Vietnam, A War, Not a Country 9789463723084, 9789048556397

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Vietnam: A War, Not a Country

Heritage and Memory Studies This ground-breaking series examines the dynamics of heritage and memory from transnational, interdisciplinary and integrated approaches. Monographs or edited volumes critically interrogate the politics of heritage and dynamics of memory, as well as the theoretical implications of landscapes and mass violence, nationalism and ethnicity, heritage preservation and conservation, archaeology and (dark) tourism, diaspora and postcolonial memory, the power of aesthetics and the art of absence and forgetting, mourning and performative re-enactments in the present. Series Editors Ihab Saloul and Rob van der Laarse, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Advisory Board Patrizia Violi, University of Bologna, Italy Britt Baillie, Cambridge University, United Kingdom Michael Rothberg, University of Illinois, USA Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University, USA Frank van Vree, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Vietnam: A War, Not a Country

Ron Eyerman, Todd Madigan and Magnus Ring

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Ron Eyerman Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 308 4 e-isbn 978 90 4855 639 7 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789463723084 nur 689 © R. Eyerman, T. Madigan & M. Ring / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Preface 7 1 Introduction: Cultural Trauma and the American-Vietnamese War 9 2 Cultural Trauma and Vietnamese Arenas of Memory

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3 The Trauma of Vietnam: The American Perspective

103

4 Journey From the Fall

193

5 Cultural Trauma and Vietnamese-American Arenas of Memory

237

6 Conclusion: War, Trauma, and Beyond

327

Index 357

Preface Book production is always a collective effort; this book in particular. The process began in one of those busy cafes near the Yale University campus and is now drawing to a close with its three authors spread around the globe. What started as close interactive collaboration ends through internet contacts. How the work world has changed! Nonetheless, the underlying process reflects three researchers working with one accord to piece together the meaning and memory of a decades-long violent conflict from the divergent perspectives of its various protagonists. Adding to the timeliness—and poignancy—of a project focussed on the trauma of whole societies is the fact that it is being released in 2023, which marks the 50th anniversary of the withdrawal of American combat forces in Vietnam. We look forward to the reception of these efforts. A book like this is not only a collaborative endeavor among three authors. As we researched this project, we visited a multitude of museums, monuments, memorials, and galleries scattered across the United States and Vietnam, sites whose creation necessitated the collaboration of vast numbers of people and considerable resources. These sites range widely in terms of the way they tell the story of the American-Vietnamese War and the degree to which they continue to impact their visitors. But even more moving than our visits to these sites were the interviews and conversations we had with countless students, scholars, artists, journalists, veterans, and other community members who have been touched in some way by the American-Vietnamese War. Without the generous insights, reflections, and vulnerability of these individuals regarding what for many remains a deeply personal—and often painful—topic, this book would simply not have been possible. It is to you, with gratitude, that we dedicate this work. As this project has taken shape, we have had the opportunity to present various portions of it at academic conferences across Europe, North America, and Asia, and we wish to express our thanks to the scholarly community that has offered us substantial feedback during these presentations. In particular, our thanks extends to the anonymous reviewers who offered their detailed and nuanced comments on our manuscript, and to the editorial staff at Amsterdam University Press, all of whom have helped improve the book. And finally, for the support that transcends contributions focussed solely on scholarly production, we express our love and indebtedness to our families. Given the presence of three authors and the academic tradition of marking individual reputation through publications, we feel it necessary

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to describe the division of labor that made this book possible. Ron Eyerman assumed primary responsibility for Chapters 3 and 6, Todd Madigan for Chapters 1, 4, and 5 and Magnus Ring for Chapter 2. We all read and commented on each of these chapters and see the end result as collective and collaborative.

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Introduction: Cultural Trauma and the American-Vietnamese War Abstract There is continuing conflict over how the American-Vietnamese War ought to be understood, represented, memorialized, and learned from, and this struggle over its memory has been waged within the communities of all those who were touched by its hostilities. And precisely how the war is remembered is of ongoing concern, for when a collectivity understands itself to have been fractured by some calamity, then if it is to persist as a collectivity, it must reconstitute its identity. This process of collective identity reconstruction is indicative of cultural trauma, the traumatization of an entire society. The present chapter develops the conceptual tools necessary to trace this process within the societies of each of the war’s primary belligerents. Keywords: Vietnam War, cultural trauma, collective memory, cultural sociology, Vietnamese American, narrative identity

One day, Vietnam may become a country; for now, it remains a war…. The Nation, 19901

At the close of the twentieth century, Vietnamese-American novelist Monique T.D. Truong claimed that “For the majority of Americans, Vietnam as a self-defined country never existed,” that its existence in the U.S. national consciousness emerged only when it became “defined by military conflict”—as the site of American warfare (1997: 220). Through the opening decades of the twenty-first century, little has changed to challenge this assertion. Twenty years after Truong made this statement, another Vietnamese-American 1

Cited in Kunzle, 1991: 23.

Eyerman, Ron, Todd Madigan and Magnus Ring, Vietnam: A War, Not a Country. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463723084_CH01

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writer, Pulitzer-Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times where he asserted, “For most Americans and the world, ‘Vietnam’ means the ‘Vietnam War,’ and the Vietnam War means the American war” (NYT, 5/2/2017). This fact is also highlighted by the editors of a 2016 book on the war when they claim that “‘Vietnam’ is used as shorthand in the United States for the war, not the country” (Boyle and Lim, 2016: xv). And as if to illustrate this point, Karl Marlantes, the author of Matterhorn and a veteran of the American-Vietnamese War, titled an article in such a way as to make this equivalence of Vietnam-as-war explicit: “Vietnam: The War That Killed Trust” (NYT, 1/8/2017). Although we might take issue with the idea that a nation—an entire people—can by and large be reduced to a single, terrible event, the fact remains that in the broader American society, it has been reduced in this way; indeed, the very need for the oft-repeated slogan—“Vietnam: a country, not a war”—belies its own pronouncement.2 And it is in recognition of this painful truth that we have settled on our book’s title: Vietnam: A War, Not a Country. Beyond the common understanding of this equivalence of Vietnam-aswar—where the war referred to is a shooting war—we want to suggest that there is another way in which Vietnam remains a war, not a country. From this alternative perspective, there is an ongoing battle over the meaning of the war. In an interview immediately prior to the release of his 2017 documentary, The Vietnam War, Ken Burns suggests that “with knowledge comes healing” (Kamp, Vanity Fair, 7/12/2017); but this raises the question: Knowledge of what? As his co-director Lynn Novick points out, when it comes to the American-Vietnamese War, “There’s no agreement among scholars, or Americans or Vietnamese, about what happened: the facts, let alone whose fault, let alone what we’re supposed to make of it” (ibid.). As we will show throughout this book, there is continuing conflict over how the war ought to be understood, represented, memorialized, and learned from; in short, there exists a war over its memory, a war that continues to be waged throughout the communities of all those who were touched by its hostilities. Viet Thanh Nguyen asserts that “All wars are fought twice, 2 To mention only a few examples of this slogan: the 1991 documentary, Vietnam: A Country, Not A War; Jack Payton’s article, written 20 years after the capitulation of Saigon, “Vietnam: A Country, Not Just a War” (Tampa Bay Times, 7/16/1995); Harold Truman’s 1999 travel commentary, A Country, Not a War—Vietnam Impressions; the home page of the Vietnam Embassy in the U.S. in 1999 and 2000 noted that Vietnam is “a country and not a war” (Schwenkel, 2009: 208); Hoa Pham’s 2013 article on Vietnamese diasporic literature, “Vietnam Is a Country, Not a War”; Yen Le Espiritu’s observation that “many Vietnamese proclaim that Vietnam is a country, not a war” (2014: 14); and Anh Pham’s article, “Vietnam: A Country, Not a War” (4/27/2017).

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the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory” (2013: 144). And it is on this second sense of “war” that we will focus our attention. Therefore, while we draw extensively upon the vast historiography of the American-Vietnamese War, it is not our goal to add something significant to this area. Instead, we understand our project as contributing to the ongoing discussions of collective memory, what it is and how it works, as well as to the more recent debates over cultural trauma, whether an entire society can be understood to have been traumatized.3 Beyond our focus on collective memory and cultural trauma, we hope also to contribute to the way in which the war’s discourse is framed. One of the most interesting and significant developments in representations and analyses of the American-Vietnamese War has been the growing attention paid to voices “from the other side.” A great many of the more recent American histories and cultural productions that take this war as their subject have incorporated Vietnamese sources and perspectives. This is the case in the pioneering 1991 collection of war-related artwork of 40 American and Vietnamese artists, As Seen By Both Sides; the acclaimed Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam, a book that in 1997 broke new ground by exhibiting photographs taken by all 134 of the photojournalists who died or went missing during the war;4 the 2001 Legacy of Discord: Voices of the Vietnam War Era, an anthology of 19 interviews with those providing “divergent, high-powered perspectives” on the war; the 2003 Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides, a book comprising excerpts from interviews of 135 different people who were asked about their experiences of the war; and finally, it is also true of the much-discussed 2017 documentary, The Vietnam War. The problem so far with this movement to include the perspective of “the other side” has been the common assumption of a binary opposition between “us” and “them”—the U.S. and their Vietnamese foes. This simplification elides much, not least of all the people aligned with the anti-communist government of South Vietnam (formally known as the Republic of Vietnam). For example, in Patriots, just 13 of the 135 individuals interviewed are Vietnamese people who were in some way associated with South Vietnam; in As Seen By Both Sides, only one of the 40 featured artists 3 See Madigan (2020) for a detailed discussion of competing understandings of cultural trauma. 4 In the case of this particular work, the period covered stretches from the height of the French Indochina War in the 1940s to the capitulation of South Vietnam in 1975 and includes not only the territory of Vietnam but that of Laos and Cambodia as well. Many of the photos included in Requiem form a permanent exhibit based on the book at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.

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is from the South; similarly, in Requiem, only two of the 134 photographers represented in the book are from South Vietnam; and in Legacy of Discord, only a single interview out of the 19 included in the book is with someone associated with South Vietnam. In all these cases, the presence of those aligned with the anti-communist South barely registers in the mind of the reader/viewer. Comparable points have been made regarding the Burns and Novick f ilm, The Vietnam War. Lan Cao, a Vietnamese-American law professor and novelist, observes that “In the section of the PBS series about the Tet offensive of 1968, for example, there were hardly any South Vietnamese soldiers whose voices were included…. But North Vietnamese and Vietcong voices were amply heard” (Lan Cao, The New York Times, 3/22/2018). Similarly, after watching the 18-hour documentary, Beth Nguyen, the Vietnamese-American author of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, wrote, “I kept hoping to see more commentary from those who fought, especially on the South Vietnamese side, but that hope was not fulfilled” (KQED, 10/10/2017). Likewise, after watching the same film, Sutton Vo, a former major in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, lamented that “The Vietnam War included the Americans, South Vietnam and North Vietnam. But in the 18 hours, the role of South Vietnam was very small” (Sanchez, San Jose Mercury News, 9/29/2017). This relative absence of those Vietnamese aligned with the Republic of Vietnam has been commented on by scholars as well. In Christina Schwenkel’s book on the Vietnamese memory of the war, The American War in Contemporary Vietnam, she writes that “a sustained focus on Vietnamese American memory is not included in this text but would be a project of great importance” (2009: 8). In light of this omission, one of our objectives in the present book is to be among the first to attempt this “project of great importance,” to bring together in equal measure the collective memories of the war that persist within contemporary Vietnam, the Vietnamese-American community, and the broader U.S. society. And it is specifically through this tripartite comparative framing of the war’s tangled knot of collective memories and traumas that we hope to play our part in the conversation.

The Theater of War For most Americans, mention of “the Vietnam War” conjures up images of low-flying helicopters pitching in and out of combat zones, beleaguered G.I.s fighting an unseen enemy through dense jungle, and a handful of iconic, gut-wrenching photographs. Indeed, regardless of their opinions about U.S.

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involvement in Vietnam, so powerful are these representations that it is difficult for most Americans to conclude anything other than this was the war. While we may disagree about the merit of the war or the manner of its prosecution, we are tempted to say that the facts are the facts, and they are well known; the rest is ideology. However, like most things concerning the American-Vietnamese War, it’s not that simple. Even something as seemingly objective as the number of dead and wounded is complicated by how one counts and who is counting. The estimates of civilian and military casualties in Vietnam vary by hundreds of thousands. But beyond disagreement over the details of objective measurement, there are in truth numerous perspectives on the war that, while more or less factually accurate, differ substantially in terms of which facts are included or excluded, the extent to which they are emphasized or de-emphasized, and the ways in which one set of events are thought to have precipitated another; in short, the perspectives on the war differ in the ways they are narrated. And these differences in narration affect, among other things, when and why the war is said to have begun and ended, how culpability for the war and its aftermath is attributed, and ultimately the degree to which reconciliation between those involved is possible or even desired. The purpose of this book, then, is to explore how the American-Vietnamese War is understood and remembered. Specifically, we will analyze: (1) the ways in which the memory of the war is narrated, (2) the consequences of these narratives, and (3) the nature of the trauma suffered by the war’s participants. Because remembering entails a representation of the past from the vantage point of the present, we will focus our inquiry on the contemporary manifestations of what were the three primary belligerents: the Vietnamese communists, the Republic of Vietnam, and the United States.5 The memory of this war, if it has been anything, has been contentious, and this contention bares its teeth at the outset of our project by problematizing the way we refer to the conflict and its participants. While Americans routinely refer to the war as the Vietnam War,6 this is certainly not the way it is referred to by most of those in present-day Vietnam, where it is called the American War, 5 Of course, there were more belligerents beyond the three listed here. Again, the point of our project is to focus on the ways in which memory is contested within social groups, not to give an exhaustive historical account. 6 Shortly after independence from French colonial rule was declared in Hanoi by Ho Chi Minh and the Communist Party of Vietnam, the First Indochina War was fought between the French and Vietnamese (the former being heavily subsidized by the U.S.). This war is typically said to have lasted from 1946 to 1954 (Kiernan, 2017: 385). For this reason, what can be seen as a resumption of hostilities between the Vietnamese communists and the U.S. is sometimes

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the War of National Independence, the American War of Aggression, the Resistance War Against the American Imperialists, the Neocolonialist War, and many other names besides. Because it is not one of the intentions of this book to advocate any perspective in particular, we will endeavor to be evenhanded—without sacrificing intelligibility—by using the slightly modified expression, the American-Vietnamese War. Of course, what is meant by this phrase will vary depending on which social group we are analyzing, which is the very reality our book sets out to explain. And this brings us immediately to a second terminological problem: how to refer to the three primary social groups under consideration. North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, and American might seem sensible enough in that their usage has become familiar to an English-speaking audience, but it is important to note that these terms obscure some critical details, including the fact that many of those in South Vietnam—for example, members of the National Liberation Front and their People’s Liberation Armed Forces7 (collectively known by their opponents as the Việt Cộng, a derisive expression for “Vietnamese Communist”)—were fighting along with the North Vietnamese (officially the Democratic Republic of Vietnam) in an effort to supplant the government of South Vietnam (officially the Republic of Vietnam). Therefore, when discussing the period prior to the capitulation of the Republic of Vietnam on April 30, 1975, we will—in a knowing simplif ication for the sake of clarity—typically use the term Vietnamese communists to refer to all those Vietnamese aligned with the National Liberation Front and Democratic Republic of Vietnam, South Vietnamese to refer to those Vietnamese aligned with the Republic of Vietnam, and Americans when referring to the United States government and military forces. However, when discussing the period after April 30, 1975, the matter is complicated once again. At that time South Vietnam ceased to exist as a political entity, and on July 2, 1976 the entire territory of Vietnam was unified under a new name, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV). What’s more, the large Vietnamese diasporic community now living in the United States, a social group that began as refugees with ties to South Vietnam, is just as American as the rest of the population living in the United States. In another attempt at impartial simplification, when denoting the contemporary social groups that emerged from the war’s principal belligerents, we will use the terms Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) to describe the post-July 2, 1976 referred to in the U.S. as the Second Indochina War, but by the 21st century this has become less common. 7 Also known as the Liberation Army of South Vietnam (LASV).

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government of Vietnam, Vietnamese-Americans to refer to those Vietnamese who relocated to the United States (along with their descendants), and the broader American society to generalize about Americans who do not have Vietnamese ancestry. For reasons that should be obvious, not all of the social groups we analyze in this book are coextensive with what we normally think of as nation-states (e.g., the wartime Vietnamese communists and the Vietnamese-Americans certainly do not qualify as such). Even so, the groups under consideration are no less cohesive and identifiable. They are, in the words of Benedict Anderson (1983), imagined communities. That is, they are bodies of individuals—individuals who will never meet most of the other members of the group—that are bound together by a shared sense of identity. As imagined communities, these social groups constitute collective actors that are capable of uniting in shared projects; the War in Vietnam was one such project and, as we will demonstrate, remembering the war is another.

Cultural Trauma While the memory of the War in Vietnam has been contentious, one point of broad agreement is that the war and its legacy have been traumatic for many of the individuals who were directly involved. In the U.S., the articulation of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a unique mental health condition was developed in the 1970s in large part due to the war-related distress experienced by many veterans of the war on their return home, and the long-term mental health effects of the war and resettlement of Vietnamese immigrants is a growing area of research (e.g., Tieu, “First-of-Its-Kind Study to Delve into Wartime Trauma on Vietnamese Americans” ABC10, 5/1/2022; also see Sun et al., 2022). However, less obvious is the idea that the war might have been traumatic for the societies embroiled in the hostilities, that their cultures themselves might have been traumatized. This notion of cultural trauma is motivated by a theoretically insightful extension of the concept of trauma, the Greek word denoting “wound” that was historically reserved for physical injuries. As is well known, in the late 19th century the concept of trauma was extended to a species of psychic injury. In the case of physical trauma, the wound consists of damage to the integrity of the physical body caused by a literal blow. In the case of psychic trauma, the blow is figurative; the wound consists of damage to the integrity of the psyche caused by the “blow” of an overwhelming experience. Taking this concept one step further, in cases of cultural trauma the injury is to an entire social group

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and consists of damage to the integrity of the group’s collective identity. In its seminal formulation, cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways. (Alexander, 2004a: 1)

An episode of cultural trauma, then, has two interrelated moments: first is a sense of the fracturing of a community’s self-understanding, a grave disruption that is seen as “a threat to a culture with which individuals in that society presumably have an identification” (Smelser, 2004: 40). When members of a group believe the group itself has been fractured, as when a religious community experiences a schism, they are traumatized not in terms of their personal identity but in their sense of identity as members of the group; that is to say, individuals are traumatized as Catholics or as Muslims. However—and this is essential to the theory of cultural trauma—no event is inherently traumatic (Alexander, 2004a: 8). Instead, “a narrative that frames the event as catastrophic must emerge as the most widely accepted way of understanding the event” (Madigan, 2020: 47). Once this traumatic event has been integrated into the collective memory of the group, the cultural trauma itself must be constructed as such by the members of the group. Cultural trauma emerges only when a social group regards an experience as so injurious that it must re-narrate its collective identity in order to make sense of it. And this brings us to the second moment in an episode of cultural trauma: It is a process that aims to reconstitute or reconfigure a collective identity, as in repairing a tear in the social fabric. A traumatic tear evokes the need to “narrate new foundations” (Hale, 1998: 6), which includes reinterpreting the past as a means toward reconciling present/future needs. (Eyerman, 2004: 63)

In other words, in order to count as an episode of cultural trauma, a shared experience must be understood as catastrophic and the identity of the social group—the imagined community—must be re-narrated in light of this catastrophe. But we must hasten to point out that this re-narration is not an inevitable outcome whenever a social group has understood itself to have experienced catastrophe. It is conceivable, for example, that in the aftermath of a catastrophic event, a collectivity might disintegrate completely. In

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this case (e.g., perhaps the erstwhile members of the shattered collectivity are simply absorbed into other collectivities after the traumatic event), no cultural trauma has occurred. We would argue that a more appropriate analogy for this social dissolution is cultural death. Instead, if we are to apply the diagnosis of cultural trauma, there must be some recognition of continuity between the pre- and post-traumatic collectivity among its members; the collectivity must survive the troubling event if it is to be considered traumatized. It follows, then, that just as not all harrowing events experienced by individuals cause psychic trauma, neither do all calamities experienced by societies result in cultural trauma, even when the collectivity is acknowledged to have survived the event. This explains, for example, why in the U.S., despite the lack of a clear victory and the extraordinary human toll—nearly 40,000 American deaths and over 100,000 casualties—the Korean War did not result in a cultural trauma. Americans continued on after the war much as they had before the war; they simply did not understand the war as having fractured their collective identity. As we will demonstrate throughout this book, the three contemporary social groups under consideration—the SRV, Vietnamese-Americans, and the broader American society—have diverged in the ways they have come to understand and narrate the AmericanVietnamese War, leading to divergent results in terms of cultural trauma. When we remember events collectively—even recent events—there is much that is left out or forgotten, while the remaining details tend to settle into a particular order; or rather, because our role in this process is an active one, it is more correct to say we impose order onto the content of these shared memories. This is sometimes a conscious, intentional formulation and other times an entirely unconscious process. And the form that these memories take is that of a narrative: a verbal representation of a sequence of actions, significantly related to one another, that constitutes a unified whole (cf. Ricoeur, 1990). It is because of this active process that we (i.e., the authors of this book) maintain, somewhat counterintuitively, that the traumatic event in question, while typically correlated with some actual occurrence in the physical or social world (e.g., a political assassination, a genocide, a schism, a natural disaster, a war), is in fact a construction—a narrative construction. An event can only be considered a cultural trauma when its specific narrative is woven into the more comprehensive narrative of a society’s collective identity, a collective identity that is broken and reconfigured in response to this jarring insertion. That the traumatic injury is to the culture and not just to the subset of individuals who directly experience the event explains how a historical reality such as the American institution of slavery or Hurricane

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Katrina, which devastated the American Gulf Coast in 2005, can be traumatic to Americans who were either not yet born during the period or not present in the vicinity where it occurred. While many Americans might not have experienced these painful events as they happened, they will still tend to experience their troubling effects through the ways in which they understand themselves to have been injured as Americans.

Collective Memory In order to better round out the theory of cultural trauma—a theory pivotal to the analysis offered in this book—it will be helpful here if we elaborate on another concept central to our purposes: collective memory. It should be noted immediately that while the term “collective memory” might suggest the rather nebulous idea of a “collective mind” or “shared consciousness,” this is not an idea we mean to endorse. In fact, it is precisely in the modern context of a diverse and differentiated society, along with its wide-ranging individualism, that the concept of collective memory has its origins and salience. By collective memory we mean a narrative about the past that is held by a social group, a narrative that provides its members with an emotionally powerful identification with the collectivity. This concept can be traced back to the early twentieth-century writings of Maurice Halbwachs, who, building on the foundational work of Emile Durkheim, brought the term collective memory into prominence within the social sciences. In his 1912 work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995), Durkheim developed the concept of collective representations, symbols carrying the ideas, beliefs, and values held by social groups that enable the group to order and make sense of the world. A paradigmatic collective representation in the aboriginal groups Durkheim studied was the totem, an object—such as a plant or animal—onto which a social group projected the source of great power and sacrality. Indeed, to these traditional cultures, the totem was its deity. However, Durkheim argued that it is in the totem’s nature to be mis-recognized, that unbeknownst to the social group the true referent of their veneration is actually the group itself. That is, while the totem is believed to represent an ultimate cosmic power, it is in fact the members’ experience of the group’s own power, authority, and import that the totem represents. This felt power of the group is the sense within every member that there are appropriate and inappropriate ways of life, that some actions are good and others are evil, that some people inspire our love and some objects evoke our disgust. These feelings exercise a tremendous force over

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group members, binding them together by enabling certain thoughts, emotions, and behaviors while constraining others. Indeed, so strong are these feelings and their effects that individuals routinely ascribe them to something external to themselves. Durkheim attributed the true origin of these passions to the group, itself. When early communities came together for a common purpose, such as a religious ritual, the excitement in the air, their collective effervescence, was palpable (today, we need look no further than the experience of fans at a major sporting event or political partisans at one of their candidate’s rallies to understand this reality). And this felt power of the group, according to Durkheim, was habitually misplaced—in the case of so-called primitive societies—onto its totem. Far from a mere anthropological curiosity, a principal point of Durkheim’s work is to show that these collective representations persist in modern societies in ways similar to those of so-called primitive societies. While religious beliefs are paradigmatic examples of collective representations, they are merely a “special case of a very general law” (Durkheim, 1995: 228), a law dictating that social groups imbue the physical world with powerful meaning and value. Durkheim gives the example of a national flag as an equivalent to the primitive collective representation: soldiers on the battlefield give their lives to keep what is otherwise a mere scrap of cloth from falling into the hands of the enemy. Why? Because it is imbued with the power, authority, and import of the whole society—the passions and sentiments associated with what gives the society its unique character and identity. This emotionally charged nature of the flag is not, of course, empirically perceptible: we could never discover the power held by the flag with a microscope or through chemical analysis of its thread. Yet its power is just as real as any physical force. It is a power that is felt to be within us, yet not of us, a force that applies pressure on group members to treat the object as worthy of the greatest reverence. While religious beliefs and national f lags are powerful collective representations, their special form of social power does not reside in all representations of the social group: the force of a collective representation is absent from a mundane token of the group, such as a church bulletin or a patriotic beach towel; no one would risk their life for one of these. That said, in addition to certain specific representations of entire social groups, Durkheim extends the concept of collective representation to include other symbols of collectively held ideas and values. Human blood, he asserts—the sight of which fills most of us with a certain degree of horror—is a collective representation, as are certain very rare postage stamps: in both cases, the objects—while clearly not representing an entire social group—are held

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to command a certain level of respect: many shudder at the sight of spilt human blood, just as the world of philately would shudder at the destruction of a 1918 Inverted Jenny postage stamp. In the generation of French sociologists that succeeded Durkheim, Maurice Halbwachs augmented the former’s work on collective representations by turning his attention toward memory. Halbwachs begins by pointing out that individual memory, left unaided, tends to dissipate. In order to remember, individuals require publicly available prompts, such as conversation, texts, objects, and images. He points to recollections of our own childhood as a clear case of this phenomenon. These autobiographical memories—the quintessential “individual” memories—are largely recalled to us by discussions with our parents and siblings; the sight of a toy or article of clothing we had when we were young; family photographs; or bodily marks, such as scars from childhood injuries. Surprisingly, then, even my personal memories “are recalled to me externally, and the groups of which I am a part at any time give me the means to reconstruct them” (Halbwachs, 1992: 38). However, this process of external prompting by one’s group is not a neutral retrieval of past events; it also has the effect of teaching us what is important for us to remember and what is appropriate for us to filter out or forget. When a parent asks their child to recount their day at school, the child is prompted to relate certain events (e.g., what they learned in class) while discouraged from dilating on others (e.g., the color of the coat worn by each child on the school bus). More specifically, the child is taught what is important for us—for our family—to remember (e.g., our parents’ birthdays), and what is appropriate for us to filter out or forget (e.g., the birthdays of our city council members). In the example above, the family is the group facilitating memory, but our group membership obviously extends beyond the family to include a whole constellation of national, religious, ethnic, political, and other organizational collectivities. And like the memories recalled to us by our families, we have memories that are recalled to us by the other groups to which we belong. These collective memories work in the same way as many of our personal memories in that they are prompted by external objects and discourse and are tied to a vital sense of group membership. Similar to the ways in which Durkheim’s collective representations serve to carry the emotionally compelling ideas, beliefs, and values held by social groups, Halbwachs argues that collective memories “express the general attitude of the group … [and] define its nature and its qualities” (1992: 59). And it is this close connection to the group’s identity and interests that led Halbwachs to differentiate a group’s collective memory from its history. In Halbwachs,

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the goals of professional history—regardless of whether they are actually achieved—are that of a rational, objective, static, and neutral description of the past. In stark contrast, he maintains that collective memory is an ever-changing representation of the past that is filtered through the group’s present needs, a representation that provides the group with a unique set of shared characteristics and experiences that creates a boundary between “us” and “them.” Drawing on these ideas of Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, a scholar of collective memory, argues at length for a sharp distinction between memory and history. Indeed, he goes so far as to assert that “Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition” (1989: 8). While we believe the distinction between history and collective memory is an instructive one, we do not see the two concepts as mutually exclusive in the way Halbwachs and Nora do. Rather, as the contemporary theorist of collective memory Jeffrey Olick suggests, it is more fruitful to understand the concept of collective memory as comprising a broader set of “mnemonic products and practices” (2010: 158; italics in the original) that includes historical studies as well as oral reports, journalism, memoirs, textbooks, political speeches, drama, film, photography, painting, sculpture, literature, music, museums, monuments, memorials, commemorative events, and so on. It is through all of these modes of expression that a somewhat coherent story of collective identity takes shape, although more often than not the story is simplified and told piecemeal. In the U.S., for example, the Thanksgiving holiday in November commemorates the arrival of the first English settlers in what would become the United States, a single chapter in the American collective memory as well as a historical simplification in that the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 were preceded thirteen years earlier by the Jamestown settlement in the colony of Virginia. In the same way, the American Independence Day holiday commemorates and simplifies yet another chapter of the American collective memory. While the holiday is thought of as a celebration of the country’s birth as an independent nation on July 4th, the vote for independence from Britain was actually cast on July 2, 1776, and the war for independence was not won until 1783 (what’s more, there is no evidence that one of the most recognizable symbols of American independence—the Liberty Bell—was rung on July 4, 1776). Each of these holidays has its own congeries of images, objects, foods, and traditional activities that represent their respective portions of the American narrative of collective identity. While neither Plymouth Rock nor the Liberty Bell is a narrative per se, each is a collective representation of both its particular narrative (i.e., that

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of the first English settlers in America and the birth of the United States of America, respectively) and the broader narrative of which they are a part (i.e., the whole story of the United States of America). Each exists external to any one individual’s brain and calls to nearly every American’s mind its respective narrative; as collective representations, they serve to perpetuate the collective memory of American identity across succeeding generations of Americans. Moving closer to our subject matter, the images of harried G.I.s fighting in muddy jungles, helicopters swarming just above the surfaces of rice paddies, a naked nine-year-old girl running down a highway, flesh burning with napalm—these are some of the collective representations of America’s collective memory of the American-Vietnamese War. And these collective representations exercise extraordinary power over social groups, for “it is never the past itself that acts upon a present society, but representations of past events” (Assmann and Shortt, 2012: 3; italics in the original). Indeed, it is the braiding of these representations of past events into a narrative of collective identity that gives them meaning and potency. In the case of the American-Vietnamese War, we can look at its collective representations and wonder, Was Saigon liberated or did it fall? Was South Vietnam a puppet regime or an independent nation? Did the U.S. suffer ignoble defeat in Vietnam, or did it achieve peace with honor? And all of these sorts of questions—not questions of objective fact but powerful, valueladen questions of meaning—are best answered by referring to collective memory, the narrative reconstruction of a social group’s past. What’s more, the answers to these questions of meaning will vary greatly depending on whom you ask, whose memory you interrogate. It is this set of distinctions that makes this book primarily an exploration of collective memory rather than a history of the American-Vietnamese War. This perspectival and conflictual nature of collectively held memories and beliefs was developed by a younger contemporary of Halbwachs, the sociologist Karl Mannheim. In 1928, Mannheim argued that collectively held beliefs are “rooted in and carried by the desire for power and recognition of particular social groups who want to make their interpretation of the world the universal one” (Mannheim, 2011: 405). The struggle resulting from this desire for narrative control is apparent in the conflict between the three social groups that emerged from the American-Vietnamese War, but the collective memories within these three social groups are also far from harmonious. It is another one of the goals of this book to reveal the heterogeneity of collective memories not only between these groups but also within them. And in order to better describe and delimit the disparate narratives of collective memory that circulate within each

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of the three principal people groups, we examine the social processes through which these narratives are created, maintained, and transformed. This analysis shows that far from a congenial operation, these processes are often fraught with conflict, and instead of a single collective memory, we discover numerous competing narratives, each with its own set of advocates. Eviatar Zerubavel calls these contests mnemonic battles (1999: 99), and how—or whether—a particular past experience is woven into the narrative of collective identity is contingent upon these trials. In some cases, after a period of struggle, these competing narratives achieve a degree of cohesion, whereas in other cases one of the narratives will emerge as dominant while its competitors are marginalized or abandoned altogether. Narratives provide a basic cultural structure that unites a collectivity by linking together collective representations into a coherent story, one that can be transmitted across generations and facilitate the incorporation of new members into the group. Founding narratives tell the story of how the collectivity came to be, weaving together historical facts and myths in such a way as to consolidate and perpetuate a group’s identity. This process is the same for collectivities ranging from families and ethnic groups to nations and religious communities. These origin stories are told and retold; they are inscribed in memory and embodied through rituals, including such mundane mechanisms as schoolroom practices and holiday traditions, until they become incorporated as the taken-for-granted foundations of individual and collective identity. These are precisely the foundations that rupture in the process we have identif ied as cultural trauma. The story of the American nation, for example, can be thought to begin with the Revolutionary War, a war of national liberation from the British colonial empire; this is inscribed in textbooks and celebrated every year as Independence Day. Indeed, the valorization of war more generally—and the sacrifice it entails—is a core aspect of American collective memory and stems from these origins. At the same time, America’s founding narrative can also be read as celebrating the exact opposite set of circumstances: the establishment of a successful colonial enterprise by the British, one that is commemorated every year on Thanksgiving Day. There is no acknowledgement of this paradox in official celebrations of these holidays, but the tension between them has sometimes been articulated, not least by the intellectuals and activists who participated in the anti-Vietnam War movement. In stark contrast to other wars, the incorporation of the American-Vietnamese War into the American narrative of collective identity has been, as we will discuss, problematic.

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The victorious Vietnamese of the SRV have also fashioned a founding narrative that celebrates the collective struggle against colonial domination, one that includes the war against the Americans. As we will discuss, the Vietnamese of the SRV have created memorial sites and ceremonies to represent this narrative of national liberation through violent struggle against more powerful enemies. Their narrative focuses on the forcefulness of long-term resilience and collective will. Those Vietnamese who opposed them and fought alongside the Americans—i.e., the South Vietnamese—are almost entirely absent in this narrative; and when they do make an appearance, they do so as “American puppets”—mere instruments of a foreign enemy. This invisibility and its resulting struggle for recognition permeate the attempts by exiled Vietnamese to re-found their community in the United States and elsewhere. Arriving for the most part as unwanted refugees in the United States, they were met with a combination of silence and hostility, for they were the symbolic reminders of what many Americans considered a lost war. While the first generation of these refugees looked backward, succeeding generations have more or less become successfully assimilated Americans. Their founding narrative begins on April 30, 1975, which is commemorated within the Vietnamese-American community as Tháng Tư Đen (“Black April”). It remains to be seen how long this commemoration will continue, but even as the personal memories of the war fade into history, the celebration does function to distinguish Vietnamese Americans from the broad category of Asian Americans to which the U.S. Census Bureau and others have relegated them.

Arenas of Memory In order to expose the often impassioned mnemonic battles between competing versions of collective identity, we develop the concept of arenas of memory, a heuristic device that allows us to demarcate the social spaces where different narratives of collective memory interact. These arenas of memory are distinct discourses that are tied to specific individuals, organizations, and institutions that advocate specific narratives through specific forms of media. For the purposes of this study, we have identified four cardinal arenas of memory: the political, the academic, the artistic, and the community. In each of the three social groups we examine, the contests between competing narratives of the American-Vietnamese War (and the war’s place within the group’s collective identity) occur both within and between these arenas of memory. A society’s arenas of memory—the

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distinct conversations in which specific individuals and groups use specific media to create, perpetuate, and contest specific narratives—could of course be diced up in any number of ways, but the four we have identified here have a certain level of institutional coherence and durability that facilitates the following analysis. For example, American politicians have narrated the war in different ways depending on their present needs, and these needs have differed not only over time but also by party affiliation. Even so, throughout the changing times and circumstances of the past half century, there have been certain constants within the American political arena such as the general prohibition of disparaging the U.S. military, a prohibition largely absent from the relatively independent academic, artistic, and community arenas. In the SRV, this prohibition against disparaging the nation’s military has been largely extended to all the arenas, revealing a much tighter integration of their arenas and a more thorough control of cultural production by the Communist Party of Vietnam. It should be noted that each arena of memory is a more-or-less discrete discourse that has three interrelated components: (1) the individuals or groups that are involved in producing the arena’s set of narratives; (2) the specific narratives, themselves; and (3) the particular media through which the narratives are produced and propagated. For example, the artistic arena includes novelists, poets, sculptors, screenwriters, and painters who offer up a certain set of (potentially incompatible) narratives about the AmericanVietnamese War, narratives that are objectified in novels, poems, sculptures, films, and paintings. Similarly, in the political arena, elected and appointed officials as well as government bureaucrats and candidates for office will pass laws, negotiate treaties, make speeches, and write op-ed pieces that will be carried in the news media or recorded in government archives. Occasionally, however, the boundaries between arenas will be blurred, such as when a national monument or memorial is created or an exhibition at a national museum is curated (projects through which at the very least the political and artistic arenas are brought together). In these cases, we will need to look at the ways in which different arenas—and their various versions of collective memory—interact. Running through each of these arenas of memory, of course, are both personal memories and generational memories. Personal memory—what Halbwachs calls autobiographical memory—consists of the memories of what we ourselves have directly experienced. Although Halbwachs is at pains to show how even our autobiographical memory is largely framed by social factors, he nevertheless distinguishes between it and collective memory proper. That said, autobiographical memory can in some cases

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become part of collective memory, and in terms of our book’s subject, that is precisely what we find. In fact, sociologist Thomas DeGloma developed the concept of mnemonic alignment to theorize this phenomenon, arguing that it is not only that autobiographical memory parallels and reinforces collective memory, but the reverse is also true: collective memory parallels and reinforces autobiographical memory (2015: 160). In order for this transfer from the personal to the collective to take place, autobiographical memory must first be objectified—it must somehow be brought into the public discourse. This can be accomplished in numerous ways, including giving interviews, making speeches, or writing autobiographies and memoirs, such as Truong Nhu Tang’s A Vietcong Memoir (1986) or General Westmoreland’s A Soldier Reports (1976). It can be used to inform artistic productions, such as Oliver Stone’s film Platoon (1986) or Bao Ninh’s novel The Sorrow of War (1987); to build political capital, like that of U.S. Senator John McCain and U.S. Secretary of Defense John Kerry; or add depth to academic work, such as that of Vietnam veterans who spoke at university teach-ins throughout the 1960s and early 1970s or popular scholarly publications like Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies (2016). Once these autobiographical memories have become objectified, they enter an arena of memory, one of the ongoing social conversations about the American-Vietnamese War. These memories can offer powerful rhetorical weight to their narratives by the special claim of an individual to have “really” experienced a particular event, but more often than not these “real” memories turn out to be far from mutually compatible and anything but straightforwardly accepted; they are still subject to the same level of contestation as any other form of memory. Every autobiographical memory is potentially countered by the charges of misrepresentation, ulterior motives, mistaken perception, and faulty memory and is subject to alternative interpretations and discrediting. Such was the case with the dramatic 1971 Winter Soldier Investigation, three days of hearings on the U.S. Armed Forces’ massacres of Vietnamese civilians and torture of prisoners of war that was followed by additional testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. These hearings were organized by the U.S. Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and prominently featured the testimony of 109 U.S. servicemen who were in many cases present at the various atrocities they described. While the soldiers who testified to these events provided a powerful attack on the official narrative of the U.S. government, their attestations were nevertheless vehemently contested by the Nixon administration. Among other things, the president authorized the “Plan to Counteract Viet Nam Veterans Against the War” in an attempt

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to locate material that would discredit those who offered testimony, and the president encouraged the formation of the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace (VVJP), a group dedicated to supporting the American war efforts in Vietnam and countering allegations of atrocities with its own set of autobiographical memories directly opposed to those of the VVAW. While the case of the Winter Soldier Investigation exemplifies how a confrontation between agents from the political arena and those from the community arena can be augmented by autobiographical memory, it does not in itself reveal much about the concept of generational memory. For this latter form of memory we will turn to Mannheim, the scholar most responsible for its conceptual spadework. One of Mannheim’s important theoretical projects was describing how collectively held beliefs and memories are largely influenced by the social position of the group that holds them, and one of the principal elements of social position is that of the generation. More than a mere aggregate of individuals born in the same historical period, the sort of generation Mannheim was interested in was a concrete social group on the same level as other collectivities that share a set of values, beliefs, and memories. This sort of concrete generation forms only when a birth cohort is exposed to some significant social destabilization (Mannheim, 2007) such as those caused by wars, revolutions, or natural disasters. And naturally, different birth cohorts will experience and remember the same historical events differently; children and adults are affected differently by social destabilization, something Mannheim attributes to the “stratification” of our lives into different stages (e.g., first impressions, childhood experiences). However, even members of the same birth cohorts do not all experience socially destabilizing events in the same way. And this fact leads Mannheim to differentiate each actual generation into separate “generational units,” subgroups that “work up the material of their common experiences in different specific ways” and participate in a shared response (ibid.). At this point in his analysis, Mannheim is very close to defining generations in the same way we are def ining arenas of memory. He states that “within any generation there can exist a number of differentiated, antagonistic generation-units. Together they constitute an ‘actual’ generation precisely because they are oriented toward each other, even though only in the sense of fighting one another” (ibid.). Indeed, one could certainly define both autobiographical memory and generational memory as unique arenas of memory, but for our purposes, these modes of memory run orthogonal to our chosen array. That is, autobiographical and generational memories run through all the other arenas of memory instead of forming complementary, independent categories; each arena of memory holds within it members from

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each birth cohort. We will have occasion throughout our analyses to point out how individual and generational memories affect positions within our arenas of memory, but for all the reasons above, we will not consider them as constitutive of their own arenas.

Historical Background and the March Toward War In order to better understand the collective memories of the groups we analyze, it is helpful to keep in mind both a general picture of Vietnam’s history and some of the immediate antecedents of the American-Vietnamese War. In what follows, we attempt to highlight a number of the principal events and historical trends that motivate the narratives promulgated by the collectivities we discuss. While we have been at pains to argue that all narratives of the past are told from particular perspectives, we believe this brief bit of scene setting will not be overly contentious from the standpoint of our three main collectivities and will provide an important background against which to understand the various collective memories considered in subsequent chapters. One of the major themes of Vietnamese collective memory shared by those who would later be divided by the war is the people’s long history of foreign domination coupled with their equally long struggle for independence.8 This narrative was prevalent throughout Vietnam during the early twentieth century, and only during the mid-twentieth century did it begin to bifurcate between broadly accepted communist and anticommunist versions.9 The Vietnamese trace their origins to the first millennium B.C. in the region around what would someday become the city of Hanoi, but already by the second century B.C., China had invaded and occupied their land. Despite a number of celebrated rebellions against the Chinese, including that led by the two Trưng sisters in 40 A.D., this domination would last for one thousand years. It was not until 938 A.D. that Vietnam at long last regained 8 The people living in the territory of what is today the Socialist Republic of Vietnam comprise some 50 different ethnic groups; the purpose of this present section is to discuss the specifically Vietnamese collective identity, not that of all the other groups who share this region. 9 Many of those who would eventually side with South Vietnam and join the Republic of Vietnam Military Forces (RVNMF) actually spent their early military careers with the Viet Minh (“League for the Independence of Viet Nam”) fighting for Vietnamese independence from the French. The Viet Minh was actually a front organization set up in 1941 by Ho Chi Minh and the Indochina Communist Party. Not the least of these was Nguyen Cao Ky, the eventual Premier of South Vietnam (Ky, 2002: 19).

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its independence. Flush with its hard-won freedom, the newly liberated kingdom proclaimed itself Đại Việt (“Great Viet”). In the ensuing decades, Đại Việt developed a highly organized administrative system run by mandarins who were promoted based on competitive civil service examinations. By the eleventh century, the Vietnamese had a postal system, an efficient network of roads, a stable monetary system, an imperial college, annual literary competitions, and a standardized penal code. Under this strong centralized government, Đại Việt began a centuries-long conquest southward along the coast. However, while the Vietnamese gradually overwhelmed various peoples to the south, they were continuously harassed by their old foes to the north. Throughout the second half of the thirteenth century, Đại Việt repelled three separate Mongol invasions. In the fifteenth century, however, China succeeded in once again briefly subduing Vietnam. But this time the Chinese occupation did not last. With a “mixture of guerrilla and attrition warfare” (Fall, 2000: 41), the Vietnamese threw off the yoke of their imperial nemesis and gave birth to a new dynasty, the Lê, that would reign for the next three centuries. While the Lê dynasty busied itself with shoring up its defenses to the north and conquering ever more territory to the south, it was during their rule that a new influence arrived, this time from the sea. In the mid-sixteenth century, Portuguese traders and priests began arriving in Vietnam, and the first Catholic Church was erected in the region in 1615. Shortly afterward—at about the time the Pilgrims were landing at Plymouth—one of the first Frenchmen to visit Vietnam, Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes, arrived in Hanoi. He was sent by the Pope to lead the first permanent mission in Vietnam. By the time he was banished in 1649, his imprint on the culture was indelible; tens of thousands of Vietnamese had embraced Catholicism. He had also transliterated the Vietnamese language from Chinese characters to the quốc ngữ script, with its Latinized alphabet and added diacritical marks to signal the multi-tonal character of the language. The quốc ngữ script remains in use to this day. Much of the seventeenth century in Vietnam was marred by a protracted civil war between the South, led by the Nguyen clan, and the northern Lê dynasty supported by both the powerful Trinh clan and the Chinese. After a truce was called in the 1670s, the southern Nguyen expanded still southward into the Mekong Delta. This uneasy century of north-south division finally gave way when the whole of Vietnam was thrown into political turmoil by the Tây Sơn brothers, three young men who gathered followers among the disenfranchised by preaching a message of social justice. The brothers, aided by landless peasants and a disgruntled merchant class, led

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a rebellion and defeated the Nguyen and Trinh clans—as well as the Lê dynasty—by 1778. However, the short-lived hegemony of the Tay Son was subsequently defeated by the remnants of the Nguyen, who had appealed to and were aided by the French. In 1802, with the backing of the French, the sole surviving Nguyen prince proclaimed himself Emperor Gia Long of Nam Viet, unifying the territory of Vietnam from the border of China in the north to the Gulf of Siam in the south—a greater expanse than had ever before been under Vietnamese control, and largely the territory comprising the present state of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Gia Long, who derived his name from Gia Định (Saigon) and Thăng Long (Hanoi) to represent the unification of north and south Vietnam, moved the capital south from Hanoi to the centrally located Hue. In 1803, he sent envoys to Peking to establish diplomatic relations with China. However, China objected to the name of the newly stabilized realm—with its invocation of the rebellious Chao T’o’s fiefdom of antiquity—and in 1804 pressed for the country to be renamed “Việt Nam,” (i.e., “Southern Viet”—i.e., the Viet people to the south of China) (Taylor, 1983). With the death of Emperor Gia Long in 1820, Vietnam’s relationship with France soured. In 1825, Long’s successor issued an edict against Christianity, and over the next three decades an estimated 130,000 Catholics were put to death. During this time, the U.S.S. Constitution, under the command of Captain John “Mad Jack” Percival, passed through the region while in the process of circumnavigating the globe. Learning of the American Navy’s presence, the French bishop Dominique Lefebre, who was being held prisoner in Hue and was due to be executed, sent a plea for succor to Percival. On hearing of Lefebre’s plight, Percival put into port at Da Nang. On May 10, 1845, he marched a Marine detachment ashore, captured several high Vietnamese officials, and held them hostage for many days. Percival also captured numerous Vietnamese ships and in the process fired upon them, killing several Vietnamese individuals. Four years after the incident with Percival, the U.S. issued a formal apology for the incident. However, the French had other ideas: “the Vietnamese court had to be punished for its persecution of Catholics and to be jolted out of its obstinate refusal to permit adequate trade” (Jamieson, 1995: 43). In 1858, the French navy attacked Vietnam and temporarily occupied Da Nang, moving south the following year to attack and ultimately occupy Saigon. In November, the French dispatched Admiral Page with instructions to secure a treaty protecting the Catholic faith in Vietnam but not to obtain any territory. With the bulk of the French navy in Southeast Asia diverted to China during the Second Opium War, Vietnam besieged the

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occupied Saigon for nearly a year until the French received reinforcements. By 1862, the Vietnamese government was forced to sign the Treaty of Saigon, which ceded Vietnamese territory to the French. In 1867, the combined French acquisitions in southern Vietnam were pronounced the colony of Cochinchina, subject now to direct rule by France. By 1883, the remainder of Vietnam—Annan (the central territory) and Tonkin (the northern territory)—became French protectorates. French Indochina was officially formed in 1887 when these territories were united with Cambodia and Laos. Vietnam remained a French colony for the next half century, and French companies—such as the tire manufacturers Michelin and Dunlop—developed and capitalized on large rubber plantations worked by the local Vietnamese population under harsh conditions. The French also—through Vietnamese labor—harvested tea and coffee and extracted coal and a variety of minerals to be sent back to France; levied burdensome taxes on the local population; controlled monopolies on opium, salt, and alcohol, and set minimum quotas for the consumption of these goods; maintained an unequal pay structure for civil servants (e.g., the lowest paid French bureaucrat was paid more than the highest paid Vietnamese); and prohibited the Vietnamese from positions of power. Rebellions and attempted assassinations were common throughout this period, and during the early years of the twentieth century, Vietnamese nationalism increased substantially, encouraged by the example of Japan, an Asian country that had modernized to the level of many advanced European nations and proved its prowess by defeating Russia militarily in 1905. But these rebellions did little to shake the French control of the country at the time; they were met with summary repression. It was not until the severe conditions brought on by the global economic depression of the 1930s, followed by the massive political instability of World War II, that a sustained movement for independence took hold. In 1925, Ho Chi Minh, having spent time traveling and studying in France and the Soviet Union, founded what would eventually become known as the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP). Headquartered in southern China in order to evade French authorities, the ICP began organizing and training cadres in Vietnam, and in 1930, as the onset of the global depression coincided with bad harvests in Vietnam, the group was able to initiate labor strikes and mass demonstrations. However, these movements were put down with overwhelming force by the French authorities, a repression that led to a temporary weakening of the ICP. For the next several years, Ho Chi Minh continued to travel and play an active role in promoting Vietnamese independence and communism. In 1941, he was able to reorganize the dormant League for the Independence of Vietnam (a.k.a., the Viet Minh), a

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militant Vietnamese anti-imperialist organization that aimed for a national revolution against the French and Japanese (Kiernan, 2017). Throughout most of WWII, France’s Vichy government—while still technically retaining its Indochinese colonies—allowed Japan to station troops in Vietnam. Under fascist rule, a far more aggressive effort was made to eradicate communist activity. At this point, the Vietnamese communists found common cause with the French Popular Front, the French group fighting against the Vichy collaborators, as well as the U.S. in their fight against Japan. In fact, in 1942 the anti-communist Chinese authorities arrested Ho Chi Minh, and the U.S. joined in the negotiations for his release the following year (Kiernan, 2017: 378). In turn, the Viet Minh had numerous occasions to rescue U.S. service personnel who parachuted into or were shot down over Japanese-controlled regions of northern Vietnam (Goscha, 2016: 196). As the war dragged on, and Japan became involved with fighting the U.S. in the Pacific theater, communication between Vietnam and France was cut off. Emboldened, Japan began dictating the policies of Vietnam, demanding vast quantities of food and other material from the colonial administration. Indeed, the situation became so dire that among a population of 25 million, famine claimed more than one million lives by the end of the war in 1945 (ibid.: 187). In March of 1945, Japan terminated French colonial control over Vietnam altogether. They imprisoned French authorities and declared Vietnam’s independence, installing Emperor Bao Dai as head of state. But this was not exactly the independence the Viet Minh had been fighting for. It did not provide for a Vietnamese ministry of defense and split the country in half, with independence going only to the northern protectorates of Annan and Tonkin. Cochinchina—the southern part of Vietnam that was strategically important to the Japanese war effort—was to be left under Japanese control. During the immediate aftermath of the dissolution of French colonial authority, the Viet Minh took advantage of the disorder by seizing French weaponry. Then, with the help of American OSS officers, the Viet Minh trained the dispossessed peasantry and began raiding public granaries. By the time the Japanese surrendered to the U.S. on August 15, 1945, there was a power vacuum: the Japanese were present in Vietnam but were simply awaiting their repatriation to Japan; the French colonial authorities were still in prison; and the new independent government of Emperor Bao Dai, without a ministry of defense, was impotent. This left the Viet Minh in a prime position from which to seize control. On August 16, the People’s Congress elected Ho Chi Minh as chief minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, and on August 19, the Viet Minh seized Hanoi, forcing the governor to abdicate and to transfer

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authority to Ho Chi Minh’s government. A few days later, the agitation by the Viet Minh spread through Saigon in the south and the imperial city of Hue in central Vietnam, and by the end of the month, Emperor Bao Dai abdicated authority to the Provisional Revolutionary Government as well. On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh read the Proclamation of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam—a document that in some cases quotes verbatim the United States Declaration of Independence—and announced the birth of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) to the crowds gathered for the occasion. While U.S. President Roosevelt had been sympathetic to Vietnamese independence, President Truman, who assumed the presidency only a few months before Ho Chi Minh’s declaration of independence, was more sympathetic to France in light of his eagerness to forestall Soviet influence in postwar Europe. In the months following the establishment of the DRV, Ho Chi Minh sent a half dozen letters to President Truman requesting recognition by the United States; they went unanswered. The newly independent Vietnam would remain unchallenged for a total of four days. France was still too weak to immediately intervene, so on September 6, 1945, British troops landed in Saigon to begin the restoration of colonial order. They charged the defeated Japanese soldiers with keeping order while at the same time releasing and arming the French soldiers that had been detained by the Japanese. On the night of September 22, the newly liberated French soldiers took control of the major public buildings throughout Saigon, forcing the fledgling Vietnamese leaders to flee underground. Shortly thereafter, fresh troops arrived from France and began their reconquest of Vietnam. The Viet Minh were no match for direct engagement with the well-armed and well-trained French, so they abandoned the urban centers and engaged in guerrilla tactics. By early 1946, the French had solidified control over Cochinchina—southern Vietnam. Meanwhile, in the period following the end of WWII, China had moved into the northern part of Vietnam to disarm the Japanese. But while there, they began to behave as if they were a conquering army, engaging in looting, replacing government personnel, and dictating policy with no clear timeline for withdrawal. At the same time that southern Vietnam had been reclaimed by France, an agreement was reached between France, China, and the DRV: the Chinese were to vacate Vietnam, and the entirety of Vietnam was to be recognized as once again under French control. For obvious reasons, large parts of the movement for Vietnamese independence were incensed by this treaty and called Ho Chi Minh a traitor. French troops moved into Hanoi and installed pro-French elements into the DRV government, and Vietnam was to remain divided; French-recognized “Vietnam” was to consist of

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Annan and Tonkin—the area of Vietnam north of the 16th parallel—while everything south of that line was to be determined by a referendum by the people of Cochinchina themselves. This division was in part because of Cochinchina’s historic status as a true colony, whereas the northern territories had technically been protectorates. In short, the southern part of Vietnam was to remain French. This situation did not last long before simmering hostilities turned to armed conflict. By the end of 1946, skirmishes took place between DRV and French troops, and the DRV government under Ho Chi Minh was forced to abscond to the countryside of northwestern Vietnam as the French seized control of Hanoi. From hiding, Ho Chi Minh called on the entire Vietnamese population to rise up, and for the next four years, the Viet Minh was limited to battling the French occupying forces with guerrilla and terrorist tactics. In order to pacify the north, France worked to politically isolate the DRV by declaring Vietnam united under its former Emperor, the French-educated Bao Dai. In August 1949, Bao Dai commissioned the new government of the Associated State of Vietnam (ASV). However, although unified, Vietnam was still not truly independent. It was part of the French Union, and the DRV viewed the ASV as collaborators with the French. The guerrilla war between the DRV and French continued unabated after the creation of the ASV, but the situation changed when at the end of 1949, Mao Zedong defeated Chiang Kai-shek in China, establishing the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC) and promising support to the harried DRV. At the start of 1950, the PRC recognized the DRV as the legitimate government of Vietnam, and the USSR followed shortly thereafter. At the same time, the U.S. and other European allies recognized the ASV. Now, with the significant backing of her communist neighbors to the north, the DRV was able to begin contesting the full force of the French occupying forces. These attempts met initially with defeat, and as the war progressed, more and more Vietnamese of the ASV were pressed into service on the side of France. The Vietnamese soldiers eventually accounted for half of the entire French fighting force. The U.S. materially supported the French war effort but refused to engage in combat. In 1954, as the French suffered a major defeat at Dien Bien Phu, negotiations were getting underway regarding a political resolution to the conflict in Vietnam. On July 21, 1954, the Geneva Accords were signed. The accords stipulated that France recognize Vietnam’s independence and sovereignty, a demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating the territory of the DRV and ASV located at the 17th parallel, and a general election be held in 1956 when all of Vietnam would decide on a single government over a free, independent, and unified Vietnam. A ceasefire

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arrangement was signed by representatives of France and the DRV, while the People’s Republic of China, the USSR, and Great Britain were among the major negotiating powers. However, the ASV flatly rejected the document, for they had no official input into the agreement (France had negotiated on its behalf). In 1955, the newly appointed Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem “publicly announced that as a non-signatory to the Geneva Agreement his government was under no obligation to support the 1956 elections and would in fact not participate in them” (Asselin, 2007: 122). Going even one step further, Diem, a former provincial governor and minister of the interior in Vietnam who had spent the past several years studying at a Catholic seminary in the U.S., ordered the flag to be flown at half-mast and decreed that the signing of the Geneva Accords be memorialized annually as a “day of shame” (ibid.: 122 n.103). The other noteworthy power that refused to sign the treaty was the United States. At this time, the United States was growing evermore concerned by the spread of communism. China had been “lost” in 1949, then the northern half of Korea, and now the northern half of Vietnam. And the U.S. was fearful that in a general electoral contest between Ho Chi Minh and Diem, the latter would be defeated. Therefore, with the backing of the U.S., Prime Minister Diem consolidated his power not by means of the 1956 general election mandated by the Geneva Accords but through a referendum held only in the south to decide on a single head of state: Diem received 98.2 percent of the vote compared to Bao Dai’s 1.1 percent—an embarrassment to the U.S. in its flagrant electoral fraud. Three days after the referendum, in October 1955, the Republic of Vietnam—“South Vietnam”—was founded, and Diem was its president. With the American promise of support, Diem felt emboldened to reject the agreement laid out in the Geneva Accords, including the call for a general election. The stage had been set, the lines had been drawn, and the sides had been chosen for the American-Vietnamese War.

The Book’s Approach The American-Vietnamese War “was a war of many perspectives, a Rashomon 10 of equally plausible ‘stories,’ of secrets, lies, and distortions at 10 Rashomon is a 1950 film by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa in which a murder is described in mutually contradictory ways by various witnesses. Performance theorist Richard Schechner notes that “A ‘Rashomon effect’ occurs where the same data are woven into many different narratives according to cultural bias, editing, and individual interpretation” (2008: 325).

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every turn” (Burns and Novick, 2020: 2). To best make our way through this labyrinth of conflicting narratives and identify how the war is understood and remembered throughout the several arenas of memory 11 we have identified, we will have recourse to the whole range of mnemonic products and practices of the three primary social groups under consideration: the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Vietnamese-Americans, and the broader American society. Each one of these collectivities will have a chapter dedicated to its particular arenas of memory. We will identify the competing memories within each arena when they are spelled out in narrative form as well as point to the objective representations of these narratives when they occur in non-narrative modes, including paintings, museum installations, monuments, cemeteries, anniversaries, festivals, fraternal organizations, commemorative events, etc. The combined role of these narrative and non-narrative carriers of memory has been theorized at length by Nora (1989, 1996). He calls these memory-laden stories, objects, places, and institutions lieux de mémoire (“sites of memory”) and asserts that they are the places where “memory crystallizes and secretes itself” (1989: 7). They serve as the exterior scaffolding and outward signs of not only our collective memory but ultimately our group membership. In fact, more than mere signs, Nora argues, these lieux de mémoire play a critical role in fortifying our sense of collective identity, an identity that would otherwise be in constant danger of disintegrating (ibid.: 12-13). This method of inquiry, with its attention to narratives, cultural codes, and the objects, places, and institutions that instantiate them, is grounded in cultural sociology, an interpretive approach that aims to comprehend complex social phenomena by connecting them to the cultural frameworks through which they are made meaningful to members of particular social groups (Eyerman, 2011). These frameworks code individuals and organizations—as well as their actions and ideologies—as good and evil; they define group membership; they frame events in terms of perpetrators and victims; and they connect not only the present to the past but also in some cases the past to the future. In addition to the many hundreds of relevant books, articles, and individual artistic productions we reviewed for this project, we made several trips between us to Vietnam. There, we visited and collected data from 11 We pioneered this approach in our article, “Cultural Trauma, Collective Memory and the Vietnam War”: “In order to provide a coherent account of how the Vietnam conflict is remembered we distinguish several arenas of memory, the social spaces where the various narratives which form collective memory interact” (Eyerman, Madigan, and Ring, 2017: 13).

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numerous war-related museums, monuments, and memorials throughout the country. We also worked with a number of Vietnamese scholars based in Vietnamese universities. Likewise, we collected unique data from within the United States. We conducted over 50 one-hour, semi-structured interviews with Vietnamese-Americans across seven states, and our interview subjects ran the gamut from painters to writers, journalists to university professors, and groups of broadcasters, students, professionals, and veterans of the Republic of Vietnam Military Forces (RVNMF). We visited and collected data from the Museum of the Boat People and the Republic of Vietnam in San Jose, California, the Vietnamese-American Vietnam War Memorial in Westminster, California, and the Peace Mural Foundation in Miami, Florida. We were also present during Vietnamese-American commemorative practices, including Black April (Tháng Tư Đen) observances and the 65th anniversary of the founding of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam in Westminster, California. Through primary and secondary sources, as well as the original data we ourselves collected, we have worked to identify the various collective memories operative in each of the book’s three principal collectivities. In doing so, we have enabled the further exploration of whether these collective memories reveal evidence of cultural trauma, a distressing break in the narrative of collective identity that leads to a re-narrating of that identity. The nature of these collective memories and the diagnosis of cultural trauma provide a powerful explanation for the ways in which the American-Vietnamese War continues to impact the present. For Americans, most particularly those authorities in charge of foreign affairs and national defense, the collective memory of the war has continued to cast a shadow over any deliberation of military engagement, particularly that which could lead to “boots on the ground.” In the Vietnamese-American community, certain versions of the war’s collective memory have led to the opposite result: a strong desire for armed re-engagement with forces on the ground. In all cases, as we will show in the book’s final chapter, these competing collective memories affect how culpability for the war and its aftereffects is attributed as well as the likelihood of reconciliation between the erstwhile belligerents. Supplementing these three chapters focusing on the arenas of memory— and the concluding chapter examining themes of reconciliation—we have included an additional chapter (Chapter four) that offers a synoptic narrative of the fall of Saigon and the mass movement of people from Vietnam to the United States. Without a general picture of the events that followed the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam, it would be impossible to understand the ways in which the various groups within the Vietnamese-American

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community remember the war and its place in their narrative of collective identity. While this summary is meant to be a general one in that it does not hew closely to any one particular narrative, the chapter is based largely on Vietnamese-American sources, for it remains an integral part of this group’s collective identity. Finally, while we have highlighted the uniqueness of our approach to the American-Vietnamese War, many of our academic colleagues will be interested in its generalizability. To these concerns we would say that the broader implications of our project are those of argument rather than representative in terms of data. Our way of analyzing the construction of narratives, which aims at representing and reconciling the trauma of war, might well be applicable to other cases such as in the Balkan region of Eastern Europe and in the Middle East. The theory of cultural trauma on which we build our analysis has proven useful in a diverse array of comparative historical cases (Alexander et al., 2004; Eyerman, 2011; Eyerman, Alexander, and Breese, 2013). Our study aims at expanding the application of this theory through more nuanced attention to the competing memories of an event, the narratives in conflict both between and within collectivities.

References Alexander, Jeffrey (2004a) “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma.” Pp. 1–30 in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, eds. Jeffrey Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka. Berkeley: University of California Press. Alexander, Jeffrey, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, eds. (2004) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Appy, Christian (2003) Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides. New York: Penguin Books. Asselin, Pierre (2007) “Choosing Peace: Hanoi and the Geneva Agreement on Vietnam, 1954–1955.” Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring 2007): 95–126. Assmann, Aleida, and Linda Shortt (2012) “Memory and Political Change: Introduction.” Pp. 1–16 in Memory and Political Change, eds. Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt. New York: Palgrave. Boyle, Brenda M., and Jeehyun Lim, eds. (2016) Looking Back on the Vietnam War. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Burns, Ken, and Lynn Novick (2017) The Vietnam War [film]. PBS Documentaries. ——— (2020) “Introduction.” Pp. 1–6 in The Vietnam War: An Intimate History, eds. Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns. New York: Vintage Books. Cao, Lan (2018) “Vietnam Wasn’t Just an American War.” The New York Times (March 22). DeGloma, Thomas (2015) “The Strategies of Mnemonic Battle: On the Alignment of Autobiographical and Collective Memories in Conflicts Over the Past.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 3(1): 156–190.

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Dorland, Gil (2002) Legacy of Discord: Voices of the Vietnam Era. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s. Durkheim, Emile (1995) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: The Free Press. Espiritu, Yen Le (2014) Body Counts. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eyerman, Ron (2004) “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Foundation of African American Identity.” Pp. 60–111 in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, eds. Jeffrey Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——— (2011) The Cultural Sociology of Political Assassination. New York: Palgrave. Eyerman, Ron, Jeffrey Alexander, and Elizabeth Breese, eds. (2013) Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering. Boulder: Paradigm. Eyerman, Ron, Todd Madigan, and Magnus Ring (2017) “Cultural Trauma, Collective Memory, and the Vietnam War.” Croatian Political Science Review (54): 11–31. Faas, Horst, and Tim Page (1997) Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina. New York: Random House. Fall, Bernard (2000) Last Reflections on a War. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books. Goscha, Christopher (2016) Vietnam: A New History. New York: Basic Books. Halbwachs, Maurice (1992) The Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jamieson, Neil (1995) Understanding Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kamp, David (2017) “Why The Vietnam War Is Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s Most Ambitious Project Yet.” Vanity Fair (July 12). Kiernan, Ben (2017) Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kunzle, David (1991) “Two Different Wars.” Pp. 23–32 in As Seen By Both Sides: American and Vietnamese Artists Look at the War, ed. C. David Thomas. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Ky, Nguyen Cao (2002) Buddha’s Child: My Fight to Save Vietnam. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Madigan, Todd (2020) “Theories of Cultural Trauma.” Pp. 45–53 in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, eds. Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja. New York: Routledge. Mannheim, Karl (2007) Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Routledge. ——— (2011). “Competition as a Cultural Phenomenon.” Pp. 399–437 in From Karl Mannheim, ed. Kurt H. Wolff. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers. Marlantes, Karl (2017) “Vietnam: The War That Killed Trust.” The New York Times (January 8). Nguyen, Beth (2017) “Def initive For Americans: A Refugee’s Review of ‘The Vietnam War’.” KQED (October 10). Nguyen, Viet Thanh (2013) “Just Memory: War and the Ethics of Remembrance.” American Literary History Vol. 25, Issue 1 (Spring 2013): 144–163. ——— (2016) Nothing Ever Dies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ——— (2017) “The Great Vietnam War Novel Was Not Written by an American.” The New York Times (May 2). Ninh, Bao (1987) The Sorrow of War. London: Vintage. Nora, Pierre (1989) “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring 1989): 7–24. ———, ed. (1996) Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. New York: Columbia University Press. Olick, Jeffrey (2010) “From Collective Memory to the Sociology of Mnemonic Practices and Products.” Pp. 151–161 in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, eds. Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning, and Jeffrey Olick. Berlin: De Gruyter. Payton, Jack R. (1995) “Vietnam: A Country, Not Just a War.” Tampa Bay Times (July 16). Pham, Anh (2017) “Vietnam: A Country, Not a War.” Asia Matters For America (April 27).

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Pham, Hoa (2013) “Vietnam Is a Country, Not a War.” Creative Industries Journal Vol. 6, No. 1: 17–27. Ricoeur, Paul (1990) Time and Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sanchez, Tatiana (2017) “Veterans Frustrated by Ken Burns’ [sic] Film on Vietnam War.” San José Mercury News (September 29). Schechner, Richard (2008) Performance Theory. New York: Routledge. Schwenkel, Christina (2009) The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Smelser, Neil (2004) “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma.” Pp. 31–59 in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, eds. Jeffrey Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stone, Oliver (1986) Platoon [film]. Hemdale Film Corporation. Sun, Mengxue, Duyen Tran, Anna Bach, Uyen Ngo, Tiffany Tran, Thuy Do, and Oanh L. Meyer (2022) “Impact of War and Resettlement on Vietnamese Families Facing Dementia: A Qualitative Study.” Clinical Gerontologist 45(4): 798–807. Taylor, Keith (1983) The Birth of Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thomas, C. David, ed. (1991) As Seen By Both Sides: American and Vietnamese Artists Look at the War. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Tieu, Van (2022) “First-of-Its-Kind Study to Delve into Wartime Trauma on Vietnamese Americans.” ABC10 (May 1). Truman, Harold (1999) A Country, Not a War—Vietnam Impressions. San Diego: Pale Bone. Truong, Monique T.D. (1997) “Vietnamese American Literature.” Pp. 219–248 in An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, ed. King-Kok Cheung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Truong, Nhu Tang (1986) A Vietcong Memoir. New York: Vintage. Westmoreland, William (1976) A Soldier Reports. New York: Doubleday. Zerubavel, Eviatar (1999) Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

2

Cultural Trauma and Vietnamese Arenas of Memory Abstract After a brief historical background, this chapter explores the meaning and collective memory of the American-Vietnamese War as it is represented and displayed in Vietnamese war museums. The off icial narrative of these museums is the focal point of the analysis. The founding narrative celebrates the collective struggle against colonial domination, one that includes the war against the Americans. We discuss how the Vietnamese of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam have created memorial sites and ceremonies to represent this narrative of national liberation through violent struggle against more powerful enemies. Their narrative focuses on the forcefulness of long-term resilience and collective will. As other narratives exist, the dominant heroic narrative expressed in off icial museums and memorials is contrasted by examples from the arena of the arts and ancestor worshiping. Keywords: Collective memory, Vietnamese history, war museums, commemoration, the American-Vietnamese War

April 30, 1975: The Moment of Triumph On April 29, 1975, the North Vietnamese army initiated a heavy artillery bombardment in order to prepare its final attack on Saigon (now called Ho Chi Minh City, Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh). By April 30, the last line of defense northeast of Saigon broke down and the North Vietnamese army advanced. In a matter of hours, they took control over most of the strategic places in Saigon, including the presidential palace. A North Vietnamese T-54B tank, which later became iconic, broke the gates of the palace—a symbolic instance famously depicted by the war photographer Francoise

Eyerman, Ron, Todd Madigan and Magnus Ring, Vietnam: A War, Not a Country. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463723084_CH02

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Demulder.1 Saigon had fallen, and the war was over. Earlier that month, on April 21, President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam had resigned and was eventually replaced by General Minh, who on this day was serving his third and what would be his last day in office. Somewhat remarkably, there were no massacres and no ad hoc actions of revenge that day, and the takeover is generally described as being made in good order. This can partly be explained by the discipline that now marked the North Vietnamese Army (Hägerdal, 2005) but surely also by the fact that there was no longer any major resistance and that as many as 7,800 Americans and South Vietnamese had already been evacuated in the previous days. For many, the fall of Saigon was a horrific moment, but for others such as Nguyen Huu Thaia, a soldier in the North Vietnamese Army, it was an emotional moment marking the end of endless years of war (Oanh/Vietnam News Agency, 2015). This moment was perhaps marked as much by relief and an expectation of a long-awaited calamity as by triumph (Rosen/The Atlantic, 2015). As frantic as the experience of the fall of the city was from the perspective of those who desperately tried to flee it, from the perspective of the invading North Vietnamese forces it was a moment of military success and the closure of a long period of continuous warfare aimed at national liberation and unity. At noon on April 30, 1975, Nguyen Huu Thai, a former leader of the Student Association in Saigon, witnessed the unconditional surrender of the President of the Republic of Vietnam, Duong Van Minh, as he was present at the scene when Saigon Radio broadcasted this historical moment. This is how he described that moment: We are the representatives of the Saigon—Cho Lon—Gia Dinh Revolutionary People’s Committee. We were the first to arrive at the Independence Palace by 12:00 noon, and together with the soldiers of the Liberation Army raised a flag over the palace. We are Professor Huynh Van Tong and Nguyen Huu Thai, former President of the Student Association of Saigon … Life has returned to normal in Saigon – Ho Chi Minh City. The city that Uncle Ho expected to free has been liberated. We would like to introduce the call from Duong Van Minh and Vu Van Mau of the Saigon administration regarding the surrender of this city. (Oanh/Vietnam News Agency, 2015)

Just hours before, the T-54 had broken the gates of what is today called Independence Palace, and moments later the very same Nguyen Huu Thai 1 The very same T-54, with the number 843, is now on display outside of the Vietnam Military History Museum in Hanoi.

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assisted the tank commander, Lieutenant Bui Quang Than, to the roof of the palace in order to hoist the flag of the Liberation Army. Just as many others, Nguyen Huu Thai later that evening experienced the calamity and silence that finally had come to Saigon, the first night “of peace and reunion of the nation and family,” as he later recalled (ibid.). As the North Vietnamese tanks rolled into a more or less defenseless Saigon on April 30, the American-Vietnamese War (or, as it is also called, the Second Indochina War or the American War) ended. Resistance was for the most part non-existent, and the few remaining Americans as well as many South Vietnamese had already fled. Most of the gunshots heard that day seem to have been fired in the air as tokens of triumph and victory on behalf of the communists. As the North Vietnamese forces took over Saigon, a process of reconciliation and the reconstruction of national identity began. This is illustrated in the following quotation (as cited in Hägerdal, 2005), when the North Vietnamese army colonel Bui Tin addressed a gathering of South Vietnamese ministers at the Independence Palace on April 30. The assembled ministers were frightened by the sound of gunfire outside the palace, and in an attempt to calm them, Colonel Bui Tin told them:2 Our men are only celebrating, and you have nothing to fear. Between Vietnamese there are neither winners nor losers. It is only the Americans who were defeated. If you are patriots, take this moment as a moment of joy. The war for our country is over (quoted in Hägerdal, 2005; translated by author).

This quote is telling in many ways, as it reveals a nationalistic ideology of the North Vietnamese forces.3 There is a message here, a message about how there are no longer any perpetrators or enemies among the Vietnamese, a people that instead could now be seen as one unit, one nation. “We”—i.e., the Vietnamese people—are now all to be seen as victims of a foreign, American aggression, despite all the atrocities committed by both sides and among the Vietnamese against each other before April 30. This ideal and in a sense “revisionist” view of the war allows for the construction of a narrative of consolidation, a narrative that nonetheless cannot completely 2 Bui Tin also made another and more famous and harsh remark that day when he stated—as General Minh offered to hand over the power to him: “You cannot give up what you do not have”. 3 Note that the colonel uses the word patriots rather than for instance “comrades” or Vietnamese, and that the victory clearly is seen as a victory for the whole of Vietnam.

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overshadow the fact that with the unification came a period of Leninist policies of “re-education” as well as economic decline during the first ten years after the reunification. The official and state-sanctioned narrative of victory and consolidation naturally does not tell the whole story but rather, as with most narratives, is a simplification of matters that hides an underlying complexity. In addition, and from a more contemporary perspective, most of the young population that now dominates Vietnam in demographic terms have no personal experience or direct memory of the American-Vietnamese War. Nevertheless, the history of that war is still present in Vietnamese society, not least in the form of various kinds of commemorative sites. As such, it is a distant history that continues to be a source of pride for most—but not all—Vietnamese. April 30 is now celebrated as Ngày Thống nhất, Reunification Day (alternatively Victory or Liberation Day, Ngày Chiến thắng, or Ngày Giải phóng). The following year, North and South Vietnam were formally united for the first time since 1858. Two years earlier, in 1973, the U.S. had more or less left the South Vietnamese to their own fate, and it was just a matter of time before the North Vietnamese would become victorious. The price paid for this victory was enormous for the Vietnamese people. More than 1.1 million North Vietnamese soldiers had died, including the NLF forces in the south. 4 At least 200,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and millions of civilians had also lost their lives. In material terms, it is a well-known fact that the United States dropped approximately three times more bombs over Vietnam than was dropped during World War II , and one can thus talk about the total destruction of entire regions of the country.5 Furthermore, before the war against the United States, there had been the war against the French, sometimes called the First Indochina War, and the war against the Japanese during World War II. Even before that, there had been wars during the pre-colonial and colonial era. And the state of war did not end on April 30; there were two other wars to fight: a short war against China 4 The NLF, the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, also known as the People’s Liberation Front for South Vietnam (Mât-trân Giai-phong Miên-nam in Vietnamese or Front national de libération du Viêt-nam du Sud in French). The NLF was founded in 1960 by the Communist Party’s Central Office for the Southern Region, in order to fight against Diem’s regime (Taylor, 2013). In reality, the NLF was made up of several different organizations and groups but was dominated by the communists and could best be described as a guerrilla organization that was supported by the North Vietnamese. 5 Having said this, neighboring Laos claims to be the most bombed country in history. These bombings also occurred during the Vietnam War as the U.S. tried to stop the transports on the Ho Chi Minh trail (Suthinithet, 2010).

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and another more costly one against Cambodia. That war did not end until 1990, when Vietnamese troops finally withdrew from Cambodia. But the war against the U.S. stands out in terms of the number of casualties and for being collectively understood as an epic struggle against an all-powerful enemy. The trauma that followed this war is still evident, both on a collective and individual level. But how does it linger? And how was it dealt with in terms of an official collective memory?6 After a century-long struggle against colonialism and—following a brief pause of a couple of years from 1954—more than 30 years of war against foreign invaders (the French, the Japanese, the French again, and then the U.S.; cf. FitzGerald, 1972) and between the Vietnamese people themselves, the need for respite and reconciliation was evident. Besides the brutal effects of war, one must also take into account the potential divisiveness caused by the existence of more than 50 ethnic groups within the borders of Vietnam,7 the religious diversity of the nation (Buddhism, Confucianism, Catholicism, as well as indigenous religions, even if Vietnam is officially an atheist country), and the fact that Vietnam itself had been forcefully divided for decades through colonization and occupation. The traumatic experience of the death of millions and the 10 million people rendered handicapped due to the use of Agent Orange has had a powerful impact on a population 6 Based on visual and textual analysis, f ield visits, and interviews, this chapter explores the meaning and collective memory of the American-Vietnamese War as it is represented and displayed in Vietnamese war museums. Thus, it is the official narrative of these museums that is the focal point of the following analysis, even if other narratives exist. 7 Many of these ethnic groups inhabit the mountains and highlands in Vietnam, such as the Hmong, Yao (Dao), Tai, Muong, and Nung people who inhabit the mountains in the North along the Red River (Cornet, 2009; Michaud, 2009). Many of these, particular the Hmong, were recruited by the U.S./CIA to fight in the “secret war” in Laos. Other groups include the Hoa (ethnic Chinese) and the Khmer in the South. A large proportion of the refugees that fled from or were displaced in Vietnam during and after the American-Vietnamese War were ethnic minorities. The various ethnic groups that live in the mountains in central Vietnam are sometimes referred to as “Montagnards”, which is a French name; in Vietnam, they might be referred to as người Thượng, or “highlanders”. The dominant narrative, which is the focus of this chapter, minimizes the ethnic diversity as it brings forward issues of nation-building and a shared Vietnamese identity, and even if the reality is more complex, issues of diverse ethnicity do not play a large role in that narration. The idea of “Vietnamese-ness” is related to the concept of a Vietnamese national identity. “Vietnamese-ness” is then understood as an ethnic identity that is constructed by means of education, for instance, and—as we will see—by the construction of a collective memory, both emphasizing the history of resistance against foreign invaders described in an antagonistic way (Saito et al., 2014). However, it has also been argued that ideological boundaries superseded ethic boundaries, at least from the perspective of the communists in North Vietnam, and that a rhetoric of nationalism was used mainly in order to export the revolution and in particular to create an image of the enemy as a threat to all Vietnamese people (Dror, 2018).

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of close to 90 million people, many of whom still suffer the direct effects and legacy of warfare. What we are faced with is nothing less than collective suffering and trauma on an enormous and nearly unimaginable scale. It is in this context that we approach and attempt to understand the role played by state-sanctioned memorialization such as national museums and memorials of war remembrance. Needless to say, our interpretation and understanding is just that—an interpretation—but we do make a claim to veracity as we unfold the official narrative that frames them. This is particularly true for national museums, as they display a sanctioned version of “history” and in doing so more or less exclude the inherent polyphonic context in which collective memories are formed.8

A Brief Historical Background As already pointed out in the previous chapter, there is an immense literature covering the American-Vietnamese War, and we have no ambition to offer a final account of what happened. Nevertheless, it will be useful to recall once more the general history of Vietnam, as it is related to how war is remembered by official public institutions such as the museums we will discuss here. We begin with the war for independence against the French— the First Indochina War—before moving on to the intervention of the U.S. and the Second Indochina War, more commonly known to Americans as the Vietnam War. The war for Vietnamese independence was actually two separate wars. In Vietnam, however, these are sometimes seen as one coherent, ongoing struggle for national freedom from colonialist and imperialist forces. At times, a distinction is made between the “first” and the “second” Indochinese wars, which refers to the French colonial name of the region, “Indo-chine” and which reflects the colonial background to both of these wars. Yet historically speaking, the Chinese rather than the invaders from overseas have been seen as the traditional archenemy of Vietnam, as throughout its history, the country had been invaded and threatened by its powerful northern neighbor many times.9 This legacy has also contributed to the self-understanding of 8 Collective memories are contested (e.g., Tota, 2003). This implies contrasting “voices” contesting over the construction of such memories. Collective memories can therefore be seen as a kind of consensus response to a conflictual situation. 9 Vietnam’s historical relationship with China spans centuries and is as complex as it is long. The very name Viet Nam, first used in 1804, indicates both the ethnic origin and geographical position (“nam” meaning “south”) vis-à-vis China and Vietnamese culture, especially in the

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the nation, as we will discuss, as it marked the nation’s historical identity and left traces in academic history as well as popular myths. The colonial experience, on the other hand, is something that the Vietnamese share with the rest of the region known as French Indochina (Laos and Cambodia) that was subjected to French colonial rule. As previously noted, the First Indochinese war, which had begun with a Viet Minh10 guerrilla campaign in August 1946 (Ho Chi Minh had declared Vietnam an independent nation in 1945), ended in the defeat of the French at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Americans were already then engaged in the struggle against the Viet Minh, an engagement that was apparently so strong that the U.S. Chief of Staff at the time, Arthur W. Radford, once hinted to his French colleague that the U.S. was ready to lend them bombers armed with nuclear weapons (Hägerdal, 2005: 230), an offer that was vetoed by President Eisenhower. The French, despite their ability to fight jungle wars, were defeated. This defeat was a humiliating part of a more overall—often violent—global process of decolonization that swept through the world in the 1950s and 1960s. Two Vietnamese states claimed victory over the French: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (in the north) and the Republic of Vietnam (in the south), which previously had been recognized as the strongly anti-communist State of Vietnam (1949-55) under the leadership of Bao Dai.11 The Geneva Accords of 1954 then divided Vietnam along the 17th parallel and required that elections be held in both zones within two years. In geopolitical terms, Vietnam was interpreted as being in a similar situation as that of Korea. The context of the conflict was thus transformed from what could be called a “colonial” context, with its roots in the nineteenth century, to the Cold War. At the same time, the Eisenhower administration applied what came to be called

North, has both been accepted and emulated as well as forcefully imposed on the Vietnamese throughout history. Today, China continues to be seen as both a positive and a negative role model in Vietnam, for instance in copying the economic model with high economic growth rate while maintaining the dominance of the communist party. On the other hand, the Vietnamese are cautious towards China on the basis of historical reasons as well as that China is the dominating power economically and military speaking in the region. 10 The Viet Minh was a national coalition, f irst known as the League for Independence of Vietnam (Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh), that opposed the French and the Japanese and struggled for Vietnam’s independence. It was formed in 1941 by, among others, Ho Chi Minh or, as his real name was at the time, Nguyen Ai Quoc (Anderson, 2005). 11 Bao Dai was the former and last emperor of Annam and was re-installed in 1949 by the French as “head of state” in the State of Vietnam (Cochinchina), which was dependent upon the French. Bao Dai eventually left Vietnam in 1954, never to return (cf. Kiernan, 2017).

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the domino theory to the region. In practice, this meant drumming up fear of a communist takeover throughout Southeast Asia. Already after the First Indochinese War, one could speak of the traumatic impact of war. The numbers of casualties stated varies (partly due to soldiers lost in captivity not being accounted for), but between 100,000 and 172,000 French soldiers are said to have been killed, and there are between three to five times as many dead among the Viet Minh.12 The First Indochinese war lasted for more than seven years and was fought in present-day Vietnam as well as Laos and Cambodia. On the French side, the fighting was primarily carried out by the French Far East Expeditionary Force (Le Corps Expéditionnaire Français d’Extrême-Orient, CEFEO) consisting of 250,000 troops—excluding the equally large “Associated Army” of soldiers that had been recruited in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam itself (Encyclopedie Larousse, 2017). The equipment and tactics employed by the French were badly suited to the kind of guerrilla warfare they were facing, and the colonial forces faced great difficulties in engaging their enemy in a decisive encounter. A similar pattern emerged when the Americans took over the fighting. Finally, however, the French were able to wage their much-anticipated “proper battle” on March 13, 1954, at Dien Bien Phu. The battle ended on May 7 when, much to their surprise, the French found themselves defeated. Peace talks were initiated almost immediately thereafter. This Vietnamese victory is often seen—not least in the way it is publicly commemorated—as the final and decisive blow against French colonialism, even as the French continued to pour resources into Algeria. One could be forgiven for assuming that the French then fled the Indochinese Peninsula in humiliation. In reality, however, 150,000 of the French Expeditionary Corps remained in South Vietnam until the spring of 1956. In addition, the French retained control of 12 As with the American-Vietnamese War, figures on casualties here vary significantly. For instance, the Vietnamese government claims that 191,605 Viet Minh died in the First Indochinese war, while f igures on civil casualties vary heavily. According to ONAC (Off ice national des anciens combatants et victimes de guerre), a French organization under the Ministry of the Armed Forces in France, the war resulted in 500,000 casualties among Viet Minh soldiers and 47,000 among the French, plus an additional 45,000 serving in the indigenous (Indochinese) armies (ONACa). Other estimations mention about 100,000 dead or missing, including 20,000 metropolitan French (Cadeau, 2010). L’Encyclopedie Larousse gives specific numbers (retrieved 2017-10-09), claiming that the French side lost 20,000 soldiers, 11,000 “legionnaires”, 15,000 “Africans,” and 46,000 Indochinese troops in combat, plus an additional 1,900 French officers. By their own account the Viet Minh lost some 500,000 soldiers. Some historians submit that up to 172,000 French soldiers were killed (Hägerdal, 2005: 232). All in all, a total of about 600,000 to 800,000 people are believed to have died in the conflict against the French (e.g., Duiker, 1995: 270).

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the Vietnamese National Army, as most of the army’s officers were French (Kiernan, 2017). In fact, then, French domination of the southern part of Vietnam persisted for another two years.13 While the first Indochinese War acts as a backdrop to our analysis, it is also more concretely formative for the official history of the Second Indochinese war, what we call the American-Vietnamese War. The first war had one important characteristic in this respect: it was the most significant defeat suffered by any colonial power.14 This enhanced the symbolic value of the victory, both locally and internationally; at the same time, it filled the Vietnamese with military and political confidence, a confidence that is evident in the official history of these conflicts. The Vietnamese had proven, to themselves and others, that they could defeat a much stronger invader in a war that was seen as righteous, given that it was a fight for national independence. The war against the French also distinguished Vietnam from its neighboring countries, where independence was achieved by different means.15 This gave the Vietnamese a rather unique collective experience compared to their regional neighbors. A more direct outcome was the Geneva conference that took place in 1954. France, who by then wanted to leave Indochina, had signed a treaty with South Vietnam granting them sovereignty (ibid.). The two-state outcome of that conference—one communist and one more oriented to the West—mirrored not only the rising tensions of the Cold War but also the divisions that had been determined by France within its colonial empire; that is, Cambodia, Laos and the three Vietnamese regions; Tonkin in the north, the centrally located former Annam and Cochinchina in the south. Tonkin and Annam north of the 17th parallel became parts of North Vietnam. The Geneva Accords that emerged from the conference separated what is now Vietnam into two zones, North and South Vietnam, with the provision that a unified Vietnam was to be created through general elections by 1956. The first Indochinese war also included other characteristics that had some bearing on the second war. For instance, under the influence of the 13 In cultural terms, the French legacy was even more persistent, influencing language and cuisine as well as the educational system (e.g., Thuy-Phuong Nguyen, 2014). 14 The loss of Indo-chine can also be seen as a trauma for France, following upon its humiliation in WWII and its participation in the process of decolonization that culminated in the independence of Algeria in the 1960s. 15 Cambodia and Laos were both kingdoms and gained independence from the French in 1953; the non-communist State of Vietnam (South) gained independence in 1949. The State of Vietnam then included the Mekong delta, which traditionally was linked to Cambodia and the Khmer Kingdom. Thailand was never colonized.

