Wagner, Sarah E.

OUR SYNOPSIS: Sarah E. Wagner amplifies “the efforts to recover and name the Vietnam War’s missing in action,” emphasizing how “science is changing the way American war dead are remembered and honored.” She focuses on “what happens when missing service members are identified and what happens when they remain missing,” foregrounding rituals of meaning-making and how they change over time. (3) She employs ethnographic methods to piece together these human experiences. Each story is fully shaped by its own unique historical and community contexts. Indeed, “homecomings enabled by forensic science innovations entwine the living with the dead in the project of national belonging, but they do so on local terms and according to the particular histories of loss and remembrance.” (12) She contextualizes Vietnam War memorialization by comparatively exploring the memory of other wars, showing how rituals changed over time and differed internationally. Her analysis illuminates the complex interrelationships between science and ritual as individual cases of MIA soldiers evolve. For example, in one case she shows how newly acquired evidence meant that “The remains of the Vietnam Unknown swiftly shuttled from one realm of security and significance to another, going from being the object of national reverence to the subject of scientific inquiry.”
When the military ritual ended and the scientists took over, she writes, “Where military ritual left off, scientific protocol picked up.” (49) Different forms of authority conflicted and interacted in this memorialization process. She also argues that scientific advances in identifying missing soldiers enabled the U.S. government to claim a measure of success, in sharp contrast to some negative public memory of the government role in the Vietnam War. In all cases, the recovery of MIA soldier remains is a singular part of a complex web of reconciliation, memory, and in some cases homecoming practices that are unique and evolve over time.