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

Louis Beam is emblematic of a certain subset of US Vietnam War veterans who, upon coming home, decided to wage another, different kind of war against their own government. Vietnam was a radicalizing event across the political spectrum, including many elements on the left (such as the Black Panthers) who saw themselves as waging the same war against unjust colonial authority as the Vietnamese were. On the right, Vietnam was another chapter in a long history of war producing veterans who came home to reinforce traditional racial hierarchies. War tends to produce the social disruptions that destabilize social hierarchies, while giving certain men the skills, associations, and will to reimpose those hierarchies by force. Vietnam was particularly destabilizing because of its murky, asymmetrical combat against a shadowy enemy, where massacres by US forces became public knowledge and spoiled the nation’s self-conception as a global force for good. Most importantly, the Vietnam War was the first clear defeat in American military history, even more shocking for coming at the hands of a communist insurgency with a fraction of American military capability. A narrative emerged of veterans who were “denied permission to win” by a callous government watching the poll numbers (23), who were then ignored upon coming home, while untold numbers were left behind as prisoners of war.