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U.S., France attempted to implement a “Vietnamization” of the war—or, in racist terms, “yellowing” (“jaunissement”)—by creating a domestic national army in a similar manner that the Americans would do some 20 years later (Burleigh, 2013). Another feature that both wars shared was that “the French or Bao Dai’s troops seemed to control by day, Viet Minh took over as darkness suddenly fell” (ibid.: 221). At least as important, the first war gave the Viet Minh the all-important experience of successfully engaging in jungle combat against a much stronger and technically advanced enemy, an experience that would benefit them in the impending war against the U.S. and the army of South Vietnam. After the first Indochinese War, there was a brief period of relative peace before a long period of wars set in that would last until 1990, when Vietnamese forces finally withdrew from Cambodia. Commentators have argued that it is remarkable that the Viet Minh agreed to the Geneva Accords in 1954, as they were the stronger party in terms of military strength. However, Vietnam’s fate was already then part of the overarching strategy of the Cold War, and the two communist superpowers that supported the North Vietnamese —China and the Soviet Union—had little interest in an escalation of the conflict at this point (Hägerdal, 2005). Further, Ho Chi Minh and the leaders of North Vietnam—or the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, as it came to be known—clearly understood that an escalation by the Americans was unavoidable and calculated, and that there was too much risk in pursuing the military campaign in the South at this time (Ho Chi Minh, 1967). It was, they surmised, better to wait and rebuild. This strategy of patience, which at times proved costly, continued to characterize North Vietnamese strategy throughout the war. At the same time, American support for the South Vietnamese regime, the State of Vietnam, increased continuously. South Vietnam was in chaos as the first war ended, still occupied by the French and on the brink of civil war. After 1954, Bao Dai, the former emperor who served as “head of the state”, moved to Paris, and Ngô Dinh Diệm was appointed prime minister. In late 1955, a disputed referendum confirmed the outspoken anti-communist Diem as president of the Republic of Vietnam. Diem, in turn, faced a range of challenges to his reign, such as militant Catholics, underground resistance movements including the strong political-religious movements Cao Dai and Hoa Hao,16 and problems related to the 860,000 16 Hoa Hao and Cao Dai—both religious movements—played an important role throughout the twentieth century. The novice Dai (or Cao Dai) movement was a mixture of different religious positions and forms and mixed traditional religion with Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism. Its origin and its major centers were in South Vietnam. After 1945, it become a major political

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refugees (mostly Catholics) moving in from the north (Hägerdal, 2005; see also Nhat Hanh, 1967). After a dubious election process, Diem was elected the first president of the Republic of Vietnam in 1955. In this position, he opposed national elections on the unification of Vietnam, as this would have clearly benefited Ho Chi Minh and the communists. To further complicate matters, Diem and many of the South Vietnamese Saigon-based elite were Catholic,17 while most of the 14 million that comprised the population of South Vietnam were Buddhist. As Catholics made up only 8% of the population, there was a genuine fear of the strong and numerous Buddhist religious movements such as Cao Dai and Hoa Hao. Buddhism has a nearly 2,000-year history in Vietnam, but it was only at the beginning of the 1,000-year-long history of the Vietnamese monarchy that it filled a fundamental function in society (Hägerdal, 2005: 40-41). However, this does not mean that Buddhism has been the dominant religion or, for that matter, that it has been practiced in an orthodox form in Vietnam. Traditionally, religious beliefs are somewhat mixed among the Vietnamese. Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism have a strong presence in the country, and religious practice also includes beliefs in the spirits—a fact that has been suggested as having been beneficial for the spread of Catholicism. For some, this explains the relative success of the Catholic mission in the area (ibid.: 108), a success that would later have political implications in South Vietnam under Diem’s regime. A Catholic mystic, Diem oppressed the Buddhists, favoring those of his own faith. This eventually led to anti-government protests—including the famous self-immolations—during the so-called Buddhist crisis of the early 1960s. This crisis ended all hope that Diem could create an effective government and led the Americans to remove him from office (Anderson, 2005; see also Miller, 2015 and Nhat Hanh, 1967). We will discuss this further in the next chapter. force, as it had a strong movement identity focusing on political, social, and economic activities (Oliver, 1976). Hoa Hao was more of an unmitigated Buddhist movement that originated in 1939 and soon began building strong forces devoted to self-defense. Both movements competed with the Viet Minh in terms of support from the population in South Vietnam, and both gained some support from Japan during WWII (Hägerdal, 2005: 221). Eventually, the relationship became hostile as the Viet Minh murdered Hoa Hao’s leader Hyunh Phu So in 1947. What they had in common with other militant religious groups in the South—for instance the militant Catholics in the Red River Delta—was that they were all united against both the Viet Minh and the French, and they were all resistance movements that in the South turned against Diem’s regime 17 Diem was brought up in a “Mandarin Confucian” family, and it has been pointed out by Nhat Hanh that this would have had an effect on the way he governed, as if he was a “high governor of a king” (1967: 68) or an emperor playing on old Confucian principles, being a mandarin, a parent to the people, and as such expecting complete obedience.

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Catholics benefited under Diem, but he was nevertheless a strong opponent of the French, who were now to a large degree forced out of the country. Touted by the Americans as a democratic leader, Diem’s regime was unpopular, ineffective, and had the clear markings of a dictatorship.18 As the problems of legitimate rule continued in South Vietnam, the U.S. presence slowly increased. At the same time, the North Vietnamese regime was much more stable and popular. Communist rhetoric was downplayed, as attempts were made by Hanoi to unify a nationalistic elite with the aim of mobilizing support for an independence struggle and an anticipated unification. In short, this strategy reflected the situation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as a Marxist (one-party) state, fostering a strongly nationalistic rhetoric (Hägerdal, 2005: 239). The attempt to unify Vietnam through national elections was hindered by Diem when he refused to negotiate with the communists during the scheduled consultations—part of the 1954 Geneva Accords—as preparation for the election process. In 1956, Diem simply refused to hold elections, partly due to his government’s unpopularity.19 However, during the 300 days the borders were open, not all communists fled the South. A large number remained in hiding below the 17th parallel, preparing for a possible future armed confrontation, which was already being anticipated by the leadership in the North. These groups would later become part of the National Liberation Front (NLF), established in 1960 in connection to the then ongoing general uprisings against the South Vietnamese regime (Turner, 1998). From 1959 onwards, there was more direct support from the communist North to the armed struggle conducted by NLF against Diem’s regime in the South. The slow pace in this process can be explained by tactical considerations and the analysis made by the North Vietnamese that the U.S would intervene if such support became too large and obvious (Hägerdal, 2005; Ho Chi Minh, 1967; Pentagon Papers, 1971). For academic historians, the most important difference between the North and the South, as the 1950s 18 Even U.S. observers at the time concluded that Diem’s regime was an “emerging fascist state” and widely unpopular (e.g., Kiernan, 2017: 408). 19 At the time, it was not clear whether the U.S. had played an active role in this refusal, a refusal that could be seen as pushing the Communists away from engaging in a more peaceful struggle and towards the choice of an armed conflict. However, in 1954, during the Geneva conference, Secretary of State Dulles suggested that the U.S. should try to delay the process towards national elections and in a cablegram to the Under Secretary of State, Walter Bedell Smith, expressed his concern that the elections would mean a unification under Ho Chi Minh. (“Elections Balked” 1971; the Pentagon Papers, 1971; see also Butterfield, 1971 and Kiernan, 2017: 399)

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turned into the 1960s and as the conflict escalated, was that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had by then achieved a much more stable political situation within its borders. This made it possible for the regime in the North to pursue its ambition to unite the nation through military means, even if it was aware that the price of this struggle would likely be enormous and could take considerable time. The national narratives also offer a complementary view of the differences in stability between the North and the South. As we suggest, the core narrative, with its combination of nationalism and communist ideology, was by then well-grounded in North Vietnam, and it proved to be more sustainable and transformable than the less clear and stable version of a common Vietnamese future propagated by South Vietnam—for example, in Diem’s more traditionalistic and feudal understanding of nation-building in combination with his “Personalist Revolution” (see Miller, 2015 and Kiernan, 2017). Diem’s “Personalism” (Nhan vi) was a successor to the idea of a “National Revolution” (Révolution Nationale) that was part of the political rhetoric of Vichy France, an attempt to create a new kind of nationalism that was built on personal cultism, the promotion of traditional values, and antiparliamentarism, among other things. These ideas spread to the colonies after World War II, and at times influenced the attempt to create new, “post-colonial” nations. A central idea was that the “person” rather than the “citizen” would be primary, and at the same time, ‘Personalism’ was seen as a kind of antidote against threats from a potential totalitarian “apparatus” in order to defend the individual. But Diem’s “verbal allegiance to democratic procedures was unsupported by real conviction or action” (Raffin, 2005: 205), and “he never built a political party or movement” (Kiernan, 2017: 408). By 1960, Diem’s situation had worsened, and in the shadows of repression and unrest, the communist insurgency, in the form of the now established NLF, was able to emerge in the countryside. Thus, the civil war escalated, and Diem was assassinated in a 1963 coup orchestrated by Vietnamese nationalists and the military. By then, the U.S. presence had grown and the conflict had become of even greater interest to the main powers involved in the Cold War. The American perspective on these events will be covered in the following chapter. As mentioned earlier, China and the Soviet Union had little interest in an escalating conflict; their role was evident, however, but perhaps not all that clear in historical terms. It has been suggested that China played a much larger role than the official history of the Vietnam conflict reveals (Zhang, 1996). Surely there are macro and geopolitical aspects that must be analyzed, but as we will see, these played only a minor role in the national

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narratives that were constructed, where even the tactical considerations made by the North Vietnamese in relation to the two communistic superpowers are largely ignored. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that the Vietnamese have a long tradition of enmity to the Chinese, which complicated matters as they tried to get support from the two great powers of the communist world. This might also have had an effect on the issue of how to commemorate the war.20 When the North Vietnamese Minister of Defense, Vo Nguyen Giap, summarized the situation in 1967, he barely mentioned the support his regime was receiving from China or the Soviet Union.21 This was not surprising, as the North Vietnamese fought the war mostly by themselves. There were no regular military troops from the Soviet Union in Vietnam, even if much of the war materiel—such as weapons, supplies, and “advisors”—came from the Socialist block and many Vietnamese received their military (and medical) training there.22 On the other hand, Giap points out, the North Vietnamese did not expect the U.S. to invade North Vietnam, as such an action might well have led to a severe response from those who supported North Vietnam (Vo Nguyen Giap, 1968). This possibility also played a central role in American tactical planning. Even if Giap downplayed the role of the U.S.S.R. and China, it is clear that the North Vietnamese were dependent on the two communist superpowers in order to carry out the war. 20 China’s role is obviously downplayed in the official narrative and is even an issue of dispute in the academic arena, as it is the traditional enemy of Vietnam. This will probably not change in the near future, given China’s ambitions as a regional power in Southeast Asia. Paradoxically enough, this has now made Vietnam more willing to approach the U.S. in order to balance the regional ambitions of China. An illustration of this situation occurred already in 1975 when China withdrew all its military assistance to Vietnam and continued to support Cambodia (Anderson, 2005: 117–118). Before that, there had been “skirmishes” along the border between China and North Vietnam in 1973, and China occupied the Parcel Islands in 1974 (Cheng Guan, 2004: 165; see also Li Xiaobing, 2019 for an overview of the increasingly tense relationship between China and Vietnam during the 1970s). These events, close to the end of the war, together with a general predisposition in China to keep the situation with two separate Vietnams intact (ibid.), may have contributed to this downplay of China’s role during the war. 21 General Vo Ngyen Giap was a legendary figure. After being victorious at Dien Bien Phu, he wrote a number of articles in the Hanoi communist party and army press (Nhan Dan and Quan Do Nhan Dahn) during the autumn of 1967. 22 The arrangement went the other way around as well. Soviet military personnel served (and 16 died) as advisors in North Vietnam (Dunnigan & Nofi, 2000: 284), and China provided substantial economic and material support, particularly before the Tet Offensive (e.g., Chen, 1995; see also Zhang, 1996). In the 2017 Burns and Novick documentary, the North Vietnamese veteran and author Bo Ninh makes a point of emphasizing this as a way of pointing to the hypocrisy of the elite.

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Giap’s optimistic summary finely illustrates the state of affairs just before the 1968 Tet Offensive. At this point, the North Vietnamese expressed confidence that they could win the war (ibid.). However, they soon realized that this was not going to be easy. American “stubbornness” and “stupidity” (Giap’s words) were a bit more pronounced than anticipated. Before discussing the Tet Offensive from the perspective of the North, we will first look at the role of the National Liberation Front.

The National Liberation Front As mentioned before, the National Liberation Front (NLF) was formally established in 1960, but its history and origins are not clear-cut and vary depending on the perspective taken. The primary controversy has to do with the NLF’s origins and who controlled it. Specifically, this involves two questions; whether the NLF was founded and controlled by the North Vietnamese or whether it was an indigenous and independent actor in South Vietnam. Whichever the case, there was a period of increased resistance in South Vietnam against the Diem regime after the 1954 Geneva Accords. This resistance culminated in uprisings in the South at the end of 1959 and beginning of 1960. These local uprisings were in turn supported by the former Viet Minh (Hägerdal, 2005), and it was not until September 1960 that the party congress in Hanoi decided it was time to support the local resistance in the South. The idea was to maintain a low profile in appealing to the South Vietnamese non-communist resistance against Diem but not to do this openly, as that would risk provoking an American intervention (ibid.: 246). On December 20, 1960, delegates from various forces established the National Liberation Front (NLF) from groups that were initially rather disparate, including ethnic minorities and religious groups as well as student and peasant organizations.23 However, the organization soon came to be dominated by the Communist Party, and in 1961 it was reorganized and re-armed. In 1961, it established an army known as the People’s Liberation

23 Sources vary on this. For instance, Duiker (1995: 132) claims that “representatives of a wide body of political, social, religious, and ethnic groups” formed the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam on December 20, while Kiernan (2017: 414) just states that the communists established the front in December 1960 and that it was estimated at that time to have about 37,500 members. Taylor in turn acknowledges the Communist Party’s Central Off ice for the Southern Region as establishing the front in December and states that it later would include representatives from various organizations (Taylor, 2013: 574).

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Armed Forces in the south.24 Their “nickname”, the Viet Cong, is somewhat misleading despite the dominance of the communist faction, as the organization as a whole remained mixed in terms of ideology and participating groups (cf. ibid. and Taylor, 2013).25 The organization soon became robust and was able to conduct efficient guerrilla warfare as well as sustain mobilizing actions in the countryside. Together with other forms of resistance, such as the religious organization Hoa Hao, they efficiently undermined Diem’s position. However, the relative success of the NLF also led to an increase in American interest and influence in South Vietnam, just as Ho Chi Minh and others had feared. At the same time, the NLF continued to be a strong force and the major organizer of opposition against the regime in South Vietnam up until at least 1968. In the post-war collective memory, the heroic dimension of NLF warriors plays an important symbolical role both in Vietnam and in the international community. In reality, the NLF played a relatively minor role if one only focuses on its military impact. Particularly after the Tet Offensive, the war was primarily carried out by the regular forces from North Vietnam (NVA). Symbolically and politically, though, the NLF played a larger role, both locally and internationally, in relation to the social movements in other parts of the world that were supporting the Vietnamese people’s struggle against the U.S. An example of the international acceptance of the NLF is the recognition that their Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam (PRG), formed in 1969 (Duiker, 1995: 223), received from Sweden, a country very vocally opposed to the war and one of the few Western countries that openly supported the struggle of the Vietnamese people.26 This had to do with the NLF not being seen as a “hard-core” communist organization but rather as an alliance of several parties mirroring the local tensions and conflicts in South Vietnam. Thus, it could be said to represent the people as a whole and their struggle against Diem’s dictatorship and the U.S. But the North Vietnamese communists dissolved the PRG soon after Saigon fell, even in localities where it had functioned as a government for a short time. The 24 Also known as the Southern Liberation Army, “Quan Giai Phong Mien Nam” (Taylor, 2013). 25 This issue is to this day controversial. As the NLF was established by the communists carrying the legacy of the Viet Minh and it initially included broader nationalistic and anti-colonial ideas, it became more and more a part of the North Vietnamese scheme as an ally and tool for the government in the North. 26 The PRG had off ices not only in Sweden but also in Algeria, the United Arab Republic (Egypt), the U.S.S.R., and other East Bloc countries, (Select Committee on Missing Persons in Southeast Asia, 1976; see also Utrikesdepartementet, 1976).

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organization as a whole was incorporated into the institutions of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976/77. The Tet Offensive was to have a huge impact on the NLF’s future as well. As indicated above, it meant that the NLF—and thus the more local resistance—was sidelined as the presence and importance of the regular North Vietnamese army in the south increased.

The Tet Offensive To state the obvious, the Vietnamese and the Americans view the Tet Offensive differently, a point that will be discussed further in the next chapter. In 1965, the United States began bombing North Vietnam with great intensity (Turner, 1998),27 leading Ho Chi Minh (whose health was declining) to call for all-out popular support for the North Vietnamese government. In reality, this was a mass mobilization. In mid-1967, preparations for a major offensive began, and at dawn on January 31, 1968, a surprise attack was launched (Kiernan, 2017). It was the opening of the Vietnamese Lunar New Year holiday, a day carefully chosen. In a bid to cut off supply lines between the south and the north, the Americans were more focused on the Ho Chi Minh Trail than bombing major areas such as Hanoi. This in turn meant an escalation of bombing in Laos and Cambodia, as the trail went through these countries. The Tet Offensive—targeting more than 100 cities in South Vietnam and all major airbases and military garrisons—was a massive war effort by the North Vietnamese and the NLF.28 In military terms, it was a failure—as American military leaders were quick to point out—but in political terms it had an important outcome, as it created a domestic crisis in the United States that significantly lowered support for the Vietnam War among the American population. The offensive was designed to trigger a popular uprising. The North Vietnamese anticipated that the people in the South would rise up to support their operations. This was underscored by the fact that the majority of the forces initially involved were from the NLF, though some regular North Vietnamese forces were also engaged. One possible reason for the operation 27 Operation Rolling Thunder. From 1965 to 1968, some 800 tons of U.S. bombs on average fell every day on North Vietnam (Kiernan, 2017). 28 The Tet Offensive was carried out by around 80,000 men, of which 60,000 were from the People’s Liberation Armed Forces, the official military forces of the NLF (Kiernan, 2017: 443). The Vietnamese name for the Tet Offensive was Tổng tiến công và nổi dậy (General offensive and general rebellion/insurgency) (Bowden, 2017).

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was that the North Vietnamese themselves were initially ambivalent about which strategy to choose: the more patient approach advocated by the veteran general Giap as well as Ho Chi Minh himself, or the more aggressive one advocated by Le Duan. The latter had risen to general secretary in the communist party hierarchy (a position he would hold until his death in 1986). Le Duan’s strategy won out, even though it was more designed to have a political effect than a military one. This was confirmed by the outcome, as it impacted the Americans more “at home” than in Vietnam. Prior to the Tet Offensive, the American escalation of the war in combination with the growing public protests in the U.S. (which the North Vietnamese tacticians were well aware of) called for some kind of action in the south. There was a window of opportunity that required acting upon. It was Le Duan who seized this moment with his promotion of an aggressive strategy (Nguyen, 2006; Bowden, 2017)—against the advice of his more experienced North Vietnamese generals. The Swedish historian Hans Hägerdal (2005) describes how General Giap argued for guerrilla warfare (i.e., for continuing more or less as before), while the commander of the regular troops in the south, General Thanh (who died before the offensive began), argued for a coordinated “blitzkrieg” on a major holiday. Thanh’s argument was accepted by the Northern political leaders—one can imagine many reasons for this, ranging from Ho Chi Minh’s advanced age to more rational, strategic considerations—and they launched the meticulously planned attack that included both local forces, which were meant to arouse local support, and regular NVA forces (see Bowden, 2017 for a detailed account). Two events are telling, as they exemplify the complexity and brutality that characterized the war around this time: the execution carried out by the head of the South Vietnamese security police in one of Saigon’s streets, famously recorded in a photograph that shocked the world; and the horrific events in Hue, where the North Vietnamese massacred hundreds of civilians before withdrawing (Bowden, 2017). In fact, as the North Vietnamese entered Hue, they carried lists of those they intended to murder, lists that included all foreigners except the French (Hägerdal, 2005). In many ways, the Tet Offensive led to a general brutalization of the war, with the American atrocities at My Lai being another example. It also marked an escalation on the part of the NVA, which now began to incrementally increase its participation in and control of the military action in the south. In other words, the Tet Offensive marked a significant turning point for all sides in the war. The battle for Hue highlighted the cruel character of full-fledged civil war to the Vietnamese, just as it revealed to some American authorities that the war could not end in military victory in any traditional sense.

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Many observers have noted the importance of the American escalation of the war from 1965 to 1968 (e.g., Bowden, 2017). Clearly, this sharpened the conflict. What is not often noticed is the changes that occurred on the other side during these same years. What is often called the Americanization of the war was matched by the increasing participation and then domination by the Northern military forces and their communist leaders. As we noted, many who supported the NLF in the south were in fact not communists, and the rather ambitious schooling/indoctrination that the Front propagated was not Marxist ideology but rather a form of patriotic nationalism. This was recognized by the leaders in North Vietnam, where the battle cry “Socialism in the north and national democratic revolution in the south” was put forward in recognition of the differences between these two regions of the country (Hägerdal, 2005). In one of the ironies of history, one could argue that the North Vietnamese communists would not have been able to impose communism on the South if it were not for the American escalation. What that escalation brought to the forefront was a situation that resembled colonialism, and it provided the North Vietnamese with the opportunity to redefine the war as a national struggle against foreign domination. What could be described as a civil war could now more easily be portrayed as an anti-colonial war (by referring back to the previous successful struggle against the French). The increased dependence on Americans troops also ensured that the South Vietnamese forces would on their own never be able to match the now well-trained, experienced, and better equipped North Vietnamese army. This was further ensured as it became clear that the liberation of the nation from “colonial” rule had now become synonymous with a victory for the NVA. The Northern-led Tet Offensive was motivated by the view that American involvement had reached its climax and that a major offensive in the south would inspire an uprising (Cheng Guan, 2000, 2002). The reality proved otherwise. While some in the United States described Tet as a major political victory for North Vietnam as seen from a long-term perspective, it was experienced as one that came at an extremely high cost in the short run. As a consequence, the ensuing years were described by the North Vietnamese as “the most difficult years in the entire war” (Ngo Vinh Long, 1996: 90). It took more than three years to recover and rebuild strength. “We had thrown all our forces into the general offensive…and when the enemy opened its counteroffensive, we had no force left, our position was weakened and we coped with the counteroffensive with great difficulty” (NVA General Tran Do, quoted in Nguyen Lien-Hang, 2012: 148). After suffering heavy losses, it was necessary to start a process of rebuilding, one that also involved

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developing new tactics in order to keep up the contact with the people of the south. This was somewhat helped by the fact that American and South Vietnamese forces were now also engaged in Cambodia and Laos (Ngo Vinh Long, 1996). Even if the Tet Offensive was not a military success, it has achieved iconic status in the official history of the war, though some recent criticism has emerged (Nguyen, 2012). One reason for this iconic status is the impact that it had on American public opinion as well as the extent to which it revealed the dependency of the South Vietnamese regime on the United States. The Tet Offensive marked a turning point in the war in other ways as well. For one, peace talks were initiated in Paris. And more importantly for the North Vietnamese, it forced them to reflect on their policy regarding how to regroup in the North and rebuild the NLF in the South. American policy towards the conflict also shifted, as more responsibility for combat operations began to be transferred in a subtle way to the South Vietnamese army (the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, ARVN). This Vietnamization of the war did not work out as the Americans had hoped it would. Operation Lam Son 719, a failed attempt to take over the supply routes in Laos in 1971, is an important example of this. Besides trying to strike a major blow against a hub on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the operation was also seen as a test of the Vietnamization tactic, as American forces only provided ARVN forces with firepower and helicopter transport but did not participate with advisors or any other ground personnel. Despite the major improvements the ARVN had booked in the years prior to this, the South Vietnamese failed in their mission and had to withdraw in what was a major blow to their confidence (Nguyen Duy Hinh, 1979). In February 1971, the South Vietnamese set out for Tchepone, a major supply town on Route 9, with 12,000 men. Initially, the operation went well, but eventually NVA reinforcements overran two South Vietnamese battalions no more than 16 miles from the border. Within weeks, the operation had come to an end (ibid.). If the aim had been to “demonstrate…the progress achieved in combat effectiveness by the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces” (ibid.: v), the failure clearly showed that it was not up to the task of facing the more tactically experienced and militarily competent North Vietnamese. From a North Vietnamese perspective, however, things were moving steadily according to plan. International protests against the war combined with domestic resistance in the U.S., and the continuous withdrawal of U.S. forces (as well as Australian and New Zealand troops in 1971)29 made it clear 29 Australia in particular was involved in Vietnam, both as a trustworthy ally to the U.S. by tradition and as a nation that was potentially affected by the political turmoil in Southeast Asia

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that the end of the war was near. The weakness of the South Vietnamese army when left on its own, as exemplified above, had already indicated the outcome. The Paris Peace Accords were finally signed, and in March 1973, the last American ground troops were withdrawn from Vietnamese soil. Consequently, the North Vietnamese again launched a number of military offensives, including popular mobilizations, against the South. On April 21, 1975, the first of a number of South Vietnamese presidents resigned, and on April 30, the North Vietnamese army took over Saigon. The war seemed to be over, but the situation turned out to be more complicated. The 1975 ending of the “conflict” still carries different meanings for Americans and the Vietnamese, both “north” and “south”. Indeed, from the perspective of the whole region, violence and instability prevailed for a long time thereafter. As for the immediate aftermath in Vietnam, there was the view that the Vietnamese people as a whole had won, but at the same time, the fighting between fellow Vietnamese had been harsh, something that continued to have an impact on people’s lives long after the actual combat had ended. One could find a general sense of relief that the war against the Americans was now over, but this did not mean that the difficult times were in the past. “Re-education” camps were set up to “reform” former enemies, and private property was confiscated. Consequently, many Vietnamese as well as Chinese fled the newly united country.30 In neighboring Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975, prompting Vietnam to invade Cambodia. Even though the initial military campaign was brief, leading to the overthrow of the Cambodian government in a matter of weeks, it was a high-risk operation, as the Khmer Rouge had support from China. Thus, there was also a brief border war against China in 1979. The Vietnamese army continued to be engaged in Cambodia throughout the 1980s. These continuous violent events, which did not end until 1990 when the Vietnamese army finally withdrew from Cambodia, left the Vietnamese with the belief that they were surrounded by enemies, something that strengthened the role of the communist party as well as the importance of the armed forces. At the same time, the regime sought to lessen the regional differences within the newly defined national borders. The North Vietnamese continued to view the South Vietnamese as corrupted by Western influence and were afraid of the “relative pluralism and individualism” in the south (Smedberg, after WWII. About 60,000 Australians served in Vietnam, and by the time the nation withdrew its troops in 1971, 521 soldiers had died (Edwards, 2017). 30 Over one million people spent time in re-education camps, 50,000 of who were held for over five years (Anderson, 2005: 118).

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2008: 296).31 The NLF, which could be seen as having been more pluralistic in its origins, was dissolved in 1976 as part of a major reorganization of the army (ibid.). The south was radically transformed by the regime into a more hard-core socialist economy, often with devastating effects on the local economy and businesses. For instance, in 1978, all private enterprise was forbidden in Vietnam except for restaurants. The Buddhist Hoa people, who were traditionally of Chinese origin and who had played an important part in the Vietnamese economy, now started fleeing in the tens of thousands.32 The rigid economic policy was loosened in 1986 under a reform program known as Doi Moi to move the country towards a socialist-oriented market economy, similar to the reforms launched by China under Deng Xiaoping. Despite these reforms, the decades after the American-Vietnamese War were marked by economic hardship and food shortages (e.g., Duiker, 1995; Ebbighausen, 2015). These hardships meant that there was not much room for alternative interpretations and/or narratives about the war. Nonetheless, a narrative did emerge, one that was important not least for the generation that had lived through it and that needed some clear understanding of its meaning.

Arenas of Memory in Vietnam Before discussing the dominant narrative of the American-Vietnamese War from the perspective of the Vietnamese, we will briefly explain the issues at stake in terms of the four arenas we identified: the political, the academic, the artistic, and the community arena. The focus here will be on the official narrative, given its role in offering closure for a diverse population as well as its role in nation-building. It is nevertheless important to see the connections between the four arenas. The academic arena is primarily concerned with the official history of the war; at stake is the revealing of “what really happened,” within the norms of established academic disciplines. Nevertheless, there are other issues as well. History, as we know, is not always neutral 31 For instance, the military veterans of the North Vietnamese army received pensions as well as other privileges, while veterans of the South Vietnamese army were treated quite differently. Such practices reminded those involved of the internal nature of the conflict and made reconsolidation more difficult. 32 In that period, some 50,000 enterprises were confiscated and 320,000 Hoa Chinese deported to the countryside as workers. As a consequence of the conflict with China, the Chinese started to flee, and in 1979 there were about 200,000 refugees in the region, most of whom ended up in the U.S. Some 25,000 came to Europe (Smedberg, 2008: 303).

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and “objective,” something that is especially clear when it comes to war. In our case, we can offer the example of the controversies that have to do with the possible motivations behind the involvement of China and the Soviet Union in the Vietnam conflict.33 As we will see, the language used in commemoration can demonize an enemy. There is also a choice to be made regarding what knowledge should be mediated and transmitted as the history is reconstructed. This leads naturally to the political arena, which, given the continuous conflictual and war-like situation after the American-Vietnamese War as well as the political conditions that characterize a one-party state, is very much an arena of control and domination. Political attempts to control the narrative of this war were clearly present both during and after the Vietnam War (see, for instance, Nguyen Lien-Hang, 2012, for a thorough account). Museums and historical knowledge in general may therefore be seen as partly used for political purposes and can also be interpreted differently in terms of political message. As arms of the state, or at the very least vehicles of state influence, museums clearly have the potential for transmitting a particular political message. With this in mind, one can say that the museums play an active role in terms of narrations that originate in both the academic and the political spheres in Vietnam. As spectators, individuals who visit these museums are, of course, free to make their own interpretations of the displays and objects that are presented to them, including the politically motivated arrangements around them.34 Despite attempts to frame interpretation through a guiding narrative, any intended message is open to interpretation as well as reflection and even rejection. Visitors may identify with the arranged situations, imagine themselves to be part of the history displayed, and connect to previous generations that were a part of the history on display. Also, and perhaps more importantly, there is always the possibility for any visitor to question or reflect on that history from their own personal experience. In that sense, the museums and the remembrance they offer are links between individual and collective memory that to some extent are an opening for reflection and interpretation. 33 A striking example is the disputed involvement of China. The off icial narrative clearly downplays the support of China. However, it has convincingly been suggested that most economic aid to the North Vietnamese in the years before the Tet Offensive (1967-68) came from China (see Metha, 2012). And as we discuss elsewhere, Chinese troops and military materiel were present in Vietnam. 34 However, this is only partly true, as some visitors are there in order to be instructed in the official narrative (e.g., schoolchildren).

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The other arenas of memory of interest to us here are the artistic and popular culture arenas and the biographical or community arena. These arenas overlap in many cases, as biographical reflections might be expressed in artistic terms. At the same time, these arenas influence how collective memory is shaped, as they are spread in ways that a community might be formed and influenced. What is important to remember in the Vietnamese context is the presence of censorship. As mentioned above, the end of the American-Vietnamese War in 1975 was not the end of war in Vietnam. This, and the fact that the communist regime was repressive and would not tolerate internal opposition, meant that the possibilities of formulating alternative narrations of how to remember the Vietnam War were limited. In addition, there are also local and oral means of commemorating the war. Of particular interest are some of the aesthetic representations offering alternative interpretations of the war that became possible under the period with a more liberal Doi Moi (reconstruction) policy during the mid-1980s. But before we look closer at alternative interpretations, we need to become more familiar with the dominant narrative, as it can be seen as the one that has had the greatest influence on collective memory.

The Dominant Narrative of Defeated Perpetrators and Victorious Victims We now take a closer look at the dominant and official (in the sense of being state-sponsored) Vietnamese narrative of the war. This will be done by analyzing how this narrative is mediated in major public and statecontrolled museums that deal with the history and thus how the state attempts to construct a collective memory of the American-Vietnamese War in Vietnam. The museums we discuss are the Vietnam Military History Museum and the Museum of the Revolution—both located in Hanoi—and the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. There are numerous museums and memorial sites all over Vietnam, including smaller ones devoted to Buddhist and other more traditional spiritual understandings of memory—such as the presence of dead ancestors—and larger, more or less official ones. Here we focus on major national museums that deal with the memory of the American-Vietnamese War, and as such, these memories are officially sanctioned. When objects and artifacts are placed on display in sites such as museums, the viewer gains access to an officially sanctioned collective memory. In this sense, museums are locations of memory (Nora 1989). Halbwachs argues that

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collective memory “unfolds within a spatial framework” (1980: 139). In other words, collective memory is located spatially. In our case, these locations are museums, which form central entities in the collective process of memorialization and may function as a form of state-sponsored collective reparation (Brett et al., 2007). War museums in a general sense offer emotional and corporal involvement (Violi, 2012), and the war museums in Vietnam are no exception. Consequently, they enable individual identification with a grand narrative, as the viewer is placed “in history.” Museums “perform” a sanctioned collective memory, and in so doing, they offer a narrative that brings meaning to individual and collective experience, acting as “cultural technologies” and “nationing” history on behalf of the state (Bennett, 1995). Further, such memories relate to issues of morality as well as healing, as they connect to universal notions of “good” vs. “evil”. They also dictate—or at least suggest—that individual and collective loss have a heroic meaning as something endured for the greater good. This is the case involving one museum’s representations of “heroic mothers” (as will be discussed below). It is important to understand, however, that official memorialization of this kind can always be disputed and that other stories do exist. However, it is this grand narrative that is in a unique position when it comes to addressing the national collectivity. At the same time, it must be stressed that we are looking here at the state-sponsored representation of that “collective,” one that is reconstructed as a shared collective memory. In that respect, the museums discussed may differ from other representations of a collective past (for instance in the U.S.) that are open to a more ambiguous response. As suggested above, these museums play a distinctive role in relation to the academic and political arenas, as they are important actors in both displaying historical “facts” and formulating/transmitting political messages. As locations or “sites” of collective memory, museums also offer visitors emotional and corporal involvement, thus allowing for more subjective interpretations of the mediated messages. At the same time, they invite the spectator into an already formulated script. From a dramaturgical perspective, therefore, museums can be seen as performances of history.35 Initially, we made use of a typology rooted in this dramaturgical perspective: the perpetrator, the victim, and the spectator. This relates to the much-used metaphor of the theater in order to define an essence of society (e.g., Alexander, 2013; Boltanski, 2004; Goffman, 1990)—here extended to include not only actors but also members of the audience. The spectator is 35 See for example Bowman & Pezzullo (2010) who discuss a dramaturgical perspective on tourist destinations. See also Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998).

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important as the receiver of the collective meaning that the “show” narrates, displays, and transmits. This is the performative aspect of the narration offered by war museums. Further, the emotional and corporal involvement operates as an “invitation” to the spectator to enter the scheme/script. The spectator is a subject that should “learn” its collective history. The dichotomy of the perpetrator/persecutor–victim is a way of structuring the meaning displayed and, as we will see, leads to a core theme of heroic victimhood and—given the positive outcome of the war—a “happy” ending to the drama. Before we discuss the museums in more detail as arenas of memory, their role in relation to the state and the nation should be further clarified. The state and nation shall here be seen as constructed political, social, and cultural entities (i.e., Anderson, 1983).

How to Remember War: Museums, the State, and the Nation Halbwachs acknowledged the importance of social framing (“cadres sociaux”) for (collective) memory and argued that collective memory was expressed within spatial frameworks (1980). In our case, the framework is the major national museums of war in Hanoi (the Vietnam Military History Museum and the Museum of the Revolution) and Ho Chi Minh City (the War Remnants Museum). Officially sponsored museums are related to states and nations as they are related to time/history and space/territory. Further, as history is made and displayed in the museums, time is connected to space, just as history is connected to territory in the formation of the nation. The state plays the main role in the “nationing” of history: “It [the State] organizes the forward course of the nation and thus tends to monopolize the national tradition by making it the moment of a becoming designated by itself, and by storing up the memory of the people-nation” (Poulantzas, quoted in Bennett, 1995: 141). Further, “there are few areas of policy formation in which the state can play so direct and leading a role organizing the time-space co-ordinates of the nation. And there are few institutions, correspondingly, which can rival the authority invested on those constructions of the nation’s past and projections of its future destiny which are embodied in museums and national heritage sites” (ibid.: 142). Taking such thoughts into account, museums can be viewed as powerful “cultural technologies” in the post-WWII era when it comes to “political and cultural initiatives to produce a post-colonial national culture and identity” (ibid.). This means that museums in a post-colonial context are particularly of interest as examples of processes of “nationing”. Patrizia Violi, writing

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on the prison and genocide museum Toul Sleng in Cambodia, states: “the memory of a traumatized society became an instrumental component in a complex strategic game of political positioning, aimed at the redefinition of core national identity” (2012: 43). To re-present actual war events and experiences is a matter of constructing national collective identities through processes of meaning making. These processes include “objective” statements of historical “facts” as well as calling on the emotions of the subject. In the following, the focus will be on the connections between memory, narrative, and national identity.36 Without going into detail concerning the political positions possible in Vietnamese society, we can nevertheless uncover an attempt within these museums to discursively construct and redefine national identity through the experience of war. In such a context, the reworking of memory is not aimed at objective historical truth but rather the production of memories—or rather, the knowledge put forward in order to support the actual remembrance is partly re-inscribed and contested (e.g., Lê Yen Espiritu & Wolf, 2013: 189). The museums, as other sites of remembrance, are part of a representation of a collective past that, though related to the history, are essentially concerned with the collective identity of a newly formed nation. In Vietnam, as in many other places, such sites are also part of the tourism industry, which means that the visitors are not restricted to the Vietnamese people. Vietnam has become an increasingly popular country for tourism in a region that until recently was dominated by Thailand. Now, however, both Cambodia and Vietnam compete in this regard. In addition to more traditional popular sites of cultural and recreational interest, both of these countries have now established tourist sites that attract what is called “dark tourism”—tourism that includes traveling to “places associated with death, disaster and destruction” (Sharpley & Stone, quoted in Keyes, 2012: 1).37 In addition, war-related tourism in general is an important part of the Vietnamese tourist industry (ibid.; see also Schwenkel, 2006)). As the war moves from memory to history with each passing generation, this is a 36 The construction of a national identity and its relation to collective memory and narrations is a particularly complex issue when it comes to nations or regions that have been under colonial rule. Typically, colonialism destroys the societies and nations subjected to colonial rule, and a complex reconstruction of collective national (and other) identities take place as the situation goes from a colonial to a post-colonial one. 37 Other examples of dark tourism sites include such diverse places as Hiroshima, memory sites in Rwanda, and Chernobyl (see also White & Frew, 2013) and the remains of the Hoa Lo Prison (“Hotel Hilton”) in Hanoi (a main section of the prison was demolished in 1990; Anderson, 2012, https://www. businessinsider.com/american-military-history-in-hanoi-vietnam-photos-2013-5?r=US&IR=T).

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matter of some reflection and concern, as it is only a matter of time before one of the most common categories of American tourists—war veterans and their families with a personal connection to the American-Vietnamese War—disappears. As a result, other categories of potential tourists must be found in order to replace them. This means that the museums, battle memorial sites, monuments, and the like must relate to an audience that is both national (the sites must relate to national collective memory and representation) and international (the sites must handle the presentation of a national history and collective self-identity in relation to an “other”). In this, they differ from other sites of remembrance that are open to an analysis of this kind, such as cemeteries or spiritual sites of memory (that are above all local and oriented towards domestic individuals), as well as the opposite, i.e., sites that are primarily oriented towards international tourists. There is a time aspect in this, as current museum displays do not necessarily have the same content as they had previously. Two factors are of importance here in relation to time: one is the need to transmit a historical narrative to new generations of Vietnamese, and another is the adaption of that narrative to international tourism and a wider global community. The displayed items must therefore serve multiple purposes and accommodate a more heterogeneous audience. The American-Vietnamese War was a complex conflict with many dimensions. As with all wars, it involved suffering and death but also a general experience of chaos and potential meaninglessness both on an individual level and a collective level. The war was part of the Cold War—which, with the exception of the superpowers, was not that “cold” after all—and the geopolitics that was part of the conflict between “East” and “West”. This gave it the potential of a post war understanding for the adversaries involved in terms of vanquishing “east” versus failing “west”. At the same time, it was one of several national liberation and anti-colonial wars. This situation underlined the local dimension of the American-Vietnamese War and divided the Vietnamese people “at home.” This perhaps helps explain why there have been few attempts to approach the war in an ironic or distant way in Vietnam, as is common in American popular culture. The consequences of the war called instead for a coming-together narrative, one that could contribute to the unification of a nation and perhaps a reconciliation among its members. The chaos, atrocities, and the pure meaninglessness of it all had to be firmly embedded in one meaningful, unifying story. This was the master frame that would attempt to incorporate all the personal tragedies into a heroic story of collective redemption. Such a story can be found in the official narrations of the history of the American-Vietnamese War,

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most particularly at the public museums and memorials, which also serve to illustrate how such a collective narrative can be told as one story with one purpose. The Vietnamese museums and their exhibitions are primarily related to what we identify as the political arena, though there is a natural nod at the academic arena as well. These museums are public institutions connected to and funded by the state and thus constitute vehicles for an officially sanctioned story. As such, they are only partly related to the other arenas we identify, and they differ from our other cases where the memorials may also be more biographical and connected to communities other than the national community.38

The Vietnam Military History Museum (Hanoi) The Vietnam Military History Museum is a national museum located in central Hanoi and includes the highly symbolic Flag Tower in Hanoi. It opened in 1956 and has since expanded into several buildings. The main building is dedicated to the wars up to and including World War II. Additionally, there is a more modern structure devoted to the American-Vietnamese War, which is the main focus of this book. The story is told primarily through photographs, which are placed in wooden frames with short informative texts attached, such as “An elastic band used to shoot grenades by guerrillas of Don Puhoc village, Hau Giang” or “National Assembly Chairman Truong Chinh pays a visit to Hanoi artillery men.” One also finds many examples of the homemade weaponry used in the war as well as illustrative reconstructions of tunnels. The interior of the museum covers different parts of the war, and there is a great variety of items on display. Many of the photographs are strikingly symbolic, even iconic, such as the picture taken of the first US pilot downed and captured in 1964, or that of a small Vietnamese militiawoman with a captured American pilot twice her size, or the photographs taken of the tank that triumphantly entered the gates of the Palace of Independence in Saigon. Besides the enormous amount of armory, machine guns, bazookas, and small mortars shown, there are 38 We focus on how the narrative roles are displayed in the form of themes/discursive typologies. Besides visiting the memorial sites addressed here, we have analyzed visual material in the form of pictures taken at the time of the observation/visit and secondary data. The number of pictures is about 800, and at an initial stage a typology was made based upon the dramaturgical scheme of the persecutor, the victim, and the spectator.

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also installations showing the conditions along the Ho Chi Minh trail and explanations of how materiel and supplies were transported through the jungle with the help of overloaded bicycles. All items on display are presented with texts in Vietnamese, English, and French. The museum as a whole is very large, and the number of items on display and the repetitiveness of the way in which they are exhibited make for an overwhelming as well as impersonal experience. Outside of the museum, there are additional aircraft and other captured American military equipment on display; these vehicles appear side by side with Soviet tanks and Chinese war-related materiel, the centerpiece of which is a MiG-21 jetfighter. Here one also finds the actual T54 tank that took part in the final attack on the presidential palace in Saigon in 1975. The tank has great symbolic significance, as it marks the end of the war against the United States. The museum is divided into sections covering different time periods, one of which remains somewhat hidden. This is a section devoted to the “Heroic Vietnamese Mothers of War.” Here the walls are covered with small, framed photographs of mothers identified by name, such as “Mother La Thi Thu, born in 1926”. These mothers are praised for offering their sons to the war and the national struggle. As one of the characteristics of the war was the ubiquitous presence of women, most particularly in combat (Taylor, 1999), singling out women as mothers for commemoration is not something one would expect in this context, although it might be more commonplace in other national war museums. Outside of the building, one finds a sculpture by the artist Nguyen Long Buu depicting one of these heroic mothers: Nguyen Thi Thu, who was born in 1904, had nine sons, all of whom died in the wars against the French and the Americans.39 In the courtyard, one also finds a massive pile composed of remnants from crashed American aircraft, formed into a tower-like sculpture with a large photograph at its base showing a woman on a beach, dragging a piece of a wing from a downed fighter plane. All around the inner courtyard are the scattered remains of American warplanes, such as an engine from a B-52 bomber. These appear among damaged tanks and a range of other military vehicles, mostly American, captured during the war. One also finds Vietnamese aircraft that are proudly presented here, with texts such as: “MiG-21F96, number 5121 …shot down 5 U.S. aircraft, including a B-52 bomber which was downed by pilot Pham Tuan on the night of December 27th, 1972.” Overall, this is a very large museum, about 12,000 square meters, covering a long period of Vietnamese military history. As with the Museum of 39 Many women took active part in the armed forces of North Vietnam as well as the NLF; however, they are barely mentioned in the grand narrative.

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Revolution that we will discuss below, the items on display here are sorted in terms of the various periods of the separate wars. The overwhelming number of items can be characterized as military artifacts of many different kinds, and the museum exudes a certain fascination with the remnants of war as such (as exemplified by the sheer number of weapons and machinery on display). The overarching theme, however, is the heroic nature of the armed struggle against various prevailing invaders throughout history. The main narrative is one of heroic struggle and resilience as documented in the everyday life of war as well as in specific major events. However, there is no depth in terms of historical explanation or any attempt to contextualize the different wars. Rather, the narrative takes as its starting point the collective memory of the defensive wars against the Chinese and then leads the viewer forward, addressing the anti-colonial struggles against the French and then the Americans. In this way, the visitor gets a sense of a continuous and brave battle against multiple foreign invaders, highlighting the role of the military as well as the necessary sacrifices made by the Vietnamese people. The notion of the “people” efficiently hides any ethnic or other differences among those involved. The collective that is remembered is presented as being homogenous, a collective that is as constructed as it is remembered. Further, the principal focus on the collection of various artifacts is striking and serves to underline the theme of resilience against a much stronger opponent, pointing out the inventiveness as well as the courage of the Vietnamese and reminding the visitor that the Vietnamese were the underdogs in all of their wars. 40 In many ways, the museum transmits a story of a nation of warriors that was able to create a nation in a continuous struggle against stronger foreign opponents. Such a story can be compared and contrasted to the narrative of revolution, revolutionaries, and nation-building that one finds in the Vietnam Museum of Revolution.

The Vietnam Museum of Revolution The Vietnam Museum of Revolution is also located in Hanoi, close to the grander National Museum of Vietnamese History, which is devoted to other parts of Vietnam’s history. Nevertheless, it pays a good deal of attention to 40 The great number of artifacts collected and put on display is striking and reminiscent of a “collection of curiosities” and the 18th century European idea that museums should be just that, collections of items put on display, a practice that also has been followed in East Asia for centuries (cf. Lewis, 2000).

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recounting the war in the wake of colonialism, including the foundation and early history of the Communist Party. The museum as a whole is focused mainly on the history of the national liberation movements—the “Vietnamese people’s patriotic and revolutionary struggle”—and in particular the struggles of the communists.41 It was established in 1959 and is housed in a building built in the classic French colonial style. Much of the narrative is told through original documents in combination with portraits of famous revolutionaries. The part of the exhibition that is devoted to the Vietnam War—or the American war as it is called here—is relatively small, as that subject is covered on a grander scale elsewhere, in the Vietnam Military History Museum. However, the narration is such that it becomes clear that it is the successful build-up of a revolutionary movement that enabled the fortunate and heroic outcome. In contrast to the other museums, the Museum of Revolution is more directly oriented towards the Vietnamese public. It becomes clear to the visitor that Vietnam is a nation that has been at war for the majority of its recent history, and there is a strong focus on the persons and events related to the struggle—in its various forms—against foreign invaders and for national independence. Significant parts of the exhibition concerning the twentieth century are made up of photographs of specific events with some information attached, such as “French troops expand the war in the South, in 1945” or “American Vice-President R. Nixon inspecting French army in Genh market (Ninh Binh) in November 1953.” The information is given in Vietnamese, English, and French. In addition to the photographs and captions, there are also some artifacts on display. Some, such as flags or books, are connected to the history of the revolutionary movement and the party. Other artifacts illustrate the harsh conditions under colonial rule, such as the handcuffs, irons, and chains used to punish Vietnamese resistance fighters. A main object displayed is a French guillotine, with a sign stating: “The guillotine placed by the French colonialists at Hoa Lo prison (Hanoi) and used to behead a great number of revolutionary fighters.” The museum is traditionally ordered, illustrating the recent history while at the same time highlighting the role of Ho Chi Minh and other communist leaders in the struggle for independence. The 41 Ho Chi Minh underlined the importance of museums and their didactic role: “When visiting the museum, Party cadres and non-Party members, especially young people, will be able to see how heroes have sacrificed themselves for the nation, how the Party has led the Revolution, how many difficulties it overcame to bring it to victory.” (quoted in Hue-Tam Ho Tai, 1998: 190), a declaration that is still representative of the given official role of these museums.

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visitor gets a clear idea of the roots and origins of the recent conflicts and wars in colonial history but is not really drawn into a narrative of war. The main narrative is focused on the political history of the revolution and the movement for national independence as represented by the Communist Party. Thus, this is a narrative that clearly fits into the political arena, one that adds political biographical data related to the main characters in the epic political struggle. Here we are confronted with the construction of a collective memory of nation-building, where the Communist Party and its leaders are the main actors. In contrast to the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City discussed below, there is no particular intention at the Vietnam Museum of Revolution of adapting to international visitors. Even if it is evident that the U.S. is the main adversary as the war escalates, the visitor—with some effort—gets a more overall picture framed as a struggle against colonialism for national independence, a struggle in which the Communist Party plays the major role. The museum periodically illustrates various historical phases that form an extensive background to the war against the Americans. In the period prior to World War II, there is a section devoted to the “Democratic movement 1936–1939”, followed by one describing the “Viet Minh Movement 1941–1945” and “The Defense of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam 1945–1946” as well as a section that focuses on the war against the U.S. It is evident that the narrative concern is with the consolidation of the anti-colonial democratic struggle, the birth of the communist nationalistic movement, and the defense of the new nation of Vietnam. These three major parts are interconnected through a narrative that underlines the movement and its heroes’ role in the creation of contemporary Vietnam. While this is a story of the revolutionary struggle against colonialism, it is also a story of modernization, as Vietnam was modernized through this revolution and room is made for a more modern understanding of the nation. The modernization process ran parallel with the French colonial occupation, and thus one finds documentary photographs of the building of bridges and roads, for instance, such as the Long Bien Bridge in Hanoi, constructed by the French and completed in 1902. This kind of documentation is placed side by side with that of resistance fighters captured and tortured by the very same French colonial power. There are also sections devoted to the founding of the Communist Party in February 1930, with portraits of important leaders such as Ho Chi Minh (presented under one of his other names, Nguyên Ai Quac; his original name was Nguyễn Sinh Cung) in his role as the president of the founding meeting. Other sections are devoted to the democratic movement between 1936 and 1939 and the

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Viet Minh Movement’s history until 1945. It is worth noting that the history of the revolutionary movements runs parallel not only with the process of modernization but also with the overarching project of building a nation and that these processes are seen as intertwined and interdependent. In the post-World War II period, the focus shifts towards the various actors involved in the Geneva Agreement and the escalation of the conflict between North and South Vietnam. An example of this is the documentary photographs showing how the regime in Saigon—here called the “U.S. Puppets”—established a military court that made use of the guillotine to conduct executions of the “patriots called Viet Cong” in October 1959. There are also photographs showing how civilians were killed in 1960. The use of the derogatory term Viet Cong is interesting here, as it was a term made popular by the Americans. The rhetorical language used in the short notes that accompany these photographs is harsher towards the United States (e.g., “fascist state”) than one finds at the more popular War Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. As there is more of a focus on American atrocities, where such terms as fascist and imperialist can readily be found, it is made clear who is to blame for the massacres, torture, and destruction that are pictured. In similar fashion, the Saigon regime is negatively labelled a puppet regime/army, henchmen of imperialism, and the like. The guerrilla activities carried out by the “Viet Cong” (or “the guerrillas”) are again framed as heroic, and the theme of fighting a superior enemy with primitive means is present here as in the other museums. This can be illustrated through the example of a text accompanying a photograph of a war scene: “Central Highland guerrilla unit ambushed and fought the enemy with their self-made weapons in 1959.” This museum’s grand narrative of the later history of Vietnam is in many ways structured around the brutality of the Americans and the victory, against all odds, of the Vietnamese nation under the banner of communism. However, the focus of the narrative is still on the revolutionary process that enabled resistance and eventually national liberation and victory, including the main characters that made this process possible. In comparison with the other museums, we can say that the main subject of liberation is the Communist Party and the resistance movements rather than the “people.”

The War Remnants Museum The War Remnants Museum42 in Ho Chi Minh City is one of the most—if not the most—popular tourist sites for foreigners in Vietnam and perhaps 42 The museum was initially also known as the Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes.

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the museum that has adapted the most to standard tourist expectations (in terms of being easily accessible, providing clear information in English, having a souvenir store, etc.). It is in this way more embedded in the emerging tourist industry and a natural part of the package tours available in the city. The museum opened in 1975 and is located in a relatively new building that had previously housed the U.S. information services. It is worth pointing out that the museum opened almost immediately after the victory of the North Vietnamese and the fall of Saigon. Initially it was given the provisional name “Exhibition House for U.S. and Puppet Crimes”—with the term “puppet” referring to the Saigon regime. The museum remains focused on this perspective, highlighting the illicit actions taken against the Vietnamese people and promoting a message of how the South Vietnamese were rescued from the Americans. In this spirit, the pictures and texts on display document the most known war crimes, such as the My Lai Massacre, and also events that are more random but no less horrific, such as a photograph of a laughing young American soldier posing with a corpse, very much reminding the viewer of a hunter with his trophied prey. As with most of the many war museums in Vietnam, the horrors of war are thoroughly displayed and “objectively” described, leaving the viewer with not much room for an alternative interpretation (if that could be possible) or reflection on the complexities of war (see Falkman, 2014). Similar to the museums in Hanoi, visitors pass by a number of captured aircraft and various U.S. military equipment as they enter the museum. This particular museum clearly addresses “the world,” taking the foreign visitors’ expectations much more into account than the museums in Hanoi, which are more oriented towards patriotic celebrations. Perhaps in accordance with this, an overriding theme in the exhibition is the gratitude expressed to those who supported the (north) Vietnamese struggle, as expressed in the following quotation: We would like to thank the Communist Parties and working classes of the countries of the world, the national liberation movements, nationalist countries, peace-loving countries, international democratic organizations, and progressive human beings, for their whole-hearted support and strong encouragement to our people’s patriotic resistance against the United States, for national salvation.

The underlying message highlights the importance of international support for the Vietnamese struggle for national independence. This is further confirmed by the artifacts on display; there are, for example, banners from the supportive movements around the world, such as the one from Sweden

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stating “Med FNL för Viet Nams folk” (With the NLF for the Vietnamese people). Further, the museum contains a large section devoted to the effects of Agent Orange, gathered under the bold heading “Agent Orange Aftermath in the US Aggressive War in Vietnam.” In comparison to the museums in Hanoi, this part of the museum’s exhibition is rather advanced in its design. The walls are all painted in orange and combined with the documentary photographs, which are all in black and white, making the grim message all the more striking. In general, the museum is more contemporary in its design and relies more on illustrative photographs than displayed items. The photographs also give the exhibitions a sort of documentary character, adding an element of “witnessing” in contrast to the other kinds of items that are displayed. Also, the photographs trigger a more emotional response, for instance in terms of identification, particularly for visitors that might have difficulty connecting to or identifying with various war-related artifacts such as weapons and machinery. There are also numerous—and at times rather long—texts written on the orange walls, with messages similar to those described above, messages that underline the U.S. aggression and its responsibility for Vietnamese suffering. This can be illustrated in the following quotation, taken from the exhibition, that makes a strong case for calling what the U.S. did in Vietnam “genocide”: The United States bears responsibility for the use of force in Viet Nam, and has, therefore, committed a crime of aggression, a crime against peace… In subjecting the civilian population and civilian targets of the D.R.V.N. to an intense and systematic bombardment, the U.S.A. has committed a war crime. The U.S. armed forces used or tested weapons prohibited by the laws of war (C.B.U.s, napalm, phosphorus bombs, combat gases, toxic chemicals). The prisoners of war captured by the U.S. armed forces were subjected to treatment prohibited by the laws of war. The U.S. armed forces subjected the civilian population to inhuman treatment prohibited by international law. The U.S. government is guilty of genocide vis-à-vis the Vietnamese people. (Conclusions of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal, Stockholm session, May 2–10, 1967 and Copenhagen session, November 20 to December 1, 1967). 43 43 The Bertrand Russell tribunal or the International War Crimes Tribunal was a tribunal organized by the philosophers Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre in Stockholm and Roskilde respectively, not Copenhagen as stated in the quotation above (see Coates et al., 1971).

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This charge is illustrated with well-known photographs of the war, such as an American soldier setting alight the roof of a hut with his cigarette lighter. Overall, there is a strong focus on the photographic documentation of atrocities of war that are attributed to the Americans, partly in contrast with other exhibitions that frame the Vietnam War in terms of a historical struggle against various opponents. There is also a special section entitled “Requiem—the Photo Collection of the U.S. Aggressive War in Vietnam” that displays pictures taken by many of the photographers who died in Vietnam and Indochina. Interestingly, this exhibit is said to have been sponsored by United Airlines and was a gift from “the people of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.” This collection was originally set up in April 2000 and was initially intended to be a two-week exhibition (Schwenkel, 2008). Curiously enough, these photographs cover not only the atrocities of war but also more everyday and even romantic situations from the perspective of the Vietnamese and other war photographers. The exhibition is clearly meant to be transnational, both in terms of the contributors and the intended audience, but as we mentioned, the selection of contributing photographers is uneven, with very few having an origin in South Vietnam. Less focus is placed on nation-building in this exhibition and more on transmitting a transnational experience of the war, placing the Vietnamese experience in a global context and addressing a range of collective memories that are shared by the Vietnamese as well as by foreigners. At the same time, an accusation is made. The documented atrocities function as witness and testimony against one main opponent (or perpetrator/persecutor), namely the U.S. Other foreign nations involved in the war, such as Australia or South Korea, do not get the same attention at all, and neither do the South Vietnamese, even if they are present in the narrative. This has the effect of simultaneously addressing all four of our memory spheres in one way or another. Naturally, there is a relation to the academic and “historical”/“factual” arena in that the photographs document actual historical events. Also, the display forms part of a relatively new policy ambition connected to the Doi Moi reform period and the opening up of Vietnamese society to foreign investments. As Schwenkel puts it: When exhibited alongside one another in the context of post-reform Vietnam and analyzed against the backdrop of shifting US-Vietnam relations, the images and their accompanying texts resurrected and reproduced several competing political convictions and ideological beliefs central to the war that still circulate in certain public spheres today. (2008: 39)

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The exhibition is modern in its design so that Western visitors are more likely to feel “at home” within its space. The items are well-lit; information is in well-composed English; and the items on display are ordered and carefully selected. Again, this is in stark contrast to other museums as well as those sections of the Remnants museums that are more traditional in their design (even “colonial,” as the French language in these sections is clearer and more present than English), less ordered, and displayed in dim lighting. The museum also has a more “global” design, as it is not clearly formed by the selected location or events related to the history of Vietnam. For instance, there are no colonial or indigenous traits to the design, which makes it somewhat more neutral and gives it slightly the character of a “non-place” (Augé, 1995). This only serves to underline the accusation towards the U.S., making it more general and neutral. The photographs on display also correspond more with popular culture representations of the war. The visitor can clearly follow the visual language and its narration as it connects to other, later representations of the war—not least those found in popular films. This also serves to highlight the representativeness of certain memorial artifacts such as Zippo lighters, helmets, maps, and the like that are also sold in and around the museums. Many such items are now connected in a signifying way to the Vietnam war through their representation in popular media. One example is the Zippo cigarette lighters that are both displayed as war artifacts and sold as souvenirs. In biographical terms, there is less to analyze. The exhibition as a whole also has a personal angle, as it displays the names of the fallen—mostly Vietnamese—photographers, underlining the subjectivity and authenticity of the pictures as well as pointing out the national sacrifice in terms of individual suffering (i.e., the heroic mothers) and the loss of individual lives among the Vietnamese population. In addition, this part of the War Remnants Museum lends itself to individual biographical reflection, to personal memories, which offer the visitor the possibility to put oneself in another person’s shoes in the situations displayed in the photographs. Other parts of the museum are organized thematically, such as the section on “Children at War” or the section focusing on the geography, tactics, and means of the war. For instance, there are collections of maps that show where different units of the U.S. army were positioned, and some illustrative military equipment such as guns and armor, but there is much less focus on these aspects than in the museums in Hanoi. In the back courtyard of the museum, one finds even more tanks and helicopters as well as a separate section showing a guillotine and so-called tiger cages, used by the South Vietnamese and the Americans to house prisoners. Again, the “spectator” here is the international tourist as

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well as the individual Vietnamese, but now with no accompanying textual messages or coherent narration. Overall, though, the impression given by the design of this museum and the text on display is that the museum is geared towards an international audience. The message conveyed is that of an attacked nation that bravely repelled American aggression, which was unjust and unlawful; a nation that was rescued and is now looking towards a new future.The role of the media, particularly the war photographers, is highlighted in all of these museums and in particular in this one, where an entire section is devoted to them (sponsored by the Canon Corporation). “Walls of Names” are recurrent elements in memorials (Violi, 2012), and one finds just such a wall here, with an astonishing number of names of the fallen photographers (most of them North Vietnamese). From the perspective of constructing a collective national identity, however, the important message here is that the world watched the war through the heroic contributions of these war photographers, many of whom died in the process. 44 This underlines and strengthens the narrative about the national heroic struggle and also adds a sense of moral justification—or even superiority—in relation to the Americans as well as their allies. In this way, Vietnamese and foreigners alike play central roles in the construction of the narrative about a heroic struggle against unlawful intruders, a narrative in which these photographers here play the important role of witness.45 Witnessing trauma by means of photography is almost as old as photography itself (e.g., Baer, 2002). Further, photojournalism may be said to have a “cultural authority” as an “objective technology” (e.g., Kozol, 2014), be it an ethnocentric one, as photographs often show atrocities that happen “elsewhere.” To some extent, this is true regarding the photographs on display here, but so is the claim that images like these privilege a “normative gaze” and “can be intentionally moralistic as they call for a judgment by the viewer” (Frost quoted in Kozol, 2014). It is this very call for a judgment that most clearly comes into play at the exhibition. The pictures force the spectator to take a moral stand, to judge the actions and actors involved on the basis of the photojournalist’s statement as a “witness.” This situation, in turn, calls for the viewer’s responsibility when the photographs make “the viewers responsible 44 For publications that reflect this exhibition, see for instance Requiem (Faas & Page, 1997), a book in which many of the photographs on display are represented. See also Page (2002) for a selection of solely North Vietnamese photographers. 45 There is an immense amount of literature on the relationship of photography and witnessing in respect to atrocities and trauma (e.g., Baer, 2002; Kozol, 2014) and not least regarding the American-Vietnamese War. The relationship should and is often seen as a complex matter regarding objectivity, intentions, and manipulation (e.g., Zenko & Welsh, 2012).

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for a past moment that has been blasted out of time,” as Baer puts it (2002: 14). As viewers should be seen as an active participant when presented with pictures of atrocities, they may construct meaning on the basis of the logic and morals that inform them in their everyday context. When presented with the suffering of others, the viewer may do this in different ways, ranging from moral responsibility to sadistic feelings (Villanueva & Castro, 2016, building on Boltanski, 2004). However, the construction of meaning always contains a moral position that differs, for example, if the picture is seen as “realistic” or “fictional,” implying a greater moral responsibility if it is seen as “realistic” (Villanueva & Castro, 2016: 105). To see, to witness—even if indirectly—the suffering of others beseeches us to take some kind of action, even if only to “judge” the situation for ourselves in terms of good and evil. The War Remnants Museum should be summarized as an accusation, primarily against the U.S., rather than a mere celebration of national heroism, even if that dimension is very present. This act of accusation could, potentially, be transmitted to a much wider context through a viewer’s interpretation and response. At the same time, the ability to narrate a national story of heroism is strengthened by making this case against yet another foreign perpetrator/persecutor and framing it in a “global” context. This serves to strengthen the foundations of the main narrative about the war: that of heroic resistance as the basis and precondition for national cohesion. On the other hand, the guillotine as well as other artifacts function as reminders of the link between the earlier colonial repression and the subsequent war against the Americans, even if the latter war was in many ways more complex, since it included obvious internal conflicts between different groups (e.g., communists, nationalists, religious groups) in postcolonial Vietnam (not to say the whole of Indochina) as well as a diversity of foreign actors ranging from superpowers to minor allies of the U.S. such as Australia and New Zealand. This message of accusation against a clear opponent fulfills the function of simplifying the narrative by portraying a clear villain, a “perpetrator”, contrasted with a victim that heroically defends itself, putting the visitor in the role of a neutral witness (or observer of testimonies; see Boltanski, 2004).

The Heroic Narrative of Resistance The grand narrative that guides these state-organized and state-sponsored representations of the war is that of ongoing popular resistance and resilience. All is arranged and presented in such a way as to convey a heroic

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struggle by ordinary people against a much superior enemy. In the process, the viewer must take account of the enormous sacrif ice made and the suffering endured. In this regard, questions have been raised in Vietnam concerning the enormous cost in human suffering and whether the price was too high, largely from an individual and generational point of view. This question still lingers in Vietnamese society. It is a question that actors in the academic and political arenas have answered by recognizing and acknowledging the enormous human sacrifice made by the Vietnamese people, claiming that “history” has proven such sacrifice to be justified and righteous. This grand narrative of remembrance is clearly double-edged in the sense of being both nationalistic and communist (which is not unusual). There is a strong current consisting of the theme of building (or rebuilding) the Vietnamese nation. This subject was, as we have seen, already important for Ho Chi Minh and his comrades in the early days of the independence struggle. 46 The struggle to unify the north and the south (as well as the disparate communities within Vietnam) became an important aspect in the narration of Vietnamese history, and the war against the Americans plays a central role in this story. As discussed elsewhere, within the framework of “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1983), nationalism, national identities, and nationalistic ideologies are social constructions created within the public sphere and its related institutions (e.g., Komulainen, 2003; see also Kellas, 1991). From this perspective, war museums in Vietnam as well as other public institutions become central agents in the creation and maintenance of national identities as well as collective memories. This is in stark contrast to the United States, where the sphere of popular culture plays a greater role in this respect. Of importance here is that the arenas of academic history and politics—which are central to the construction of national identity—do not necessarily align with biographical experiences of a more private or personal nature. These experiences, or memories, might contain what has been called “banal” or “daily” nationalism that also includes a living tradition of memorizing (Billig, 1995; Komulainen, 2003: 63), which might well differ from the official narrative. This raises the possibility of conflicting memories, in structural terms, between the grand narrative of national heroism and 46 Ho Chi Minh—describing himself as a patriot before he became a Leninist (Ho Chi Minh, 1967)—was equally the leader of a nationalistic post-colonial movement as that of a communist struggle. The fight against colonialism could even be seen as being his “life’s work,” as he was more directly involved in this struggle than he was in what came to be called the Vietnam War (Sutherland, 2005).

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justified sacrifice and the more personal biographical narratives. As in the American context, popular culture such as films, memoirs, and local religious practices of memorialization has provided space for representing such counter-memories. This conflict between official and popular memory has become very problematic for the Vietnamese state, to such an extent that some authors have been forced into exile. In the Vietnamese context, to recollect and commemorate war and to engage in the collective trauma of the Vietnamese people, one must not only take into account historical representations but also consider performative actions that construct and maintain a national identity that is highly sensitive and politicized. In this way, the experience of collective trauma becomes a basis for nation-building and contributes to the strengthening of a collective identity. However, in order to function in this way, the memorialization of trauma must exclude aspects that in other contexts might have been possible to discuss in a range of arenas, such as the arena of popular culture. Because of this politicized sensitivity, the Vietnamese case differs from our other two cases, the Americans and the exile Vietnamese, in that it relates to a different kind of public sphere, political organization, and ideology. This brings us to another foundation in this grand narrative, namely, a communist ideology that goes hand in hand with the ambition to unify a nation. Communist ideology plays an important role in the narrative, as it connects historical progress with a science-based claim to its outcome, that is, the victory of the people and the creation of a communist society following the tenets of historical materialism. Through this framework, colonialism and the associated aggression of the United States could be included as central elements in an even grander narrative, that of the global struggle of the common people against capitalist domination. Ironically, then, the “international” message of communism here (as in many other post-colonial communist struggles) could be inverted to become a resource for the struggle for national independence. Also, the war against the United States and not least its outcome (a high-priced victory) could be commemorated and made even more meaningful in light of ideological communist ambitions. During the colonial era and the periods of war, there were aspects of class conflict within Vietnamese society. These conflicts have had an impact on post-war society. Those individuals who were closest to the American and French enemy—often members of families that consisted of high-ranking officers or merchants—had their standard of living quickly reduced after 1975 (Nguyen Khac Vien, 1979). Many members of these groups ended up in re-education camps or fled the county. This has as much to do with the

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communist understanding of the nature of the enemy (which consisted of foreign invaders but also domestic “enemies of the people” in a Leninist sense) as with the side that various actors had chosen in the major conflict. This sad aftermath of 1975 has no part in the official narrative of remembering the Vietnam War, and one reason for this is that it contradicts the all-present notion of a unified nation reconsolidated. In addition to providing an interpretation of the political and social context in which these conflicts took place, communist ideology also provided the North Vietnamese (and then later the whole of Vietnam) with an overarching long-term strategy that could be rooted in the historical situation (and therefore was “objectively correct”). 47 There was an enduring faith that the Communist Party would—in every situation—formulate “an adequate tactic and strategy that accorded the historical situation” (Nguyen Duy Hinh, 1979: 60). The party, it was believed at the time, would mobilize the nation, something that was possible because the party was seen as being synonymous with “the people” and their aspirations. This understanding of the role of the Communist Party—almost metaphysical and in some ways comparable with Diem’s idea of a “personalist revolution” discussed above—proved to be very useful in Vietnam. It enabled the party, particularly under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh who personalized this vision, to connect the two important if somewhat abstract concepts of the nation and the people in order to mobilize and motivate the latter. Obviously, “history”—in the sense of constructing a collective understanding of what has led to a contemporary situation as well as in the sense of the “historicity” of the fate of the Vietnamese—played a central role. Nationalism and communism are not the only pillars upon which this Vietnamese grand narrative rests, nor are they the only possible explanation for the successful if costly struggle. Equally important is a collective sense of the “thousand years of history,” a sense that the several wars combined with the revolutionary movement to bring about national independence. This enabled a grand narrative of the struggle against the French and, more importantly, the war against the Americans to be understood as part of a grander (if not epic) historical situation, as previously pointed out. A central theme in this is the previous struggles against more powerful enemies; historically speaking, these have been the Mongols and the Chinese. But 47 For communists the use of words like “objective” and ”scientific” gives a sense of historical materialism (Marx) and scientific socialism (Engels) as much as a sense of the historical necessity of the communist victory at hand. The tension between national and international outcomes has a long history of debate within the Comintern and the Communist International.

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there was also a general historical awareness that enabled the Vietnamese to point out that they were an ancient civilization and that the American War was just another war to win in order to maintain independence. As with the previous wars, the outcome—in the long run—would be that Vietnamese society would persevere. This is a theme that itself perseveres throughout Vietnamese history. It has been incorporated into the legends, and the North Vietnamese brought it forward during the war (e.g., Eriksson, 1969). This resilience was made possible through a tradition of warfare formed around tactics and principles that could “defeat the strong with the weak” and “fight many with few.” In Vietnam, the Hung period is often seen as the founding period of the Vietnamese civilization. Beside the legend of the Water Spirit from that period, there is another legend from that period that is well known to many Vietnamese, a fairy-tale-style story about a child hero in a village called Giong. The legend of Thang Giong or Saint/God Giong exists in many versions, but the central plot is roughly as follows. In this legend, Vietnam is invaded and its people cruelly massacred. The child Giong could not walk or talk at the age of three, but when the king’s men came to the village in order to mobilize its members, the child stood up and said he would defeat the enemies if he was given an iron spear (or sword) and an iron horse. Then the child ate enormous amounts of food, grew to become a giant, and subsequently defeated the enemies to bring about peace. After the victory, he flew up into the clouds and disappeared (Nguyen Khac Vien, 1978; Vo Van Thang and Lawson Jim, 1993/2000). The story has similarities to the story of David and Goliath, which Bertrand Russell used in his closing address in the Stockholm session of the Russell Tribunal: The concern for the weak struggling after long suffering against the strong for their simplest rights is the source of our ethics and the great moments in our common history … David and Goliath, the Greeks at Salamis, the Vietnamese and Genghis Khan—the partisans of Vietnam and the United States air force and mechanized army—are part of a continuous tradition. (Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 1971)

A core aspect of this self-understanding was the idea that the entire population was involved as one in defending the nation: “All are soldiers;” “We have 2000 years of experience in wars of resistance” (e.g., Eriksson, 1969: 12, author’s translation). There is a notion that by learning from its history, the Vietnamese can beat many with the efforts of a few and above all have the capacity to beat a much stronger enemy (ibid.: 13). In order to function,

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however, this grand narrative must downplay ethnicity and other differences within the nation and the people. The main collective identification is thus with the nation as an imagined community as opposed to a “real” one based upon region, ethnicity, and/or other differences and similarities. The central elements of the grand trauma narrative—such as the heroic struggle for the liberation of the nation—converge neatly with the “actors” within it: the perpetrator, the victorious victim, and the intended spectators/witness. All are, to some degree, “mythological” parts of the narrative, together with the imagined community of the nation, the “scientific” communistic ideology, and the mixture of legends and historical facts. As a whole, they become powerful parts within the construction of a collective memory of the American-Vietnamese War from the point of view of the Vietnamese. Not least, this creates the possibility of putting the enormous suffering of the Vietnamese people in a context of historical necessity and victorious unity. However, the range of experiences of the individual Vietnamese does not necessarily fit easily into this grand narrative, neither at the individual nor at the collective level. Nor is this the whole picture of Vietnamese society. Rather, what is discussed are dimensions of the official narrative given by the museums concerning primarily the war against the U.S. On a societal (as well as historical) level, one would need to add religious conditions, for instance. In short, the official narrative excludes a range of complexities and internal conflicts while at the same time offering meaning, unity, and closure. We have now looked more closely at some representations of the official main narrative of how the Vietnam War is remembered in Vietnam. This is a narration of heroism and a revolutionary struggle against foreign powers that eventually led to a unified nation; a narrative in which the Communist Party is a main actor and in which the dead are depicted as heroes. There is less place for individuals here than in the trauma narratives constructed in the United States, where stories tend to personalize history and focus on the individual rather than collective actors. However, there are of course other interpretations available in Vietnam as well. We find them in art and literature, but as we shall see, it is perhaps not in high and popular culture where we find the most powerful contemporary challenges to the official narrative.

Real and Imagined Memories: On the Vietnam War and Vietnamese Art Artists played a significant role for the Vietnamese communists during the war. They documented the war and its participants, and in doing so

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ensured that at least some were remembered. In this, artists played a role in the memorialization of the war, both on a collective and individual level. At the same time, the visual art of the North Vietnamese was propagandistic. Consequently, the artistic expressions during the war could be divided into “combat art” and “propagandistic art” (or “revolutionary art”). 48 Combat art is the artistic work done in the field, in actual combat or close to it. Being useful for purposes of propaganda, it nevertheless differs from the propagandistic art produced in order to raise the ideological awareness of the general population. In Vietnam, as elsewhere, such “art” has a style of its own. Propagandistic art fulfilled a major purpose, not least in spreading the revolutionary message to distant villages, often by the artist themselves (e.g., Gluckman, 2006). This period could be said to have begun around 1948—when Trường Chinh (the then General Secretary of the Party and later president of Vietnam from 1981 to 1987) proclaimed that Socialist Realism should be used against Western modernism—until 1987 (Pearlman, 2015a). Despite Trường’s proclamation, there was some room for other, more independent forms of art, for example the Southern impressionistic style that was mixed with the more realistic style of the Northerners. This, however, had to be done in “subtle ways” (Pearlman, 2015a). 49 Stylistically speaking, the artists during the American-Vietnamese War were influenced by both traditional Vietnamese visual arts and French schools of painting, combining impressionism and cubism with a more “naïve” style of painting (ibid.). The French heritage can be traced to the Hanoi College of Fine Arts, founded in 1925 under French colonial rule, which had a clear impact on the style of future generations. Further, as Buchanan (2008) has pointed out, art played a central role in the military training of the Vietnamese soldiers, and throughout the war the NLF considered art to be an important propagandistic tool, very much in the same manner as it was and had been in the Soviet Union and China. Consequently, this more ideological connection influenced the artistic style. A main goal was 48 There are to my knowledge no similar attempts in South Vietnam to enlist combat artists in the same way as the North Vietnamese and the Americans. 49 All Vietnamese artists led their life under an authoritarian rule, as has been pointed out by among others Dumbrell: “Party rule was authoritarian, and explicit dissent was not tolerated. As in other authoritarian systems, the absence of obvious dissent should not be confused with universal support. During the war, the paintings of Bui Xuan Phai—often dismal street scenes in Hanoi—represented one, partially suppressed indication of dissent from official thinking on the glory of war. Ho Chi Minh provided a slogan for collectivized agricultural production: ‘everyone to work as hard as two.’ This apparently gave rise to a popular verse of the 1960s and 1970s: ‘Everyone work as hard as two/ so that the chairperson can buy a radio/ Everyone work as hard as three/ so that the cadre can buy a house and courtyard’” (2012: 198).

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of course to mobilize support, but oddly enough, much of the art produced tended to highlight harmonious and personal themes, often picturing the landscape and the people in idyllic scenery and colors and avoiding more violent or “dark” themes (e.g., Chonchirdsin, 2014). At the same time, these “artists of war” risked their lives as they took part in and often were close to actual combat, a condition that they shared with the photographers that were documenting the war in a more “objective” way. As this is clear in many of the works of the “guerrilla artists,” it is also clear that it is nearly a mundane, everyday life that is pictured in the artistic work, avoiding the spectacular and highlighting the aspects of everyday life in a war zone. The result is a combination that underlines and points towards some of the paradoxes of how the war is remembered. On the one hand, it is clear that the artists were in the midst of a full-fledged war with causalities and hardship. At the same time, heroic, stoic, and even romantic aspects of the war were highlighted in the artistic representations, an aspect that is equally present in the official grand narrative as it is presented in the museums. In a way, “combat art” can be said to represent a more individualistic expression of some of the general themes highlighted in the official grand narrative, but at the same time, one should not forget the context in which this art emerged. The very term “combat art” or “war art” incorporates the overarching goals of that very war. The result is that heroism and the focus on sacrifice is given personal and individual expression, one that underlines stoicism as well as a close connection to the natural and local environment. At the same time, this very heroism and ability to sacrifice for the collective serve a more overarching common goal. Despite being an impressionist-inspired documentation of everyday life during the war, propaganda was also present. Much of the artistic work produced during and after the war had purely propagandistic purposes, and in this sense, they were more in line with the well-known, almost global genre of Soviet-style propaganda art. These artistic representations bring forward similar themes such as the official memorialization of the war, heroism, the Vietnamese nation, and the role of the Communist Party. These themes are shared among many communist nations (many of them post-colonial), which tend to highlight national independence and the central role of the communist ideology in achieving this. The propagandistic part of the art produced during the war does not share the personal and individualistic expressions found in “combat art,” the individuals look very much “the same,” and the style as such is equally less personal and expressionistic. Art is in this case more clearly a means to an end.

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Not all artists embraced the tasks given to the artistic community during the war. Many fled or had to give up their artistic work (Williamson, 2006). Still, and particularly so in combat-related art, the aesthetic expressions left room for some reflection over the societal experience of being engaged in a total war. From a “Western” perspective, the lack of critical artistic expressions could be seen as remarkable, as a sign of total ideological control and subordination of the artists. But this would be too simple a conclusion to draw. As much as the art expresses ideological intentions in combination with the intent of lifting the morale of both civilians and combatants, it also expresses the pain, horror, and sorrow that every Vietnamese experienced during the war. And as such, it may be said to put forward an alternative—if not critical—message of hope and remembrance of happier moments.50 The American-Vietnamese War continues to be a central theme among Vietnamese artists today. Some, like Dinh Q Lê, were educated and active abroad; others, like the influential writer, critic, and artist Nguyen Quan, are active in Vietnam.51 The generations born during or after the war might experience the sensation that their own memories are mixed with official or popular cultural representations of the war. This is a theme that Dinh Q Lê has explored in his work on real and imaginary memories in which he addresses how a popularized memory of others became a part of his own personal memory. Belonging to the generation whose parents fought in the war, Dinh Q Lê also explores generational aspects of the war—a younger generation trying to understand an earlier one. Here as well, the mix of personal and collective memory as depicted in popular culture becomes central (e.g., Qin, 2015). Of course, not all contemporary art in Vietnam is necessarily engaged in the memories of the war. Generally speaking, the opposite is the case. Themes that underline tranquility and/or stoicism predominate (as in the work of Lihm Kim Kathy, for instance),52 and contemporary Vietnamese art reflects more the ambition to move on rather than to dwell on the past. It is also in line with Doi Moi in the sense of opening up society. This art is 50 This aspect has, for instance, been brought forward by the contemporary Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê in his project Light and Belief, which consists of a collection of art that was made during the war. 51 Nguyen Quan became editor-in chief of the national Vietnamese Art magazine in 1986 and has since been influential in the development of art after Doi Moi. He also writes about the history of Vietnamese art, stressing local and village-based traditions and practices (Taylor, 2014). 52 Contemporary here means art produced after the Doi Moi, in contrast to the “modern” art that was produced after 1925 and the more propagandistic art produced during the war itself.

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more oriented towards the art market of Southeast Asia and resembles in this way contemporary art in China. This does not mean that it avoids what can be called difficult matters, rather that there is no pervasive concern with the American-Vietnamese War or its legacy. Since 1990, when the first private gallery opened in Hanoi, an expanding art scene has existed in Vietnam which consists of Vietnamese artists that—like Dinh Q. Lê—have returned from exile. Further, as the general population has become more dominated by a younger generation, newly opened galleries like 3A have oriented themselves toward global culture. This too is similar to China, as is the mixture of workshops, galleries, concert activities, and the like that have emerged despite difficulties with bureaucracy and funding (e.g., Pearlman 2015c). Vietnamese f ilmmaking originated in the 1920s during the colonial period and was naturally very much influenced by the following periods of continuous warfare. Vietnamese cinema originated and developed during the most vicious wars within our country’s recent history. Many Vietnamese filmmakers are former soldiers. Naturally, this influences their choice of theme … Heroism and humanitarianism form Vietnamese cinema’s crucial artistic values. They emerged from that nation’s altruistic national traditions of developing and defending one’s country. (Pahn Dinh Mau, 2011: xxiii)

The influence of the ever-present war made directors focus on the ongoing war, warlike situations, and people involved in the armed conflict—patriots defending their country. Naturally there was a normative and, in a sense, propagandistic aspect to this. After 1975, the situation changed and filmmakers were able to address other, broader issues. It was then possible to address emotional responses to the war in more complex ways and to depict ordinary people and not only soldiers in combat. However, the heroic aspect was mainly maintained, and suffering as well as sacrifices were framed in terms of “the nobility and beauty of the Vietnamese character,” connecting a heroic history with the notion of everyday “banal nationalism” (Sutherland, 2005; see also Billig, 1995). There are a number of films that directly relate to the memorialization of the war from a Vietnamese perspective. These include The Girl from Hanoi (original title Em bé Hà Nôi, 1974),53 The Abandoned Field: Free Fire Zone (Cánh 53 See IMDb https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0327681/.

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dông hoang, 1979), Cards on the Table (Ván bài lật ngửa, 1985), Coordinates of Death (Toa Dô Chêt, 1985), the short movie The Sound of the Violin in My Lai (Tiéng vi câm o My Lai, 1998), and the Song of the Stork (Vu Khúc Con Cò, 2002), a Vietnamese-Singapore joint venture. Song of the Stork is rather melodramatic and addresses issues such as camaraderie, heroism, and romance during war but also more complex matters such as choosing between the interests of the nation and those of the family. In general, the themes remained the same in many of the post-Doi Moi (“new change”) expressions of the memorialization of the war. As the official narrative brought forward themes such as heroism, sacrifice, and national unity, artistic expression during and after the war brought forward similar themes but at the same time placed them in more individual and personal contexts. Nevertheless, the heroic element is present, albeit often in rather idyllic natural surroundings or with highly stylistic human social and romantic relations. It must be pointed out, however, that Doi Moi changed the art scene in Vietnam in numerous ways. Earlier, in the post-1975 period, cultural workers were strictly controlled, and artists originating from South Vietnam had to endure a mandatory two-month-long ideological re-education (Pearlman, 2015b). They were then informed that art should glorify the working class and favorably depict agriculture and industry. Even if reunification led to a certain confluence between southern and northern artists that had worked in different traditions, most of the “post-war” era was destructive as far as aesthetic expression was concerned. Art books and nude statues were destroyed and condemned as “bourgeois” and therefore offensive. Following Doi Moi, Vietnamese artists could more easily access art works and evolving trends from the rest of the world (for instance via articles in the magazine of the Artist Association, cf. Pearlman, 2015c). As a consequence, aspects of Vietnamese art became more expressionistic and individualistic. At the same time, sales opportunities widened, with the first private gallery opening in 1990, and the Vietnamese art scene continued to expand throughout the 1990s. Compared to artists and the art world, the censorship of the Vietnamese authorities remains more of a reality for journalists and authors in Vietnam. This partly explains the relatively large number of writers in exile and the existence of a genre of Vietnamese exile literature. Even if journalists are more exposed to censorship, this also affects writers. Again, we see here the difference in generations: the older one still preoccupied with the experiences of the war, and the younger generation for whom the war is more distant. Consequently, the older generation views the younger as being self-obsessed, while the younger generation views the older as being obsessed by the war (Falkman, 2014).

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Ghost as Collective Witness Which corpse is my love, Lying in that trench, In the burning fields, Among those potato vines… From A Song for the Corpses, by Trinh Công Son54

One may get the impression that there is no cultural trauma in contemporary Vietnamese society; that the individual and collective trauma of the war no longer tears the social fabric. This would imply that the experience of the American-Vietnamese War has successfully been incorporated into the heroic narrative of national liberation despite the enormous suffering it caused, much of which is still present for all to see. In other words, this collective suffering is now commemorated as meaningful in ways that are supportive of the social order. There is some truth to this, yet tensions and wounds remain. The American-Vietnamese War was a trauma of enormous proportion for the Vietnamese people(s) and culture(s)—not only because of the death and destruction that can be traced directly to the Americans but also because it was a civil war. Any ongoing cultural trauma can be traced to the well-known consequences of “brother killing brother” (and sister) as well as the heart-rending process of displacement that was a direct consequence of the war. This tear in the social fabric remains an open wound. Death and dying are connected to sorrow and mourning, and the ability to mourn and to build meaningful narratives that assist in the healing process are important ingredients in overcoming trauma, whether collective or individual. In Vietnamese culture, the dead are mourned by interring the body. It is important that the dead come “home.” One consequence of the American-Vietnamese War was the dislocation or displacement of the dead (as well as the living). These dislocated dead became ghosts, of which there are many (Kwon, 2008a; for a literary depiction, see Ninh, 1987). Heonik Kwon, using the My Lai massacre as one of many examples, has shown how ghosts in Vietnam are related to social order and how many Vietnamese must relate to the ghosts of all those dead in the war.55 A thorough accounting would of necessity include those Vietnamese now living in exile. The working through of Vietnamese trauma calls for reconciliation with the socially if not physically dead, including those who were forced to leave and thus lost their home. 54 Quoted in Shafer (2007). 55 Ghosts are present in Bao Ninh’s novel The Sorrow of War, as the reader early on is introduced to the ghosts and lost souls in the Jungle of Screaming Souls. See also Klass & Gloss (1999) on spiritual bonds to the dead.

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Given the internecine nature of the war, there could be no genuine notion of a “national experience of war” (e.g., Schivelbusch, 2001; cf. Scagliola, 2007 on the difficulties of representation and commemoration of unconventional wars). Any such idea would have to be forcefully constructed, maintained, and reproduced. As the official narrative would have it, southern Vietnam was not a unified entity in relation to the overall objective of national liberation and the anti-colonial struggle. The south was divided between those who fought against the north and those who supported national independence as pursued by the North Vietnamese regime; for instance, as the NLF controlled the countryside, the regime and the Americans controlled the urban areas. The NLF controlled the night, while the regime handled the daytime. Even families were divided along these lines, as were villages and other groupings. Kwon (2008a, 2008b) discusses how this experience is related to the problematic division of the war dead in terms of heroes and ancestors. Vietnam, in particular the southern and middle regions, has a strong tradition of ancestor worship that the communist regime for a long period tried to stifle but that has experienced somewhat of a revival from the 1990s onward (Kwon, 2008a). The belief that the misplaced dead became wandering ghosts plays a great role in the country. As we have seen, the official Vietnamese narrative represents the war dead as heroes rather than as ancestors. What we have, then, is a case of what could be called ritual politics, that is, a political effort to control the mourning and remembering of the dead. This is in contrast to the role of “cultural witness” that the ghosts play (ibid.: 5). The narrative of a unified and unifying war highlights the idea of the heroic soldier or, for that matter, the heroic mother and heroic sacrifice. In contrast to this, we have the local, family-based, and communal processes of memorialization (remembering, honoring) of the dead ancestors, many of whom died on distant battlefields. This must be understood as a shared collective (cultural) traumatic experience. Kwon (2008b) observes how the aforementioned revival of ancestral worship is in part a response to the exclusion of many of the war dead from (the politics of) official national memory, as reflected in museums, war memorials, and the like.56 This could also be extended to include the more biographical and individual expressions to be found in contemporary artworks. There are some exceptions, of course. Kwon (2008a) mentions the famous and widely distributed novel The Sorrow of War, and specifically a dialogue concerned with the ghosts of the war. Indeed, The Sorrow of War is somewhat marked by the eerie atmosphere of ghosts and 56 This is particularly the case when it comes to the memorialization of the soldiers that fought with the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (see Heathcote, 2015).

