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The Ethics of Accounting: The Search for American Soldiers Missing in Vietnam

This paper explores the ethical implications of the United States' ongoing search for the bodies of 1,907 servicemen unaccounted-for in Southeast Asia as a result of the Vietnam War. The essay begins by critically engaging the interpretive commitments of the accounting effort to reveal the various means by which the search secures legitimacy. This engagement enables a reassessment of the United States' insistence upon Vietnam's responsibility to account for missing Americans as a humanitarian gesture, a circumstance all the more important given the nearly 300,000 Vietnamese also missing from the war. Through the work of Emmanuel Lévinas, David Campbell, and Michael Shapiro, the essay proposes an ethical relation which not only foregrounds the Vietnamese as the basis of reflection but also suggests new interpretive possibilities concerning the bodies of absent servicemen. There is also the question of whether it is not bizarre, perhaps even morally obscene—and an insult to the bravery of the dead—to spend so much money searching for bones in a country where children die for want of antibiotics, and thousands of amputees from the war, many of them former Saigon-government soldiers who fought on the American side, hobble on crutches or go armless, because they cannot afford prosthetic devices.1