Few topics have inspired publication of as many collections of scholarly essays as the Vietnam War. In recent years alone, new anthologies have appeared on topics as diverse as historiography, international dimensions of the war, and the Franco-Viet Minh conflict before 1955. Amid this outpouring, it is reasonable to ask whether supply may be exceeding demand – or at least exceeding the capacity of scholars to produce groundbreaking work at such a clip.

Jon Roper's volume The United States and the Legacy of the Vietnam War makes one wonder whether the answer might, alas, be “yes.” Though admirable in its ambition to step beyond the well-trodden ground of politics and diplomacy and to explore the war's deeper cultural ramifications, the book suffers from several of the shortcomings that make the most prestigious academic presses increasingly wary of publishing edited volumes. Above all, the contributions are uneven in tone and scope, problems perhaps stemming from the book's origin as a series of papers delivered in 2005 at a conference marking the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the war. Two of the essays, an outdated polemic by journalist Jonathan Schell and an out-of-place personal reminiscence by Vietnam veteran W. D. Ehrhart, detract significantly from the book's overall authoritativeness.

Moreover, the book fails to address the 11 September attacks or the subsequent war in Iraq in any sustained way. This lack is curious, partly because Roper's introduction promises such discussion but mostly because the “war against terror” has unquestionably reinvigorated and altered the cultural resonance of the Vietnam War more forcefully than any event since 1975. It is therefore odd that essays about literature, film, memory, and political culture have little to say about the matter, sticking instead to tried-and-true exercises such as analyzing Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. As a consequence, the collection loses an opportunity to update and build upon seminal studies of Vietnam War legacies published in the 1980s and 1990s by authors such as Richard Slotkin, Fred Turner, Susan Jeffords, and Jerry Lembcke.

Happily, there are exceptions to this generalization. Most remarkably, Philip H. Melling offers a fascinating essay demonstrating the continuity of American anxiety about the “barbarous other” (129). Melling explores white fears of captivity and brutalization by Indians and Barbary pirates in earlier centuries before demonstrating the remarkable similarity of American discourse about enemies in Vietnam and Iraq. In both of the more recent cases, Melling argues, Americans imagined their adversaries as brutish inhabitants of a heathen wilderness, a conception that helped rationalize massive destruction and make possible atrocities such as My Lai and Abu Ghraib.

Also noteworthy is H. Bruce Franklin's essay on American political culture since the turn of the millennium. With the same energy and wit he displayed in his classic study of the American obsession with GIs categorized as “missing in action,” Franklin examines the nation's renewed dedication to what he terms “fantasy Vietnam” (48) – a version of history in which weak-kneed politicians, journalists, and antiwar activists betrayed heroic US soldiers. The power of this myth was never more evident, Franklin suggests, than in the 2004 presidential election, when the draft-evader George W. Bush expertly exploited it to defeat John F. Kerry, a highly decorated, thrice-wounded Vietnam veteran. Fully explaining that success will keep scholars – including, one can only hope, Franklin – busy for a long time to come.