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wandering spirits, including descriptions of how the main character Kien and his squad build an altar to honor the wandering souls of their dead comrades, setting a theme of memorialization that runs throughout the novel. This theme makes it clear that commemorating war is as horrific as it is psychological challenging: “Losses can be made good, damage can be repaired and wounds will heal in time. But the psychological scars of the war will remain forever.” (Bao Ninh, 1987: 180). Ninh points out the “appalling paradox” that lies in the horrific deaths and atrocities that are now mere memories in a beautiful landscape, a landscape now inhabited by the wandering ghosts of war. There is thus a vast portion of Vietnamese war dead that are not included in current commemorative practices. Their exclusion is a result of the post-war politics of memory. What has become of them? They have become ghosts, haunting the living. Various ritual practices have emerged to deal with this situation, as the war destroyed former secure places for “traditional, family-based commemorative practices” (Kwon, 2008a: 5). This has also contributed to the previously mentioned revival of ritual activity as regards interactions with the ghosts of war. The revival can be said to be a response to an ethical demand made on behalf of the living actors to help the dead as well as a response to calls to reclaim ancestor worship, which has been overshadowed by the hero worship put forward by the political authorities. The ghosts actually act as a carrier group and witness to the horrors of war and in that sense directly speak to the issue of cultural trauma. This hypothesis helps us to understand the paradox that appears when we discussed memory and cultural trauma in Vietnam as being both present and not present at the opening of this chapter. On the one hand, we can say that the dominant narrative of the heroic struggle for independence has functioned as a bandage on an open wound. On the other hand, it remains clear that the ever-present troubled ghosts point to difficulties that exist in mending that wound and putting the trauma to rest. The official story is that the trauma has been overcome, that the tragic horror of war was a necessary sacrifice, and that the nation can now build a future upon its proud memory. This notion is largely shared by the population—contained in such notions as forgiving and moving on (compare the Buddhist idea of forgiving, forgetting, and moving on). It is further reinforced by the fact that the younger generation—which has no personal memory of the war and which now dominates Vietnamese society in pure numerical terms—is eager to focus on the future rather than the past. The issue of hero worship vs. ancestor worship is surely also present for them. But, as the example of

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ghosts suggests, the sorrow of war is not completely over, and the collective trauma still lingers. The ghosts “carry” and express a collective trauma of the war, in particular in terms of the displacement of ancestors (and thereby also the history of the community) as well as the displacement of large groups of living humans as a consequence of the civil-war-like nature of the war (a similar situation can, for instance, be seen in the Balkans with mass graves). These ghosts—and thus the memory of the war—continue to haunt the younger generation. One way to resolve this situation is to transition from “hero worship” to “ancestor worship,” as Kwon points out. Ghosts are related to society and collective memory in the same way that ancestors are, and in that sense become part of the social order. They play a role in the possible reestablishment of the social “fabric,” as they carry the collective trauma and literally speak on behalf of the many dead. Another way to view this is as two parallel ways of handling the traumatic memories of the war. One way, which dominates the official story, is to narrate this memory in terms of a heroic sacrifice in the struggle for independence against a stronger opponent; this is a narration that connects and builds upon a general historical narrative and the myth of the Viet nation. The other way, highlighted by Kwon but also present in more popular stories such as in the novels of Bao Ninh, is to construct a ghost “narrative” that downplays the heroic and brings out the tragic aspect of the war, thus acknowledging the trauma on an individual as well as collective level while at the same time making space for rituals that function as healing practices. To successfully heal the trauma, this approach would of necessity include commemorating the dead of southern Vietnam.

Conclusion In this chapter, we examined how the American-Vietnamese War is commemorated in contemporary Vietnam. We cannot stress enough the overwhelming impact that the war has had on Vietnamese society and the complexity of its outcome both in terms of collective memory and the lived experience of the Vietnamese themselves. In attempting to understand the legacy of the war, one is almost bewildered by the amount of literature on the theme of trauma and suffering (e.g., Turse, 2014; Tal, 1996). However, from the Vietnamese perspective, there is also another image possible. Surprisingly, some of the firsthand accounts in memoirs and art highlight the positive relations built during war, often depicting love relations or

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focusing on contrasting impressions such as the tranquility of the jungle in between combat encounters. In literature written by foreign observers, such as French and Swedish journalists and authors, there are also often expressions of hope and admiration both during and after the war (e.g., Burchett, 1977; Eriksson, 1969; Falkman, 2014) that could be seen as examples of simplification or even propaganda. These at times contradictory accounts might point towards a successful resolution of the collective trauma that the Vietnam wars inflicted on the Vietnamese people, and even if that were not the case, these additional perspectives on commemoration are different in their at times apparent consensual approach. This is partly because the American-Vietnamese War means something different for each of the protagonists involved and consequently is not remembered in one coherent manner, even if the official narration is an attempt to create such a cohesion. A reason for this domestic polyphony is that for the North Vietnamese and the majority of the South Vietnamese, this was a “total war,” a war that no one could escape. This makes it very different from how the majority of Americans experienced it. For North Vietnamese and many in the South, it was also a continuous war of national liberation and a war that was experienced differently depending on which group one belonged to in Vietnam itself. People who have experienced war might often want to forget it and return to a normal life in order to move on. This could indeed be true of many Vietnamese, even if the nagging question—“Was it worth it?”—has persisted for a long time. For many, the war became an issue of personal grief and indeed of having the traumatic experience of not being able to bury the dead and mourn them in a proper way, not to mention handling their own personal memories. On a collective level, the situation is different—hence the need for monuments and memorials. On this level, regardless of the outcome and separate from whether one is perpetrator or victim, there is collective trauma and a “tear in the social fabric.” Thus, there is a need to come up with some sort of unifying and inclusive narrative, even if simplified. In the case of Vietnam, this narrative is created around the heroism of the people, as it is mainly formulated through officially (state-)sanctioned means. What is not seen in this grand narrative is the vast complexity of the long struggle for independence from colonial rule. In this, the role of the two communist superpowers—Soviet and China—have been largely excluded, a point that remains disputed to this day. As we have seen, there exists a disparity between the official heroic narrative and the more individual and biographical accounts that might

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very well raise the question “Was is worth it?”.57 Likewise, the official heroic narrative stands in stark contrast to the questions asked by the ghosts of war. The ghosts stand out as a kind of carrier of collective trauma and as a constant reminder of the consequences of this war. They also raise the issue of a good versus bad death and meaningful versus meaningless suffering. From the perspective of society as a whole, we might be asked to make sacrifices for the common good, especially in war, but from the perspective of the collective (and the individuals), there is no such thing as a “good” death, as the ghosts remind us. This is a problem that is not exclusive to the Vietnam War but holds for all wars. The sorrow of war, which haunts the next generations, will never be fully balanced by the collective remembrance and glorification of the fallen. A distant war: As one travels through Vietnam today, the AmericanVietnamese War is both present and distant—present in the memorials and the organizations that employ Agent Orange victims; present in the land mines and bombs that still lie in the jungle and rice fields. It is also present in the faces of the elderly, as it is present in the custom of worshiping the dead. The moped taxi driver may express his gratitude for the donations of medicine made to the Vietnamese people during the war and still remembers the foreign medic that saved his life when he was a child. The books sold in the souvenir shops still have a lingering, distinct smell of war, as do the old uniforms and military gear that are put out for sale. The distant war is still present and the memories close. If one looks up across the road outside of the Military History Museum in Hanoi, there is an improvised skate park in the shadow of the Lenin statue where the children play as in any global city, and life seems to go on without being haunted by ghosts or heroic forefathers. In light of this, one is struck by a sensation of listening to a distant and polyphonic echo that lingers in Vietnamese society—sometimes present, sometimes not. We have seen how the dominant narrative in Vietnam is centered around a heroic struggle for national independence that excludes or downplays many dimensions of the traumatic memory of the war(s). In a sense, this narrative emerged out of necessity. The Vietnam War was in many ways 57 We call the narrative heroic given its main characteristic and message, but it is also a traditional one in terms of historical narration (Rüsen, 1987), as it affirms “pre-given patterns of self-understanding,” “constitutes present form of life,” and gives a sense of eternity vis-à-vis history. The question “Was it worth it?” addresses both the justification of the violent struggle as such and the doubts of whether it was “waged in a proper way,” pointing to the possibility of a retrospective debate about choices made by the Vietnamese leadership both during and after the war (e.g., Duiker, 1995: 270-271).

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a complex civil war for the Vietnamese in the aftermath of the French attempt to restore colonial rule—a civil war in which the U.S. intervened with an escalating presence but eventually abandoned. However, the intervention of the Americans provided an opportunity for the communists in the North as well as for the NLF in the South to gather their forces in the name of national liberation. As discussed throughout this chapter, this could be seen as a simplification that surely had its function from a political perspective but also for the sake of constructing a coherent and overarching narrative of the costly process towards national liberation. Beneath this narration lies the immense complexity of this war, or rather the range of war and war-like situations that lasted for decades. This goes hand in hand with a core message within the dominant narrative, namely that the Vietnamese people have historically always faced threats from the outside in terms of war. This kind of statement reflects the idea that the people would like to be seen as a nation of warriors rather than peasants. It also reflects the pride that stems from overcoming a complex geopolitical situation in which the national liberty and freedom of Vietnam were at stake in one way or another. However, one could also talk about different wars in terms of how it was experienced in rural or urban areas and of course by the south and north Vietnamese. In this approach, this war was always present in different ways depending on the context. The relative safety of the urban existence in Saigon at the time included experiences of terror but not like the overwhelming experience of total war that characterized the rural existence, most particularly in South Vietnam. For the North Vietnamese, in particular towards the end of the 1960s, the war was increasingly carried out by a national army with conscripted soldiers who were f ighting in a “regular” war against a clear opponent. It was this kind of development of the war that also made a “two-state” solution difficult to imagine from the perspective of both major sides of the conflict. Indeed, reconsolidation—or for that matter peace—was not to be achieved immediately after 1975, as Kiernan (2017: 452) points out. “National reunification proved to be the single major outcome of the war’s end,” but it did not mean that conflicts were settled. To that “open ending” we should also add the continuous complexity of religious, ethnic, and other distinctions present during the whole period of the Indochinese wars and afterwards. Undoubtedly, this complexity added both to the cruelties conducted during the war and afterwards and to the need for a simplified grand narrative that nevertheless could not hide the trauma, of which the ghosts still remind us.

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The Trauma of Vietnam: The American Perspective Abstract The chapter traces the “meaning struggle” as carried out in the various arenas of memory in the United States. Central concepts and themes in the official narration of the war are identified and discussed, such as the “Vietnam Syndrome” and the “lessons” drawn from the lost war. Could the war have been won, was it a “failure” from the beginning and thus a “tragic mistake”? The counter-narratives developed in the powerful antiwar movement are also given a central place in the chapter. Mass media and popular culture representations of the war are discussed in detail. Artworks, novels, and other forms of aesthetic representations are included, most especially those produced by veterans. The chapter concludes by arguing that the American war was the cause of cultural trauma in the United States. Keywords: imagined community, American exceptionalism, Vietnam generation, Cold War

We know that for years now, there has been no country here but the war. Michael Herr, 1968 A just memory…recall(s) the weak, the subjugated, the different, the enemy, and the forgotten. Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2016: 17 For too long, we have lived with the “Vietnam Syndrome”.… It is time we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause. A small country newly free from colonial rule sought our help in establishing self-rule and the means of self-defense against a totalitarian neighbor bent on conquest. We dishonor the memory of 50,000 young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feelings of guilt as if we were doing something shameful, and we have been shabby in our treatment of those who

Eyerman, Ron, Todd Madigan and Magnus Ring, Vietnam: A War, Not a Country. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463723084_CH03

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returned. They fought as well and as bravely as any Americans have ever fought in any war. They deserve our gratitude, our respect, and our continuing concern. Ronald Reagan, 1980 speech before the VFW national convention, while campaigning for the American presidency

As the North Vietnamese forces approached the outskirts of Saigon on April 29, 1975, approximately 1,000 Americans remained in the city. They were mostly support personnel, both military and civilian, left to administer American interests. Among them was a contingent of U.S. Marines hastily sent in to protect the American embassy and its staff. Ambassador Graham Martin was one of the last to leave, with ships and helicopters evacuating American citizens and thousands of their Vietnamese collaborators. As the chaos neared its end, President Ford made the last-minute decision that only Americans would be permitted on the final helicopters ferrying people between Saigon and American warships lying off shore. Thousands of desperate Vietnamese, most of whom had worked for the Americans, were left to their fate in the face of the advancing enemy. The recorded images of these final hours of the American war in Vietnam have become seared into collective memory. On its front page the following day, The New York Times featured a dramatic photograph displaying lines of people clambering up a narrow stairway into the back of a waiting helicopter, precariously perched atop a building in the embassy compound. Spread in bold black type across the top of the page, the headline proclaimed: “Minh Surrenders, Vietcong in Saigon.” Beneath the photograph, reportage began: “The United States ended two decades of military involvement in Vietnam today with the evacuation of about 1,000 Americans from Saigon as well as more than 5,500 South Vietnamese” (NYT, April 30, 1975). By this time, most of the upper-class South Vietnamese had fled the county. These included the newly resigned president and former general Nguyen Van Thieu, who flew with relatives to Taiwan on a US military transport plane with millions of dollars and 15 tons of baggage (Young, 1991: 297). General Duong Van Minh, one of the few remaining high-ranking officials, was hastily put in place as the head of the Saigon government by the Americans, who were motivated by a hope that a negotiated settlement was still possible. Such hopes proved to be false. The South Vietnamese Army had long since been decimated, and an arriving North Vietnamese officer told Minh, “You have nothing left to negotiate.” The Times story was careful not to speak about defeat or surrender with regard to the Americans. The military engagement had ‘ended,’ that was all.

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The article quoted President Ford in an appeal to a deeply divided American public: “[this] closes a chapter in the American experience,” Ford said. “I ask all Americans to avoid recrimination about the past, to look ahead to the many goals we share…”. The Times also quoted Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger addressing military personnel: in the hour of pain and reflection, you may feel that your efforts and sacrifices have gone for naught. That is not the case. When the passions have been muted and the history is written, Americans will recall that their armed forces served them well. Under circumstances more difficult than ever before faced by our military services, you accomplished the mission assigned to you by higher authority. In combat you were victorious and you left the field with honor.

These sentiments were to become central themes in the official narration of the war, at least in its public expressions. The American military served well, won every battle, and ‘left the field with honor,” If there was defeat, it was the fault of politicians, ‘higher authority’, and the South Vietnamese military.1 It was the latter, after all, who surrendered. It would take years, however, for Schlesinger’s interpretation to emerge as the dominant one in the American discussion about the meaning of the American-Vietnamese War. Antiwar sentiments and a sense of failure on all sides in the American debate about the war remained so strong that many public officials felt it better to remain silent about the war, to ‘move forward’ and “look ahead to the many goals we share,” as President Ford had proposed. It was not until the 1980s—during the Reagan presidency and after a long struggle to approve and erect the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982—that this interpretation of the American experience in Vietnam emerged as the official 1 Senator Barry Goldwater, who was defeated by Lyndon Johnson in 1964 in his bid for the presidency, put this succinctly on the floor of the Senate in 1985 “U.S. military forces did not lose the Vietnam War, civilian policymakers did” (quoted in Crawford, 2013: 423). This is a version of the “stab-in-the-back” myth that can be typical after defeat. It is also part of a wider strategy of handling collective defeat, something Schivelbusch calls “loser myths” (2001: 26). He writes: “What neurosis is to the individual, the creation of myths is to the collective. Our three losers’ myths—the Lost Cause, the dream of revenge, and im Feld unbesiegt (undefeated on the field of battle)—all deny that the nation has been defeated.” One can also find an element of revenge in the imposition of harsh economic sanctions by the United States on Vietnam and in the way Vietnamese refugees were treated by the United States government. The notion of a lost cause or a defeat that could be blamed on someone other than the American soldiers who fought the Vietnam War has been a powerful force in the White Power movement and paramilitary activists in the United States (Belew, 2018).

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and dominant one. In this way, the obvious failure—so vividly illustrated in the humiliating evacuation of Saigon—could be incorporated into the narrative of American exceptionalism as a noble effort gone wrong.2 While relative consensus may have been reached in off icial commemoration, the American memory of that war is still contested in the public mind, with accompanying emotions not only strong but deeply ambiguous. While the “Vietnam syndrome” mentioned by Reagan above—a neurotic reluctance to use military force—may well have lessened as new wars have been fought, the explosive impact of the American-Vietnamese War remains strong today. This is true in part because of the war’s impact on a generation whose embattled memories still capture public attention.3 Beyond this generational memory lies the issue of the reconciling war-related cultural trauma that has transmitted these emotions across generations, a process that has now expanded to include Vietnamese Americans who have added their voice to the American discourse on the trauma of the war as embedded in institutions and in institutional memory as well as individuals and groups. In the Amercian case, this most directly involves those institutions responsible for military affairs and foreign policy, where the failure, if not defeat, was most strongly felt. The meaning of significant events like wars and revolutions takes time to cohere and settle into the orthodoxy of the collective conscience, or what we just called the public mind. Along the way, many competing perspectives and storylines contend in what could be called a meaning struggle to define the event at hand. In order to grasp this process of uncovering and cohering the meaning and memory of the war for Americans, we 2 Writing more generally about the culture of defeat, Schivelbusch (2001: 31) notes, “By rejecting the path that led to war and defeat as an error, a nation is able at the same time to declare the stretch of history before the mistaken detour to be more consonant with its spirit, destiny, and true character.” This is precisely what was attempted here. 3 Reston (2017: 6–8) further divides this generation, which he specifies as “those who came of age from 1965 to 1975,” into “groupings”: “There were the soldiers who were drafted or volunteered… the active passionate dissenters…the malingerers…(and) the lucky ones who were excused with high lottery numbers or who came of age after the draft was eliminated.” On the other side, the government in Hanoi also instituted a draft that increasingly modeled the American one, especially as the war progressed. Bao Ninh, the author of Sorrow of War and veteran of the North Vietnamese Army, recounts in the Burns and Novick (2017) documentary that very few children of the Northern elite fought in the war, with many sent to the Soviet Union to study. Most of the fighting, he recalls, was done by peasants with rural backgrounds. The same can be said of the Southern forces: few members of the urban elite fought in the war and even fewer of their children.

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distinguished several arenas of collective memory construction. We can briefly recall them here. In the academic debate and official discourse, the war in Vietnam is now considered by many as “an avoidable mistake” (Dumbrell, 2012). It took close to 40 years to achieve this degree of consensus in what was a very contentious debate. In this chapter, we reconstruct the central points of contention marking the way to consensus. Conversely, no such consensus has been reached in the political and policy arenas, where the war remains enigmatic. Politicians and policymakers still debate the ‘lessons’ of Vietnam and struggle to overcome the ‘syndrome.’ There are always lessons to be learned, even from failure or defeat. Vietnam overshadows the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as other engagements in the Middle East, where American leaders debate the consequences of putting “boots on the ground” and composing reliable “exit strategies.” James Wright (2017: 147) writes that American policymaking in Vietnam was “marked by incrementalism and ambivalence—and by undisclosed calculations and unspoken plans.” From this, a “lesson” about the importance of clearly stated goals in military ventures could be drawn. Another such lesson that could be gleaned concerned the domestic response to the costs of war—“the cost to families and to public life of the casualties we suffered and inflicted”—something that is all the more important when those casualties are made visible on a daily basis through the mass media (Sapolsky and Shapiro, 1996: 122). Such currently discussed policy lessons can be traced to the experience of defeat as exemplif ied in the ignoble exit from Vietnam, a ghost that continues to haunt the corridors of the American government, especially its military organizations. This has carried over into commemorations of the war, where the only real consensus concerns celebrating those who served, making little mention of the aims and outcome of the war itself. The Vietnam War still rages in American popular culture. As Nguyen (2016)—cited earlier—recalled, wars are always fought twice: once in the real world and then again as fantasy. He might also have pointed out that the second battle centers around memory and commemoration. In liberal societies like the United States, this is an autonomous sphere, relatively free from political, religious, and commercial attempts at censorship and control. The phrase ‘relative’ is of course important, for as in all wars, the American government and military sought to manage the flow of information about the war through the mass media to the greatest degree possible. Given that the latter is largely commercially driven, control and influence was also exerted through corporate ownership. The sphere of popular culture is one of the most important in the debate

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over the meaning and memory of the American-Vietnamese War. As will be discussed below, here one can uncover a meaning struggle framed through coded binaries like perpetrator/victim, along with attempts to resurrect the heroic narrative of American exceptionalism. In this, one can find an overlap with official commemoration and political discourse more generally. At the same time, it is largely through the medium of popular culture that post-war generations access the war, in particular through film and literature. For as long as they remain alive, the recollections of what has come to be called ‘the Sixties generation’ will keep their lived experience of the American-Vietnamese War from fading from public view. This generation—and most particularly those who fought in and for or against the war—are the bearers of a distinctive collective memory. Formed by the war, this generation continues the struggle to include its biographical experience into the national story, making corrective claims rooted in lived experience against official and popular representations of the war.

Historical Background While a nation may be an imagined community, as Benedict Anderson (1983) has suggested, nations are also collective actors in ways that have consequences for those individuals who imagine their community. As protagonist of a collective imaginary (and an imaginary collective), nations rely on mythical traditions embedded as collective memory and articulated through core narratives to justify national projects (Lembcke, 1998). An example most relevant to our discussion is what has been called American exceptionalism, a narrative about the greatness of the American nation and its special mission in the world. Its central tenant is that unlike other nations, the United States seeks neither territorial nor material gain in its military actions; instead, these are always motivated by a concern for those who are weaker and who might emulate its values. This myth finds its roots in the struggle for independence that grounds the origins of the national founding narrative. This myth was reaffirmed during World War II, which was framed as a struggle to stop the spread of authoritarianism in Europe and Asia. It became a central ideological tenet in the Cold War, as the nation emerged as a world power in the postwar period. American exceptionalism is reflected in the words of Ronald Reagan, quoted above, as part of the attempt to reconfigure and restore the nation’s greatness after the trauma of Vietnam. Reagan called the war a ‘noble cause’ and praised those

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who had served, despite the defeat. 4 This formulation marked an attempt to restore the national image and rehabilitate the military so vital to its maintenance. The ennobling of the American mission in Vietnam became increasingly difficult as the war progressed, most particularly after the Tet Offensive, the My Lai Massacre, and the publication of the Pentagon Papers, as we will see below. Reagan and those American presidents that followed did their best to revitalize this positive self-image. As with all mythical traditions, the exact meaning of American exceptionalism is open to interpretation. It was drawn upon to oppose the war as well as to justify it. One of the most contentious sites of symbolic battle as the war raged was the struggle over who owned the nation’s most potent symbol, the American flag. Pro-war demonstrators proudly lined up behind a row of red, white, and blue, while antiwar protestors turned the flag upside down as a sign of distress. For many war protesters, what was exceptional about America was precisely the concern for those weaker and less fortunate—a point of view that would lend support to the Vietnamese struggle to free themselves from colonial rule, as the Americans had done from the British. From this point of view, American forces should have been aiding rather than fighting against the rebel forces. As was stressed in the opening chapter, history and memory are couched in narratives—frameworks that give form to images and impulses that make up what we call “the past.” These narratives refer to experience and to real events while at the same time selecting and shaping the past they recall. Such narratives concurrently provide a framework for acting in the present. Within the master narrative of American exceptionalism, the first interpretive frame brought to bear by American politicians and policymakers on what was then called Indochina was shaped by World War II and what had just been christened the Cold War. The direct precursor was the ongoing conflict in Korea. Following the parameters of American exceptionalism, the Korean War (1950–53) was heroic in content and missionary in prescription while at the same time ‘realistic’ in its commitment to ‘containing’ the communist threat. This was precisely how America’s coming conflict in Vietnam would be framed: contain communism while supporting a democratic friend in need. Writing about a social circle influential in 4 Lachmann and Stivers (2016) develop the notion of “defensive heroism” with reference to medal winners during the American-Vietnamese War. Through a study of Medal of Honor citations, they show how “heroism citations from Vietnam differ from earlier wars and instead usually focus on the honoree’s success in killing numerous enemy soldiers without explaining how those feats contributed to a larger object”. In other words, the individual acts of heroism are honored, but not the fact of military defeat.

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Washington, D.C. in the 1950s, Robert Kaiser (2015) notes, “For them and many other members of the World War II generation, Vietnam was a test of character. Did we learn the lessons of Munich or not? We did the ‘right’ thing in Korea, now we must do it again in Vietnam. That was the line, embraced by numerous right-thinking worthies, including many liberal Democrats.” The group Kaiser refers to includes the young John F. Kennedy, high-ranking editors of the Washington Post, and nationally syndicated columnists, all of whom would play a vital role in shaping America’s initial engagement. Their view of the world was shared and perpetrated by leaders of the major political parties, including Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon, and appeared to resonate with a majority of American citizens.5 As Wright (2017: 79) puts it “To most American officials, Vietnam seemed a better place [than Laos, where earlier threats had emerged, ] to take a stand because of its long coastline and seaports and the fairly stable Diem government with the well-equipped and well-regarded army of South Vietnam.” In his collective biography of the West Point graduating class of 1968, Atkinson (1989) describes how such notions were absorbed and reproduced by those who would become some of the junior officers to direct the American-Vietnamese War. Vietnam seemed a war that could easily be won and a good opportunity to prove one’s prowess. While presidents and policymakers committed themselves “to preserving a non-Communist toehold in Vietnam” (Logevall, 2012: 79), a new generation of soldiers were being prepared to sacrifice themselves for yet another noble cause. Unlike its counterparts in Europe and Asia, the United States emerged relatively unscathed and unified from WWII. The victory over Germany and Japan—the ‘evil axis’—was described as a triumph of good over evil and helped confirm the nation’s view of itself. This was reinforced by endof-the-war revelations of the mass slaughter of Jews and others in what came to be known as the Holocaust as well as the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese. Those who fought in that war have since been heralded as the Greatest Generation, a group of men and women who answered the call, serving and dying not only for the national good but for the good of all humanity. Returning WWII soldiers were greeted with parades honoring and celebrating their victory, with public recognition everywhere to be found. The war’s end, however, brought a new evil to the world stage— communism—in the form of the Soviet Union, an ally turned enemy, and 5 The Cold War moved the power to initiate war more firmly into the hands of the executive branch and away from Congress. The National Security Act of 1947 was a key factor in this process (Crawford, 2013).

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China, ‘lost’ to the ‘free world’ following its bitter civil war, where the U.S. had supported the losing side. As the hot war ended, a Cold War heated up. The Soviets attained nuclear capacity, signing a pact with China (the Sino-Soviet Pact) in early 1950 (McCormick, 1990). The Korean War reflected and reinforced American anxiety and the vision of the world that encased it (for a comparison of the political contexts of the Korean and the Vietnam wars, see Sevy ed., 1989: 273). It was them against us, with the whole world at stake. Every conflict was now assessed globally in terms of American interests and security, as the policy of containment came to define American strategic thinking (Kiernan, 2017). The realism of containment permeated the American foreign policy establishment to complement and sometimes conflict with the heroic narrative of American exceptionalism. The two major political parties generally shared this composite worldview, although it was most strongly fostered by Republicans. In 1952, the WWII hero Dwight Eisenhower was elected president with a vocal anti-communist, Richard Nixon, as his vice president. It was Eisenhower who coined the term ‘domino effect’ about falling regimes in Asia and who proposed a Korean solution to the Vietnam problem (Wright, 2017; Hayden, 2017: 42) In 1953, Nixon visited Indochina on a tour of the Far East to promote American interests as now understood through the Cold War framework. The same worldview had prompted Democratic President Harry Truman to send American military and civilian personnel to Indochina three years earlier and John F. Kennedy, another Democrat, to extend military aid and authorize the creation of tactically oriented armed forces prepared for a new style of warfare—the so-called ‘limited war’—in the nuclear age. Vietnam would be its testing ground. All of this created a web of treaty-based ‘commitments’ that would be used to justify American military engagement (Westmoreland, 1990). This commitment was symbolic—involving image and prestige—as much as it was treaty-based and formal. Lyndon Johnson extended and expanded it further in the mid-1960s, escalating a war that was increasingly judged unwinnable.6 Nearly all of the military high command and non-commissioned officers were war veterans, as were many politicians. The collective memory of war formed an important part of their identity, guiding both their actions and 6 The idea that the American involvement in Vietnam was rooted in treaty obligations is one justification used by policymakers. W.W. Rostow, a Johnson advisor, claimed as much but was immediately challenged by others, such as Richard Goodwin, an advisor to both Kennedy and Johnson, who claimed instead that it was “American power and interests” that ‘demanded’ engagement in Vietnam (Taylor, 1970: 183ff). General William Westmoreland was another who claimed treaty obligation as a cause of war.

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their understanding. In addition to politicians, policymakers, and military leaders, other groups important in fostering the Cold War vision of perpetual threat were religious organizations like the Catholic Church and veteran groups like the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the American Legion. Conservative political organizations such as the John Birch Society and right-wing intellectuals and journalists were also active in the promotion and dissemination of this vision. They had a ready audience and means of communication. Though there were dissidents in its ranks, the Catholic Church and other religious organizations defined themselves as defenders of religious faith against atheistic communism. This message was delivered from the pulpit and through a range of other media, including newspapers and magazines. New York’s Cardinal Spellman was a leading figure in this, even flying to Vietnam to bless American troops and pray for the Catholic refugees who fled Southern Vietnam following the Geneva Accords (Wright, 2017: 116).7 The VFW—to whom Ronald Reagan delivered the speech cited at the beginning of this chapter—gathered veterans, families, and friends in their meeting halls in cities and small towns across the country. Such groups tended to glorify military service and patriotic blood sacrif ice. Organizations like the John Birch Society had a smaller yet perhaps more committed audience to whom they communicated conservative Christian ideas about the communist threat through monthly meetings and newsletters. Members of Congress were listed among their membership. In addition to such organizations, television and radio programs, newspaper columns, and magazines disseminated similar ideas on a daily basis. Graphic maps filled with an ever-expanding “red menace” (the communist threat) proliferated, from the schoolroom to the newly available color television screen. 7 Wright (2017) gives a full account of the various media of popular culture that coalesced to support the war and to present it as a noble cause. He includes the story of the Navy doctor Tom Dooley who had worked with Catholic refugees in Vietnam and ‘became a symbol” for the dramatization of the war as a humanitarian mission to alleviate suffering (ibid.: 116). Dooley’s life story was widely distributed in the United States when it was published by Reader’s Digest. Dooley made well-attended tours to promote his book, in which he wrote of the Vietnamese refugees, “I had identified myself with their dream of a life in freedom and their tragic destiny. They had become my suffering brothers” (ibid.: 117). When Dooley died of cancer in 1961 at the age of thirty-four, he was the “third most admired man in the world—trailing only the pope and President Eisenhower” (ibid.: 118). The last person to visit his deathbed was Cardinal Spellman, the Archbishop of New York and an outspoken proponent of the war. Wright describes Dooley as a ‘complicated charlatan’, someone who worked hard for Vietnamese refugees yet who also ‘played heavily on the ideology of suffering, which found a ready audience in the United States,’ whose alarming accounts could never be authenticated by those who worked with him (ibid.: 117).

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As politicians and policymakers warned of countries falling like dominos, American youth pledged their allegiance to the flag and practiced hiding beneath their desks in the event of a communist nuclear attack. “Reds” were everywhere: now most visibly in Korea but soon, they were told, in Vietnam. It was America’s responsibility—its moral duty as the conservative intellectual Norman Podhoritz (1982) would later put it—to defend and eventually free the Vietnamese and the world from communism. This was an altruistic as well as heroic effort, a crusade that had to be undertaken even if there were no chance of winning. Though President Lyndon Johnson believed more in the containment of communism than its defeat, he also called upon altruism in making a case for escalating the war. This at least would be the public face of American commitment, while the private face as revealed in the Pentagon Papers and in newly released White House tape recordings presented quite another motivation. This Cold War ideological framework provided a way of denying any claims to popular rebellion made by insurgents in what were referred to by some as national liberation struggles. The “Reds” that were “everywhere” were really confined to a small cadre of leaders and intellectuals like Mao Tse Tung and Ho Chi Minh who had misled the masses of peasants that were said to be indifferent to politics and ideology and only supportive of such regimes under threat. Similar to the political discussion in the United States at the time, communists were claimed to have infiltrated key societal institutions and had to be rooted out. Similar views could be found in Europe and most particularly in France, where an ongoing struggle to maintain its colonies helped bring right-wing governments to power in the 1950s (see, for example, House and Macmaster, 2006). Along with officially sanctioned representations, popular culture was a major force in articulating and diffusing this threatening vision of the world as well as the American mission to combat and contain it. As it had done in previous wars, the movie industry led the way, with mass circulation magazines and comic books following in its strides. Hollywood had made a major effort in mobilizing public support for World War II. Those who fought in Vietnam were raised on Hollywood films and comic books, which helped to form their image of both war and the military.8 John Wayne, a 8 Dittmar and Michaud (1990: 7) highlight the role and capacity of film in this ideological endeavor. They write, “Film in particular, with its penchant for spectacle and acoustic resonance and its highly developed and even systemized ability to encode artifice as realism and endow it with a compelling aura of actuality, has proven a powerful medium for this project of refurbishing symbols, obscuring contradictions, and shoring up wavering beliefs.”

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hero of Hollywood war films, was a role model for many young American males. Who could forget Wayne raising the flag in Sands of Iwo Jima (1950); certainly not the young marine Philip Caputo (later an acclaimed journalist and author) who screamed obscenities at the enemy after a successful battle outside Da Nang: “I was John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima. I was also Aldo Ray in Battle Cry” (1999: 269). Hollywood’s version of communism was presented in Korean War-era films as essentially a militant fascism, a ‘Yellow Peril” of invading hoards against the thin line of American defense.

The Vietnam Generation The addressees of this message were the general public, but most specifically the generation that would soon be called upon to fight. Those like Caputo, born during or just after the Second World War, would come of military age in the 1960s. In preparation, Congress passed the Universal Military Training and Service Act in 1951, initially designed to meet the demands of the Korean War.9 The age of induction was lowered to eighteen-and-a-half, and active-duty service extended to 24 months. All males in the United States were required to register and be in possession of a “draft card,” which also served as a proof of age. For American men, the military uniform was not merely a symbol of manhood, of coming of age, but also of honorable membership in the national community. Serving in the military was part of being a good citizen and the wearing if the uniform was a sign of service to the collective, something to bear proudly. It was, in other words, a valued symbol of individual and collective identity.10 To be a ‘draft dodger’ was 9 The provisions of this act stipulated that it needed re-approval every four years. This occurred in 1963 with little debate or controversy. “President Kennedy had extended deferments to married men, which made draft calls even less controversial; this would be rescinded in 1965 by President Johnson. A deferment for college students remained in place. Also in 1965, a survey found that 61 percent of junior and senior high school students thought the system fair” (Wright, 2017: 119-20). Close to 17 million American males were of draft age (18-26 years old) in 1964, with 2.8 million already in uniform. Many chose to enlist rather than wait for their number to be called, in part because one could then choose other branches of service than the Army and be eligible for training in things other than infantry. Having a high school diploma often marked a crucial difference. For the social class and racial implications of this, see Appy (1993) and Wright (2017). Soon after he assumed the presidency in 1969, Richard Nixon authorized the implementation of a lottery system as being fairer in selecting those drafted to service. Abolishing the draft altogether had been one of his campaign promises. 10 This was also the case for many North Vietnamese of the same generation. In recounting his upbringing and his volunteering to f ight, the previously mentioned Bao Ninh (in Ward and Burns, 2017: 461) writes, “I wanted to sign up in September 1969, a few months before my

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dishonorable, especially in working class families where there existed long traditions of military service (Wright, 2017). The same was true within the many minority groups that make up American society, where proving one’s worth through military service was also an important symbol of membership in the national community. This taken-for-granted aspect of what it meant to be an American would soon be challenged, primarily by middle class college students, and eventually shattered with the abolishment of the draft in January 1973 as the war was still ongoing. Registering for the draft would become something more than a routine coming-of-age ritual. While in principle anyone could be ‘drafted’ into combat, in the early stages of the American involvement in Vietnam, when war still seemed like a noble cause, those who went could legitimately be called volunteers or “professionals,” as Time magazine profiled them in the spring of 1965 (April 23, 1965). At that time, as the newsweekly reported, there were 33,200 American service personnel “in country,” with 336 killed and 2,021 wounded since January 1961 (when the Pentagon began counting). The first combat troops had arrived just weeks before, with the great build-up yet to commence. When this occurred, the profile of the American fighting man would change dramatically from civilian and military professional “advisors” to teenage draftees drawn largely from the working class, with an overrepresentation of African Americans and other minorities. This was something acknowledged and even condoned in the Selective Service system, administering the draft (Appy, 2014). Shaped by subtle and not so subtle forms of indoctrination—including the carrot of military supplied job training and social mobility as well as the stick of the draft law—the poor and the working class entered military service in the mid-1960s. Like most Americans at the time, they believed their country had only good intentions: the nation was engaged in helping a weaker people resist an invading aggressor. It was their responsibility, their noble cause, to come to their aid. This understanding of the war—and of the United States as a heroic nation with an honorable mission to protect the world’s weak and defenseless as it applied to Vietnam—would be challenged eighteenth birthday. Why? I wanted to fight foreign aggression, to be an honorable man, and to be a good citizen.” Because he was under 18, Bao Ninh had to receive the written permission of his parents, who reluctantly agreed. Another example of a badge of membership is given by Viet Thanh Nguyen (in ibid.: 566–571), who came to the United States as a four-year-old. He recounts attending a funeral for a fellow refugee: “At twelve years or so of age, I felt only shame and embarrassment at having to wear a white head band of mourning around my head as we drove through the city streets to a funeral mass. Wearing that band was Vietnamese tradition, but it was also a sign of our alien stature in the United States” (ibid.: 568).

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as the war progressed, despite all attempts by both the authorities and the mass media to maintain it. More foundational patriotic values, such as the duty to die in the service of one’s country—even if one had no real understanding of the causes and consequences of the war—were also tested in later stages of the war. While writing their own memoirs and autobiographical fictional accounts, veterans like Caputo (1999), Larry Heinemann (1975), Tim O’Brien (1994), and Robert Mason (1983) articulated a generational experience while at the same time creating a means for transmitting their recollections to future generations. In addition to recording life-altering personal experience, these accounts present the war as an at once harrowing and comic flow of occurrences, through which an awareness of war’s deadly purposelessness slowly emerges. Both Caputo and O’Brien would call upon the Roman poet Horace’s famous aphorism that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. O’Brien asked, for example, “how sweet and fitting is it to die for one’s country in a war that is ‘silly and stupid’” (1973: 145). In an ironic twist, he reflects on this phrase while describing a fragging incident in which disgruntled black soldiers murder their white sergeant. How “sweet and fitting” is that death, and to whom? (see Herbele, 2001: 60–61). Similarly, describing the heroic death of a friend, Caputo (1999: 223–4) writes: You died for the man you tried to save, and you died pro patria. It was not altogether sweet and fitting, your death, but I’m sure you died believing it was pro patria. You were faithful. Your country is not. As I write this, eleven years after your death, the country for which you died wishes to forget the war in which you died. Its very name is a curse. There are no monuments to its heroes, no statues in small-town squares and city parks, no plaques nor public wreaths nor memorials. For plaques and wreaths and memorials are reminders, and they would make it harder for your country to sink into amnesia for which it longs. It wishes to forget and has forgotten.

Representing the Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW), the young John Kerry (2021), a former Naval officer, wondered “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to die for a mistake?” How sweet and fitting would that be? There is little heroism in such representations; it would fall to others such as James Webb, in his role as novelist and later activist fighting for a specific design of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, to represent the war in more traditional terms, we will discuss this further on in the chapter.

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Mass Media It is said that “most Americans learn about both ongoing and past events from mass media” (Schwalbe, 2006: 266). This may be because of the ability of mass media to “disseminate information to large numbers of people quickly” (Schuman & Rodgers, 2004). It is here that many of the narratives about the war were first constructed and disseminated. The role of television has been especially highlighted with reference to the Vietnam War, denominated ‘the first televised war.’ In reference to popular memory, one could argue that the American war in Vietnam began around the time the U.S. Marines stormed ashore for film cameras outside Da Nang in March 1965. One of those marines was the previously mentioned Lt. Philip Caputo, who describes the situation in this way: Their entrance into the war zone had been the stuff of which comic operas are made. Like the marines in World War II newsreels, they had charged up the beach and were met, not by machine guns and shells, but by the mayor of Da Nang and a crowd of schoolgirls. The mayor made a brief welcoming speech and the girls placed flowered wreaths around the marines’ necks. Garlanded like ancient heroes, they marched off to seize Hill 327, which turned out to be occupied only by rock apes—gorillas instead of guerrillas, as the joke went—who did not contest the intrusion of their upright and heavily armed cousins. (1999: 33)11

This public opening was meant also to be a closing: the marines are here; the war is over. Caputo’s ironic phrasing is testament to the early stages of the conflict and his memoirs a judgment as to how wrong that projected image would prove to be. A few days later, Lyndon Johnson felt compelled to remind the nation that “this really is war.” Making the war “real” also meant making it “ours.”12 This process would later be reversed by Richard 11 This was entirely an American show. The Vietnamese government in Saigon had not even been informed, and the greeting arranged in Da Nang was a hurried affair. 12 How this ‘event’—the landing of U.S. Marines—was represented to the American public is important. American combat troops were there, the public was told, on a purely defensive mission to aid our allies. This was ‘performed’ before the television cameras, complete with a welcoming speech and grateful natives bearing flowers. It was not an invasion, in other words. In an ironic comment on this, Noam Chomsky was to write: “For the past twenty-two years, I have been searching to find some reference in mainstream journalism or scholarship to an American invasion of South Vietnam in 1962 (or ever)… There is no such event in history. Rather,

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Nixon, who through his “Vietnamization” policy would make the war instead “theirs.”13 In the same nationally televised speech, President Johnson announced an increase in troop deployment and draft call-ups, though this was not explained or meant to be understood as an escalation (Hallin, 1986). Though sharing some of the precepts of American exceptionalism and Cold War anxiety about communist expansion, the Johnson administration had committed itself to expensive domestic reform and thus maintained an ambivalent relation to the war, especially as the costs escalated. This was reflected in the same speech, where it was implied that though the Americans really were at war, it was not a particularly big one: the United States can afford guns and butter. In public rhetoric, the Vietnam “engagement” had now moved beyond a supportive action, in which Americans acted as “advisors,” to being a “limited” war, though still not formally recognized or declared. What exactly this might have meant in terms of duration and commitment, including what ‘victory’ would look like, remains central to current discussions about the war. At this point, however, one can uncover a shift in the official narrative of the war. No longer was the communist threat stressed; instead, it was a matter of the United States having gotten itself engaged in a war, however limited, and having its reputation to consider. The Vietnam engagement had become as much about saving face as defeating an enemy. Prior to 1965, American involvement in Vietnam, to the extent considered by the public at all, was understood in altruistic and strategic terms. Vietnam was “somebody else’s war” yet still important for the United States when viewed through the lens of the Cold War. The vast majority of Americans there is an American defense of South Vietnam against terrorists supported from the outside (namely from Vietnam)” (quoted in Espiritu, 2014: 81). 13 This would be the third Vietnamization assumed by a Western power. As we have discussed, the French did the same in the early 1950s, when it became difficult to find support for their ongoing battle against those rebelling against their post-WWII colonial aspirations. They organized and trained the Vietnamese Army, which reached 151,000 men in 1953. This occurred at the same time as the war was becoming “Americanized,” though at this point largely in terms of funding and material rather than troops. Ironically, those they were fighting against—the forces commanded by the Worker’s Party of Vietnam led by Ho Chi Minh—were being supplied by the Chinese with American arms captured from the defeated Chinese Nationalist forces or in the Korean conflict (Shipway, 2008:109). The second Vietnamization was begun by Lyndon Johnson around 1966, when after his defense secretary Robert McNamara admitted he had no plan to end the war on favorable terms, Johnson asked aides to design a strategy to turn the f ighting over to the Vietnamese (Young, 2017). As White House tapes exposed by Burns and Novick (2017) reveal, Richard Nixon was lying in his public statements that the South Vietnamese government said it could now win the war itself.

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shared the view that the military was there to help save an emerging nation from foreign invasion, as much a moral intervention as it was political. This was the story as filtered through the mass media. American administrations, up to and including Kennedy and Johnson, had done their best to mask the fact that the country “really was” at war. The term “advisor” was part of that process.14 The first obvious boots on the ground with battle-clad soldiers storming ashore as newsreel cameras whirled was meant to evoke images of World War II and the notion that this would be more a victory lap than a real war.15 The American Air Force had aircraft and support personnel already in place at Da Nang and other bases when the Marines arrived, as the air war had already begun. The first task of these combat troops was to protect those forces.16 According to officials, their role was purely defensive and their arrival in no way represented an escalation of the conflict or a change in policy.17 As Hallin (1986) has shown, this would be the rhetoric employed in the extensive increases that followed. A cable from American Ambassador 14 Ronald Spector (1994: 112) offers a more nuanced and elaborated clarification of the role and meaning of the American advisor. See also Daddis (2014). Bowden (2017: 15) offers a more positive picture of the relations between the American advisors and the ARVN than in many other accounts. 15 Bowden (2017: 48) makes the point that the great American build-up, which made the war more American, had the effect of pushing many southern Vietnamese who were uncertain which side they supported in the ongoing civil war to support the southern rebels and the north. This increase of the American presence made clear that this was another colonial war and not simply a civil war between the Vietnamese. This was especially the case in Hue, but one would assume also in Saigon and Da Nang and other big cities that were relatively untouched by the war until the Tet Offensive, and where the intellectuals and students were gathered. The American presence, Bowden argues, pushed the more neutral intellectuals and Buddhists toward the communists. 16 On a personal note, members of one of the author’s (Eyerman) own unit, the 18th Field Maintenance Squadron of the USAF, rotating to Da Nang with tactical attack aircraft from a base on Okinawa, suffered mortar attacks in late December 1963. Incidents like this were the precursor to the landing of ground combat troops to protect these airbases a few months later. 17 That this was rhetoric aimed at the public is more than revealed in the policy outlined in the Pentagon Papers. The aim was to help the South Vietnamese control a countryside that was largely in the hands of the insurgents. As Kiernan (2017: 436) puts it, “From 1965 on, the United States and its allies faced a challenge similar to that which had confronted the French in 1946: how to reverse a near-complete communist takeover of the populated rural areas.” This was a task that proved impossible, especially since the American strategy to achieve this “took less account of the guerrilla war in the villages and tended to overlook the dual impact of large-unit conventional war there, first on villagers: frequent devastation of homes and lives—and then on the guerrilla insurgency: increased recruitment” (op cit). From this perspective, it was not the press or the politicians that were responsible for the eventual defeat but the military itself.

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and former general Maxwell Taylor pursuant to the president’s wishes reveals a conscious effort to hide escalation: Under the circumstances we believe that the most useful approach to press problems is to make no, repeat, no special public announcement to the effect that U.S. ground troops are now engaged in offensive combat operations, but to announce such actions routinely as they occur… This low-key treatment will obviate political and psychological problems … but will allow us to handle them undramatically, as a natural consequence of our determination to meet commitments here. (Quoted in Hallin, 1986: 91–2).

By the end of 1965, there were nearly 185,000 American troops in Vietnam and 1,350 had been killed in action (DeBenedetti, 1990: 123).18 Television camera crews were on hand to follow some of the action, including scenes of American soldiers setting thatched huts alight with their cigarette lighters. This image would be reproduced in fictional form in many of the later films about the war, becoming a symbol of American cruelty and indifference.19 At the time, however, it more ambiguously represented part of the reality of this “dirty little war” in a place where the lines of battle and the identity of the combatants were unclear. One such incident—caught on camera by a crew including CBS correspondent Morley Safer in August 1965—did, however, cause a major controversy, including an alleged angry phone call from President Johnson to Frank Stanton, his friend and head of CBS (Hallin, 1989: 131–2; Safer, 1990; Mirsky, 1990). News 18 It was in this context and with this aim in mind that President Johnson would soon announce his “Marshall Plan” for developing Southeast Asia. This was aimed at American (and world) public opinion, to show that the U.S. had good intentions as well as national security issues in Vietnam. The building of a “South Vietnamese” nation, as distorted as it was (Carter, 2008), formed a central part of American strategy to win the war and to retain influence once the war was won, according to Daddis (2014). 19 The event, filmed in its entirely, showed American troops employing tactics used by the Nazis during WWII, where an entire village was destroyed in retaliation for gunfire coming from one house. In the process, at least four civilians died, including one infant. It was all reported and broadcast by Walter Cronkite in his series on the war. The relationship between televised images of the war and later film representations and the pervasive use of the former in American Vietnamese war films is discussed in Dittmar and Michaud (1990). In their introduction, they point out: “At work here is the relation between reporting and imaging, between the claims to immediacy and accuracy that reportage always makes…and the evaluative mediation and dialogic reception inherent in the process of ‘telling,’ whatever its medium” (1990: 3). The effect is to blur the lines between documentary and fictional narrative in the attempt to make fiction film seem “real.”

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reporting, most particularly the evening television news, brought images of war into American homes on a daily basis. As the war progressed and the antiwar movement grew, the boundaries between the war overseas and the war at home became even more blurred.20 There were in fact at least two “wars at home”: the first within the political and policymaking arena between so-called hawks and doves, and the second between the growing antiwar movement and the government. Along with what was happening in Southeast Asia, these “wars” influenced news coverage. The reverse was also true, that is, that media coverage influenced the conduct of the war itself. There has been much discussion on the role of the mass media in the conduct and outcome of the war. Some even go so far as to blame the mass media for the defeat (see Hallin, 1986; Charles Mohr in Sevy, 1989 for argument against; and Elegant, 1989 and Westmoreland, 1990 for the opposing view). Hallin (1986: 125) offers some insightful comments on the difference between the print media and television reporting in the context of American representations of what came to be called the Vietnam War. Because of their different audiences … and because of television’s special need for drama, TV and the prestige press [The New York Times and Washington Post] perform very different political functions. The prestige press provides information to a politically interested audience; it therefore deals with issues. Television provides not just “headlines” … nor just entertainment, but ideological guidance and reassurance for the mass public. It therefore deals not so much with issues as with symbols that represent the basic values of the established political culture. [emphasis in original]

It is often pointed out that the Vietnam War was the first televised war, some suggesting that this made that war more real for Americans, since its images intruded into households every evening. However, as Lucy Lippard 20 Daniel Hallin (1986) directly addresses the issue of whether media coverage was a decisive factor in how the American-Vietnamese War was understood in the United States and if it can be considered a predominant factor in how the war was conducted. Based on an analysis of The New York Times and television network news coverage of the early stages of the war, he concludes that while the media was clearly important, it was not decisive in setting American policy and that despite some conservative claims to the contrary, media reporting was more supportive than critical of the American effort. One of Hallin’s central points is that, despite its own self-understanding as politically neutral and objective, the American media coverage of the war, most particularly in these early years, shared the Cold War worldview of American policy: the aim was to stop “Communist aggression and expansion”. What the media did, according to Hallin, was to reflect official opinion and when this opinion became divided, the media divided as well, representing conflict and criticism as well as consensus.

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(1990: 10) points out, television may well have made the war less real “since it was full-color but small-scale, wedged between the dominant culture’s other fictions….” Television reporting builds around recorded images, with newscasters adding commentary to short film clips. Their words tend towards the factual, giving context and form to the story told by the pictures and graphs. Yet, as Hallin (1986: 124) suggests, there is a moral and ideological positioning to their words and images they fill out. One such position is the morality of good versus evil, here suggesting American good and enemy evil, reflecting the Cold War worldview discussed previously. The evil could fluctuate, but the good remained the same. Especially at this early stage, taken for granted in the representation was the American willingness to sacrifice and to negotiate versus the communist aggression, deviousness, and intransigence. This impacted form as well as content: one could offer dramatic representations of war and violence couched in a framework of good versus evil.21 Print media works differently. Reporters in the field add tone and color through word choice and sentence structure. Their voice carries an authority gained through “being there,” as they personalize the war in the double sense of highlighting the individual soldiers and taking on the position of observer/participant in their reporting. On the ground, experience gave these reporters access not only to information about the actual conduct of the war but also to field officers who might offer a different opinion than that released through official press conferences. A tension would soon emerge between field reporting and the official press conferences, made more apparent in print reporting than on television. The days when there would be direct conversation between studio-based newscasters and on-the-scene reporters lay in the future. The technology at the time did not permit this, and it could take hours—even days—to communicate between continents by cable. 21 On the interesting issue of the role of television images of violence and death in affecting American public opinion against the war, Hallin (1986: 130) has this to say: “Only about 22% of all film reports from Southeast Asia in the period before the Tet Offensive [the period covered by this book] showed actual combat… A similar percentage, about 24%, showed film of the dead or wounded… Of the 167 film reports and voice-over stories in the sample…only 16 had more than one video shot of the dead or wounded.” This was in part due to a self-imposed censorship and agreed-upon rules between the networks and the government. The main reason, Hallin goes on to say, had to do with the fact that “most operations in Vietnam involved little contact with the enemy; for the average combat unit a bloody firefight was not an everyday occurrence”. The memoirs and novels written by veterans provide a more graphic account of combat, Hallin notes, than the actual coverage by American television. In his account, the main theme and content of television coverage was “American boys in action.”

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This was true even for official correspondence, such as that between the Saigon embassy and Washington. Television relay was greatly speeded up through the addition of a communication satellite, put in place at the end of 1963 (see Laurence, 2002 on this development; also Bartimus et al., 2002).22 It was through the print media that irony and doubt were first introduced into mainstream war reporting. This occurred sometime around 1963, when reporters like David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, both former student reporters for the Harvard Crimson, went to Vietnam for The New York Times and United Press International, respectively. Along with a few others in the Saigon-based press corps, they introduced a subtlety in tone and subtext to what on the surface looked like factual reporting. Sheehan, who headed UPI’s Saigon bureau, would become instrumental in the publication of the Pentagon Papers and would later write several books based on his Vietnam experience. Halberstam won the Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam reporting and is credited by many—most especially those on the political right who oppose him—with constructing what has come to be called (by its critics) the orthodox representation of the Vietnam War as a tragic and bungled defeat.23 All of this was most forcefully put forward in a book he published in 1965, The Making of a Quagmire, based on that experience. It was this book and the title it carried which set the tone for one of the most compelling interpretations of the war. 22 Many field reporters worked freelance and were thus less constrained by corporate rules or ideology. Television reporting was done by crews and was burdened by heavy equipment, making their access to actual combat more restricted. One reporter described the American media coverage in this way: “To cover the Vietnam War, most of the networks sent their headliners for brief stints in the field… They came for what we called ‘face time’ in front of the cameras. A few days in the field, a couple of on-camera stand-ups to show that they were really in the country, and then home. A second tier of reporters were sent in for longer periods, staying three months to a year. Most of them were young, and their excellent reporting established them as first-class broadcasters… The Vietnam War also attracted a large number of freelance journalists who were not unlike mercenaries. They sold their services to any news organization that would pay. They were fearless and willing to go to any lengths to get a story that might ensure a broadcast career. Only a handful of women were covering the war. Their arrival on the scene was to make many changes in the news coverage of the war.” (Anne Morrissy Merick in Bartimus et al., 2002: 93). For fascinating accounts by several of those few woman reporters (including the one just quoted) in both print and television, see Bartimus et al. (2002). From them, one gains insight not only into gender issues but also the attempts at censorship imposed not only by American authorities but also by the South Vietnamese. Most of these female reporters arrived in the closing years of the war. 23 Decades later, when Halberstam died tragically in an automobile accident, several of his critics used the occasion to remind their audience of their differences regarding the AmericanVietnamese War.

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Tet: A Breaking Point Media coverage, even of bloody combat, can become routinized, deadening the impact of the images conveyed. This was more or less the case with television coverage of Vietnam as the war and the protests escalated throughout 1967. By the end of that year, American troop strength had reached nearly half a million and the death toll around 20,000 and rising. The American public had gotten used to this, as part of the background noise of everyday life. Except for those families directly involved, the war was far away—and besides we were winning, or at least that was the way the news generally summed it up. Then in late January 1968, a series of shocking incidents fractured the routine and the consensus. North Vietnamese troops coordinated surprise attacks with southern rebels on nearly all the major cities and military installations in the south. More than 84,000 rebel soldiers took part in what came to be called the Tet Offensive (Israel, 2013: 102). The most poignant and disturbing of these attacks came against the fortress-like American Embassy compound in Saigon. In an ongoing media story, the embassy grounds were not declared secure until more than nine hours later.24 Reportage of this and other related incidents filled the media. Interest in the war took a sudden turn as “Fifty-two new correspondents arrived in 24 While Tet is usually acknowledged as having been very costly, it is usually considered a political victory for Hanoi. Within the framework of the heroic narrative, however, it is described as both a political and military defeat. For example, former general Westmoreland (1990: 47) writes, “the Communist Tet Offensive was a political defeat for Hanoi [because there was no spontaneous mass uprising in their support], but that perspective was given little public visibility in the United States…many journalists reported irresponsibly and against the interests of political success.” As discussed, the name given to the offensive by the North Vietnamese is ambiguous with regard to the meaning/expectation related to “uprising.” The Vietnamese name for the Tet Offensive is Tong-Tan-cong-Noi day which translates as “general offensive” or “general uprising.” The “uprising” part can be interpreted in several ways, I would argue. The Americans, like Westmoreland, interpreted “general uprising” to mean that the communist leadership in Hanoi was hoping for a general revolt against the Saigon regime, like a great spontaneous public revolt, which of course did not happen. Westmoreland thus claimed this as part of the victory, which was then political as well as military (body count). Bowden (2017: 51) offers another version of “uprising”: “Tong-Tan-cong-Noi-day was conceived as an attack from without and from within; it was both an “offensive” and an “uprising.” The bulk of the invading force would be NVA. Mixed with them were battalions of VC, many led by NVA officers who had moved south. So the only truly local part of the NLF was these local militiamen.” This could be interpreted to mean not a general popular uprising, though one can be sure they would have hoped for that, but more of a locally based contingent coordinated with the outsiders from the NVA. Reportage on Tet is seen as yet another example of the role of the mass media in contributing to the outcome of the war. Along with its opening and closing, key incidents like Tet are still being contested and subject to narrative framing.

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Vietnam during Tet, for a total of 248 American reporters—an all-time high—to cover America’s humiliation on the battlefield” (Kaiser, 1988: 61).25 It wasn’t so much a military humiliation as a political one, however. In fact, as the American military leadership saw it, Tet was a victory. And if one looked at the casualties or ‘body count’—a favored measure during the Vietnam War—they were correct: 3,895 Americans and between 45,000 and 58,000 enemy deaths occurred (depending on who was counting). Both General Westmoreland and Lyndon Johnson pronounced a great victory. For the American public, victory was harder to see, as no new territory was conquered and, worse, the territory already in American hands seemed much less secure. Tet may have been a military catastrophe for the enemy, not only in terms of casualties but also because the hoped-for spontaneous uprising of the southern population never occurred. It was, however, a major political and psychological victory because it shattered the myth of American invincibility, revealing at the same time the optimistic statements by military and political leaders as a sham. The Americans’ readily assumed victory, always right around the corner, was now called into question by more than the antiwar movement. Open dissent within the political establishment became apparent, with the call for more troops by General Westmoreland met with strongly voiced opposition. The long-serving Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, one of the war’s chief architects, resigned at the end of February. A month later, Lyndon Johnson acknowledged his own defeat in Vietnam when he shocked the nation by announcing he would not seek re-election, which prior to Tet had been assumed as automatic. By June, Westmoreland was also gone, leaving his Vietnam legacy an area of debate and controversy (Sorley, 1999; Daddis, 2014). Besides the myth-shattering disruption, Tet was to produce two of the most compelling media-generated images of the Vietnam War, images that have been seared into American collective memory, influencing how the war is remembered. A few days into the Offensive, the front page of The New York Times (February 2, 1968) featured what would become one of the most infamous images of the war. Under the broad headline “Street Clashes Go On In Vietnam, Foe Still Holds Parts of Cities; Johnson Pledges Never to Yield” was a photograph of the national police chief and ARVN General 25 Westmoreland was matched on the other side by Le Duan, one of the key figures behind the Tet Offensive who also forcefully argued for “victory,” as opposed to Ho and Giap who sought a negotiated settlement (Nguyen, 2012; Bowden, 2017: 60). Bowden also presents a detailed CIA report on the situation in Hue just prior to the Tet Offensive that clearly revealed the deteriorating position of “friendly forces.” This report was dismissed by Westmoreland, who remained convinced that the main target was Khe Sanh (ibid.: 196–97).

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Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing “a suspected Vietcong guerilla” on a Saigon street.26 The photographer Eddie Adams would win the Pulitzer Prize, and the image would become a central visual representation of the war. Yet the television images were perhaps the most chilling. A censored filmed version was shown on the major networks, including NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report, which along with CBS’s Evening News with Walter Cronkite was America’s most watched and trusted news program (Kaiser, 1988: 68–9). As Kaiser puts it, “this image probably did more damage to the idea that America was bringing civilization to South Vietnam than any other event” (ibid.). It was published on the front pages of newspapers around the world and has since been reproduced in hundreds of variations, including those of Vietnamese artists. It was becoming increasingly difficult to ennoble the American cause. Little more than a month later, on March 16, an American army company on a search-and-destroy mission in response to the Tet Offensive shot and killed between 300 and 500 unarmed villagers; the exact number is still contested to this day. This incident, which became known as the My Lai Massacre, did not become public until more than a year later.27 The presence of a military photographer gave the world photographs of cowering women and children and stacked bodies of the executed. One of the responsible junior officers, Lt. William Calley, would become the only American to be convicted of a war crime during the Vietnam War. After this conviction, public pressure to free him was so strong that President Nixon issued a pardon. Reactions to this trial are indicative of the cleavages within the 26 Like many other high-ranking South Vietnamese military and civilians, Loan and members of his family fled to the United States as Saigon fell. He did so however of his own accord, as he was relieved of his command before the fall of Saigon. While in the U.S., Loan operated a pizza parlor in northern Virginia, but after his past became known, his business declined significantly. There were attempts to charge him as a war criminal. He died in 1998 (The New York Times Obituary July 16, 1998; see also Stockton 2017). The background to this execution, what happened just prior to its occurrence, has created some controversy. Articles on the internet and in the regular press have given a more complex account of the events leading up to the shocking photograph (see https://cherrieswriter.wordpress.com/2015/08/03/the-story-behind-the-famous-saigon-executionphoto/). What is revealed is that the victim had himself been leading a series of executions the previous days, which if nothing else added a level of complexity in interpreting the photograph. At a 2017 exhibition about the American-Vietnamese War at the New York Historical Society, a visitor wrote a long and angry response in the Guest Book, complaining about displaying the infamous photograph without offering this background information. 27 The definitive account can be found in Jones (2017). In what can be seen as one of the lessons the American military took away from this horrendous event, the term “search and destroy” was changed to “search and clear,” and soldiers of all ranks were made legally responsible for the killing of non-combatants.

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American public with regard to the war. From one perspective, what we have been calling the heroic, Calley’s actions could be construed as those of a soldier carrying out his assigned duties. While his actions were carried out in a nasty war and therefore regrettable, they were not criminal. With an important qualification, some antiwar activists, while morally outraged, saw Calley as a scapegoat for the military and political policies, placing a soldier in what was an impossible situation in the first place. These included the veteran-turned-antiwar-activist John Kerry, who proposed that the entire military and civilian chain of command should have been on trial, not merely a lower-ranking officer. In between these two positions stood the majority of Americans, shocked and confused by the images and whose more-or-less unquestioned support for the war was now shaken. The issue of whether Calley (and beyond him American soldiers generally) was a perpetrator or a victim would help frame interpretations of the war from this point on. A third media-generated incident was very significant in explaining this change of attitude. In February 1968, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite traveled to Vietnam with a camera crew to report on the Offensive as it was occurring. At the end of the month, after returning to New York, Cronkite closed his news program with an editorial comment ending with these words, “it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out [of Vietnam]…will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”28 Tet marked a turning point both within the political establishment and the American public with regard to the Vietnam War. The military command would receive only a very limited increase in troop deployment and, as the number of American casualties increased dramatically in 1968, public support for the war decreased in response. The notion that the war had been a “mistake” was on its way to becoming a majority position, one endorsed by McNamara himself. From a high of 65% who agreed with war in August 1965, that number had dropped to 35% by August 1968. At the last measurement in May 1971, it had fallen to 28%.29 Tet helped shift the discourse away from victory and greatly influenced the way the American public would view the war (Oliver, 2006: 26). Suddenly, death and destruction became visible in a way that they had not been as the possibility of failure if not outright defeat was actualized. This would alter the “moral coordinates” of the war (ibid.), making it possible to ask if it was 28 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Cronkite. 29 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_United_States_involvement_in_the_Vietnam_War#Public_opinion.

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worth dying for a war that could not be won. The growing domestic opposition to the war would contribute to this not least by providing alternative explanations for why America was in Vietnam. Domestic opposition also impacted the soldiers in Vietnam. Decorating one’s gear with peace symbols and slogans, once a joke and a small sign of resistance to military discipline, became more widespread and serious. By 1969 and with the promise of “Vietnamization,” military morale began its nosedive. The great sense of mission, the nobility of the cause—be it stemming the communist evil, helping a weaker people, or instilling freedom and democracy on foreign soil—had all largely disappeared. The main and perhaps only motivation for those on the ground to carry on was survival—their own and those in their units (see Wright, 2017: 198ff for personal accounts of this shift).

The War Within: Articulating the Ignoble Though much less bloody, the war was fought almost as intensely in the United States as it was in Southeast Asia. It is therefore not surprising that by this point what had been referenced as an engagement was not merely a “war” but now an American war. With the aid of newspapers and television, the battles and the body counts of Vietnam were experienced morning and night in American homes, along with the protests they inspired. As both sides escalated, the war became news in much more than a military sense. It was the subject of televised debate amongst the country’s leaders and of massive demonstrations on urban streets and college campuses. Those who fought the war and those who fought against it would become major forces in the struggle to define the meaning of the war as they would in its recollection and commemoration. Were the American soldiers noble warriors bearing the mantle of “exceptionalism,” or were they perpetrators of imperial conquest, cruelly imposing their will on indigenous populations? Or were they themselves victims of a power elite seeking only to maintain their standing and that of the country in the eyes of the world?30 The Vietnam 30 Interviewed by his biographer in 1970, Lyndon Johnson recounted his Vietnam dilemma in this way, “I knew from the start, that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved. If I left the woman I really loved—the great society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs. All my hopes to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. All my dreams to provide education and medical care to the browns and the blacks and the lame and the poor. But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as an appeaser and we would find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.” (quoted in

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experience, whether or not one actually served in the military, was formative of individual identification and of a generational consciousness. The question “Which side are you on?” was one no American could escape. As a result, the “Sixties generation” would be the bearers of the memory of Vietnam for years to come. When American marines came ashore outside Da Nang, the American public was by and large very supportive of their mission. Polls taken in 1964 after President Johnson sent more troops and ordered the bombing of North Vietnam in “retaliation” for alleged attacks on American military vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin, revealed 85 percent in support of such military action.31 Antiwar sentiment was growing, however, as protests on college campuses across the country built on previously existing pacifist and antinuclear organizations. Since few Americans knew anything at all about Vietnam beyond the images flashing on the nightly news, the students’ first task would be to raise awareness. A wave of Buddhist-led protests in South Vietnam, which included and inspired public immolations (in the United States as well)—along with the assassination of South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963—brought more media attention and general interest to Vietnam. By 1964, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a newly formed national organization, had added the war to its mobilizing strategy aimed at reforming America (Gitlin, 1989). In addition to its focus on community organizing and support for the civil rights movement, SDS helped to arrange demonstrations at the Oakland, California induction center in March 1965, just as the marines landed at Da Nang. It should also be noted that one of the key events of the civil rights movement, the march in Selma, Alabama, occurred the day before the marines landed. To some extent building off each other, the two movements would soon be linked, most symbolically through the personage of Martin Luther King, Jr. By the next month, SDS was overwhelmed by the turnout at another demonstration it helped to Wright, 2017: 99). Johnson also said repeatedly he did not want to be the first American president to lose a war. This notion was also taken up by Richard Nixon. 31 We place quotation marks around “retaliation” because, as Daniel Hallin (1986) convincingly shows, the Johnson administration was very keen on hiding any apparent escalation of the war under the cover of retaliation. As the Pentagon Papers and then Daniel Ellsberg (2002) also revealed, members of that administration actively sought provoking incidents to justify enhanced military action. Increasing combat actions and troops were always framed as responses to enemy “aggression.” The reality of the “Tonkin Incident” remains a matter of controversy, with Daniel Ellsberg and others stressing its staged quality and people like Westmoreland (1990) its factuality. In any case, after the alleged attack, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964), which gave the President complete discretion to do “whatever was necessary” in Vietnam. It was the equivalent of a declaration of war.

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organize in the nation’s capital. More than 20,000 people from across the country filled the area around the Washington Monument following a march from the White House. The demonstrators were mostly white and college-aged, and the speeches were more educational than political. A new mobilizing technique had taken form, with the first “teach-in” about Vietnam organized at the University of Michigan. More than 3,000 students and faculty participated (DeBenedetti, 1990: 108; Wells, 2016).32 This type of anti-war action quickly spread, and “within a week Vietnam teach-ins were held on at least 35 more campuses, and by the end of the school year the idea had spread to some 120 schools” (ibid. 108). Fueled by mass media attention and campus-based mobilization, the antiwar movement was a force to be reckoned with by the end of 1965 (Small, 1994). Teach-ins proved to be very significant in that they helped to legitimate as well as mobilize dissent. With college students and their professors at the forefront, it became increasingly difficult to stigmatize war protesters as a radical fringe. In addition to legitimating dissent, protests “created a market for information” about the war from varying perspectives (DeBenedetti, 1990: 109). The teach-in phenomenon soon transcended the local college campus, becoming a nationally televised event through a debate between scholars gathered at a Washington, D.C. hotel broadcast live to colleges around the country. A few weeks later, a major television network (CBS) broadcast a similar debate. While the teach-ins helped make dissent respectable, the mass demonstrations provided publicity and money as donations flooded in. The mass demonstrations created an opportunity for a decentralized series of protest events to gather their various supporters “under one banner” (Small, 1994: 18). All this created a sense of excitement and possibility, a feeling that something significant was afoot. Not only could a war be protested but a nation’s sense of itself challenged. For the participant, it offered an exhilarating feeling of being part of history in the making. Most especially for the youth, joining “the movement” provided identity and meaning at an age when things still appeared to be open, when changing oneself and the world one inhabited seemed possible. It was a feeling that would help define at least a segment of a generation as opponents of, rather than participants in, a war. At the same time, the notion that serving in the 32 Wells (2016) gives a particularly detailed account of the origins and development of this process and the involvement of SDS, including the infighting between various factions of the budding movement. One ironic anecdote concerns the reluctant participation of Daniel Ellsberg, who joined early SDS activities for romantic rather than political reasons. Wells also details the government’s attempt to counter the teach-ins by sending its own representatives to college campuses.

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military was a taken-for-granted part of what it meant to “be a man”—or even more broadly to “be an American”—was challenged.33 It would be a mistake to exaggerate support for these protests and their impact on the conduct of the war itself. In fact, the protesters represented only a very small proportion of the college population, to say nothing of the country at large. They were a vocal minority, while the majority on campus and within the general population went about their business as usual.34 For the “silent majority,” as Nixon would later call them, the protesters were objects of disdain and catalysts of support for encouraging the war among the previously indifferent. Polls taken in May and August 1965 found great support for the handling of the war, with “commitment to the war particularly strong among young respondents (aged twenty-one to thirty), 76 percent of whom endorsed it” (Belknap, 2002: 14). Most Americans learned about the war and the protests against it from media coverage. Hallin (1989) shows that while war reportage was largely positive and supportive, coverage of the protests and protesters was overwhelmingly negative. For the mainstream media and its primary audience, antiwar protesters were “bearded and dirty,” cowardly, and decidedly “un-American.” Yet network television helped to project another arena of public criticism and opposition to the war: the Congress. In 1966, Senator William Fulbright opened a series of congressional hearings into the conduct and purpose of the war; it was the first sign of interest from the legislative branch in the conduct of war in many years. These hearings were televised, with the audience shown distinguished Americans openly criticizing the policies of its government. This, again, sharply contrasted the accepted image of the typical protester. Fulbright, who had only recently changed his own mind about the war, conducted these hearings until 1971.35 In April of that year, John Kerry, the veteran naval officer and future presidential candidate 33 The challenging and even shattering of foundational myths and symbols concerning what it meant to be a member of the American nation was a common feature of the social movements of the era. While the antiwar movement challenged the idea of what patriotism meant, the women’s movement attacked the notion that the family was the rock upon which American society rested. The civil rights movement, which preceded and in many ways inspired both of them, helped shatter the myth of equality and equal opportunity that was central to American mythology. 34 Be that as it may, it is important not to understate the forcefulness of movement activism on college campuses. As Hayden (2017: 21) writes, “By 1969 and 1970 there was a wave of student strikes that shuttered hundreds of campuses, involved more than 4 million in protests, and forced closures of key institutions through the spring semester of 1970…”. 35 Fulbright had helped Johnson in his efforts to pass the Tonkin Resolution. He then spent years trying to repeal it.

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and Secretary of State, testified before the congressional committee about American war crimes as a representative of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The slowly growing opposition to the war paralleled its escalation in Vietnam; the two fed off and into one another. As troop deployments increased, so did the demonstrations and the participants. One of the popular slogans of the growing antiwar movement was “Bring the War Home,” which carried several meanings. It meant making Americans more aware of the war, bringing home the troops, and, at the same time, making war on those aspects of American society thought responsible for the war’s continuance. The first implied the pursuit of public education, argument, and debate, such as that employed in the teach-in movement. The second, which in part can be seen as a reaction to the perceived failure of the first, implied more disruptive and sometimes violent tactics, such as the attempt to shut down universities and draft recruitment centers or, at the extreme, bombing public buildings (for an insider overview, see Gitlin, 1987, 1989).36 While the American media tended to personalize the war by highlighting the experiences of the common soldier, its ideological perspective remained firmly aligned with the Washington leadership and their representatives in Saigon (Hallin, 1989). Antiwar sentiment was therefore dependent upon other means to communicate its position. In the early stages, opponents of the war used college campuses, the streets, newsletters, and small-distribution journals to articulate their position. What came to be called the Movement was a broad-based carrier of oppositional viewpoints, some with their own communication media. As this oppositional culture grew more vibrant, there developed a chain of “underground” and “alternative” media, including newspapers and radio stations. Some were attached to college campuses, the most significant ones located in the larger coastal cities like New York, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco bay area. They became major voices and sources of information for antiwar activities and anti-establishment ideas in general. Mass movements have an appearance of spontaneity that can be deceptive. The early protests against the war were actually, as noted, arranged through coalitions of existing groups. They provided the required knowledge and experience necessary to bring large numbers of people together. These 36 The phrase “Bring the war home” is also the title of a study of White Power and American paramilitarism (Belew, 2018). Belew documents the significance of the American-Vietnamese War for right-wing groups as a symbol of liberal betrayal. She writes: “Narratives of the war as a government betrayal and as a source of grievance laid the groundwork for white power activism” (2018: 21). Some of this took the form of paramilitary activity, which included donning war-era uniforms and weapons.

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included relative newcomers, like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), founded in 1960, and the older, more established organizations mentioned above. As part of an emerging New Left, SDS offered personal and political reasons for opposing the war. As a student-based organization, its members had an interest in opposing the draft. An interaction evolved between SDS and the pacifist organizations like the War Resisters League, which offered counsel on how to avoid military service. This type of antiwar activity also provided opportunities for professionals, lawyers, and law students, for example, to participate in antiwar activity in a practical manner. Questioning and formally challenging the war’s legality was another area where lawyers and law students could apply their professional skills. Their presence at demonstrations, along with medical students, doctors, and nurses, was also important for the services they provided. Like the Old Left, which provided some organizational support for the budding movement, the New Left depicted the war as a colonialist and imperialist adventure. Americans were in Vietnam for economic and political reasons that had little to do with national security or protecting a weak nation against aggression. From this perspective, the United States was itself an aggressor, replacing the French in a war of domination, a clear challenge to American exceptionalism. This was also a revolutionary war, a struggle for national liberation, with the United States, the former hero of anti-colonialism, supporting the wrong side. One can find these views powerfully articulated in the 1974 documentary “Hearts and Minds,” which is one of the first American films to take the Vietnamese perspective solidly into account (see Grosser in Dittmar and Michaud, 1990). A modified version of this interpretation represented the conflict as a civil war between opposing nationalist forces, one with a communist vision and the other a mandarin or feudal order. Here the issue of what role the United States should play was more open and ambiguous. Leaders of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) of the civil rights movement, Black Power advocates, and the boxer Muhammed Ali added a racial dimension to this with the antiwar battle cry, “No VC ever called Me a Nigger!” The very popular and media-savvy heavyweight boxing champion was stripped of his title for his refusal to join the military effort. SDS leader Tom Hayden traveled to Hanoi in 1967, providing his own take on this identification through alignment when he declared, “We are all Viet Cong now” (DeBeneditti, 1990: 192).37 Both 37 Hayden was not the only well-known American to visit North Vietnam during the war. His wife, Jane Fonda, was an even more famous—infamous to some—visitor. The folk singer and peace activist Joan Baez was another. Baez’s visit to Hanoi in 1972 in the midst of American

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statements and Hayden’s visit mark a clear radicalization in the antiwar movement, a transformation that would only intensify in the coming years.38 It was the antiwar movement and its associated intellectuals that articulated and helped to disseminate what they thought of as another side of American exceptionalism. This perspective argued that the nation should be aiding rather than resisting struggles of national liberation. There are important sociological aspects that need to be mentioned in understanding the contention over collective representations of the American-Vietnamese War. Participation and positioning (for and against) with regard to the war was strongly affected by social class, gender, race, bombing has been recorded in a well-distributed video and interview (http://www.rollingstone. com/politics/news/joan-baez-in-hanoi-12-days-under-the-bombs-19730201). The author Susan Sontag visited Hanoi in 1968 and wrote a book about it. The novelist Mary McCarthy wrote reports from Vietnam in 1967 for the New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/ articles/1967/04/20/report-from-vietnam-i-the-home-program/ 38 This radicalization was also prominent in other arenas as well. Protests by artists, for example, shifted from the signing of petitions to manifestos and the production of distinctive artworks designed to shock. The Angry Arts exhibition at NYU in 1967 highlighted collage projects by Martha Rosler and Violet Ray. Violet Ray used photo collages to disrupt taken-for-granted everyday perception, a technique previously used by dissidents during WWII. Rosler titled her series, “Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful” (Lippart, 1990 and Israel, 2013: 86ff). Using photographs from glossy 1950s magazines depicting images of the inside of American homes, the artist inserted dead Asian bodies and American soldiers. One of the most well-known is entitled “Red Stripe Kitchen” depicting a classic American kitchen filled with wares but empty of inhabitants except for two combat-clad soldiers appearing to be searching for something, land mines perhaps, buried beneath the floor. In another, wrapped corpses lie next to a living room couch in an otherwise empty well-furnished room. The war is here literally brought home. Violet Ray, a pseudonym, worked with advertisements in a way now very familiar in protest art, reconf iguring a recognizable advertisement through juxtaposition, in this case an image symbolizing war. In one of these, a well-known American actress and model poses provocatively in a stream of water. Beneath this image is the inserted photograph of a young Vietnamese mother in a river fleeing with her three small children, their faces a mask of fear and anxiety. The underlying text, taken from the original ad, reads, “This is the Spell of Chanel for the Bath.” Such irony was joined by theater productions such as MacBird (1967), where Shakespeare’s Macbeth was recast to include Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination and the escalation of the Vietnam War. Playwrights had long been actively protesting the war. Robert Lowell composed a trilogy called The Old Glory already in 1964, and Arthur Miller wrote a New York Times op-ed in 1965 opposing the war. The San Francisco Mime Troupe staged Dragon Lady’s Revenge and the Bread and Puppet Theater “A Man Says Goodbye to His Mother” and so on. Christopher Bigsby writes of this series of plays, “Virtually none of these works was a realistic play. It was as though that was acknowledged to be a form and style inadequate to addressing a war which seemingly defied rational analysis” (Introduction in Rabe, 2002: xiv). Hayden (2017) recounts this visit and others he made to Vietnam during and after the war. More importantly, he presents a cogent argument for the significant role the antiwar movement played in ending the American-Vietnamese War.

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and ethnicity—those cornerstones of sociological analysis. The soldiers who fought the war were overwhelmingly working and lower-middle-class men with comparatively little formal education (Appy, 2014). There were 8,00 to 10,000 women who served in Vietnam, most of them nurses (Spector, 1994: 58).39 Especially early on, combat soldiers tended to be disproportionally poor and black, a point understood during the course of the war by the military command, which attempted to modify this (Spector, 1994: 36). Their commanding officers were predominately white, many with a college education, though standards for the junior officer ranks were lowered as the war progressed and demand increased (Belknap, 2002). Those who made the larger decisions—the policymakers and the politicians—came from the higher status groups, from public and private bureaucratic organizations, including leading universities and major corporations. They were “the best and brightest” in David Halberstam’s memorable ironic phrasing (1972). Splits within the elite would emerge as the war progressed and would become publicly obvious during the election campaign of 1968. If the foot soldiers were lower class and multi-ethnic, the antiwar movement was primarily middle class and white (see Fallows, 1991, for an ironic personal accounting). Especially in the years before draft deferments became more restricted, the movement was peopled by students, their teachers, religious leaders, and other professionals, a large proportion of whom were women. Organizational leadership in the early stages came from longstanding anti-militarist organizations, such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPE), the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), and the American Friends Service Committee (DeBenedetti, 1990: 16). They were soon joined by newer organizations like the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and the Committee for Non-Violent Action (CNVA). Each of these organizations published newsletters and used other locally 39 The role of women in the war and their status as “Vietnam veterans” became a matter of interest and controversy when groups such as the Vietnam Veterans of America and Vietnam Veterans Against War formed. On this, see Van Devanter (1983). Van Devanter’s book was used as a basis for the popular television series “China Beach.” It was also the cause of strong critical opposition from those who spoke from the heroic narrative position. It was claimed that Van Devanter’s recollections focused too much on the negative (see for example Patricia Walsh, 1981). That most of the fighting was done by working class males may also have had an impact on some of the darker and often hidden aspects of the war, such as rape. Weaver (2010) sees the anger and aggression that may have led to the significant amount of rape by American soldiers as having its roots as much in American culture and society as in military training. She argues that class-related views on masculinity are a significant factor in explaining its occurrence. Thus, the soldiers who committed rape and other war-related atrocities were not merely “ordinary men” but ordinary American men instilled with a particular view of women and an “enemy.”

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based means to communicate and recruit. They represented an alternative vision of American exceptionalism in which Vietnam was anything but a noble cause. The basic theme uniting these groups was a critical stance toward the Cold War standoff, most specifically the danger of nuclear war. The Cold War was interpreted as a moral as much as a political issue, with the possibility of nuclear war threatening the very conditions of human life. From this perspective, Vietnam was one more expression of this spiritual crisis. Leaders and activists from the civil rights movement, most prominently the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., became visible figures at major antiwar demonstrations, adding to the breadth and depth of the movement. This marked a significant development, as it was the civil rights movement that helped fracture the conformist, conservative atmosphere marking the 1950s in the United States. The antiwar and feminist movements so strongly identified with the 1960s can be said to have emerged out of the civil rights movement. At this point, they all fed off of one another. As with all significant social movements, the Movement was a broad-based, fluid coalition of organizations, individuals, and viewpoints. It was, relatively speaking, a highly educated movement rooted on college campuses, and the articulation of antiwar positions reflected this. Especially early on, opposition tended towards the categorical, concerned not so much with policy, though this was the topic of many campus debates, but with morality and justice. For those who were not pacifists, distinctions were drawn between just and unjust, good and bad wars. Central here was the question of responsibility. Who was responsible for this war—its declaration, conduct, and purpose? What responsibility did individual citizens have towards the policies and practices decided upon by their leaders? The issue of the morality of the war was questioned concerning two dimensions: (1) Was going to war justified? and (2) Was it being carried out in a just manner? (Levy, 1995: 100ff) The first engaged religious leaders and legal scholars in debates not only about a declared or undeclared war and the powers of the president but more substantially about claims of outside aggression and the status of “South” Vietnam. Was this a civil war or a revolutionary war? Was “South” Vietnam a legitimate, sovereign state or a mere client created according to American interests? The second concerned the actual conduct of the war, such as the overwhelming force used by an advanced industrial nation against a much poorer and less technologically developed society. As Levy (ibid.) put it, “Each measure was exhaustively explored: was it necessary? Was its destructiveness roughly proportional to the threat facing the nation or its fighting men? Did it adequately distinguish between the

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innocent and the guilty?” Though there were differences in nuance, the answer to these questions was a resounding “No.” Given that American exceptionalism presented the United States as free and democratic—an idea underscored by the claim that the war was about protecting these ideals—the issue of the responsibility of its citizens with regard to the actions of their military and the policies of their government was a vital issue. The heroic war narrative represented responsibility in terms of duty, honor, and service. The antiwar movement saw responsibility in quite another way: the duty to question and resist such demands if deemed necessary. Rather than being “un-American,” it identified dissent as quintessentially American. This interpretation of the war was articulated on college campuses and elsewhere by intellectuals like Noam Chomsky. In what some consider the most important antiwar text to emerge from the American side during the war, Chomsky’s “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” was published in the New York Review of Books on February 27, 1967 (on this, see Schalk, 2005). In a tone reminiscent of Johnathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” Chomsky castigated the nation’s intellectual elite, from President Johnson’s advisors to neo-conservatives and the liberal readership of the Review for their responsibility—passive or active—in allowing the war to continue. In commenting on American realpolitik, as advocated in this instance by Reverend R.J. de Jaegher of Seton Hall University, Chomsky wrote, “But one may ask, why restrict ourselves to such indirect means as mass starvation? Why not bombing? …the North Vietnamese [who have lived under communism] ‘would be perfectly happy to be bombed to be free’.” Chomsky’s call for “responsibility” was taken up by many others, including Catholic intellectuals who, after branding the war unjust and immoral, called upon Catholics to protest and resist (DeBenedetti, 1990: 195). Other religious leaders soon joined them. This was part of a mounting opposition within traditionally conservative institutions, something that helped to legitimate the growing draft resistance and conscientious objection. 40 From this perspective, one had the responsibility—a moral duty—to oppose an immoral war and, further, to act on that responsibility. The issue of responsibility would be later faced most vividly by American authorities as Saigon fell and after the war ended. What responsibility did the American government have towards the thousands of Vietnamese, including its military and political leaders, who chose to flee? Who would be ferried out on the last ships and helicopters? President Ford, who during the last 40 According to Hayden (2017: 22), there were “forty thousand desertions to Canada and Sweden” from the military forces.

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hours of the American presence in Saigon made the decision to evacuate Americans only, appealed to Congress for aid and for special provisions for Vietnamese refugees. In this appeal, he employed moral responsibility as a central motivating factor.

The Struggle for Postwar American Memory The statements of officials reveal that the humiliating evacuation of Saigon finally ended the American “engagement.” Although from the American perspective the war might have been over in January 1973 when the Paris Peace Accords were signed, the United States remained in the war even if not present on the ground. As Saigon fell in 1975, the “noble cause” interpretation of the Vietnam War was already available, yet as noted it took many years for this to become the dominant narrative. A number of steps and shifts in the narrative led to the normalization of this perspective, most importantly the dedication of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in 1982 and the commemorative celebrations that followed. The diminishing public support for the war after the Tet Offensive and the open dissent within the political establishment and mass media produced an almost panicked reaction. One of its first articulations occurred in popular culture. In the attempt to counter the growing opposition and its representation of the war, the popular actor and conservative spokesperson John Wayne produced (with the aid and support of the military) what was essentially a remake of a World War II film, The Green Berets (1968). Named after the counterinsurgency force created by John Kennedy and based on a similarly titled novel, the film depicted an evil aggressor invading a small and vulnerable ally of the United States. American soldiers were sympathetically portrayed as the first line of defense in this struggle against the Red menace. 41 The rising dissent and the alleged role of the news media in undermining the American effort was forcefully recorded in the plot. A central character in need of convincing of the war’s idealist purposes is a journalist, who is at first skeptical but then strongly endorses the American mission. In this way, according to David James (in Dittmar and Michaud, 1990: 241), the film “directly addressed the 41 For sympathizers of the heroic narrative, Wayne’s film “failed to seize the moment with its flattering portrayal of the American war effort, losing out to Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1969), which although nominally about the Korean War, lampooned American involvement in Vietnam” (Wiest, 2010: 7) The Green Berets followed a Cold War ideological pattern in representing the Vietnamese as simple, goodhearted peasants in need of American protection from evil communists who threatened them.

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obligation of the press to produce domestic consensus.” As has now become a cross-genre marketing strategy, the movie highlighted a song, “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” written in 1966 by a wounded veteran. Its composer performed the song in uniform on national television, and it reached number one on the national music charts. It was an unabashed attempt to revitalize the heroic narrative of American exceptionalism, made necessary by the turning tide of public opinion. The “engagement” in Vietnam was now really a “war” in need of further justification. This characterized 1968; when the heroic narrative of American exceptionalism came to incorporate the Vietnam war is difficult to specify exactly. It could have been in 1950, when the first American military arrived in significant numbers; in 1954, when the United States assumed more than the financial burden from the French; or in 1960, when the National Liberation Front was officially founded (Spector, 1994: 94). Whichever one chooses as a starting point, paradoxes emerge. If the aim of the American intervention was to come to the aid of a democratically elected ally, then one must explain why the United States refused to observe the 1954 Geneva Accords that called for national elections to be held within two years. The Americans and the government in South Vietnam it helped to put in place feared that the Northern leadership would win any election (Karnow, 1997; Kiernan, 2017). One reason why Hanoi resumed arm conflict, some claim, is precisely because no elections were held (others point to communist deviousness). In later attempting to deal with this paradox within the parameters of the heroic narrative, Norman Podhoritz (1982) reasoned, The point was to prevent the Communists from taking over the whole of Vietnam. If in the name of democracy elections had been forced on Diem [the American supported President of South Vietnam] and the Communists won, the result would have been not the extension of democracy to the South but the destruction of any possibility of a development in the direction of democracy there.

The people, in other words, had to be protected from themselves. The mission of spreading American values was further complicated when Diem was assassinated in November 1963 in an American-supported military coup. 42 This occurred just a few weeks before the assassination 42 This ‘support’ for the coup was not total or even strongly willed. In fact, as McMaster (1997: 46) and others have shown, there was much opposition among responsible decision-makers, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), which opposed it.

