cover image What Remains: Bringing America’s Missing Home from the Vietnam War

What Remains: Bringing America’s Missing Home from the Vietnam War

Sarah E. Wagner. Harvard Univ, $29.95 (285p) ISBN 978-0-674-98834-7

Anthropologist Wagner (To Know Where He Lies) delivers a thoughtful study of the ways in which forensic science has changed public and private rituals for commemorating America’s fallen soldiers. According to Wagner, the U.S. government spends approximately $130 million annually to “recover, repatriate, and scientifically individuate its war dead.” Combined, these efforts constitute an “ethos of exceptional care” first developed in response to the “embittering divisiveness” of the Vietnam War. Wagner depicts every stage of the process of bringing home a missing soldier, from a recovery mission at a jungle crash site in Vietnam to a family’s reunion with their loved one’s remains at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in Hawaii. In the book’s most moving sections, Wagner describes remembrance ceremonies for three soldiers from Bayfield, Wis., including a Native American whose remains are still unaccounted for. While acknowledging the limits of DNA testing and the issues that arose when the U.S. military adopted a “business-model approach” to the recovery process in 2015, Wagner makes a convincing case that forensic science has created a “new language of remembrance.” Written with poignancy and academic rigor, this clearheaded work will appeal to scholars and readers with a personal connection to the subject. (Nov.)