ABSTRACT
The imperative to psychologize the storyline of Vietnam veterans derived from the political dynamics of the Moratorium Days against the war in 1969. The magnitude of the civilian military collaboration was alarming to the Nixon Administration and its response was to challenge the credibility of these antiwar warriors. Luke, too, opposes the war and, consistent with the psychologizing of political behavior provided by the champions of PVS, Coming Home portrays Luke's politics as a form of catharsis. The projection of the victim-veteran image into popular and political culture would, in turn, displace the memory that thousands of veterans had been radicalized by their wartime experience and help rewrite the history of the war as something that happened to America. By then, virtually every news organization in the country had done a feature story or special report on troubled veterans. The discourse of trauma has displaced almost all else from the coming-home news coverage of our current generation of veterans.