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of John Kennedy, once a strong Diem supporter. Diem’s significance and the role of the United States in his ousting remain contested issues in current debates about both the war’s meaning and outcome. For example, Mark Moyar (2006) believes that South Vietnam was actually making great economic progress under Diem and refers to his assassination as America’s “greatest mistake.”43 Philip Catton (2010) argues that the “Strategic Hamlet” program initiated during Diem’s regime was just beginning to succeed when it was abandoned. The philosophy behind this program, aimed at pacifying the countryside, he writes, “paints a different picture of Ngo Dinh Diem from the prevailing one of the unimaginative autocrat” (2010: 35). 44 William Westmoreland also calls the assassination “a grievous mistake,” one that “morally locked us into the affairs of South Vietnam, since we were involved in changing the leadership of that country” (1990: 41). It was now, according to Westmoreland, impossible to withdraw. 45 H.R. McMaster (1998) agrees to a point, when he deems the Diem assassination a turning point in American involvement. He writes, “After November 1963 the United States confronted what in many ways was a new war in South Vietnam. Having deposed the government of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu, and having supported actions that led to their deaths, Washington assumed responsibility for the new South Vietnamese leaders” (McMaster, 1998: 324). Where the two generals might disagree would be over the inevitability of such a commitment and what it meant in terms of how the war was actually conducted. 43 The claim that such policies were a success and that Saigon had increasing support among the peasantry is disputed by Kiernan (2017: 439). As evidence, he cites figures on the number of recruits joining the National Liberation Front, “recruitments quadrupled; the 1964 tally of 45,000 new Front recruits shot up to 160,000 for 1965. Membership of the southern communist PRP also rose, to a high of nearly 100,000 in 1966.” The size of these opposition forces, he writes, was a matter of “prolonged dispute between MACV and the CIA” (op cit). 44 This program involved the relocation of the rural population from their ancestral villages to newly established settlements that were surrounded by militia and military forces. It was a tactic the French originated as part of their techniques against colonial insurgency. They had called it regroupement, the Americans ‘pacification’. Whatever the name, it was clearly intended to control the population as much as it was a means to protect them. 45 William Westmoreland was the commanding general of U.S. forces in Vietnam between 1964-68, the most crucial period of the American engagement. His role in developing strategy and in the course of the war itself is still a matter of great controversy. For a recent attempt to revise Westmoreland’s image, see Daddis (2014). A military historian teaching at West Pont, Daddis also offers a cogent history of the conflict from this point of view. It should not be surprising that some of those engaged in ‘revising’ accounts of the war teach at military academies or are former high-ranking officers. This is all part of the ‘healing’ process from within the military itself.

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Once hailed as America’s hope in Asia and a prime example of the ongoing success of American efforts in the region, Diem’s regime had become an unacceptable liability by 1963. His government, which included several members of his immediate family, followed ingrained patterns of nepotism and corruption. He built neither a party nor a movement and openly supported Catholics over others in a country where the majority was Buddhist (Kiernan, 2017: 408). Open dissent was severely repressed in ways that had become obvious to Western observers; these practices became all the more visible when students and Buddhist priests led mass demonstrations against the government. These included the public immolations and a photograph by the American journalist Malcolm Browne of a monk set alight in a main Saigon intersection in June 1963, which shocked the world. Though dismissed by some conservative commentators as communist-inspired and thus not truly “of the people,” the Kennedy administration was forced to explain and react to these images. The end result was the removal of Diem as an embarrassment to expressed American ideals. Following Diem’s death, a series of military coups and mixed governments produced neither stability nor legitimation for democratic claims. The impact of all this intrigue and plotting was not lost on the military forces on the ground. It became increasingly difficult to believe claims about popular support for the American mission, which in turn affected morale and further undermined the already declining faith in the courage and commitment of their Vietnamese allies. The role of the South Vietnamese government and the performance of its military are central features in all accounts of the war from an American perspective. It is a role and a presence that is ambiguously represented throughout. On the one hand, the South Vietnamese are presented as a distinctive group, different in culture, temperament, and ideology from the “northern invaders” (see for example Taylor, 2010 and Fitzgerald, 1972; see also Scigliano, 1964 for a description of South Vietnam as an independent nation). 46 This is complicated by the fact that many high-ranking officers in the South Vietnamese military were northerners by birth and spoke a distinctive dialect. This was true for example of Nguyen Cao Ky, head of the 46 Robert Scigliano was part of a controversial U.S. government project that sent academics from Michigan State University to Vietnam in the late 1950s to help solidify the government of the newly established “South” Vietnam. This project was later criticized by antiwar activists as part of an American propaganda apparatus. In 1966, Ramparts, a magazine associated with that movement, published an exposé about the project, with the magazine cover featuring the wife of a leading government figure dressed as an MSU cheerleader (https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Michigan_State_University_Vietnam_Advisory_Group). Scigliano returned to Vietnam in 1961, with funding from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations (Scigliano 1964: ix).

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air force and vice president. Unlike many other military leaders in South Vietnam, however, Ky was a Buddhist. While this united him with the majority of the rural population in the south, it separated him from others in the Saigon leadership, who were primarily Catholic and from central Vietnam. Regional differences and structural patterns inherited from the French divided the South Vietnamese leadership and did nothing to help legitimate their claims to authority, especially among the rural population, which made up the vast majority of the southern population. The Saigon leadership included Nguyen van Thieu, an ARVN general and Ky’s bitter rival, who became South Vietnam’s last president. Thieu’s inner circle, those he most trusted, were central Vietnamese Catholics like himself, and in this he followed a pattern of religious favoritism put in place by Diem. The ascension of Thieu and Ky to president and vice president in September 1967 was seen by the United States as a good religious and regional balance. Although both were military men, American officials were keen on representing South Vietnam as a “democratic” republic, complete with a constitution and a balance of powers between various branches of government (Carter, 2008).47 Key to this was the distinction between the military and the elected political officials. This distinction was nearly impossible to maintain, given that the military was the single most stable and formative institution in South Vietnam, at least as seen from the American perspective. Another stable institution was the Buddhist-based religious network. Their rebellion in 1963 led to the fall of the Diem regime, causing great political repression in the years that followed. 48 After years of internal political struggle that repressed or eliminated all the major forces of opposition (like the Buddhists), French-educated military men were largely in control in South Vietnam, many having received 47 There are various ways of interpreting this process of “state-building,” which was done with the help of academic consultants. On the one hand, it could be viewed as the attempt to plant “democracy” on foreign soil and thus to bring “freedom” to the people of Vietnam. This was how some in the American government viewed the process. On the other hand, the entire process could be viewed as a subtle form of imperialism, building “an apparatus for the serial production of sovereignty” (Jansen and Osterhammel, 2017: 9), as a means by which to dominate or at least strongly influence through more subtle means than brute force. In his history of Vietnam, Kierman (2017) reveals the existence of longstanding democratic traditions in the country dating back to the 1920s, when the first political parties emerged under French colonialism. 48 According to Kiernan (2017: 431), “Diem’s demise had brought some initial gains for the GVN {Government of South Vietnam”. Until his overthrow, the NLF {National Liberation Front} recruited heavily among those he alienated, but now NLF membership reportedly fell by “perhaps 50,000 or 100,000.” This would prove temporary, however, as by 1964 the “NLF forces seized most of the countryside, and ARVN suffered several dramatic military defeats” (ibid.: 432).

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further military training in the United States. Along with accommodating American interests, however reluctantly, the fear of a military coup driven by internal tensions and rivalries was one of the determining forces in South Vietnamese politics. This has clearly affected the post-war American debate, namely, the performance of the South Vietnamese military during the war. Most American accounts, from the leadership to the common soldier, have represented the South Vietnamese military as a problematic—if not incompetent—ally. Criticism from the American side was recorded as early as 1963, when the ARVN performed miserably in a heavily reported-upon major battle (Halberstam, 1965, revised 2008; Sheehan, 1989). This continued until the end of the war, including the disastrous strategic choices that eventually led to the fall of Saigon in 1975. Even those seeking to rehabilitate its image, like Wiest (2008), are forced to acknowledge the internal corruption and mismanagement that permeated the South Vietnamese military. Some former South Vietnamese military leaders, including General Ky (2002) and Lam Quang Thi (2001), have offered their own opinions about the performance of the ARVN (see also Espiritu, 2014). To them, the war was lost by the Americans, not by the South Vietnamese, with a range of different reasons behind this assertion offered. Spector (1994: 113) suggests that although it may have resembled the American military in appearance, the South Vietnamese military was built around entirely different principles. He contrasts one [the U.S. military] based on promotion according to merit, strict adherence to a hierarchical chain of command, and separation from and subordination to civil authority, and the other based on alliances and arrangements between families and cliques, promotion and assignment based on patronage and political compromise, and the performance of the most important political functions by the military.

Given the necessity of the appearance of autonomy, the role and performance of the South Vietnamese government and military have a central place in post-war American representations. This performance then factors into how the war is narrated and explained. Within the framework of the heroic narrative, the South Vietnamese military tends to be presented as a barrier to American success, though as late as 1967-68, General Westmoreland praised their military capacities. 49 In the field, however, ARVN soldiers 49 The Tet Offensive was seen as a major test and proof of the abilities of the ARVN. Westmoreland believed Tet “had the effect of a Pearl Harbor,” in another telling reference to World War

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were seldom trusted by the Americans who fought alongside them. They were repeatedly referred to in derogatory terms. In addition to a pervasive racism, this also resulted from the type of war being fought, where one could hardly distinguish friend from foe and where these roles might easily switch by day and night. In a situation where the overwhelming majority of the population was a Buddhist peasantry, the primarily Catholic clique of urban insiders who ruled from Saigon appeared increasingly dependent on American support.50 This helped make the issue of who and what one was fighting for all the more critical, especially for those in harm’s way. Was it worth risking one’s life for what was beginning to look like a lost and unappreciated cause, both at home and in country? From this perspective, the 1968 presidential debate concerning the war became all the more important. The ultimate winner, Richard Nixon’s “peace with honor” and Vietnamization strategy looked more like something to appease the American public in the face of an unwinnable war. The promised withdrawal of American combat forces would leave the war’s outcome in the hands of the Vietnamese, seemingly freeing the U.S. of responsibility.51 In the meantime, however, close to 38,000 additional Americans would die between 1968-75 (http://www.archives.gov/ research/military/vietnam-war/casualty-statistics.html).52 As Nixon and his chief advisor Henry Kissinger withdrew American soldiers, they incrementally increased the bombing of targets in North and South Vietnam and, secretly, in Cambodia as well. Vietnamese, both military and civilian, died in the hundreds of thousands. With the Americans out of the country and tired of war, the Northern-led forces attacked with fury and routed the South Vietnamese military. On April 30, 1975, Saigon surrendered, II (quoted in Daddis, 2014: 165). In response to Tet, which he saw as a victory, Westmoreland said, “the South Vietnamese government was intact and stronger; the armed forces were larger, more effective, and confident…” (op cit.). 50 See Hayslip and Wurts (1993) for one of the very few memoirs of the Vietnam War from the point of view of the peasantry. This book would provide the foundation for Oliver Stone’s third film about the American-Vietnamese War. 51 Corson (1974) makes the case that Nixon made the best of a very bad situation that he inherited. By his reckoning, Nixon chose the best of some very bad alternative strategies in order to extract American forces with the least amount of chaos and damage to the nation’s reputation. Carson does acknowledge, of course, that this exit strategy came at enormous cost. 52 In December 2016, The New York Times revealed the presidential candidate Nixon did all he could to undermine the ongoing peace talks in October 1968 to ensure that his opponent, Hubert Humphrey, would not gain any advantage in the upcoming election. This had long been suspected and was strongly denied by Nixon on several occasions. The Times article revealed new documentation to show Nixon’s deception and called this “criminal” and “worse than Watergate” (Farrell 2016, http://nyti.ms/2hDVIyy).

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and the last Americans fled, ending the “American engagement.” As the ships were leaving Vietnamese waters, one naval commander announced to his crew, “Well folks, that just about wraps up Vietnam. So let’s have a party and get outta here, so we can mosey on back to Subic Bay (Philippines) and get ourselves a genuine Budweiser beer” (quoted in Dumbrell, 2012: 225). If it is ambiguous where the incorporation of Vietnam into the heroic narrative begins, where it ends is even more so. It is difficult to find anything but tragedy in the American effort, though the ironic gallows humor of the naval commander quoted above is certainly another way of looking at the war, one more at home in fictional representations. The hasty and humiliating retreat from Saigon left a bitter taste. That it represented defeat was quickly contested by the military, as Westmoreland and other former commanders repeatedly claimed the war to be a military success. “We won every battle,” the former general was fond of saying. Shay (1994: 7) reports similar feelings amongst rank and file soldiers.53 If the war was lost, the feeling was, it was lost by politicians who denied the military its full capabilities, something to which the mass media and even more so the antiwar movement contributed.54 The view that the war was lost in Washington and not in Vietnam is also that of General H.R. McMaster (1997), the national security advisor in the administration of Donald Trump and military historian cited above. McMaster highlights the policy struggles between the Johnson White House, most particularly as formulated by Robert McNamara, who called for using civilian controlled “gradual pressure” against the North Vietnamese, and the military leaders that composed the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), who sought to remove all politically motived “limitations” on the use of force.55 53 Schivelbusch (2001: 7) writes: “A…relationship exists between individual battles and wars: a critical mass of lost battles results in a lost war. In wars of attrition, this critical mass is reached not through decisive battles but through the gradual exhaustion of national resources.” The belief that American soldiers never lost a battle and thus could not have lost the war is rooted in a conventional notion of war, as reflected in the first example above. Vietnam was, however, not a conventional war, and the U.S. severely misjudged its enemy’s resources and will. 54 The issue of the battlefield performance of the American military and the strategies and tactics employed is also a matter of debate in postwar accounts. See for example Spector (1993) and Daddis (2014). For a more critical assessment, see Luttwak (1990). The role of the antiwar movement in ending the war remains controversial. For Todd Gitlin, a student activist turned sociologist, it was a determinant force. He lists the accomplishments: “The movement helped bring down two war presidents, divide the political class, demoralize the leadership, shatter its families, and upend public opinion” (in Ward and Burns, 2017: 516–521). 55 McMaster reveals how McNamara’s strategy of gradual pressure was rooted in his experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis while serving in the Kennedy administration: “Like the commitment to get the missiles out of Cuba in 1962, the enemy would be convinced that the United States was prepared to meet any level of escalation they might mount” (McMaster, 1998: 157). He goes on

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A sense of betrayal is at the heart of such accounts. If the war was lost, it was lost at home because politicians cared more about public opinion and their own image than about the real purpose of the war. The worst betrayers in this accounting, however, were the antiwar intellectuals and protesters, who through their actions colluded with the enemy to betray heroic American soldiers. The “stab in the back” myth remains powerful in some circles to this day, called upon in discussions of contemporary military engagements. The resurrection of the heroic narrative of American exceptionalism began almost immediately within enclosed circles. There were three prime target areas in this project: the military, foreign policy, and public opinion. Despite all thoughts to the contrary, a strong military lay at the core of America’s standing in the world. It was, after all, the military that carried the force of American ideals abroad. While policymakers and commentators might speak of noble causes, it was military might that would actualize them. After the humiliation in Vietnam, the American military was in need of both redemption and reorganization. The first steps had already been taken in the latter stages of the war; in January 1973, the end of the draft and a new all-volunteer, professional military was announced. This fulf illed a campaign promise made by Richard Nixon. The underlying premise was that random recruits from the general population could no longer be counted upon, especially in unpopular wars. In addition to this, a major restructuring of military organization and discipline was carried out (Dunnigan, 1993). This included a modernized and more highly tuned public relations division to mediate interactions with the general public. The American public too had to be reclaimed. The war had fractured the populace, and it’s obvious failure helped to undermine not only the military but also the public trust. Especially in the wake of the Watergate scandal, America looked less like an exception, with its political establishment—and, by implication, its foreign policy—in seeming disarray. Many on the political right took notice and set about steadying the ship. The so-called neo-conservative intellectuals, organized through small circulation magazines like the New York-based Commentary, contributed to this cause. In July 1975, just after the fall of Saigon, the journal devoted an entire issue to a symposium entitled “America Now: A Failure of Nerve.” Authors were among the first to diagnose the Vietnam Syndrome, a psychological response to the “trauma of Vietnam” (see McQuade, 2014 for other significant works). Soon after, the journal’s main editor, the previously noted Norman Podhoritz, to call this parallel “comforting” to American policymakers, as it seemed to simplify the much more strategically complex situation in fighting a counterinsurgency war in Vietnam.

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published an article with the provocative title “Making the World Safe for Communism.” This breathed life into fears of a new inward-turning isolationism taking hold of the nation. A more substantial contribution came with Guenter Lewy’s America in Vietnam in 1978, a historical account providing a more appealing framework for interpreting the war. While offering one of the first of what would become a series of “revisionist” histories of the war, Lewy’s book was more about the present than the past. Both in this text and elsewhere, Lewy, a political scientist, expressed concern about how Americans should feel about the war. Lewy addressed the issue directly in an essay entitled “Is American Guilt Justified,” originally published as part of a debate following the publication of his book.56 In answering “no” to this question, Lewy sought to counter claims that the war was perpetrated in an immoral manner and that Americans should feel guilty about this. Lewy reiterated that the United States had good reason to be in Vietnam; even where tactical mistakes might have been made, the cause was right. In a rather different reference to World War II, he wrote that Vietnam was less “dirty” than that heroic venture. If a few atrocities did occur, like the infamous My Lai Massacre, the other side was worse (on My Lai, see Jones, 2017 and Eyerman, 2019). He urged Americans to accept this aspect of war and not feel guilty or reluctant to engage. Hollywood and popular culture played a central role in this re-narration of the war, which altered not only its coding but also the representation of those who served. Representations of the war in film and literature, most especially in the 1980s, “evoked images of violence, often sexualized violence; meaninglessness; and national failure” (Dumbrell, 2012: 237). One can uncover, however, a subtle attempt to move beyond the victim/ perpetrator framework of the immediate postwar world and a return to the heroic narrative of service that had led the country into war in the first place. This had to be carefully prepared because emotions remained raw. An early effort reflecting conservative and patriotic views of the war was the film Good Guys Wear Black (1978), featuring Chuck Norris as a heroic soldier betrayed by politicians. More influential were the Rambo films (1982–2019), which cast Silvester Stallone as a John Wayne figure in the struggle against evil. Such films rode the media-orchestrated wave of public concern for those still missing and for prisoners of war. They were supported by grassroots organizations like The National League of Families of American 56 The question of guilt with regard to the American-Vietnamese War can be extended to include the South Vietnamese who were left behind in Saigon and those refugees who arrived in the United States. This is one of the subjects addressed by Espiritu (2014).

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Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia and, later, The National Alliance for the Return of America’s Missing Servicemen. As had occurred during the Iranian “hostage crisis” (November 1979 to January 1981), Americans were encouraged to wear yellow ribbons, a symbol memorializing missing soldiers with roots as far back as the Civil War. The aim was to keep the war and its American victims alive in the public mind, partially in order to mobilize support for the Gulf War (Lembcke, 1998: 23). The Vietnamese, of course, remained invisible, except as that evil enemy that would not acknowledge those American soldiers that were left behind in Vietnam. The plot of rescuing and revenging American soldiers helped to further personalize the war and was additionally used as political leverage against the new government in Vietnam. Like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, attention turned to the soldier as victim—a missing husband or son who could have been any American—rather than perpetrator of any policy or program. Sentiments like this had played a role in the pardoning of William Calley, who was convicted of a war crime for his actions at My Lai (Eyerman, 2019). Such representations also implied that the United States was itself a victim and the victorious Vietnamese the evil perpetrator. As we can see, the victim/perpetrator dichotomy did not disappear with the return of the heroic narrative in popular culture. The soldier as victim reflecting a more liberal if not antiwar point of view was the theme of Heroes (1977). The film featured the popular television actor Henry Winkler (who played the character known as “The Fonz” in the nostalgia of the aptly titled Happy Days) as a veteran suffering from PTSD. Others in this genre included Coming Home (1978), in which Jane Fonda, a real-life antiwar activist hated by the war’s supporters, plays a woman who falls in love with a disabled veteran while her own husband is serving in Vietnam. Here, victim and hero blend uneasily together with betrayal, all familiar themes in American representations of the war. It would take another ten years to move outside of this framework and return to representing American soldiers as the ordinary American boys of WWII films.57 The very popular 57 The link between Hollywood WWII films and later American-Vietnamese War films is drawn by Dittmar and Michaud (1990: 3-4). They write, “If anything, Vietnam War films depend on this correspondence. Tapping formula expectations, they guide viewers by invoking time-honored narrative and cinematic conventions. Vietnam combat films… own aspects of their narrative structure, character construction, and cinematography to their 1940s predecessors….” At the same time, they also point to specific differences, most particularly the treatment of returning veterans, where Vietnam veterans are treated with much more ambivalence, as the representation of veterans “became the site where America’s ambivalent feelings toward the conflict were made manifest.”

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tragi-comedy Good Morning Vietnam (1987) was a turning point. In this film, popular culture reflects on its own benevolent role in warmaking. The main character, played by Robin Williams, another popular television star, is a Vietnam-based disc jockey struggling against the wishes of his superiors to offer the sort of music young soldiers want to hear. These soldiers are neither avenging heroes nor the victims of the Rambo films. They are instead the boy next door, caught up in dangerous circumstances. The rock music they prefer is likely the same preferred by those in the viewing audience. This had the probable effect of creating identification and a sentiment of “that could have been me”: a clear attempt to create a bridge to the next generation of potential soldiers. While the Vietnamese in this film get better treatment than other films from the decade after the war, (as exemplified in The Deer Hunter [1978] and Apocalypse Now [1979]), the central Vietnamese character in Good Morning Vietnam is a complex f igure, in the end revealed as a duplicitous double agent. Within all these various interventions, the wound of Vietnam remains open, neither the veteran nor the uniform regaining the status they had held following WWII.58 The next stage in this transformative process was to portray the soldier as warrior/hero. The first Gulf War (1990–91) was important here, although the real hero in that war was American technology and its skilled application. The event that proved to be the most significant turning point in refocusing the heroic narrative was the national trauma known as 9/11. The shocking attack on American soil, the first since World War II, helped remove the stigma of the uniform, transforming everyone who wore one—from policemen to firefighters—into heroes. “Thank you for your service” has since become a routine phrase mediating relations between civilians and military personnel, which would not have been possible in the years following Vietnam. Today, uniforms no longer carry the mark of disgrace, though victims are still identified and identifiable under the broad umbrella of PTSD. The disastrous war in Iraq did little to tarnish the military, though the Abu Ghraib photographs and the continuing revelations concerning the use of torture recall the perpetrator/victim dichotomy. The professional 58 In their discussion of American Vietnamese War films, Dittmar and Michaud (1990: 6-7) point out how these f ilms helped shatter some of the foundational myths and symbols that helped meld the national collective. They point in particular to the category of veterans and the military uniform as a symbol of honorable service to the society. As represented in these films, “Being a veteran was not something to be proud of, as it had been historically. Rather, it was something to forget or hide. This was one significant product of the Vietnam era: many of the important symbols by which members of a society construct and communicate their national and personal identities were destroyed or damaged.”

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soldier is now routinely called a warrior in the mass media and official commemorations. This is the case even when that warrior is troubled, as the hero of the film American Sniper is (2014). Representations of policymakers, on the other hand, have been less kind (e.g., in films such as Green Zone, 2010). The victim/perpetrator model of Vietnam may well be repeated in popular culture for years to come. As emotions have cooled with time, military historians like Vietnam veteran Ronald Spector (1994) would offer a more moderate appraisal. This did not, however, challenge the heroic narrative and its underlying aim of managing defeat. Spector pointed out the constraints on the military as resulting from a complex of historical and political factors leading to an overdetermined lack of success. Rather than seeing betrayal, Spector argues that the conduct of the war could never have been an entirely military matter. He cites one commanding officer to this effect: our “authority to command or significantly influence the utilization of those resources which relate realistically to the achievement of [t]his mission is circumscribed severely in this unique politico-military struggle” (quoted in Spector, 1994: 216). Both inside and outside of the country, the war in Vietnam was fought on many fronts, including for the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese. The military command in Saigon did not and could not act in even a relatively autonomous manner. Decisions about extensive bombing, for example, were made based as much on political as on military criteria. At the same time, the American war was actually conducted through several institutions, with the four branches of the military being only one, and an internally competitive one at that. The others were the State Department and the CIA (ibid.: 217). Military decisions were also complicated by the claim to be aiding an independent South Vietnamese government and military. Even as the number of American soldiers greatly increased, their presence remained formally that of an invited guest, there to aid an ally. How much autonomy could the American command in Saigon exert without affecting that relationship? This was all part of a deeply political game being played, one that involved the military leadership and civilian governmental representatives in Washington and Saigon. After considering all the possibilities, Spector concludes that there was no good solution in Vietnam. He writes, “In the end, the American failure was a failure of understanding and imagination. The American leaders did not see that what for them was a limited war for limited ends was, for the Vietnamese, an unlimited war of survival” (1994: 314). There was ultimately no solution and, he believes, no lessons either. He contends that “lessons are controversial and fleeting but memories are long… the ghosts of

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Vietnam haunted all sides of the recent deliberations about the Gulf War.” In the wake of that war, President Bush hastened to announce that “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome.” Doubtless, many Americans would like to agree. From this perspective, defeat was a mere setback, and the cause for doubt was now overcome. The ship had righted, and the mission could continue. There was, however, one major precondition to moving forward: determining how to deal with those who served, who could not forget and refused to be forgotten.

The Great Compromise: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial 2,700,000 served, 300,000 were wounded, 75,000 were disabled, 57,000 died, and more than 2,000 remain unaccounted for… They are not forgotten. From the official program at the ground-breaking ceremony of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Memorial Day 1982

One strategy in dealing with defeat is to pretend an incident never happened, as revealed in some of the immediate postwar reactions by military leaders. Denial was also a significant part of the American reaction to those Vietnamese who managed to get themselves to the United States. As discussed in a later chapter, these former allies were treated with distain and indifference. The same can be said of those Americans who fought in the war. Although sometimes scorned, the most common reaction to returning veterans of the war was indifference. As opposed to World War II, the American-Vietnamese War had little impact on the everyday lives of civilians outside of the media representation and the protests. Americans seemed more concerned by the oil crisis in 1973 and the long lines at gasoline stations than with the returning soldiers. Had they returned in triumph, this might have been different even without a major impact on daily life. Victories call for celebrations and the public recognition of those who served. Defeat, even where the everyday impact might have been small, called at best for moving on and at worst for indifference and disdain.59 Wars have served throughout history to unify nations. This is especially true when justified in defense of national honor and domestic security. When they end victoriously, nations build monuments to commemorate the occurrence and memorials to remember those who died for the cause. 59 An interesting exception is the celebration of the glory of the American South and its “Lost Cause” (see Eyerman, 2022).

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What monuments and memorials have in common is that they offer official recognition, creating sites of memory and commemoration. As Arthur Danto (1985: 152) famously observed, “we erect monuments so that we shall always remember, and build memorials so that we shall never forget.”60 There was no desire to remember or memorialize the American-Vietnamese War when the last American returned home. Unlike the French, the Americans had not gone to Vietnam to stay. With the humiliation of the hasty exit and open wounds to the body politic, it seemed better to forget, to “move on.” Personal memories were only painful; from the official point of view, there was nothing to commemorate. The initiative to erect the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, now one of the most visited sites in Washington, D.C., came from the bottom up, from popular memory and the efforts of those who served, not from officialdom. This too marks the war and its commemoration as highly unusual (on the debate surrounding the Memorial, see Scruggs and Swerdlow [1985] for a personal history; Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz [1991] for a sociological analysis; Sturken [1997) for a humanities approach; and Reston [2017] for the most comprehensive account).61 The initial impulse for a memorial came from a veteran, a common soldier, stimulated by a viewing of The Deer Hunter, a popular Vietnam War film produced in 1979. The film evoked strong personal memories and a stubborn desire for collective recognition. If nothing else, this reveals the interplay between personal memory, popular culture, and official memory. This impulse eventually led to an organization of veterans who against all odds were successful in their dogged attempts to convince government officials to allow a memorial to be erected on the sacred grounds of the Washington Mall. The story is movingly told in To Heal A Nation by two of the project’s instigators. The book’s title also reveals their intention. One of the guiding 60 Sturken (1997: 47) adds this insightful comment: “Monuments are not generally built to commemorate defeats; the defeated dead are remembered in memorials. Whereas a monument most often signifies victory, a memorial refers to the life or lives sacrificed for a particular set of values.” 61 There are many international examples of this, however, including several ‘post-colonial’ defeats, such as the Dutch in Indonesia and the French in Vietnam and elsewhere. Regarding the Dutch/Indonesia example, Scagliola offers a relevant comment on the difficulties faced by Dutch veterans with regard to their traumatic memory of their war: “the fighting took place in a far-off and foreign country that can only be visited as a place to mourn and remember by a small minority. The memory ‘evaporates’ more easily as it cannot be connected to a specific site. Moreover, this ‘foreign’ experience isolates the veteran from the reference frame of his surrounding civilian community” (2007: 243). Reflecting on this point, one can better understand the significance of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial for veterans and their families. This has become the main site of memory, as the graves and battlefields lie far away.

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rules the group adopted was never to discuss personal opinions “about what the Vietnam War meant, whether it should have been fought, whether proper tactics were used, what they thought of the antiwar movement, or why America lost” (Scruggs and Swerdlow, 1985: 12). The antiwar movement was very much on the minds of the initiators, as they feared their attempts would reignite the controversies that had long marked the war. There was some criticism from antiwar activists, for example the claim that any memorial should include not only those who served but also those who fought against it. This criticism and the attempt to include antiwar activists and the role of the antiwar movement generally in the commemoration of the war continues to this day (Hayden, 2017).62 However, the strongest and most vocal opposition, primarily over the design, came from those more embedded in the heroic narrative of American exceptionalism. This group wanted a monument, not a memorial, and strongly opposed the idea of two somber sunken black walls upon which would be carved the names of all those deceased or missing. They wanted a symbolic representation of heroism in the classic style. For them the Wall, as the memorial has come to be called, represented a “slap in the face,” a “black gash of shame and sorrow” (Sturken, 1997: 51). As expressed by the previously mentioned James Webb, a veteran/author and member of the sponsoring committee (and future Secretary of the Navy and U.S. Senator), they wanted something like the Washington Monument: Watching then the white phallus that is the Washington Monument piercing the air like a bayonet, you feel uplifted. You are supposed to feel uplifted…and then when you peer off into the woods at this black slash of earth to your left, this sad, dreary mass tomb, nihilistically commemorating death, you are hit with that message also…That is the tragedy of this memorial for those who served. (quoted in Sturken, 1997: 53)

Leaving aside the unreconstructed masculinity apparent here, something which itself eventually led to the erection of a memorial for women who 62 Tom Hayden (2017), a longtime antiwar activist and opponent of the American-Vietnamese War, wrote of this struggle in his posthumously published memoirs. He recounts discussing the inclusion of antiwar activists in a project organized by the Pentagon in 2014 to create an internet-based history of the war. Hayden writes of the meeting, “We realized that our fight over memory had just begun….and now, with the advent of social media, we had an edge, the potential power to dramatically and publicly expose false stories that had circulated from the 1950s to the Obama presidency, and cast into sharper relief the pivotal role that our protests had played” (Hayden, 2017: 8).

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served in Vietnam, the “uplifting” heroic narrative threads are apparent. Criticism such as this led to compromises in the original design of the memorial, including the placing of an American flag in a prominent position and, after it was officially dedicated in 1982, the addition of an eight-foot-high statue depicting three male soldiers—black, white, and Hispanic—bowed but still standing. The statue commemorating women was added in 1993 and depicts a woman caring for a wounded soldier (see Reston, 2017, for an account of the political debate behind these additions). As a result, there was space made for everyone, including the flag and traditionally stylized monuments, along with a memorial wall highlighting the names of the fallen.63 The unifying idea, which would later become a dominant theme in official discussions about the war, was separating the war from the warrior: to commemorate service rather than the war itself. As the conservative newspaper columnist James Kilpatrick wrote during the initial stages of the project, “The bitterness engendered by Vietnam may never be forgotten. The sacrifice at least should be remembered” (cited in Scruggs and Swerdlow, 1985: 24). As Hashimoto (2015: 36) has pointed out, the focus on service and sacrifice helps relieve a tension between personal trauma and political interests; it also made it possible to turn victims into heroes (Assmann, 2016: 60). The Memorial site has become a gathering place for veterans and a site for individual and collective reflection in ways that transcend its function as an official memorial. Located amongst the icons of American mythology on the Washington Mall, it provides a space where personal, popular, and official memories collide and sometimes collude. Protestors and supporters can freely mix in front of its walls and on the surrounding grass, visually united with the names of the dead as reflected on the highly polished gabbro surface. This is truly a landscape of memory, as the Wall itself becomes a screen upon which the national collective is projected. As Howard K. Smith (in Scruggs and Swerdlow, 1985: xv) writes, “When you, the visitor, pass before the granite slabs and read the names, you suddenly see beyond the names the faces of living Americans, moving, looking, touching, whispering—and in their midst your own face in the shining mirror. It seems to say, Vietnam was not theirs alone, it is all of ours.” Such reflection offers a different experience than the more consciously majestic impression created by the reflecting pool between 63 On the compromise to include a statue and a flag: “In a funny sense the compromise brings the memorial closer to the truth. What is also memorialized is that people still cannot resolve that war, nor can they separate the issues, the politics, from it” (Maya Lin, quoted in Scruggs and Swerdlow, 1985: 133).

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the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. The sky and the heavens beyond are reflected in that pond, implying infinite power and connection to an Almighty, to say nothing of the skyward thrusting phallus of the Washington Monument itself.64

Making the War Ours The Memorial tells a story of service and sacrifice meant to unify a nation in sorrow and loss. This loss is collective, with no mention made of the specific mission that was its cause. As Griswold (2007: 205) writes, “there is nothing heroic about this memorial.” This, of course, is intentional. To remember those who died in the service of the nation, the conflicting forces that sent them into battle had to be forgotten.65 Missing also are the Vietnamese and any suggestion of the moral issues raised by the war. This aspect of the debate did not disappear entirely with the demise of the antiwar movement. In the absence of any official discussion of the other side of the war (such as the once-suggested congressional hearings on war crimes and political and military mismanagement), popular culture rather than the political sphere became an arena to continue the debate on the meaning of the war.66 Through a wide-ranging array of documentaries, fiction films, poetry, memoirs, novels, plays, and other works of aesthetic representations , the moral and political repercussions of the war have been cast into the public domain. One of the most powerful and poignant depictions regarding the Vietnam Veterans Memorial itself is Chris Burden’s monumental sculpture “The Other Vietnam Memorial” (1991). In the form of a gigantic Rolodex 64 For a thorough account of Lin’s thinking about the use of granite and the color black, see Reston (2017: 76). 65 Weaver (2010) argues that for this compromise to be possible, the atrocities committed by American forces had to be conveniently forgotten. Most prominent among these was rape. Espiritu (2014) adds those Vietnamese who fought alongside the Americans, many of whom became refugees living in exile in the United States. 66 Newly elected California Congressman Ronald Dellums petitioned to open hearings on American war crimes in the aftermath of My Lai (see Dellums, 1972). This came at the initiative of a citizens group and was modeled on the Bertrand Russell International War Crimes Tribunal. Twelve members of Congress attended these hearings, and the results have been published. Their call for a wider congressional investigation went unheeded. Most of those testifying were Vietnam veterans, and these hearings held in April 1971 followed the Winter Soldier hearings that took place the previous January. Senator Mark Hatf ield of Oregon asked the Senate to incorporate the testimony made at these hearings into the Congressional Record and called for a formal congressional investigation, also in April 1971.

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file, the names of thousands of Vietnamese who died in the war have been etched onto copper sheets.67 A particularly interesting group amongst those representing the war through popular culture are veterans themselves. The Vietnam War Memorial has become more than a traditional site of commemoration. No matter how controversial its design, its location ensures this. While it has been adopted in official discourse, there remains sufficient ambiguity in both the design and location to accommodate critical reflection. There are other memorials to the Vietnam War and to those who served that have emerged from popular memory and popular culture, including hundreds of museums and memorial sites around the country (Hagopian, 2009; Kieran, 2014; Espiritu, 2014; Reston, 2017). In 2017, the New York Historical Society opened one of its major halls to an exhibition on the American-Vietnamese War. Rather than limiting itself to a regional perspective as might be expected, the items on display were national in focus. The exhibition made clear that this was an American war with two fronts, one in Southeast Asia and the other within the United States itself. The entranceway announced the War’s parameters as 1945–1975, and the hall itself had equally divided wall space between “Home Front” and “War Front” murals. As has become more common in American representations of the war, the Vietnamese received some mention, though very little. The exhibition’s content was dominated by mapping the stages and places of the conflict, in Vietnam and the sites of antiwar protest in the United States. The intent was clearly educational; this was not a memorial, though there were many artifacts on display, from zippo lighters to helmets and more substantial forms of military hardware. Popular culture sources were also on display, such as an issue of Life Magazine with rows of individual 67 The sculpture, which stands thirteen feet tall, has been displayed at the MOMA in New York and in Los Angeles. According to the Los Angeles Times (June 28, 1992), three million South Vietnamese died during the American war, about half of them civilians. In addition to Chris Burden’s memorial, the internet has created an opportunity for virtual memorials. One such is “Another War Memorial: Memoires of the American War in Vietnam,” a website dedicated to those “others” who died in or protested against the war (http://anotherwarmemorial.com/). While still under construction, the site features photographs and stories of Vietnamese and Americans who experienced the war. During the war, Ed Kienholz created two installations in protest. One was called “The Portable War Memorial,” in which a large reproduction of the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima is placed in front of a reproduction of the well-known “I Want You” poster from WWI. In discussing Kienholz’s work, Lippart (1990: 37) makes the point that such “conceptual” art pieces can also be considered part of war or conflict internal to the American art world. The making of “political” art was something frowned upon in established art circles, as was creating artworks that were not easily commodified, that is ready-made for sale. This was especially true of the “performance” and “body art” that emerged during this period, such as that by Carolee Schneemann mentioned earlier.

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yearbook-like photographs of the American dead, a precursor of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial perhaps. The pro-war demonstrations and associated artifacts were also given space, though this was clearly overshadowed by the other side, the much more powerful and national antiwar movement. A handout suggested looking at a website for more details on the “Photos, films, and stories available on the gallery monitors.” The exhibit was ordered chronologically, with the Cold War and the Korean conflict as a starting point. World War II is only briefly mentioned. There is no attempt to “put the viewer in the war,” no use of sound to force the experience of being there, as is sometimes done. There are no battle scenes, no loud helicopters, bombs, or gunfire. This is more a reflective story. More an educational site than a site of memory, the exhibition aims at reminding its visitors of what war can mean and what it can do to a democratic society. The stacked paper pile meant to represent the Pentagon Papers symbolically recalled the power of an independent press in the same way that the public protests, on both sides of the issue, brought home the place and power of public voice as a check on legitimate authority. A survey of the several guest books placed at the entryway and exit of the hall gave the impression of satisf ied visitors, many of them foreign tourists. The guest books at the entrance asked for a response to the question: “What do you know about the Vietnam War?” And there were several strikingly colorful replies that said “Nothing!” It was this gap in historical memory that the exhibition was meant to fill. What stood out as well was the number of veterans who signed their names and unit numbers, along with their in country dates. There were some complaints as well: as mentioned in an earlier footnote, one person commented strongly against the “liberal New York” perspective that framed the exhibition, offering the example of the iconic Saigon street execution photograph being displayed without explanation of its complex background. One Vietnamese-American wrote, “The exhibit was great, but it needs one more panel—one for people like my parents, who fled the post-war communist regime in search of freedom and are today proud American citizens.” There was a long comment written first in Vietnamese and then in English by a visitor from Hanoi: When I finished viewing the exhibit on the war between America and Vietnam at the History Museum, my ideas about the views of Americans about the war changed a lot. Nobody wanted this to happen. I believe that the people of America and Vietnam will look past in order to make a better future for the two countries. Thank you to the organizers of this exhibit.

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Popular culture is a medium of memory offering its own forms of commemoration, a resource from and through which individual and collective memories can be constructed. As prime bearers of trauma, Vietnam veterans have used this medium to articulate and communicate their experience to the wider society. Similar to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, or “the Wall” as it is colloquially called, popular culture serves as a screen through which to project the memory of the war (Sturken, 1997: 75). Along with many others, Vietnam veterans have helped to create an array of films—both documentary and fictional—memoirs, novels, plays, poems, music, and visual artworks of all kinds that reconstruct how the war was experienced and how it is remembered.68 We can begin by briefly focusing on visual representations, specifically the mediums of film and photography. As Sturken (1997) points out in an astute analysis of what she calls camera images, film, television, and photography have greatly impacted the experience and memory of the Vietnam War. These camera images have produced impressions and evoked reactions to the war as much as they have documented it. As such, camera images have shaped how the war is experienced and remembered, most particularly for those generations that were born long after its conclusion. While televised images had a great impact on how the “Vietnam generation” experienced the war in the United States, it was photographs and movies—most of the latter studio-produced—that shaped the war for later generations. As opposed to literature, film is often experienced collectively. Gathering an audience in a darkened space, it invites a focused attention on screened images, which intensifies the potential “to cohere publics around shared sentiments and remembrances” (Feldman, 2014: 163). However, as Ditmar and Michaud (1990: 8) insightfully point out, the receptive understanding of audience members will vary, though most will share the collective identification as “American.” According to them, American Vietnam War films “single out certain audiences for a particular address…these films presuppose an empathetic, not analytic, model of reception, except that the uses of this empathy vary from film to film” (op cit. 1990: 8). Identification with the protagonists rather than critical political analysis is the underlying coded message, in other words.69 Film is also a major medium of collective memory 68 Some of the veterans participated in special groups and programs designed to stimulate this creative process. Universities and colleges offered special sponsorship to teach veterans to learn to write, and there were even programs to bring veteran/authors from both sides of the war together. Two of the most well-known Americans in this category, Tim O’Brien and Larry Heinemann, participated. 69 As an example, they point out, “Even as different films make their appeal to specific audiences, cinematic and narrative structures within each film work to minimize spectator difference

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as well as a filter through which personal memories are reconstructed. Sturken (1997: 120) has suggested that “Vietnam War films are forms of memory that function to provide collective rememberings, to construct history and to subsume within them the experience of the veterans … they move from personal memory into cultural memory and finally into history.”70 While individual viewers bring their own biography and interests to the cinema, thus creating the possibility of varying interpretations, the shared experience opens the possibility of collective catharsis as well as recollection. Regarding Vietnam, this may be particularly relevant for veterans on both sides of the camera. Lynda van Devanter (1983), the nurse who wrote a memoir about her Vietnam experience, recounts viewing the film Coming Home (1976), mentioned earlier, 17 times, crying her way through each time. We’ve already discussed the impact The Deer Hunter (1978) had on one initiator of the Vietnam War memorial. Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) has had a similar impact, judging from its critical reception and discussions amongst veterans. It should be noted that these films aroused quite different emotions in Vietnamese Americans (see Nguyen, 2017).71 Stone, who wrote and directed Platoon and two other Vietnam war films, dropped out of college to become a foot soldier during the war and was transformed in the process. While fictional, the film is rooted in personal experience and represents Stone’s attempt to portray the war from the point of view of the ordinary soldier as authentically as possible in a Hollywood film.72 “Knowing that overt Vietnam message mongering was the commercial kiss of death, Stone promised ‘no political message … just the … Oliver Stone uses a series of close-ups and point-of-view shots at the beginning of Platoon to prompt audience identification with his narrator-protagonist … In contrast, Stanley Kubrick undermines audience empathy by purposefully leaving his narrator-protagonist…unidentified in the opening sequences of Full Metal Jacket” (1990: 8–9).It is just such identification that has troubled Vietnamese Americans viewing these films. 70 For the most comprehensive account of American-Vietnamese war films from all sides, see Malo and Williams (1994). 71 Nguyen (2017: 568) writes, “During the 1980s and 90s, I watched almost every movie made by Hollywood about the war, an exercise I do not recommend. The experience confirmed for me that Americans saw the war as about them, with the Vietnamese people of all sides relegated to the margins, where they were mostly to be silent, saved, raped, or killed.” 72 Stone made two other films in what has become known as his Vietnam trilogy. Born on the Fourth of July (1989) is based on the life of an American soldier who, after being severely wounded in the war, became an anti-war activist. The third film, Heaven & Earth (1993) marked a clear shift in focus. Also based on autobiographical sources, it tells the story of the war from the perspective of a young Vietnamese woman caught between warring factions and the tensions this caused in her family and village. The Vietnamese-American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, who arrived as a young refugee, speaks of Hollywood as an essential part of the American war machine, “a

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truth as I saw it’” (quoted in Doherty, 2010: 243). This may very well have been the intention; it seems clear, however, that even the combat veteran Oliver Stone was influenced by other camera images of the Vietnam War as well as those recollections drawn from his personal experience and also from his film school training.73 Veterans in particular have debated how true to life the film remains. In an interesting twist, the disparity between the actual experience of war and its filmed representation is the subject of a play by Mark Sitko. In Gonna See a Movie Called Gunga Din (2012), Sitko uses Vietnam War films as a backdrop to reflect on this issue.74 Photography is another “camera image” important in the construction of popular memory. Replacing the weekly newsreel at cinemas, it became the predominant form through which the mass public received information about world events in the period immediately following World War II, only to be superseded by television as the Vietnam War commenced. However, photography and photojournalism still played an important role throughout that war. More like literature than film and the newsreel, photography is often experienced individually, though both photography and film share a visual texture as well as digital reproduction. A number of photographs taken and disseminated during the American-Vietnamese War have intimately shaped popular memory in the United States through their reproduction. We have already referred to two: the street execution of a suspected member of the National Liberation Front by the head of the Saigon police during the Tet Offensive in 1968; and the stacked bodies of villagers in what became known as My Lai. Another is of a group of children, most prominently a naked young girl, horrified and burned, fleeing a napalm bombing.75 Along with the newsreel footage and still photographs of the desperate crowds attempting to board the last helicopters leaving Saigon, these images have left a lasting impression of the war, both evoking and (re)shaping its memory. component of the military-industrial complex” and “an industry of memory” (Nguyen, 2016). As pointed out above, he offers his own analysis of some of the films we mention here. 73 Stone took a f ilm course taught by Martin Scorsese while at New York University’s f ilm school. Commenting on how being a Vietnam veteran might have influenced Stone’s film, Robert Cumbow (in Mao and Williams, 1994: 330) writes, “people who attributed Platoon’s brilliance to the fact that Stone is himself a combat veteran of Vietnam had it only half right. True, he knew what to look for and what to look at. But, he also knew how to see.” 74 See www.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/theater/reviews. 75 This photograph, taken in 1972, won the Pulitzer Prize. The girl in the picture has itself become a story. Phen Thi Kim Phuc is now popularly known as “the napalm girl” and is a Canadian citizen. She has been treated, free of charge, for her burns by hospitals in the United States. When the photograph first appeared in American newspapers, President Nixon was caught on the White House tapes as expressing doubt about its authenticity.

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What these images have in common, besides the fact that they have been reproduced so often, is that they reference the Vietnamese, those largely missing in the official commemorations of the war. While the street execution/assassination might be interpreted as just another example of the horror that is warfare, others may see the ruthlessness of an American ally and the lack of any commitment to the rule of law, which can bring one to fundamentally question the basis of American claims.76 Opposed to this, the images of My Lai appear to leave little doubt as to perpetrator and victim. In the heat of the war, a polarized American public found justification on both sides. The emotions that kindled the debate following Lt. Calley’s conviction and eventual pardon have long subsided, however (Eyerman, 2019). What we now see in the photographs are innocent Vietnamese victims and American perpetrators, and it is hard to imagine that anyone could have seen otherwise. The same can be said regarding the fleeing children. That the napalm had fallen by mistake from South Vietnamese planes and that the children were running towards American troops, not from them, is rendered unimportant. What one sees are simply innocent children surrounded by an American-made catastrophe. This is the American-Vietnamese War. Similarly, the images of the hasty evacuation of Saigon are dramatic in their display of human emotion and would draw an audience for that reason alone. Like war itself, there is much drama for cameras to record, as crowds of desperate people fight for a place on the last helicopters. Those struggling to get on are not Americans, most of whom had already left by other means; these are Vietnamese who were promised evacuation by the American authorities. Along with desperation, these images suggest, once again, betrayal.77 Who could trust the Americans after this? Such images re-invoke the question of the war’s outcome. Was this a defeat? If so, of what kind and for whom? The vast majority of American 76 On the background to this photograph, see Stockton 2017. Stockton reveals the complex background that led to the street execution, including the fact that the man killed had recently carried out numerous terrorists acts and executions of a similar type. Of course, this does not excuse the act, but it does help explain the ruthlessness of it. At the same time, this raises the interesting question of what a photograph does or does not do with regard to its reliability to witness incidence. As opposed to other visual arts, film and painting for example, a documentary photograph like this one makes a claim to representing a factual reality. This shooting actually happened; we have it here recorded for all to see. However, this claim to depicting an actual incident “as it happened” leaves out as much as it records, a point that Stockton’s background analysis helps us see but is not “seen” in the photograph. 77 The images of the chaos in Saigon and the American embassy appear in the film The Deer Hunter, where fiction and real newsreel images are mixed together. The documentary Last Days in Saigon (2014) offers more of the South Vietnamese perspective.

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military had long departed when Saigon fell. Those that remained were there to protect American civilians, primarily those in government service. Following the tenets of Vietnamization, whatever one thought of it, the war ended with the defeat of the South Vietnamese military, not the Americans. Any “defeat” on the part of Americans was more political and psychological than military. As we will see, some in the American military preferred to speak of “failure” rather than defeat (Corson, 1974).78 The end of the war brought no major national catastrophe to the United States. It was not like Austria or Germany after World War I or Japan after World War II. There was no loss of territory, no reparations, no bread lines or masses of desperate veterans roaming the streets. In fact, most veterans returned one by one to find a nation unaffected and largely indifferent. If there was a defeat, it was they who bore the burden. Except for the humiliation of Watergate, moderate inflation, and an annoying gas crisis brought about by another war, daily life went on unchanged. At least, so it seemed. What the Saigon pictures reveal is a moral defeat, the abandoning of an ally under extreme circumstances to an unknown fate. These images recall a failure of a nation to live up to its promises in the most graphic way. This traumatic memory lies embedded in individuals and institutions and is a contributor to the “Vietnam Syndrome.”

Making the War Theirs: Visual Arts Given the predominance of photography and film in representations of the American-Vietnamese War, it is not surprising that more traditional modes of visual representation like drawing and painting would be less well known. However, just as the war stimulated literary expression and extended established genres, it had a similar effect on the visual arts. As the war raged both at home and abroad, there was more art opposing the war than supporting it, a first in American history (Lippard, 1990). In Vietnam itself, soldiers and later veterans produced paintings and drawings in great numbers, though most of the better-known works were created after the war. The erection of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, whose dedication in 1982 was attended by more than 150,000 veterans, catalyzed an outpouring 78 This issue, the use of failure or defeat to describe the American effort, apparently haunted the Burns and Novick documentary on the war. According to Ian Parker (2017: 55), Burns said that “an internal debate about whether ‘failure’ should be ‘defeat’ lasted for months” as the documentary was being produced.

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of art for public display (Sinaiko, 1998a). In the months following the dedication ceremony, a Washington, D.C. gallery featured artworks by American Vietnam veterans. This collection was eventually moved to Chicago with the founding of the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum. As with the Memorial, the initiative to construct such a museum came from the bottom up (Varco in Sinai ed., 1998). Sondra Varco recounts how a chance meeting in a Chicago art class was the initial catalyst, with a reluctant veteran/ artist convinced to seek out others and pursue the possibility of a showing featuring works by Vietnam veterans. Another similarity between the Memorial and the Museum is the general absence of political commentary in the works shown; the substantive focus is on daily-life situations—the work of war rather than who was responsible or the outcome. These artistic representations of war are drawn from lived experience as reflections and recollections of biographical memory. In this sense, they aim at something quite distinct from official memory, which is a national project of collective memory. The artwork of active-duty and veteran artists reflects group memory, a sub-collective within the national collective that can claim a privileged position with regard to the meaning of the war. A further difference between museums and memorials: the latter are sites of remembrance, the former meant to preserve and to teach (Gopnik, 2014). This difference is problematized, however, by the actual use made of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, as it has become a site of popular commemoration in ways that might challenge and counter its official usage. The National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum displays artworks in ways meant to instruct its audience about the war’s emotional impact and meaning. To that end, it is also engaged in a selective struggle about what is remembered and forgotten. The art protesting the war sought to remind Americans that the war was “ours,” that “we”—citizens and soldiers—are responsible for its destructiveness and horror. Such post-war art aims at keeping that thought alive but does so from the perspective of lived experience, not necessarily a moral or political perspective. There is a selection process involved in all museum collections, in deciding what is included and excluded.79 With regard to selectivity, one need also consider what the artist—here the American soldier/artist—chooses to represent, to see, and not see. During the war, on-the-scene art by soldiers were primarily aesthetic acts of witness guided by an impulse to document an extraordinary experience. 79 The fact that there are no atrocities included reflects both levels of selection. Weaver (2010) argues that war rape was a very prevalent aspect of the American war in Vietnam but is not something often discussed much less represented in works of art.

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Like letters home, drawing offered a readily accessible form of representation for the artistically inclined. Some combined the two forms, letter writing and drawing. More formally, as the American engagement escalated, the U.S. Army instigated a Vietnam Combat Artists Program in 1966 as part of its military history project. By that year, the war was real and visible to Americans, and it is not surprising that soldier/artists were called upon to do their part in its representation. This program lasted until 1970 as the American campaign was coming to an end. Among other things, it offered soldiers a non-combat opportunity to travel around South Vietnam and, in the best case, a sojourn in Hawaii to produce their work. Most of these drawings and paintings are traditional in style and subject matter, with images of soldiers and Vietnamese landscape dominating. There is little irony or commentary here. The majority of works aim at memorializing a time and place. One can imagine self-censorship and also the official (military) eye standing behind pencil and paintbrush, though it would be too simple to dismiss these works as “dutifully illustrated patriotic clichés” (Lippard, 1990: 10). Several works stand out for their aesthetic and narrative content. A colored pencil drawing by David Farrington from 1968 with the title Yea Vietnam is one. Featured is a half-completed image of a combat-clad soldier of unknown rank and unit, his blackened face standing against a cross-like form. The words “Yea Vietnam” are stenciled alongside, as if on a cargo shipment. The phrase recalls a common marching cadence, “If I die in a combat zone, box me up and ship me home”, which was also the title of Tim O’Brien’s first Vietnam novel. What awaits the American soldier in Vietnam but death, Yea, Vietnam! A notable difference between these artworks and those of their North Vietnamese counterparts is that they were not necessarily meant to be—or useful as part of—an official national narrative; they had and have no official sanction or purpose beyond documentation, though of course they could be assembled as displays of American talent and sensibility. Without a clear audience, there is no overriding narrative structure that would guide their public display, no commissioned story of triumph or heroic struggle.80 80 As reflected in the collection Mekong Diaries: Viet Cong Drawings and Stories 1964–1975 (Buchanan, 2008), for example, Vietnamese war art was commissioned by the leadership, and artists were part of a propaganda/motivational effort. Their responsibility was to produce artworks that, while aesthetically pleasing, aimed at revealing a heroic collective effort. Artists were also careful not to produce images such as dead bodies that might be upsetting to the military effort. Notable also in this collection of beautiful watercolors and drawings is the focus on the collective, not the individual, as in much of the American artwork produced by military artists.

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This makes for a great difference in terms of what was represented and why. Only a few of those who made these works went on to become professional artists. For those like Farrington and Broderick (discussed below) that did, representations of war became only a minor part of their portfolio. In the commercial art world, there is a limited market for such works and little official interest in its representation. This distinguishes the Vietnam War from other wars in that it can offer very little to sanctioned displays of heroic national sentiment. Given their predominance, one can ask what can paint and drawing offer beyond the photograph and film clip? As personal expression, such works express—potentially—a more authentic and total representation, free of the selective framework and interests of mass media or official doctrine. Yet there is a paradox in all art that attempts to represent war in a realistic way. War is too big and too traumatic to be captured in any work of art. This paradox was expressed by Leon Golub, one of the earliest and most consistent artists to paint the Vietnam War. When asked in a 1982 interview to explain the grotesque images of war he created, he said, “There was World War II, Korea, Vietnam…. How are you going to make contact with those fantastic numbers of slaughters? You can’t do it by making pretty pictures about it, You have to create these kinds of stylized forms which are so brutal that they jump beyond stylization” (quoted in Lippard, 1990: 47). Like the experience of war itself, attempts at its representation can be transformative. As expressed by one veteran/artist, “It is through painting that Vietnam is now giving me and others a new life. It is through art that we fight back, and it is through the eyes and hands of veterans that the truth is told” (John Plunkett in Sinaiko, 1998a: 151). For the post-war viewer, such images might well recall “a time of anger,” as Lucy Lippard (1991: 20) puts it. She writes, “Art, when it escapes from isolation as a status symbol or lofty cultural artifact, can serve many more functions than our society has come to expect from it.” In the works collected in the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum, traditional war themes are highlighted, most particularly representations of camaraderie and death. As Siniako (1998a: 226) points out, however, one finds a special ironic twist: “the ironies and inversions that emerge in veterans art reflect the particularly surreal and ironic experience of the Vietnam War, in which distinctions between enemies and allies, safe and unsafe, right and wrong were so often and so easily blurred.” One central theme prevalent in the museum collection is the personal transformation of young men into soldiers, not in the romantic sense of coming of age or a Hollywood melting pot of diverse American youth forged as a combat

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unit. Rather, they espouse how extraordinary, not to say traumatic, shared experience transforms an individual and a group that shares it. At once shattering—a sensation represented in one painting as an unrecognizable self-image reflected back in a mirror—the war was also congealing and emotionally uniting, providing a common frame of meaning and reference. For many veteran/artists, the war was a watershed experience, at once demanding representation and challenging it. One artist whose work is particularly interesting is Ned Broderick. A former marine foot soldier who served 19 months in Vietnam, Broderick continues to believe in the war’s necessity.81 Whatever his personal views and intentions, these compositions, all of which were completed after the war, are open to a range of interpretations. One of Broderick’s mixed-media works, The Wound (1978), features a shredded American flag, part of the cloth hanging outside of the frame. Inside of the flag, a combat soldier stares blindly out from a hole ripped at its center. The flag—the “wound”—is meant to symbolize the American social fabric ripped apart by war, just as the wild-eyed soldier appears psychologically, not physically, wounded by it. Similarly, Hi Mom, I’m Home (1994) features a distorted face and bloody hands set against a cloudy red background. This work appears on the cover of the collection, described by Janson (in Sinaiko ed., 1998: 206) as capturing “the strange sense of alienation that many vets felt when they returned to the World.” Hands are bloodied, but no one seems to care. While supporting the war as a political project, Broderick reflects on its consequences for the country and most especially for those Americans who fought in it: those who, like himself, came home scarred from battle only to face misunderstanding and indifference. Describing his 45-day leave at home between tours in Vietnam, Broderick recalls that he could not wait to return to his comrades. Like O’Brien, who returned from Vietnam with a very different sense of war and combat, Broderick says the war changed his life forever. Broderick’s 40-foot sculpture, Above and Beyond, built out of tens of thousands of dog tags, was featured on Veterans Day 2010 at the National Vietnams Veterans Art Museum. Looking at these dog tags, one ponders why they died. The artist appears convinced of the war’s necessity, but will others who view the work agree? A less ambiguous work featured in the Museum collection is Neal Pollack’s Vietnam Service Ribbon (1976). Like the dog tags in Broderick’s sculpture, the Vietnam Service Ribbon is a marker of military service. Unlike the dog tag, 81 See interview with Ned Broderick as part of the Veterans History Project Library of Congress: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001.00442/.

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however, the Service Ribbon is a specific—not universal—military issue; one had to have been in Vietnam for an extended period to receive one. It could be a badge of honor, as it surely must be for Broderick, but in Pollack’s rendering, it is a badge of sorrow and pain. Constructed in the colors of the South Vietnamese flag, the red stripes on a yellow background drip blood over a yellow face. American death and (South) Vietnamese suffering is a common theme, implied here in bloody tears. Blood congeals, knits together all those that it touches. In 1990, several years after the dedication of the Memorial and the opening of the Vietnam Veterans Art Museum, the William Joiner Foundation sponsored an exhibition of artworks by artists from Vietnam and the United States. The stated aim of the exhibition was to promote “reconciliation” between the two countries. The Foundation itself had been established two years prior with that aim in mind.82 The exhibition, which opened in Colorado and then moved to various places in the United States and Vietnam, was titled As Seen By Both Sides (1991). While it included works by veterans and non-veterans on both sides of the conflict, the fact that there is an overwhelming disparity between the number of Americans represented and their former enemies with Americans overrepresented suggests that the war may not be over. The catalog features a chronology from both sides and a list of the dead and wounded, highlighting its integrative and educative intention. The works collected reveal great differences in both style and substance in the way the various “sides” represent the war. The Americans, especially the veterans, tend toward realistic depictions of war scenes, similar to those in the collection discussed above. The Vietnamese—both those who supported the revolution and those who fought with the Americans—are more pastoral, almost romantic in their approach. As Lippard (1991: 20) puts it, “There is a certain humility and compassion in the work by the Vietnamese artists that is rarely found in American images of war. And there is a certain modesty.” The Americans in the exhibition for the most part depict combat and the daily routine of war. When they paint landscape, it is mixed with anxiety, such as John Plunkett’s Ambush Behind Thin Woodline and Meeting Red Ants in Bamboo, both from 1988. In these graphite works, the former soldier offers beautifully composed renderings of foreboding forest, filled with black weapons and no humans to be seen. These stand in stark contrast 82 The Foundation was named after a Vietnam veteran who died of cancer connected to Agent Orange. It is now part of the William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and its Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts Boston. It has sponsored exchanges between artists and authors from all sides of the Vietnam conflict.

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to paintings by Vietnamese artists whose landscapes are more welcoming, almost serene. These are works of memory as well as imagination, with the memories on the American side stark and threatening. One image present in much iteration is Eddie Adams’ photograph of the Saigon street execution discussed above. The Vietnamese American artist, Tin Ly, calls his rendering Gunshot Heard Around the World (1985), representing both the perpetrator and victim as blurred figures against a chaotic background. The former American soldier, James Cannata, paints over the photograph, highlighting the agonized face of the victim. Having served in Germany during the Vietnam War, Cannata had no direct experience of war to draw upon; his work builds upon the mass-mediated images the war generated. Cannata’s work was one of the few by an American veteran featured in another major exhibition of Vietnam War art that opened in 1989 at the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Washington. This show was curated by Lucy Lippard, a forceful critic of the war.83 All of the art exhibited can be classified as protest art, including Cannata’s. There is little reconciliation in these works; rather, the aim is both to display and reinforce the power of political art, especially regarding the Vietnam War. Lippard (1991) writes much about the tensions in the American art world concerning political art, a point also made by Israel (2013).

The Veteran as Collective Witness As reflected in the discussion above, veterans are prime bearers of the memory of war; they are the carriers of its individual and collective trauma who returned with biographies in need of healing (Hashimoto, 2015: 31). Their collective trauma takes form in a generational consciousness that includes many of those of the same age for whom the war was a defining part of their identity, even where they were not directly involved. In some cases, the vivid memory of war dies with those who lived it, as living memory fades into history. This is true of all wars, but there is something distinctive about the American-Vietnamese War. It is a war that will not go away, even now, nearly a half century since its end. As President Obama prepared for an official visit to Vietnam in May 2016, his former defense secretary, Chuck 83 Lippard also provided an extensive overview of American art as it relates to the war. Lippard was one of the founding members of the Art Worker’s Coalition, a group that included Leon Golub mentioned above and that organized collective protests against the war, including against art institutions that in their mind remained silent or supportive of the war (Bryan-Wilson, 2009).

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Hagel, a war veteran, braced himself “for the onslaught of recollections” the visit would evoke. “I know those images will hit me. They’re going to make it all come back,” Hagel told The New York Times.84 “There are still a lot of ghosts around. There is still a great deal of debate about Vietnam and what it meant for this country. It still haunts us, that terrible waste of lives, and the lessons we learned there, the terrible lessons that still hang over us.” The veterans of America’s Vietnam war are different in that they bear witness to an at once individual, collective, and cultural trauma, a national trauma that others would very much like to repress and forget. This war, after all, created a “new memory profile” for a nation that viewed itself through the triumph of World War II. Rather than forget, many in this generation have sought to represent their experience through aesthetic means and in so doing resist the pressure to “move on.” There are essentially three distinct yet interrelated positions available from which to represent this sort of trauma: perpetrator, victim, or bystander/witness. Representations made by veterans, visual artists, and authors are works of memory, after-the-fact reconstructions of a participant observer who obviously takes sides but also distance. Different modes of representation offer different means and possibilities for distancing, for adding angles and nuance. For those working with texts, like Tim O’Brien, Larry Heinemann, and David Rabe, there exists the possibility of including a multitude of voices representing various positions. In their novels, O’Brien and Heinemann use a variety of characters and situations to describe the particular moral and political ambiguities of the American engagement in Vietnam. Here perpetrators, victims, and bystanders are present in nearly every incident, with their roles and positions shifting on occasion. The author’s position is also complicated by the fact that these fictional accounts remain rooted in real experience, suffused with intense emotion. This is especially apparent in Heinemann’s Paco’s Story, a novel about not combat but rather its aftereffects. Paco, the novel’s protagonist, is shown shattered and alienated by his war experience, which included the gang rape of a Vietnamese girl (Weaver, 2010). Paco is perpetrator, victim, and bystander at one and the same time. He witnessed the rape but did not actively participate, yet suffers the guilt of the bystander, a comrade in arms if not in deed. This draws him closer to being a perpetrator: in war, there can be no innocent bystanders. Unable to free himself of these feelings and crippled by the physical wounds of war, Paco can function only marginally in a society for whom the war is a matter of little concern. Marginalized, he is also a victim. 84 http://nyti/1V4UzOA.

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The returning veteran in David Rabe’s Sticks and Bones faces a similar alienation, albeit one articulated in a very different context. In Rabe’s play, a blinded soldier returns to a family seeking to maintain its equilibrium through denial. The war is a non-entity in their world of prayer and popular culture, and their wounded son’s return experienced as an intrusion, a foreign invasion. In this, they come to see themselves as victims, while David tries to convey their complicity. As a wounded soldier in a war whose meaningless is expressed through his family’s indifference, David is at once perpetrator, victim, and witness. The play ends where it began, in the family’s living room, where they assist David in his suicide, on the couch in front of the drone of the television. O’Brien’s combat stories and other fictions are similar in their complexity of character and vision. Mark Heberle (2001: xxiii) calls O’Brien “a trauma artist,” by which he means O’Brien’s own war experience is both represented and worked through in his fiction. O’Brien’s novels, he writes, are a “fabricating trauma,” a form of “trauma witnessing, the uncertain border between actual experience and fictions,” therapeutic for both writer and reader. In the process, a complexity of characters and situations are brought forth to reveal a condition of intense moral ambiguity and ethical dilemma. The latter is poignantly represented in a chapter in O’Brien’s most famous book The Things They Carried, where a character remarkably like the author faces the choice of submitting to the draft notice he has just received or driving over the Minnesota border into Canada to escape military service. In the end, there is no choice; the protagonist feels bound by the pressure to conform to family and community expectations: “I was a coward. I went to the war” (1991: 63). This critical reversal of the ingrained notion of bravery/cowardice is something that the antiwar movement also struggled to make the general public understand: that protesting the war and refusing to participate was an act of courage, not cowardice as those who supported the war claimed. The moral ambiguity represented in O’Brien’s novels only heightens during the war itself. In his surrealistic war novel Going After Cacciato, O’Brien (155-6) writes of his fellow soldiers: They did not know even the simple things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice. They did not know the feeling of taking a place and keeping it. They did not know how to feel. Whether when seeing a dead Vietnamese, to be happy or sad or relieved, whether, in times of quiet, to be apprehensive or content; whether to engage the enemy or elude him. They did not know how to feel when they saw villages burning. Revenge? Loss? Peace of mind or anguish? They did not know…. They did not know good from evil.

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Heberle (2001: xxv) calls such writing the “double trauma of victimizing and victimization,” where the war experience on all sides of the conflict “is turned into something terribly beautiful.” In the real war, people died for no good reason, as O’Brien himself might well have. This may be the case to some extent in all wars, but in O’Brien’s telling, this was the tragedy of the Vietnam War: there was no good reason. In this sense, the grunts were victims of their own moral cowardice, as those they killed were their victims. For this reflective veteran/author assuming the position of witness, this constitutes a double trauma; being a victim of one’s own moral shortcomings forces one into the position of perpetrating another’s death. This lack of clarity may be present in all wars, and it is the fact of retelling that imposes a meaningful order. But from O’Brien’s authorial point of view, Vietnam pushed this meaninglessness to the extreme. In another account of O’Brien’s writings, the literary critic Steven Kaplan (1995: 169) writes: Before America became militarily involved in defending the sovereignty of South Vietnam … it had to “invent” the country and the political issues at stake there. The Vietnam War was in many ways a wild and terrible work of fiction written by some dangerous and macabre storytellers. First, America decided for Vietnam what constituted good and evil, right and wrong, civilized and uncivilized, freedom and oppression according to American standards; then, the United States military travelled the long physical distance to Vietnam and attempted to make America’s notions of these things clear to the Vietnamese people, eventually using brute technological force. For the American military and government, the Vietnam they had in effect invented became fact. For the soldiers they then sent there, however, the facts their government had created about the enemy was what the issues were, and how the war was to be won were quickly overshadowed by a world of uncertainty.

Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, O’Brien uses real names and places but creates incidents that might never have happened, at least not in the way he describes them. His aim is not mimetic reconstruction of how things actually occurred but rather a performative act, staging what might have happened while at the same time being aware of the factiousness of this reconstruction. According to Kaplan (1995: 180), in such reflexive representation, “the reader is thus permitted to experience f irst-hand the uncertainty that characterized being in Vietnam. O’Brien forces his readers to ‘believe’ that the only ‘certainty’ was the ‘overwhelming ambiguity’.”

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O’Brien is a featured commentator in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s 18-hour-long documentary The Vietnam War, where he is joined by the North Vietnamese novelist Bao Ninh and Karl Marlantes, another American novelist and a much decorated combat veteran.85 Marlantes’s novel Matterhorn (2010) traces the initiation and development of a young Marine lieutenant much like himself as he faces the absurdity of a war without clear measures of accomplishment or victory beyond the heroic acts of individuals and raw survival. It is a war much like that portrayed in Burns and Novick’s documentary, where suffering dominates the experiences of those on the ground and careerism colors the motivation of those who lead. In explaining why he wrote the novel, Marlantes has said “We have to find a way to turn those ghosts (our memories of the war) into ancestors. Put them on the shelf and then you can think about them and you can honor them and you can talk to them. But they don’t have to be inside you.” This was made possible through writing the novel. “For me, it was through the transmogrification of putting this into a work of art and a story.”86 Are these “confessions” in the sense meant by Morag (2013) writing about what she calls “perpetrator trauma”? The closest to this might reasonably be Paco Story, where the main character suffers from recurring flashbacks to a gang rape. In the majority of these accounts, however, the boundaries between perpetrator, victim, and bystander are fluid. There are no heroes either, and this makes for something quite distinct from official discourse. Global politics are absent. The war that veteran authors represent is primarily about survival and camaraderie under terrible conditions. Postwar aesthetic representations by American veterans are filled with emotion, with grief and loss being the most prominent. This loss included not only comrades but also a loss of innocence and a loss of self. The shattered mirrors and the fragmented representations attest to that. The long stare and the black eyes contained in many of the portraits also reflect that. Are these victims or perpetrators that are represented? 85 Bao Ninh writes movingly about his war experience in the previously cited article in Ward and Burns (2017) and in his autobiographical novel The Sorrow of War (1987). He visited the United States as part of a mission to bring Vietnamese and American authors and veterans together to share their experiences. Larry Heinemann and Tim O’Brien were among the Americans who participated. Heinemann (2006) has written movingly about this encounter and his return to Vietnam as a civilian. Returning veterans now make up a significant part of the large Vietnamese tourist industry. On this, see Laderman (2009) and West (2017). 86 Quoted in https://w w w.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2017/09/29/theamerican-war-youve-watched-all-18-hours-of-the-vietnam-war-heres-what-ken-burnswants-you-to-remember/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-e%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_ term=.177cf02a04d5.

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Arenas of Memory and the Meaning of the War As with all complex historical phenomena, no ready-made account of the meaning and memory of the American war in Vietnam is waiting to be found. As the years pass and emotions fade, however, the retelling of a collective past has a way of settling into a consensus. As noted, this has for the most part happened in academic accounts of the American-Vietnamese War. Library shelves are stacked with historical reconstructions, personal histories, and heated debates about the war. There is a generational account of their shifting nature waiting to be written. Yet as Dumbrell (2012) convincingly demonstrates, any continuing controversy amongst professional scholars is at once couched in orthodoxy. An underlying consensus exists that the American engagement in an ongoing Vietnamese conflict was “an avoidable mistake” (Preston, 2013). Even those who served and suffered most directly—like the late U.S. senator and former prisoner of war John McCain, who had long blamed the loss on politicians—came to accept that point of view (NYT, May 5, 2018). Why this was a mistake and how it might have been avoided are prime subjects of any remaining contestation. Earlier debates concerning the war’s necessity or whether victory, however conceived, was possible, have been superseded by discussing the “lessons” to be learned. Some refer to the war as “tragic” in order to highlight not only the unnecessary deaths and dislocations but also the fatal flaws in the American character that led the nation into this “quagmire.” Central here is a self-deception concerning the nature of the national mission and the belief that once Americans set their mind to it, anything is possible to achieve. These were points made early on by David Halberstam (1965), who popularized the quagmire metaphor. The consequence of such hubris, also chronicled by Halberstam (1973), is strongly put by Preston: The sad truth is, Vietnam never mattered to the United States, and the Vietnamese never held anything more than geopolitically symbolic value for the Americans … Ultimately, Vietnam was important to Americans— that is, to U.S. foreign policymakers in the Cold War—simply because they believed it was, and then said so repeatedly. Moreover, when they stopped believing that Vietnam was important—after unsuccessfully waging a disastrous, futile, pointless and stupendously senseless war … the Americans were simply able to walk away. (2013: 39)

Tragic or not, the American Vietnam engagement now viewed through the clear light of history seems at once hellish and pointless, except for whatever lessons might be learned from the “avoidable mistake.”

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The current consensus found amongst historians took years to establish, a fact that is reflected in the way American high school textbooks represent the Vietnam War. In an early accounting, Frances Fitzgerald (1979) found American textbooks “evasive” in their attempt to present the war in a favorable light. As she points out, school textbooks always have an underlying patriotic intent, and in the United States they are also lucrative commercial exercises. Schoolbooks are produced for profit to be sold to local school boards, which are likely conservative in outlook. According to the books she surveyed, Americans were in Vietnam to help the South Vietnamese—residents of an independent country—to establish a democratic society. Fitzgerald found little mention of deceit and deception on the part of American leaders, of atrocities committed by American soldiers, or of opposition to the war. In dealing with My Lai, for example, one textbook reported that “the alleged incident at My Lai afforded Communists and anti-Americans everywhere an opportunity to condemn the United States” (Fitzgerald, 1979: 125). Only one textbook of those surveyed offered criticism of the war, entitling its section on Vietnam “The Disaster of Vietnam” (Fitzgerald, 1979: 125). In their comprehensive study of American textbooks and the Vietnam War, Lachmann and Mitchell (2014) extend Fitzgerald’s survey to 2009. They reveal how the representation of the war has become increasingly bleak. They write, “No passages [in the textbooks they covered] present Vietnam as glorious, and numerous paragraphs, photos, and student exercises depict the war as hellish” (2014: 198). In their comparison between textbook presentations of WWII and Vietnam, they conclude: Textbooks’ changing presentation of both wars suggest that (1) the Vietnam War soured Americans on all wars, not just Vietnam; (2) the antiwar and other social movements…have made uncritical patriotism less acceptable in textbooks; and (3) a world culture of individualism affects how textbook authors and publishers think about war and the experiences and sacrifices of soldiers. (201)

This tendency to represent the war as “hellish” and to personalize war experience can also be found in popular culture representations of Vietnam, which now includes graphic novels (for an example, see Backderf, 2020). One very significant unintended outcome of the war from the American perspective is this problematizing and questioning of the meaning of patriotism. Central to the struggle between the war’s opponents and its supporters was what it meant to be a patriotic American. For its supporters, going to war and

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“serving” one’s country was the ultimate proof of patriotism. To die for one’s country was the ultimate sacrifice, the highest honor. For those opposed to the war, protesting and even refusing to “serve” in what was understood as an unjust and immoral enterprise was the height of patriotism. This could ultimately be grounded in the claim that the nation itself was formed out of protest and that the right to protest and to disagree was a foundational American value. There are many who claim that this polarization around the meaning of protest and what it means to be a patriot still festers in American society and is one of the lasting legacies of the American-Vietnamese War. It has moved on from being a claim made by the left to now being central to right-wing protests. The notion of lessons to be learned is the centerpiece of discussion in the political sphere, a sphere deeply entrenched in institutions and officialdom, including policymaking, institutional reform, and official commemoration. The media, through which discussion in this sphere is carried out, overlaps with the scholarly books and articles that are the main vehicles of discourse in academic reconstructions. Added to that are the more internal documents such as reports from think tanks and research produced for or meant to influence governmental committees. One can also include here the autobiographies and memoirs produced by individuals important to the political and policymaking process. To speak of “lessons,” as Schalk (2005: 139) points out, is to assume those with responsibility are rational and willing to learn from past mistakes. Here, consensus is less stable than in scholarly discussion. On the one hand, debate concerns the meaning of Vietnam for current and future military engagement as well as what actually happened and who was responsible. It was in this context that the phrase “Vietnam Syndrome” was first articulated, as it was meant to imply a psychological reluctance on the part of politicians, policymakers, and the general public to engage in warfare after the humbling Vietnam experience. As George H.W. Bush understood the phrase, it meant, “What people mean when they say we worry about a Vietnam, is that they don’t want to put this nation through a long drawn-out inconclusive experience that had military action that just ended up with a kind of totally unsatisfactory answer.” Bush thought such reluctance was overcome with the “success” of the Gulf War (1990–91). His son, President George W. Bush, thought the same when he announced “mission accomplished” after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. On the other hand, critics of the Iraq War have pointed to lessons not learned rather than any overcoming of psychological reluctance to go to war. Ironically, and tragically, the Gulf War gave rise to another “syndrome” (aptly coined

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the Gulf War Syndrome), a non-political psychological condition suffered by returning veterans.87 One can identify two main positions regarding the transmission and reconciliation of traumatic memory reflected in the citations quoted above. On the one side, one finds the idea that overcoming trauma—represented as a “syndrome”—is accomplished as much collectively as individually, through placing oneself in a similar situation that caused the trauma and working through the resulting fear and anxiety, say as a pilot who has crashed must fly again as quickly as possible. Here, one can speak of “lessons learned” and of “moving forward” as a return to normalcy. An alternative to this pragmatic working through is presented by Nguyen (2016) within the notion of “just memory,” where trauma is worked through collectively more than individually and in a dialogue with those once considered the enemy. This is the work of truth and reconciliation, where the latter involves full acknowledgement not only of one’s own failures but more importantly of the humanity of the other. In this process, sincerity is essential, and phrases like apology and forgiveness play an important role. With regard to the trauma associated with war, working through transcends the direct experience of a generation to impact future generations depending on how and how well it becomes integrated into the collective memory. We will return to this issue in the concluding chapter. Another aspect concerns the issue of the relationship between civilian policymakers in the State Department and elsewhere and those in the military command. How much control over military operations should civilians have? Senator Barry Goldwater was very clear what he thought about this in his 1985 speech quoted earlier, where he blamed the defeat in Vietnam on civilian policymakers: The lesson of Vietnam is that once civilian policymakers decide on war, the result of placing military operations under the day-to-day management of unskilled amateurs and rejecting the advice of the best military professionals may be loss of the original objective for going to war. Such rules must never again be applied to our armed forces (quoted in Crawford, 2013: 423).

In other words, once initiated, the conduct of war should be left in the hands of the military. 87 Lien-Hang T. Nguyen (2012: 302) speaks of Vietnam being freed of its “America syndrome,” as after the death of Le Duan, the ardent revolutionary who guided the country through the last stages of the war against the United States, reformers in the Vietnamese Communist Party were able to make policy changes more in line with capitalism.

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The performance and current condition of the American military have been key issues in the post-war policy debates. One finds a clear crossover with the historical debate about the initial U.S. mission in the war and whether the military was defeated or merely failed to achieve its goals. This question remains of great concern for military historians, political leaders, and policymakers alike. As previously noted, the distinction between defeat and failure in Vietnam was initially posed as American forces were withdrawing. William Corson, a former Marine colonel, wrote several books about Vietnam after his retirement from active service.88 In The Consequences of Failure (1974), Corson, who blamed South Vietnamese allies as much as American authorities, calls Vietnam a failure rather than a defeat, thus putting much of the blame on policymakers, both civilian and military. Like others in the military command, Corson implied that American fighting forces had not been defeated on the battlefield and argued further that the nation did not experience the devastating sense of defeat suffered, for example, by Germany and Japan after World War II. In the case of the American-Vietnamese War, an entire way of life was not threatened with collapse. On the contrary, as many returning soldiers experienced, the country seemed to go on largely as before, as if the war had never happened. Failure is a more limiting concept than defeat and “not an uncommon experience in the life of a nation” (15). “Failure” can be traced to decisions and policies within specific institutions and relegated to personalities rather than the nation as a whole. Failures are thus easier to incorporate into a heroic national narrative. In the case of Vietnam, the failures could be traced to institutions like the military and the government that oversaw it. Carson and others point to the military command’s failure to control a drug problem, to deal effectively with internal dissent, and to control racial tensions. By encouraging careerism, it produced 88 The f irst, The Betrayal (1968), was nearly cause for his court-martial. As The New York Times wrote in its obituary (July 19 2000), “The book condemned the assumptions that led the United States into a quagmire.” The obituary went on to quote from the book: “The politicians saw in Vietnam, or so they thought at the time, a chance to pull off a cheap victory against the Communists … When their initial judgements about Vietnam were found to be in error, there was no way to confess their error, without risking defeat at the polls.” These views are entirely in line with the orthodoxy amongst historians mentioned above. It also reflected a view held by many in the military, not so much about the “error” that led the country to war as about the “cheap victory” and, for officers at least, its potential impact on their own careers. Many in the military leadership liked to blame any failures on the politicians and policymakers who, it was felt, set limits on their use of the nation’s military might. This fed well into what Kimball (2008) calls a stab-in-the-back rationale used to make failure more palatable and to deflect it from any hint that it might be their own.

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an officer corps more concerned with personal image and advancement than fighting a war (1975: 101ff). Another former officer, William Hauser, made similar points. His America’s Army in Crisis (1973) describes an institution in crisis stemming from an “unwon” war and a growing anti-militarism in the American public arising from it. The American military, Hauser concludes, has lost its sense of “professionalism because of war crimes, corruption, and careerism” (162). Thoroughgoing institutional reform was claimed to be absolutely necessary if the United States was to regain its standing in the world. Decades later, Andrew Bacevich (2013), another Vietnam veteran and military commander turned historian, argued that any discussion of the lessons of war should include a discussion of the costs of war. American policy since the American-Vietnamese War has turned more and more towards militarism in Bacevich’s estimation, something he traces to the failures of that war. For him, this reaction to failure is itself tragic. Along with the obvious material and human costs and the usual cost/benefit analysis, one could add the political and moral costs of the war, something we will discuss in the concluding chapter. Vietnam changed the way the American military looked at itself, how it would recruit and train its personnel, and the tactical understanding of its mission. Such basic tools as the field manuals and handbooks with which the military trained its soldiers had to be rewritten.89 The chaos at the war’s end put an end to the draft and led to the creation of an allvolunteer, professional army as well as a new emphasis on highly mobile “special operations” aimed at limiting the number of American “boots on the ground.” This came not only because the military was in disarray but also because of public concern over war casualties. The post-Vietnam military would not only be mobile and professional, it would also put much more emphasis on technology over manpower. In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act, which required the president to inform Congress 89 Nguyen (2016: 83) writes, “The counterinsurgency f ield manual for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was written by General David Petraeus, who drew on his experiences form the war in Vietnam to refine military techniques and to encourage greater cultural sensitivity among American forces toward the peoples of the lands they occupied.” An earlier accounting of the “debits” and “credits” can be found in Kelly (1991), where the performance of the Special Forces is evaluated. In a report originally written in 1971, the author, a Special Forces officer, recounts the history and mission of this counterinsurgency group from the inside. One lesson that stands out in his analysis is the lack of local knowledge possessed by American forces. Kelly observes that “there was a lack of understanding throughout all ranks on the nature of insurgent wars and of that in Vietnam in particular. Most U.S. Army schools had failed to incorporate many of the lessons learned in the Korean War.” (Kelly, 1991: 163) One can only wonder what he would have to say about the wars that followed Vietnam.

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within 48 hours of sending American troops into combat. It also required Congressional approval or a formal declaration of war for conflicts lasting more than 60 days.90 The “unwon” war in Vietnam left institutional memory traces and, for those with interest and authority, shortcomings to be rectified. As Henry Kissinger recognized, the war exposed the limits of American foreign policy. He noted, “It was America’s first experience with limits in foreign policy, and it was something painful to accept” (quoted in Dumbrell, 2012: 236). Nixon’s former advisor also wrote more prescriptively to future presidential advisors about when not to engage military force based on the mistakes made in Vietnam by his predecessors (Kissinger, 2008).91 The administration of President Jimmy Carter (1977–81) set out to reorient foreign policy based on the “lessons” of Vietnam. Policy failures abounded. One of the most compelling is the lack of transparency about how the country became involved in the conflict and then how this escalated into war. This was exposed with the publication of the Pentagon Papers. There were many miscalculations as well as misrepresentations to add to this account. There was the failure to understand the Vietnamese themselves, due to an ignorance only partially related to viewing the war through the lens of the Cold War.92 American strategy concerned both containing communism and extending the nation’s sphere of influence; the Vietnamese were only in the way and, like Korea, their country simply another place to draw the line. To the extent that the Korean conflict could be called a success, there was a need to explain the difference in outcome. 90 The actual effect of this legislation with regard to giving Congress—and through it the body politic—more control over the initiation of war is controversial, however. Some argue that it has strengthened rather than weakened the power of the President and the executive branch. Crawford (2013: 415) for example, argues that “the Executive branch, and not the Legislative, is today firmly in control over war powers in the United States.” 91 Kissinger’s comments were made in the context of reviewing a book on the “disaster” of Vietnam. He opened his review with the following: “For America, the Vietnam War was the traumatic event of the second half of the last century. Entered into with a brash self-confidence after a decade and a half of creative and successful foreign policy, our engagement ended with America as divided as it had not been since the Civil War.” 92 The Carter administration also reoriented American policy regarding refugees. In 1980, President Carter signed into law a new Refugee Act, which amended existing legislation in a way that directly affected those fleeing Southeast Asia. The new law greatly increased the number of refugees permitted to enter the United States, favoring those who fled from communist countries. As Tang (2015: 38) puts it, “In making his case for the act, Carter took pains to emphasize that the United States had a moral and political obligation to all Southeast Asian refugees because they faced a common persecution by communist governments that U.S. forces had failed to defeat.”

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Related to this was the failure to acknowledge divergent interests between Russia and China; U.S. policymakers and presidents tended to see “the enemy” as a single-minded monolith, with the Vietnamese acting only as a stand-in for larger powers. The complexity of Vietnamese society, with its religious and social divisions, was wiped out in the single designation of the time: communist and non-communist. As the war progressed, even this difference became more and more difficult to see, especially for those on the ground. When the Vietnamese did come into focus, there was an overestimation of the American military power’s capacity to defeat them and an underestimation of the will of the Vietnamese—North and South—to resist. Policymakers took the resilience of enemy forces too lightly while misjudging their own power to appoint and control South Vietnamese leaders. When it became clear to Lyndon Johnson and his inner circle (divided as they might have eventually been) that the war could not be won, the aim became one of saving face, for the Johnson presidency and for the nation’s image vis-a-vis the rest of the world. As a contending superpower, Presidents Johnson and then Nixon thought the United States could not afford defeat, especially at the hands of a poor, rural enemy. Escalation rather than retreat followed. It was here that war turned from tragedy to catastrophe: millions died or were displaced in what was at least privately acknowledged as a lost cause. Some of the mistakes of the Johnson administration have been publicly recognized and discussed by their perpetrators. The prime example—Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the book In Retrospect (1996) and the documentary The Fog of War (2003)—came close to a tearful apology. In his memoirs, McNamara deals directly with the question of “lessons” to be gleaned from this “mistaken” war. He advises future policymakers never to engage in “nation-building” or to enter a war without multilateral deliberation and decision-making. Ever the organization man and rationalist manager, he concludes: “we must learn from Vietnam how to manage limited wars effectively. A major cause of the debacle there lay in our failure to establish an organization of top civilian and military officials capable of directing the task” (McNamara, 1995: 331–2). Writing three years after McNamara, H.R. McMaster places much of the blame for the “disaster” in Vietnam squarely on McNamara’s shoulders, as the Secretary of Defense was part of the political “team” surrounding Lyndon Johnson that made Vietnam an American war. He writes: The disaster in Vietnam was not the result of impersonal forces but a uniquely human failure, the responsibility for which was shared by

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President Johnson and his principal military and civilian advisors. The failings were many and reinforcing: arrogance, weakness, lying in the pursuit of self-interest, and, above all, the abdication of responsibility to the American people. (McMaster, 1998: 334)

Any “lessons” to be gleamed from his account go far beyond the organizational prescriptions outlined by McNamara. As compared to the glories that could be gleaned from previous wars, most particularly World War II, the Vietnam War “left a legacy of lies, errors and impotence” (Dittmar and Michaud, 1994: 6). One of the most recent accounts of America’s “tragic mistake” in terms of Vietnam War policy is by Max Boot (2017), who argues that there were viable alternative opinions around very early on, if one cared to listen. His hero is Edward Lansdale, one of the most influential American operatives working with Vietnamese resistance against the Japanese at the end of World War II. Lansdale returned to Vietnam in 1953 to serve as “policy advisor” to American diplomats and became a confidant of Ngo Dinh Diem and a promoter of the “hearts and minds” approach to the war. As several other recent works argue, Diem’s assassination was for Boot a crucial turning point in a war that could have been won, had been better handled by the American policymakers. Boot’s point is that there were missed opportunities in which the United States could have redefined the meaning of “victory” in Vietnam by focusing more on state-building and adopting some of the ground-up attempts at political education followed by the Viet Cong. Victory would then have encompassed a two-state solution, thus maintaining American power in the region and preventing a humiliating defeat. Whether this “road not taken” was at all viable at the time is subject to ongoing debate. Beyond the Pentagon Papers, revelations about the reasoning behind the prolongation of the war at the Nixon White House have become available with the release of secret tapes. One hears Nixon and his chief national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, acknowledging that military victory is not possible while pondering escalating the bombing in North and South Vietnam and Cambodia.93 It has become clear that the aim of their policy of “Vietnamization” was to provide a “decent interval” between American 93 The bombing of Cambodia and Laos actually began much earlier. Lyndon Johnson approved such measures already in October 1965. The impact on the region was devastating, as it created millions of refugees and helped support oppressive regimes, such as the notorious Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. This was to help produce a different kind of “domino effect” than that devised to justify American engagement in Vietnam in the first place. The bombing between 1965 and 1973 “killed between 150,000 and 500,000 Cambodians” (Tang, 2015: 30). After the American war, the

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withdrawal and the inevitable victory of the North Vietnamese rather than to create a divided country along the lines of Korea (Burr and Kimball, 2015). On the other side of the American war effort, one can find exiled former South Vietnamese military leaders (Ky, 2002; Thi, 2001) who claim that with more American support, their military forces would have secured a two-state solution. For them as well as for some American ‘revisionist’ historians, the retelling of the war takes the form of “what could have been.” Their own story is one of betrayal—by American politicians, Richard Nixon in particular—and misrepresentation. Exiled former military leaders argue that their forces have been falsely portrayed as cowardly and corrupt. Two sides can be extracted from the policy debates about the lessons of Vietnam. On the one hand, there are those who interpret Vietnam through the Cold War policy of containment. For them, the war was one that had to be fought but was fought badly. From this perspective, institutional reform—primarily involving the military—and new strategic policies about engaging in “limited wars” with clear goals and “exit strategies” are among the chief lessons. For those who view the war more as a misreading of the contenting forces in Vietnam, who interpret America’s strategic vision in terms of “global reach” or an “imperial impulse,” the main lesson lies in grasping the limits of American power. For them, the concepts of “overreach” and “overstretch” are central (Dumbrell, 2012: 242ff); the crucial takeaway from this perspective is knowing what the nation’s limits are at any given time. From this standpoint, the American-Vietnamese War was a mistake from the very beginning, and that in itself is a “lesson.” Both sides, however, share the desire to restore the nation’s status as a benevolent superpower, a key player in the “new world order.” Memorial sites and official commemorations of war are patriotic rituals that tend to glorify sacrifice in the nation’s honor. In the case of erecting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, this entailed more a settling of accounts. The “unwon” war undercut the esteem given the military in the eyes of many within the American public. From the official point of view, it might have been better to forget than to commemorate. Soldiers were vilified or ignored upon return; many recall casting their uniforms in the first available trash bin as they re-entered civilian life. Though some of them claimed more abusive treatment (such as being spat upon), this may have been exaggerated (Lembcke, 1998; for counter-examples, see Marlantes, 2011, who was spat upon; Atkinson, 1990, also reports such an incident). Still, Vietnamese invaded Cambodia to remove the Khmer Rouge from power, helping put an end to the ongoing genocide.

