Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

by Kathleen Belew

The idea that the nation had wrongly rejected, failed to honor, and impugned veterans created an emphasis on healing and memorialization. This discourse papered over a critique of the war itself by foregrounding the wounded and wronged veteran.23 Meanwhile, a systematic accounting of wartime atrocities—including official apologies for events such as the massacre of hundreds of civilians at My Lai—came to be seen as an open threat to an ascendant neoconservative worldview. For the war to be remembered as a “noble cause,” as presidential candidate Ronald Reagan called it in 1980—or even to sustain the narrative that its veterans had been honorable men “denied permission to win,” as he said after he became president—required the systematic exclusion of an antiwar critique and transformed what appeared to be an apolitical, intimate style of memoir and narrative into a conservative political project.