Book review: Dissenting POWs: From Vietnam Hoa Lo Prison to America Today

Abstract

One challenge of research that attempts to reconstruct a war discourse is that certain spaces are typically inaccessible. While public discussions in the United States about the nature of an enemy or consternation about whether the state is engaged in a just war are pervasive and can be readily ascertained through a careful read of media archives, access to the discourses that occur inside war prisons are another matter. War prisons, concentration camps, and the like not only detain bodies but also information. As some scholars maintain, such camps are the paradigmatic storehouses of hidden transcripts, and indeed, knowledge about their very existence is often restricted. Tom Wilber and Jerry Lembcke have overcome this challenge in their book Dissenting POWs: From Vietnam’s Hoa Lo Prison to America Today by carefully reconstructing of the discourse surrounding the Vietnam War, as it happened for both American soldiers inside the prisoner-ofwar (POW) camps and average Americans on the homefront. In their own words, Wilber and Lembcke sought to develop “the history of attempts to repress that dissent and purge it from public memory” (p. 11). The project appears to have personal significance for Tom Wilber, whose father, Navy pilot Gene Wilber, was shot down in 1968 and captured in North Vietnam. Wilber was captured and while in captivity, he came out against the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. Then, after Wilber’s release in 1973, journalist Mike Wallace interviewed him for CBS’s “60 Minutes.” “Had Wilber succumbed to torture in his antiwar statements broadcast by Radio Hanoi?” Wallace asked. Without making an overt accusation, the introduction helped promote an emergent retort to the antiwar protests of POWs. By framing dissent as the tainted view of veterans who had been either broken or brainwashed, state and media agents were able to effectively contain the volatility of that dissent. Although they do not explicitly make the connection, Wilber and Lembcke’s analysis engages what political theorist James C. Scott (1990) usefully refers to as the public transcripts, or the official interpretations of events that typically serve the interests of state elites. Crucially, the authors also dive into what Scott refers to as the hidden transcripts, or those interpretations which are quickly scuttled to the far margins of the official narrative and enshrouded in a cloud of suspicion. Thus, in addition to the television interviews and popular books, such as John Hubbell’s widely read P.O.W.: A Definitive History of the American Prisoner-of-War Experience in Vietnam, they also track down more hidden unfurlings of the antiwar discourse through documentary evidence and untelevised interviews with former administrators, guards, and staff workers from a North Vietnam war prison, which American POWs famously dubbed the “Hanoi Hilton.” 1183522 COS0010.1177/00207152231183522International Journal of Comparative SociologyBook reviews book-review2023