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there was little honor in having served; being a Vietnam veteran offers little in the way of political or cultural capital. The struggle for recognition and rehabilitation, which began in earnest after the Memorial project, aimed at encouraging Americans “to remember these soldiers as some of their own, rather than as others who evoked only disgrace and humiliation” (Nguyen, 2016: 48). With the aid of annual ceremonies, official recognition has now been accorded. The Memorial is now a site where individual, collective, and official memories meet (Hass, 1998). As in the design itself, the intention of those who fought for its construction was to separate the politics, policy, and outcome of the war from those who died in its name. There is no indication of a “noble cause” to be found there, no monument to a nation’s greatness, but rather a quiet place to mourn. One could as easily mourn failed national policies as lives lost at this place. President Barack Obama made this clear when he spoke there on Memorial Day in 2012. Addressing the veterans present, he declared, “You were often blamed for a war you didn’t start when you should have been commended for serving your country with valor…. You were sometimes blamed for misdeeds of a few, when the honorable service of the many should have been praised”.94 What these misdeeds were and who carried them out was left to the audience to decide. The process of separating the policies—and those who made them—from the soldiers who carried them out began in the late 1960s when antiwar demonstrators chanted: “Oppose the war, support the troops.”95 As we saw in the official comments quoted in the opening pages of this chapter, a similar strategy was employed even as the final helicopters left Saigon. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger prophesied that “Americans will recall that their armed forces served them well … you accomplished the mission assigned to you by higher authority. In combat you were victorious, and you left the field with honor.” He implied that although the mission may have been flawed, this was not the fault of the soldiers who carried it out. This theme would be carried further by Ronald Reagan, who raised the mission itself to a “noble cause” during the 1980 presidential campaign. Here again, the implication was that the “higher authority” that designed the war may have been guilty of mistakes but the cause remained right and just. This has now become the standard official narration of the war: a flawed but righteous mission. 94 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/us/politics/obama-begins-com. 95 The problematic issue of the relation between the “stay-at-home” civilian population and the soldiers who fight “in their name” is an old one. What responsibility, politically as well as morally, does the civilian population have with regard to their nation’s military actions? Not supporting the “troops” could lead to “stab-in-the back” accusations (Schivelbusch, 2001).

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Reagan recast the war as heroic rather than mere dutiful service. His speech, however, was more about the future than the past; the soon-to-be president was preparing the nation for new conquests and offering the military an opportunity for redemption. The invasion of Grenada in 1983 would be only the first of several test cases used to raise the confidence of the military and regain the trust of the American public. What would have been impossible in 1975 seemed by the mid-1980s to be a distinct possibility. Aiming beyond the audience made up of Veterans of Foreign Wars, Reagan addressed a new generation that, he hoped, was not as wounded by Vietnam. As we discussed in the Introduction, sociologists like to distinguish between collected memory and collective memory, where the former refers to an aggregate of individual recollections about the past and the latter to a project of representing the past as a means to solidify collective identity (Olick, 1999). Biographical memory refers to what individuals remember about the past, including their own lived experience. As such, these are selective and personal recollections “organized in ways that are meaningful and coherent to the narrators” (Hashimoto, 2015: 47). A central point in the sociological approach to memory is that individual recollections are always interpreted in a social and historical context, which influences and shapes it. What individuals remember about their own experience is, in other words, socially conditioned by the experiences of others and by shared representations. What Americans remember about Vietnam, for example, even those who lived through the war, is filtered through and influenced by a wide range of representations such as the accounts of friends and family as well as the narrations encountered through popular culture. This is true even for those veterans with first-hand experience, as one can glean from some recent “collected memories” of the war (for example Stanton, 2017; Wright, 2017). Such is the case with any complex historical occurrence; one’s own experience is always relative and personal, remaining in a sense incomplete. One way to imagine the connection between biography and history is to think in terms of generational experience and the impact that the shared experience of significant events might have on those individuals living through it. Sociological surveys of what individuals remember about a collective past reveal that those who were alive when the American-Vietnamese War was ongoing are more likely to refer to it when asked than those younger or older. This is called a generational effect. Schuman and Scott (1989), for example, investigated what individual Americans recalled about some recent wars that have involved the nation. The most surprising result regarding Vietnam was that those alive during that war were more likely to recall World War II in positive terms than those who actually lived through it. By way of explanation,

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the authors write, “it is primarily the Vietnam generation that looks back on World War II as the ‘good war’ that we fought and won—not those who lived during the war itself!” (Schuman and Scott, 1989: 374). This suggests that living through a time of great turmoil produces both a generational consciousness— a collective identification such as the “Vietnam generation”—as well as a shared nostalgia for another age when things seemed better. Generational effect is a claim about biographical identification: those who lived through an emotionally powerful experience are likely to identify with others similarly placed. With regard to Vietnam, such identification is especially compelling for those who fought in or against the war, such as veterans, refugees, and political activists. Viet Tranh Nguyen (2016) claims that the war has never ended as far as Vietnamese Americans are concerned; many American veterans feel the same way. For this generational group, the trauma of Vietnam remains an open wound, a hurt that will not go away. This hurt will probably fade with time. Perhaps future generations of Americans will look back on Vietnam with nostalgia, something that is today hard to imagine. It is not simply the oft-repeated claim to being the first “televised” war that helps account for Vietnam’s place in the American imaginary. It is also that Vietnam was at the very least a military and political failure, a relatively rare occurrence in the American past and as such difficult to assimilate into its collective mythology. Defeat, as Schivelbusch (2001) writes, produces its own burdens for a nation; failure, as discussed above, creates some of the same effect when it involves such important societal institutions.96 The American-Vietnamese War was a political and military failure not merely in Vietnam but also in the United States. Central organs of the American government routinely distorted information, and authorities deceived the public about the causes and consequences of the war. As this deceit was revealed, a noticeable loss of public faith became apparent. There was a sense that it was American democracy that had failed, not merely the military or specific officials. The failure in Vietnam was thus more than a matter of image and honor, a blow to the United States’ self-representation and perceived standing in the world. It was a failure that struck at the very foundations of collective identity: that taken-for-granted sense of what it meant to be an American. The nation is still living with this failure, and each new military engagement is measured against Vietnam and touted as proof that the nation has gotten over it. 96 Developing this with reference to Japan, Hashimoto (2015) analyzes the various trauma narratives that emerged in response to the emotional devastation caused by defeat. She identifies three, stressing fallen heroes, victims of defeat, or the acts of perpetrators.

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Was Vietnam a moral failure? From a post-war perspective, the answer must be yes, not least because the Vietnamese, both as victim and perpetrator, have been systematically made invisible and silent in the discussion. This point has been made by many Vietnamese Americans, most particularly and powerfully by Nguyen (2016), as we discuss elsewhere in this book. Was it a just war, a good war fought badly, or an outright bad war? One of the narratives constructed by the antiwar movement depicted the war as immoral, characterizing Americans as the aggressor in a battle against a highly over-matched opponent. In this telling, the United States was the perpetrator and Vietnam the victim in a conflict that could be judged criminal as well as immoral. This, in fact, is how the victorious Vietnamese narrate their American war. This narrative has all but disappeared on the American side. So too has the idea that Vietnam was a just war, in which the conflict became interpreted as a heroic struggle against evil. There are few heroes of the Vietnam War celebrated in the United States and no iconic moments such as the raising of a flag on conquered territory. There is certainly no sense of a just end. On the contrary, as we have suggested earlier, the iconic images of the war are of another character entirely. Vietnam can no longer be looked upon as a good war either, a war that brought victory in the pursuit of national interest or more political power and influence to the nation. Vietnam lives on, in part, because what exactly it was (or is) has not been resolved. More significantly, Vietnam lives on because it left the United States fractured and traumatized. America’s Vietnam engagement was a failure that fractured the nation in ways that continue to reverberate in the body politic and more particularly within its most central institutions.

A Cultural Trauma? Was the American-Vietnamese War cause for cultural trauma in the United States? Yes must be the definitive answer. In our Introduction, we listed three criteria to be applied in addressing this question: an event must be understood by a social group as a shared catastrophe, and the identity of the social group must both survive this catastrophe and be re-narrated in light of it. The American war in Vietnam was a central mobilizing and polarizing force in what we have come to call “The Sixties,” a decade that opened to great promise and raised expectations and that ended in the catastrophe of a lost war. In between, Americans experienced the assassination of political leaders and burning cities as the nation came apart around the question of what it meant to be an American in a period of great social crisis. In a dramatic

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discursive process, foundational values and faith in institutions fell like those on the battlefields of Southeast Asia. As the body count mounted, negative attributes filled the national media; governmental reports spoke of a “sick society” and a nation falling apart through collective distrust and violence. The catastrophe of the war is now well-recognized, and the re-narration of what happened and why is still ongoing. As this chapter has demonstrated, the war was not fought in Vietnam alone but in the United States as well, and its aftermath—encapsulated in the question what it means to be a patriotic American—lingers on. While the country was able to regain its superpower status and lost no territory, the war had a devastating impact on the nation’s psyche. The identity of the group—the American people—has survived, but what exactly that identification means, especially with regard to war and blood sacrifice, remains a matter of debate. With the professionalization of the military, there are no longer draft cards to be carried as proof of age or to be burned in protest; the commitment to die in the nation’s service is restricted to a small group who are now routinely thanked on commemorative occasions. The American flag became a contested symbol during the Vietnam War, with each side, those for and those against the war, claiming its glory, as the right to protest clashed with the duty to serve in the struggle to define the meaning of being an American. The taken-for-granted nature of ritual displays of patriotism—the flag salute and the playing of the national anthem at sporting events for example—is no longer uncontested. What began with raised fists by black athletes at the 1968 Olympics has continued in escalating form in the present day. As we pointed out, 1968 marked a significant turning point in the American-Vietnamese War and in American society as a whole. The year began with the Tet Offensive and ended with the election of Richard Nixon as a “peace-candidate” who secretly escalated the war and lied to the American people in the process. Memories of Richard Nixon, if not Vietnam, fill the current political discourse, as Watergate and the possibility of impeachment are part of daily discussion. The attempt to make sense of these events—of which the war was a central aspect as part of the American collective memory and identity—continues.

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4

Journey From the Fall1 Abstract Unlike both the Vietnamese communists and the broader American society, the South Vietnamese experienced at the end of the AmericanVietnamese War the annihilation of their governmental and political institutions, military forces, economic system, and mode of social organization: their state, the Republic of Vietnam, was simply snuffed out. What’s more—and also in contrast to the communists and the rest of the United States—the individuals who would become Vietnamese Americans were displaced from their homeland to a foreign country. The dissolution of the Republic of Vietnam and the dislocation of the Vietnamese to North America led this group to construct a new collective identity over the course of subsequent years, and the present chapter provides an overview of what the Vietnamese Americans consistently narrate as the key moments of their shared experience. Keywords: Vietnam War, cultural trauma, collective memory, cultural sociology, Vietnamese American, narrative identity

How did we get to such a lonely place? … I keep looking toward the past…tracing our journey in reverse…over the ocean…through the war…seeking an origin story that will set everything right. From the graphic novel The Best We Could Do2

It should be clear by this point in the book that although the collective memories of the American-Vietnamese War share the same subject matter, the way those memories are narrated within each of our three main social groups differs substantially. In the case of the Vietnamese Americans, to 1 2

The title of this chapter is taken from the film of the same name by Tran Ham (2007). Thi Bui, 2017: 39-41.

Eyerman, Ron, Todd Madigan and Magnus Ring, Vietnam: A War, Not a Country. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463723084_CH04

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whom we now turn our attention, the most radical differences in terms of content derive in part from two historical peculiarities. First, unlike both the Vietnamese communists and the broader American society, at the end of the war the South Vietnamese experienced the annihilation of their governmental and political institutions, military forces, economic system, and mode of social organization: their state—the Republic of Vietnam—was simply snuffed out. Second, also in contrast to the communists and the rest of the United States, the individuals who would become Vietnamese Americans were displaced from their homeland to a foreign country. As we pointed out in the book’s introduction, when a collectivity understands itself to have suffered a significant calamity, one that fractures its collective identity, then if it is to persist as a collectivity, it must reconstitute its identity. The dissolution of the Republic of Vietnam and the dislocation of the Vietnamese to America led this group over the course of subsequent years to do just that—to construct a new collective identity. Due to these unique circumstances, and because its history is less well known outside of specialists and the community itself, our examination of the VietnameseAmerican collective memory will be divided into two chapters. The present chapter will give an overview of what the Vietnamese Americans consistently narrate as the key moments in their shared experience and identity, and in the chapter that follows we will focus on an examination of the contours of the various arenas of memory within the Vietnamese-American community and the different ways in which the American-Vietnamese War is narrated. To understand the importance of the present chapter, which is meant as something considerably more than a mere historical overview, it is important to recognize that narratives of collective identity frequently comprise a small number of core elements that are repeated over and over across many different modes of representation. Although the individual characters and specific events that populate the novels, news articles, poems, memoirs, films, etc. differ from story to story, the general structure of the collective experience remains the same. In the present case, while we might identify a broad similarity across the whole range of Vietnamese-American narratives of collective identity, these narratives can also be divided into numerous distinct types. Based on the contrasting interpretations of these narratives’ core elements, as well as the way that secondary events and entities are included in or excluded from various representations, we can see how different groups within the Vietnamese-American community favor and identify with these different types of narrative. In his Content of the Form (1990), historiographer Hayden White argues that the act of selecting and omitting certain events to include in a historical

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account is a human act: events in the world do not “come to us already narrativized” (1990: 25). That is, when we choose which events, characters, and institutions to include in our narrative of a particular subject, we are in that moment creating a plot. And this creative act “arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and only can be imaginary” (ibid.: 24). This is by no means to suggest that the events within the narrative are merely imagined or are somehow unreal; it is simply to point out that the specific way we separate these events from the rest of reality, bring them together, and arrange them into a beginning, a middle, and a proper conclusion is a constructive act. (It is also to suggest that the events are subject to alternative constructions.) What’s more, as White goes on to assert, this process of selection, omission, and arrangement is inherently moralizing: “Where, in any account of reality, narrativity is present, we can be sure that morality or a moralizing impulse is present too” (ibid.). That is to say, the decisions as to how a narrative is structured, which elements get selected for inclusion or omission from the story, and how those elements are arranged are decisions guided by collectively held values. As we have demonstrated in the previous two chapters, this intrinsic connection between narrativity and morality reveals itself in the powerful emotional investment that different groups display toward their favored narrative of the American-Vietnamese War and how it fits into their larger narrative of collective identity. Because our goal in this chapter is to show the specifically VietnameseAmerican narrative of their own collective identity—and not an attempt at some objective history of the events that populate the narrative—the sources we draw on are weighted heavily toward the accounts given by Vietnamese-Americans3 who have written or been interviewed about them. These sources are supplemented by other eyewitness accounts as well as more general historical works in order to corroborate and augment the overarching narrative—but never to “correct” it.4 Although what follows is certainly not an attempt at an exhaustive catalogue of the many individual narratives of Vietnamese-American collective identity, it does lay out four of 3 Or in some cases, where we look at events occurring in Vietnam, accounts by former citizens of South Vietnam before they fled the country and settled elsewhere, such as Australia. 4 For example, as we described in previous chapters, the situation in Saigon on April 30, 1975—the day that the Republic of Vietnam surrendered to communist forces—is narrated quite differently by the Vietnamese communists. It is not our intention to arbitrate between the various memory claims made by the different social groups but rather in this case simply to describe the Vietnamese-American narrative of collective identity. For this reason, the communists’ accounts are largely omitted.

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the most prominent episodes present in these narratives, the core elements around which the different types of narratives are constructed. Knowledge of these episodes will give indispensable context to the ways in which the American-Vietnamese War is remembered across the various arenas of memory discussed in the next chapter. In brief, the principal episodes found in most Vietnamese-American narratives of collective identity can be summarized as the following: 1) the fall of Saigon, 2) life under the communist regime in Vietnam, 3) the escape from Vietnam, and 4) life in the United States.

The Fall of Saigon In our discussion of the broader American collective memory, we showed how the entire period of military and political struggle between the belligerent forces is narrated as a traumatic event. However, in the case of the VietnameseAmerican collectivity, the corresponding traumatic event centers on—and in some instances is completely crystalized into—a single moment: the fall of Saigon. In order to understand how this might be so, it will be helpful to begin by pointing out three aspects of how Vietnamese Americans typically understand this event: first, the idea of succumbing to the communists was terrifying for a great many of those in Saigon; it was imagined that such a conquest would not merely herald a change in government and social organization but would constitute an extinction event. Second, despite coming at the end of two decades of nearly continuous warfare, the fall of Saigon is frequently remembered as occurring in a time of relative tranquility. As strange as it might sound to those who were not in Saigon at the time, by 1975 the war had become merely “a backdrop to busy lives” (Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, 2016: 18). And third, the defeat came as a surprise to nearly everyone, a shock amplified by what those from South Vietnam consider their abandonment by the Americans. The following section will review the last days of Saigon in order to show how these three aspects were present, thus laying the foundation for the various cultural trauma narratives of the Vietnamese in America. On March 14, 1975, U.S. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger assured the American public on national television—and by extension, the people of South Vietnam who were also watching intently—that there would be no major communist offensive that year, that there was at that time “no immediate crisis” in South Vietnam (NYT, March 14, 1975).5 And yet just 5 This confident public pronouncement is particularly disappointing, knowing as we do now that on April 2, 1975, at a meeting of the Washington Special Actions Group (which included

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a few weeks later, at midday on April 30, 1975, a tearful President Minh announced the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam. His message was broadcast over the radio and amplified through countless loudspeakers on the streets; a stunned Saigon listened in disbelief. “Everyone was utterly shocked and astonished,” recalls Kim Ha, at the time a 25-year-old who was pregnant with her fourth child. “We had not expected the war to end this way. We had thought it would end in a peace conference like the ones in Geneva” (Ha, 1997: 17). But there would be no more peace conferences. As he announced the nation’s capitulation, President Minh was already in North Vietnamese custody, and the communist flag was flying above the presidential palace.6 In the moment it took to make the declaration, the people of the Republic of Vietnam became—in a term used by many Vietnamese Americans to describe their status—orphans. “The war ended so suddenly that nobody knew what to do,” remembers Phan Quynh Giao, a law court official (Hawthorne, 1982: 185). Bui Van Cao, a South Vietnamese government administrator, says simply, “I felt like a walking corpse … the life I had been trying to build for the past twenty years was at an end” (Hawthorne, 1982: 63). The war that had raged for so long came to its end in what seemed like an abrupt, terror-filled collapse: a few days of unnatural tranquility punctuated by paroxysms of panic and chaos. Vu Thi Kim Vinh, the teenage daughter of an RVNMF officer living in Saigon, recalls her family’s sense of security during the final days leading up to the communist victory: “Even when they came close to Saigon, we didn’t worry, because my father believed that the Communists would never win…. we didn’t think there was a way we could lose; we had a strong army and a strong military” (Hunt, 2010: 196). And it was not just naive civilians who felt invulnerable. Many of those within the military shared the sentiment. Even soldiers who had experienced first-hand the onrush of the communists’ final Spring Offensive7 remained confident. Nguyen Truing Toai, an ARVN soldier whose unit had collapsed before the advancing People’s Army of Henry Kissinger and other high-ranking officials from the State Department, the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the National Security Council). “Those assembled agreed that South Vietnam would fall imminently. The Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, gave a very bleak and accurate report of the situation when he warned, ‘We should be prepared for collapse within three weeks. I wouldn’t count on any more than 45 more days’” (Demmer, 2021: 28). 6 The first flags to be flown over the Presidential Palace after capitulation were those of the National Liberation Front (i.e., the “Viet Cong”). 7 On April 14, 1975, the Vietnamese Communist leadership gave the name “Ho Chi Minh Offensive” to the final push to take Saigon (Hoang Van Thai, 2008: 211).

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Vietnam (PAVN)8 battalions at the end of March, 1975, was captured in mid-April and interned in a re-education camp. Yet even then, as a prisoner of war being held by the communists in South Vietnam, Toai reflects that “we never thought for one minute that Saigon would fall” (Engelmann, 1997: 238). But on April 27, 1975, a handful of PAVN rockets fell on Saigon for the first time in years. The city was jolted from its relative composure, terror-stricken by the previously unthinkable prospect of a massive enemy onslaught. What’s more, the unforeseen possibility of a swift communist victory prompted a sense of dread that far surpassed the potential sorrow of defeat. The nearly 860,000 northerners who had fled to the South in 1954 and 1955 (Kiernan, 2017: 404) were haunted by memories of the violence that had taken place as the communists seized control of their villages. At that time—the period of the Geneva Accords and the partitioning of the country between North and South—the communists implemented a land reform program through which landlords and wealthy farmers were to have their land confiscated and redistributed. As part of the process, tens of thousands of those in the north were publicly denounced during open-air tribunals. They were taunted, demeaned, and sometimes assaulted by their neighbors before the entire community—often for hours at a time—even though many of the accused at these “peoples’ courts” were in fact neither landlords nor wealthy farmers: “the North Vietnamese government targeted the educators, writers, business people” (Bich Minh Nguyen, 2007: 32). But most of the accused were condemned just the same. At least 3,000—and possibly more than 15,000 (Kiernan, 2017: 424)—of those brought before these ad hoc courts were summarily executed during this brief period, and many more were added to that number during the purge of North Vietnamese intellectuals that followed (Lind, 1999: 10–11). Beyond that, the persecution eventually spread southward. As historian Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen explains, The communist “campaign of terror” took hold in the southern countryside in 1956, and accounted for the murder or abduction of more than 25,000 South Vietnamese civilians by 1965. Village officials, medical personnel, social workers, and schoolteachers were specially targeted. (2016: 7)

The 20 years of f ighting since then had done nothing to diminish the animosity that these northerners now living in the South felt toward the communists, and the unexpected arrival of the latter brought with it extreme foreboding. 8

More commonly known in the U.S. as the North Vietnamese Army (NVA).

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Closer to home for the majority of southerners was the massacre of civilians and prisoners of war that occurred when the communists captured the southern city of Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive. Some 2,800 individuals were executed over the course of the three-and-a-half weeks the city was held, while another 3,000 went missing (Willbanks, 2004; Karnow, 1997: 543). The bodies of those who were executed were shoved hastily into mass graves that were discovered after the U.S. and South Vietnamese regained control of the city; and in some instances, there is evidence that those who were piled into these mass graves were still alive at the time of their burial. More recently still, during the ARVN’s hurried and ill-conceived tactical retreats from the central highlands region of South Vietnam in mid-March 1975, there had been widespread reports of mass civilian casualties. Many of the ARVN soldiers in the central highlands had their families stationed with them, and as the unwieldy column of withdrawing trucks, buses, cars, motorcycles, and oxcarts lumbered along the narrow mountain highway, the PAVN did not deign to spare the elderly or children in what became known as “The Convoy of Tears”: “The sound of roaring artillery and small arms, the scream of seriously wounded people at death’s door, and children, created a voice out of hell” wrote a journalist who accompanied the retreat. “Soldiers and civilians were massacred by machine-gun fire after trying to surrender and hundreds of bodies floated down the river” (Vo, 2006: 56). Of the 400,000 civilians who had fled the region, only a small number ever reached the Mekong region of the far south (Herring, 2019: 259). And now, in the aftermath of the fall of Da Nang on March 30, reports were circulated of kill lists carried by the communists: “Government policemen were beheaded, groups of soldiers were tied together and killed with grenades, and security personnel were liquidated” (ibid.: 58). Beyond the memories of those who had personally witnessed communist violence and the second-hand accounts of neighbors and family members who had encountered the same, the fear of communist brutality was continuously stoked throughout the war by both the South Vietnamese and U.S. governments, either directly or through state-controlled mass media (Veith, 2012: 472–473). Aged 11 at the end of April 1975, Trinh Quang Do recalls the horror he felt as the communists closed in on Saigon: “The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) did not have any qualms about shooting at civilians before, so why should they care now? I still remembered vivid images of the massacres of civilians they carried out during the Tet Offensive of 1968 and the Easter Offensive…of 1972, that I had seen on TV” (2004: 3–4). And this fear was exacerbated not only through the sensationalized reporting of actual atrocities but also by means of dire predictions. A 41-year-old

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Vietnamese woman—a high school teacher from Saigon—recalls one of the rumors that was rampant about what would happen should South Vietnam fall to the communists: They said that they are going to give each single girl a huge sack containing a sick or handicapped communist soldier to take care of him, and to marry him, or if the men soldiers “need,” the single girls have to give. The children will belong to the government. I rather die than doing these things. (Kelly, 1977: 17)

These speculations of forcing unmarried South Vietnamese women into relationships with communists were widespread and set off a desperate rash of weddings in the South during the final days of April (Snepp, 2002: 415). But the fear of what would unfold in the event of a communist victory was not only stoked by the hearsay that sprung from the civilian population; it was also actively generated by both the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned that all those associated with either the South Vietnamese or U.S. government were “seriously endangered” (Willbanks, 2004: 257), while Defense Secretary James Schlesinger anticipated that “as many as 200,000 Vietnamese might be massacred in a Communist takeover” (ibid.: 258); Vice President Rockefeller raised the stakes when he warned Congress that “if the Communists take over … one million people [would be] killed—they are going to be liquidated” (Lewis, NYT, 2/3/1975). And if this were not enough, the U.S. also broadcast wholly fictitious “black propaganda” directly to the people of South Vietnam, information disseminated under the guise of coming from the communists themselves. On the Japanese island of Okinawa, the CIA had established a secret radio transmitter that broadcast what claimed to be a Vietcong radio station located in South Vietnam, “Red Star Radio,” promising vengeance to those of South Vietnam in the event of a communist victory (Manyon, 1975: 72). But after the rockets fell on Saigon during the morning of April 27, despite the pent-up terror among the population, there was an eerie calm throughout most of the city. The hours passed quietly, and people began to realize the hammer had not struck; the apocalyptic assault had not commenced. A weird kind of optimism was in the air, an optimism not contained to the general public but prevalent throughout all levels of the government. Up until about a week earlier, then-President Thieu had counted on emergency military support from the U.S. He had been assured by President Ford—just as he had been assured by President Nixon before him—that

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the U.S. would come to the assistance of South Vietnam should the country become seriously endangered. In mid-March, as the North Vietnamese began to launch a significant foray into the heart of South Vietnam, President Thieu had ordered a series of military maneuvers that, according to General Nguyen Tien Hung, Thieu believed would “pressure the U.S. government to stage a rescue” (Tran and Arevian, 2009: 189). Indeed, Thieu “continued to believe that the United States would intervene up to the last minute of his presidency” (ibid.: 187). Over the latter part of March and early April 1975, as the South Vietnamese military began to collapse before the advancing North Vietnamese, President Ford lobbied Congress for an additional $722 million in military aid to South Vietnam; but Congress balked at the request. President Ford stated that even now—on April 16—he was “convinced” that if the military support were granted, “the South Vietnamese could stabilize the military situation in South Vietnam today” (NYT, 4/17/1975). But the following day, the Senate Armed Services Committee rejected any additional military support to South Vietnam. The sense of abandonment within the South Vietnamese military was intense. General Tran Van Don reports that Within the ranks of younger officers, there were many who harbored considerable resentment at the United States for failing to live up to promises made at the time of the signing of the cease-fire agreement [i.e., the Paris Peace Accords signed on January 27, 1973]. Some planned to seize as hostages about one thousand Americans, including the ambassador, his staff, and the military attaché. (Tran, 1978: 245)

In light of the fact that all expectations of a military solution were now shattered, a new approach was put into play. On April 20, the U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Vietnam, Graham Martin, met with President Thieu and advised him that the sole means of halting the advance of the North Vietnamese offensive was through a political settlement with Hanoi. But there was a catch: the only public figure with whom Hanoi would negotiate was General Duong Van Minh (Tran and Arevian, 2009: 246). Over a decade earlier, in 1963, Minh had been president of South Vietnam for a short period following the coup he led against President Diem. However, after being deposed by a second coup in January of 1964, he had spent much of the intervening years in exile. Recently, in stark contrast to President Thieu, Minh had been a vocal advocate of compromise with the communists. Furthermore, his own brother was a general in the North Vietnamese Army. Incensed by what he saw as American perfidy, President Thieu resigned on

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the following day, and in his televised speech he railed tearfully against the betrayal by the United States: “you have let our combatants die under the hail of shells. This is an inhumane act by an inhumane ally” (Hunt, 2010: 190). After the briefest of intervals, during which Thieu’s vice-president assumed the presidency for one week, Minh was sworn in to office on April 28 in concession to the communists’ demands. Despite the lack of any forthcoming American military support, Ambassador Martin remained convinced that the U.S. could stay in Saigon through July or August of 1975 (Snepp, 2002: 448). Indeed, with Minh’s ascension to the presidency, Martin believed they were on the verge of a settlement between North and South; he even cabled his wife, who was at that time in Bangkok, and had her return to Saigon (Snepp, 2002: 448). Negotiations were ongoing, and eliminating the last vestiges of the prior regime was seen as a necessary sop to the communists. These political maneuverings and diplomatic deliberations were happening while in fact all around the outskirts of the city the noose was tightening. Over 130,000 communist troops were at that point poised to attack Saigon (Willbanks, 2004: 271), and there was little left of the South Vietnamese armed forces to put up a defense. Indeed, unbeknownst to the U.S. and South Vietnamese, hundreds of PAVN commandos had already infiltrated Saigon along with the confused masses of refugees who had been streaming into the city over the past few days (ibid.: 274). Incredibly, even on April 28, there were still many Vietnamese in Saigon who did not recognize that the country’s collapse was imminent. Indeed, on the morning of the 28th, ARVN General Tran Van Nhut was ordered to report to the deputy prime minister and minister of defense. “When I arrived, [the deputy prime minister] said: ‘The situation is wonderful now. General Duong Van Minh has become president. He will stay here and work, and later, when the situation stabilizes, we can have anything we want’” (Tran and Arevian, 2009: 205). Hoa Tran, a provincial governor, recalls the utter lack of urgency he felt in those final days: “I didn’t think the Americans would leave Saigon. I thought maybe they could keep Saigon neutral. The day we left our country, I played tennis” (Morrison and Zabusky, 1980: 426). Elsewhere in the city, although her husband wanted to flee to the ships weighing anchor in Saigon’s harbor, Kim Ha writes in her memoirs that she convinced him that they and their family should stay: “Why should we have to leave our country while the country was in peace?” (Ha, 1997: 16). But by the next day, after a night spent beneath the bed, their children screaming over the pandemonium of communist shelling, Ha notes ruefully that “we changed our minds, realizing we must go if we did not want to be killed” (1997: 16). But it was too late.

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On the evening of April 28, a North Vietnamese air strike—one of the only such strikes of the entire war—hit the Tan Son Nhut Airport, located on the northern edge of Saigon. Five recently captured South Vietnamese aircraft, led by a South Vietnamese pilot who had defected to the North, were used in the attack and destroyed numerous aircraft parked at the airport. Hai Van Le, a Republic of Vietnam Air Force pilot recalls the situation: “I was at Tan Son Nhut on April 28 when North Vietnamese pilots bombed us … It didn’t frighten me at all. In 1968 during Tet, the Communists had come into the city, too, and we pushed them out. So this was nothing new to us” (Engelmann, 1997: 248). Le and his comrades remained upbeat: the consensus was still, after all, “How could we lose?” (Engelmann, 1997: 248). However, this aerial assault was followed in the early morning hours of the 29th by a far more threatening and sustained rocket and artillery fire. One of the first rockets to fall destroyed an American C-130 transport aircraft as it prepared to take on a group of evacuees. Another landed a direct hit on a fuel depot and sent a ball of fire into the sky that could be seen throughout the city. Still another hit a guard post killing two U.S. Marines, the last U.S. combat deaths of the war. The airport fires, with their thick plumes of black smoke, would continue burning for days as the concussions from the incoming rounds shook Saigon with every burst. Later that morning—a mere 24 hours before columns of North Vietnamese tanks came rumbling through the streets of Saigon unopposed—Ambassador Martin had yet to signal the final evacuation. “I still think Hanoi intends to negotiate,” the ambassador told CIA Station Chief Thomas Polgar (Snepp, 2002: 482). The U.S. had four evacuation options: one relied on American commercial ships picking up passengers from the docks of Saigon, and the others using aircraft flying out of Tan Son Nhut Airport. Although a fair number of non-essential American personnel and some South Vietnamese nationals had departed over the past couple weeks on fixed-wing aircraft, there were still about 1,000 Americans in Saigon, along with an estimated 100,000 “high-risk” Vietnamese (i.e., those with close ties to the U.S. government). But if one included their family members, the number of Vietnamese who were in danger of communist reprisals was upwards of one million individuals (Frank Snepp, cited in Ellison, 1981; Karnow, 1997: 681; William Stearman, cited in Demmer, 2021: 29). Indeed, Henry Kissinger reported to President Ford that including U.S. citizens, third-country nationals, and high-risk Vietnamese, a total of 1.6 million were candidates for evacuation (NSC Meeting, April 9, 1975: 26). Ambassador Martin had reasoned that to signal an evacuation would trigger a panic, something he was determined to avoid. As long as the South

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Vietnamese saw that their Americans allies were present, so the thinking went, optimism would be reinforced and morale would remain high. Thai Di, a secretary in Saigon, recalls that “Until the 29th of April, we still believed we would win” (Hawthorne, 1982: 211). As for Ambassador Martin, it wasn’t until he had driven out to the airport to personally assess its condition that he finally understood the gravity of the situation. The runways were cratered and littered with jettisoned fuel tanks, abandoned and damaged aircraft, and unexploded ordinance. North Vietnamese troops had already penetrated the airport perimeter, and sporadic artillery and rocket fire continued to fall. No more fixed-wing aircraft would be able to fly out of Tan Son Nhut. The Ambassador contacted Kissinger in Washington and acquiesced to “Option IV”: the immediate and total evacuation of all American citizens and high-risk South Vietnamese by helicopter. Around noon on April 29, the coded emergency evacuation signal went out over the American Armed Forces Radio: “The temperature in Saigon is 105 degrees and rising” said the broadcaster, and then, over the din of explosions and small-arms fire that echoed through the city, came the soothing sounds of “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.” The problem was that the evacuation plans had not been updated to account for the need to move such a large number of people in a short period of time, and now that Tan Son Nhut Airport was under attack and the city surrounded, none of the pre-arranged options were appropriate. Helicopters it would have to be, but they would have to lift off from the U.S. Embassy, not the airport. There were numerous points throughout the city that were hastily designated as points of extraction, and embassy staff made frantic phone calls to let their American and South Vietnamese colleagues know where to go. Bus convoys fanned out across the city to pick individuals up and take them to a number of rendezvous points; from there, CIA helicopters were to bring the individuals to the embassy for final transfer to the U.S. naval ships amassed off the coast. Once the buses and helicopters began scrambling to their extraction sites and bringing people to the American Embassy, all of Saigon knew the end was at hand. As word spread, thousands upon thousands of Vietnamese descended on the U.S. Embassy, desperately trying to gain entrance with the hope of being evacuated. As previously noted, the extra 130 U.S. Marines that had been called in to support the embassy’s evacuation helped keep the crowds at bay, and in desperation, parents began pleading with the soldiers inside the embassy gates to take their children, attempting to pass infants and toddlers over the barbed wire.9 9 A distressingly similar scene was repeated in 2021 as the United States formally ended its longest war. As the U.S.-backed Afghan government quickly (and unexpectedly) collapsed

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The delay in initiating the final evacuation meant that the screening of high-risk versus low-risk Vietnamese was haphazard. In the end, many of those evacuated were simply friends or acquaintances of GIs: tailors, cooks, bottle-washers, barmaids, domestic servants—those who were in no particular danger of targeted reprisals—were evacuated, while many CIA translators, police officers, high-ranking military personnel, Vietcong defectors, and government officials were left behind. As the situation grew ever more fraught and it began to occur to people that they would not be able to make it out of the country, the sale of sleeping pills and tranquilizers spiked (NYT, 4/24/1975), and many South Vietnamese began spontaneously committing suicide. British journalist Julian Manyon, who remained in Saigon through the end of the war, reports how a former National Police Chief chose to die: “As the first communist troops entered Saigon he had gone to the war monument in front of the National Assembly and shot himself through the head” (1975: 133). Similarly, Frank Snepp, the last CIA strategist to leave Vietnam, describes how General Pham Van Phu, “in a neatly pressed dress uniform, campaign medals glittering on his chest” (2002: 503), paid a final visit to the American Defense Attache, General Homer Smith. Phu “executed a slow formal salute, turned on his heel, and walked out … A short while later, Phu put a bullet through his head” (ibid.: 504). While “many-lower ranking officers and enlisted soldiers” (Veith, 2012: 496) also took their own lives at this time, perhaps more shocking still are the reports of individuals who in their despair succumbed to murder-suicide, like the father who “poisoned his entire family, shot everyone, then blew his own brains out” (Vo, 2006: 72). As the final American helicopter lifted from the rooftop of the U.S. embassy shortly before 8:00AM on April 30, 1975, some 420 South Vietnamese remained nervously waiting on the grounds. Among the thousands who had thronged the walls of the compound, these individuals had been able to produce documentation of their connection to the U.S. government and had been permitted onto the grounds and promised emergency evacuation. Now they sat and waited, searching the sky for the rescue aircraft that would never come. Meanwhile, without the presence of the U.S. Marines who had been keeping the crowds outside the embassy from overrunning the compound, thousands surged through the gates and began ransacking before advancing Taliban forces, the American military was forced to hastily flee from its only remaining presence in Afghanistan, the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. Over an 18-day period, some 123,000 Americans and Afghan allies were airlifted while tens of thousands more surrounded the airport in what was ultimately a futile effort to escape.

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the place. Anything that wasn’t bolted down—and much that was—was hauled off through the disordered crowds: chairs, desks, lecterns, refrigerators, lamps, sofas, curtains, water fixtures, ovens. Debris quickly began accumulating around the embassy, and thousands of pages of partially shredded classified documents were strewn across the surrounding streets and into the branches of trees—paper meant for embassy incinerators but blown from the staging areas by the wash of the helicopters. Mattresses were tossed from upper stories and heaped languidly over the backs of scooters that zig-zagged between the scavengers running pell-mell around the embassy grounds. Gun shots cracked sporadically around the area, and people wept openly in the streets. While people continued to loot the American embassy and other abandoned U.S. sites, the situation at the Saigon dockyard had sunk to absolute havoc. South Vietnamese soldiers fought with civilians and each other for space on the last few ships readying to flee the city; shots were fired into crowds, and people were run over, crushed, and drowned. Elsewhere, South Vietnamese Air Force pilots commandeered planes and helicopters, picked up what family and friends they could, and flew to Thailand or out to the South China Sea in the hope of locating the U.S. Seventh Fleet. The sky was swarming with aircraft as pilots picked up passengers from suburban streets and front yards. Along the coast, thousands made away with whatever boats they could find, regardless of their seaworthiness, motoring east in the faith that they would be rescued by the Americans. These were the first of those who would later become known as “the boat people.” Scattered throughout the city at the rendezvous points designated by the U.S., clusters of high-risk Vietnamese remained huddled and waiting in groups small and large: 60 employees of the U.S. Information Agency lingered at a private residence; 250 supply staff at a logistics compound; 70 CIA translators at a hotel; 150 senior police officers at their headquarters; and most famously, the scores of people stretched out along the ladder and rooftop of the CIA’s Saigon apartments, a group who made it onto the front page of The New York Times but not onto the helicopter perched iconically atop the structure. They had all been guaranteed passage out of Vietnam by the U.S., but in the haste of the impromptu airlift they had been left behind. With no hope of escape, many of the civilians resigned to returning home to destroy anything that might reveal their relationship to the Americans, including books, documents, and family photographs. South Vietnamese soldiers began not only discarding their weapons and military identification but also stripping from their uniforms entirely and casting off anything that might expose their role in the military. Many of those who were present on

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that final day recall the thousands of boots, rifles, and fatigues that were strewn haphazardly across the empty streets, as well as the small bands of frightened young men wandering through the city in their underwear. The loss and humiliation was complete. Saigon had given up the ghost: “Smoke from a thousand fires soiled the sky, and the broad avenues, always choked with traffic, were vacant and littered with rubbish” (Ky, 2002: 342). Kim Ha speaks for nearly all those aligned with South Vietnam when she recalls that moment: “On April 30, 1975, I listened with astonishment as Vietnamese President Duong Van Minh raised his voice on the air to surrender to the Vietnamese Communists” (1997: 5).

The First Wave of Refugees Closely associated with the Fall of Saigon in the Vietnamese-American collective memory is the exodus from Vietnam. As one of the core elements of their narrative of collective identity, it is important to understand how it is that these Vietnamese became American. The Republic of Vietnam had a population of about 20 million in April 1975, and while the numbers who emigrated to the U.S. made up “the largest population movement to the U.S. since the immigration of Jews during and after WWII” (Pelaud, 2011: 10), these émigrés still accounted for only a small percentage of Vietnam’s population; 95% of the population remained in Vietnam. There were very particular forces affecting this prolonged period of emigration, and these forces did not make themselves felt equally among all of those of the former Republic of Vietnam, nor did they impact the whole population at the same time. Before 1950, there were only about 300 Vietnamese living in the U.S. (Hung Cam Thai, 2008: 4). As the U.S. became more involved in the war, it began bringing South Vietnamese over for specialized training and education programs, and as American servicemen began marrying Vietnamese women, these spouses began to emigrate to the U.S. as well. However, by 1975, there were still fewer than 18,000 Vietnamese in America (Hung Cam Thai, 2008: 4). Remarkably, by 2019, the number of Vietnamese in the U.S. had grown to approximately 2.2 million (Pew Research Center, 2021). In its most stylized account, the exodus of Vietnamese—over half of whom ended up in the U.S.—can be divided into three waves. The first wave consisted of those who fled during the process of Saigon’s collapse: throughout April and the first few days of May 1975. Many were evacuated by the American government during this time, but others had arranged for commercial and chartered flights before the closing of Tan Son Nhut Airport. More than

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this, however, were the improvised departures using RVNMF ships and helicopters and even merchant marine barges and fishing vessels. Those Vietnamese airlifted out on American helicopters from the U.S. embassy in Saigon accounted for about 5,600 people, but all told there were about 130,000 refugees during this initial wave (Demmer, 2021: 6). One of the early evacuation programs, announced by President Ford on April 3, 1975, was designated “Operation Baby Lift.” This consisted of some 30 planned flights on commercial and military fixed-wing aircraft, and as the name suggests, the passengers were infants and young children. Specifically, these were children taken from the large number of orphanages around Saigon. As the communists advanced on the city, there was fear in all corners that there would be a terrible protracted battle, so a number of international children’s organizations and adoption agencies advocated for getting these children out of the war zone. But this was more than a humanitarian mission: there was also the Ford administration’s calculation that by conducting a desperate, high-profile evacuation of orphans, the U.S. Congress would at last be moved in support of its foundering ally. Needless to say, this support was not forthcoming. In spite of its failure to cajole Congress into coming to the aid of South Vietnam, Operation Baby Lift flights continued until the end of April 1975, when the shelling of Tan Son Nhut Airport rendered it unusable. By that time, some 4,000 children had been flown to other countries, including about 2,500 to the U.S. Tragically, the very first flight, taking off from Tan Son Nhut Airport on April 4, crashed shortly after takeoff. The plane suffered a major malfunction, and as it tried to return to Tan Son Nhut Airport, it landed in a rice paddy, broke apart, and caught fire. Although about half of those on board survived, a total of 138 people died, including 78 children. There has been a great deal of controversy over the ethics of this operation in the years since 1975, but the concerns were voiced from the very beginning. On April 7, 1975, Premier Pham Van Dong of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, the North Vietnamese state) claimed that the U.S. plan to evacuate Vietnamese children was a crime (cited in Aguilar San-Juan, 2009: 175n.22), and on April 12, an editorial in England’s Manchester Guardian Weekly stated that Operation Baby Lift “starkly reveals how many Americans still implicitly believe it is better for Vietnamese to become Americans that [sic] to remain Vietnamese, as is their birthright, if it means living under a government which America does not like” (cited in ibid.: 19). On top of these assertions that the orphans should have been left in Vietnam, it has also become clear that many of the children who were evacuated were not, in fact, orphans; their parents or close relatives were still alive and in Vietnam.

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In addition to the evacuations that occurred by means of American aircraft, there were also many who escaped during the last days of April by boat. In fact, a majority of those who fled Vietnam at that time did so not by air but by sea. On the 29th of April, in the midst of the disorderly evacuation by U.S. military helicopter, the American Embassy arranged for a number of barges to take refugees from the docks of Saigon out to the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet positioned in the South China Sea. The total capacity of these barges was 16,000, but because of the chaos caused by the approaching North Vietnamese Army and lack of adequate preparation on the part of the American and South Vietnamese governments, the barges waited in vain at the docks; only about 6,000 people made their way to the mostly empty vessels (Kelly, 1977: 28), while just a few blocks away, at the American Embassy, thousands were being left behind. Still more were able to make their escape by boarding South Vietnamese naval craft; during the first week of May, 26 vessels flying the Republic of Vietnam flag and carrying 30,000 passengers arrived at the U.S. naval base at Subic Bay in the Philippines (Chan, 2006: 63); however, by that time the Republic of Vietnam had ceased to exist, and the Philippine government no longer recognized the RVN national colors. With great sadness, on May 7, 1975, the RVN ships lowered their flags one last time and were forced to hoist the American flag in order to dock in Philippine territory. As a ship is considered sovereign territory of the nation whose flag it bears, the lowering of the colors represented the final, tragic disappearance of the Republic of Vietnam to the sailors onboard. During the pandemonium of the Republic of Vietnam’s final day, many South Vietnamese pilots took fate into their own hands. Believing the end was at hand and fearing reprisals of a victorious PAVN, many commandeered military aircraft and fled the country. While a few flew to Thailand, many others headed out to the open sea. There were numerous cases where helicopter pilots flew from an airbase straight to their homes, touching down in the middle of the street or a suburban yard just long enough to pack their families onto the small craft before lifting back up over a Saigon in chaos. Most pilots, once they made it to the South China Sea and out of range of PAVN fire, had no clear idea where a U.S. Navy ship might be located. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy, who had moved the Seventh Fleet just outside of Vietnam’s territorial waters, had sent word for the Vietnamese pilots to fly their helicopters out to the fleet in order to prevent the hardware from falling into the hands of the enemy. But many Vietnamese pilots did not get the message, and the Seventh Fleet really had no idea what to expect in terms of who would try to make it to their ships. A large number of South

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Vietnamese helicopters managed to locate the fleet, but many of the ships had only a single, small helicopter landing pad. Although the vast number of pilots had never landed at sea, they circled the ships and one by one began touching down. The problem, of course, was that the number of helicopters far outnumbered what the ships could accommodate. After each helicopter landed and was evacuated, U.S. Navy personnel would literally push the craft by hand straight off the side of the deck and into the sea, making space for the next helicopter to land. All of this was captured on film and viewed by audiences around the world. In some cases, however, helicopters found U.S. Navy ships that were not equipped to handle their landing. In these cases, the pilot would hover above the deck while his passengers—including children and the elderly—leapt out of the aircraft to the ship below. Then, with his passengers safely disembarked, the pilot would fly his helicopter next to the ship, hover just a few feet above the surface of the sea, and in images caught dramatically on news film, jump from the helicopter as it came crashing into the waves nearly on top of him. In one particular case, a South Vietnamese pilot approached the USS Kirk in a twin-rotor Chinook helicopter much too large to land on the ship. Hugh Doyle, the ship’s chief engineer, recalls the scene: the huge chopper positioned itself above the deck, “opened up its rear door, and starts dropping people out of it. It’s about 15 feet off the fantail! There’s American sailors back on the fantail, catching babies like basketballs!” (Shapiro, NPR, 8/31/2010). In some instances, as helicopters attempted to touch down on the deck of a ship, they collided. In one case, one of the helicopters whose pilot had just leapt into the sea veered back toward the ship and slammed into its side. Petty Officer Lawrence Dickerson of the USS Blue Ridge recollects the incident: as the South Vietnamese pilot bailed out, the helicopter swerved and bore into the ship’s starboard side, “showering the main decks and helo-pad with debris hitting an offloading chopper and causing its rotors to shatter and shower us with more debris” (CBS News, April 25, 2000); 25 years later, Dickerson still carried some of that shrapnel in his body. Even at this point, on April 30, there were still Vietnamese soldiers who either did not realize or refused to believe the war was over. Some had heard neither the radio announcement of President Minh ordering the armed forces to stand down nor the broadcast of his unconditional surrender. That afternoon, Nguyen Phuc Thieu, a second lieutenant in the Air Force of the Republic of Vietnam, received word that the Americans had called for pilots to fly their craft to the Seventh Fleet. He and several of his men crowded into two helicopters and flew out to the South China

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Sea, and with only five minutes of fuel remaining in their aircraft, spotted the ships. We thought that when we landed on the American ships, we would be resupplied and then regroup. Then, we thought, we would go back to Vietnam and fight and the Americans would go with us. We thought they were calling us out in order to make new plans for a counter attack. And that sounded like a good idea. We were still ready to fight. But as soon as we had landed on the ship, American Marines took away our weapons. We thought that was very strange. Then they led us to another part of the ship. And then we watched them start to push our helicopter over the side. Some of our men started shouting and they tried to run over to stop the Americans. But a Marine stopped our men and said, “Stand back, boys. The war is over.” Some of the men started to cry. And when they saw our helicopter fall into the sea and they knew we would not be going back to Vietnam, some of them tried to jump into the sea. (Engelmann, 1997: 247)

Throughout the days following April 30, 1975, the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet was deluged with Vietnamese fleeing the country’s new regime. After the collapse of central Vietnam earlier in the month, 40,000 of the South Vietnamese refugees from the area were relocated to Phu Quoc, a small island some 60 miles off the coast of Vietnam (Vo, 2006: 74). Phu Quoc had a minor South Vietnamese naval base and a prison for enemies of the Republic of Vietnam,10 but other than that it was only home to a small fishing community. As news of the Republic of Vietnam’s surrender reached the island, a significant number of the refugees and local population mobilized in an effort to reach the Seventh Fleet. Small RVN naval patrol craft loaded on as many passengers as possible, as did many of the island’s fishing boats. As the evacuation got underway, RVNMF aircraft continued to land on the island from nearby provinces. The boats motored toward the open sea and were soon rewarded by encountering an American naval cargo ship standing by to pick up any refugees they might find. At that point, there followed a dangerous transfer of passengers from the small Vietnamese boats, where the refugees young and old were forced to climb ladders that rose and fell with the ocean swells, scramble up the swinging nets hanging 10 The prison was constructed by the French colonial government in 1949 and was used to imprison enemies of the colonial government. Later, under the Republic of Vietnam, it was used to detain suspected communists; the South Vietnamese government has been widely reputed to have engaged in systematic torture and abuse of its inmates.

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over the sides of the American ship, and leap between the boats. Carolee Tran, an eight-year-old whose father, an ARVN soldier, was still in Saigon at the time, recalls the panic on April 30, 1975 as the refugees attempted to move from a small fishing craft to the U.S. ship off the coast of Phu Quoc: We had to jump from boat to boat, and I could see dead people in the water who had missed (as they jumped) … I remember hearing a loudspeaker, telling people to calm down, women and children were going to get on first. And I could see men trying to get on, and they were kicked off by Navy men, and got crushed between the ship and the scow. (Hudson, The Davis Enterprise, 5/29/2015)

For those refugees who risked everything to escape the new regime, merely making it onto an American helicopter or ship was hardly the end of their ordeal. The first place that most of those in the initial wave of refugees ended up was a refugee camp, such as those that were hastily set up in Subic Bay or on the tiny U.S. island territory of Guam. Before the refugees’ arrival, Guam had a population of 80,000; then almost overnight some 60,000 refugees were brought to the island (Vo, 2006: 77). The refugees were sheltered in tents with groups of strangers, and while food and clothing was supplied, sanitation became a serious problem. Such a large influx of people produced some three million gallons of sewage daily, and it simply could not all be processed by the island’s waste-treatment infrastructure; human fecal matter could be found floating in the surrounding ocean and washing up onto shore (ibid.). What’s more, some of the refugees brought with them cases of Dengue fever, a disease spread by mosquitos. The medical facilities and efforts to spray insecticides were not able to cope with the spread of the disease, one that resulted in the death of many of the children in the camp (ibid.). Beyond the physical stresses, the emotional trauma of having left not only their homeland behind but also vulnerable family members weighed heavily on many of the refugees. In fact, about 1,900 escapees at the Guam refugee camp decided they wanted to return to Vietnam. They were given a refurbished cargo ship, and with 1,546 passengers, the ship motored back to their homeland. The Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) accused the repatriated refugees of being CIA agents, and they were promptly sent to re-education camps upon their arrival (Chan, 2006: 64). Refugees who did not make it to a U.S. camp often fared worse in their country of first asylum. Thanh-Nam piloted his small fishing boat to Thailand, but the passengers on his boat were not allowed to disembark. They were compelled to anchor at a dilapidated pier and were confined to the

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boat for three months (Hawthorne, 1982: 258). Han-Ahi-Van and the group with whom he escaped ended up in Malaysia, where they were bused to an isolated wharf. The authorities towed their boat to the wharf and insisted that the refugees get back into the boat, but the refugees were warned by representatives of the Red Cross not to comply, “for they said that if we did, the Malaysian authorities would trick us, and we would be towed out to the sea, and left” (ibid.: 271). Refusing to board their boat, they were not allowed onto the mainland and were deprived of necessities: “We had to stay on the wharf without any shelter, and during the day we suffered from the sun, and at night from the cold dew. We had no tents at all—just a few sheets of plastic and a few wet blankets” (ibid.). Sometimes the people were simply placed in a large, unfurnished warehouse and treated like prisoners, often beaten by the police that guarded the camp, such as the case of some of the refugees who landed in Hong Kong (ibid.: 285). While a number of different nations from around the world volunteered to accept quotas of refugees from the growing assortment of camps and holding areas, those quotas were quite limited and accounted for only about ten percent of the total number of Vietnamese seeking sanctuary: the refugee crisis was largely seen as an American problem (Chan, 2006: 65). The refugees were typically processed at these camps and then quickly dispersed across the globe with little or no say regarding the country to where they were sent. In the U.S., four reception centers were set up in the states of California, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Arkansas to handle the influx of immigrants. From there, volunteer organizations and faith communities worked to recruit American sponsor families for each Vietnamese family. These sponsors were asked to assist Vietnamese adults with seeking employment, help enroll the children in school, and generally facilitate the navigation of American culture and social systems, such as grocery shopping and bill paying. Although it seemed interminable to some, all of the Vietnamese refugees of this first wave who made it to the U.S. were placed with American sponsors by the end of 1975 and resided in communities across all 50 states.

Life Under Communism and the Second and Third Waves of Refugees As the last of the first wave of refugees departed their homeland, the communist armed forces descended on Saigon and took up positions in strategic locations. The few pockets of ARVN resistance were put down handily, and fighting within Saigon was minimal. As the People’s Army marched

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through the streets in the days following the surrender of South Vietnam, it was the f irst time that the two opposing forces had the opportunity to size each other up in circumstances other than combat. As the panic of April 29 and 30 subsided, many of the civilians of Saigon came out to glimpse the enemy their country had been f ighting for so many years. At first, the reactions were mostly that of relief and mild condescension. The communist soldiers were very young and wore ill-fitting uniforms and sandals made of automobile tires. Saigon’s children gathered around them and peppered them with questions about the North, to which the communists are purported to have replied that whatever they had in the South, the North had more and better. Son Ha, a former medical officer in the ARVN, describes the situation this way: During these first few days, the people surreptitiously told one another of the boastfulness, the stupidity of the newly arriving soldiers of occupation. For instance, they were seen to use the water from the toilet bowl to wash their faces and cook their meals; they lit fires in the middle of the houses; they put their fish into the toilet bowl and pushed the button, thinking that they could wash the fish that way. (Hawthorne, 1982: 137)

For many in South Vietnam at this time, there was a sense of consolation and even happiness. The long war was over, the dreaded bloodbath had failed to materialize, and the victors, after all, were Vietnamese like them. But there was also a great deal of uncertainty among those of the former Republic of Vietnam about what would happen to them—especially the military veterans and government functionaries. On the other hand, the communist leadership was concerned about potential threats from the many erstwhile RVNMF officers and civil service personnel who had disappeared into the civilian population. At the end of April 1975, a fair number of the RVNMF were being held by the communist forces, but at least 90% were unaccounted for, and it would be impossible to identify and arrest them all. It was at that point that the Southern Command of the communist troops “came to one of the most daring decisions of the war: namely, to release unconditionally and immediately all military and civil officers” (Qúi Dú’c Nguyen, 1994: 137). With this apparent display of magnanimity, the communists persuaded government and military personnel of the former RVN to register with the new regime. A few weeks later, in June 1975, the call to these registered individuals was largely obeyed, and the registrants were told they would be required to attend a short program of re-education. Former civil servants and members of the RVNMF were assured that the process was to last one

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month for high-ranking officers, ten days for lower-ranking officers, and a mere three days for regular soldiers. But it was a ruse: “90 percent of them fell into the trap” (ibid.). Some 300,000 southerners were immediately sent off to 21 hastily constructed re-education camps (Kiernan, 2017: 453) to undergo indoctrination and do penance through hard labor for their support of the Saigon regime.11 The general rule was that the enlisted men spent several weeks or months in the camps, low-ranking officers spent eight years there, and high-ranking officers spent 12 years (Woods, 2013: 60–61). All inmates were made to write confessions of their crimes against the people of Vietnam, and many were beaten, isolated, starved, and confined to Conex boxes12 for weeks at a time (Vo, 2004: 95). Truing Cong Hai, a lieutenant commander in the Republic of Vietnam Navy, was interned in 1975: “At the time I was recently married with a three-month-old child. I thought that if my countrymen arrested us, they would let us out after a while, it wouldn’t be a problem” (Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, 2016: 145). However, he ended up being held for ten years. “I was treated like a convict. I was beaten, I was also shackled. Many [camp inmates] died of starvation and hard labor.… There was nothing to eat other than cassava and sweet potatoes, and if you wanted meat you had to catch frogs” (ibid.). Estimates of the number of those who died in re-education camps vary, but approximations run from 100,000 (Le, 2009: 192-193) to 165,000 (Patricia Nguyen, 2021). In many cases, for those who did not succumb to disease, did not die sweeping minefields by hand, and who escaped execution, starvation, or permanent debilitation, the time spent in internment could approach 20 years. The remaining portion of the population in the South was subjected to a different set of hardships: bank accounts were immediately frozen, businesses were forcibly closed, property was conf iscated, farms were collectivized, and the population was systematically discriminated against in employment and education. One of the most notorious measures of the new regime came in the form of sending vast portions of the conquered citizenry to New Economic Zones (NEZs). The NEZs were areas in remote, undeveloped regions of the country where up to one million of the civilian population were taken and told to build their own homes and raise their own food. Conditions were extremely primitive, typically without electricity, 11 Amnesty International “reported that ‘some observers’ estimated the re-education camp population to be 200,000 at the end of 1976, while in February 1977 Vietnamese [i.e., SRV officials] put the figure at 50,000” (Demmer, 2021: 104). 12 Conex boxes were 4’x4’ airfreight containers made of wood or metal. Often several inmates would be shackled and confined within a single box for weeks at a time (Vo, 2004: 59).

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running water, or tools and supplies adequate for survival. Most of the people relocated to NEZs were from urban areas and did not have the requisite knowledge and skills to farm, and tens of thousands perished. One woman, Vo Thi Tam, who was interviewed in 1979 just days after escaping Vietnam by boat, related the following with tears streaming down her cheeks: My husband was a former officer in the South Vietnamese air force. After the fall of that government in 1975, he and all the other officers were sent to a concentration camp for reeducation. When they let him out of the camp, they forced all of us to go to one of the “new economic zones,” that are really just jungle. There was no organization, there was no housing, no utilities, no doctor, nothing. (Morrison and Zabusky, 1980: 446)

Anthropologist Ken MacLean writes that during a decade [1975–85] in which inflation peaked at 775 percent, an estimated 70 percent of the population lived beneath the poverty line, and chronic food shortages meant fifteen million people nationwide were either severely malnourished or on the edge of starvation due to insufficient calories. (quoted in Woods, 2013: 63; see also Kiernan, 2017: 470)

The famine affected the entire country, and large portions of the Vietnamese people began to take on a haunted, emaciated look. Phan Quynh Giao remembers how before the communist victory, those in the South used to say that their women “were as beautiful as the weeping willow … But now there was nothing left of the prettiness of many South Vietnamese women. Soon many people were like walking skeletons” (Hawthorne, 1982: 187). The resentment felt toward the new regime was intense, but fear of draconian punishment tended to keep it repressed. In addition to the physical hardships, it was the sense of political oppression that weighed the heaviest on some. The businesswoman Tran T.D. said that within six months of the communist victory, “it was clear that the slightest kind of freedom was abolished” (ibid.: 191). One former schoolteacher in the South, Ngoc Dien, spoke of the fear he felt from the communist regime: I saw that now hundreds of thousands of people, many like my father, were incarcerated, and millions of others had to live in fear, for even the smallest knock at the door in the night might be the signal that announced the arrival of the secret police to take someone away. (ibid.: 197)

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In addition to the poverty, food shortages, and police-state tactics of social control, the long hours of forced labor and the nightly compulsory propaganda meetings took their toll. Kim Ha, a young Saigonese mother in 1975, looks back and laments that Every day for us was a bad one, and every night was a nightmare. We were exhausted and began to have nervous breakdowns. Everybody was frightened by all kinds of menacing methods. Once in a while, friends were arrested during the night. (Ha, 1997: 24)

Meanwhile, the children of the former Republic were indoctrinated in the new communist-run schools and in many cases being encouraged to denounce their parents. One boy, whose father was an ARVN captain that was called in for a ten-day re-education seminar that ended up being a nine-year prison sentence, recalls his first-grade experience in 1976: I learned new songs celebrating the victory of the North over the South. Other songs were about how Vietnamese kids loved Ho Chi Minh. I was taught that the North Vietnamese had fought unselfishly for many years to “kick out” the Americans and to unify the country. (Chan, 2006: 243)

Later, in high school, this same boy describes how “I hated the Americans for bombing my country and killing innocent people. My teachers said that Americans were greedy and that was why they tried to colonize Vietnam” (ibid.: 245). That their own children were turned against all that they had fought for was devastating, but there was no safe public outlet for these feelings of anger and despair: “People carried out their daily lives like actors and actresses, becoming professionals at concealing and dissembling. Out loud, they praised Uncle Ho and the Communist party, but silently they cursed and wished that the Communists would fall” (Ha, 1997: 23). Phan Quynh Giao describes the animosity felt by many as they engaged in private, symbolic acts of aggression. Each home was required to hang a framed portrait of Ho Chi Minh within, and “Every night when the doors of the house were closed and nobody knew, the people took the frame down, removed the picture, put it on a chair, sat on it, or beat it, or sometimes hurled all manner of insults at it to relieve their frustration!” (Hawthorne, 1982: 187). A few years later, in the midst of the country’s poverty, hunger, and resentment, Vietnam found itself once again at war, this time with Cambodia and China. Throughout 1979, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam mobilized one million troops and suffered 60,000 deaths in this two-front war—more than

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the total U.S. dead over the entire Vietnam conflict. Given the hardships imposed on the Southerners by the new regime, it is not surprising to see a second wave of immigration occurring throughout this period. This wave is typically dated from the surrender of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975, to 1979. In the months and years following the fall of Saigon, emigration grew from a trickle to a torrent: in the second half of 1975, only 377 are known to have fled; in 1976, there were 5,619; in 1977, 21,276; in 1978, 106,489; and after only the first few months of 1979, 106,604 had taken flight (Vo, 2006: 83). Throughout the late 1970s, there was a strong anti-Chinese sentiment in Vietnam (Pelaud, 2011: 10), and in 1978, in addition to the 106,000 refugees who fled mostly by sea, 160,000 ethnic Chinese who had lived in Vietnam— primarily in the north—escaped overland to China (ibid.: 84). The SRV officials viewed the ethnic Chinese “as both economic saboteurs and fifth columnists” (Caplan, Choy, Whitmore, 1994: 3) and were thus happy to be rid of them. Van Cao, an ethnic Vietnamese and former government administrator in the Republic of Vietnam, notes the difference in official attitude toward the ethnic Chinese and ethnic Vietnamese when they were caught trying to escape the country: The communists were quite easy on escape attempts organized by the Chinese. If the Chinese were arrested, they would be released straight away, or be kept for a few months, and then released. But for us, it was much more difficult. It was much harder to organize. I had no money, and I had to plan in absolute secrecy. (Hawthorne, 1982: 238)

In addition to the overland route north to China, many Vietnamese southerners made their escape westward through Cambodia to Thailand. This was often accomplished with the assistance of frequently unreliable Cambodian guides who occasionally abandoned, robbed, or even killed their charges. But their help was considered crucial, for not only was it a roughly 300 mile trek through unfamiliar villages, cities, and wilderness, but—for the first few years after the fall of Saigon—the murderous Khmer Rouge had taken control of the country and anti-Vietnamese sentiment was at a fever pitch throughout the country. Being caught could mean being sent to a labor camp—or worse. The experience of Kim Ha, her husband, and their four children illustrates the perils of an overland escape through Khmer-Rouge-held territory: After crossing the Cambodian border illegally at night, they rode on the back of bicycles to Soai Rieng, then on the bed of a truck to the outskirts

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of Phnom Penh. They crossed the Mekong River on a small boat among suspicious natives and entered the city from the South. They rode to Battambang on the roof of a train fighting sun, smoke and heat. Their guide then abandoned them in the middle of a forest after they refused to give him extra money. They walked around without knowing their way and ran into thieves who stole their bags and clothing. They lost the rest of their money to a Cambodian guard at a checkpoint, and rode on smugglers’ oxcarts to the Thai border. (Vo, 2006: 131–132)

However, by far the most common manner of escape during the second wave of emigration was by boat. Although this flight was illegal, the way for such a mass exodus could often be paved by bribing government officials. And this was no easy matter. In the midst of the poverty described above—as well as frequent governmental changes in legal currency—individuals and families had to come up with enough of the right form of money to pay off the local police. What’s more, they also had to locate and pay a captain who had a boat and was willing to take on the risk of the trip. This was a dangerous process, and many were defrauded by unscrupulous captains or caught by the police in their attempts to escape and imprisoned. That the vessels used to escape were often not seaworthy was a problem inevitably complicated by their extreme overcrowding and under-provisioning. Lack of fuel, fresh water, food, and medical supplies was the norm. Lu Van Thanh, a former ARVN officer who spent three-and-a-half years in a reeducation camp, notes that their escape craft carried 59 passengers, and after four days the children “all had terror-stricken eyes, cracked lips, and they lay semiconscious in the small cabin, asking for sips of water” (Lu Van Thanh, 1997: 176). Desperately attempting to pilot a boat whose gearbox was broken across the South China Sea, the captain had to rely on a toy compass donated by a 12-year-old escapee. However, even more distressing given these dire circumstances, their craft was ignored by 17 passing trade ships over the course of seven days in international waters in spite of their signaling for rescue (Lu Van Thanh, 1997: 177). The overcrowded conditions led to situations where people had to defecate on the decks and below in the holds. Vu Thi Kim Vinh, a teenager who escaped in 1979, recalls the cramped and deplorable conditions: “People urinated on my head. I had to sit underneath the people for six days … My legs became numb” (Engelmann, 1997: 340). One young girl, whose parents sent her away alone at age 14, describes the hardships she faced during her escape: During our journey across the ocean, we had no thoughts of anything else except food and water. The boat owner gave each of us a very small

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cup of water and an un-cooked yam each day. But we could not eat the raw yam because we were so tired that our teeth had become too weak to chew anything. We sat in the boat exhausted as we waited to get to our destination. After seven days at sea, we ran out of water. About half the people in the boat became disoriented. They fought with one another as they desperately tried to see who had food and water. The last few days on the boat, I was so sick that I became almost unconscious. As I lay on the deck, people stepped over me. (Chan, 2006: 223)

This level of hardship is indelibly written into the collective memory of the Vietnamese-American community, and as we will see in the following chapter, it is included as an integral element in their narratives of the war. We cited the case of Vo Thi Tam, above, the woman who had just arrived in the U.S. as a refugee in 1979. Her husband had been in a re-education camp, and upon his release, the family had been sent to a New Economic Zone where they struggled to survive. They decided that escape was their best chance at survival, and in the process, the husband was separated from the rest of the family (he was caught and sent back to a re-education camp). Meanwhile, the other family members found themselves stranded at sea and facing impossible choices. After seven days we ran out of water, so all we had to drink was sea water, plus lemon juice. Everyone was very sick and, at one point, my mother and my little boy, four years old, were in agony, about to die. And the other people on the boat said that if they were agonizing like that, it would be better to throw them overboard so as to save them from pain … while we were discussing throwing my mother and son overboard, we could see another ship coming and we were very happy, thinking maybe it was people coming to save us. (Morrison and Zabusky, 1980: 447-448)

But instead of a rescue ship, Vo Thi Tam and the rest of the refugees were met by the first of what would be three separate attacks by pirates, each group of which robbed and beat them and left them to die. In the endless parade of dangers faced by the boat people, one of the most terrifying was the frequent attacks by pirates. Not only did a large percentage of those who attempted to escape die in transit by the various means mentioned above, but many were captured by marauders from nearby Thailand, raped, and taken into sexual bondage. While the initial wave of refugees escaping through the Gulf of Thailand passed largely unmolested, the steady flow of weak and defenseless escapees carrying whatever wealth

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they had soon became too great a temptation for many of Thailand’s seafaring class. At first, the pirates were opportunistic. A commercial craft would be fishing, and if it spotted a boat full of Vietnamese refugees, it would approach it and demand whatever gold, jewelry, cash, or other valuables the passengers might have. However, eventually these opportunistic robberies gave way to sophisticated operations in which Thai boats using radio communication would form vast rings, and when an escaping boat would unknowingly enter the ring, the boats would converge on the unwary refugees (Vo, 2006: 143). These maneuvers soon became substantial enough to begin attacking larger cargo ships with hundreds of refugees on board, and the pirates, who before had carried only knives, axes, and iron bars, took to carrying firearms (Vo, 2006: 143). As the means of violence were ratcheted up, so were their acts. Female refugees would smear their clothes and bodies with grease, soot, and fish sauce, hoping that this might make them less attractive to any pirates they might encounter during their escape, “But the pirates knew about the trick: they simply ordered them to bathe, then raped them” (Vo, 2006: 145). Not content to rape the girls and women on the high seas, some of the assailants would abduct female refugees as sexual captives or for sale to Thailand’s brothels. In Doan Hoang’s auto-biographical documentary film Oh, Saigon (2007), the Vietnamese-American filmmaker’s sister, eleven years old, is separated from her family in the chaos of April 30, 1975. Her family makes the quick, agonizing decision to leave the country without their oldest daughter, and it isn’t until years later that they are reunited in America. However, in the meantime, the daughter, while making her own escape by boat, is taken captive, assaulted, raped, and imprisoned by Thai pirates, until she eventually escapes and completes her flight to the United States. The experience was all too common. In another case, after drifting for six days and being passed by a number of commercial ships that elected not to rescue them, one small boat of refugees was rammed by pirates, then towed to an island where its passengers were taken off. One of the passengers, a twelve-year-old boy, recalls coming to know a young girl—also about twelve years old—whose father had cropped her hair short and smeared her face with soot in order to disguise her as a boy. One night, while the two young people sat on the sand talking about what they planned to do if they ever made it to America, One of the pirates noticed the soot on the girl’s face. He wiped it off, turned to the others, and smirked in victory: he had found a girl. Three pirates dragged her to a nearby bush and took turns raping her as the whole camp watched in horror. A long time passed before they emerged

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from the bush. Her father ran to the bush and carried her out. She had fainted. Crying, he pulled his hair and repeatedly wailed, “Why, God, why?” (Chan, 2006: 204)

The plight of the Vietnamese boat people was a highly public phenomenon and caused a great deal of international consternation. After the U.S. had cleared its camps of refugees at the end of 1975, refugees were forced into camps located in the countries of first asylum. Off the Malaysian coast, one such camp—Pulau Bidong—sprung up on an island in response to the throngs of escapees arriving by boat. Although the island had been deserted, within five weeks it was home to 25,000 refugees, and it eventually swelled to 60,000 (Vo, 2006: 152-153). No facilities were prepared in advance. Instead, the refugees were forced to build a shantytown from debris or whatever discarded material they could gather, including cardboard, cloth from rice bags, plastic sheeting, leaves, and tree trunks (Vo, 2006: 153). The pit toilets that were dug by the refugees were the only place they had available to relieve themselves, and the whole place swarmed with rats that fed on the garbage produced by the overcrowded camp. Human corpses would wash ashore with regularity from the disabled boats pushed back from the island by the Malaysian government in their efforts to keep more refugees from landing (ibid.). Tran Thi My Ngoc recalls with horror the time he spent in the camp: “I was on Pulau Bidong for three and a half months. And it’s there I learned how people behave when they are desperate. People could kill for a little food or for a little money” (Engelmann, 1997: 353). Similar conditions flourished all across Southeast Asia. Camps were erected in Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Lack of adequate food, potable water, sanitation, and medical services were the norm. The officials who operated the camps frequently robbed and beat their charges, raped the women, and in some cases simply killed troublemakers. And the inmates often languished in these camps for years. One camp in Thailand had by 1990 reached a population of 180,000. The overcrowding and inactivity led to violence and organized crime on the part of some of those being held there, and gambling dens and brothels cropped up (Vo, 2006: 157). Another camp in Hong Kong, the Shek Kong Camp, experienced riots in 1992. At that time, a large group of refugees were locked in one of the hangars that was being used to shelter them, and the structure was set ablaze by another faction of refugees: “Twenty-four people died, including ten children” (ibid.). By the end of the migration period, between 200,000 to 400,000 people had perished in the sea as they fled Vietnam. As the numbers of the second

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wave of refugees continued to increase—there were 54,000 in June 1979— people were amassing for longer and longer periods in the squalid and dangerous refugee camps throughout Southeast Asia. By July, there were 350,000 refugees in the camps, and many of the countries of first asylum began patrolling their shores so that when a boat of refugees was spotted, they could be pushed back into international waters. In 1979, according to Malaysian reports, hundreds of boats carrying an estimated 51,422 refugees were turned away from their shores (ibid.: 166). Singapore even began fining its fishing boats’ owners $4,000 per refugee they were found to have saved (ibid.: 165). Often by the time a boat was spotted, the passengers were already beginning to die of dehydration, starvation, and untreated medical problems. So desperate were the passengers that in many instances, as a government ship approached to push the refugees back, the refugees would scuttle their ship to either be saved or drown. Things had become so bad that in July 1979—by which time an estimated 700,000 refugees had fled Vietnam—the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) convened an international conference to work out a solution to this ongoing humanitarian crisis. The UNHCR asked Vietnam to stem the illegal tide of refugees issuing from its shores, and they negotiated the means whereby qualified people would be allowed to legally depart the country. The resulting agreement was called the Orderly Departure Program (ODP), which accounts for a large portion of the third major wave of emigration from Vietnam and stretches from mid-1979 until 1996. The ODP stipulated that Vietnamese could emigrate abroad if they had spouses, children, parents, grandparents, or unmarried grandchildren already settled in another country. Under the ODP, 623,509 Vietnamese left the country, 450,000 of whom settled in the U.S. The process for expediting the transfer of people from the camps to their final country of asylum included an interview process to determine whether an individual was a refugee (and thus eligible for asylum) or merely an immigrant. In the case that an individual was deemed an immigrant, he or she would be repatriated to Vietnam. However, the ODP did not do much to improve conditions at the camps. As one 15-year-old refugee put it, “When the plane [carrying him from Vietnam] arrived in Thailand, I was shocked by the ‘hospitality’ the officials extended to us. They treated us like prisoners, they fed us as though we were animals, and they made us feel inferior” (Chan, 2006: 236). Political prisoners who were not eligible under the negotiated terms of the ODP could depart instead under the Humanitarian Operation Program (Vo, 2006: 168). Another program developed to handle those seeking to depart Vietnam was the Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA). In 1986, a new type of refugee

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emerged. These were individuals from the northern part of Vietnam who were seeking a better life in the U.S. Because they did not qualify as persecuted and did not have relatives abroad, they did not meet the qualifications for resettlement under previous provisions. In 1989 the CPA was implemented, at which time some 100,000 individuals still remained in refugee camps throughout Southeast Asia (Vo, 2006: 169). One of the most contentious parts of this program was the screening interview that was developed in order to expedite the process of resettlement from the camps. The countries of first asylum often used the process to simply reject as many people as possible from settling in their country; a case in point is Hong Kong, who accepted only 19 percent of its applicants for asylum, compared with 43 percent in Indonesia and 53 percent in the Philippines (ibid.: 170). The result of rejection was forced repatriation, and this was often the case even with unaccompanied minors. And for those who were repatriated, their homecoming was often made even more difficult by the Hanoi government that would in many cases refuse the returnees their identification papers, without which they could not enroll in school or apply for employment (ibid.: 172). One final program that falls within the third wave of refugees was initiated in December of 1987: the Amerasian Homecoming Act. Amerasians—the vast majority of whom had been fathered by American GIs during the war and then left in Vietnam13—often faced severe discrimination and open derision in Vietnam. They were almost exclusively the result of liaisons between GIs and young Vietnamese women, often those who worked in proximity to the American troops as bar girls, PX employees, cooks, and laundry workers. After the American forces left and the communist regime assumed power, Amerasians were seen as children whose mothers had collaborated with the enemy and were consequently barred from many educational and employment opportunities. The children became social outcasts known as bụi đời (“dust of life”), a Vietnamese expression referring to the poorest of the poor (McKelvey, 1999: 5). One Vietnamese young person who left the country in 1984 under the ODP reflects on the unjust treatment suffered by these children: “Vietnamese kids called them names and said nasty things about them … Not only did the Vietnamese kids taunt them, but adults also criticized them” (Chan, 2006: 236). As a result, the Amerasians tended to isolate themselves from the broader Vietnamese society and avoid interacting with “pure-blooded” Vietnamese. Tu, a young Amerasian woman, recalls how she was taunted by her classmates who said things like “Amerasians should live in the pig pen” and constantly pulled her hair, hair that was brown, not properly black like that of other 13 Demmer puts the number of Amerasians left in Vietnam after 1975 at 30,000–50,000 (2021: 101).

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Vietnamese. Tu became so ashamed of her brown hair that she twice shaved it off (McKelvey, 1999: 37). In fact, Amerasians are frequently denied being considered Vietnamese at all and are sometimes simply called “Americans.” Even 40 years after the war’s end, there were still many of these outcasts—now in middle age—living in Vietnam. A Washington Post article in 2015 described what the children had been forced to endure as they came of age in Vietnam: Growing up with the face of the enemy, they were spat on, ridiculed, beaten. They were abandoned, given away to relatives or sold as cheap labor. The families that kept them often had to hide them or shear off their telltale blond or curly locks. Some were sent to re-education camps, or ended up homeless and living on the streets. (Gowon, Washington Post, 4/17/2015)

The Amerasian Homecoming Act provided the opportunity for some 70,000 Amerasians and their relatives to resettle in the U.S. (McKelvey, 1999: 3), something that many had always longed for. The absence of these children’s fathers—and sometimes mothers as well—is a festering wound in many of their hearts. In the late 1980s, Larry Engelmann conducted interviews with several Amerasians still living in Vietnam. Nguyen Diep Doan Trang, a 19-year-old, said he dreams of going to America and that “I know nothing about my father … If he knew that I was here he would love me” (Engelmann, 1997: 318–319). As child psychologist Robert McKelvey points out in his research on Amerasians, “Growing up fatherless in a society like Vietnam’s where status, income, and opportunity derive from the father, Amerasians faced almost insurmountable difficulties” (McKelvey, 1999: 102). Minh, a 16-year-old orphan living in Ho Chi Minh City, a boy who has never attended school and is illiterate, stated poignantly, I know nothing about my father. I have no idea who my parents are. I have never known them. I think I love my parents, even though I don’t know who they are or where they are. That, I think, is what love is, what I feel inside myself about my parents. (Engelmann, 1997: 319)

Life in the United States For those who survived the war, the extreme conditions under communist rule, and the treacherous escape, a warm embrace by their long-time ally was what they might have been expecting, but it was not what they received. A national poll taken immediately after the surrender of South Vietnam revealed that only

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36 percent of Americans believed that the U.S. should allow the Vietnamese refugees into the country. At the prospect of a surge of Vietnamese refugees, one Arkansas woman mused, “They say it’s a lot colder here than in Vietnam. With a little luck, maybe all those Vietnamese will get pneumonia and die” (Newsweek, 5/12/1975, cited in Lieu, 2011: 10). And these loathsome remarks were not limited to the margins of America. The Republican congressman Burt Talcott of California exemplified the racism underlying much of this opposition when he angrily resisted resettling any of the Vietnamese refugees in the U.S. “Damn it,” he said, “we have too many Orientals” (Kelly, 1977: 18).14 However, in spite of its unpopularity, President Ford urged Congress—and the rest of the nation—to provide humanitarian assistance to those fleeing Vietnam. On May 1, 1975, as many of the very first vessels crowded with refugees were still adrift throughout the South China Sea, a bill authorizing funds for refugee assistance was put before the U.S. House of Representatives; the bill was voted down. A frustrated President Ford claimed that the bill’s rejection “reflects fear and misunderstanding rather than charity and compassion” (Binder, NYT, 5/2/1975) and vowed to press the issue. In the days following the fall of Saigon, messages regarding the Vietnamese refugees poured into Congress, a majority of which opposed providing assistance. On May 6, 1975, the president took to national television in order to make his case directly to the American people. Acknowledging the economic challenges facing the U.S. at the time, President Ford chided those averse to accepting the first wave of refugees, reminding the public that 60 percent of them were children. The president bristled at the American unwillingness to aid the escapees, confessing that he was “very upset because the United States has had a long tradition of opening its doors to immigrants of all countries” (Binder, NYT, 5/7/1975). He went on to express the conviction—in what might have been merely wishful thinking—that “the vast majority of Americans today want these people to escape the probability of death” (ibid.). Of course, by this time the first wave of refugees had already left Vietnam, and the emergency funds for food, clothing, water, transportation, and medical supplies in the camps set up throughout Southeast Asia and the four processing centers around the U.S. were being borrowed from other foreign aid programs—and the money was running out. After the initial bill’s defeat on May 1, Ford requested $507 million in aid for resettlement, and in 14 Commenting on this openly racist sentiment in 1978, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Advisor to President Carter, observed, “if the refugees were white Europeans they [Americans] would be much more concerned than they are with yellow people half-way round the world” (Demmer, 2021: 88).

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the end, on May 16, the Senate gave final approval for the reduced amount of $405 million. Reflecting on this episode in a Washington Post opinion piece 31 years later, Quang X. Pham, himself a 10-year-old refugee in 1975, wrote that “Ford became the savior to those lucky enough to escape the taking of Saigon by the North Vietnamese army” (Pham, Washington Post, 12/30/2006). By 2022, there were more than four million Vietnamese living abroad, about half of them living in the United States. Upon their arrival in the U.S., starting in 1975, the resettlement process was designed to distribute them across all 50 states. The transition to American life was difficult, especially for those who fled Saigon in the final days of the RVN, for the sudden relocation was largely unplanned. One teenager writes of her experiences as a young girl: after fleeing Saigon by boat on April 29, 1975 at the age of 4, she was no sooner in America than she began to experience a new sort of torment, being called “fresh off the boat,” “Chink,” “China girl,” “boat person,” and “dog-eater” (Chan, 2006: 141–142). Another young woman who suffered through internment in a Vietnamese reeducation camp, a traumatic escape by boat, and two years without her family in a Malaysian refugee camp, writes that “I had great expectations of America, but since my arrival in 1985 I have faced many unexpected disappointments and realize that my dreams were little more than illusions” (Chan, 2006: 219). For a great deal of those who arrived in America as children—the so-called 1.5 generation—the American school system provided the major source of their initial trials. In many cases, getting picked on and bullied at school was routine. In Catfish and Mandala, a work of autobiographical “creative nonfiction,” the narrator recalls: “I grew up fighting blacks, whites, and Chicanos. The whites beat up the blacks. The blacks beat up the Chicanos. And everybody beat up the Chinaman whether or not he was really an ethnic Chinese” (Pham, 1999: 328). Sometimes the stress of this upheaval in their lives became too much. Mai Vinh, a young girl, has struggled with despair: I’m sad. I was sad about leaving my friends, my relatives. My grandmother live[d] with us…but we have to leave our grandmother. [cries] … My mother worries about my grandmother. [cries] We always feel sad … I’m very sad because I have no friend with the same age to talk to, to play with. I like swimming, singing, dancing, painting, although I paint very bad … I don’t know how my friends [in Saigon] are, alive or dead. [cries] I miss them. (Morrison and Zabusky, 1980: 433)

Another young refugee relates how “I went through a long period when I was constantly suicidal. I would find myself in the closet or the bathroom with a knife, thinking about killing myself” (Engelmann, 1997: 342).

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The older refugees faced a different set of ordeals. For those who were not already proficient in English (unlike those who had worked closely with the U.S. during the war), learning the language was difficult, especially because they often had to either work long hours at undesirable jobs just to keep their family hovering at the level of poverty or stay home to mind the children with little or no contact with English speakers. Often the only employment available to a refugee involved a precipitous fall in social position, as when Lam, a former colonel in the RVNMF, was reduced to scrubbing toilets to support his family (Lam, 2005), or when Tuan Pham, a practicing medical doctor in South Vietnam could only get work as a physician’s assistant. But sadly, this set of obstacles unique to adults did not obviate other ordeals. In Pham’s case, for example, he relates the following incident as a physician’s assistant: “I took the blood and I did whatever I had to, and then the patient left and then one of the family came in and said to me: ‘Do you know who I hate? First I hate blacks. Second, I hate yellow. I love animals more than you and blacks. Get out of here’” (Morrison and Zarusky 1980: 423). What’s more, there were often unsympathetic social service agencies to navigate, confusing immigration and naturalization paperwork to complete in a language they didn’t understand, and frequently all this was exacerbated by the anguish of not knowing the status of family members left behind in Vietnam. Many experienced a sudden descent in social status. “Cabinet ministers, generals, lawyers, radio station managers, etc., found themselves faced with employment as cooks, waiters, bell boys, dishwashers, and janitors” (Kelly, 1977: 163). Not long after his arrival in the U.S., former South Vietnamese Premier Nguyen Cao Ky found himself running a struggling liquor store in Orange County, California. However, there were some refugees who were able to avoid this precipitous vocational descent by practicing the same profession in the U.S. as they had in Vietnam. One group that experienced some success in this way consisted of fishermen. Although not all Vietnamese fishermen ended up practicing their trade in America, a fair number did. And as word of the initial good fortune of a few spread throughout the growing network of immigrant families, communities of Vietnamese-American fisherman began growing along the American Gulf Coast. Commercial fishing, of course, is far more than merely pulling fish from the sea; it is a deeply cultural activity, and the Vietnamese newcomers’ lack of adherence to American fishing norms and unwritten rules soon exacerbated the racial intolerance that was there to begin with. One example of this phenomenon was played out in Seadrift, Texas. With a population of 1,000, Seadrift—with the assistance of a local Catholic Church—became the new home of some 100 Vietnamese refugees.

