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Viet'namenca: The War Comes Home. By Thomas A. Bass. (New York: Soho, 1996. x, 278 pp. S25.00, ISBN 1-56947-050-2.)
For Thomas A. Bass and a number of those he met in the course of writing his account of the children that American soldiers and civilians left behind in Vietnam, the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1987 brought the "war home again." These biological children of largely unknown or rejecting American fathers and Vietnamese women are, in Bass's view, "the last casualties of the war" now "finally being evacuated." Some might find it odd to define "the last casualties of the war" as those associated, one way or another, with the United States, a definition that renders invisible the millions of casualties in Vietnam itself, not to mention those who will become casualties from land mines or the long-term effects of Agent Orange. Yet, arguably, Vietnam itself, the war it fought and the peace it established, is as necessary to understanding the situation of the Amerasians as are...