Un-doing the Vietnam War Legacy: Monumentalizing Second World War Veterans to Legitimize Contemporary US Military Interventions

Arthur C. Danto’s distinction between monuments and memorials proposes a differentiation between two ideologically-determined modes of commemoration, encompassing not just architectural symbols of the past but also all other forms of cultural ‘remembering’, including documentary, literary, and cinematic forms of representation. My discussion will focus on a photographic album significantly entitled The Last Good War and the transhistorical depictions of the war veteran in the film Memorial Day. The purpose of this paper is to underscore the ideological ambivalences at the heart of the American Second World War veteran ‘craze’, which not only paved the way for overriding the post-Vietnam War cultural legacy, but also served to ethically and ideologically legitimize contemporary US military interventions in national (collective) memory.