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But as their numbers grew, racial stereotypes were aggravated. Reporting on the attitudes of the “mildly xenophobic” locals toward their new neighbors, one journalist remarked on the locals’ claims that the recent arrivals engaged in petty shoplifting, allowed their children to urinate in the streets, and that “it was the general consensus among the townspeople that once the Vietnamese began speeding around in cars and trucks, no dog or pedestrian remained safe” (Milloy, NYT, 4/6/1980). And once the shrimping catch began to dwindle, making life difficult for the local population, it wasn’t long before the Vietnamese fishermen were being blamed; boycotts of the VietnameseAmerican catch were followed by intimidation, threats, vandalism, and physical violence until, in the summer of 1979, a knife attack on one of the refugees led to the shooting death of the white assailant. After the killing of the white man—although the Vietnamese-American was acquitted because the shooting was in self-defense—two Vietnamese-American shrimpers were beaten, three of their fishing boats were firebombed, and one of their house trailers was set ablaze. At the same time, 100 miles down the coast in Seabrook, another small fishing town, many of the white shrimpers—some of whom were Vietnam vets—complained that “the federal Government has enabled the Vietnamese to do better than Americans who fought in Vietnam” (Stevens, NYT, 5/25/1981). At the request of the locals of Seabrook, the Ku Klux Klan were brought in to train the white fishermen in paramilitary tactics (Stevens, NYT, 5/25/1981), and hooded Klansmen began burning crosses and patrolling the local waters armed with high-powered rifles (Vo, 2006: 183–184). Eventually the white fisherman claimed that “we have reason to believe North Vietnamese Communists are infiltrating the ranks of the [local] Vietnamese” (Stevens, NYT, 5/25/1981), and it began to look more and more like the stage was being set for a warped version of the American-Vietnamese War to be replayed in the fishing towns along the coast of Texas. Perhaps most painful was the sense of estrangement that developed between the two generations of refugees. A young woman in her early twenties reflects on the pain she feels regarding her parents, even though they have all been together in the U.S. for the past seven years. The way my parents live their lives still saddens me. I don’t know why but every time I think about that I cry and cry. Maybe I am crying for two people who eat and breathe but are, in fact, dead. They died the instant they left their native land. Perhaps I am also crying for two people whom I call my parents but who are alienated from their children simply because they refuse to accept the fact that America is their new home and not

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merely a temporary refuge. I cry because I do not really know what my parents feel and think. The most important reason I cry is that I have to watch my parents die a little each day and there seems to be nothing I can do about it. (Chan, 2006: 227)

Even the Amerasians—young people who in Vietnam faced such bitter ostracism and prejudice for bearing the “face of the enemy,” who dreamt all their lives of coming to the U.S. to find their fathers and escape the crushing poverty most were reduced to—often ended up disappointed and aggrieved after resettling in America. Only an estimated two to three percent were ever actually able to locate and reunite with their fathers (McKelvey, 1999: 102), and because they were frequently not very well educated—in many cases they were illiterate even in Vietnamese—they faced significant challenges adjusting to life in the U.S. One Amerasian who was resettled in the South Bronx describes his frustration: In Vietnam, we saw pictures of the United States. There were pretty white houses on clean, tree-lined streets. It looked like a land of dreams … I have seen no pretty white houses or clean, green streets—only this, the South Bronx. I live with three other Amerasians in a small, dirty apartment … We can’t find jobs because we speak English so poorly. We’re afraid to walk around because it’s so dangerous. I wish I had known what it would be like when I was still in Vietnam. Maybe I wouldn’t have come. (McKelvey, 1999: 5)

In spite of these troubles, most Vietnamese refugees persevered. “The Vietnamese came in [to depressed urban neighborhoods] and with their numbers and commercial skills revitalized these areas, turning them into vibrant business districts” (Vo, 2006: 175). Nguyen Le, a successful Houston realtor who escaped Vietnam by boat as an 8-year-old in 1979, gives voice to this perseverance and the motivation for his success: “I didn’t hop on a boat to come here and fail” (Thompson, ESPN, 10/28/2017). In the case of the Vietnamese Americans, the success of some laid the foundation for the myth of the “model minority.” Ellen Mathews, one of the first American sponsors of a Vietnamese refugee family in 1975, cheerfully exclaims that “[t]he success of the Vietnamese in this country has been phenomenal. They have shown themselves to be a proud, independent people able to regroup under extremely trying conditions” (Hawthorne, 1982: 127). Peter Phan, who arrived at the United States as a refugee in 1975, is today a Catholic priest and professor at Georgetown University. In looking back over the sufferings

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that the Vietnamese Americans experienced—both during their time in Vietnam and as refugees—Phan remarks that Tragedy, however, can give birth to blessings. After three decades in the Diaspora, Vietnamese expatriates can look back with pride on their accomplishments in many different fields and recognize with gratitude the opportunities they have been given… (2005: 2)

And more than anything else, this opportunity and success have been exemplified through academic performance. In an anthology of autobiographical essays written between 1975 and 1986 by Vietnamese-American college seniors of the 1.5 generation, the student authors repeatedly stress their commitment to academic success (Chan, 2006). And the 1994 book Children of the Boat People is a study of the “startling and extraordinary” scholastic progress and achievement of Southeast Asian refugee children— and particularly that of the refugees from Vietnam (Caplan et al., 1994: 15). Indeed, the authors report that by 1985, in a subsection of Orange County, California whose refugee community accounted for less than 20 percent of the school population, 12 of 14 valedictorians were of Indochinese descent (Caplan et al., 1994: 9). One of our interviewees for this book, a successful dentist who arrived in the U.S. as a young girl, brought a copy of a magazine article with her to our interview. Written about her family, it began with the following reflections made by her father: “Everything was a blur. My heart was dead and frozen,” recalled Chuong Nguyen of his family’s escape from South Vietnam at the end of April 1975. “We left with nothing except what we were wearing. There was no time to salvage anything from our home.” (Hanneman and Hodge, 2001: 17)

After describing the Nguyens’ settlement in Washington state, we read that by 2001, All six of the Nguyen children graduated from Liberty High School in Issaquah, and the four older children were class valedictorians. The younger two, their father explained, “only graduated with honors. They were not 4.0 students, but 3.8. I think they were involved in too many extracurricular activities.” (ibid.: 22)

“The high-achieving Asian-American student” is one of the tropes that the broader American society has effortlessly applied to the Vietnamese

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Americans. However, this trope, no matter how enthusiastically it might be accepted, is problematic on several counts, not least of which—when it is applied wholesale—is its inaccuracy. More troubling is the underlying idea that the success of Vietnamese-American students is somehow explained by an inherent, underlying difference between them and students of other ethnic groups. This purported difference, while one moment a quality praised by the social majority, can in an instant turn into a perceived threat to the American status quo, a threat to those who have been the traditional bearers of privilege; and history has shown time and again the dark road that this idea can lead us down.15 The truth is that Vietnamese Americans are scholars, professional and Olympic athletes, musicians, minimum-wage laborers, astronauts, religious leaders, convicted felons, artists, farmers, journalists, high-school drop-outs, scientists, actors, firefighters, entrepreneurs, gang members, officers in the U.S. military, fashion models, Pulitzer-Prize winning photographers and novelists; they are city council members, mayors, community organizers, state senators, federal judges, and U.S. Congresspersons. Indeed, over the course of several decades, the achievements and shortcomings of Vietnamese Americans look very much like those of most other Americans. But beyond their typically American individual struggles and successes, the Vietnamese Americans have formed vibrant communities throughout the country and by doing so have not only adapted to American culture but also inflected American culture toward that of their native Vietnam. In many cases, these impacts have centered on and emanated from VietnameseAmerican enclaves scattered throughout the country, neighborhoods and business districts that often eventually became known as Little Saigons. The most prominent of these Little Saigons is located in Orange County, California, which nearly 200,000 Vietnamese Americans called home in 2022. In the first few years after settling there in the mid-1970s, the growing number of Vietnamese immigrants began establishing businesses along Bolsa Avenue, including grocery stores and restaurants catering to Vietnamese tastes, Vietnamese-language newspapers, nail and beauty salons, barbershops, tailors, and professional offices. Store-front signs were written in English and Vietnamese, and commercial architecture was designed with sloped, pagoda-like roofs and accented with life-size statues of tigers and dragons (Aguilar-San Juan, 2009: xv). The Little Saigon of Orange County is 15 Another worrisome aspect of this stereotype, though perhaps less germane to the present analysis, is how it pits minority groups against each other and allows for invidious comparisons. These judgments can have the effect of decreasing entitlements to society’s most disadvantaged members.

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the largest home to Vietnamese outside of Vietnam,16 and in addition to the multitude of other commercial enterprises, it boasts radio and television stations, a thriving music recording industry, myriad Buddhist temples, a brilliant artist collective and film festival, a massive annual Tet (i.e., the traditional Vietnamese Lunar New Year) celebration, and it remains a bastion of anti-communist sentiment. The University of California at Irvine, a highly regarded research university located in Orange County, has a student body that is approximately 60 percent Asian; this led acclaimed Vietnamese-American essayist Andrew Lam to joke in his opening remarks to the 2013 graduating class that, in spite of the university’s commitment to diversity, “this year they decided they didn’t really want a ‘minority’ to speak at the commencement” (Lam, Huffington Post, 6/15/2013). In her book Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America, Karen AguilarSan Juan argues that “staying Vietnamese is not an act of constancy but of purposeful, and ultimately strategic, shifting and changing in order to arrive at new ways of being Vietnamese in a U.S. context” (2009: xxvii). Part of this new way of being Vietnamese in America involves—as we have argued above—developing a narrative of collective identity. Nam Nguyen, editor-in-chief of the California-based Vietnamese-language newspaper, Calitoday, states this sentiment poetically in the following: The Vietnamese myth of the birth of their nation should be revised. It’s a story all Vietnamese schoolchildren learn. In an ancient time, a dragon married a fairy and they gave birth to one hundred eggs. The eggs hatched and became the Vietnamese people. A new Vietnamese is being “hatched” abroad … and a new myth is needed. (cited in Lam, 2010: 68)

And the core of this new “myth,” with its four principal episodes, is what we have attempted to provide in the present chapter. We have argued that when a collectivity understands itself to have suffered a significant calamity, one that fractures its collective identity, then if it is to persist as a collectivity, it must reconstitute its identity. This is a twofold process: 1) the group must construct a narrative of the traumatic event, itself, and 2) it must re-narrate its collective identity so as to make sense of the traumatic event. In the next chapter, we will explore the various ways in which the new narratives of Vietnamese-American collective identity are plotted within its sundry arenas of memory and how the American-Vietnamese War fits into these different narratives. 16 In 2022.

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References Aguilar-San Juan, Karin (2009) Little Saigon: Staying Vietnamese in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Binder, David (May 5, 1975) “Ford Asks Nation To Open Its Doors To Refugees.” New York Times. Bui, Thi. (2017) The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir. New York: Abrams Comicarts. CBS News (April 25, 2001). Caplan, N., M.H. Choy, and J.K. Whitmore (1994). Children of the Boat People: A Study of Educational Success. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Chan, Sucheng, ed. (2006) The Vietnamese American 1.5 Generation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Demmer, Amanda C. (2021) After Saigon’s Fall: Refugees and US-Vietnamese Relations, 1975–2000. New York: Cambridge University Press. Do, Trinh Quang (2004) Saigon to San Diego: Memoir of a Boy Who Escaped from Communist Vietnam. Jefferson: McFarland and Company. Ellison, Richard (1981) “Interview with Frank Snepp.” Vietnam: A Television History [f ilm]. WGBH Boston. Engelmann, Larry, ed. (1997) Tears Before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam. New York: Da Capo Press. Gowon, Annie (2015) “Legacies of War: Forty Years after the Fall of Saigon, Soldiers’ Children Are Still Left Behind.” Washington Post (April 17). Ha, Kim (1997) Stormy Escape: A Vietnamese Woman’s Account of Her 1980 Flight through Cambodia to Thailand. Jefferson: McFarland & Company. Hanneman, Mary L., and Minh-Anh Thi Hodge (2001) “Making a New Home.” Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History (Spring): 17–22. Hawthorne, Lesleyanne, ed. (1982) Refugee: The Vietnamese Experience. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Herring, George (2019) America’s Longest War. New York. McGraw Hill. Hoang, Doan (2007) Oh, Saigon [film]. Hudson, Jeff (2015) “Recalling an arduous trip 40 years ago.” The Davis Enterprise (May 29). Hunt, Michael, ed. (2010) A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Karnow, Stanley (1997) Vietnam: A History. New York: Penguin. Kelly, Gail Paradise (1977) From Vietnam to America: A Chronicle of the Vietnamese Immigration to the United States. Boulder: Westview Press. Kiernan, Ben (2017) Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ky, Nguyen Cao (2002) Buddha’s Child: My Fight to Save Vietnam. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lam, Andrew (2005) Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora. Berkeley: Heyday Books. ——— (2010) East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres. Berkeley: Heyday Books. ——— (2013) “For College Grads, Friendly Advice and Tender Warnings.” Huffington Post (June 15). Le, Tram (2009) “Curatorial Statement.” P. 7 in F.O.B. II: Art Speaks. Santa Ana: Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association. Lewis, Anthony (1975) “Who Lost Vietnam?” New York Times (February 3). Lieu, Nhi T. (2011) The American Dream in Vietnamese. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lind, Michael (1999) Vietnam: The Necessary War. New York: Simon and Schuster. Manyon, Julian (1975) The Fall of Saigon. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

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McKelvey, Robert (1999) The Dust of Life: America’s Children in Vietnam. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Milloy, Ross. (1980) “Vietnam Fallout In A Texas Town.” New York Times (April 6). Morrison, Joan, and Charlotte Fox Zabusky, eds. (1980). American Mosaic: The Immigrant Experience in the Words of Those Who Lived It. New York: Dutton. National Security Council (NSC) (1975) “NSC Meeting, 4/9/1975”. Ann Arbor: Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library. New York Times (April 17, 1975). New York Times (April 24, 1975). Nguyen, Bich Minh (2007) Stealing Buddha’s Dinner: A Memoir. New York: Viking. Nguyen, Nathalie Huynh Chau (2016) South Vietnamese Soldiers: Memories of the Vietnam War and After. Santa Barbara: Praeger. Nguyen, Patricia (2021) “Reeducation Camps & States of Suspension.” Amerasian Journal 47(2): 351–367. Nguyen, Qúi Dú’c (1994) Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. Pelaud, Isabelle Thuy (2011) This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Pew Research Center (2021) “Vietnamese Population in the U.S., 2000–2019.” Pham, Andrew X. (1999) Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Pham, Andrew X. (2006) “Ford’s Finest Legacy.” Washington Post (December 30). Phan, Peter C. (2005) Vietnamese-American Catholics. New York: Paulist Press. Shapiro, Joseph (2010) “Forgotten Ship: A Daring Rescue As Saigon Fell.” National Public Radio (August 31). Snepp, Frank (2002) Descent Interval: An Insider’s Account of Saigon’s Indecent End Told by the CIA’s Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Stevens, William K. (1981) “Klan Inflames Gulf Fishing Fight Between Whites And Vietnamese.” The New York Times (April 25). Thai, Hung Cam (2008) For Better or for Worse: Vietnamese International Marriages in the New Global Economy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Thanh, Lu Van (1997) The Inviting Call of Wandering Souls. Jefferson: McFarland. Thompson, Wright (2017) “Meet Nguyen Le, the Astros’ biggest fan.” ESPN (October 28). Tran, Ham (2007) Journey from the Fall [film]. Tran, Van Don (1978) Our Endless War. Novato: Presidio Press. Tran, Van Nhut, and Christian Arevian (2009) An Loc: The Unfinished War. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press. United Press International (1975) “Schlesinger Says Infiltration by Hanoi Is Up ‘Dramatically.’” The New York Times (March 14). Veith, George (2012) Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam 1973–1975. New York: Encounter Books. Vo, Nghĩa M. (2004) The Bamboo Gulag: Political Imprisonment in Communist Vietnam. Jefferson: McFarland. ——— (2006) The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975–1992. Jefferson: McFarland and Company. White, Hayden (1990) The Content of the Form. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Willbanks, James (2004) Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

5

Cultural Trauma and VietnameseAmerican Arenas of Memory Abstract This chapter provides a fine-grained analysis of the competing narratives of the American-Vietnamese War that have circulated within the Vietnamese-American community. The three major arenas of collective memory where these narrative contests occur are delineated (i.e., the community, the academic, and the artistic), then the specific narratives within each of those arenas are identified. Based on the ongoing narrative struggle over the nature of the war and the Vietnamese-American collective identity, the claim is made that the Vietnamese-American collectivity has suffered a cultural trauma. Keywords: Vietnam War, cultural trauma, collective memory, cultural sociology, Vietnamese American, narrative identity

Continuing with the organizational plan of this book, we will now proceed to examine the different arenas of memory that the Vietnamese-American community comprises and explore the ways in which the war-related narratives are handled in each of them. One of the unique characteristics of the Vietnamese-American collectively is its hybrid nature—situated as it is within and between two cultures. Pulitzer-Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen describes how the Vietnamese-American community “is the third force between the binary poles of Vietnam and the United States,” how it “simultaneously belongs to or in both countries” (2017: 566). We pointed in the previous chapter to the challenges many Vietnamese refugees faced upon their arrival in the U.S.; to that list, we now add the challenge of how to make sense of the American-Vietnamese War and how to understand one’s identity in relation to it. Thanh Tan, host of the Seattle-based Second Wave, a podcast exploring the Vietnamese-American experience, speaks

Eyerman, Ron, Todd Madigan and Magnus Ring, Vietnam: A War, Not a Country. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463723084_CH05

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for many second-generation Vietnamese Americans when she says the war “is the backbone of my identity. It doesn’t matter that I was born after the fighting ended. Whether I like it or not, the Vietnam War is my war, too” (NYT, 10/3/2017). And indeed, she has often not liked it. In the following, Tan explains how this struggle affected her in her formative years: I would see things related to the war—like my mother shedding tears while listening to an old pre-1975 Vietnamese song or my dad organizing a “Black April” memorial event commemorating the loss of South Vietnam—but I didn’t know how to process any of it. I guess I dealt with these two conflicting narratives by not really dealing with them at all for a long time—I truly thought the Vietnam War was behind us; that it was my parents’ war and not mine. Needless to say, I was not proud to be Vietnamese-American. (NYT 11/7/2017)

For many of those who, like Tan, were not old enough to have personal memories of the war, the conflicting narratives—those of the VietnameseAmerican community versus those of the broader American society, as well as the conflicting perspectives within the Vietnamese-American community itself—led to confusion and a questioning of personal identity. Tan speaks of this hybridity in terms of what she calls “my dual identities,” commenting that “I didn’t have a choice but to alternate between these different worlds” (ibid.). But in spite of these shared difficulties, many Vietnamese Americans relate how they eventually come to terms with their collective identity—although they do not all arrive at the same conclusion. Reflecting on her own process, Tan remarks, “Now that I’m older and more aware of how my family got here, I’ve learned that being Vietnamese-American means embracing a complex history filled with a potent mix of joy, tragedy and redemption” (ibid.). It is the goal of the present chapter to reveal the specific ways that Vietnamese Americans narrate this “complex history.”

The Absence of a Vietnamese-American Political Arena of Memory The major arenas of memory within the Vietnamese-American community can be summed up as the following: the community, the academic, and the artistic. A society’s arenas of memory—the relatively independent conversations in which specific individuals and groups use specific media to create, perpetuate, and contest specific narratives—could of course be

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configured in any number of ways, but the three listed here have a certain level of institutional coherence that will facilitate the following analysis. Having already looked at the arenas of memory within the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) as well as those of the broader American society, the obvious omission from this short inventory of Vietnamese-American arenas is that of the political, and this omission deserves a word or two of justification. After all, despite the frequent charges of dysfunction and the questioning of its legitimacy, the Republic of Vietnam had a sprawling political apparatus that was largely recognized by the international community. One might reasonably ask why some semblance of this institution was not reconstituted upon the refugees’ arrival in the United States—or even if the former political machinery was not reconstituted, why we do not view some of the various newly formed organizations within the Vietnamese-American community—those with clearly stated political goals—as comprising an independent political arena of memory. The answer to these questions involves several factors, which we will now address. To begin with, the former Republic of Vietnam heads of state were not even in the United States in the years immediately following the fall of Saigon. In the final ten days of its existence, the Republic of Vietnam cycled through three presidents. President Nguyen Van Thieu, who had held that office since 1967, resigned on April 21, 1975; four days after his resignation, Thieu—the man who had shortly before vowed to “fight to the last bullet, the last grain of rice” (Pearson, Washington Post, 10/1/2001)—fled to Taiwan and from there to London, where he remained until the early 1980s. It was only then that he made his way to the East Coast of the United States, where he was to live out the rest of his life in relative obscurity. His successor, President Tran Van Huong, who held the presidency for exactly one week, did not leave Vietnam as the communists took control of the South. He was placed under house arrest for two years, then spent the rest of his life in Vietnam as a private citizen. And finally, President Duong Van Minh, who presided over the surrender of the Republic of Vietnam on April 30, 1975, remained in the country until 1983, at which time he was allowed to emigrate to France. In the 1990s—like Thieu—Minh made his way to the United States to live out the remainder of his life, also in obscurity. Although Presidents Thieu and Minh eventually made it to the United States, the animosity toward them within the Vietnamese-American population was intense. Thieu was regularly blamed for the series of military miscalculations in early 1975 that allowed the communists to roll through the South with a rapidity that caught even the communists themselves by surprise. On March 10, 1975, the PAVN launched what would

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become known as the Battle of Buôn Ma Thuột—a key element in their Spring Offensive—by sending a large fighting force against the ARVN battalions stationed in the central highlands. On March 14, after several days of intense combat, Thieu ordered most of his forces in the north of the country to retreat in order to fortify the area around Saigon in the south. He justif ied this strategic maneuver by claiming that the ARVN could not effectively defend every inch of its territory and that the military had to be “lightened at the top and heavy at the bottom” (Vien, 1983: 132). But this poorly planned withdrawal led to a disastrous rout of the troops and civilians retreating from Buôn Ma Thuột (some 100,000 were reportedly killed or captured). This obliteration in turn initiated a series of events that isolated other ARVN units in the northern area of South Vietnam and led to a general collapse of most of the region north of Saigon, allowing the NVA to advance rapidly southward toward Saigon, which was now defended by an eviscerated ARVN. The South Vietnamese general Tran Van Don writes specifically that “our senseless withdrawal from the Highlands triggered the process of [South Vietnam’s] collapse,” and that this disaster “was caused in great measure by our president’s [i.e., Thieu’s] inaction and lack of leadership” (Tran Van Don, 1978: 245). What’s more, four days after tearfully vowing in his nationally televised abdication speech never to abandon the country, Thieu absconded to Taiwan (allegedly with great quantities of the Republic of Vietnam’s gold packed in his personal luggage).1 Tran Thi My Ngoc, just a girl at the time, remembers the words of her father. Realizing late in the evening on April 29 that Saigon was lost and that they would not escape, Tran’s father told her never to forget that “two of our biggest enemies were Thieu and the Communists. He said, ‘Don’t ever forget what they did to us! Thieu and the Communists!’” (Engelmann, 1997: 292). Indeed, the acrimony toward Thieu in the period immediately after the fall of Saigon was so great that President Ford, who had insisted—in spite of the unpopularity of the decision—on allowing the initial wave of 130,000 refugees to settle in the United States, purportedly sent word to Thieu in Taiwan letting him know that “because of his reputation, he is not welcome here” (Ky, 2002: 350). President Minh, who had surrendered the Republic of Vietnam to the communists, was widely despised by the Vietnamese in America because of 1 This claim has been disputed: “In 1990 it emerged from various eye-witness accounts that he had not stolen South Vietnam’s gold reserves amounting to 16 million tons. They were still intact in the National Bank in Saigon when the Communists took it over.” (The Independent, 10/2/2001 “Nguyen Van Thieu” [Obituary]; see also Morley Safer, 1990).

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what many considered his overhasty capitulation.2 At the time of his order to surrender on April 30, 1975, there were still effective South Vietnamese fighting units in the Mekong Delta to the south of Saigon, and many were hoping to shore up defenses around a toehold in the southernmost region of the country. General Nguyen Cao Ky—one-time Premier of the Republic of Vietnam, as well as the former Air Marshall of the Vietnamese Air Force (VNAF)—relates in his autobiography how he met with senior South Vietnamese military leaders as the communist forces were encircling Saigon and devised a plan whereby “[w]e would … take up positions south of the broad Dong Nai River, which formed Saigon’s southern boundary. Then we would destroy all the bridges, so the enemy could not follow us across” (Ky, 2002: 329). On April 29, 1975, Ky gave a speech in Saigon that was broadcast over the radio. He implored the soldiers to continue the struggle against the communists. He was hoping that “everyone who could fight would stay in the Saigon area to fight one more big battle, to punish the enemy and stall the offensive long enough for our troops to reorganize and establish a strong line of resistance” (ibid.: 329–330). And this plan was not merely the delusion of a few military diehards. It was shared by some of the civilian political leadership as well. Nguyen Phuc Hau, an elected official, describes a supervisors’ meeting in Saigon in April 1975: “We had a plan to move the government to Can Tho [i.e., a large city directly south of Saigon] … I felt very good about this. I said, ‘We want to send a message to all of the people who want to fight the communists. They can go to Can Tho and we will organize our front line there to fight against them and keep the government safe’” (Engelmann, 1997: 255). With these bold plans in the air, the sudden surrender of South Vietnam by President Minh shocked and shattered the hopes of many; and for large numbers of South Vietnamese, it was unforgivable. An ARVN medic, Nghia M. Vo, recalls that reactions to the surrender in his unit “ranged from utter disbelief and resignation to pain and anger” (2009: 178); Bui Van Cao remembers with bitterness his hearing that “that bastard Duong 2 It should be noted that there are other South Vietnamese who consider Minh to be a savior of sorts, crediting him with saving the lives of countless of their countrymen. The argument is that with an already populous Saigon swollen with refugees, had the South maintained an armed stand against the communists, who had completely surrounded the city, the death toll would have been immense—and would have delayed the inevitable by only a short time. “[Minh] was responsible for saving Saigon from unnecessary destruction and by his actions, he indirectly permitted over 130,000 Vietnamese to leave their homeland and seek new lives away from Communist oppression … double-crossed and deserted, he resigned himself to his own sacrifice so that those of his countrymen who could not accept the Communist domination could emigrate in safety and to ensure that those who chose to remain did not suffer the horrors of total destruction” (Tran Van Don, 1978: 252).

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Van Minh had declared the surrender of all authority to the communists” (Hawthorne, 1982: 63); Nguyen Phuc Hau puts the widespread incredulity succinctly: “We just quit” (Engelmann, 1997: 255); and Duong Van Mai Elliott relates that some South Vietnamese felt Minh “had presented Saigon on a platter to the communists” and “that Minh, whose brother was a Viet Cong general, had conspired with Hanoi” (Elliot, 1999: 408). The sense of betrayal by their leadership was overwhelming, and it was certainly not limited to their former presidents; very few within the political elite escaped censure. Nguyen Phuc Thieu, a veteran of the VNAF, remembers pointedly that “On the night of April 29 we listened to general Ky [who had served as vice president under Thieu] on our radio. He made a speech in which he said he would stay and fight to the death. He said we should do that, too. Then he left” (Engelmann, 1997: 246). Hue Thu, an English teacher in Saigon at the time of its fall, was still embittered decades after the country’s surrender, saying “I still don’t like the way [General] Ky, or Cao Vien [the Chairman of the Joint General Staff], or [President] Thieu ran like that. They should stay and fight … I was there. I didn’t see any fight at all…. [President] Huong Van Minh just announced that we lost” (ibid.: 267). General Ly Tong Ba diagnosed the problem in the final days of the Republic of Vietnam as a “sickness that eats away at the people,” a sickness in the form of corruption: “This society is corrupted. The people become corrupted because the leaders are corrupted” (ibid.: 244). Former ARVN Sergeant Huynh Van Do points to the same problem when he recalls that “At the time [i.e., when he was a young soldier in training], I didn’t know that we got only one half of our pay since the corrupt training officers kept the other half for themselves” (Li, 2010: 17). And decades later, in an interview featured in the Burns and Novick documentary, The Vietnam War, Phan Quang Tue could say, “In terms of corruption, yes, they were corrupt. Both Thieu and Ky, they abused their position. We paid a very high price for having leaders like Ky and Thieu. And we continue to pay the price” (Burns and Novick, 2017: episode 5, emphasis added). This stinging breach of faith and abandonment (to say nothing of the breach of faith and abandonment by the Americans3), combined with the global dispersal of South Vietnam’s final three chief executives, is emblematic of the strains running through the diasporic population in its entirety. It 3 Former ARVN captain Michael Do echoes the common and persistent sentiment of South Vietnam’s betrayal by the U.S. this way: “President (Richard) Nixon promised that he would help with any means, any way, to save Vietnam if the communists attacked again…. But they did nothing” (Flakus, Voice of America News, 5/23/2016).

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also suggests one of the reasons why there never emerged a legitimate government-in-exile4 that might have constituted a unique political arena of memory. However, there is another factor that contributed to the absence of a political arena. As the previous chapter illustrates, the departure from Vietnam was hurried and chaotic. The initial immigration apparatus set up in the United States to process the Vietnamese refugees was manufactured in an equally impromptu fashion and sought to distribute the massive wave of displaced people more or less equally across the 50 states. Indeed, not only was the body of refugees carved up in this way, but so were individual families. The initial wave of Vietnamese refugees was dependent on the whims of the American public; before they could leave their processing centers, refugees had to await sponsorship from individual Americans—people whom they had never met. And this often meant, in the cases where American sponsors limited the number of individuals they were willing to host, that families were broken up. Viet Thanh Nguyen recalls how “my parents went to one sponsor, my ten-year-old brother went to another, and my four-year-old self went to a third” (2017: 567). This wide geographic dispersal, combined with their initial destitution and the torrent of recriminations that flew in all directions between the erstwhile government elite, added significant obstacles to the formation of a cohesive political body in the United States, one that might have provided an additional arena of collective memory. That said, the Vietnamese in America certainly have not shied away from participation in politics. But in all these cases, their political activity is directed toward American or other broadly recognized political institutions, such as the European Union and the United Nations. Their engagement is that of American citizens, and when they are not actually holding office (e.g., as city council members, mayors, federal judges, and representatives in both state and U.S. legislatures), they are working the levers of civic power through the ballot, community organizing, lobbying, campaign contributions, demonstrations, and even highly publicized hunger strikes and suicide pacts. So, although they formed no autonomous political arena, the Vietnamese in America developed an extraordinarily active aggregate of community organizations—both formal and informal—where the struggle over how the war in Vietnam ought to be remembered continues to play out. 4 There have been a small number of self-proclaimed governments-in-exile within the Vietnamese-American diaspora, two prominent examples having been formed in the U.S. in 1990 (the Provisional Government of Free Vietnam) and 1995 (the Government of Free Vietnam). These will be discussed below, where we will argue that they are better thought of as organizations within the community arena of memory.

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The Endless War One of the most startling contrasts between those within the VietnameseAmerican community and those in either the Socialist Republic of Vietnam or broader U.S. society is that the Vietnamese in America often narrate the American-Vietnamese War as not yet over. Amanda Demmer, historian of war and author of After Saigon’s Fall, asserts that “For many South Vietnamese, the Vietnam War persisted past 1975” (2021: 3). This claim is a refrain heard in the title of an early memoir, published in 1978 by General Tran Van Don: Our Endless War; in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s opinion piece published in The New York Times in 2015 on the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon: “Our Vietnam War Never Ended”; in the scholarly article by Yen Le Espiritu, “Thirty Years AfterWARds: The Endings That Are Not Over”; in General Tran Van Nhut’s 2009 book, An Loc: The Unfinished War; and in direct statements like those of Brigitte Huynh, the owner and editor-in-chief of the Southern-Californiabased Little Saigon Daily News: “The war is not over with us” (Roosevelt, Orange County Register, 4/25/2015). Of course, the Vietnamese-Americans are not unique in the use of this “not-yet-over” language. As we have seen in previous chapters, the war is also said to persist in the SRV and the broader United States, and this can also be discerned explicitly in the titles of the many articles written on subject. In Vietnam, the war is said to carry on through both the unexploded ordnance that has killed tens of thousands since 1975 (“For Vietnam, Leftover American Bombs Mean the War Never Ended” 5/26/2014, The World) and the continued birth defects brought about by the 20 million gallons of defoliant sprayed over Vietnam by the United States (“War Not Over for Children of Agent Orange” Bailey, 8/16/2007, Things Asian). In the United States, American veterans also suffer from war-related physical ailments (“Our War Is Not Over” is printed on T-shirts and sold by the Agent Orange Store) and mental health problems, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (“War Is Never Over for Those with PTSD” Scala, 6/26/2016, The Intelligencer). In addition, the meaning of the war is still fought over (“Vietnam: The War That Never Ended” Hagopian, April 2019, History Today). And for the campaign to free the prisoners of war that are purportedly still being held in Vietnam, the slogan is “Their War Is Not Over.”5 Most recently, in an interview immediately after the airing of his highly anticipated and critically acclaimed 18-hour documentary, The Vietnam War, filmmaker Ken Burns could state emphatically, “the Vietnam 5 Demmer explores “the POW myth” (i.e., the idea that American POWs were still being held in Vietnam in the 1980s) in After Saigon’s Fall (2021: 133ff.).

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War isn’t over” (Rosenberg, Washington Post, 9/29/2017). Karin Aguilar-San Juan, in her book Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America, sums this all up tidily: according to the personal memories of veterans on both sides, of their families, of a people living on a land torn apart by napalm and Agent Orange, and of those seeking refuge in places such as Little Saigon and Fields Corner, the war still rages into the present. (2009: 65)

Yet despite the similarity in phrasing, the claims within the SRV and the broader United States that the American-Vietnamese War is “not yet over” signal a strikingly different meaning from the claims of the Vietnamese Americans. In the SRV, the enduring traumas are straightforwardly the effects of material artifacts left over from the war (i.e., explosives and chemicals); they are the legacy of the war as physically experienced by individuals. In the United States, it is common enough to refer to some American veterans of the American-Vietnamese War as still engaged in f ighting the war. But this is usually meant as a comment on their individual psychic trauma. The same individualistic understanding applies to the veterans who suffer from physical ailments (including the effects of toxic defoliants) and combat wounds received during the war. These are claims that individuals are still struggling with personal war-related traumas. In addition, on the society-wide level of the American collective, the battles over the meaning of the war, the reasons why it was waged, the conduct of those who prosecuted it, and the lessons to be learned are still being fought over. But in both of these instances—the individual and collective—the war itself is understood to have ended, a war def ined f irst and foremost as armed combat. In the SRV and the broader United States, the narrative of the war has as a matter of fact concluded; but there are some within the Vietnamese-American community for whom it has not. Twenty-f ive years after the fall of Saigon, a poll found that “40 percent of Vietnamese living in Orange County [California] said ‘f ighting communism’ was a ‘top priority’ for them personally” (Furuya and Collet, 2009: 65). On this point—the ongoing war against the communists—Vietnamese-American scholar Nhi T. Lieu observes that “the most remarkable aspect of this community’s cultural and political activism over the past thirty years since settling in the United States is its commitment to f ighting the communist regime in Vietnam” (2011: 57–58).

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A. The Community Arena of Memory The community arena of memory comprises a wide range of formal and informal institutions, including museums and cultural centers, public memorials, RVNMF veterans associations, philanthropic organizations, business consortiums, news media, cultural and commemorative events, social movements, and educational programs. And given this broad spectrum, it is not surprising to find that participation in this arena spans every demographic within the collectivity. However, despite the heterogeneity of this mélange, only three rather tightly structured narratives persist and are struggled over by its constituents. In what follows, we will examine each of these narratives in turn.

1. The Narrative of Ongoing Violent Struggle Against the Communists Hope your website will have one new section in the near future: Fall of Hanoi. —Vu Dinh, guestbook comment on a Vietnamese-American website memorializing the ARVN war dead, 5/25/20066

The first narrative we will examine—one that has been present within the Vietnamese-American community since the earliest period after the fall of Saigon—holds that the combat operations have not yet ended. We will call this the narrative of ongoing violent struggle against the communists. The claim that the shooting war has not yet ended might sound outlandish to many. Even for those who see the war as metaphorically ongoing, or ongoing within the minds and bodies of those who fought in it, this literalness can seem to stretch credulity to the breaking point. The U.S. signed the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973 (the official title of the document is “The Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam”), and by March 29 of that same year, all American combat troops had left Vietnam; by April 30, 1975, all remaining American personnel were evacuated; and finally, on May 6, 1975, President Ford could state definitively that “the war in Vietnam is over” (Binder, NYT, 5/7/1975). What’s more, as detailed above, on that last day of April 1975, the Republic of Vietnam formally and unconditionally surrendered to the communists, and the state was officially 6 Cited in Espiritu, 2016: 25.

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dissolved. For about one year after the surrender, what had been the Republic of Vietnam was administered by the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam, an administrative apparatus that ceased to exist when its territory was “reunified” with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (i.e., “North Vietnam”) on July 2, 1976, forming the modern state of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Yet despite all these indications that the hostilities had come to an end, many Vietnamese Americans read the story differently. From the very first days of their exile from Vietnam, large numbers of the diaspora in America have looked toward a future return. Historian Ronald Takaki notes that “Many Vietnamese see themselves as sojourners, hopeful that they can return to their country some day. Indeed, a 1977 survey of heads of households showed that 41 percent planned to return to Vietnam to live” (1989: 455). But for some, as Vietnamese-American sociologist C.N. Le notes, to return would be not to live but to kill and die. Almost immediately upon their settlement in the United States, many Vietnamese refugees began plotting on how to reconstitute their military resources, wage a campaign to reinvade Viet Nam, and reclaim their country from the Communists. (2009: 195)

Nguyen Truong Toai is an example of a Vietnamese American who held on to this hope. Nguyen was a young ARVN veteran whose unit collapsed on March 25, 1975. In mid-April he was captured by communist forces and sent to a re-education camp. In 1979, after his release, Nguyen fled to the U.S., and many years later, he was still clinging to the hope of victory: “In the beginning when I was in the U.S. I kept thinking about Vietnam and wanting to return. It was a dream, a hope. Even now I still have that dream, to return in order to fight” (Engelmann, 1997: 240). In the 1980s, the continuing fight was more than a dream for Pham Van Lieu, a former ARVN colonel; victory was something immanent: “I think we will defeat them [the Communists] in three to five years, surely before the end of this decade” (Takaki, 1989: 455). For individuals like Nguyen and Pham, the shooting war was not over. They formed organizations like the National United Front for the Liberation of Vietnam (“the Front”) where in their official anthem, they declare: “Citizens, arise and respond to the call of the ancestor land … Even at the cost of lying in dead heaps, we shall shed our blood to revenge our people.” At Tet New Year celebrations, they gather under a banner trumpeting the slogan, To Quoc Tren Het: Country Above All. “We shall return,” they

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shout as they pledge themselves to the “liberation of Vietnam.” (Cited in Takaki, 1989: 455)

In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saigon, there were rumors among the diaspora that there were small groups of South Vietnamese soldiers who had refused to surrender. They were believed to be holed up in the jungles and mountains of Vietnam as well as in secret cells within the cities, where they had caches of weapons, ammunition, and supplies with which they engaged in sabotage, assassination, and even small-scale battles with the communist forces (Faber, 1988). These erstwhile RVNMF soldiers were also said to be supplemented by Montagnards, a blanket term for a number of ethnic hill tribes who had been encouraged by the CIA to fight against the North Vietnamese during the U.S. involvement in Vietnam (ibid.). Stories of this sort of guerrilla resistance were fuelled by the regular influx of refugees from Vietnam. For example, a former noncommissioned officer in the South Vietnamese Navy who escaped Vietnam and ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand “described in detail the operations and organization of a resistance group that he said he had belonged to until he fled his country” (Kamm, NYT, 1/29/1978). In the first year after the fall of Saigon, Nguyen Ngoc Huy, founder of the diasporic Alliance for Democracy in Vietnam, claimed that “300 communist cadres were assassinated” through the efforts of this armed resistance (Faber, 1988: 121). By 1978, The New York Times could confirm that a “growing body of evidence seems to be accumulating that indicates some resistance by military units of the former anti-Communist Government is persisting in scattered areas of South Vietnam” (Andelman, NYT, 10/19/1978). Under the name Dega, one such group of anticommunists, consisting of “at least thirty or more uplanders trained by the U.S. Special Forces” and “at least fifteen former ARVN military officers and twenty RVN civil servants, as well as nurses and schoolteachers…. fought on in the highlands for several years [after 1975]” (Kiernan, 2017: 459–460). In October 1982, the SRV’s military journal, People’s Army Review, “published an analysis on the security situation in the South and warned of many enemies there: [including] former RVN and ARVN personnel” (ibid.: 469). Indeed, throughout the 1980s, SRV officials continued to express their concerns to American officials that the U.S. might officially organize former re-education camp detainees as a “counterrevolutionary force” (Demmer, 2021: 133). Up through the early 1980s, the resistance against the communists continued in this way, perpetuated by South Vietnamese combatants who had not surrendered and had never left Vietnam. However, while supplies were slowly being depleted for those fighters in Vietnam, resources and resolve

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were building in the U.S. (Faber, 1988). In 1982, massive rallies with thousands of participants were taking place all across the U.S., rallies for the express purpose of raising money and recruiting volunteers for the ongoing fight against the communist government in Vietnam (King, NYT, 6/3/1982). In 1983, Hoang Co Minh, a former deputy admiral in the South Vietnamese Navy, stood before “a packed convention center in Washington D.C., to make an announcement: He intended to reconquer Vietnam … that he’d built a force that would topple the Hanoi government and liberate the homeland from the totalitarian rule of the Communists” (Thompson, ProPublica, 11/3/2015). Hearing this declaration, “The crowd—thousands of Vietnamese refugees who’d fled the country after Saigon fell in 1975—erupted in celebration, and in some cases, tears of joy” (ibid.). By 1985, there were reputed to be 72 Vietnamese groups in the United States that “describe themselves as being involved in resistance activity” against the communist regime (Butterfield, NYT, 1/7/1985). Moreover, these groups were not content to merely rely on support from their own community: “The patriots refuse to acknowledge the end of the war. They lobby Congress to give military aid to the ‘freedom fighters’ in Vietnam and overthrow the Communist government” (Takaki, 1989: 455). In 1983, former South Vietnamese Premier Ky claimed that “Vietnamese refugees were training in U.S. national parks in preparation to engage in armed struggle in their homeland. ‘Give me the guns,’ he promised, ‘and we’ll kick them [the Communists] out’” (ibid.). Michael Faber, whose research has focused on the post-April 30, 1975 movements against the Vietnamese communists, notes that “Many object to aiding the Vietnamese Resistance on the grounds that they don’t want to start another war in Vietnam. This is a fallacy, however, since the war there never ended” (Faber, 1988: 239: emphasis added). And this sentiment is repeated over and again throughout the Vietnamese-American community arena of memory. In the following, Nguyen Cao Ky indicates the power of the narrative of a war that never ended, a war that will eventually conclude in triumph for the dispossessed Vietnamese diaspora: “I believe that my destiny is I will some day have to go back to Vietnam. You wait and see. The world is changing, changing from the beginning for millions of years, a continuous cycle of changing. There will be a change in power, and I will go back” (Morrison and Zarusky, 1980: 423). And Ky was not the only person busy petitioning the U.S. government to this end. Ho Quang Nhut, co-chairman of the nationwide League of Vietnamese Voters in the United States, said that his group recently lobbied some Republican members of Congress for military aid to the “freedom fighters” they believed were poised to attempt

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an overthrow of the Vietnamese Government from within the country with the assistance of troops training along the border regions with Laos and Cambodia. (Bishop, NYT, 8/3/1987)

Meanwhile, armed incursions by Vietnamese-Americans had already commenced. One of the most active groups in this drive to continue the war in Vietnam was the Front, a group founded in 1981 by the joining together of three other anti-communist organizations and led by Hoang Co Minh, the former deputy admiral whose proclamation to an audience of Vietnamese Americans in Washington D.C. we described above. The group’s purpose was “to seek the eventual liberation of Vietnam from Communist domination” (Faber, 1988: 131). Late that same year, the group set up a camp on the Thai-Laotian border, and by 1983 a short-lived “Resistance Radio” had been set up in Bangkok to broadcast anti-communist propaganda into the southern reaches of Vietnam (ibid.: 139). Throughout the early 1980s, the group was propagating its message through its own monthly publication, Khang Chien (Resistance), and processing a large and steady flow of financial contributions from both individuals and Vietnamese-American-owned businesses; it augmented this support by opening a chain of pho noodle houses, and by the end of 1984 claimed to have $7 million in its treasury (Devoss, LAT, 1/5/1986). Although in 1985 the group was restructured and renamed—and Minh was removed from his leadership position—these organizational alterations did little to change what happened two years later. In the autumn of 1987, armed with assault rifles and M72 anti-tank rockets (Thompson, ProPublica, 11/3/2015) Minh and his group launched their invasion. Laotian and Thai press reported in November and December 1987 that a group of 200 Resistance fighters crossed the Thai Lao border with the aim of traversing Laos, and setting up a resistance base in Quang Nam-Da Nang Province [in central Vietnam]. It is reported that Hoang Co Minh led this band. The Laotian Communists claim to have engaged in a total of 23 skirmishes with the group before finally liquidating them. The Laotians claim to have killed 104 and captured 65. Among those reported killed, is Admiral Hoang Co Minh. The remnants of Minh’s faction of the Front deny that Minh was either captured or killed, but in December 1987, the Hanoi delegation to the United Nations circulated death photos of Admiral Minh. (Faber, 1988: 148)

The New York Times reported on the legal aftermath of the incursion:

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A Vietnamese tribunal sentenced 17 people to prison today on charges of trying to stage a guerrilla invasion with American and Thai backing. The leader of the guerrillas was reported to be a former South Vietnamese admiral, Hoang Co Minh, who became an American citizen a few years ago. Hanoi says Mr. Minh was killed in Laos in August with more than 100 other members of the group. (Crossette, NYT, 12/4/1987)

One of the fascinating pieces of information to emerge from this event is that most of those charged in this incident were young men in their 20s (Crossette, NYT, 12/4/1987)—men too young to have fought in the RVNMF. In other words, the narrative of a continuing war against the communists was not the sole province of veterans of the South Vietnamese government or military, nor even solely that of the older generation. The narrative of ongoing violent struggle against the communists has had wide appeal, an appeal that has been manifested in the myriad rallies, the continued financial support, and the sheer quantity of organizations dedicated to bringing the narrative to its fruition by conquering the SRV. Another group to have championed the narrative of ongoing violent struggle against the communists is the Government of Free Vietnam (GFVN), an unrecognized government-in-exile headquartered in California. In 1994, the U.S. lifted its 19-year-long trade embargo against the SRV; on that occasion, Elmo Zumwalt, the U.S. Navy Chief of Staff from 1970-1974, published an opinion piece whose title had the familiar assertion “The War Is Over” (Zumwalt, NYT, 2/7/1994). The following year, President Clinton officially normalized relations between the U.S. and the SRV; the front page of The New York Times proclaimed: “War Is Yesterday” (Sanger, NYT, 8/6/1995). But at this point it should come as no surprise that the American war-is-over narrative fell on many deaf ears within the Vietnamese-American community. Indeed, it was precisely in the midst of these events, on April 30, 1995—the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon—that the GFVN was formed. And for the next decade, the group actively sought to take the fight to the enemy with the goal of toppling Vietnam’s government. Like the Front, the group was well-funded, claiming at one point to be receiving $1 million per year. They also had members located all across the world and consistently drew large crowds to their conferences in southern California (Lam, OC Weekly, 11/14/2013). And their commitment to their goal of defeating the communists can be seen in the following litany of direct actions. In 1999, 38 of the organization’s members were arrested in the southern part of Vietnam: they were found with anti-government leaflets and 37kg of explosives that were destined for use in bombing public monuments and

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festivals; in 2000, the GFVN was accused of starting a fire at the Vietnamese embassy in London; in April of 2001, they bombed the Vietnamese embassy in Phnom Penh; in June 2001, three members were arrested for planting bombs at the Vietnamese embassy in Bangkok; in September 2001, three members were charged by the Philippine police with plotting to bomb the Vietnamese embassy in Manilla (Johnson, Time, 10/29/2001). In October of 2001, when U.S. sheriff’s deputies arrested GFVN member Vo Duc Van in relation to the attempted bombing of the Bangkok embassy, the southern California Vietnamese-American community erupted in protests, marches, and hunger strikes (Lam, OC Weekly, 11/14/2013). Speaking of Vo Duc Van’s arrest, Nguyen Huu Chanh, the leader of the GFVN, told the Los Angeles Times, “We want to stand behind him. He’s a freedom fighter,” (Lam, OC Weekly, 11/14/2013). In a 2003 diplomatic cable between the SRV and the U.S., Chanh is referred to as a terrorist ringleader who traveled to Laos and Cambodia to “recruit and train people to produce, use mines and bombs … [and] purchase grenades and explosives for terrorist activities against Vietnam” (Lam, OC Weekly, 11/14/2013); in fact, the GFVN is listed as a terrorist organization on the Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium. In 2005, seven GFVN members were arrested in Vietnam for attempting to set up illegal radio transmitters in order to broadcast anti-government propaganda (BBC, 11/10/2006). The more quixotic the efforts, the more the power of the not-yettriumphant nature of the narrative of ongoing violent struggle against the communists is emphasized. One particularly poignant example is the 1991 incident in Sacramento, California. Four Vietnamese-American young men—two of them teenagers—took 41 people hostage at gunpoint in a Good Guys electronics store and demanded bullet-proof vests, four million dollars, and a helicopter to go “fight the Viet Cong” (Lam, 2005: 51). After a standoff of eight hours, a police sniper took a shot at one of the young men, missed, and the hostage-takers began shooting their hostages at close range. The police stormed the building, and after the last shot was fired, eleven hostages had been wounded, three killed, and three of the four hostage-takers were dead (Lam, 2005: 51; Gross, NYT, 4/6/1991). Of course, this narrative of ongoing violent struggle against the communists is not the only narrative to have emerged in the community arena of memory. There is another narrative that is equally hostile to the communist regime in present day Vietnam, but it is one that accepts that armed combat has come to an end. This narrative, one that we will refer to as the narrative of ongoing political struggle against the communists, will be explored next.

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2. The Narrative of Ongoing Political Struggle Against the Communists THE FOOT SMASHING OF HO CHI MINH’S FACE —The name of one of the New Democracy Movement’s strategic campaigns (accessed on the website of the Third Republic of Vietnam7 Dê Tam Viêt Nam Công Hòa)

Strong anti-communist sentiment is not solely the province of those who maintain that combat operations against the Vietnamese communists did not end in 1975. C.N. Le estimates that there were on the order of 140 anti-communist organizations within the Vietnamese-American community in the 1980s (2009: 196), and certainly not all of them were predicated on the violent overthrow of the SRV. What we have identified as the narrative of ongoing political struggle against the communists is a narrative widely shared among the Vietnamese diaspora, one that has many institutional proponents throughout the Vietnamese-American community arena of memory. This narrative tells the story of a decisive communist military victory in Vietnam, a victory that largely precludes any subsequent armed struggle for control of the country. But it goes on to maintain that the communist government is nonetheless illegitimate and must be battled politically in order to be radically reformed or—ideally—replaced. Much like the narrative of ongoing violent struggle against the communists, this narrative has been present from the earliest days of the Vietnamese refugees’ entry into the U.S. In her book American Dream in Vietnamese, Nhi T. Lieu describes how “Upon arriving in the United States…Vietnamese refugees sought ways to…garner enough political power throughout the Vietnamese diaspora so that one day it would be possible to bring democracy back to Vietnam” (2011: 27). Decades later, many refugees still maintain this desire. Second-generation Vietnamese American Ngoc Nga asserts that for the older generation of Vietnamese Americans, “It’s about how can we topple the government in Vietnam and return to our rightful place” (cited in Aguilar-San Juan, 2009: 86). We have already seen how some segments involved in this initial effort at organized overseas resistance to the communist regime in Vietnam adopted the means of violence, and we will now

7 Previously, this organization was known as the Provisional National Government of Vietnam (Chính Ph̉ u Quốc Gia Vịêt Nam), but the group changed its name to the Third Republic of Vietnam in 2018.

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turn to an exploration of the ways in which it also looked to non-violent political power. We mentioned above that the attempts at forming a Vietnamese government-in-exile within the Vietnamese-American community are better thought of as being played out in the community arena of memory. This is because the associations that were formed to this end never received the sort of broad and sustained recognition necessary to constitute a fullfledged arena; not only were these self-proclaimed governments-in-exile never recognized by the United States or the United Nations, but even within the Vietnamese diaspora their membership was never more than a small fraction of the population. We have already described one of these organizations—the Government of Free Vietnam—and showed how this group was deeply committed to the narrative of ongoing violent struggle against the communists. However, another organization that claimed to be the legitimate government of Vietnam, the Provisional National Government of Vietnam8 (PNGV), adopted the narrative of ongoing political struggle against the communists and asserted the following: The stated goal of the Provisional National Government of Vietnam is to achieve FREE AND DEMOCRATIC ELECTIONS IN VIETNAM. The government seeks to create an atmosphere of non-violent pressure on the Communist’s regime to allow for an election process whereby the people can choose whether or not to retain communism as the preferred system of governance. (Provisional National Government of Vietnam)

According to the group’s website, in 1985, “the Vietnamese people, including businessmen, ex-soldiers, former Republic of Vietnam off icers, and intellectual immigrants all over the world, have silently joined together to form an organization called: The New Democracy Movement”9 (Provisional National Government of Vietnam). The New Democracy Movement “demanded [a] free and fair election for Vietnam,” and their central goal was to unify the Vietnamese in their efforts to unseat “the dictatorship of communist Vietnam” (Provisional Government of Vietnam). To this end they formed the California-based PNGV in 1990, and in 1991 the 39-year-old Dao Minh Quan was sworn in as prime minister, a position

8 Chính Ph̉ u Quốc Gia Vịêt Nam. The group was renamed the Third Republic of Vietnam (Đệ Tam Việt Nam Cộng Hòa) in 2018. 9 Vietnam Tan Dan Chu.

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he has retained up to the present.10 In 2005, the off icial PNVG website claimed that Nowadays, many Vietnamese patriots, including Ex-Vietnamese communists have joined Mr. Dao Minh Quan’s leadership, which will ensure that the Vietnam Communist regime will have to accept the demands for a free and fair election for Vietnam. (Provisional National Government of Vietnam)

At the time of the PNGV’s institution in 1990, the would-be Prime Minister Dao Minh Quan was encouraged and supported by Phuong Hang. Hang was one of the co-founders of the United Front, the group discussed above in the context of ongoing paramilitary operations within Vietnam. According to the PNGV’s website, Hang “vowed dedicatedly to support the new Vietnam National Provisional Government to topple Barbarian communists in Vietnam” (Provisional National Government of Vietnam). However, despite the support of the more militaristic elements within the diaspora, the PNGV has primarily engaged in political struggles, including a number of ambitious letter-writing campaigns. Early in 2013, in his capacity as prime minister of the PNGV, Quan sent letters to Pope Francis, U.S. President Barack Obama, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, and numerous other world leaders. These letters vary in length but generally thank their recipients for “kindly intervening again with the Vietnamese authorities, following our request for the prompt release of the people struggling for human rights, freedom, democracy and territorial integrity of Vietnam.” The letters then typically proceed with further supplications on behalf of specif ic individuals who were at that time being held in Vietnamese custody (Provisional National Government of Vietnam). These PNGV letters to individual world leaders were followed by the f iling of a series of legal complaints. In 2013, Dao Minh Quan, again in his capacity of prime minister of the PNVG, f iled a formal complaint to both the International Criminal Court in The Hague and in U.S. Federal Court, alleging “war crimes such as genocides, torture, repression, terror, massacre done by the Communists of Vietnam and China since Hồ Chí Minh started the communist regimes in our fatherland of Vietnam” (Provisional National Government of Vietnam). In 2014, Dao followed 10 As of this writing (2022).

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these complaints with another identical complaint to the Federal Public Service Justice in Brussels. Within these identical complaints is a list of 19 communist leaders (some of whom—like Ho Chi Minh—are deceased), along with numerous narrative accounts of the specif ic crimes they are alleged to have committed. Many of these enumerated events date back to the early and middle of the twentieth century, but some are claimed to be ongoing, like the ceding of Vietnamese territory to China; environmental destruction within Vietnam; the repression of dissident voices “by jailing, beating, [and] torture” as well as human traff icking, including “exporting minors to other countries for prostitution” (ibid). In December 2013, just before U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s state visit to Vietnam, Dao sent him a short letter requesting that Kerry “intervene with the Vietnam’s Communist Government to free those who are imprisoned because they were expressing patriotism and struggling for human rights” (ibid). In addition to these letters and legal filings, Dao makes regular appearances at Vietnamese-American community events. He leads processions, makes speeches, sits as an honored guest, and accepts awards and commendations. He is present at community events like the anniversaries of the founding of the ARVN and the commemoration of the Fall of Saigon, Tet New Year’s Celebrations, and events associated with Armed Forces Day, Veterans Day, Memorial Day, and even local events like the annual Garden Grove Strawberry Festival Parade. In 2016, the city of Los Angeles issued a certif icate of recognition to “Prime Minister Dao Minh Quan,” signed by Mayor Eric Garcetti. A photograph of this certif icate is posted on the PNGV website, and the caption beneath it reads the following: “Resolution from Los Angeles city to honed [sic.: “honor”] and recolonize [sic.: “recognize”] that Prime Minister Dao Minh Quan has persistently fought for over 30 years to bring freedom to Vietnam and its people” (Provisional National Government of Vietnam). However, far from an official recognition of the PNVG—let alone its mission of “bringing freedom to Vietnam,” the certificate actually states that it is in fact recognizing Dao’s “30 years of dedication to the Vietnamese community, both abroad and in the United States. Your efforts to bring resources and supplies to refugee camps throughout Southeast Asia are truly commendable” (Provisional National Government of Vietnam). Dao’s philanthropic work on behalf of refugees in camps throughout Southeast Asia (i.e., outside of Vietnam) as well as his work within Southern California are lauded; however, his work with the Vietnamese government-in-exile is passed over in silence. In fact, the

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PNVG is never mentioned in the certif icate. In the same year, Dao also received a certif icate of recognition from California Secretary of State Alex Padilla and the California State Legislature, using similar language. In these certificates, not only is there no mention of the PNVG, but also absent is Quan’s title of “Prime Minister.” Although the photographs of these three certif icates appear on the PNVG’s website, they are quite clearly honoring the community work of the individual, not the claims to political legitimacy of the PNVG. Although organizations like the Government of Free Vietnam and the Provisional National Government of Vietnam have the aspiration of being legitimate political actors, thereby constituting a genuine political arena of memory for the Vietnamese-American community, we argue that they are best thought of as part of the community arena. Neither the United Nations nor the United States has ever recognized these organizations qua state actors. But there are many other organizations throughout the community that do not claim to be political institutions yet still promote the narrative of ongoing political struggle. One such group is Vietnam Evolution, a Vietnamese-American advocacy organization. This group states on its website that it “promotes freedom and democracy for Vietnam,” asserting that “Under the current authoritarian, state-controlled, communist regime, Vietnamese people do not have their basic human rights, and always live in fear of being arrested by the secret police”. The group issues the following call to action: “Vietnam patriots, let [sic.] together stand up in non-violent ways to speak out, and protest, and demand for Vietnamese People’s Universal Human Rights and Free Vietnam” (Vietnam Evolution). Collectively, these groups—allied with other human rights organizations—have continuously lobbied the U.S. Congress to take stronger measures against the SRV. And as a result, on September 11, 2012, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Vietnam Human Rights Act of 2012.”11 The bill relates a long list of grievances, the very grievances that the Vietnamese-American community has been protesting since their arrival in the U.S., including charges of corruption, arbitrary arrests and imprisonment, violent repression of peaceful prayer vigils, and inadequate freedom of religion, expression, association, and assembly. What’s more, after pointing out that “Vietnam remains a one-party state, ruled and controlled by the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), which continues to deny the right of citizens to change their Government,” the bill declares its purpose as succinctly as many of the Vietnamese-American organizations 11 H.R. 1410 (112th Congress).

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we have looked at in this section: “The purpose of this Act is to promote the development of freedom and democracy in Vietnam.” But this bill failed to pass when referred to the Senate, where it died at the end of the 112th congress in 2013. Although both of the narratives we have analyzed thus far differ substantially, there is obviously strong agreement with regard to their stance against communism. The slogan of Westminster’s Little Saigon Daily News,12 with its nation-wide circulation of 70,000, reads: “The Voice of the Non-Communist Vietnamese.” The periodical’s publisher, Brigitte Huynh, asserts that “I created this newspaper because I have one dream: I want to see the Communist government [in Vietnam] collapse!” (Roosevelt, OCR, 4/25/2015). And these two narratives’ opposition to communism extends not only to Vietnam but to its presence in the United States as well. In 2004, the city council of Garden Grove—located at the heart of Southern California’s Little Saigon—unanimously passed a resolution stating that it “does not welcome, or sanction high-profile visits, drive-by or stopovers, by members or officials of the Vietnamese Communist government” (The Free Library, 2004). The city became the first in the U.S. to declare itself a “no communist zone” (The Free Library, 2004). Van Tran is a Garden Grove city council member and Vietnamese American who came to the U.S. as a ten-year-old refugee. He argues that the Vietnamese government “claim[s] they want reconciliation with the Vietnamese community here but they drive through Little Saigon in motorcades with lights blazing and with motorcycle escorts as if they own the place” (The Free Library, 2004). One of the Garden Grove proponents of the declaration, community activist Ky Ngo, stated, “We don’t accept the communists anywhere” (Tran and Morin, LAT, 4/28/2004). In 2017, the current law barring members of the Communist Party from working in California’s state government was challenged by Assemblyman Rob Bonta. After fierce debate and public testimony—much of it from Vietnamese Americans—the assemblyman shelved the bill (AB 22) and made the following public statement: “Through my conversations with veterans and members of the Vietnamese-American community, I heard compelling stories of how AB 22 caused real distress and hurt for proud and honorable people…. For that, I am sorry” (Marzorati, KQED, 5/18/2017).

12 Little Saigon Daily News filed for bankruptcy in 2015, and in 2016 its assets were ordered by a federal bankruptcy court to be given to Nguoi Daily News as part of a libel suit (Roosevelt, OCR, 2/10/2016).

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3. The Narrative of Reconciliation with the Communists I am a Vietnamese-American, I left when I was young, but now I’m back here [in Vietnam] to help the country. So whatever we do here is all about reconciliation. —Dr. Le Nhan Phuong, Director of Health Programs for Atlantic Philanthropies13

The two preceding narratives of the American-Vietnamese War are both in a very real sense still unfolding; from their perspectives, the war against the communists is still raging and is being fought with violence and diplomacy, respectively. But there is another narrative within the community arena, one that appears to be gaining salience: the narrative of reconciliation with the communists. This is a narrative that acknowledges a lost war, a story that reached its conclusion during the period following the climactic fall of Saigon. In a doleful denouement that saw those allied with the Republic of Vietnam persecuted, imprisoned, and ostracized from their beloved homeland, the narrative reaches its end. The already-completed nature of the war marks a close similarity to the dominant narratives within both the SRV and broader U.S. society. However, the recognition of communist reprisals and injustice following their victory, as well as the hardships faced by the refugees fleeing that oppression, has much more in common with the other Vietnamese-American narratives. It must be emphasized at the outset that this narrative—despite the claims by some to the contrary—is not “pro-communist.” As VietnameseAmerican scholar Nhi T. Lieu notes, “Most Vietnamese immigrants believe that Vietnam is a repressive communist country with a corrupt government that continues to commit human rights violations against its people” (2011: xiii), and those who accept the narrative of reconciliation are no different. Sonny Le, who escaped Vietnam in 1981 at the age of 17, notes that after the communist victory in 1975, “purges and persecutions were carried out against those who were part of the American-backed regime, of which my father was a member” (Le, Hyphen Magazine, 12/16/2013). Having grown up mistreated and stigmatized by the communist regime for his family’s support of the Republic of Vietnam, Le felt that after fleeing the country by boat and eventually arriving in the U.S., he was on his way to becoming a “flag-waiving anti-communist Vietnamese immigrant … Like all Vietnamese refugees, we had resentment and hatred for the regime that forced us out. It had become our sworn-enemy even though we were fellow Vietnamese” (Hyphen Magazine, 12/16/ 2013). But in 1990, after having been 13 Wilhelm, 2009.

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exposed through a college course to the racism endemic in the United States—particularly that against Black Americans—he attended a rally featuring Nelson Mandela. Mandela had just been released from his 27-year imprisonment in South Africa and was in the midst of a speaking tour across the U.S. Le describes Mandela’s effect on him as a “DNA-changing experience” (Hyphen Magazine, 12/16/2013): “his words portrayed none of the resentment and hatred for his jailers or the regime that had tried to kill him. His message was one of reconciliation … It was a shocking revelation” (ibid.). The following year, Le returned to Vietnam to visit the family members he had left behind—he was one of the first group of refugees to make the journey back to his homeland. “What I learned from Mandela was that hatred and resentment only poison your own mind, not your enemy’s” (ibid.). This push toward reconciliation with the communist regime in Vietnam had no real traction in the first decade-and-a-half after the fall of Saigon. Throughout the 1980s, refugees were still fleeing Vietnam in large numbers, and many were languishing in both the communist re-education camps within the country and the ad hoc refugee camps set up throughout the countries of f irst asylum. It was not until the very end of the 1980s and early 1990s that the narrative of reconciliation began to crystalize within the community arena of memory, and although still a marginal understanding of the war, it was given impetus by the high-profile promotion of none other than former President Thieu himself. As we described earlier in this chapter, President Thieu had been vilified throughout the Vietnamese-American community, not least for the perceived disastrous handling of the war effort in the spring of 1975. However, he was still the former President of the Republic of Vietnam—the country that had been kept alive in idealized form within the collective memory of the Vietnamese diaspora. He had been a stalwart enemy of the communists, and although he might be blamed for the South’s military collapse, he was not guilty of surrendering. Indeed, in 1992 he had denounced the thawing relations between the U.S. and SRV (Pearson, Washington Post, 10/1/2001). But by the following year, Thieu had begun to understand the situation in a new light: For the first time since his regime collapsed 18 years ago, former South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu has publicly extended an olive branch to Vietnam’s Communist leaders, calling on the government and opposition factions at home and abroad to begin talks aimed at national reconciliation. (McLaughlin, Chicago Tribune, 5/13/1993)

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This rejection of the narrative of ongoing political struggle by Thieu was shocking to most of the Vietnamese-American community. It flew against the prevailing winds of a belief in an ongoing war being waged against the regime in Vietnam. Sonny Le points out that at that time, “visiting Vietnam was seen as aiding and abetting an enemy state, which needed to be brought down” (Hyphen Magazine, 12/16/2013). Indeed, a mere two weeks prior to Thieu’s proposal for reconciliation, five Vietnamese Americans calling themselves the “Elderly Suicide Group” had vowed to take their lives if their demand for a transitional government in Vietnam was not met (McLaughlin, Chicago Tribune, 5/13/1993). What’s more, the olive branch extended to the communists by Thieu was not accepted (The Telegraph, 10/1/2001). The government of the SRV had no interest in talking with someone they still viewed as representing the hated “puppet” regime of the vanquished RVN. And yet slowly, cautiously—often painfully—this desire for reconciliation carved out a place within the Vietnamese-American collective memory. Le Khac Ly was just one of the myriad refugees who wanted to return to Vietnam in order to defeat the communists: “we would go back. We would continue to fight and win the country back” (Jang and Winn, 2004). But unlike those who joined organizations like the Front, Ly made the agonizing narrative shift to one that saw the war as over. And this was occasioned by his decision to become an American citizen. “It was very difficult for me to realize that we cannot win the country back in the foreseeable future. When I decided to become an American citizen I had the feeling that I am leaving my real identity. I would not be Vietnamese any more” (ibid.). This notion expressed by Ly—that acceptance of the end of the AmericanVietnamese War was somehow tied closely to losing one’s identity—was and is a common sentiment of those who have come to question their adherence to the not-yet-over narratives. Even the younger generations feel that their identities as Vietnamese Americans are inextricably bound to the war. Than Tan, a Vietnamese-American journalist, asserts that the war in Vietnam “is the backbone of my identity,” despite the fact that she “was born after the fighting ended.” Fatalistically she says, “Whether I like it or not, the Vietnam War is my war, too” (Tan, NYT, 10/3/2017). But while this decision to accept the war as over is often painful, it is not without its redemptive qualities. Peter Phan, a Vietnamese-American Catholic priest and university professor, asserts that in spite of the immense suffering caused by the American-Vietnamese War, it has been “through Vietnamese refugees, [that] the two peoples have been brought closer together” (2005: xii). If the narrative that the war has ended can be championed by the Vietnamese Americans, they can act as the connection that would bring

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the two erstwhile enemy nations toward reconciliation. Through this role in the process of reconciliation, their suffering might not have been in vain. By 1996, the U.S. had normalized its relations with the SRV: reconciliation was fast becoming a reality between the two nations. But in fact, it was the Vietnamese-American community that now—in spite of voices like Peter Phan’s—carried the torch of opposition to reconciliation. One of our interview subjects, Thao, whose father had spent time in a re-education camp, moved with his family to the U.S. in 1992. He observed that any interaction with the government of the SRV was tantamount to endorsing the regime: “I have friends that are fighting human trafficking [in Vietnam] and work along with the government, and then in return, they have been categorized as communists.” Another friend of Thao, also a Vietnamese American, ran a nonprofit that promoted and facilitated the adoption of Vietnamese children by American couples. Eventually—by 2013—she had enough resources to begin the construction of a school in Vietnam, which naturally required coordination with the government. But, Thao says, most Vietnamese Americans won’t work with her “because they feel like she’s a communist.” So it was the source of great perturbation to many within the VietnameseAmerican community when, in 2004, another high-profile anti-communist and former RVN leader announced his desire for reconciliation with the SRV. In 2004, former Premier Nguyen Cao Ky announced that he was returning to Vietnam—for the first time since he fled in 1975—in order to “bring a message of reconciliation” (Tran, CBS News, 1/14/2004). What made this announcement especially loathsome to so many was that it was being undertaken at the request of the SRV government. In the decade since former President Thieu had offered to broker talks of reconciliation with the SRV, it appeared that the regime had also experienced a change of heart. Ky’s is an interesting case—although by no means unique—in that he made a progression through all three of the major narratives operating within the community arena of memory. Back in 1983 he had lobbied the U.S. Congress for guns in order to overthrow the communists through force (Takaki, 1989: 455). Then, by 1990, he had shifted from a narrative of violent overthrow to one focused on political pressure, claiming that together, the people of the U.S. and Vietnam could achieve “a final victory over the Communists” (Mydans, NYT, 7/23/2011). But by the early 2000s, he was opining that “I think it’s very wrong that some—especially some Vietnamese overseas in America—today are asking and demanding that Vietnam has to adopt some sort of democracy like they have in America” (ibid.). Indeed, Westminster City Council member Tony Lam—the f irst

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Vietnamese-born person to be elected to off ice in the U.S.—recalled that at the time of his trip back to Vietnam, Ky had told him “To me, the war is over, and I don’t want to be considered a warmonger. I want to improve the situation so it will benef it the people of Vietnam” (Knoll, LAT, 7/24/2011). Needless to say, Ky’s decision was met by the condemnation of large numbers of activists in Southern California who argued that such a visit to Vietnam “bestows legitimacy on a corrupt government” (Tran, CBS News, 1/14/2004). There was a general outcry among those who maintained a narrative that saw the war as not yet concluded: “Vietnamese radio hosts blasted him, and a group of protesters held a rally in Garden Grove to denounce Ky” (Knoll, LAT, 7/24/2011). Years later, reflecting on Ky’s 2004 message of reconciliation at the time of his death in 2011, Minh Nguyen stated that “[t] he community is very angry with him” (ibid.), while Ky Ngo, 58, claimed that “[t]he overwhelming thought in the community was he was a traitor” (ibid.). But in spite of this antipathy toward anything redolent of reconciliation with the communists, by the early part of the new century, the narrative of reconciliation had taken root. In April 1975, Le Nhan Phuong, a 10-year-old at the time, was flown from Vietnam as part of Operation Baby Lift, the desperate evacuation of children from Saigon as the city braced itself for an imminent attack from the communist forces that had surrounded it. Decades later, in 2007—a time when, in Hanoi alone, some 37 to 40 people were dying per day in traffic accidents—Phuong, now a medical doctor, found himself back in Vietnam and working with the communist government in a successful effort to pass a law requiring the riders of motorbikes to wear helmets (Wilhelm, 2009). By 2009, Phuong was appointed director of health programs for Atlantic Philanthropies, a role that positioned him to oversee efforts to improve health inequalities in Vietnam, among other places around the globe. He works very closely in partnership with the government of SRV, and consistent with the narrative of reconciliation, he declares that “whatever we do here is all about reconciliation” (ibid.). Such bold collaboration with the government is still opposed by many within the Vietnamese-American community, but it is becoming increasingly common. In 2010, the Vietnam Involvement and Engagement (VIET) Fellows program was incubated by the Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy. Their promotional literature acknowledges that the “lack of reconciliation for the Vietnamese people and its diaspora communities remains” (Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy) and offers this fellowship as a step toward remedying this lack of concord. The main

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activities of the fellowship are developing the next generation of leadership within the Vietnamese-American community through civic participation and sending Vietnamese-American young adults on summer-long trips to Vietnam. On these trips, the VIET fellows learn about the challenges facing the people of Vietnam as a result of the war—including poverty and the legacy of Agent Orange—and work on issues of social welfare by visiting and volunteering at schools, shelters, orphanages, and hospitals (ibid.). At the same time that the VIET Fellowship was being developed as a means of community-based reconciliation, An T. Le was appointed the U.S. Consul General to Vietnam. Born in Vietnam, Le assumed his post in 2010 and offered cautious optimism about the future: “I would hope the government of Vietnam will extend some reconciliation and encourage a larger number of Viet Kieu14…to return…to the land of their ancestors” (Boudreau, San Jose Mercury News, 11/15/2010). However, in retrospect this optimism seems to have been premature. It remains the Vietnamese-American community (or, more accurately, a subset of the community) who continue to outdo the SRV in the push for reconciliation. Huy Duc, a former resident of Hanoi and author of The Winning Side, a book about Vietnam after reunification, remarks that even in 2015, the “present regime [in the SRV] has never seriously thought of true reconciliation issues … They always affirm themselves as the winner of the war and the master of the nation” (Boudreau and Ha, Bloomberg, 12/23/2015). Trinh Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American who has relocated to Ho Chi Minh City to start a software company, asserts that “[a] lot of time overseas Vietnamese are not being treated fairly, let alone being welcomed here” (ibid.); “Unless the overseas communities see some reconciliation efforts, Vietnam will not draw the cream of the crop from overseas” (ibid.). Clearly, only time will tell whether the manner and extent to which the SRV, the broader U.S. society, and the Vietnamese-American community will achieve true reconciliation. For the time being, it is enough to note that the narrative of reconciliation is present within each of these collectivities. In 2009, C.N. Le asserted that “many Vietnamese Americans have begun to personally, and even publicly, suggest a path toward reconciliation with their hated adversaries” (2009: 208), and by 2012, Hai-Dang Doan Phan, a Vietnamese-American literary scholar, could observe an established “thematic of reconciliation present in much of the postwar literature by writers in the U.S., Vietnamese homeland, and diaspora” (2012: 157).

14 Those of the Vietnamese diaspora, upon returning to Vietnam, are known in Vietnam and throughout the diaspora as Việt kiều (“returning Vietnamese”).

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B. The Academic Arena of Memory I argue that refugee discourse has largely pathologized Vietnamese experiences by presenting distorted images and descriptions of the treatment of refugees before, during, and after their relocation. —Nhi T. Lieu, Professor of American Studies, Asian American Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin

The academic arena of memory comprises Vietnamese-American scholars and their students, and its discourse occurs primarily through classroom discussion, scholarly publication (in a variety of media, including professional academic journals, blogs, and books), academic conferences, and within Vietnamese Student Associations (VSAs). It is worth noting at the outset that while many Vietnamese-American academics are professors in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), most Vietnamese-American scholars who are engaging in the academic arena with narratives of the American-Vietnamese War and the Vietnamese-American experience are professors in the humanities and social sciences.15 And among this group there is a fair degree of consistency regarding the narrative of the war, and the consistency revolves around the idea of critique. In the inaugural issue of the scholarly Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Yen Le Espiritu urged scholars to adopt the approach she calls “critical refugee studies” (cited in Valverde, 2013: 4). Long Le of the University of Houston gives us a condensed picture of the prominence of critique among Vietnamese-American scholars in the following: Therefore, as advocated by Yen Le Espiritu (2005), there is a need to “impose a critical perspective” on particular stories [i.e., narratives of collective memory within the Vietnamese-American community] … And if a critical perspective were not imposed, according to Nguyen Vo Thu-Huong (2005), “the most simplistic anti-communist and proempire views” (p. 171) would dominate when Vietnamese Americans reprise their history in the U.S. Only by employing a critical lens, as noted by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2003), will it become clear that younger Vietnamese Americans “often feel reluctant to voice contrary opinions….” (2011: 2–3) 15 While some Vietnamese-American scholars within the STEM disciplines participate publicly on behalf of a certain narrative, they tend to do so outside of the academic arena (e.g., through contribution to the discourse within the community arena).

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1. The Narrative of Critique Given this critical emphasis on the part of so many Vietnamese-American academics, we will refer to the dominant narrative of collective memory in this arena as the narrative of critique. This narrative situates the AmericanVietnamese War within the larger geopolitical and historical context, and it features a broad critique of nearly all the participants. The narrative of critique runs something like this: first, Vietnam had been under a brutal French colonial rule for nearly a century; next, the people of Vietnam fought an incredibly destructive war of independence against their oppressors and against each other for three decades, all the while serving as Cold War proxies for the larger communist and anti-communist powers; the massive American military, economic, and cultural presence in Vietnam had deleterious effects on Vietnamese society; upon the cessation of hostilities, the communist victors turned to summary executions, forced relocation of the population, and re-education camps. This led hundreds of thousands to flee the country as refugees and created an economic and human-rights catastrophe; and finally, upon their arrival in the U.S., the Vietnamese refugees faced a variety of racial and economic inequalities. In the academic arena of collective memory, there is sympathy for the war-time discourse of nationalism and independence, a discourse that was largely shared by both the Vietnamese communists and those affiliated with the government of South Vietnamese. Both North and South Vietnamese generally saw foreign occupation—dating back to the ancient millennium-long vassalage to China but more specifically starting with the French, passing momentarily to the Japanese, then back to the French with the help of the British—as oppressive and unjust. Even during the American presence, these sentiments were not altogether absent among those affiliated with the government of South Vietnam, and the academics tend to sympathize with this sentiment. Viet Thanh Nguyen, professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature, connects the French and the American “civilizing mission[s]” directly by stating that “[t]he American misadventure in Indochina was the sequel to a French colonial calamity” (2016: 51). And like the French before them, the Americans are typically portrayed in the academic arena as domineering and their presence corrosive of Vietnamese society. Nhi T. Lieu, the professor cited at the beginning of this section, argues that Along with military, political, and economic involvement in the war, foreign presence intensif ied class conflict in Vietnam … Americans

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penetrated South Vietnamese society, forging unequal economic relationships whereby the economy of South Vietnam was almost completely dependent on American imports … Along with military assistance, the United States provided Vietnam with consumer goods as well as material culture in the form of popular icons, music, art, film, and literature … Economically, the United States maintained a hegemonic relationship with Vietnam and its people. (2011: 5)

Lieu goes on to tie this economic and cultural hegemony to the political objectives of the United States: Serving to mask political intentions of maintaining a puppet government in Vietnam, U.S. economic and technological “assistance” programs catapulted an affluent middle class to power and introduced them to social and cultural trends from abroad … The Vietnamese provided both a source of labor and a market for the consumption of American products, creating a cycle of interdependency between the two nations. (ibid.: 6)

This emphasis on the economic, cultural, and political ties created between the U.S. and Vietnam underpins one of the unifying themes running throughout the academic narrative of the American-Vietnamese War, namely, the war’s place within the larger context of American imperial ambitions. Lieu states this explicitly when she insists that it is imperative to view the Vietnamese-American community “as one formed through U.S. ideology and imperialism” (ibid.: xv). In her 2014 book on Vietnamese refugees, Yen Le Espiritu, a professor of ethnic studies, situates her work and its importance within the following: “At this moment of reinvigorated U.S. imperialism and globalized militarization, it is important to interrogate anew public recollections of the U.S. war in Vietnam” (2014: 1). Vietnamese-American scholars regularly draw attention to both the geographical and temporal reach of American militarism. Mimi Thi Nguyen, a professor of gender and women’s studies and Asian American studies writes that “in 2010 alone, U.S. Special Operations forces were reportedly deployed for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in seventy-five countries” (2012: xi), and after cataloguing the myriad armed interventions by the U.S. over the past 100 years, Viet Thanh Nguyen asserts that “[t]hese wars were part of a century-long effort by the United States to exert its dominion over the Pacific, Asia, and eventually the Middle East—the Orient, broadly defined” (2016: 6–7). He goes on to say that “[t]he real American War was this entire American Century” (ibid.: 7), while Mimi Thi Nguyen states that “never-ending war” is on the horizon,

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and in fact, “war is no longer finite—no more a violent event ‘out there,’ but instead a vital presence permeating our everyday” (2012: xi). This theme, along with the historical situation within which many of these works have been written (i.e., of the early years of the twenty-first century), also means that comparisons between the U.S. war in Vietnam and the U.S. wars in Iraq are commonplace. In their 2016 edited volume, Looking Back on the Vietnam War: Twenty-First Century Perspectives, the editors Brenda M. Boyle and Jeehyun Lim preface the book with a chronology that begins with “1897: After years of colonizing and warring, France makes itself the government of the Indochina Union” (ix) and leads us to the final point on the timeline: 2003–2015: In March 2003 U.S. and allied forces invaded Iraq … Massive numbers of allied forces remain in Iraq until 2011; forces leave Afghanistan by 2015. Estimates for costs of the three wars (including Pakistan, which the United States funds) run up to US$4.4 trillion and the deaths of 330,000 people directly from war violence. (xiv)

This connection indicates that the narrative of the American-Vietnamese War—as it is developed within the Vietnamese-American academic arena of memory—positions the war as not yet concluded. Espiritu challenges the broader American society’s claim that the war is “over and done with” by “[h]ighlighting the ongoingness of the Vietnam War” (2016: 18–19). This not-yet-concluded nature of the American-Vietnamese War is typically made explicitly in Vietnamese-American accounts within the academic arena. However, even on the occasion when the phrasing indicates the opposite perspective (i.e., that the war has ended), the context reveals that this is not the case. For example, Aguilar-San Juan writes that “[f]rom the refugee perspective, the end of the war, the normalization of U.S. trade relations with Vietnam, bureaucracy and corruption under communism, and the POW-MIA issue are one long chain of interrelated issues” (2009: 75); in other words, the narrative of the war continues in various ways long after the fighting has ceased. Similarly, while Viet Thanh Nguyen can start a passage with a readily understood shorthand for the cessation of major combat operations—“For more than a decade after war’s end” (2016: 40)—he remains a strong proponent of the fact that the American-Vietnamese War was much more than the major combat operations that came to an end on April 30, 1975. Indeed, the very title of one of his New York Times op-ed pieces is “Our Vietnam War Never Ended” (4/24/2015). Instead, the narrative of the war is said to continue through its effects and under new guises: “A

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true war story should also tell of the civilian, the refugee, the enemy, and, most importantly, the war machine that encompasses them all” (Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2016: 224). Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, a professor of English, writes powerfully of the way in which American leadership—the “war machine” in the Viet Thanh Nguyen citation above—has used the American-Vietnamese War to justify further martial projects. In a speech to Veterans of Foreign Wars on August 22, 2007, President George W. Bush said: “One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields.’” He went on to cite the 400,000 Vietnamese who were sent to prison camps and the tens of thousands more who perished after America’s withdrawal from Viet Nam in 1975. This recollection of the past clashes with the normative memory of the conclusion of the Viet Nam War as an ignominious end to a misguided war with very few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies. Vietnamese refugees’ tears, losses, and blood were suddenly reinserted into the historical narrative, not to learn from these experiences but to request more funds to continue a war in Iraq. This revisionist national rhetoric appropriates human rights violations to allow America to shed itself of national responsibility and guilt, and rationalizes conquest and war. (2011: 7)

The American imperialism in which Vietnam and Iraq have been embroiled is also widely understood by Vietnamese-American scholars to be rooted in an inveterate American racism, a racism that is—if anything—resurgent at the writing of this book.16 Espiritu cites Ayako Sahara approvingly in claiming that during the aftermath of the American-Vietnamese War, the “Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations represented Southeast Asian refugees as the white man’s burden” (2016: 18). Viet Thanh Nguyen confides with his readers that although he has never been called “gook” to his face, “I know that the epithet exists to be aimed at me. No one had to call me that name, because American culture had already done so through 16 E.g., “Poll: Distrust of Asian Americans Is Rising” (Chen and King, 5/4/2022); “Preliminary data from more than three dozen U.S. police departments indicate a double-digit spike in hate crimes last year and a continued rise into 2022, with incidents targeting Asian and Jewish Americans accounting for the bulk of the increase” (Farivar, 5/14/2022).

