Run for the Wall: Remembering Vietnam on a Motorcycle Pilgrimage

Run for the Wall. Remembering Vietnam on a Motorcycle Pilgrimage, by Raymond Michalowski and Jill Dubisch. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001. 295 pp. $55.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-8135-2927-1. $22.00 paper. ISBN: 0-8135-2928-X.

The unresolved conflicts of veterans and protesters from the period of the Vietnam War are more apparent now that the participants are middle aged and beginning to reflect. Raymond Michalowski and Jill Dubisch engage these conflicts as they investigate a conjunction of social memory and ritual healing in an ethnography and social analysis of a motorcycle pilgrimage. Run for the Wall is a compelling story about the construction of a ritual from an unlikely source, told through participant observation. The authors' personal histories and political views situate them in opposition to the military campaign that is remembered in an annual motorcycle ride to the Vietnam Memorial. However, their opposition does not prepare them for the healing bonds that are constructed in the "run" from California to Washington, D.C. They are uneasy with their reception along the way, as small towns provide the bikers with the kind of warm welcome that Vietnam veterans did not receive. Michalowski and Dubisch respond as academics, contextualizing the ritual journey in social, political, and cultural frames. Much of the book is concerned with background: the POW/MIA social...