returned in Operation Homecoming in 1973 closed the books on this issue was ill-advised and almost certainly not accurate (pp. 65–67).

Despite the book's overdrawn thesis, Hawley's semiotics on the bodies of the missing is insightful. After calling attention to the importance given to the bodies of the fallen in Western Christendom, he lays out how this importance is enhanced in the United States with its far higher rates of bodily burials than in other Western countries. Further, although Americans have shown tolerance for larger numbers of missing in other wars—78,000 in World War II and 8,000 in Korea (p. 4)—their obsession over the missing in Vietnam is convincingly laid at the feet of its unique defeat. The author's additional arguments, that this obsession can be interpreted as a drive to remasculinize these fragmented bodies of defeat and as a ploy to manipulate them into an image of America as a victim of evil Vietnamese, rather than as a perpetrator of the immoral war itself, are more interesting than they are convincing.

The most provocative part of this book lies in its discussion of the symbols of this movement: the returned veterans themselves as the “culturally missing,” the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial, the Tomb of the Unknown Vietnam War Soldier, and the POW/MIA flag. Taking the veterans first, he points to the disparity between the actual success of Vietnam veterans in their social reintegration and their depiction as “crazies” in the popular culture. Keeping the MIA issue alive with its images of the heroically fallen served as a noble antidote to these presently returned “deviants.” Hawley's brief essay on the Tomb of the Unknown Vietnam War Soldier is illuminating, if only because to most of us the existence of such a tomb itself was unknown. His lengthy treatise on the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial is complex, both in its political and artistic analysis of the memorial itself and in its symbolic placement. He argues that the central location of the memorial between the Washington and Lincoln Memorials, but still in a pit, is atonement for defeat as well as a welcoming home for all of the Vietnam War's participants, back into the bosom of the American body politic. Whether these meanings of the memorial were as self-consciously promoted by the designers as he seems to assume is almost beside the point. These ideas are well worth considering on their own terms.

It is on the philosophical level where Hawley falls on his sword. His explanation of “the materiality of the body” as a way to understand the ethics of the Vietnam War ontologically in terms of some distinction between the said and the saying simply could not be penetrated by this reviewer. His concluding discussion on the politics of the war as the government's use of the POW/MIA issue to shift the blame for the war onto the Vietnamese suffers from Hawley's almost willful ignorance of the extensive literature on the war itself with its host of alternative explanations.

Thus, though certainly not without its flaws, 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.