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the discourse of the Gook, myself as other struck by the slurs hurled from the airwaves of pop culture” (2016: 63–64). These scholars point out that while the American-Vietnamese War is likely the most documented war in history, the documentation nevertheless obscures the devastation of the Vietnamese people and nation. [In fighting the war in Vietnam,] The United States acted in self-interest, allowing their military machine to ravage the Vietnamese landscape, poisoning it with defoliants such as Agent Orange and indiscriminately destroying human life in the process. (Lieu, 2011: 12)

And yet Espiritu argues that despite this well-documented death and destruction, the broader American society has committed an act of “organized forgetting of the more than two hundred thousand ARVN dead” (2016: 19). She cites Ralph Ellison who reminds us that “the hypervisibility of the black man in fact renders him ‘un-visible,’ enabling most whites to feign ‘moral blindness toward his predicament’” (2005: xiv) and adds the following: In the same way, we are concerned that the profusion of text and talk on the Vietnam War actually conceals the war’s costs borne by the Vietnamese—the lifelong costs that turn the 1975 “Fall of Saigon” and the exodus from Vietnam into “the endings that are not over.” (2005: xiv)

This peculiar sort of invisibility is conceptualized by Viet Thanh Nguyen as “disremembering,” which he describes as “being simultaneously seen and not seen. Disremembering allows someone to see right through the other” (2016: 63; emphasis in original). This disremembering is what makes the very visible violence and destruction of the racial “other”—in the eyes of the dominant American society—tolerable. As the speech quoted above by President Bush shows, the suffering of the racial other—while perhaps lamentable—is ultimately not only acceptable but positively beneficial, as it is exploited for further imperial expansion. Viet Thanh Nguyen cites Martin Luther King, Jr. to state succinctly the Vietnamese-American academic consensus that “the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together” (ibid.: 2). One powerful and provocative way this nexus of racism, imperialism, and exploitation is brought to bear on the memory of the American-Vietnamese War is through Mimi Thi Nguyen’s caustic and ironic notion of “the gift of freedom” (2012). This is the idea that throughout the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, the U.S. has positioned itself as an “us” vis-à-vis a

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racial “other,” where the “us” sees itself as the bearer of freedom, democracy, peace, and progress. And as the bearer of these universal human goods, the U.S. is burdened with the obligation to share these gifts with the benighted other. This, of course, is a modern restatement of Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” and is precisely what is enshrined in President Truman’s 1947 speech that put forward the Truman Doctrine. Mimi Thi Nguyen cites part of that speech, where Truman argues that Only by helping the least fortunate of its members to help themselves can the human family achieve the decent, satisfying life that is the right of all people. Democracy alone can supply the vitalizing force to stir the peoples of the world in triumphant action, not only against their human oppressors, but also against their ancient enemies—hunger, misery, and despair. (quoted in Mimi Thi Nguyen, 2012: 13)

However, in this ironic concept of the gift of freedom, Mimi Thi Nguyen takes this notion of an obligation to share a step further than Kipling and Truman by drawing on the work of Derrida. According to the latter, a gift, if it is to be a genuine gift, must be free from the expectation of reciprocity. The giver of a genuine gift must be oblivious to having given the gift, somehow giving without the consciousness of giving. What’s more, the recipient of a genuine gift must not know from whom the gift comes. If either of these two conditions are not met—when there is consciousness of giving or knowledge of the benefactor’s identity—the gift is sullied and rendered impure by the obligation to reciprocate. Quoting Derrida, Nguyen asserts that the impure gift is a form of violence: “To overtake the other with surprise, be it by one’s generosity and by giving too much, is to have a hold on him, as soon as he accepts the gift. The other is taken, caught in the trap” (ibid.: 7). Paradoxically, the debt that accrues in the giving of the gift of freedom is a form of subjugation, and equally paradoxical, the recipient is not free to decline the gift of freedom, for it is an axiom of liberalism that all peoples wish to be free; these paradoxes lead Nguyen to describe such a gift as a “precious, poisonous gift of freedom” (ibid.: 3). The gift of freedom is not inherent in empire building but is a particular manifestation of a specifically liberal project of empire (ibid.: 4). It is through violence that the liberal empire delivers the other from violence. But liberalimperial violence is not only necessary to bring about freedom; it is necessary to maintain it. In President Johnson’s words, “if freedom is to survive in any American hometown it must be preserved in such places as South Viet Nam” (cited in ibid.: 20). Despite the fact that the gift of freedom always “opens with

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war and death” (ibid.: 2), it ultimately manages to end in “love and gratitude, guilt and forgiveness” (ibid.: 4) on the part of its recipient toward its giver. Mimi Thi Nguyen begins her book with the vignette of Madalenna Lai, a woman who in 1975 fled a war-ravaged Vietnam in a small fishing boat. After two decades in the U.S., having raised a family and become a prosperous entrepreneur with her own chain of beauty salons and a cosmetology school, she set about addressing her debt. In an effort to show her gratitude for the gift of freedom, Lai sold her house, and when that wasn’t enough, she took to soliciting donations in front of grocery stores and asking for money door-to-door. “I told myself,” she says, “after my children finished school and I reunited with my husband, I would give my life to thank America” (2012: 2). For eight years she struggled to raise the sum of $120,000, the cost of creating an elaborate float for the annual Tournament of Roses Parade in southern California, a televised spectacle seen by millions each year. The float took the form of a golden, 35-foot boat with a mystical bird from Vietnamese legend, Lac Viet, rising from its prow. The boat with all its detail was constructed using hundreds of thousands of resplendent flowers and was shown carrying a grateful group of refugees to freedom and bearing the message “Thank You America and the World” (2012: 2). Madalenna Lai’s float was not only seen by millions in person and on television during the Parade of Roses on New Year’s Day, 2002, but her message of gratitude—her indebtedness—was also carried by news outlets across the country. In an additional illustration of the dynamics of the gift of freedom, Mimi Thi Nguyen draws on another refugee, a VietnameseAmerican far more well-known than Madalenna Lai, a refugee who as a young girl became the very epitome of the American-Vietnamese War: “the girl in the photograph.” Phan Thi Kim Phuc, who was caught in a storm of napalm at the age of 9, was captured by South Vietnamese photographer Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut as she ran distraught and forlorn down the highway, her clothing burnt from her seared flesh. While many are disposed to see in the body of this young girl all the horror and inhumanity of the American-Vietnamese War—indeed, all the horror and inhumanity of war itself—and suggest that this incident gave powerful impetus toward ending the war, Nguyen wants us to see another, more insidious mechanism at work. “Picturing for us the spectacular disaster of freedom’s bestowal” (2012: 84), Phan Thi Kim Phuc comes to the U.S., a recipient of the gift of freedom, and eventually sets out on a mission of mercy. She publishes an autobiography, she is interviewed on National Public Radio, she appears on the Oprah Winfrey Show, and on Veterans Day 1996, she travels to the nation’s capital and, standing at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial alongside

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an American former prisoner of war, offers the nation absolution. Even this is forgivable, she tells us; even the traumatic burning of an innocent child’s body by the juggernaut of the American military machine can be pardoned. And through this message of mercy, we learn that even when the violence through which the gift of freedom is granted is made excruciatingly visible, it is nevertheless forgivable; perhaps it is even worthwhile. In her work on the American-Vietnamese War and militarized refugees, Espiritu takes the worthwhile nature of Vietnamese suffering a step further. She argues that the identification of the U.S. as rescuer and the Vietnamese refugees as rescued positions “Vietnam’s ‘collateral damage’” as not merely justified but as “historically necessary for the progress of freedom and democracy” (2014: 83; emphasis mine). By drawing attention to the stories of Madalenna Lai and Phan Thi Kim Phuc, Mimi Thi Nguyen underlines the idea that Vietnamese refugees are twice the recipients of the gift of freedom. First, as they are overwhelmingly from South Vietnam, the refugees received the gift of the American presence in their country, a presence that kept the Republic of Vietnam independent for two decades, and a presence that came at a great sacrifice to the U.S., costing some $170 billion and more than 58,000 of its citizens’ lives. Second, regardless of what they might have suffered, the refugees—if they weren’t killed during the war or during their escape from the country—received the gift of freedom when they were rescued from the terrors of a life under communist rule and given a place of refuge in America. In a self-perpetuating cycle, the forgiveness, gratitude, and patriotism of the refugee is then marshaled as evidence of the righteousness of the gift of freedom. Yen Le Espiritu puts it this way: Vietnamese refugees “become the featured evidence of the appropriateness of U.S. actions in Vietnam: that the war, no matter what the cost, was ultimately necessary, just, and successful” (2014: 2). But, she continues, the value of the refugees’ experience went well beyond that one particular war. Indeed, it played an important role throughout the entire Cold War: “The propaganda value of accepting refugees fleeing communism…was central to U.S. foreign policy goals” (2014: 8). Refugees from China, Hungary, Cuba, Poland, Yugoslavia, Korea, and Vietnam were all pointed to by the U.S. as proof that the U.S. was a great guardian and bestower of the gift of freedom. One of the ways in which this dynamic can be seen to be insidiously circular is through an understanding that refugees were often only allowed asylum on condition that they formally acknowledged the receipt of the gift of freedom. In numerous gatekeeping processes throughout the two decades following the fall of Saigon, Vietnamese hoping to flee Vietnam

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for the U.S. were required to “prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were fleeing communism” (Espiritu, 2014: 96). Whether it was to board a plane or helicopter from Saigon in April 1975 or to be granted asylum from a refugee camp under the 1989 Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA), the same narrative was expected. To be eligible for a ticket out of the country in April 1975, one needed to show close connection to the U.S. or South Vietnamese government such that one feared reprisal in the case of a communist victory (although, as noted above, the haste with which the April evacuation was conducted meant that in practice this requirement was often circumvented). In the case of the CPA—the international plan on how to resettle the tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees that still languished in refugee camps throughout the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Singapore—the stipulation was that only those who could demonstrate a “well-founded fear of persecution” (ibid.: 54) would be granted asylum in third countries; the rest were to be repatriated to the country they had just risked everything to leave. “For the most part, the refugees regarded the screening interview as a mystery: they debated at great length over what to say and how to behave, offering and soliciting advice from each other on the ‘magic words’ that would gain them a resettlement offer” (ibid.). Indeed, nearly two-thirds of those would-be escapees—unwilling or unable to articulate their desire for the gift of freedom—were sent back to Vietnam. Thus, with seeking freedom from communist oppression as the passport to the U.S., “Vietnamese Americans may have unwittingly allowed themselves ‘to be used in justifications of empire by those who claim to have fought for [their] freedom’” (ibid.: 96). In addition to their forgiveness, gratitude, and patriotism, even their success in their new home was absorbed into the propagation of America’s liberal imperial project. And one of the best measures of success was assimilation: “the assimilation of refugees into the American landscape simultaneously served both domestic and foreign policy in promoting the United States as a democratically exceptional nation that does not engage in colonialism but fights for freedom” (Lieu, 2011: xxi). The myth of “the model minority,” the painting of an entire population group as hardworking, studious, docile, willing to endure any hardship without complaint, and ultimately financially successful was eagerly applied to the Vietnamese refugees no matter how ill the fit sometimes was. This myth—Espiritu insists on the importance of remembering that it is a myth by noting that “the economic status of many Vietnamese Americans is characterized by unstable, minimumwage employment, welfare dependency, and participation in the informal economy” (2014: 99)—has often been disseminated through the trope of

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“before” and “after” narratives, that is, before and after their reception of the gift of freedom. In this case, the “before” narrative is one of material deprivation, educational deficit, political oppression, and existential despair, while the “after” narrative is one of material abundance, educational success, political freedom, and existential hope. This broader American narrative means that “Vietnamese refugees [are positioned] at the intersection of two oppositional discourses that racialized them as both traumatized victims and model minorities” (Lieu, 2011: 1–2). These “before” and “after” narratives are sometimes supplemented by the addendum of the “would-have-been” narrative, a persuasive trope that projects a refugee’s hypothetical life had they not escaped Vietnam. In one example provided by Espiritu, the Los Angeles Times Magazine compares the actual divergent paths of a family that was separated. While one part of the family escaped to the U.S. and is “‘now nestled in Southern California suburbia,’ their life ‘a mosaic of frozen pizzas, skateboards and well-kept lawns’” (Espiritu, 2014: 98), the other family members who were left behind are sentenced to struggle and squalor: “They have never ridden in an airplane, stayed in a hotel, or eaten chocolate. They do not have a car or a TV”; “The family’s address is Alley 116, and the home is a mishmash of corrugated tin and plywood … The home’s shower doubles as the dishwasher, but at least the family has running water and electricity, unlike many in Vietnam”; and “The older children left behind make about a dollar a day. At times they cannot afford salt, much less meat … His tiny 5-year-old daughter has a persistent cough. Her front teeth are black and no one is sure why.” (ibid.)

Had the refugees not escaped Vietnam, the “would-have-been” narrative insists, this is the deplorable life they would have lived. And this makes for a powerful justification of the American gift of freedom at any cost, not just as a gift for the Vietnamese but for all the “others” of the world in need of rescue. Sometimes the total destruction of a nation, a culture, or a people is necessary to save it; but save it we must. Citing the insight of Marita Sturken that “the way a nation remembers a war and constructs its history is directly related to how that nation further propagates war” (Sturken, cited in Espiritu, 2014: 104), Espiritu asserts the theme common throughout the Vietnamese-American academic arena that the “selective retelling of the Vietnam War builds support for and emboldens U.S. military interventionism in the world” (ibid.). Viet Thanh Nguyen also ties the American-Vietnamese War closely to other U.S. military interventions, averring that this particular

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war “was one conflict in a long line of horrific wars that came before it and after it. This war’s identity—and, indeed, any war’s identity—cannot be extricated from the identity of war itself” (2016: 2). Viet Thanh Nguyen both crystalizes and advances the received opinion within the academic arena with the concept of a “just memory” of the war (2016). This ethical form of memory is contrasted with “unjust memory,” a type of memory that Nguyen sees as manifesting itself in two distinct species. In the first of these unjust forms of memory, the proponent engages in self-valorization and the vilification of the “other.” This is the most common sort of war-related memory and is the memory that is operative in much of the official discourse of nation-states. It is summarized by Nguyen in the following: “When it comes to war, we usually remember our own as noble, virtuous, suffering, and sacrificial” (2016: 28), while at the same time vilifying our enemies. And with some rhetorical sleight of hand, this is the same unjust form of memory at the heart of the exhortation to “oppose the war but support the troops,” a slogan used by the powers-that-be to mute antiwar sentiment (ibid.: 49). If our discussion of the “gift of freedom” has exposed the American embrace of this species of unjust memory, Nguyen is just as insistent that it is applicable to the SRV. He points out that all across contemporary Vietnam, the national monuments and memorials, the cemeteries for fallen soldiers, the propaganda on roadside billboards and other public places, the museums, and the ubiquitous image of “Uncle Ho” all “urge on the people the heroic version of the ethics of remembering one’s own, where their identity is one with that of party, state, and country” (ibid.: 29). The second species of unjust memory is subtler but just as injurious, and it is the sin of the global antiwar movement and the Western Left (ibid.: 74). While the first species of unjust memory enjoins us to remember our own, the second species is its reversal. It can be felt in the words of philosopher Paul Ricoeur: “The duty of memory is the duty to do justice, through memories, to an other than the self…moral priority belongs to the victim” (cited in Nguyen, 2016: 68). In other words, the sacred/profane dichotomy in this second form of unjust memory has just flipped the referents of the first: in the first species of unjust memory, the “us” is identified as sacred, while the “other” is held as profane; in the second species, it is “we” who are profane, while the “other” is held sacred. Seen as crass and unreflexive, the first sort of unjust memory is rejected by the Western Left in favor of what is considered to be a refinement of memory—one “at work only in those societies that see themselves as more inclusive, open, and tolerant” (ibid.: 69). But, Nguyen warns, this refined sort of memory can just as easily be

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brought to heel in the service of liberal imperialism: “The willingness to remember others and to allow others to remember themselves justifies the campaigns of open and tolerant societies against others not so ethically refined” (ibid.). So far as idealizing the other, the way the global antiwar movement usually saw the Vietnamese—and often still does—is an archetypical case of treating the other as victim and the victim as other, freezing them in perpetual suffering and noble heroism. Thus the antiwar movement elevated Ho Chi Minh to iconic status, waved the flag of the National Liberation Front, praised the communist Vietnamese as heroic revolutionaries defying American imperialism, accepted communist propaganda that the South Vietnamese were traitors or puppets, and was mostly blind to the Stalinist direction of the Vietnamese Communist Party. (ibid.: 74)

When one views conflicts this way, exclusively through a frame of perpetrators and victims, where the victims are—by virtue of their victimhood—devoid of any wrongdoing, one simply trades sides with the official discourse, which makes this a move from the simplistic official condemnation of the other to the equally simplistic consecration of the other. Instead, Nguyen wants to attack the dichotomy itself. For Nguyen, a “just memory” is one that recognizes the complexities of humankind, the amalgam of humanity and inhumanity inherent within us all: “while it is ethical and just to remember others and victims, it is also ethical and just to recognize our potential to harm, damage, and kill others” (2016: 72; emphasis added). When we view the “other” as an idealized victim, we deprive them of the moral complexity of one who is fully human. This deprivation of moral complexity is a “misrecognition” that is just as dehumanizing as viewing them as an intractable perpetrator. Instead, argues Nguyen, we must work to develop a memory that can take honest stock of our own dual capacity for good and evil and work to recognize that same capacity in the would-be other. Nguyen admonishes the Left to understand that “[w]hile the West may deserve criticism, this judgment need not come at the expense of turning others into (nearly) idealized victims or (almost) unknowable enemies” (ibid.: 76). Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde, a Vietnamese-American professor of AsianAmerican studies, exemplifies this perspective by framing her book on the community, culture, and politics of the Vietnamese diaspora as “explicitly critical of both red-baiting by the Vietnamese American community and human rights suppressions in Viet Nam” (2013: viii).

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While it is clear that within the Vietnamese-American academic arena there is tremendous condemnation of the U.S. imperial project, there is simultaneously the recognition that things went horribly wrong with the revolution led by the communists, a recognition that sets it apart from much of the broader American academic arena. Particularly hard hit were those who had ties to the former government of South Vietnam. In the few years following the Communist victory, Vietnamese citizens faced continuing political instability, increasing corruption, natural disasters that reduced crop yields, increasing political suspicion against ethnic Chinese, little if any infrastructural development, and brutal retaliation against those associated with the U.S. government or the South Vietnamese military. (Le, 2009: 191)

Quan Tue Tran remarks that after the collapse of Saigon, the veterans of the RVN “became second-class citizens in the newly formed Socialist Republic of Vietnam” (2016: 34), and Le notes that those “whom the Communists considered ‘war criminals’ were rounded up and imprisoned in the so-called reeducation camps designed to punish, humiliate, and indoctrinate them” (2009: 192). One of the features that the academic arena’s narrative of critique shares with the other Vietnamese-American narratives of the war is that with the communist victory in 1975 came tremendous suffering for many in the South—and in many cases the friends, parents, and other relatives of these scholars themselves. The confiscation of property, the demolition of monuments, the exile to New Economic Zones, the long imprisonment and forced labor of re-education camps, the summary executions, the famine brought on through collectivization, and the general political oppression of an authoritarian regime—all of this is present within the academics’ narrative. Their awareness of the SRV’s inhumane history means that VietnameseAmerican scholars tend to adopt a memory of the war whose narrative begins with foreign domination and subjugation, moves through a catastrophically destructive war, and ends in both an exile and a “liberation” of Vietnam that is just as bad as the original state of foreign oppression. But these endings are not really endings in the usual sense; in the words of Espiritu, these are “the endings that are not over” (2005: xiv). Long after the bombs stopped falling, the war continues, for “[w]hen wars begin and end are not indisputable historical facts but contested rhetorical positions” (2016: 18). Pelaud writes that “wars do not end with the signing of documents and treaties. War and its consequences continue to affect the lives

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of the survivors and their descendants” (2011: 59). Indeed, the narrative of critique supports a much more expansive view of the war’s narrative than mere combat. Viet Thanh Nguyen contends that most people “think of soldiers and shooting when they think of war stories, but that is too narrow a definition.” He goes on to assert that “[a] true war story should tell not only of the soldier but also what happened to her or him after war’s end. A true war story should also tell of the civilian, the refugee, the enemy, and, most importantly, the war machine that encompasses them all” (2016: 224). And for all these reasons, the narrative of critique is one that continues on in the academic arena.

C. The Artistic Arena of Memory The form of Vietnamese literature has, over the fifty years or so of its existence, become increasingly aesthetically refined, but its content remains potentially, uneasily troublesome, even volatile. At the center of it all is the war. Viet Thanh Nguyen

Within the Vietnamese-American artistic arena of collective memory, there are three principal narratives of the American-Vietnamese War.17 For the purposes of this section, we will focus within the artistic arena specifically on literary works (e.g., novels, short stories, and memoirs). This is because, as we elaborated in the introduction, a narrative is a verbal representation of a sequence of actions, significantly related to one another, that constitutes a unif ied whole. In other words, a visual representation is not, strictly speaking, a narrative. It might depict a scene from a narrative or capture the theme of a narrative, but by itself, it is one interpretive step removed from a narrative. For this reason, we will elaborate the narratives located within literary works, narratives that can then be used as interpretive frames with which to understand visual representations. However, before delineating each of the narratives found within the artistic arena, it will be helpful to make a few remarks on some of the overlap that exists between the artistic and academic arenas of Vietnamese-American collective memory, an overlap that manifests in several important ways. 17 Despite there being three distinct narratives of the American-Vietnamese War throughout Vietnamese-American literature, Madigan (2021) argues that this literature taken as a whole develops a unitary perspective on war itself. Madigan describes this perspective as epimilitary culture and contrasts it with the dominant American paramilitary culture.

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As we discussed above, the principal interlocutors within the academic arena are university faculty in the humanities. This means that much of the written commentary and criticism within the Vietnamese-American world of art and literature is written by the same professors we described as participating in the academic arena. Second, beyond their ancillary role as critics and commentators, many of these faculty are themselves artistic creators who publish novels, short stories, and poetry and create paintings, sculpture, and multimedia pieces that are publicly exhibited in galleries and museums. Third, many of the artists within the VietnameseAmerican community who are not associated with the humanities are nevertheless recipients of M.F.A. degrees, often having produced artistic works while embedded within the academic milieu as graduate students and in many cases themselves going on to be instructors at both academic and art institutions. Despite this overlap, it is still a helpful heuristic device to see the artistic arena of collective memory as distinct from the academic arena. Recall that arenas of memory are distinct discourses that are tied to specif ic individuals, organizations, and institutions that advocate specific narratives through specific forms of media. In the case of the artistic arena, the first obvious point is that the specific media—the works of art themselves— comprise a unique mode of discourse. Journal articles, works of history, course lectures, or other public statements made by academics are more or less clearly distinguishable from works of literature. But beyond this, the narratives themselves are largely distinguishable. There are specific narratives that we see propagated through literary works that are not found within the academic arena (as we will see, there is one exception). With these justifications, we maintain that within the largely autonomous artistic arena of memory, there are three principal narratives: the narrative of critique, the narrative of triumphant return, and the narrative of loss and moving on.

1. The Narrative of Critique Despite the fact that the artistic and academic spheres comprise distinct arenas of memory, one of the narratives that circulates within the artistic sphere is, in fact, the dominant academic narrative: the narrative of critique. As we elaborated in our description of the academic arena, this narrative situates the American-Vietnamese War within a larger geopolitical and historical context, and it features a broad critique of nearly all the participants. And

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it is perhaps not terribly surprising to find academic writers of fiction and literary essays reproducing the narrative of critique, since this is the way in which their scholarly research is framed. Gia-Bao (GB) Tran and Thi Bui are two such examples. Bui was born in Saigon just three months before the Republic of Vietnam’s surrender, and Tran was born in the U.S. shortly after his parents arrived as refugees in 1975. Both are now professors at the California College of the Arts,18 both work as authors and illustrators, and both have written and illustrated highly acclaimed graphic novels centering on their families’ experiences of the American-Vietnamese War. While having worked on numerous projects, Tran and Bui are perhaps best known for their graphic novels. Tran wrote and illustrated Vietnamerica in 2010, and Bui wrote and illustrated The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir in 2017. In both works, the artists recount the tortuous stories of their immediate ancestry, beginning in the 1930s and 1940s. Throughout these intimate portrayals, much attention is given to the ever-shifting geopolitical realities that buffeted Vietnam throughout the twentieth century. They both describe aspects of the country’s recent history, including its colonial status under the French, the occupation by Japanese forces during WWII, and the arrival of the Chinese National Army upon Japan’s surrender to oversee their disarmament (Tran, 2010: n.p.; Bui, 2017: 117). Bui describes—with a sense of would-be optimism—the declaration of independence by Ho Chi Minh (2017: 116) but follows that watershed moment with a lamentation of the course that history took from there: 1945 could have been the moment for a union of Vietnamese leaders from the North, Center and South to create a self-determining democracy. Had they succeeded…the next thirty years of war might have been avoided… millions of lives spared. (ibid.: 118)

Both artists relate their families’ narratives with a retelling of the period when, after WWII, the French reasserted their control over Vietnam and the guerrilla resistance of the Viet Minh strengthened across the North (ibid.: 118–127). Along with her description, Bui illustrates a French war plane flying over Vietnam and comments that “[u]nable to tell a communist peasant from a noncommunist one, the French made this war a hell for villagers” (ibid.: 119). She then continues with dialogue coming from the French fighters within the plane: “They all look the same,” says one, to which another replies, “Shoot anything moving just to be sure” (ibid.). Linking 18 At the time of this writing (2022).

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these events to her own history, she chronicles how when her father was quite young, his village was repeatedly targeted by the French military. At one point she illustrates her father as a little boy curled up and frightened, hiding in a small cave: “Above ground, the soldiers burned houses, killed women and children” (ibid.: 122). Reflecting on the cost of the war between the French and Viet Minh, Bui editorializes: “Every casualty in war is someone’s grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, brother, sister, child, lover” (ibid.: 157); indeed, Tran relates how his grandfather was shot and killed by French troops during a search for Viet Minh collaborators (2010). Bui recounts the colonialists’ violence against the people of Vietnam but also the repressive communist regime that developed in the North at the time: “Here there was no freedom of thought, no allowance for individuality” (Bui, 2017: 168). She also includes the disastrous reorganization of society when the communists “began to weed out all the landowners…and killed them, or beat and tortured them.” Over an illustration of a great mountain of human skulls, Bui writes that “[i] n a short time the land reforms killed 220,000 people” (ibid.: 169). When the Americans arrived on the scene en masse in 1965, Bui enumerates the tremendous hardships they caused the people of Vietnam, especially their allies in the South. “American planes carpet-bombed a country dependent on agriculture with napalm and the defoliant Agent Orange” (ibid.: 200), she remarks. Both Tran and Bui elucidate the effects of the inflation, black markets, and corruption that accompanied the arrival of U.S. forces. Tran describes the corruption of some South Vietnamese commanders by noting that “[i]f you’re lucky, they were just selling the extra ammo on the black market. If you’re unlucky, they’d be given directly to the enemy” (2010: n.p.), and Bui simply states that “[m]oney ruined everything … As the war intensified, cities turned into police states” (Bui, 2017: 201–202). However, after the Americans left and Vietnam had been unified under communist control, “[i]t meant constant monitoring, distrust, and the ever-present feeling that our family could, at any moment, be separated, our safety jeopardized” (ibid.: 221). Bui goes on to describe the New Economic Zones where those the communists did not trust were sent for isolated hard labor, the poverty and hunger experienced by all, the surveillance and prison that hung over everyone’s head, and eventually the desperate escape by boat, the refugee camps, and ultimately, her family’s arrival in America. Tran writes that “[a]fter the war ended, the Vietnamese’s suffering really began” (2010: n.p.), describing how “[i]ntellectuals were the new regime’s biggest threat. Doctors, officers, politicians, and scholars… were considered dangerous” (ibid.: n.p.). He then proceeds to illustrate the

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hardships experienced by those in re-education camps, including forced labor, indoctrination, hunger, and torture. One of the critical additions to the narrative of critique—when recounted within the artistic arena—is the depiction of the geopolitical conflict as playing out within the protagonist’s mind. While this sort of internal duality is a constant theme throughout many of the Vietnamese-American narratives, the duality is typically that of the individual’s simultaneous Vietnamese and American sense of identity. However, within literary narratives of critique, the internal conflict is also that between the critique of the communist and anti-communist factions engaged in the war. The elements and actions of each side are subject to critique, but the critique in these narratives runs through the hearts of the central characters, who are torn and confused about the conflict. The narrator of The Best We Could Do repeatedly expresses this inner conflict regarding how to frame the American-Vietnamese War, confessing to being troubled by the contradictions and American oversimplifications she struggled with as she tried to make sense of the war (Bui, 2017: 207); similarly, in Vietnamerica, Tran has his father assert: “You can’t look at our family in a vacuum and apply your myopic contemporary Western filter to them” (2010: n.p.), then goes on to state that “Our family wasn’t alone. We weren’t a special case. Everyone suffered. Everyone had to do whatever they needed to survive” (2010: n.p.). Ultimately, Bui asserts that “[t]here is no single story of that day, April 30, 1975. In Viet Nam today, among the victors it is called Liberation Day. Overseas, among experts like my parents, it is remembered as the day we lost our country” (Bui, 2017: 211). Like the narrator of The Best We Could Do, the unnamed narrator of the novel The Sympathizer expresses this same sort of critical ambivalence. This narrator, a communist spy working as the aid-de-camp to an ARVN general, describes himself as “a man of two minds … I am simply able to see any issue from both sides” (Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015: 1). As we pointed out in the previous section on the academic arena of memory, Viet Thanh Nguyen is a professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature and has written extensively on the American-Vietnamese War as an academic and public intellectual. However, he is also one of the leading lights working within the Vietnamese-American artistic arena, having won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Sympathizer. Similar to his scholarly work, Viet Thanh Nguyen hews closely to the narrative of critique in his fiction. Much like the other works cast in this narrative, The Sympathizer critiques the French colonial administration of Vietnam. In one passage, the narrator describes how the previous generation had been radicalized when

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confronted by the reality that their colonial overlords were second-rate administrators who were sent to Vietnam because they could not make it in France. His communist commander’s great uncle had spent time in France after having been drafted into the French war effort in WWI, and the following encapsulates his assessment of what the narrator calls “the previous century of avuncular French molestation” (Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015: 31-32): The [French] mediocrities had been dispatched to Indochina, allowing France to staff its colonial bureaucracies with the schoolyard bully, the chess club misfit, the natural-born accountant, and the diffident wallflower, whom the great-uncle now spotted in their original habitat as the outcasts and losers they were. And these castoffs, he fumed, were the people who taught us to think of them as white demigods? (Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015: 27)

While the French were deplorable, there was no shortage of competitors for the ultimate title: “the brief Japanese interregnum of World War II” and the subsequent “sawing in half of the country in ’54 by foreign magicians” (ibid.: 31–32) implicated numerous other national powers. And in the narrator’s estimation, the Americans were no better than any other nation with imperial ambitions. After offering a litany of American superlatives—supermarkets, superhighways, supersonic jets, Superman, super carriers, the Super Bowl (ibid.: 28)—the narrator makes the following observation: Although every country thought itself superior in its own way, was there ever a country that coined so many “super” terms from the federal bank of narcissism, was not only superconfident but also truly superpowerful, that would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam? (ibid.)

The narrator repeatedly rehearses the fact that the Americans had essentially raped Vietnam during its involvement in the war. He asserts that “the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom” (Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015: 37), and then goes on to generalize this as follows: “Americans liked seeing people eye to eye, the General had once told me, especially as they screwed them from behind” (ibid.: 8). True to form, The Sympathizer’s narrative of critique also includes a dressing down of the Republic of Vietnam, referring to it as a “jackfruit

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republic that served as a franchise of the United States” (ibid.: 6–7). The narrator points to the chaos of the country’s government and treachery of his countrymen when he remarks that “our bickering generals had fomented more coups d’état than I could count” (ibid.: 24) and how, when the central part of the country began to collapse before the communists’ final offensive, “our troops had shot civilians in the back as they all fought madly to escape on barges and boats, the death toll running into the thousands” (ibid.: 3); the people of South Vietnam were “robbed and raped by their own soldiers” (ibid.). As damning as these critiques of the Republic of Vietnam and the French and American imperialists are, the communists in victory receive a no less scathing condemnation. The simple question the narrator puts to his handler, the Commandant, sets up the take-down. Speaking of all the Vietnamese people who had risked their lives to escape the country after unification, the narrator asks, “what dream do you think compelled these refugees to escape, taking to the sea in leaky little boats that would have terrified Christopher Columbus? If our revolution served the people, why were some of these people voting by fleeing?” (ibid.: 155). Upon his return to communist-controlled Vietnam from his assignment to spy on the South Vietnamese military officers in exile in the United States, the loyal narrator is subject to prolonged physical and psychological torture in one of the communists’ re-education camps. We learn early on that The Sympathizer is actually a long, written confession being given by the narrator in a re-education camp. And as the story builds toward its climax, along with his increasing despair, the narrator finally completes his “re-education” by seeing that the famous dictum of Ho Chi Minh—Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom—was a cruel joke and that “Nothing was the punchline” (Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015: 355): “only a man of two minds could get this joke, how a revolution fought for independence and freedom could make those things worth less than nothing” (ibid.: 361; emphasis in the original). The narrator explains that his re-education taught him at last how our revolution had gone from being the vanguard of political change to the rearguard hoarding power. In this transformation, we were not unusual. Hadn’t the French and the Americans done exactly the same? Once revolutionaries themselves, they had become imperialists, colonizing and occupying our defiant little land, taking away our freedom in the name of saving us. Our revolution took considerably longer than theirs, and was considerably bloodier, but we made up for lost time. When it came

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to learning the worst habits of our French masters and their American replacements, we quickly proved ourselves the best. We, too, could abuse grand ideals! Having liberated ourselves in the name of independence and freedom…we then deprived our defeated brethren of the same. (ibid.: 360)

In the final scene of The Sympathizer, after the narrator has completed his re-education and has been released from the camp, he is preparing to make the daring escape from Vietnam by boat, not knowing what the future will hold, but determined at all costs to survive. Another place where the narrative of critique shows up within the artistic arena is in the poet-turned-novelist Linh Dinh’s 2010 work, Love Like Hate. Like other works based on this narrative, there is an unsparing censure of all the major belligerents of the war. While there is sympathy toward the people of Vietnam and a recognition that they had been the victims of larger powers—e.g., Dinh has a character remark that during the rapprochement between China and the United States, “Vietnam became a dispensable pawn” (ibid.: 79)—the communists who are struggling to liberate the country from the imperialist powers lose their legitimacy as soon as they assume power: “From 1975 to 1986, Saigon went through a dark age. Hundreds of thousands of people were sent off to concentration camps. Food shortages became a fact of life … Nearly everyone was hungry all the time” (ibid.: 92). Indeed, the narrator contends that “[t]he worst thing about Communism is not that it stops you from thinking or writing poetry, the worst thing about it is that it can stop you from eating altogether” (ibid.: 9). Dinh explains that “[t]he humiliation of a minor country is that it is always at the mercy of a major one” (ibid.: 81), and in Love Like Hate, this idea plays itself through the trope of prostitution. In fact, this trope is at the heart of the novel’s title. One of the characters, Quang Trung, leads a Vietnamese punk band called Love Like Hate. Quang Trung explained to Hoa that he called his band Love Like Hate because that is how he felt about Vietnam. “I love Vietnam so much I hate her. How can I not hate her when I love her so much? I am like a son who froths at the mouth because he has to watch his mother sell her pussy. She’s sold her pussy to the Chinese, French, Russians and Americans, and now she’s selling it to the Taiwanese. She’d sell her pussy to anyone because she feels inferior to everyone. She’s thrilled to be humiliated because someone is paying attention to her. And when she’s too old to sell her own pussy, she sells her daughter’s pussy. That’s Mother Vietnam for you!” (ibid.: 192)

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Just as in other Vietnamese-American works cast in this narrative, in Love Like Hate there is a point at which one of the central characters eventually understands all this. And this understanding ushers in a sense of hope and possibility for the future. In The Best We Could Do, the narrator concludes the book by looking lovingly at her young son and declaring “I don’t see war and loss … I see a new life, bound with mine not quite by coincidence, and I think maybe he can be free” (Thi Bui, 2017: 327–328). Similarly, in The Sympathizer, as the narrator prepares to escape Vietnam by boat along with other would-be refugees, he asserts that “[d]espite it all … We remain the most hopeful of creatures” (Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015: 366). In Love Like Hate, the book closes with the young Vietnamese girl, Hoa, having spent several days sleeping with a Frenchman whom she had just met and accepting his money in exchange. She has liberated herself from her mother, who was bent on marrying her off to nearly any foreigner who would have her (clearly a form of prostitution). She has come to understand that relationships always involve exchange and that freedom consists in setting your own terms. As she departs the Frenchman’s flat, never to return, she recognizes that from her new understanding, “she could see the future. She was the future. Now that she had money, she could check into a hotel on Pham Ngu Lao Street. That very night she went out to make more money” (Linh Dinh, 2010: 238). This newfound freedom—founded solidly on a realist outlook (or cynical outlook, depending on one’s own perspective)—is the logical conclusion of the narrative of critique.

2. The Narrative of Triumphant Return Another narrative that propagates through the Vietnamese-American artistic arena of collective memory is the narrative of triumphant return. This narrative is unique in that it actually posits a Vietnamese-American victory over the communists. As improbable as this might seem on its face, this professed victory over the communists comes with a twist: it is a moral victory, of sorts. That is to say, this narrative asserts that while the communists might have won the shooting war, the true victory is manifest in the fact that the Vietnamese refugees in the United States quickly became more educated, healthier, and wealthier in exile, while at the same time enjoying political freedoms denied to those living back in Vietnam. In this narrative, the moral victory is consummated when, after decades in the United States, Vietnamese Americans return to Vietnam as Việt kiều (“returning Vietnamese”). Once back in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,

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the people’s poverty, lack of education, degraded health, and absence of political and economic opportunity provide the evidence that lays bare the true triumph of the Vietnamese Americans. Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood sums up this claim in the following: “[it is a] Vietnamese fantasy to attribute everything that is right and good to America” (Time, 5/2/2022). It is worth noting that the narrative of triumphant return is a departure from the narrative of ongoing violent struggle against the communists discussed above in the context of the community arena of memory. In the latter, the Vietnamese-Americans are still waging a military or paramilitary war that has not yet ended—a war that involves ongoing physical combat. Examples of this narrative are indeed found within the artistic arena of memory, but they are usually acknowledged in passing or at any rate do not constitute the central narrative of the particular work. For example, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer devotes a significant amount of attention to this narrative, but it is not the main thrust of the novel. In a similar way, but with less emphasis over the course of the novel, the narrative of ongoing violent struggle against the communists is present in Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge. In the following passage, the narrator of Monkey Bridge gestures toward this theme: Four years after North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of South Vietnam’s Independence Palace, the war, it appeared, at least in our living room, could still be won. “Who’s to say, in the scheme of things, when the war is really over? A million boat people leaving, hundreds of thousands of prisoners in re-education camps, one of the biggest ricegrowing countries in the world importing rice, the economy in shambles. Who can call that victory?” (1998: 152)

While the context of the passage above is a sort of fantasizing engaged in by many first-generation Vietnamese Americans, the questioning of the communists’ victory is not tantamount to claiming an actual military victory over the communists. But it is actual victory—albeit a moral victory—that is claimed by numerous works within the artistic arena. In Andrew X. Pham’s 1999 literary travelogue Catfish and Mandala, the young VietnameseAmerican narrator takes a months-long journey by bicycle from California around the Pacific Rim and finally through the length of Vietnam. Pham perfectly encapsulates the narrative of triumphant return in the following: “We [i.e., the Việt kiều] return, with our hearts in our throats, to taunt the Communist regime, to show through our material success that we, the once pitiful exiles, are now the victors” (1999: 6; emphasis added). But this sense

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of triumph over the communists—who have been the implacable enemies of those who fled the country—is often alloyed with the grief of exile. It is seldom exultant. One of the methods of highlighting the notion that a return to Vietnam is actually triumphant is to contrast the prestige of the Việt kiều with the degradation of the Vietnamese living in Vietnam. The country is portrayed as a failed state filled with poverty, corruption, and misery. In his literary reflections entitled “Coming Home,” De Tran describes the woefully disfigured and disabled veterans of the war who populate the streets, the beggars, and the fact that “[c]orruption and smuggling are rampant” (1995: 182). Stepping out into the night on his first trip back to Ho Chi Minh City after having evacuated in April 1975, De Tran remarks that “you can smell the raw sewage in the nocturnal air. Walk down the street and you see people sleeping on the sidewalk, their shadows like corpses in the night” (ibid.). A decade or so later, Bich Minh Nguyen describes her return to her native Saigon in Stealing Buddha’s Dinner. There, she relates how her relatives lived in a neighborhood of muddied alleys, in a concrete home with a red-tiled roof, on the outskirts of Saigon … The cement floor had a long hairline fracture … The windows had bars over them instead of glass … That first afternoon in Vietnam, a cat died while I was looking at it. (2007: 240)

Taking pity on these long-lost relatives, she relates that “[b]efore I left I slipped them an envelope full of American money” (ibid.: 245). It is often this combination of the communists’ deprivation and their own magnanimity that foregrounds the moral victory of the Việt kiều. In her second memoir, Child of War, Woman of Peace (1993), Le Ly Hayslip elaborates on the suffering that persists in Vietnam after the end of the shooting war and how she works tirelessly—using her own economic and social capital in the United States—to serve as benefactor to her erstwhile countrymen. She started a foundation (East Meets West) that funds a medical clinic she founded in Vietnam, about which she remarks, Since the Mother’s Love clinic opened, it has treated more than 16,500 patients and delivered 300 babies. East Meets West is currently constructing a twenty-acre rehabilitation center for the homeless and handicapped amid the white and tall pines of China Beach. (Hayslip: 1993: 366)

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In his Perfume Dreams, Andrew Lam describes the position of the Việt kiều in contemporary Vietnam, and in doing so, draws out their newfound superiority: Vietnamese nationals living abroad, especially those in America, whose successes and wealth serve as a mirror against which the entire nation, mired still in poverty and political oppression, reflects on its own lost potential … Today it is the Viet Kieu, those persecuted by Uncle Ho’s followers and forced to flee—people like me—who exude that muchcoveted independence and freedom. (2005: 12)

In other words, as the war was fought over dueling versions of “independence and freedom,” it is clear who has won. While the victory claimed in the narrative of triumphant return is often declared by the Vietnamese Americans themselves, it is also expressed through the attitudes and observations of the Vietnamese who never left their country. In Catfish and Mandala, the narrator discusses the status of Việt kiều in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam with Cuong, a well-heeled Vietnamese man with whom he has struck up a friendship while sojourning in Ho Chi Minh City. Cuong describes the superiority that seems to emanate from these returning Vietnamese. The real damning thing is the fact that there are Viet-kieu, our own brothers, skin of our skin, blood of our blood, who look better than us, more civilized, more educated, more wealthy, more genteel. Viet-Kieu look kingly next to the average Vietnamese. Look at you, look at me. You’re wearing old jeans and I’m wearing a suit, but it’s obvious who…who is superior. (Pham, 1999: 330)

In some cases, becoming American becomes a kind of emblem or shorthand—a collective representation—of this victory. Bich Minh Nguyen puts this on full display in the following passage: “We were Vietnamese, we were refugees, we were Americans. My father [who had made the decision to flee Vietnam with his family] could not possibly regret it. I do not regret it. I am grateful for his unimaginable choice” (2007: 251). And the victory is recognized by those in Vietnam when she visits: “‘You are an American girl,’ my aunt said to me in Vietnamese, with teasing pride in her voice” (ibid.: 243-244). This is the pride that the aunt—who had been left behind—bears for her niece as she returns home, victorious. And it is the recognition that De Tran’s cousin—whose side of the family had been aligned with the

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communists during the war—voices upon seeing his Việt kiều cousin upon the latter’s return to Vietnam: “The Americans fought with guns and bullets and didn’t win. Now, they fight us with dollars. There’s nothing to counter that” (De Tran, 1995: 183). And in Andrew Lam’s East Eats West, we hear the common assessment of ultimate moral triumph by those who make up the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: “Going to America,” so goes the new Vietnamese mantra, “is like going to heaven.” America is where reincarnation can be had in one lifetime. Go to America and your sufferings end. Go to America and your sons and daughters will grow up to be astronauts or presidents of rich computer companies. (2010: 56)

3. The Narrative of Loss and Moving On The final major narrative within the Vietnamese-American arena of memory is the narrative of loss and moving on. This narrative shares certain similarities with the others within the artistic arena yet still distinguishes itself as sui generis. For example, while it is often critical of the war in a way that tracks with the narrative of critique, it tends not to dwell on the geopolitics in the same way. Rather, the war in this telling tends to be criticized on a much more personal level, elaborating on memories of personal tragedy. With the narrative of triumphant return it shares a certain acceptance of becoming an American (at least in some attenuated way) and even a sense of optimism about the future. However, there is no trace of victory over the communists. Rather, this narrative tends to be centered in the United States, with the war as a source of painful memories that have personally affected the Vietnamese-American characters. And throughout works written in this way, there is an ongoing struggle with this pain—the pain of loss—and eventually an effort to simply keep moving on with life in spite of this pain. There is often a sense of acceptance that manifests itself in the conclusions of these works, and sometimes even forgiveness and reconciliation. In an interview given to a local television station in 2011, Lê Thị Diễm Thúy, author of The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003), describes her novel as being about a family of Vietnamese refugees trying to make their way in the United States, a way beset “by the difficulties they have of letting go or actually facing their past.” The protagonist of this work is a daughter in a family that has suffered much: her brother drowned while the family was still in Vietnam, a loss that continues to haunt each of them; her father

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was interned for a long, degrading period in a re-education camp. Eventually, after having fled Vietnam by boat, they have to survive in California as refugees, which is difficult and isolating. The family members seem continuously to be haunted by their various losses: the loss of their son, the loss of their country, and even the loss of their connection to each other. Fleeing all this loss, the protagonist runs away from home multiple times as a teenager and eventually flees for good to the East Coast, where she attends college and becomes a writer. But she cannot escape the past. While still a young girl in Vietnam, after the death of her brother, she “began to feel that he was right beside me” (2003: 148). In this way, the pain of his loss is both past and present. The novel ends with the protagonist still both connected to the past and fleeing from it. It ends with a memory—a happy memory, but a memory nonetheless—one from soon after her family’s arrival in the United States: “As my parents stood on the beach leaning into each other, I ran, like a dog unleashed, toward the lights” (ibid.: 158). The protagonist is still running, the past—like the memory of her lost brother—still with her. Ocean Vuong’s poignant 2019 novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, is another example of the narrative of loss and moving on. The entire book is cast as a letter written from the protagonist (Little Dog is his name) to his mother, a letter he is writing, he says, in an effort “to break free” from the past, a freedom he analogizes as a race “between the hunter and its prey” (4). The story Little Dog recounts is filled with loss and suffering—both his and his mother’s—and the pain and loss of the American-Vietnamese War continues to reverberate in the present: “the war was still inside you,” he writes to his mother, and “once it enters you it never leaves” (ibid.). But Little Dog closes the book recounting a story his mother told him about fleeing from the past: “‘Why didn’t they get me?’ his mother asks. ‘Well, ‘cause I was fast, baby’” (ibid.: 242). Similarly, in Vu Tran’s novel, Dragonfish (2015), the central Vietnamese-American character, Hong, is running from the past, but in this case she is running so fast that while she is the force that drives the novel’s action, she is almost never depicted. Rather, the protagonist is her ex-husband, a police detective who is searching for her, confessing that he never really knew anything about her. Like a mirror image of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, in Dragonfish, the mother (Hong) has written letters to her daughter. But in this case, so desperate was Hong to escape the pain of her past—“the years after the war … the day you [i.e., her daughter] were born and what I’d suffered everyday since” (118)—she abandons her daughter to the care of a man she has just met in a refugee camp after fleeing Vietnam. She tries to explain this decision to her daughter in one of her letters: “All I needed, I thought, was the chance to know what it was like to be unneeded,

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unwanted, unfettered” (ibid.). In other words, all she needed was to be free, to be able to escape the bonds of all the pain she had endured during the war and what followed; to move on. In Aimee Phan’s 2004 novel, We Should Never Meet, two central characters, Huan and Mai, are orphans in Vietnam who are sent to the United States at around the time of the Republic of Vietnam’s surrender. The two have in a sense been twice orphaned, having lost both their parents and their country, and some two decades after they arrived in America, they return to visit the land of their birth, a trip that arouses a series of painful memories for them both. Near the end of their trip, as the two discuss the suffering they have experienced as a result of forces over which they had no control, Mai says to Huan, “‘It’s not our parents’ fault. Or anyone else’s here. How could I be angry with them, expect them to do right when there was no such thing? When everything here was wrong?’ Huan nods, understanding. ‘It was a war’” (243). As the two gaze out onto the busy streets of Hi Chi Minh City, teeming with young people who were born after the war, seemingly untouched by its horrors, the two take solace in the fact that without memories of the war, “Their futures are pure” (ibid.). And in that moment, Huan and Mai are themselves vicariously released from the tragedies of their past, if not their memories of it.

D. Arenas in Conflict In our community, it becomes increasing difficult to separate art, politics, and community. -Tram Le, Curatorial Statement for the F.O.B. Art Speaks exhibition

We have up to this point detailed the principal narratives of VietnameseAmerican collective memory as they exist in isolation. But of course, these narratives do not exist in isolation. In fact, there are many circumstances in which the holders of different narratives come into contact with one another. In the large Vietnamese-American communities throughout the United States, one is likely to find adherents of each of the narratives we have examined, and perhaps adherents of others besides. What’s more, the holders of these diverse narratives are often neighbors; they shop at many of the same stores, eat at many of the same restaurants, sit in many of the same classrooms, and worship at many of the same sanctuaries. Usually, this coexistence is peaceful enough. However, the fact remains that large numbers of the individuals and groups that support these various narratives

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feel passionately about them; they not only represent a particular version of their group’s past but in some ways constitute the core of their identity. As Aguilar-San Juan explains, “with great fervor, Vietnamese American leaders make their own regulations, deciding what kinds of memories the community ought to be celebrating—and which should be forgotten or dismissed” (2009: 69). But this policing of the collective memory has not succeeded in eliminating the other narratives that circulate within the community. And because some of the narratives can be seen to call into question the veracity of other narratives—to challenge what for some Vietnamese Americans amounts to their existential foundation—a certain amount of conflict is to be expected when they are juxtaposed. What might be less expected is that these conflicts over the memory of the American-Vietnamese War can turn violent and in numerous cases have in fact turned deadly. In the introduction, we pointed out that narratives are verbal representations of a sequence of actions. Paul Ricoeur, philosopher of time and narrative, put it this way: narrative “is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience” (1990: 3). But objects and concepts do not typically involve the passage of time. At most, they provide a glimpse of an instant in time. That said, we often fit these objects into narratives, thereby providing the objects with context and a specif ic meaning. The present section will examine a number of these sorts of non-narrative sites of memory and explore some of the conflicts that have occurred at these sites between groups that champion different narratives of collective memory. Before exploring a few of the more visible clashes between narratives of collective memory, it will be helpful to describe several sites of memory that typically allow for the peaceful mingling of those holding different narratives of the American-Vietnam War. In the introduction, we described Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire: the stories, objects, places, and institutions through which “memory crystallizes and secretes itself” (1989: 7), and we will invoke it once again here. In addition to the general claims made by Nora, he also asserts that these sites of memory play a central role in the creation and maintenance of minority-group identity: “The defense, by certain minorities, of a privileged memory that has retreated to jealously protected enclaves in this sense intensely illuminates the truth of lieux de mémoire—that without commemorative vigilance, history would soon sweep them away” (1989:12). In other words, there is a real sense in which many within the Vietnamese-American community are engaged in an ongoing struggle to keep their collective memory—and their collective identity—from dissolving into the broader American milieu.

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1. The Vietnam Heritage Flag In the introduction, we highlighted Durkheim’s concept of collective representations: powerful, emotionally charged symbols that carry the ideas, beliefs, and values held by social groups that enable the group to order and make sense of the world. In some cases, these symbols so completely represent a collectivity that the members of the group come to think of it and treat it as the collectivity: “The symbol thus takes the place of the thing, and the emotions aroused are transferred to the symbol. It is the symbol that is loved, feared, and respected” (1995: 221). Again, in the introduction we noted that Durkheim’s exemplar of a modern-day collective representation of this magnitude—what he called a totem—was a national flag, and he argued that in many cases the existential foundation of one’s sense of collective identity is transferred to the flag: “The flag itself is treated as if it was that reality” (ibid.: 222). To demonstrate this claim, Durkheim points out that “[t]he soldier who dies for his flag dies for his country, but the idea of the flag is actually in the foreground of his consciousness … He forgets that the flag is only a symbol” (ibid.). This theoretical explanation will help us, as we move through the rest of this chapter, make sense of the various conflicts that have occurred at Vietnamese-American sites of memory. We will argue that it makes sense to see the Vietnamese-American social group as one that has experienced cultural trauma. The conflicts we will examine below are typically described as revolving around debates over “free speech,” “democracy,” or “communism” (e.g., the headline that read: “Death threats, protests and lawsuits: Little Saigon newspaper war is about ideology, not just circulation” Roosevelt, OCR, 4/25/2015). But we maintain that there is far more than mere ideology that is being debated; it is the very identity of the individuals within the Vietnamese-American community that is at stake, for “a cultural trauma is a threat to some part of their personal identities” (Smelser, 2004: 40), and this threat is exactly what we find at the center of these disputes. Durkheim’s use of the national flag as the emotionally charged symbol of the collectivity is prescient regarding our present case. The flag of the former Republic of Vietnam is the most ubiquitous symbol in Little Saigon and, indeed, in almost any Vietnamese-American lieux de mémoire. Its three horizontal stripes of red spanning the breadth of a yellow field can be seen fluttering from flagpoles lining the streets of Vietnamese-American communities across the U.S., hanging from storefront windows, carried by color guards in parades, deployed during funeral services, printed on posters and flyers, sewn onto garments, adorning websites, and decorating the walls

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of private residences. In an interview with 59-year-old Trong Doan, who was at the time standing next to the flag of the former Republic of Vietnam, a reporter for the Orange County Register duly records a contemporary illustration of Durkheim’s claims: “Doan sheds tears when he talks about the flag … ‘I’ve seen the sacrifices people made for this flag, people died for the flag,’ he said, tearing up” (Bharath, OCR, 5/16/2008). Like some of the other sites of memory we will describe below, the flag of the former Republic of Vietnam has also been integrated into portions of the broader American society. In 2006, Vietnamese Americans successfully lobbied the state of California to formally recognize the “Vietnamese Freedom and Heritage flag” as the official symbol of California’s Vietnamese-American community. Accordingly, this flag “may be displayed on the premises of state buildings in connection with state-sponsored Vietnamese-American ceremonial events” (Lieu, 2011: 151 n.7). What’s more, the flag is now officially recognized in scores of municipalities across the United States (e.g., Houston, San Diego, St. Paul; Gottlieb and Tran, LAT, 5/6/2004) and throughout the global diaspora. But it is not just this acceptance of the Vietnamese Heritage flag that marks it as a sacred site of memory. Its profane antithesis, the flag of the SRV, with its yellow star centered in a field of red, has also been simultaneously denigrated. In 2017, following the lead of Westminster and Garden Grove, the San Jose City Council voted unanimously to ban the SRV flag from flying on city property.19 During the city council hearings in Garden Grove, which were held some 14 years before San Jose’s, the chambers were packed to overflowing with members of the Vietnamese-American community. Leslie Le, a 70-year-old ARVN veteran, testified to the council that “[w]e used our blood for that flag [the flag of the former Republic of Vietnam], we died for that flag” (Tran, LAT, 3/12/2003). Years later, a similar scene played out in San Jose. Council member Tam Nguyen, who led the 2017 resolution, asserted that the national flag of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is “a symbol of the atrocity of communism” (Lyons, SF Gate, 1/25/2017). Instead, the city decided to continue to formally recognize the Vietnamese Freedom and Heritage flag as the official flag of Vietnamese Americans in San Jose (Lyons, SF Gate, 1/25/2017). Similar to what was described above, when segments of the VietnameseAmerican community united to proclaim Garden Grove a communist-free zone, the veneration for the Heritage flag has led to the defamation of the national flag of the SRV. In 2004, California State University at Fullerton (CSUF), a school that has about 2,000 students of Vietnamese descent—possibly 19 All three cities are in California.

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more than any other American university (Gottlieb, LAT, 5/12/2004)—met with stiff resistance when it came time for their commencement ceremony. It was the university’s recently instituted tradition to display the flags of the countries from which graduating students had come, and in 2003, they had added the flag of the SRV to the display. This caused one man to climb a fence in order to tear it down after the ceremony, but aside from that, little protest was noted. However, as the 2004 commencement ceremony approached, some in the Vietnamese-American community mounted an organized opposition. Phu Ngoc Nguyen, a 20-year-old CSUF student and member of the CSUF Vietnamese Student Association (VSA), declared: “The communist flag is immoral … I want a flag that represents me to be flown” (ibid.), and many students threatened to walk out of the commencement ceremony if the SRV flag was displayed. And this was not the first American university to experience an identical concern by its Vietnamese-American students and community members. California’s Santa Ana College and Washington’s University of Puget Sound had also experienced protests over the display of the SRV flag during commencement ceremonies. In all three of these cases, the school eventually decided to remove all the flags, which defused the protests. And in the case of CSUF, where students’ homelands were also listed in the commencement program, the “Socialist Republic of Vietnam” was changed to read simply “Vietnam” (Gottlieb, LAT, 5/12/2004). There was a dialogue among Vietnamese-American academics regarding this issue, which, while maintaining its distance, often expressed some sympathy for those who held to narratives that emphasize the ongoing struggle against the communists. Viet Thanh Nguyen asked rhetorically, “Who can fault them for nursing these wounds, which are not yet, for them, scars?” (cited in Aguilar-San Juan, 2009: 84).20 However, the scholars were also critical of the protest. In the same piece just cited, which was widely circulated throughout the Vietnamese-American community and published as an editorial in the Orange County Register, Nguyen continued by pointing out that “[a]nyone in the Vietnamese American community who speaks out in favor of reconciling with Viet Nam or criticizing the South Vietnamese regime has risked vicious protest and even violence,” and because of this, “there has been no true freedom of speech in the Vietnamese American 20 Similarly, in another controversy concerning the flying of the flag of the former RVN, Tu-Uyen Nguyen, assistant professor of Asian American Studies at CSUF, commented that for the older generation of Vietnamese-Americans who “went through the war [and] had to suffer a lot of atrocities and traumatic events at the hands of the communist government…clinging to the symbol of what they lost is a way of coping for them” (Welch, USA Today, 4/23/2015).

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community” (ibid.). Professor Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde echoed this latter sentiment: “The South Vietnamese flag, strongly representing the lost nation, is one of the most potent of these symbols, and every potentially defiant act against it accrues monumental costs” (2013: 100). In this context, and without recourse to the theory of cultural trauma, Valverde nevertheless spells out the process of cultural trauma construction within the Vietnamese-American community by noting the ongoing contests between competing narratives of the American-Vietnamese War (and the war’s place within the group’s collective identity): Community members whose ideas diverge, even in the arts, threaten the anticommunist base … The fear is that if members of the community are influenced by alternative ideas, they will not subscribe to a unitary history—that of losing to the communists. (2013: 100)

2. Black April Another important lieu de mémoire through which the VietnameseAmerican community practices “commemorative vigilance” is the annual commemoration of Black April. It is a commonplace that the traditional self-understanding of the Vietnamese is bound up in attachment to the land itself. In 1905, Vietnamese nationalist Phan Boi Chau wrote, “For a human being, the greatest suffering comes from losing his country” (quoted in Hoskins, 2011: 45); note that it is not the loss of a friend or family member, but the loss of the country. And this loss (more than mere loss—death is a better description in this case) of the personified nation, which is how the day the Republic of Vietnam surrendered is conceived (e.g., Andrew Lam writes of having “grieved for my lost homeland”; 2010: 29) is made most explicit in the annual Black April commemoration observed by the Vietnamese diaspora the world over. In traditional Vietnamese culture, a memorial is held every year on the death anniversary of each departed ancestor within a certain degree of genealogical proximity (Jamieson, 1995: 23). An interviewee put it this way: “Americans, you talk about celebrating Washington’s birthday, celebrating Lincoln’s birthday. But for the Asian people, they celebrate the day that people die” (cf., Lam, 2010: 2). On April 30, 1976, the first anniversary of the fall of Saigon, members of the Vietnamese diaspora gathered together to remember the loss of their homeland and affirm their animus toward their communist foes: they called this gathering “Ngày Quốc Hận,” roughly translated as “day of national

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resentment.” However, as years went by, and the collectivity’s narratives began to multiply, the event evolved in line with these changes. Instead of being a ritual of resentment, it became—in keeping with Vietnamese tradition—a gathering to mourn the death of the nation. The memorial has since come to be known as Tháng Tư Đen (“Black April”) and has remained just ambiguous enough as to allow it to be interpreted through the frames of multiple narratives. This ambiguity is occasionally acknowledged, such as in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s op-ed in April of 2015: “This Black April, the 40th, is a time to reflect on the stories of our war” (NYT, 4/24/2015; emphasis added); more explicitly, a Boston area non-profit group dedicated to serving the Vietnamese-American community posted the following on their website in 2017: “We want to commemorate April 30th as the 42nd anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. For the Vietnamese community, there are a variety of perspectives and meanings of and about this historical day” (HP, 2007). The Black April commemoration itself typically incorporates familiar funerary motifs, including candlelight vigils, somber demeanor, reverence for the veterans of the RVNMF (many of whom attend these events in full military regalia), photos of the “departed” (pictures of Saigon on its final day), and the recitation of eulogies such as the following: “South Vietnam never got to reach its full potential because of the war, but in its short lifetime, the RVN gave a glimpse of what Vietnam was capable of” (Pham, Freedom for Vietnam, 4/30/2013). This event is now an essential ritual for large swaths of the Vietnamese diaspora: “Black April has become a sacred event for the Vietnamese diasporas for the last several decades, as sacred as the Lunar New Year for the Vietnamese people” (Glassey-Trầnguyễn, Center for Health Journalism, 5/31/2012). Another custom observed at Black April memorials is the wearing of black attire for those in attendance. This custom was not part of the initial commemoration but was adopted after a few years, along with the change in the commemoration’s name and emphasis. And this has led to an interesting objection regarding symbolic representation by some of those who take a more critical stance toward what they see as the Vietnamese diaspora’s false consciousness. Viet Thanh Nguyen puts the objection this way: …do we have to call this anniversary Black? Really, Vietnamese people? Is that the best we can do? After all, isn’t White the color of death in Vietnam? Don’t we, on funeral days, strap around our foreheads a White scarf of mourning? … The point is—shouldn’t Black April be White April? … Let’s call it White April just to remind ourselves of our own customs of mourning…. (diaCritics, 4/4/2013)

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What is pertinent in this excerpt is that the fundamental premise of the ritual is not questioned. Even though the questioning of exchanging one’s own traditional funerary attire (i.e., Vietnamese traditionally wear white) for that of another culture (i.e., Americans traditionally wear black) falls squarely within the scope of the narrative of critique, what is not questioned is the death of the nation. Rather, the community is being taken to task for not honoring the nation and its culture closely enough, for the symbolic pollution of adopting black, the Western color of mourning. Another Boston-based group, this one a loosely organized association of Vietnamese-American veterans, commemorates Black April by traveling to each of the city’s memorials to those who died during the AmericanVietnamese War. They conduct a flag ceremony featuring both the American and Vietnamese Heritage flags and make short speeches (Aguilar-San Juan, 2009: 75). They also distribute flyers to anyone who happens to be in the vicinity. In part, they explain the significance of Black April for Vietnamese Americans: On the 30th of April, 1975, North Vietnamese Communists took over South Vietnam by force. Within a few weeks, South Vietnam was turned into a living hell … April is and will be a Black Month for us until the situation in Vietnam improves (cited in ibid.)

This group of Vietnamese-American veterans, with its focus on recriminations directed toward the political regime in Vietnam, makes space for the commemoration of Black April to fit within a narrative of triumphant return to Vietnam. But this is quite different from the narrative context provided by their Boston neighbors at VietAID. For the latter, the focus is on the idea that the U.S. is now home for the Vietnamese diaspora. There is no space created for a narrative of return: For us here at VietAID, this day is a reminder of the community we serve and the ongoing commitment we have to the Vietnamese-American diaspora. We acknowledge and thank our community for their resilience in building a new home together in a new land. (HP, VietAID, 4/30/2017)

Although it has been decades since the surrender of the RVN, these two examples reveal that the commemoration of Black April is still going strong. In fact, it has in some ways become even stronger through its official adoption outside the Vietnamese-American community. In 2008, the California State Legislature passed Resolution SCR-110 proclaiming April 23 through

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April 30 of that year “Black April Memorial Week.” And for the next six years, identical bills were passed (typically unanimously); then, in 2015, and every year since then,21 resolutions have been passed by the California State Legislature proclaiming the entire month of April “Black April Memorial Month.” Meanwhile, other states, including Michigan and Arizona, have begun passing similar resolutions of varying periods (in some cases, the proclamation takes on a different title, such as Arkansas’s April 30 “Vietnamese Heritage Day”). What’s more, at about this same time, county boards of education throughout the U.S. began issuing similar resolutions. In 2015, the Orange County Board of Education became the fourth board of education in the U.S. to issue its own proclamation of “Black April Memorial Month.” Within the text of the proclamation, we read that “Vietnamese Americans know all too well what happens in a nation without freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of expression…in a country where the people are oppressed by a regime that has little respect for human rights.” Further, the proclamation declares that “[c]ommunism is an odious ideology that has been a scourge to humanity, with Nazi Germany killing just a fraction of the number of people murdered by Communist regimes, and all freedomloving peoples condemn this ideology of death.” It goes on to assert that “all Americans and all free peoples around the world pray for the liberation of the people of Vietnam, China, Cuba, North Korea, and Laos from the tyranny of Communism.” By the end of the proclamation, it is declared that “Orange County schools, and particularly history classes, are a most f itting place in which to teach young people about Black April, a major turning point in both American and Vietnamese history,” and the board “asks all Americans to reflect on this watershed moment in the intertwined histories of the United States and Vietnam and encourages educators, students, and families to commemorate this month with appropriate lectures, lessons, and ceremonies” (Board of Education of Orange County, California, 2016).

3. Vietnam War Memorial Another site of memory is the Vietnam War Memorial located in Westminster, California. The centerpiece of the memorial is a 15-foot-tall bronze statue of an American and South Vietnamese soldier donning battle fatigues and 21 As of the writing of this book in 2022.

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standing side by side in a heroic pose. Flanked by the Vietnamese Heritage flag, the American flag, and the black Prisoner Of War (P.O.W.) flag, the figures stand before a bronze replica of an ancient Vietnamese tripod out of which flickers an eternal flame, the traditional Vietnamese ritual for honoring their dead. Dedicated in 2005, 30 years after the dissolution of the Republic of Vietnam, it became the first monument in the United States to explicitly memorialize the wartime roles and sacrifices of the South Vietnamese. In the previous section, we described a group of Boston-based VietnameseAmerican veterans who on April 30 of each year gather together and pay respects to each of the memorials dedicated to the U.S. veterans who lost their lives during the American-Vietnamese War. In describing this annual commemoration, Aguilar-San Juan makes the astute observation that “[s]tanding in front of a cold and lifeless monument dedicated to U.S. veterans, Vietnamese veterans imbue the statue with new life and alternative meanings” (2009: 69). What we would like to suggest is that the same dynamic occurs at Westminster’s Vietnam War Memorial (and, indeed, all sites of memory). One of the points we have been at pains to make throughout this book is that none of our main social groups has a monolithic collective memory about the American-Vietnamese War. This means that just as Vietnamese-American veterans provide a different meaning to U.S. war memorials, so too do each of the various carrier groups within the Vietnamese-American community provide different meanings to the Westminster Vietnam War Memorial. Similar to the Vietnamese Heritage flag and the Black April commemoration, the war memorial is a non-narrative site of memory that can be made to fit harmoniously into any number of narratives—although this is not to say that it does so in all narratives. When analyzing the Vietnam War Memorial in Westminster, the initial point to emphasize, although it is hiding in plain sight, is regarding the name of the memorial. It is a war memorial. Recall that the memorial in Washington D.C. designed by Maya Lin is designated the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. This nuance between a war memorial and a veterans memorial is signif icant. In the case of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C., a memorial located on the sacred grounds of the U.S. capital’s National Mall and supported with federal funding, the very title of the memorial—not to mention the memorial’s design—had to appeal to a populace that was bitterly divided regarding the narrative of the American-Vietnamese War. As we discussed in an earlier chapter, there was simply too much American opposition to the war to memorialize it directly, so the less contentious

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memorialization of those who lost their lives in the war was settled on. And this decision is made manifest in both the memorial’s design and title. However, in the case of the Westminster Vietnam War Monument, there was a different set of circumstances that allowed for memorialization of the war itself. First, while the memorial was to be located on public land, the specific site was an unremarkable city park in Westminster, California, a city with a population of less than 90,000. And within this city, the VietnameseAmerican population comprises more than 40 percent of the total population (compared to 25.6 percent non-Hispanic white and 23.6 percent Hispanic; 2016 Orange County Progress Report). Community support for the memorial was strong, and the one-million-dollar cost of its construction was raised by private contributions. Furthermore, although we have been at pains to show the numerous narratives of collective memory in circulation throughout the Vietnamese-American community, Westminster—located as it is within Little Saigon, the heart of the largest concentration of Vietnamese outside Vietnam—is a region where anti-communism is extremely strong. Because this anti-communism can find resonance with a number of the VietnameseAmerican narratives of collective memory, and because memorializing the war is in essence memorializing the fight against communism, the Vietnamese War Memorial encountered relatively little resistance in terms of its orientation as a war memorial. Like the Black April commemoration, the Vietnam War Memorial gains salience because of its ability to be interpreted in light of numerous competing narratives. Stephen Samuel James, a scholar of Southeast Asian studies who wrote his master’s thesis on the memorial, notes that “the memorial acts as a prosthetic device…that rewrites United States and Vietnamese war historiography so that it no longer excludes South Vietnamese fallen soldiers, lost boat people, and post-war refugee survivors” (2015: v-vi). Note here that James’s assertion—based on ethnographic work within the VietnameseAmerican community—is that the war memorial is even amenable to the narratives within the artistic arena in which the combat element of the war is almost totally effaced; it can be interpreted as an essential part of the collective memory that includes the process that continues to unfold decades after the capitulation of the RVN government. This openness to different narratives makes the memorial accessible and acceptable to a broader portion of the community, a site of memory that transcends narrative boundaries and renders it amenable to the “maintenance of relationships in imagined communities” (ibid.: v) and thereby to the strengthening of ties that bind the larger part of the community together. Similarly, we can observe the way the narrative of critique can situate the memorial in the

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larger geo-political context: “Designing a war monument as a West Coast version of the Statue of Liberty and then placing that monument next to city hall in a park called Freedom on a street called All American Way represents an intentional jumping of scale from the local Vietnamese community to the United States as a global standard for democracy” (Aguilar-San Juan, 2009: 88). Among the many other events that are held by the VietnameseAmerican community on the grounds of the Vietnam War Memorial in Westminster, the site also serves as a sacred space for commemorating Black April. Interestingly, there is another memorial being planned in the adjacent city of Garden Grove: the Black April Vietnam War Memorial. However, unlike the more narratively open Black April commemoration and other extant Vietnam War Memorials, the planned Black April Vietnam War Memorial is more rooted in a specif ic narrative, and as a result it is facing more serious challenges to being constructed. The design calls for three curved walls: one side of the left-hand wall will have the names of the 41 Garden Grove veterans who lost their lives during the American-Vietnamese War, while the other side will have the insignia of the U.S. military units that served during the war. On the right-hand wall, one side will feature the units from other allied countries that served in the war, while the other side of the wall will provide some commentary on the war. However, the main contention is over the content of the memorial’s central area for which the middle wall will serve primarily as a backdrop. Whereas other memorials have featured a pair of anonymous soldiers representing equally the people of both the United States and the Republic of Vietnam, the Black April Vietnam War Memorial will feature a centerpiece comprising the busts of seven specific individuals: five generals and two colonels of the Republic of Vietnam Military Forces who committed suicide rather than surrender to the Vietnamese communists. During open hearings of the Garden Grove City Council, U.S. veteran Peter Katz called the memorial’s preliminary design “a personal affront,” while Charles Mitchell, also a U.S. veteran, “complained that the memorial would be focused on ‘one culture’ and asked why there were no similar remembrances of the bombing of Pearl Harbor” (Tortolano, Orange County Tribune, 9/27/2016). But aside from complaints that the monument highlights non-Americans, there was another sort of complaint: resident Gloria Brown objected that the memorial “sanctif ied suicide” (ibid.). And the notion that suicide is preferable to communism is a much more restrictive one in the sense that it is a diff icult notion to absorb into a narrative of reconciliation.

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4. Fresh Off the Boat II Thus far in this section, we have looked at sites of memory through which multiple Vietnamese-American narratives of collective memory have been able to coexist without too much discord. This is not to suggest that there are not tensions in the community regarding Black April commemorations, the Vietnam War Memorials, or the Vietnam Heritage flag. But as we pointed out above, it is the ambiguity and non-narrativity of these memory-laden sites that enable individuals with different narratives to absorb them into the community’s array of competing collective memories. However, there have also been episodes in which these narratives have come into direct conflict, resulting in agitation, destruction of property, violence, and murder. The first of these incidents we will examine occurred in Santa Ana, California in 2009. This was the occasion of an art exhibition sponsored by the Vietnamese Arts and Letters Association (VAALA) entitled F.O.B. II: Art Speaks.22 The exhibition itself was actually a response to protests by those who held strong anti-communist narratives; these protesters had been staging demonstrations for more than a year against the Vietnamese-American community’s largest newspaper, Nguoi Viet Daily, objecting to the paper’s having published an image of Connections, a work of art by Chau Huynh (Valverde, 2013: 90). Connections is an arrangement of three professional-grade pedicure basins painted yellow with three red horizontal stripes—the same configuration of the Heritage flag. The artist has insisted that she made Connections to honor the hard work of her late mother-in-law, who as a refugee to the U.S. had helped to support her family by working in a salon. When she first came to the U.S. at age 27, Chau Huynh spent time working alongside her mother-in-law and other Vietnamese refugees; the electrical cords of the pedicure basins were meant to signify the remittances sent back to Vietnam by many of the other women who toiled at these salons in the U.S. (Julia Lam23). In spite of her interpretation of her own work, many throughout the Vietnamese-American community considered the piece demeaning of the former Republic of Vietnam and its flag. Many labeled the Nguoi Viet Daily “communist” for merely printing an image of the work, and crowds had been staging ongoing demonstrations in front of the newspaper offices 22 The title “F.O.B.” (“Fresh Off the Boat”) is an appropriation of the slur used to denigrate those who arrived in the United States as refugees after escaping Vietnam by sea. VAALA had sponsored a previous exhibition entitled F.O.B.: A MultiArt Show in 2003. 23 The pseudonym for an interview subject associated with the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association (VAALA).

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since the image was published in 2008. As a result of the public outcry, the paper had issued an apology to the community and fired its two top editors (Tran, LAT, 1/10/2009), but the protests continued. It is clear, then, that already by the time of the F.O.B. II exhibition in January of 2009, there had been a progression of increasingly impassioned responses and rejoinders—a mnemonic battle—between the carriers of various narratives of collective memory; this battle was intense enough to bring the artistic arena into direct collision with forces outside the art world in the community arena of memory. In the exhibition’s catalogue, Lan Duong writes in his curatorial statement that the mnemonic battle is a battle that cannot be ignored: we as a community, must also address the war that burns inside our own borders. I am addressing the kinds of suppressions that occur within the Vietnamese American community, specifically the censorship of artistic expression that allows no other politics than anti-communist politics. (2009: 11)

Although Chau Huynh’s Connections was not on display at F.O.B. II, some of her other works were. But the most notable presence of her work was not inside the exhibit space. In 1999, Chau Huynh, a Vietnamese propaganda artist whose father was a member of the communist party, married a Vietnamese-American man whom she had courted during his trips to Vietnam and moved with him to his home in the U.S. At first, she recalls, it was difficult to reconcile the narrative about the war she learned while growing up in the SRV with those she was then exposed to on her arrival in the U.S.: “I didn’t want to believe it, but it was clear that I was not told the whole truth while living in Vietnam” (Huynh, 2008, cited in Valverde, 2013). The man whom she married came from a strongly anti-communist family who had fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, and in an effort to express the profound union of her husband and herself and the two erstwhile enemies of their homelands, Chau Huynh sewed together a combination of different sized flags of both the SRV and the former RVN into the piece she called Marriage Quilt (ibid.). We will return to this piece and its role in what happened at the F.O.B. II exhibition. Another pair of works that appeared at the F.O.B. II exhibition was By Land, Air, or Sea and an untitled piece by the 40-year-old VietnameseAmerican artist Steven Toly. This untitled piece was a 24 x 30 inch canvas painted yellow, hung in landscape orientation, which was then strung with three parallel lengths of barbed wire that ran horizontally across the canvas.

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The barbed wire had been painted red, giving the overall effect of the flag of the former RVN. In commenting on his work, Toly stated: The flag represents the people. The barbed wire represents the confinement and repression that is modern Vietnam. The Vietnamese people of today still lack the freedom and basic rights that all humans should be afforded. I feel that much like Vietnam, the Vietnamese-American community occasionally has inadvertently suppressed many artists whether in film, writing, painting, etc. Their actions, though noble, have stifled many who want to explore the gray areas between good and evil, patriotism and dissension, democracy and communism. (2009: 51)

Along with Toly’s work was a pair of photographs by artist Brian Doan. One of them—Thu Duc, Viet Nam 2008—featured a young Vietnamese woman seated in a chair with her back to an empty wall. She looks to the viewer’s left and wears jeans and a red tank top with a yellow star in the center—looking very much like the flag of the SRV. Next to her is a glass table on which rests several objects, including a notebook, a cell phone, a vase of flowers, and a small, cheap, golden bust of Ho Chi Minh. In the exhibit’s catalogue, Brian Doan offers an explanation of his work: My work expresses the spiritual essence of the Vietnamese people. I want to address what it means to be Vietnamese at this time in history. The work reflects upon the dilemma of change that has been the result of a turbulent century, leaving a nation split apart with its people spread around the globe. Many are still trapped, depressed, hurt, and full of hatred. (2009: 27)

The F.O.B. II exhibition had works from approximately 50 VietnameseAmerican artists in a variety of styles and media, some of them abstract, some of them sexually transgressive, some of them featuring landscapes spraypainted on shipping containers, and others paying homage to the refugees’ escape from Vietnam by boat; but it was Brian Doan’s Thu Duc, Viet Nam 2008 that generated the controversy that began with the opening of the show. On January 9, 2009, there was a press and V.I.P. opening for the F.O.B. II exhibition, and on the next evening it was opened to the public. By the 11th, protesters began to crowd around the space. During a panel discussion with some of the artists that day, members of the public demanded that Thu Duc, Viet Nam 2008 be taken down, but the curators refused. Visitors scratched the glass covering the photograph and spat on it (Chang, OCR,

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1/13/2009). One of the co-curators told the people present that “We will not take it down,” that the work is “actually a critique of communism” (ibid.). Unconvinced by this interpretation of the work, hundreds of protesters carrying placards and both American and Heritage flags came daily to the exhibition over the following week, making speeches with the use of megaphones, chanting, and shouting profanities and derogatory epithets at the artists and curators of the show. The exhibition’s organizers, who were all women, were repeatedly referred to as “whores” by the demonstrators (Valverde, 2013: 107). Speaking of Brian Doan’s Thu Duc, Viet Nam 2008, Kim Vo of Los Angeles remarked, “That girl in the photo was wearing a T-shirt with what we here call the ‘bloody flag’ … We fled Vietnam because of that flag, because of that murderer Ho Chi Minh. We do not want to be bothered by those images again” (Chang, OCR, 1/16/2009). Another protester, Charles Nguyen of Santa Ana, California, asserted that the artists “want to [provide] propaganda for the cruel regime, so we want to stop them” (OCR, 1/17/2009). Having fled Vietnam some three decades earlier, Charles Nguyen claimed that the artists “want to stick a knife in my heart” (ibid.). Still another protester, Son Do of Westminster, California, complained that the Vietnamese Americans had left Vietnam to escape communism: “We don’t want to see communists, and certainly they’re here” (ibid.). Perhaps most poignant was Brian Doan’s own father’s public pleas for his son to remove the photograph. Brian Doan’s father had been an intelligence officer for the RVN and after the surrender had spent ten years in a communist re-education camp24 (Valverde, 2013: 107). Even Van Tran, a Vietnamese-American California State Assemblyman, wrote to VAALA insisting that they shut down the exhibit because of its insensitivity toward the Vietnamese-American community (ibid.). The organizers resisted this pressure as long as they could, but by January 16, the exhibit was forced to shut down by order of Santa Ana city officials, who maintained that the organizers lacked the appropriate license for such an event. Even still, on the following day, busloads of protesters continued to come to the site to voice their grievances. Ly Tong, a prominent anti-communist leader within the Vietnamese-American community, entered the closed exhibit and sprayed Toly’s Untitled canvas and Doan’s Thu Duc, Viet Nam 2008 with red paint. To the latter, he also “attached female underwear and a feminine napkin to show how ‘dirty’ the art was” (H.-N. Vu, 2009, cited in 24 This led to Brian Doan’s estrangement from his father, and even several years after this incident they were still not speaking.

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Valverde, 2013: 107). But in the midst of these throngs of people protesting the exhibit, there appeared a lone counter-protester, James Du. And it is here that we reintroduce Chau Huynh’s Marriage Quilt, the work she created by sewing together a combination of SRV and former RVN flags of various dimensions. James Du had purchased the Marriage Quilt from Chau Huynh and dubbed it the “unity flag,” and he brought this artwork with him and held it up on display as part of his counter-protest, which he maintained was an effort to foster dialogue between Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora (Valverde, 2013: 91). However, the quilt’s presence, with its apparent representation of the narrative of reconciliation, so incensed the protesters that “about a dozen of them beat him, causing the police in attendance to handcuff and remove him for his own protection” (ibid.: 90).

5. Hi-Tek Video In terms of the sheer number of Vietnamese Americans moved to take to the streets as part of a mnemonic battle, the Hi-Tek Video store incident remains the most significant. At some point near the end of 1998,25 video store owner Truong Van Tran, a 37-year-old who had arrived in the U.S. as a refugee from Vietnam in 1980, hung a portrait of Ho Chi Minh, along with an SRV flag, inside his video store on Bolsa Avenue in the heart of Little Saigon in Westminster, California. And there they hung for some time without incident. But this low profile was apparently not Truong Van Tran’s intent; he soon faxed letters to community leaders informing them of the items hanging in his store … and still there was no response (ibid.: 103). One prominent human rights advocate in the community explained what happened next: “But then one radio personality took it upon himself to make a huge deal about it. He really helped flame the situation, and pretty soon people got very angry about Tran’s act” (Ngo, 2008, cited in Valverde, 2013: 103). Over the next few days in early January, hundreds of Vietnamese-American community members began to come to the store, which is located in a strip mall; they carried American and Vietnam Heritage flags, signs, and banners and chanted “No to communism” from the parking lot and adjoining areas to protest vehemently against Truong Van Tran and his SRV flag and image of Ho Chi Minh. But Tran would not be persuaded: The Washington Post reported that Tran claimed he was “only trying to create 25 It is unclear when exactly the images were first hung in the store. The New York Times cites Tran as claiming his poster and flag had by February 11 been up for months (Terry, 2/11/1999).

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more open dialogue about improving relations with Vietnam” (Sanchez, 3/5/1999); in other words, he was invoking the narrative of reconciliation. By January 11, the eve of Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, the crowd in front of Hi Tek Video had grown to 500, even though Tran, who had been warned by the police to stay away, was not there (Reza and Carreon, LAT, 2/16/1999). Thuy Hong, an employee of a local Vietnamese radio station who was present at the protest, complained that “[t]he communist flag and picture of Ho represent war and dying overseas … When people see these symbols, they see blood” (ibid.). The protestors began to grow more menacing as the days went by, and at one point, as Tran left his store, someone struck him in the back of his head, sending Tran tumbling to the ground. He was taken to a hospital where he was treated and released (Terry, NYT, 2/11/1999). At this point, the landlord of Tran’s video store took him to court in order to force him to remove the images, claiming that the public nuisance he had incited was a violation of his lease, and on January 22, an Orange County Superior Court Judge ordered the flag and image of Ho Chi Minh taken down from the store pending a hearing. Through his attorney, Tran continued to claim that [he] was not trying to provoke but to communicate with his fellow immigrants, to help heal his and their wounds and hearts … “the more exposure Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese flag have, the greater the chance of dialogue between the competing factions and the better the chance of understanding.” (Terry, NYT, 2/11/1999)

Just a couple weeks later, on February 10, after the case was heard, a judge dissolved the order barring the display at Hi Tek Video. More than 200 Vietnamese-Americans lined the halls of the courthouse to hear the verdict. On his return to his store the next day, his car was besieged by shouting protesters. When Mr. Tran got out of his car, [he] was confronted by a man who thrust a burning cigarette within an inch of his nose. Then another protester slapped Mr. Tran in the face with a hand covered with spit. Mr. Tran fell to the pavement as his wife and two small children watched from the locked car. As Mr. Tran lay on the pavement, a third man in the crowd draped the yellow, red-striped flag of South Vietnam over Mr. Tran and shouted, “Down with Communism.” A woman in the crowd shouted, “I hope you die.” The police arrived about five minutes later and Mr. Tran, 37, was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Fountain Valley, complaining of chest pains. (Terry, NYT, 2/11/1999)

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About ten days later, in the early hours of the morning, the police attempted to escort Tran through the protesters and into his store. But when police arrived at the store front entrance, they discovered that it had been chained shut. While waiting for a locksmith, the crowd grew to some 300 protesters, and Tran was brought in by a police van. But the crowds grew so threatening that by 10:15AM, 12 protesters had been arrested, and the throngs began to surge against the police lines set up around the store. At that point the police insisted that Tran depart—for they could not guarantee his safety—and they escorted him from the premises (Terry, NYT, 2/21/1999). “At one point, the actions of the protesters were seen as menacing enough to require four hundred police officers called in from several Orange County cities, fully equipped with pepper spray, batons, and other riot gear” (Aguilar-San Juan, 2009: 79). Tran’s lawyer, Ron Talmo, was even physically assaulted by the crowds and had to be shielded by the press covering the event until he could reach safety. Even after Tran had abandoned his store and gone into hiding, the crowds at the strip mall continued to grow. In the end, the protests lasted for a total of 53 days. The rallies and candlelight vigils that lasted late into the night persisted, freedom songs continued to be sung, and effigies of Ho Chi Minh were hung from a second-story balcony: on at least two occasions, the number of protesters was reportedly close to 15,000 (Sanchez, Washington Post, 3/5/1999). In 2004, when cities like Westminster and Garden Grove began declaring themselves “communist free zones,” they explicitly pointed to the Hi-Tek Video incident’s toll on the community as part of the justification, including the episode’s social disruption, threat to public safety, and the financial burden on the municipalities. Westminster—a city that at the time had 86,000 residents—put the cost of all the extra police support at $750,000 (Aguilar-San Juan, 2009: 105). Although the Hi-Tek Video incident pitted the narratives within the community arena of memory against one another, it was an incident that sent shockwaves through the other arenas as well. In the academic arena, many scholars have engaged the episode from the position of the narrative of critique and its larger geopolitical perspective. Aguilar-San Juan, who was present during a portion of the demonstrations, sees the event as part of the larger academic narrative of the American-Vietnam War. She identifies the affair as an attempt by some of the demonstrators to seize the opportunity to communicate to the broader American community. She highlights one particular placard: a bulletin board decorated with what looked like headshots from an American yearbook from the 1960s or 1970s, above which read a sign to the effect of “Ho Chi Minh Killed 58,000 U.S.

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Lives” (2009: 80). She goes on to comment that this placard, like many others present at the demonstration, was meant to find common cause with the broader American society, but she then points out that “[a]mong those other Americans who called for an end to the carpet bombing of the north and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the south, this refugee perspective might not inspire solidarity” (ibid.). Viet Thanh Nguyen’s comment on the incident also has a critical bent: “Anyone in the Vietnamese-American community who speaks out in favor of reconciliation with Vietnam or criticizing the South Vietnamese regime has risked vicious protest and even violence” (cited in Aguilar-San Juan, 2009: 84).

6. Terror in Little Saigon Yet another extraordinary example of Vietnamese-American narratives in conflict played out over the decade between 1981 and 1990. During this period, a series of beatings, fire bombings, and executions were carried out on U.S. soil, and they were directly linked to the mnemonic battle between the narrative of ongoing violent struggle against the communists and those in the Vietnamese-American community who sought to oppose it. The group that claimed responsibility for most of these acts of violence called itself the Vietnamese Organization to Exterminate Communists and Restore the Nation 26 (VOECRN) and asserted that their goal was to eradicate “agents of the Vietnamese communists” and work toward “the overthrow of the barbarous and inhumane regime” in Vietnam (Bishop, NYT, 8/25/1987). The group first made itself known publicly on June 4, 1981, by claiming responsibility for the arson that destroyed a company engaged in transporting gifts from Vietnamese-American refugees back to Vietnam (Bishop, NYT, 8/25/1987). But just a few weeks later, the group engaged in another act of violence: the execution of Lam Trong Duong, a 27-year-old Vietnamese-American journalist and social worker on whom the group had pronounced “the death penalty” (Bishop, NYT, 8/25/1987) for being sympathetic to the Hanoi regime, opposing the American-Vietnamese War, and ultimately, for being pro-communist (Thompson, ProPublica, 11/3/2015). Lam had begun self-publishing his own newsletter in support of Socialist ideology about one year earlier, and his sister reported that he had been 26 Translations of the group’s name differ occasionally and include Vietnamese Party to Exterminate Communists and Restore the Nation and Vietnamese Party for the Annihilation of Communism and for the National Restoration.

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threatened repeatedly throughout this time. On July 21, 1981, as he walked out of his San Francisco apartment building, he was shot and killed, the single bullet tearing through his pulmonary artery, just above the heart (Thompson, ProPublica, 11/3/2015). Over the course of the ensuing decade, four more Vietnamese-American journalists would be executed along with a number of other community members, while several more would escape attempted executions. Although some, like Lam Trong Duong, were publishers of small newsletters with limited circulation, others, like 72-year-old Pham Van Tap, a Garden Grove, California magazine publisher and 48-year-old Nguyen Dam Thong, a Houston, Texas newspaper editor, had a much wider readership. In the case of Nguyen Dam Thong, who was shot to death outside his home in 1982, friends and family report that he had received numerous threats over the content of his articles: “Mr. Thong’s wife, Hoa, said that as late as three days before his death her husband received an anonymous call from someone threatening to kill him if he continued his newspaper” (NYT, 9/19/1982). In the case of Pham Van Tap, an arsonist set fire to his small office while he was asleep inside: “He was heard screaming before he succumbed to smoke inhalation” (Thompson, ProPublica, 11/3/2015). VOECRN also claimed to have shot the 72-year-old restauranteur Nguyen Van Luy, along with his wife, Pham Thi Luu, in front of their San Francisco home. Nguyen Van Luy survived the attack, but his wife succumbed to her wounds. The couple, who had willed their estate to the government of the SRV in order “to heal all wounds and rebuild the country” (Bishop, NYT, 8/25/1987), was targeted for execution due to their efforts at reconciliation with the SRV. In their communique claiming responsibility for the attempted execution, which was postmarked in Las Vegas, Nevada, VOECRN declared that “it had decided to ‘punish Nguyen Van Luy by bullets’ and accused him of collecting foreign currency from Vietnamese refugees and sending it to the Vietnamese Government” (Bishop, NYT, 8/25/1987). In 1986, Van Khan Tran was gunned down outside a shopping center in Westminster, California after speaking in favor of diplomatic relations with Vietnam. These killings were not restricted to California, showing the reach of VOECRN and the fervor with which it defended its narrative of collective memory. Nguyen Dam Phong, the editor of a semi-monthly VietnameseAmerican newspaper, was chased from his Houston, Texas home in his pajamas and gunned down, shot seven times with a .45 caliber handgun (Thompson, ProPublica, 11/3/2015). Next to his body, a note was left reading, “Vietnamese Party for the Annihilation of Communism and for the National Restoration” (Ayers, NYT, 9/25/1990). In November of 1989, Nhan Trong Do,

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a layout artist for the Vietnamese-language magazine, Tien Phong, was shot dead in his car while parked outside his home in Virginia (ibid.). Less than a year later, a 61-year-old columnist for the same magazine, Triet Le, along with his wife, Tuyet Thi Dangtran, was executed in similar fashion: parked in their car outside their Virginia home, the couple was struck by a barrage of bullets fired by what investigators determined were two assassins armed with automatic pistols (Thompson, ProPublica, 11/3/2015). Friends and neighbors of Triet Le reported that he had received numerous death threats in recent years and that he had taken the precaution of installing security lights and cameras at his home (Ayers, NYT, 9/25/1990). Triet Le—unlike the murdered restauranteur, Nguyen Van Luy—was staunchly anti-communist; he simply disagreed with the narrative of ongoing violent struggle against the communists. In addition to these murders, numerous arsons and beatings were committed from Montreal, Canada to Orange County, California, and death threats were issued to individuals, families, and businesses throughout the U.S. (Thompson, ProPublica, 11/3/2015). This violence had a marked effect on the Vietnamese community and the ongoing struggle over its collective memory and identity. It gave the proponents of the narrative of ongoing violent struggle against the communists tremendous leverage in suppressing narratives that ran counter to their own. The Orange County, California newspaper Viet Press had its advertisers pressured to pull their ads from the paper until it ceased publication (Thompson, ProPublica, 11/3/2015). In 1989, Doan Van Toai, a writer who had publicly challenged VOECRN’s narrative, was shot in the face near his home in Fresno, California; he survived the attempt on his life but “he got the message. After the shooting, Toai stopped writing and withdrew from the public eye” (Thompson, ProPublica, 11/3/2015). In 1990, when Manh Nguyen, the manager of a Vietnamese-American television news program in San Jose, California, attempted to stage a panel discussion on the current relationship between the U.S. and the SRV, he was unable to find anyone willing to speak publicly in favor of reconciliation, stating, “The obvious reason is that they fear for their safety” (Mydans, NYT, 10/7/1990). According to ProPublica’s investigative piece on this entire violent episode, the “FBI came to theorize that VOECRN…was simply a kind of cover name for the Front” (Thompson, ProPublica, 11/3/2015). Recall that the Front is the organization described earlier in the chapter as actively engaged in armed assault on communist forces throughout Southeast Asia. Katherine Tang-Wilcox, one of the former FBI agents who investigated these incidents, has asserted that the Front had formed a clandestine death squad as part of its domestic operations: “K-9 was established as the assassination arm

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of the Front” (ibid.). However, even decades later, “the FBI has arrested no one for the violence or terrorism, much less charged and convicted them. Again and again, local police departments opened investigations that ended with no resolution” (ibid.).

