'Sacrilege of a Strange, Contemporary Kind': The Unknown Soldier and the Imagined Community After the Vietnam War

In 1998 the Unknown Soldier from the Vietnam War was exhumed, identified and returned to his family. This article explains that remarkable turn of events, complicating claims that it resulted from scientific advances and suggesting that it originated in a political challenge to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It shows that the grassroots activists who first named the Vietnam Unknown had long opposed his interment as a memorialized forgetting of the war and argues that their effort to open the Tomb succeeded because their claims of ongoing veteran victimization resonated with Americans in ways that the Tomb's vision of redemptive sacrifice did not.