The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War

The anti-Vietnam War movement in the United States is perhaps best remembered for its young, counter-culture student protesters. However, the war was the first in American history in which a substantial number of military personnel actively protested against it while it was in progress. This is a history of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), an organization that transformed the anti-war movement by placing Vietnam veterans at the forefront of the nation-wide struggle to end the war. Its members were mostly young men who had served in Vietnam and returned profoundly disillusioned with the rationale for the war and with American conduct in South-East Asia. VVAW posed a threat to America's Vietnam policy and contributed to the sense that the nation was under siege from within. Based on extensive interviews and detailed primary research, the book offers an account of men who risked censure, stigma, and even imprisonment, for a cause that they believed to be "an extended tour of duty".

About the Author :
Andrew E. Hunt is an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. He is the author of The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (NYU Press, 1999).

Review :
"Hunt deliciously complicates the history of the 1960s by introducing a protest element not bound to college campuses or the counterculture... It is a disturbing story, one that Hunt tells well." --Choice "All students of the concluding years of America's longest war should be grateful to Andrew Hunt for the clarity and grace with which he has told V.V.A.W.'s story." --Canadian Journal of History "This extraordinary and deeply moving history explodes all the encrusted stereotypes of GIs on one side of the barricades and anti-war protestors on the other. At along last we can again hear the voices of the thousands of courageous veterans who refused to be silent about the immoral war in Indochina." --Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz "A splendid addition to the growing literature on Vietnam veterans and their experiences during and after the war. Hunt's complex and moving history is a vital corrective to accounts which equate the anti-war movement with student activists as well as to those who persist in seeing veterans as passive victims." --Marilyn B. Young, author of The Vietnam Wars "Explodes one of the most persistent and pernicious myths attached to the 1960s: that the anti-war movement was anti-GI and anti-veteran. How could that be, when, as Hunt shows, many of the most committed and eloquent opponents of the Vietnam war were themselves veterans of the conflict in Southeast Asia. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War were heroes then, and they deserve to be remembered as heroes today." --Maurice Isserman, Hamilton College "For all kinds of veterans of the Sixties era, this book offers powerful testimony on the meaning of patriotism and moral courage. For younger people, whose images of the Sixties are often caught in the caricatures of the mass media, Hunt's sophisticated account of veterans' anti-war protest evokes new understanding, and I think, hard questions about a difficult time." --David Farber, author of The Age of Great Dreams