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• 1 2018-05-07T21:01:29+00:00 Memorializing the War Dead 1 image_header 2018-05-07T21:01:29+00:00 The Vietnam War era (1955-1975) transformed how Americans mourned and managed the deaths of those lost during the armed conflict. Before Vietnam, military burials changed very little between World War I and the Korean War. With no American owned cemeteries in Vietnam during the controversial war, the U.S. Army streamlined the disposal of American dead to help the bereaved cope with their loss. The process by which American casualties were identified, prepared and interred changed substantially from previous wars. At the same time, memorializing the deaths of those who perished in the war became ambiguous as public support for the conflict began to wane considerably. As a result, the bereaved increasingly chose to mourn privately. During this war, memorializing deaths in service to the nation, the Vietnam conflict’s lack of political transparency, its ambiguity, its declining public support, and the socioeconomics of those who fought and those who protested made the deaths of Americans part of an ideological conflict. The outcome was a new way in which those who died in the war were processed and memorialized. As a result, Vietnam changed the way Americans mourned, honored, memorialized, and reconciled the deaths of their military dead. One part of the enormous cultural shifts that occurred during the sixties, using President Kennedy’s assassination as a starting point from which changing perspectives on death can be summarized, Stephen Prothero writes:
  “Looking back at that moment through the prism of the Vietnam conflict and flurry of succeeding assassinations of Malcolm X, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy-the sixties seem to have begun not on the day of 1960 but on November 22, 1963. On that day American began to turn from optimism toward cynicism, from conformity to nonconformity, from excess toward simplicity. The new cultural mood reached into all areas of American life, including the funeral industry.”[1] In order to understand the internment of Vietnam war dead this website provides a background on the funeral industry as a whole. For further reading on Vietnam related burial rituals see: No One Here Gets Out Alive: Memorializing, Mourning, and Reconciling the Vietnam War Dead
   
  
  Shad Thielman recieved his MA in History from California State University San Marcos. A veteran, Shad’s focus is the relationship between race, class, culture, and social constructs in the United States during the twentieth-century. Shad’s current research examines American burial traditions and highlights the changing attitudes and perspectives towards burial rituals during the Vietnam era (1955-1975).  
   
  To contact the author please send email to: thiel019@cougars.csusm.edu
        
   
   
   

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  [1] Stephen R. Prothero, Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001).