Locating history: Vietnam veterans and their returns to the battlefield, 1998--1999

Veterans have returned to Vietnam since the late 1980's for several purposes and in several venues---as individuals, members of small groups and accompanied by their families or as members of tours that are organized and conducted by tour companies. This dissertation focuses on veterans who revisit Vietnam via the organized tour venue. I argue throughout the dissertation that organized tours for Vietnam Veterans---10 day or 2 week journeys primarily composed of Vietnam War Veterans who visit sites that are based on a set itinerary and conducted by a tour company---are the means through which veterans understand, locate and reify their places in Vietnam war history, essentially claiming them. Returning to former battle sites or bases is the centerpiece of the veterans' tour as it spotlights a person's service in the most tangible of ways, attaching a memory to a place, a place to a war experience, and an experience to a war history. My thesis is supported by the overwhelming importance of visiting locales where veterans were stationed, fought and wounded. Organized tours have the added distinction of staking claims to history within the context of the group, many of whose members shared the experience of war and will do so again, if in a limited way, making the organized tour a vehicle for camaraderie. These sharings are mediated in a number of ways; from the ways that organized tours retrace history to the levels of connection between tour members. While most tour participants are veterans, which is a significant reason for embarking on the tour, it is more important that the veterans of a tour share more primary levels of experience, that is at the unit level or other organizing experience, like battle or operational specialty. After considering the dual structures of the tour and its memberships, I examine the ostensible goal of the organized veterans' tour, the re-visitation of war-related sites and battlegrounds, a process that I claim is a kind of physical nostalgia. What emerges from the pages of this dissertation is a picture of a diverse community of men whose lives are connected differentially by history and space, and who in the process of remembrance and travel create themselves as important, heroic and even ordinary veterans against the images of brutal or physically and emotionally victimized veterans which dominate the social screens of American society.