cover image Prisoners of Culture: Representing the Vietnam POW

Prisoners of Culture: Representing the Vietnam POW

Elliott Gruner. Rutgers University Press, $37 (245pp) ISBN 978-0-8135-1930-2

A salutary treatment of media mythmaking, this incisive book shows how portrayals of Vietnam POWs in movies and books often diverge from the reality of the POW experience. Gruner, who teaches at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, suggests that the image of the POW has been used to ``rehabilitate all Vietnam veterans and romanticize the Vietnam War.'' He analyzes how POW autobiographies promote this myth, finding that the more commercially successful ones downplay negative experiences. Though the film The Hanoi Hilton draws on autobiographies, it distorts them to emphasize POW resistance and to demonize the North Vietnamese, he argues. He shows how advertisers such as Philip Morris exploit the image of the heroic POW, and emphasizes the sexism in most narratives. Most accounts, he notes, focus on the individual's triumph over adversity and not on the politics and destructiveness of the war. He concludes by analyzing how Americans tried to fit POWs from the Gulf war into the frame of Vietnam, wanting them to ``conform to certain preexisting notions of conduct, sexuality and image.'' Illustrations not seen by PW. (May)