E. Vietnamese-American Cultural Trauma The Vietnamese myth of the birth of their nation should be revised. It’s a story all Vietnamese schoolchildren learn. In an ancient time, a dragon married a fairy and they gave birth to one hundred eggs. The eggs hatched and became the Vietnamese people. A new Vietnamese is being “hatched” abroad…and a new myth is needed. —Nam Nguyen, editor-in-chief of the Vietnamese-language newspaper Calitoday

Having spent the bulk of the present chapter examining the principal Vietnamese-American narratives of collective identity as well as the mnemonic battles that are ongoing within the group’s three main arenas of memory, we are finally prepared to answer one of our book’s central questions: Has the Vietnamese-American collectivity experienced cultural trauma? And to this we can answer definitively: Yes. Recall that in order to count as an episode of cultural trauma, three conditions must be met: a) an event must be understood by a social group as a shared catastrophic experience, b) the identity of the social group must both survive this catastrophe and c) be re-narrated in light of it. It is toward the establishment of these three criteria that we now turn. In the case of the Vietnamese Americans, we argue (in a slightly modified order, for clarity) that regarding criterion b, the collectivity does indeed see itself as the same entity now as it was prior to the traumatic event. In other words, although the nature of its character has changed as a result of the war and its aftermath, it is nevertheless still the same collectivity (much in the same way a traumatized individual is still the same person—however altered—after the traumatic episode). One of the most obvious indications of this fact is the ubiquity and centrality of the flag of the former Republic of Vietnam, which continues to be—in Durkheim’s sense—a totem of the social group. John Thai Dinh, the Vietnamese-American program director at Little Saigon TV, puts it this way: “[our] identity is symbolized by our flag—and we protect the flag at all costs” (Do, LAT, 4/25/2015). Reverence toward the flag serves as a shibboleth, a sign of inclusion within the social group, and this same sign has continued unaltered from before the traumatic

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event up through the present. We saw above how there have been more and more successful efforts on the part of Vietnamese Americans to have the Vietnam Heritage flag serve as the only officially recognized flag of the Vietnamese people by numerous municipalities in the U.S. And in 2017, an online petition to Unicode27 was started requesting that the flag of the former RVN be given its own emoji. On behalf of the Vietnamese-American community, P.P. Huynh states in the petition: “We strongly believe that we deserve this recognition” (2017); that is, to recognize the national flag of the former South Vietnam and its people is to recognize the contemporary Vietnamese-American collectivity—they are one and the same. In addition to reverence toward the Heritage flag, there are many other practices throughout the Vietnamese-American community that bolster the argument that they see themselves as comprising the same social group now as they were prior to the fall of Saigon. To recall just a few that have been explored above, there is the movement throughout many of the larger Vietnamese-American enclaves to designate the area they inhabit in the U.S. as “Little Saigon”; there is the frequent singing of “Call to the Citizens,” the national anthem of the former RVN, at Vietnamese-American cultural events; there is the wearing of the ao dai, the traditional dress of Vietnamese women, at Vietnamese-American beauty pageants; there is the marshaling of RVNMF veterans in uniform at patriotic gatherings; and of course, there are the large swaths of communication still conducted in the Vietnamese language, the perpetuation of the religious, culinary, and holiday traditions of their homeland, and the close connections maintained with family members who never left Vietnam. All of these lieux de mémoire are empirical evidence of the VietnameseAmerican belief in their collectivity’s continuity from before the fall of Saigon. But these lieux de mémoire complement what is perhaps the most telling indicator: the fact that Vietnamese Americans often express this identity through the use of the first-person plural when recalling the time before the culturally traumatic event. In his work on collective memory, Eviatar Zerubavel uses the expression mnemonic community, explaining that “[b]eing social presupposes the ability to experience things that happened to the groups to which we belong long before we even joined them as if they were part of our own personal past” (2004: 4). And this is precisely the link we find that connects the Vietnamese-American community with South 27 Unicode is the non-prof it consortium responsible for the standard character encoding for systems of writing across most of the world’s software; this includes emojis. As of 2022, the petition had recorded more than 17,000 signatures.

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Vietnam. Will Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American born in the United States after the fall of Saigon remarks that “historical circumstances have defined what it means to be a southerner [i.e., of South Vietnam]: we speak with a relaxed drawl and in a straightforward manner, we cook flavorful, vivacious, eclectic dishes, and we possess a progressive, open outlook that embraces global trends” (New Naratif, 4/30/2018; emphasis added). Although Will Nguyen was born and raised in the U.S., he still identifies as a “southerner.” Similarly, Tan Thanh, who was born in the U.S. to Vietnamese refugees and now hosts the podcast Second Wave, relates what she describes as the “watered-down” version of collective identity perpetuated within the Vietnamese-American community: “We, my family, and other South Vietnamese refugees were the good guys. And the North Vietnamese, the communists, they were the bad guys who ruined so many lives” (KUOW, 9/5/2017; emphasis added). Thanh identifies as one of the “good guys” during the combat against the Vietnamese communists and as a refugee from South Vietnam, even though she was born in the U.S. after the fall of Saigon. And Phuong Day Tran, who was born in a refugee camp after her parents fled the communist regime, muses regarding the fall of Saigon that “[i]t was this day that we had lost the war” (Ta, 2015: n.p.; emphasis added), marking another example of a Vietnamese American who was not yet born at the time and yet still identifies with those who fought against the communists prior to April 30, 1975. These are simply three random illustrations of the sentiment that can be heard over and over again within the community. They reveal that it is not merely those who personally fled Vietnam who identify with the pre-traumatized collectivity but also those who were not yet born at the time of the traumatic event; their collective memory “evokes a common past that they all seem to recall” (Zerubavel, 2004: 4). Next, regarding criterion a, we argue that the American-Vietnamese War—especially the fall of Saigon, the war’s climax that serves symbolically as the most salient condensation of the war—has been narrated as the foundational catastrophic event in Vietnamese-American collective memory. The war thus forms what can be thought of as a collective version of Freud’s primal scene, the inciting incident looked to by the social group as the source of its traumatized self-understanding. This point is substantiated in numerous ways, starting with the widespread agreement that on April 30, 1975, their nation died. Most explicitly, this idea is recognized in the annual commemoration of Black April, where Vietnamese-Americans mourn the former Republic of Vietnam in ways often redolent of funerary rituals. Attention to Black April is paid continually throughout the community, not merely on one day of the year during the formal commemoration. It is never

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far from consciousness and makes itself known in venues large and small. On the website of the Vietnam Armed Forces Model Aircraft of Minnesota club, we can read the following: “April 30th, 1975: The day South Vietnam is delivered to Evil due to betrayal and abandonment”; on the Union of North American Vietnamese Student Association’s website, we are informed that “April 30th, 1975 marked a dark stain in Vietnamese history. The mass exodus of Vietnamese people fleeing the country exceeded beyond millions and the countries they sought refuge in span across the globe” (2018); on the Project Advocacy Via Art website, where second-generation Vietnamese American Thuy Tran confesses “I’m still haunted by the loss I’ve inherited” (Ta, 2015) and Jackie Nguyen flashes her tattoo that reads simply “Saigon 4.30.75” (Ta, 2015); or in the statement made by Loan Huynh of El Monte, California, a former Vietnamese Army captain: “How can we leave the past behind? April 30 is always unforgettable. We think about it in the present” (Do, LAT, 4/25/2015). Terry Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American freshman at the University of Southern California, wrote the following for the university’s newspaper on the occasion of Black April in 2017: my identity, alongside the identities of thousands of other Vietnamese Americans of my generation, holds the history of so much bloodshed, suffering, pain and destruction … April is a sad month, a cruel one for the survivors of the war. But without it, I wouldn’t be here, as an American or even born at all. (Nguyen, Daily Trojan, 4/16/2017)

In these few lines, Nguyen manages to both identify herself and those of her generation (i.e., those Vietnamese Americans born in the U.S. decades after the fall of Saigon) with the collectivity that existed in South Vietnam prior to the fall of Saigon and establish the American-Vietnamese War as a catastrophic event that serves as the very basis for her existence (and by extension, the existence of the Vietnamese-American collectivity). While Black April is in one sense a single, unified memorial event—although commemorated in myriad ways across the length and breadth of the diaspora—the centrality of the war-as-catastrophic-event can also be seen in its generalized saturation of the culture. As we described above, the war—often symbolically represented through either the fall of Saigon or its direct aftermath, the Boat People experience—is present in vast amounts of the art and literature produced by Vietnamese Americans, is grappled with by Vietnamese-American academics, and is made concrete in the physical memorials of bronze and stone that are now being erected by Vietnamese-Americans throughout the U.S. It is also at the heart of

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many of the cultural and political struggles engaged in by the community; indeed, the war’s wound is so strongly felt that it continues to be at the heart of some of the occasional organized destruction of property, violence, and murder committed within the community. P.P. Huynh summarizes the war’s role as a permanent cultural trauma in the Vietnamese-American community by noting that “[a]lthough the war in Vietnam happened more than 40 years ago, it is still, for South Vietnamese refugees, a fresh wound that time cannot heal” (change.org!, 2017). Finally, regarding criterion c, we argue that the numerous narratives of collective identity that continue to circulate within the VietnameseAmerican community provide ample evidence that this social group is still in the process of re-narrating its collective identity in response to the war’s cultural trauma. Prior to the national dissolution, the people of the Republic of Vietnam saw themselves as part of a progressive nation rising from an ancient and venerable culture. In contrast to communist-led North Vietnam, with whom they shared a common language, history, and ethnic traditions, the people of South Vietnam believed that their society was preeminent in the region. Ian Pham, writing on the Freedom for Vietnam website, describes this earlier collective identity in the following terms: I’m proud of my South Vietnamese roots. And I am proud of all our people, both civilians and heroic soldiers who sacrificed for freedom, justice, and a better world for future generations. In South Vietnam, people were proud to be Vietnamese. They respected each other, protected each other, and stood by their word and their honor. When it came time to fight, the South Vietnamese people fought. When it came time to show compassion, the South Vietnamese people gave their time, their energy, and whatever they could to help their fellow humans. This courage, love, and humanity was what made South Vietnam what it was. These are the reasons why, after 46 years since its downfall, Vietnamese people across the world continue to come together and remember this great nation, its achievements, and its ideals. South Vietnam was a nation that stood for freedom, fairness, and justice. (2021)

However, with the fall of Saigon and the demise of the RVN, none of these qualities were understood to have survived. In the Vietnamese-American collective memory, there was no nation left to be proud of, and under communist rule there was no freedom of speech or human rights, no freedom of religion or independent press. What’s more, in the aftermath of national reunification and the establishment of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,

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the economy had collapsed and the universities had lost their intellectual allure. All of this, coupled with the fact that these southerners now lived across the ocean from their ancestral homeland—the land in which their forebears are buried, where their own umbilical cords are buried28—meant that the collectivity, if it were to persist as a collectivity, needed to re-narrate its self-understanding. And we can see this strong connection between the American-Vietnamese War and the new narratives of collective identity in the following: the fall of Saigon and the flight from the communist regime that occurred in its aftermath are central to each of these new narratives, elements weighted with tremendous moral and emotional gravity that of course were not present in the South Vietnamese collectivity prior to April 30, 1975. The attempt to make sense of the American-Vietnamese War and its place in the Vietnamese-American narrative of self-understanding is a major preoccupation throughout the arenas of collective memory and is ongoing. Andrew Lam highlights the disjunction at the core of the VietnameseAmerican collective identity when he writes that Ours is an epic filled with irony: traumatized by wars, bound by old ways of life where land and ancestors are worshipped, where babies’ umbilical cords are buried as a way to spiritually bind them to our ancient land, we nevertheless relocated to a state [i.e., California] created by fabulous fantasies, high-tech wizardry, and individual ambitions. (2010: 54)

Recriminations for their cultural trauma are still being leveled in all directions by various groups within the Vietnamese-American community, including toward their enemy the Vietnamese communists, their inconstant American ally, and the South Vietnamese leadership itself. Whether the war is even considered to have ended, whether the Vietnamese-Americans believe themselves the victors or the vanquished, and whether reconciliation with the communist regime currently in power in the SRV is even possible have yet to be determined because a single, dominant narrative of collective identity has yet to be established. But this much is clear: the Vietnamese-American collectivity has been indelibly shaped by the cultural trauma of the American-Vietnamese War. 28 Lan Cao describes the sacred tradition of burying a Vietnamese newborn’s placenta and umbilical cord—thereby mystically tying one to the land of one’s ancestors—in her novel, Monkey Bridge: “the sacred land where my mother’s placenta and umbilical cord had been buried” (1998: 248).

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Lam, Charles (2013) “The Government of Free Vietnam Is No Republic for Old Men.” OC Weekly (November 14). Le, C.N. (2009) “‘Better Dead Than Red’: Anti-Communist Politics Among Vietnamese-Americans” Pp. 189–209 in Anti-Communist Minorities in the U.S.: Political Activism of Ethnic Refugees, ed. Ieva Zake. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Le, Long (2011) “Exploring the Function of the Anti-communist Ideology and Identity in the Vietnamese American Diasporic Community.” Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement 6(1): 1–25. Le, Sonny (2013) “What Nelson Mandela Taught Me, A Vietnamese War Refugee, About Justice and Reconciliation.” Hyphen Magazine (December 16). Lê Thị Diễm Thúy (2003) The Gangster We Are All Looking For. New York: Knopf. ——— (2011) “Lê Thi Diem Thúy Describes Her Novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For” [film]. KPBS. Le, Tram (2009) “Curatorial Statement.” P. 7 in F.O.B. II: Art Speaks. Santa Ana: Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association. Li, Xiaobing (2010) Voices from the Vietnam War: Stories from American, Asian, and Russian Veterans. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Lieu, Nhi T. (2011) The American Dream in Vietnamese. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lyons, Jenna (2017) “San Jose City Council Bans Socialist Republic of Vietnam Flag.” SF Gate (January 25). Madigan, Todd (2021) “Epimilitary Culture: Vietnamese-American Literature and the Alternative to Paramilitary Culture.” Pp. 169-191 in Militarization and the Global Rise of Paramilitary Culture: Post-Heroic Reimaginings of the Warrior, eds. Brad West and Thomas Crosbie. Singapore: Springer. Marzorati, Guy (2017) “Oakland Assemblyman Drops Bill to Allow Communists in State Government.” KQED (May 18). McLaughlin, Ken (1993) “Vietnamese See Way To Reconciliation.” Chicago Tribune (May 13). Morrison, Joan, and Charlotte Fox Zabusky, eds. (1980). American Mosaic: The Immigrant Experience in the Words of Those Who Lived It. New York: Dutton. Mydans, Seth (1990) “The Nation; For Some Vietnamese in U.S., War Goes On.” The New York Times (October 7). ——— (2011) “Nguyen Can Ky, South Vietnam Leader, Dies at 80.” The New York Times (July 23). Nguyen, Bich Minh (2007) Stealing Buddha’s Dinner: A Memoir. New York: Viking. Nguyen, Mimi Thi (2012) The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages. Durham: Duke University Press. Nguyen, Terry (2017) “Born From Tragedy—Reflecting on Vietnam’s Black April.” Daily Trojan (April 16). Nguyen, Viet Thanh (2013) “Just Memory: War and the Ethics of Remembrance.” American Literary History Volume 25, Issue 1 (Spring 2013): 144–163. ——— (2013) “My Black April.” diaCritics. (April 4). ——— (2015a) The Sympathizer New York: Grove Press. ——— (2015b) “Our Vietnam War Never Ended.” The New York Times (April 24). ——— (2016) Nothing Ever Dies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ——— (2017) “Dust of Life, Dust of War.” Pp. 566-572 in The Vietnam War: An Intimate History eds. Ken Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Nguyen, Will (2018) “North/South” New Naratif (April 30). Nora, Pierre (1989) “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations Vol 0, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring 1989): 7–24. Orange County Register (2009) “Hundreds Protest Vietnamese Art Show.” (January 17).

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Pearson, Richard (2001) “Nguyen Van Thieu Dies.” Washington Post (October 1). Pelaud, Isabelle Thuy (2011) This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Pham, Andrew X. (1999) Catfish and Mandala: A Two-wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Pham, Ian (2013) “April 30, 1975: Commemoration Day for the Fall of Saigon.” Freedom for Vietnam. https://freedomforvietnam.wordpress.com/2013/04/ (April 30). ——— (2021) “April 30, 2021: Thoughts and Ramblings.” Freedom for Vietnam. https://freedomforvietnam.wordpress.com/tag/black-april-day/ (April 30). Phan, Aimee (2004) We Should Never Meet. New York: Picador. Phan, Peter C. (2005) Vietnamese-American Catholics. New York: Paulist Press. Phan, Hai-Dang Doan (2012) “A Rumor of Redress: Literature, the Vietnam, and the Politics of Reconciliation” [PhD dissertation]. University of Wisconsin, Madison. Provisional National Government of Vietnam (see Third Republic of Vietnam). Reza, H.G., and Crystal Carreon (1999) “Flag Protests Draws Hundreds to Little Saigon.” Los Angeles Times (February 16). Ricoeur, Paul (1990) Time and Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roosevelt, Margot (2015) “Death Threats, Protests and Lawsuits: Little Saigon Newspaper War is about Ideology, Not Just Circulation.” The Orange County Register (April 25). ——— (2016) “Little Saigon Newspaper Can Take Control of Competitor to Settle Libel Case, Judge Rules.” The Orange County Register (February 10). Rosenberg, Alyssa (2017) “‘The American War’: You’ve watched all 18 hours of ‘The Vietnam War.’ Here’s what Ken Burns wants you to remember.” Washington Post (September 29). Rosewood, Abigail Nguyễn (2022) “I Moved to America for a Better Life. Here’s Why I’m Leaving.” Time. (May 5). Safer, Morley (1990) Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam. New York: Random House. Sanchez, Rene (1999) “Days of Rage in Little Saigon.” Washington Post (March 5). Sanger, David E. (1995) “U.S.-Vietnam ties: War Is Yesterday, Hope Is Today.” The New York Times (August 6). Scala, Kristina (2016) “War Is Never Over for Those with PTSD.” The Intelligencer (June 26). Smelser, Neil (2004) “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma.” Pp. 31–59 in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, eds. Jeffrey Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ta, Kimberly (2015) “The Fall of Saigon: Stories of Black April” Project Advocacy Via Art. Takaki, Ronald (1989) Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. New York: Back Bay Books. Tan, Thanh (2017) “Viet kieu.” KUOW. (September 5). https://kuow.org/stories/viet-kieu/ Tan, Thanh. (2017) “What Do Vietnamese-Americans Think of ‘The Vietnam War’?” The New York Times (October 3). Terry, Don (1999a) “Passions of Vietnam War Are Revived in Little Saigon.” The New York Times (February 11). ——— (1999b) “Display of Ho Chi Minh Poster Spurs Protest and Arrests.” The New York Times (February 21). The Free Library (2004) S.v. “California city becomes 1st U.S. ‘no Communist zone’.” The Independent (2001) “Nguyen Van Thieu” [Obituary, October 2]. The New York Times (1982) “Threats Preceded an Editor’s Death.” (September 19). The Telegraph (2001) “Nguyen Van Thieu” [Obituary, October 1].

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Conclusion: War, Trauma, and Beyond Abstract The chapter summarizes the book’s central arguments, particularly the American-Vietnamese War as cultural trauma. Identifying and clarifying the arenas in which collective memory is constructed and thus the development of cultural trauma, we reiterate the claim that the war was cause for cultural trauma in the United States. As the fracturing of collective identity central to cultural trauma was not present in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, we argue that cultural trauma did not occur there. What is known as the American War was understood by a large portion of the population as a war of national liberation and a continuation of a longer struggle against foreign domination. The chapter ends with a discussion of the costs of the war and the possibility of reconciliation between the participants. Keywords: Cultural trauma, forgiveness, reconciliation

In an age when human sensibility is finely tuned to all the nuances of despair, it still seems important to say of those who die in war that they did not die in vain. And when we can’t say that, or think we can’t, we mix our mourning with anger. We search for guilty men. Michael Walzer, emphasis in the original

As discussed in the Introduction, cultural trauma occurs when the takenfor-granted foundations of a collective identity are fractured and are made the object of critical debate. Most commonly, there is some precipitating occurrence of great social and political disruption—a war or natural catastrophe—that acts as catalyst. This sets in motion a trauma drama, with collective efforts to locate the causes, to name those responsible, and to identify the necessary steps towards recovery and repair. The re-narration of collective identity is central to this process. The discourse around collective

Eyerman, Ron, Todd Madigan and Magnus Ring, Vietnam: A War, Not a Country. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463723084_CH06

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identity is intimately intertwined with collective memory. Such identity, or identification—be it with family, an institution or profession, ethnic group, or nation—is rooted in a reconstructed past as well as present and is as concerned with the future as the past. This selected and filtered past, lying somewhere between myth and history, takes form in a narrative, a shared story of who ‘we’ are and came to be, as well as being embodied in material objects such as memorials and museums and embedded in ritual practices like holiday celebrations and commemorations. Such narratives are also disseminated and reproduced through the socialization processes that make and remake collective identity. In order to analyze this discursive process, we have identified several social arenas in the making and reproduction of collective memory and thus collective identity: (1) the academy, where professional historians write and debate a nation’s or group’s coming-to-be; (2) the political arena, where politicians and policymakers ‘make history’ and approve the commemoration of designated significant events that help define and reproduce the collective; (3) the popular imagination or the artistic realm, where through various means and media the collective is represented; and finally, (4) the community, where individuals and groups—including generations—remember, recall, and transmit their experiences. Such transmission can occur orally and through various forms of representation such as works of art, music, and literature. While the term ‘community’ might suggest coherence, memory within this arena tends to be splintered, as individuals who might have shared what on the surface was similar, such as participating in a war, can have widely disparate recollections of its meaning and purpose. Depending on their rank and ideological perspective, American veterans might remember a very different Vietnam War. The same could be said for exiled Vietnamese and their Communist enemies, as the previous chapters demonstrated. In this book we studied the trauma generated by the American-Vietnamese War as it impacted three collectivities, the United States, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (formerly the Democratic Republic of Vietnam), and the exiled community of Vietnamese who fled to the United States and other parts of the world. We claim that the war was cause for cultural trauma in the United States, as this conflict became a central component in that period of protest and social change known as ‘the Sixties’. As it progressed, the war radically polarized the nation, contributing to a broad public debate not only about the aims and claims of the war but more fundamentally about what it means to be an American. This conflict, along with the exposure of the deceit that was perpetrated by those in authority in their attempts

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to justify and motivate support for the war, contributed to a loss of faith in foundational American institutions that still reverberates today. This fracturing of collective identity was not the case in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, where what is known as the American War is understood by a large portion of the population as a war of national liberation and a continuation of a longer struggle against foreign domination. The war was thus framed as an inclusive historical project, though it incorporated tensions of interpretation, of nation-building against outsiders. And while traumatic on many levels, the outcome of the war was the formation of a new collective identity rather than its fracturing. As we pointed out, however, the issue of the terrible costs this unification entailed—the millions dead and millions more displaced—continues to haunt the new nation. Included in this is the non-recognition of those who had aligned themselves with the South Vietnamese government and their American allies during the war. Those diasporic Vietnamese now spread across the globe could also make claims to community building, but of quite a different sort. Their collective trauma developed as cultural trauma after their war was lost, enhanced by exile and a sense of betrayal directed at their American allies. This trauma was intensified by the sudden—and for many unexpected—total collapse of the world they had inhabited. Those Vietnamese who for whatever reason f led the forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and found themselves in the United States understood their situation through the lens of betrayal and collapse. But this sense of betrayal was also directed against them (these leaders) by other members of the exiled community who viewed them as corrupt and cowardly traitors to the national cause. This war, which resulted in diasporic exile, was formative to a collective identity, for some to a nation, for others to an ethnicity. The thickness and cohesiveness of this collective identity is something that was contested throughout the final stages of the war, after the division imposed through the Geneva Accords of 1954 that divided the country at the 17th parallel. It remains problematic to this day, as the previous chapters have revealed. There is clearly individual and collective trauma related to the loss of family and homeland, no matter how tenuous the connection may be to the idea of a South Vietnamese nation. The experience and understanding of trauma were thus different for our three protagonists. For the victorious ‘North,’ it was part of a long and violent struggle for liberation from foreign domination, fertile ground for the establishment of a new collective identity rooted in old (Vietnamese) and new (communist) traditions. This process is still ongoing, as it has been expanded to include reconciliation with the United States and inclusion

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into the ‘Western’ obit. For ‘South’ Vietnamese, trauma was entwined with the loss of homeland alongside the violence of war and the necessity of forging a new identity on foreign soil. This process too is ongoing. Along with much else, it involves an intense generational confrontation, as those born in Vietnam struggle to maintain a sense of the ‘old country’ and its traditions, while their children look forward to establishing themselves in their new surroundings. This struggle for recognition is entwined with a struggle for acceptance. As the symbolic bearers of a lost cause, Vietnamese refugees were more unwelcome than returning American soldiers, who at least had homes to return to. Perhaps one could point here to another of the ironic tragedies of this war, namely the fact that American veterans became increasingly homeless as their Vietnamese counterparts found a home in the U.S. For Americans, the trauma of a lost war was intensified as it meshed with other dramatic social conflicts in an era in which American ideals, its exceptionalism, and the assumption that the entire world strove to emulate its values were profoundly challenged. Both cultural trauma and collective identity require articulation and carrier groups that bear the burden of their representation. We have identified such groups for each of our three protagonists. Those who actually fought the war—the various categories of veterans, from military to policy and administrative officials—are central in all three. They are among the most active in the spheres of memory we have characterized, such as political and popular culture. Many have objectified their biographical experiences in published memoirs, novels, and films. This is especially the case for the Americans, but popular culture has also become a sphere of articulation and influence for Vietnamese Americans, most recently of the 1.5 and second generations. The situation in Vietnam was different, where popular culture representations have been more tightly regulated. However, this has been changing since the 1980s with internal liberalization as well as the interaction with the exile community, including an emergent group of artists and intellectuals. A central aspect of the cultural trauma process is the collective attempt to locate the causes of suffering, to place blame, and to point to remedies. These too take a narrative form, constructed by individuals and collectively by carrier groups using different media and frames of reference to address diverse audiences in various arenas. We found significant differences in form and content across our three protagonists. In the United States, where organized protest and political opposition form an inherent part of what Americans mean by democracy, social movements provided a context and thus played a central role in constructing arguments against the war

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that countered official claims. Antiwar protesters participated in college sit-ins and were joined by their professors and other professionals, including religious leaders, in denouncing the strategies and tactics of the war. Through representative figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., there was interplay between the vibrant Civil Rights movement and this antiwar movement, bringing Vietnam to the attention of a wide range of Americans and exerting great pressure on political leaders and policymakers. Especially after the Tet Offensive of 1968, journalists used mass media to report on the negative sides of the war in a way that might not have been possible elsewhere. As we have shown, there was also widespread opposition to the war among artists, playwrights, authors, musicians, and other intellectuals, who made use of various media and popular culture generally to protest the war and to name and confront those they deemed responsible for it. Other American institutions, the courts and Congress for example, were also turned into vehicles to protest and challenge the actions of military and political leaders and policymakers. The situation was different in Vietnam, where the causes of pain and suffering were seemingly clearer and more indisputable: the foreign enemy, the colonialists, and their surrogates. Whether or not the American soldiers and their allies fell into the surrogate category was a matter of dispute, but they were clearly among the former. How the situation could be remedied was less clear. Without the long-established democratic traditions of the United States, many Vietnamese rallied around Ho Chi Minh and the organized opposition his leadership provided against foreign occupation, including the Chinese, the Japanese, and of course the French. When the Americans entered the picture, there was little difficulty in painting them with the same brush. This narrative was diffused through oral and visual means during the war and put into practice through field indoctrination by cadres working among the peasants. Vietnamese artists, poets, and songwriters were active agents in this process, as they were recruited into the armed struggle. The viewpoint of the ‘South’ Vietnamese was more ambiguous. Some viewed Ho as much a nationalist as a communist or supported other nationalist movements or groups and thus viewed the American ‘advisors’ with suspicion if not animosity. Others were more strongly in favor of the American presence, though with the idea that this was something less permanent and dominating than colonial occupation. Such views were formulated by urban elites, as expressed through mass media and reinforced through the military and political parties whose interplay and relative power and strength varied over the course of the conflict. In the end, there was little distinction between the military and political leadership. The views

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of the rural population—the great majority in all regions of Vietnam—are less clear, as they had little access to all forms of media and organization beyond their local communities. Since the unification of the country, which was formalized in 1976, the circumstances have been quite different. This is especially the case with the current liberalizing trends gaining ground and with the strategy of becoming a regional power more closely allied with the West. The current population, though still largely rural and poor, is greatly weighted toward youth, and there is a strong incentive to look forward rather than back. Literacy rates are exceptionally high: 94% for adults over 24 years of age, though lower among minorities and women.1 More than 80% of urban households own a television, and the several government-run channels are available even in remote areas. Newspapers of various shades of opinion are available, and the internet has also introduced a range of viewpoints and services to the country. Smartphones and other personal digital devices are in widespread use, making social media and instant communication with a network of others readily available. All of this has radically altered the ability of any regime to control the flow of information. In the form of memorials, museums, and souvenirs, the war remains a fact of everyday life in Vietnam. Yet in many ways, the Vietnamese seem to have put the American war behind them, especially since other, more regionally based wars have intervened. With the flow of tourists and the trickling return of diasporic Vietnamese, there is a vibrant urban and urbane popular culture emerging that is outside the direct control of the state. Even for political elites, America is no longer an enemy but a trading partner and potential ally against China, the traditional regional nemesis. The memory of the American War is f ixed as history in museums and memorials—important for an older generation but seemingly less and less so for the majority of the population. At least at the cognitive level, that trauma has largely passed into history as a set piece in the heroic national narrative. More substantially, though, the war lingers in the scars on the countryside and in the wounded minds and bodies of the generation that directly experienced it. For them, the sorrow of war is still very much alive, and if their own wounded memories are not enough, there are the ghosts that wander aimlessly over a still devastated landscape. Just as they have been historically, however, younger Vietnamese are more interested in the future than the past. As a general rule, Reiff (2016: 17) suggests that “the historical importance of an event in its own time and in the decades that 1

See http://www.unesco.org/uil/litbase/?menu=14&programme=57.

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follow offers no guarantee that it will be remembered in the next century…”. From our perspective, the ability to transfer trauma across generations is part of the key to understanding why the memory of some events last longer than others. How long and over how many generations the wounds of the American war last is still an open question. The situation of Vietnamese Americans is different again. They arrived on American shores in waves of unwanted refugees and were placed in camps on military bases where they were not permitted to leave without private sponsorship. After this, they were dispersed over an unfamiliar country. It was a humiliating experience piled on top of great hardship and loss. Many felt three times betrayed: first as an abandoned ally, second when they were misled by their leadership, and third as an unwanted guest. Out of this beginning, separated from extended family and homeland, they were expected to carve out a new identity and way of life. Their experience was not that of the typical American immigrant but of the displaced person. It was trauma that brought them to the United States and that, along with a lost homeland and shared culture, is what served to unify them, at least potentially. Reading the novels and memoirs written by first and second-generation Vietnamese Americans is a moving experience, as the previous chapters have revealed. These and other works of expressive, aesthetic representation provide a window into how they understand their situation and who is deemed responsible. One thing that stands out in these collective representations is the focus on exodus and the trauma of being torn from an ancestral homeland. The notion of a torn social fabric is central to the idea of cultural trauma. Extended family relations and a rootedness in the natural environment are characteristic of Vietnamese culture and society, no matter which side of the ideological divide one placed oneself. Being forced off the ancestral landscape, whether inside or outside the county, had a very powerful impact on the generation that experienced it firsthand. It should not be surprising, then, that a sense of great loss colors the recollection and representation of the war for those now in exile, rather than images of combat and the related violence of war itself. This is in great contrast to the images recounted and represented in American and North Vietnamese aesthetic representations. In the American imagination, Vietnam conjures images and sounds of hovering helicopters and infantry trekking over rice paddies and through tough jungle terrain in sweltering heat; Vietnam is a place of death, violent battle, and exhausted soldiers, of men at war. Similarly, for the victorious Vietnamese, for whom the terrain was more hospitable and the outcome glorious, their most potent images are those of liberation, freeing the

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countryside of foreign domination, and the resilience of the local population in this struggle. The designated places for remembering the American-Vietnamese War also vary in form and content across the three. We have spent some time discussing the struggle to erect the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. As we noted, its name carries a clear message; it is not a war that is commemorated but rather a place to remember those who died in service to their country. There is no national monument to this lost and now largely dishonored campaign, one that fits uneasily into the national myth. Amongst Americans, reconciliation is more a personal and private project; the emotions raised by the foreign and domestic conflict have diminished, a process fueled by the passage of time rather than a collective working-through. Those responsible for the war—the political leaders and policymakers—have made their own reckoning; some like Generals Westmoreland and Abrams have blamed the media and politicians for the loss. Others, like General Schwarzkopf, claimed it was never lost. Robert McNamara was one of the few to publicly acknowledge his “mistakes,” something Henry Kissinger has scoffed at. We will discuss this further in the following section. Despite calls from the U.S. Congress, the mass media, and the antiwar movement, there was never a thoroughgoing government investigation into the causes or consequences of the war in Vietnam. The trauma it caused was never worked through publicly, at least not in the official arenas. It was left to individuals and families to make their own peace. Most particularly in the United States, popular culture provided a means and space where private anguish stemming from the war could find public expression and a wider audience. Theater, film, literature, and photography have been particularly important, as discussed in the foregoing chapters. Wars are fought twice, once on the battlefield and once in popular culture. This is particularly the case in the U.S., where war movies have always been a popular genre, serving as much to recruit and indoctrinate as to entertain. We pointed to the powerful role played by heroic World War II films in shaping the attitudes of the generation who fought in Vietnam. Commercial fiction films and documentaries were also important in the healing process after the war—the most recent of which, the 18-hour-long documentary “The Vietnam War” by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, reopened a mass-media-fuelled discussion about the war. As we noted, an effort was made to include the voices of all sides in the conflict, something that was the product of time and distance, when healing and moving on was thought possible. The same can be said of literature, where novels by veterans such as Tim O’Brien, Tobias Wolff, and Larry Heinemann have struggled against

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those by Robin Moore and James Webb, who continued to believe in the righteousness of their mission. The same battle has been fought in the visual arts, as our discussion of the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum reveals. American popular culture has proved a powerful resource for Vietnamese Americans to have their views and experiences represented. This has taken time, on the one hand to have a critical number of Vietnamese Americans fluent in the ways and means of American culture to be in sufficiently powerful positions to make use of its media, and on the other hand for the American audience to be made ready to see and hear their voices. As we discussed, Vietnamese Americans have produced popular films, literature, graphic novels, music, and traditional artworks that give voice to their experience. They have also formed communities—in both the real and imagined sense—that have supported and nourished such representations. These communities have supported—and in some cases built—memorials and other commemorative sites to represent and recollect their war efforts. The 30th of April remains a day of commemoration and remembrance uniting this community while being largely ignored by the rest of the country. Being recognized, seen, and heard is a vital aspect of reconciliation and of the working-through of trauma. This process now appears well underway. The availability of a relatively autonomous, commercially driven popular culture is only in the emergent state in Vietnam. The prime sites of public memory remain largely under state control. This includes places to bury and mourn the war dead, most especially those who supported the losing side; it is also why we laid so much weight on museums and official memorial sites. Alternative voices are only now being heard; something is occurring as other forms of communication become more widely available and an increasing flow of cultural exchange with former enemies from the defeated South as well as the United States is ongoing. The ‘South’ Vietnamese are still given little space, as they are not officially recognized as a legitimate force in the conflict. Just as the government preferred to distinguish the American people from its leaders who were held responsible for the war, the government of Vietnam appears to make an implicit distinction between the leaders of the “puppet” forces that fought alongside the Americans and the general population of the warring regions. This was made visible in a horrific way during the battle for the city of Hue, when thousands of civilians deemed collaborators were executed and thrown into mass graves. These were the responsible “puppets” that had to be eliminated. The postwar policy called largely for “re-education” rather than execution (though there were many), and millions were sent to camps. Neither recognition nor remorse can be found for such acts in these museums and memorials, nor in the neglected

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cemeteries of the fallen South Vietnamese soldiers. Recognizing them would undermine the claim that the war in the south was a popular uprising against an illegitimate regime. The bearers of memory are here the families of the victims; memory is kept in the private sphere. This remains a civil war in the eyes of the victors, where their interpretation dominates remembrance.

Moving On: Responsibility and Remembering, Forgetting and Forgiving Embedded in the process we call cultural trauma is the attempt to repair damage done, to re-narrate the shattered foundations of collective identity. This process of restoration, which often involves reconciliation, is as much oriented to the future as it is to the past, where the past—in the form of selected recollection—is treated as a resource for present needs. There is always selectivity with regard to the past events that are recalled, involving a forgetting that lies somewhere between the natural and the strategically instrumental. A troubled past must be worked through in order that a collective may “move on” into the future. Part of this process involves the attribution of responsibility for the pain and suffering associated with the past, a process that makes it possible to face this future. Heroic sacrifice can be found on all sides in a conflict, but victors usually celebrate heroes, while losers—who may also find heroic sacrifice to celebrate in their lost cause—look at the same time for the blameworthy, for those that are deemed responsible for the collective suffering. In discussions of responsibility for the conduct of wars initiated by governments and regimes, one is careful to point to differences between democratic and authoritarian societies (Crawford, 2013: 433) and to a distinction between direct and indirect responsibility (May, 2012). Especially in the case of the United States, where civilian oversight with regard to military actions is mandated by the Constitution, the role and thus the responsibility of the public through their elected representatives is claimed to be considerably greater than in authoritarian regimes. The people of North Vietnam and to a lesser degree South Vietnam during the war and after had less possibility of influencing official policy. How great their responsibility and what it might entail is, however, debatable. Nonetheless, leaders on all sides made claims to popular support for their policies, as was discussed in this book. We can draw on the extreme example of the My Lai Massacre to illustrate the complexity in attributing responsibility. Lt. William Calley became the only soldier of any rank found guilty of a war crime on the American

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side of the war. Though he claimed to be following orders, thus shifting responsibility for his acts, no one up the chain of command were punished, though some were reprimanded (Eyerman, 2019). Those above and below him—those who authorized and supervised the retaliatory operation carried out in the months following the Tet Offensive and those who actually pulled the triggers (with the exception of Calley) which resulted in the deaths of more than 500 civilians, mostly women and children—were exonerated. They were deemed neither guilty nor responsible by a military tribunal. One can of course dispute this judgement, just as one can dispute the pardon Calley would later receive from President Nixon. Beyond the individuals, potentially responsible collectives would include institutions and groups within them, such as the soldiers under Calley’s command and the military decision-making hierarchy as a whole. Given the civilian oversight mandated in American military efforts, this could include the policymakers and politicians who authorized the war and the political community they represented. Following Crawford (2013), one can speak not only of direct and indirect responsibility but also of moral and political responsibility. As a member of a formal collective, in this case the American military, those who witnessed the events at My Lai, those on the ground during the operation, and those in the air above supervising it (there were three command helicopters circling overhead) could be deemed responsible whether or not they actually pulled the triggers or gave direct orders to do so. The military-led investigation considered this possibility but found it wanting. Another forum could have widened the investigation by taking into account the civilian political and policymakers responsible for oversight, going all the way up the chain to the president as Commander in Chief. The agency charged with such a task would most likely be the U.S. Congress. An even wider designation of responsibility could include the American public, most particularly those adults who voiced support for the war (and for Calley) and voted for the government that acted ‘in their name’. This issue of who was responsible for the atrocity at My Lai (and beyond that the entire war), was hotly debated but slowly disappeared as the American forces withdrew. After the capitulation of Saigon, any discussion got lost in the Watergate hearings and the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon, which, along with a gasoline crisis, consumed public attention. Watergate and the constitutional crisis it involved became a surrogate, one could say, as attention focused on the televised hearings that began nearly two years before Saigon fell. Since then, the issue of collective responsibility has been subsumed and transformed into the discussion of lessons learned, as we discussed above.

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The issue of collective responsibility appears more straightforward in Vietnam itself. Given the long-term violent struggle against foreign domination, the American war was a continuation that no one really wanted but could not avoid. While the political and military leadership in Hanoi could be said to be responsible for the strategy and tactics of this campaign, and for the conscription of rank and file recruits, the war was deemed a necessary evil for which foreign powers bore ultimate responsibility. As Vietnamese novelist Bao Ninh expressed it in the 2017 Burns and Novick documentary, “no one wanted to fight, but we had to.” He meant this necessity was determined more by national survival than military conscription, which of course, as in his case, was also present. The necessity to fight, in other words, was politically determined and culturally underpinned—as in the United States—but much more determined by the reality of geopolitics than its more ideologically driven American counterpart. From this perspective, responsibility for the war came from outside forces over which the Vietnamese generally had little control; their responsibility from top to bottom was to resist. Responsibility for the actual conduct of the war, the strategy, and tactics of the campaign lay in the hands of the Hanoi-based communist elites; since there was no formal means for others to challenge or fundamentally influence their policies, they bore full responsibility. The policy disputes present in leadership circles have been known to historians but are scarcely present in public discussion (see Nguyen, 2012 for a groundbreaking account of the internal tensions in the Hanoi wartime leadership). What is fascinating to observe, however, is that their role is downplayed in the public representations of the official story of the war, with the exception of the very top leadership—the father figure of Ho Chi Minh and to a lesser extent Giap and Le Duan. It is “the people” who are the most revered. The issue of responsibility for the South Vietnamese is interesting in another sense. Responsibility is bound up with choice and the possibility to influence: what choices were available to those who lived in the South and how could influence be asserted? In part, this was determined by where one lived and what social class one belonged to. Peasants in the rural areas had little choice and thus little responsibility for the war. The war came to them. One of the few accounts from the rural perspective available in English is that provided by Hayslip and Wurts (1993; see also Hai T. Nguyen, 2018). In describing her early life in a rural village in central Vietnam, Hayslip underscores the helplessness of the peasantry as they are overrun by forces from both North and South. There is little choice but to hedge one’s bets and play both sides in order to survive. One could hardly

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hold the rural peasantry responsible for the war. As in all war, the trauma of the common people goes largely unrecorded. To the extent one considers the war separately from the United States, responsibility for carrying out the war by the South falls largely on the urban elites, primarily in Saigon. Though they had more choices and power to influence—there were political parties, newspapers, and a lively public sphere in urban areas—there was also the feeling that the war was elsewhere. Especially after the assassination of Diem, the swift changes in regime, and the full American takeover of military responsibility, the possibility to influence and thus assume responsibility became smaller and smaller even for the elite. It was these failures that conditioned the betrayal felt by the Vietnamese-Americans we have discussed; from the perspective of those in exile, it was these elites, many of whom were now their neighbors, who bore in their estimation responsibility for their situation. Theirs is a victim narrative, where individuals and the collective are united in a sense of loss of control and choice regarding the forces that determined their fate. Part of the taking of responsibility, then, is to come to terms with the trauma of victimhood and reconstitute community and a new collective identity in the new situation. Coming to terms with the past is part of dealing with the present and pointing to a new future. Within such traumatic memory, the option to forgive and forget is not as readily available. Forgetting is not even an option, especially for the generation that experienced the trauma firsthand. As we discussed, April 30, 1975 was the fateful day for the South Vietnamese, most especially those who had openly supported the Americans. With the latter tired of the war and their attention focused elsewhere, their Vietnamese allies were left to their fate, with only those primarily non-combat American forces still left in the country taking any direct responsibility for them. The final exit from Vietnam was not only hasty and chaotic; it was shameful and intensely traumatic for its suddenness. A sense of betrayal and disbelief would follow the Vietnamese into exile, coloring any attempt at narrating a new beginning, as we have discussed in detail. Betrayals are not easily fixed or forgotten. These memories would shape collective understanding and be formative of founding narratives in the Vietnamese diaspora. This is reflected in the symbolic phrases “exodus” and “boat people” used to describe their experience, something that reveals how collective suffering can be a powerful source of identification in the establishment of group identity (Assmann, 2016: 48). Collective identity is here forged from a sense of victimhood, of being the victim of external forces, which means that

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remembering its sources—rather than forgetting and forgiving—will be important in its construction and maintenance. Such is the “memory of the defeated” in Assmann’s meaning; yet this is one that at the same time can accommodate a heroic story of escape that is at once formative and subversive. It is formative in that it can provide a foundation for a positive diasporic identity, where one is both victim and yet triumphant at the same time. Resilience in the face of defeat can provide grounds for a new beginning. This narrative can be subversive in that it counters the heroic narrative of national unification of the victorious, where those defeated and forced out become stronger in the process, while they may also find solace and vindication in the promise of a triumphant return. There is little place for forgiving or forgetting in this narrative, at least as formulated by the first generation, those most directly affected. On the contrary, remembering how one came to be and who is responsible for that condition became the cornerstone of collective identification for those diasporic communities spread around the United States. This coming-to-be had to be made visible and repeatedly performed in public ceremony, such as the annual Black April commemoration. The tension between memory, forgetting, and forgiving is at the core of social repair, the process of moving on and working through to a renewed sense of normalcy. One can speak about forgetting and forgiving on an individual and collective level. Individuals can attempt to forget terrible incidents in order to move on to a normal life, as can collectivities such as nations. In the Freudian tradition, trauma cannot be forgotten, only repressed or confronted. Those influenced by this viewpoint argue that traumatic incidents leave lifelong memory traces with grave behavioral consequences if not acknowledged and worked through. This may also involve forgiving, though Freud laid little stress on forgiveness. From this perspective, forgetting is not an option but is rather a symptom, where remembering is essential to restored well-being. One could say that those in the United States who call on a “Vietnam syndrome”—following Ronald Reagan—fall into this category, where responses are symptomatic of repressed emotions. The phrase itself points to a collective attempt at forgetting, a form of social amnesia or to more conscious attempts to erase a past—a military defeat or failure—from public discussion and collective memory. Another example is the concerted attempts in the former Soviet Union to eliminate important individuals from the public record by doctoring photographs or by claiming that particular events never happened or happened in another way, such as the mass murder of the Polish intelligentsia in the early years of World War II. This example actually moves between forgetting and remembering, as the

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event known as the Katyn Massacre, if it is recalled at all in Russian history books, is blamed on the Germans rather than the Russians who actually carried out this mass murder (Bartmanski and Eyerman, 2011). Attempts such as this to wipe out memory face the problem that there will always be those who will not want to forget or who remember differently. In the case of Katyn, the memory of those murdered was carried by the families of the victims who were finally able to gain a public voice. In the case of America’s Vietnam War, those who fought for and against the war—the so-called Vietnam Generation—remain the most significant carrier group in the struggle against forgetting. For this generation, it is a struggle of how the war will be remembered. Recent additions, and in this sense a new carrier group are those Vietnamese-Americans who have the means of having their voice registered in the public debate, a group that now includes a second and even third generation beyond those who experienced the trauma of war and exile firsthand. For this group, the issue of forgiveness and reconciliation appears more salient. Freudian claims have also been made at the social and political level, where it is said that traumatic events such as the violence related to war will give rise to resentment and the desire for revenge if not sufficiently worked through, leading to repeated cycles of violence and repeated suffering (Govier, 2002). Adorno (1986), for example, argues that acknowledgement and the identification of responsible individuals is not in itself sufficient to rid a nation of such potential. Giesen (2004) makes a similar argument, where the identification of a specific group of “responsible” authorities can be an attempt to shift blame through scapegoating, thus alleviating the wider population of responsibility. The issue of who bears responsibility for the horrors of mass killing during World War II is one that remains unresolved. Outside the Freudian tradition, it is sometimes suggested that forgetting might be an option in the politics of reconciliation (Judt, 2006). By this is meant to forget in order to move on, because some things might never be forgiven. Such pragmatic forgetting should be distinguished from silencing, which could also be considered a conscious act of forgetting but with another motivation entirely. It is sometimes difficult to uncover the difference, however. Is the official non-recognition of the South Vietnamese war dead a well-intentioned attempt to move on or a silencing? If political authorities chose to acknowledge the loss and pain on all sides of a conflict, then apology, amnesty, and reparation would become important tools in the attempt to move forward after a conflict. This is so because once such recognition is granted, one faces the issue of punishing those responsible for the suffering caused. Here the question of forgiving once again becomes

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important. Forgiving in its broadest sense means to cease to hold strong emotions and the desire to mete out revenge or retribution. Grounding his discussion in Judean-Christian religious tradition, Derrida (2001) distinguishes conditional from unconditional forgiveness, where the former involves reciprocity while the latter can be one-sided. In his accounting, unconditional forgiveness can only be offered to a perpetrator by a victim or those close to her such as a family member. This may be unconditional in the sense that nothing is asked or expected in return, it is more or less a self-directed act, where the aim is to relieve the victim of strong emotional attachment so that she is no longer the victim. Conditional forgiveness, on the other hand, can involve third parties, an institution, or the State and its representatives. Related practices like “amnesty,” “pardon,” and “clemency” are connected to conditional forgiveness, being political and juridical notions with the practical intent of repairing social fracture. From this perspective, unconditional forgiveness lies outside the political process because it is characterized by pragmatic concerns. The view that groups as well as individuals can forgive is presented by Griswold (2007), who at the same time rejects Derrida’s distinction between conditional and unconditional forgiveness. For Griswold, all forms of forgiveness—religious and secular—are conditional in the sense that they necessarily involve recognition by all sides. Such recognition, he argues, does not require accepting the wrongdoing but does involve acknowledging the pain and suffering of others. Political apology is a form of forgiveness from this point of view. One of the central points of Griswold’s argument is that political apology is distinct from related concepts like amnesty, pardon, and clemency precisely because it references forgiveness (ibid.: 136). As opposed to personal apology and by implication unconditional forgiveness, political apology necessarily involves a composite of individuals and viewpoints, such as are represented in any political community. When political representatives apologize, they speak for many to many. In most cases, these representatives are not among the injured or aggrieved. This makes political apology symbolic in a way that is different from personal apology because it contains an assessment of how others, both inside and outside the community, will react. Like personal apology, political apology is a communicative act that involves recognition of another as a human subject, someone just like oneself who has suffered as a consequence of another’s actions. Both types of apologies are rooted in memory and reference to the past; the difference between them is that political apology is both representative and pragmatic, while personal apology need be neither.

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It is useful to reflect on these matters with regard to our protagonists, not only because such notions impact the memory of the war but perhaps more importantly to see how that selected and mediated memory influences current behavior. The memory of the American-Vietnamese War was clearly important when American presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama visited the country. It was present a little while later when, on a visit to Laos, Obama acknowledged “the suffering and sacrif ices on all sides of that conflict.” Although the American president did not apologize, he did recognize in a public way the losses suffered by the people of Indochina as a result of American bombing. Obama proposed millions of dollars to pay for the unexploded bombs in Laos that remain potent and dangerous memorials to the war. This was all done, The New York Times noted, “in a spirit of reconciliation” (NYT September 7, 2016: A10). It was also done in the name of the principle that Hannah Arendt (2003: 149) articulated: “Every government assumes responsibility for the deeds and misdeeds of its predecessors and every nation for the deeds and misdeeds of the past.” This example can be used to illustrate core issues in post-conflict reconciliation such as who and what should be addressed with regard to memory, forgiveness, and forgetting. Should American leaders responsible for the initiation and conduct of the American-Vietnamese War be held publicly accountable not only for its failure but more broadly for the misconstrued policies and deception in what many consider an immoral and possibly illegal war? If so, in what arena should such a process occur? During and after the war, there were calls for such proceedings, primarily from antiwar activists but also from members of Congress as we discussed above. Some responsible individuals have taken it upon themselves to make steps towards an apology, Robert McNamara being the prime example. Others like Henry Kissinger have dismissed such attempts and scoffed at those who expressed regret and remorse. Griswold (2007: 163) for his part cites McNamara’s as an example of a “failed apology” because while admitting culpability for acknowledged wrongdoing, the former Secretary of Defense’s “mea culpa is a masterpiece of equivocation.” While admitting “mistakes,” McNamara suggested these policies were mistaken primarily because they did not work and America lost the war rather than any unnecessary death and destruction they caused. His chosen audience was clearly his fellow Americans and not the Vietnamese who suffered terribly from these mistaken policies. Beyond the American public, then, should the South Vietnamese allies be addressed and redressed for the betrayal and lying that underpinned “Vietnamization,” and if so, how and in what arena? Who should the North

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Vietnamese address, the southerners who were massacred and sent to re-education camps under horrible conditions? There are identifiable steps towards political forgiveness. The first is acknowledgement of unjust deeds; in the process, one recognizes the humanity of the other party. This means recognizing “the enemy” as a complex composite of human beings, a collective that has not only strategic interests different from one’s own but also a range of motivations and emotions that are more or less universal. The dehumanization of an opponent is common practice in violent conflict. Americans routinely described the Vietnamese as “gooks” and “slants.” This was couched in somewhat more sophisticated language by General Westmoreland, who claimed that the Vietnamese had a different view of life and death than Americans (“Hearts and Minds” documentary), by which he implied they lived within a different moral order. Such prescriptions not only make killing easier, they also made it difficult to accept the Vietnamese as allies and then as refugees after the war. There is now a vast literature written by Americans going to Vietnam for the first time and returning veterans who are discovering that their former enemy as simply “people” (for example, Lamb, 2002; Heinemann, 2006), meaning that they share a moral order, which included that of soldiering but had a much broader common basis. A new slogan states that “Vietnam is a country, not a war.” This is meant to help redefine the situation in more positive terms. Along with the tourist industry (Laderman, 2009) that has emerged to promote them, such activities can be understood as part of the collective healing process that underpinned the visit and the gestures of President Obama. A further step in the process of reconciliation would be full acknowledgement of the atrocities committed on all sides, the terrible impact of strategies of massive displacement, the number of civilian causalities, and the strategic destruction of the natural environment (Nguyen, 2016). The lies and deception perpetrated during the war, which were documented early on in the Pentagon Papers (for a summary, see Herring, 1993), could also be officially acknowledged. Finally, formal apologies by political representatives to the American and Vietnamese governments could be expressed. If this is unlikely, it is because political apology seems to imply acknowledging wrongdoing. There remain some in the United of States who feel that while some of the tactics employed in Vietnam might have been misguided and even wrong, the long-term strategy of containing communism was not only correct but also successful. This is a position articulated already in the 1970s by Guenther Lewy, as mentioned earlier, in response to the question of American guilt. In 1993, former National Security Adviser Walter Rostow stated, “If you assume that the purpose was to keep Southeast Asia

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independent, then it can be argued that we accomplished our objective” (quoted in Duong, 2008: 221). Believing this would mean there would be no need to feel guilty or to seek forgiveness. Still, even accepting this one could express regret concerning the terrible costs of the war and mourn those who suffered on all sides. This, we believe, was Obama’s position when he went to Vietnam as a representative of the United States, that is, as a spokesperson for the American people including those who do not think the war wrong. Exemplified by the very fact of being in Vietnam, his visit revealed that the goals of the war could be said to have been achieved, more than 50 years on. One could then mourn for the lives lost in what for some Americans was a misadventure and for others a necessary evil. However, as Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016) points out, this would be to accept the underlying strategic interests of the United States and the current government of Vietnam. As we noted earlier, the arena of popular culture plays an important role in American society not only with regard to memory and forgetting but also collective catharsis and healing. Fiction and other forms of artistic expression, such as films, provided a means of expressing trauma to veterans while at the same time offering the general public an understanding of the war, along with vicarious experience. For both the individuals and the collectives that experienced them secondhand, this could have a healing, cathartic affect. As the years have passed and the distance to the events increased, other voices have been added, such as those of the Vietnamese. The televised documentary of the war produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (2017) is an example of this. Here, the American viewing public is offered what is intended to be an inclusive account of the war, one that includes voices and viewpoints of the three main protagonists, aimed at fostering national discussion and international healing. Following what we have described as the general academic consensus, the war is presented through the use of film clips and personal recollection as a tragic mistake, the result of for the most part good intentions made on the basis of bad—that is, blind Cold War—premises. American presidents, policymakers, and military leaders are shown to be misguided and mistaken in their actions, while foot soldiers are the victims (some more willingly so than others) of these policies and that ideological apparatus—family–church–school–mass media—that is part of American culture that filled their heads with idealist notions of American exceptionalism and the evils of communism. No apologies are made, no forgiveness is asked or given; instead, what is suggested in this documentary is that the country is moving on together after tragedy and trauma on all sides. The fact that this documentary was shown on the national public broadcasting network (PBS) reminds us of a major development in television

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broadcasting since the end of the Vietnam War. The advent and popularity of cable television has altered fundamentally and probably irrevocably television broadcasting in the United States. Originally conceived to bring television broadcasting to rural regions of the country, cable television expanded greatly in the 1970s when it spread rapidly in larger metropolitan areas. The deregulation of the industry in the early 1970s encouraged the development of original programming, and a whole new industry emerged along with the possibility of local programming and ideologically based news. It is hard to imagine a documentary like “The Vietnam War” without cable television, as the traditional national networks that continue to exist are too locked into short-term programming and commercial interests that would most likely have hindered its reconciliatory tone and multi-voiced message. What does it mean to speak of “mistakes,” even “tragic” mistakes? As noted in previous chapters, a consensus has evolved in American discussions both among professional historians and policymakers that the AmericanVietnamese War was a mistake. What does one do with a “mistake” after one has admitted it? For the most part, this has been interpreted in a practical and pragmatic sense, something one should learn from and avoid in the future. To call a mistake tragic is to imply that there were costs involved, people died unnecessarily, making it all the more important that one learns from the mistaken action. This is all to the good. The effect, however, precludes a moral dimension—any sense of right or wrong—from the discussion and deflects any sense of guilt. It is similar to the position made after My Lai by Guenter Lewy, outlined in a previous chapter, and to treating the loss of the war as a “failure,” unless one is willing to speak of a moral failure or mistake. One does not have to apologize for mistakes or feel guilty about them, though etiquette might so suggest; one simply has to learn from them and ‘correct’ them. No need, then, for American leaders to apologize for all the ‘mistaken’ death and destruction wrought on the Vietnamese people, or for those Americans who died because of mistaken policy or failed leadership. The notion of forgiveness and apology appears more possible on the individual level. This appears to be the case when American veterans return to Vietnam and either by chance or design meet with those who had been their enemies. We have numerous accounts of such encounters between Americans and those who supported the revolution, though not many accounts of encounters between Southern and Northern veterans.2 2 However, these encounters have been inevitable as even within a family, individuals fought for and were victims of the atrocities committed by either side. “There are many wars

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For the victorious North, a political apology would require casting aside their facile description of southerners as mere “puppets” of the colonialists, be they French or Americans, and thus giving their opposition social and political legitimacy. This might include recognizing the southern war dead in memorials, museums, and official burying places. Acknowledgement of the atrocities committed by their side, in Hue for example, as well as the cruelties inflicted in the “re-education” camps could also be part of real reconciliation. Of course, the issue of why the political elites would apologize and what their reasons and motivations might be is a central issue. Nobles (2008: 32) writes, “Apologies are most achievable when both political elites and aggrieved groups desire them, but the sanction of the political elite is absolutely essential to their obtainment.” This is true in both autocratic and democratic societies, but there are fewer means to influence elites in the former, whereas in democratic regimes, minorities can form voting blocs and assert pressure from below. It is here that international actors, most directly the diasporic communities, have an important role to play. An apology, however, cannot be merely a symbolic gesture; while an apology does offer recognition of wrongdoing, it should imply and be followed by actual policy changes with reference to the aggrieved. Western visitors to Vietnam have been struck by the apparent lack of anger and resentment among the Vietnamese people they encounter, as if they have forgotten or forgiven the horrors of war they have been exposed to. Whether forgetting or forgiving, the issue is complex, not least because the war was as much a matter of Vietnamese killing Vietnamese as a struggle for national independence and political representation. So who should forgive whom? Surely not all those involved in the Vietnam conflict are able to do so; it may not even be the case that one could expect them to forgive and forget. Especially considering the differing religious traditions, the practice of forgiveness might take a different form in what is a majority Buddhist society. As Rieff (2016: 7) reminds us in his eloquent book on the virtues of forgetting, “Buddhism, whether it is a religion or not in the conventional sense, is almost certainly the only philosophical system that teaches its adherents that clinging to the past, like clinging to the self, is a forlorn illusion.” In short, the official narratives of today’s Vietnam are as unforgiving as they are forgiving. This is not the forgiveness that Derrida calls unconditional; intertwined in our blood,” Mr Phac said. “We were Communists but we were not Communists. We were puppets but we were not puppets” (quoted in Hai Nguyen, 2018).

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rather it is connected to a claim of moral superiority, the righteous victors in a just war against imperialism have nothing to forgive. At the same time, Vietnamese society has clearly moved on and in that sense forgotten the atrocities committed by both sides in the conflict even if the memories still haunt the individuals that suffered during and after the war. The war is now something one does not talk (too) much about; it has become history and, in that sense, forgotten—at least for the younger generations and as long as the interests of the leadership align with the West. Of course, this may change as new disclosures—such as the counter-memories we discussed in a previous chapter—come to light. The diasporic Vietnamese may not even be in a position to forgive (who should they forgive?) or be forgiven (by whom?). How would they act collectively to forgive the Vietnamese government that made remaining in their beloved homeland unbearable, that sought to “re-educate” them with the aim of forgetting who they had been? Who amongst such a disparate group could claim to speak in their name? Similarly, how could they act collectively to forgive the Americans who abandoned them? All those who entered the mainstream of American society after spending a significant time in refugee camps were welcomed by the American families that sponsored them. One can imagine dialogues of “forgiveness” within those private households, but beyond that in the wider public realm? Despite President Ford’s admonitions, no real public discussion, let alone recognition of their suffering and loss, has occurred. And if “they” could act collectively to “forgive,” would this imply forgetting as well? A possible consequence would be acknowledging that there was now no way back and that their only possible future lay in the United States, as “Americans” cut off from their homeland and its culture. From the perspective of today’s Vietnam, the relationship to this group is equally difficult. Should the suffering of the “traitors” be acknowledged, or should they (continue to) be forgotten? To such questions there are no clear-cut answers and few institutional mechanisms that have been mobilized to find out. As a consequence, cultural trauma persists within all the three groups—albeit in different forms—as the deep wounds cannot heal without thoroughgoing public accounting beyond that of individuals and families, and even with that might still remain as scars in the collective memory. If and when it occurs, such a process of public recognition and accountability will be difficult and painful. For the exiled Vietnamese, forgiving and forgetting would be the same as giving up one’s identity and heritage. For the Americans, it seems impossible to be able to address an unconditional “forgive us” to all relevant groups affected by the conflict. For contemporary Vietnamese society, forgetting is not possible

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without dramatic changes in collective identity and culture (no longer a simple heroic narrative of national unification); an official statement with the message “we forgive and forget” would be very difficult to formulate. At the same time, the question of forgiveness lingers dramatically behind contemporary attempts to remember this conflict, relating as they do to forgetting as much as to the question of how to remember. How the different collectives eventually resolve this balance in relation to their respective cultural traumas in terms of collective history and memory seems still to be an open question. Perhaps all one can hope for is what Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016) refers to as just memory, a form of memory and memorialization that acknowledges the humanity—including the mistakes—on all sides in a tragic war. The general lesson of this analysis is that collective memory is a living force in the life of individuals and the societies in which they are embedded. Collective memory shapes the way individuals and groups understand themselves, affecting their self-understanding and why they feel and act as they do. This is especially the case with regard to those who have experienced firsthand traumatic events like war, where an entire generation may be shaped by the experience. The Vietnam conflict was formative to such generational consciousness, which in part explains why it remains alive and contested. But this war had a wider impact than just a generation, at least in the United States where the war is still a point of emotional contestation. This is especially true for those Vietnamese who fled their former country and now live there. The memory of the Vietnam conflict significantly shaped their thoughts and actions beyond those who experienced it directly. How long this will remain the case is an open question, one contingent upon the forces of assimilation and the relations between Vietnam and the United States. The memory of Vietnam remains a forceful presence in several major American institutions, most prominently those related to military and foreign policy affairs. The desire to “put Vietnam behind us,” to relegate it to history as a “tragic event,” and to “move on” is strongly felt but has not yet been satisfied. Vietnam is a war Americans would like to forget but cannot.

Exit Strategies In the American post-Vietnam discussion, especially with reference to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is much talk of exit strategies and the lack thereof. For those involved in policy discussions, one of the lessons of these wars is the need for a coherent plan of withdrawal at the end of

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a conflict, with the idea that the nation should not enter into a conflict without planning for its end. We suggest that such a policy should apply to all wars the nation engages in—win or lose—and that the exit strategy include formal public discussion of the conduct in and of war, including the cost to those who fight in the nation’s name. This is one of the lessons we would like to take away from our discussion of the living memory of the American-Vietnamese War. We believe this to be part of what taking collective responsibility means, a full public accounting as part of a process of closure after a violent conflict in which the nation was mobilized. As the military historian and Vietnam veteran Andrew Bacevich (2013) suggests, such accounting should include the political and moral costs of war, alongside the routine economic cost/benefit analysis that accompanies war-related expenditure in the United States. To the strategic lessons of war, one should add the political and moral lessons learned. One political lesson, as suggested for example in the commentaries contained in the Burns and Novick documentary and the media-based discussion in its wake, is that the mistrust in American institutions that the war engendered has had both negative and positive consequences. The negative is a long-lasting and deeply felt cynicism about the behavior of political representatives and the political process itself. This is something that the presidency of Donald Trump has built around and highlighted, summarized in the slogan “Drain the swamp” of the bureaucracy in Washington. On the positive side, there is something articulated in the Burns documentary by the former General Merrill McPeak, who says “Look, the Vietnam War basically defined who we are now. I think the Vietnam War made us stronger, not weaker” (Episode 8 of Burns and Novick, 2017). He is referring to what can be called a healthy skepticism with regard to government representatives and policymakers, not a cynical mistrust but a questioning and critical skepticism. This is a form of skepticism that would accept that opposition to policy, even to a war, is as patriotic and “American” as support. In addition to being a public act, war is a moral breach of fundamental social values. In wars, people kill and die. The killing of another human being, even if she is an “enemy,” requires suppressing and transgressing moral values that are embedded in the very notion of society. Those who kill others, even in good cause, do so by denying what they have learned to be proper behavior, though some religious leaders both during and after the war in Vietnam found religious principles to encourage killing, something that became a prominent aspect in the encouraging and justificatory ideological message early on. In the religious institutions at home and on the fields of battle, chaplains ministered their message of support and solace. A thorough

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public accounting of the costs to individuals and to a nation should be as much a part of exiting as engaging. Including this as an essential part of the closure process is part of what it means for a nation to be responsible to its citizens, to those who kill in the nation’s name, and to those who send them to do so. We make this proposal with clear connection to the social repair we identified as inherent in the cultural trauma process. The purpose of such a public inquiry is not juridical or even pragmatic (in the sense of realpolitik) but rather therapeutic. The goal is not the restoration of a peaceful relationship between enemies or the punishment for war crimes; it is rather the reintegration of a fractured collectivity, a process of social learning as much as reconciliation. A central part of this is the reintegration of those military forces into the society that put them in harm’s way. One of the main causes of the PTSD associated with modern warfare is the alienation between professional soldiers and citizens. Of course, one could suppose that a society that has been made whole through a therapeutic process is also one more likely to consider issues of guilt, responsibility, and reparations than one that remains fractured, traumatized, and defensive. Karl Marlantes, another Vietnam veteran/author and a prominent figure in the Burns and Novick documentary, writes movingly about his homecoming in the midst of that ongoing war, about being spat upon and heckled whenever he appeared in uniform. “There is a correct way to welcome your warriors back,” he writes, “returning veterans don’t need ticker-tape parades or yellow ribbons … Cheering is inappropriate and immature. Combat veterans, more than anyone else, know how much pain and evil have been wrought …Veterans just need to be received back into their community, reintegrated with those they love, and thanked by the people who sent them…to do this, however, eventually the war has to be integrated, the horror absorbed. The psyche stretched to accommodate the trauma” (2011: 195–205). An important part of re-integration is a full public accounting of the “pain and evil” the war caused to those individuals who fought and the wider public in whose name they acted. While reframing the Vietnam War as a noble cause might not have succeeded, the recognition of those who served and died for the nation, no matter what the cause, clearly has. This, too, might be another “lesson” learned from the Vietnam War, the necessity of thanking all for their service. A money-based cost/benefit analysis is common practice in legislative accountings, but how does one access the moral costs of war, and where would such an accounting take place? It can occur in various forms within the arenas we have distinguished. The morality of killing and its impact on those who kill is the centerpiece of Marlantes’s memoir. Along with

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other authors, Marlantes has made use of the arena we call the popular imaginary or the artistic realm to express and represent his experience of the war and its impact on himself and the society in whose name and for whose values he went into battle. Where Marlantes wrote a novel and a memoir, others have used film, poetry, and theater as forms to express the trauma of war and to pose questions of its political and moral costs as we have discussed throughout. The arts are powerful forms of articulation and can be individually and collectively cathartic while simultaneously serving as a means of re-integration. Access may not be open or available to all, but given the explosion of social media as well as community-sponsored projects, they are much more available today. A “Costs of War” symposium at the Ohio State University in 2015 used film, theater, and performance art—along with the traditional academic presentations—to articulate the physical and moral costs of war. While such discussions may be held at academic institutions, they are not necessarily limited to academics or to what we have identified as the academic arena. They can and should be open to the general public, as this one was. In addition, many academic institutions in the United States have opened their doors to the military through special programs to bring veterans onto their campus not only to study but also to tell their stories and represent their experiences. One such program is the Veterans Project at Arizona State University, which provides “an unscripted onstage forum [to] share stories of military service and civilian life” (from the program of the Costs of War symposium). Along with coverage of such programs and events in the mass media, these initiatives should encourage discussion in the community arena and, most importantly perhaps, in the face-to-face interactions of the home and the family. The Vietnamese should also be brought into this accounting—those former enemies in Vietnam but most particularly those who fought alongside the Americans. As many American veterans returning to Vietnam have discovered, it is often those they fought against who understand them best. The shared experience of war goes beyond those one served with and becomes even more nuanced when those fought against are included. This contact between former combatants has ancient roots and is another form of catharsis (Schivelbusch, 2001: 25). The Vietnamese have established some mechanisms for this exchange to occur, for example the network of veteran/ authors that have brought American authors to Vietnam as well as the tours and tourist agencies that specialize in veteran touring. Tourism, however, may not be the best form to encourage moral learning, especially as it seems to encourage nostalgia and the myth of the brotherhood of combat.

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Perhaps it should be highlighted once again that the Americans and the Vietnamese fought different wars, even as they were engaged in face-to-face conflict. As American soldiers were to discover when they returned to “the world” from Vietnam, American society was largely unchanged and unaffected by the war. Things went on pretty much as before, there was no panic at the prospect of defeat, no economic or political collapse, at least not those that could easily be traced to the war. For the United States, Vietnam was more along the lines of a “cabinet war” (ibid.: 8) than a total war involving mass mobilization on the home front beyond the much skewed workings of the draft, that is. For the Vietnamese, on the other hand, it was a total war, a war involving an entire population. Defeat would have been as devastating for the civilian population as the political/military leadership; this was really the case for those who aligned themselves with the South and the Americans. Not only was the war fought on Vietnamese soil, a fact that implied catastrophic social and ecological consequences for the entire country, the distinction between military and civilian population was ambiguous to say the least. Especially after Tet, there was no easy escape into the routines of everyday life, as was more than possible in the United States, even in the heyday of the antiwar movement. The war touched everyone, especially as family and villages were mobilized for or against the war efforts, setting in motion forced migrations. Members of the Saigon elite could long live under the illusion that the war existed only in the periphery, the periphery of their consciousness as well as of the city. In a way, they could lose themselves in a variant of a colonial mentality, a worldview that placed them somewhere between the colonial powers and the peasant population. They were subordinate yet isolated. The collapse came as a shock as well as a betrayal. This simple fact of fighting different wars has great consequence with regard to public accounting. Firstly, there is the issue of whom and what constitutes the public that is to be addressed and accounted for. Authoritarian regimes speak to and for rather than with their public, one they themselves construct. The public is called upon to turn out for displays of authority and power such as parades and on other occasions when leaders make themselves available for viewing. This does not mean that there are no collective emotions but that there are limited means for the “public mood” to find expression and influence. Accountability has another meaning in democratic societies, as does responsibility. Political leaders and policymakers can be held accountable for their actions, through voting and recall and through the mechanism and media of public opinion. The responsibility of the citizen is slightly more abstract, as it is mediated through political and

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moral attitudes rather than through the formal rules and procedures of political office. Wars occur within a wider moral framework in which the citizenry plays a definitive role, and this broadens the sense of responsibility. In victorious Vietnam, where a centralized Politburo and Communist Party govern the country, ruling “in the name of the people” did not imply any clearly defined notion of accountability, as its membership are not subject to popular vote or approval. In this sense, the people of Vietnam cannot be held responsible for the war, nor do they have the institutional means to ask for accountability, at least not in the way of democratic regimes. There are no readily available mechanisms in place for post-war public discussion in Vietnam. The war against the Americans became an important source of collective pride and identity, and yet it has also raised questions about its costs, most particularly in human terms. Since there are no established mechanisms or independent mass media available, such criticisms were largely made privately by individuals. As we have seen in a previous chapter, however, these voices are now finding ways of being heard (Hai Nguyen, 2018, for example). There is also a generational aspect to this process. The celebration and euphoria of victory quiets dissenting voices, even those who mourn the dead. It may take some time for this side of victory—its social costs—to be heard.

References Adorno, Theodor (1986 [1959]) “What does coming to terms with the past mean?” Pp. 114–29 in Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, ed. Geoffrey Hartman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Arendt, Hannah (2003) Responsibility and Judgement. New York: Schocken Books. Assmann, Aleida (2016) Shadows of Trauma. New York: Fordham University Press. Bacevich, Andrew (2013) The New American Militarism. New York: Oxford University Press. Bartmanski, Dominik, and Ron Eyerman (2019) “The Worst Was the Silence: The Unfinished Drama of the Katyn Massacre.” Pp. 111–142 in Memory, Trauma, and Identity, ed. Ron Eyerman. New York: Palgrave. Burns, Ken, and Lynn Novick (2017) The Vietnam War [film]. PBS Documentaries. Crawford, Neta (2013) Accountability for Killing. New York: Oxford University Press. Derrida, Jacques (2001) On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge. Duong, Van Nguyen (2008) The Tragedy of the Vietnam War. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Eyerman, Ron (2019) Memory, Trauma, and Identity. New York: Palgrave. Giesen, Bernhard (2004) Triumph and Trauma. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Govier, Trudy (2002) Forgiveness and Revenge. London: Routledge. Griswold, Charles (2007) Forgiveness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hayslip, Le Ly, and Jay Wurts (1993) When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. New York: Plume. Heinemann, Larry (2006) Black Virgin Mountain. New York: Vintage.

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Herring, George, ed. (1993) The Pentagon Papers. New York: McGraw Hill. Judt, Tony (2006) Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. New York: Penguin. Laderman, Scott (2009) Tours of Vietnam. Durham: Duke University Press. Lamb, David (2002) Vietnam, Now. New York: Public Affairs. Lewy, Guenter (1978) America in Vietnam. New York: NYU Press. Marlantes, Karl (2011) What It Is Like To Go To War. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Nguyen, Lien-Hang (2012) Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Nguyen, Viet Thanh (2016) Nothing Ever Dies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nobles, Melissa (2008) The Politics of Official Apologies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rieff, David (2016) In Praise of Forgetting. New Haven: Yale University Press. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang (2001) The Culture of Defeat. London: Granta.



Index

1.5 generation 227, 231, 330 Afghanistan 107, 178n.89, 205n.9, 205n.9, 268, 349 Agent Orange 45, 76, 96, 167n.82, 244-245, 264, 270, 282 Aguilar-San Juan, Karin 208, 232-233, 245, 253, 268, 294, 297, 300, 302, 304, 311-312 Alexander, Jeffrey 16, 38, 65 American Exceptionalism 106, 108-109, 111, 118, 128, 133-134, 136-137, 139, 146, 153, 330, 345 Anderson, Benedict 15, 66, 81, 108 ao dai 316 Apocalypse Now 149 Appy, Christian 114n.9, 115, 135 April 30 14, 24, 41-44, 61, 104, 144, 195n.4, 197, 205, 207, 210-212, 214, 218, 221, 239, 241, 246, 249, 251, 268, 283, 298-299, 301-302, 317-318, 320, 335, 339 Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) 12, 60, 92n.56, 119n.15, 125, 142, 142n.48, 143, 143n.49, 197, 199, 202, 212-214, 217, 219, 240-242, 242n.3, 246-248, 256, 270, 283, 296 As Seen By Both Sides 11, 167 Assmann, Aleida 22, 154, 339-340 Bacevich, Andrew 178, 350 Bao Dai (Emperor) 32-35, 47, 47n.11, 50 Black April 24, 37, 238, 298-305, 317-318, 340 boat people (boat person) 37, 206, 222, 227, 231, 269, 288, 303, 318, 339 Broderick, Ned 165, 166, 166n.81, 167 Boot, Max 181 Buddhism (Buddhist) 45, 50n.16, 51, 51n.16, 62, 64, 93, 119n.15, 129, 141-142, 144, 233, 347 Bui, Thi 193n.2, 281-283, 287 Burden, Chris 155, 156n.67 Burns, Ken 10, 12, 36, 54n.22, 106n.3, 114n.10, 118n.13, 162n.78, 172, 172n.86, 242, 244, 334, 338, 345, 350, 351 Calley, William 126-127, 148, 161, 336 camp, labor 218 camp, re-education (re-education) 44, 61, 61n.30, 82, 90, 198, 212, 214, 215, 215n.11, 216-217, 220, 225, 227, 247-248, 260, 262, 266, 269, 278, 283, 285-286, 288, 292, 308, 335, 344, 347 camp, refugee 212-213, 222-224, 226-227, 248, 256, 260, 274, 282, 292, 317, 333, 348 Caputo, Philip 114, 116-117 Cao, Lan 12, 288, 320n.28 Catfish and Mandala 227, 288, 290 Catholicism (Catholic) 16, 29-30, 35, 45, 50-51, 51n.16, 52, 112, 112n.7, 137, 141-142, 144, 228, 230, 261

China 28-31, 33-35, 44, 46n.9, 47n.9, 50, 53-54, 54n.20, 54n.22, 61, 62, 62n.32, 63, 63n.33, 86, 89, 95, 111, 180, 217-218, 227, 255-256, 266, 273, 286, 301, 332 China Beach 135n.39, 289 Corson, William 144n.51, 162, 177 Chomsky, Noam 117n.12, 137 Cold War 47, 49-50, 53, 68, 108-109, 110n.6, 111-113, 118-119, 121n.21, 122, 136, 138n.42, 157, 173, 179, 182, 266, 273, 345 collective effervescence 19 collective identity 16-17, 21-24, 28n.8, 36, 38, 67-68, 79, 82, 115, 184-185, 187, 194-196, 207, 233, 238, 294-295, 298, 315, 317, 319-320, 327-330, 336, 339, 349 collective memory 11-12, 16, 18-28, 36-37, 45-46, 56, 63-66, 67n.36, 68, 71, 73, 78, 81, 85, 88, 94, 104, 107-108, 112, 125, 158, 163, 176, 184, 187, 193-194, 196, 207, 220, 243, 260-261, 265-266, 279-280, 287, 293-294, 302-303, 305-306, 313-314, 316-317, 319-320, 328, 340, 348-349 collective representation 18-23, 134, 290, 295, 333 collective responsibility 337-338, 350 collective trauma 82, 91-92, 94-96, 168, 329 Cronkite, Walter 127 cultural death 17 cultural trauma 11-12, 15-18, 23, 36n.11, 37-38, 91, 93, 106, 169, 186, 196, 295, 298, 315, 319-320, 327-330, 333, 336, 348-349, 351 DeGloma, Thomas 26 Demmer, Amanda C. 197n.5, 203, 208, 215n.11, 224n.13, 226n.14, 244, 244n.5, 248 Derrida, Jacques 342-343, 347 Diem, Ngo Dinh 35, 44n.4, 50-51, 51n.16, 51n.17, 52, 52n.18, 53, 55-56, 83, 110, 129, 139-142, 142n.49, 181, 201, 339 Dien Bien Phu 34, 47-48, 54n.21 Dinh Q Le ̂ 88, 89 Doan, Brian 307-308, 308n.24 Doi Moi 62 and art 90 Dragonfish 292 Duong, Van Minh 42, 43n.2, 104, 197, 201-202, 207, 210, 239-241, 241n.2, 242 Durkheim, Emile 18-20, 295-296, 315 dust of life (bụi đời) 224 Eisenhower, Dwight 47, 110-111, 112n.8 Elliott, Duong Van Mai 242 Embassy, American (in Vietnam) 104, 123-124, 161n.78, 204-206, 208-209 Espiritu, Yen Le 10n.2, 67, 118n.13, 143, 147n.57, 155n.66, 156, 244, 246n.6, 265, 267-270, 273-275, 278

358  Eyerman, Ron 16, 36, 38, 119n.17, 147-148, 151n.60, 161, 337, 341 Fitzgerald, Frances 45, 141, 174 F.O.B. 293, 305, 305n.22 F.O.B. II 305, 306, 307 Ford, Gerald 104-5, 137, 200-201, 203, 208, 226-227, 240, 246, 269, 348 Freud, Sigmund (Freudian) 317, 340-341 Fulbright, William 131, 131n.36 Garden Grove 256, 258, 263, 298, 304, 311, 313 Geneva Accords (Geneva Agreement) 34-35, 47, 49-50, 52, 55, 74, 112, 139, 197-198, 329 Griswold, Charles 342-343 ghosts 91 Goldwater, Barry 176 Golub, Leon 165 Good Guys Electronics (hostages) 252 Goscha, Christopher 32 Hagel, Chuck 168-9 Halberstam, David 123, 173 Halbwachs Maurice 18, 20-22, 25, 64, 66 Hauser, William 178 Hawthorne, Lesleyanne 197, 204, 213-214, 216-218, 230, 242 Hayden, Tom 133-134 Hayslip, Le Ly 144n.51, 289, 338 Heinemann, Larry 169 Heritage flag 295-296, 300, 302, 305, 308-309, 316 Herring, George 199, 344 Hi-Tek Video 309, 311 Hmong 45n.7 Ho Chi Minh 13n.6, 28n.9, 31-35, 41, 47, 47n.10, 50-51, 52, 52n.19, 56-58, 72, 72n.41, 73, 81, 81n.46, 83, 86n.48, 113, 118n.14, 217, 253, 256, 277, 281, 285, 307-311, 331, 338 Ho Chi Minh City 11n.4, 41-42, 64, 66, 73-74, 225, 264, 289-290, 293 Ho Chi Minh Trail 44n.5, 57, 60, 70 Hoang, Co Minh 249-251 Hoang, Doan 221 Hue 30, 33, 58, 119n.16, 125n.26, 199, 335, 347 Huynh, Chau 305-306, 309 Indochina (First Indochina War, French Indochina War) 11n.4, 13n.6, 44, 46 (Second Indochina War) 14n.6, 43, 46 (Indochina Communist Party) 28n.9 Iraq 107, 149, 175, 178n.90, 268-269, 349 Jamieson, Neil 30, 298 Japan (Japanese) 31-33, 35n.10, 44-45, 47n.10, 51n.16, 110, 162, 177, 181, 185n.97, 200, 266, 281, 284, 331 Johnson, Lyndon 105n.1, 110-111, 111n.7, 113, 114n.10, 117-118, 118n.14, 119-120, 120n.19, 125, 128n.31, 129, 129n.31, 129n.32, 131n.36, 134n.39, 137, 145, 180-181, 181n.94, 271 Karnow, Stanley 139, 199, 203 Kennedy, John 110-111, 111n.7, 114, 119, 138, 140-141, 145n.56

Vie tnam: A War, Not a Country

Kerry, John 116, 127, 131 Kiernan, Ben 13n.6, 32, 47n.11, 49, 52n.18, 52n.19, 53, 55n.23, 57, 57n.27, 57n.28, 97, 111, 119n.18, 139, 140n.44, 141, 142n.49, 198, 215-216, 248 King, Martin Luther 129, 136 Kipling, Rudyard 271 Kissinger, Henry 144, 179, 179n.92, 181, 197n.5, 200, 203-204, 334, 343 Korean War (Korean conflict) 17, 109, 111, 114, 118n.14, 138n.42, 157,178n.90, 179 Ky, Nguyễn Cao 28n.9, 141-143, 182, 207, 228, 240-242, 249, 262-263 Lam, Andrew 228, 233, 251-252, 290-291, 298, 320 Le, Duan 58, 125n.26, 176n.88, 338 Lewy, Guenter 147, 344, 346 Lieu, Nhi T. 226, 245, 253, 259, 265-267, 270, 274-275, 296 lieux de mémoire 36, 294-295, 298, 316 Lin, Maya 154n.64, 302 Linh, Dinh 286-287 Lippard, Lucy 122, 162, 164-165, 167-168, 168n.84 Little Saigon 232-233, 245, 258, 258n.12, 295, 297, 303, 309, 312, 315-316 Little Saigon Daily News 244, 258, 258n.12 Love Like Hate 286-287 Madigan, Todd 11n.3, 16, 36n.11, 279n.17 Mannheim, Karl 22, 27 Manyon, Julian 200, 205 Marlantes, Karl 10, 172, 182, 351-352 Martin, Graham (U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Vietnam) 104, 201, 203-204 McCain, John 173 McKelvey, Robert 224-225, 230 McMaster, H.R. 145, 180-181 McNamara, Robert 118n.14, 125, 127, 145, 145n.56, 180-181, 334, 343 mnemonic alignment 26 mnemonic battles 23-24, 306, 309, 312, 315 mnemonic community 316 mnemonic products and practices 21, 36 model minority 230, 274-275 Monkey Bridge 288 Montagnards 45n.7, 248 Museum of the Boat People and the Republic of Vietnam 37 My Lai 109, 126, 147-148, 161, 336-337 narrative 13, 16-18, 21-26, 28, 35n.10, 36-38, 43-44, 45n.6, 45n.7, 46, 53-54, 54n.20, 62-63, 63n.33, 63n.34, 64-65, 67-69, 69n.38, 70n.39, 71-74, 77, 79-83, 85, 87, 90-96, 96n.57, 97, 106, 108-109, 111, 117-118, 120n.20, 124n.25, 132n.37, 135n.40, 137-138, 138n.42, 139, 143, 145-148, 148n.58, 149-150, 153-154, 158n.70, 164, 177, 185n.97, 186, 194-195, 195n.4, 196, 207, 220, 233, 238-239, 245-246, 249, 251-254, 256-265, 265n.15, 266-269, 274-275, 278-281, 283-284,

Index

286-288, 290-294, 297-300, 302-306, 309-315, 319-320, 328, 330-332, 339-340, 347, 349 National Liberation Front (NLF) 44, 44n.4, 52-53, 55-56, 56n.25, 57, 57n.28, 59-60, 62, 70n.39, 76, 86, 92, 97, 124n.25, 142n. 49 Nguoi Daily News 258n.12, 305 Nguyen, Bich Minh 198, 289-290 Nguyen, Lien-Hang 59, 63, 176n.88 Nguyen, Mimi Thi 267, 270-273 Nguyen, Nathalie Huynh Chau 196, 198, 215 Nguyen, Viet Thanh 10, 103, 115n.11, 159n.73, 237, 243-244, 265-270, 275-276, 279, 283-285, 287-288, 297, 299, 312, 345, 349 Ninh, Bao 26, 54n.22, 91, 91n.55, 93-94, 106n.3, 115n.11, 172, 172n.86, 338 Nixon, Richard 26, 72, 110-111, 114n.10, 118, 118n.14, 126, 125, 129n.31, 131, 144, 144n.52, 144n.53, 146, 160n.76, 179-182, 187, 200, 242n.3, 337 Nora, Pierre 21, 36, 64, 294 Nothing Ever Dies 26 Novick, Lynn 10, 12, 36, 54n.22, 106n.3, 118n.14, 162n.79, 172, 242, 344, 338, 345, 350-351 O’Brien, Tim 116, 164, 169-172 Oh, Saigon 221 Olick, Jeffrey 21, 184 On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous 292 Operation Baby Lift 208, 263 Orange County 228, 231-233, 245, 301, 310-311, 314 Paris Peace Accords 61, 138, 201, 246 peace with honor 22, 144 Pelaud, Isabelle Thuy 207, 218, 269, 278 Pentagon Papers 52, 52n.19, 109, 113, 119n.18, 123, 129n.32, 157, 179, 181, 344 Pham, Andrew X. 227, 288 Phan, Aimee 293 Phuc, Phan Thi Kim 160n.76, 272-273 pirates 220-221 Platoon 26, 159, 159n.70, 160n.74 Podhoritz, Norman 113, 139 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 15, 148-149, 244, 351 Rabe, David 169-170 racism 144, 226, 260, 269-270 Rashomon 35n.10 Reagan, Ronald 105, 108-109, 112, 183-184 Republic of Vietnam Military Forces (RVNMF) 28n.9, 37, 197, 208, 211, 214, 228, 246, 248, 251, 299, 316 Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam 11, 11n.4, 12, 77, 79n.44 Ricoeur, Paul 17, 276, 294 Saigon 10n.2, 22, 30-31, 33, 37, 41-43, 51, 56, 58, 61, 69-70, 74-75, 97, 104, 106, 117n.12, 119n.16, 123-124, 124n.25, 126, 126n.27, 132, 137-138, 140n.44, 141-146, 147n.57, 150, 157, 160-161, 161n.78, 162, 168, 183, 195n.4, 196-197, 197n.7, 198-200, 202-209, 212-215, 217-218, 226-227,

359 239-240, 240n.1, 241, 241n.2, 242, 244-246, 248-249, 251, 256, 259-260, 263, 270, 273-274, 278, 281, 286, 289, 298-299, 306, 316-320, 337, 339, 353 San Jose 12, 37, 264, 296, 314 Schechner, Richard 35n.10 Schwenkel, Christina 10n.2, 12, 67, 77 Selective Service Act 114 Sheehan, Neil 123, 143 Smelser, Neil 16, 295 Snepp, Frank 200, 202-203, 205 South China Sea 206, 209-210, 219, 226 Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.) 31, 33, 50, 53-54, 54n.22, 63, 70, 87, 95, 106n.3, 111, 340 Spector, Ronald 150 Stealing Buddha’s Dinner 12, 289 Stone, Oliver 27, 144n.51, 159, 159n.70, 159n.73, 160, 160n.74 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) 129, 133 Tai, Hue-Tam Ho 72n41 Takaki, Ronald 247-249, 262 Tan Son Nhut Airport 203-204, 207-208 teach-in 130 Tet (New Year holiday) 247, 256, 310 Tet Offensive 12, 54n.22, 55-57, 57n.28, 58-60, 63n.33, 109, 119n.16, 122n.22, 124, 124n.25, 125, 125n.26, 126-127, 138, 143n.50, 144n.50, 160, 187, 199, 203, 233, 331, 337, 353 The Best We Could Do 193, 281, 283, 287 The Gangster We Are All Looking For 292 The Sympathizer 283-288 Thieu, Nguyen Van 42, 104, 142, 200-202, 239-240, 240n.1, 242, 260-262 Thompson, A.C. 249-250, 312-314 totem 18-19, 295, 315 Tran, Ham 193n.1 Tran, Vu 292 Truman, Harry 33, 110-111, 271 Truong, Monique T.D. 9 Truong, Nhu Tang 26 Turse, Nick 94 Valverde, Kieu-Linh Caroline 265, 277, 298, 305-306, 308-309 Viet kieu 264, 290 Viet Minh 28n.9, 31-34, 47, 47n.10, 48, 48n.12, 50, 51n.16, 55, 56n.25, 73-74, 281-282 Veith, George 199, 205 Vietnam Combat Artists Program 164-168 Vietnam Military History Museum 69-71 Vietnam Museum of Revolution 71-74 Vietnam Veterans Memorial 105, 138, 148, 148n.58, 151-152, 152n.62, 155, 157-158, 162-163, 182, 272, 302, 334 Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey 281, 283 Vietnamese-American Vietnam War Memorial 37, 157, 301-304 Vietnamese Arts and Letters Association (VAALA) 305, 305n.22, 305n.23, 308

360  Vietnamese Organization to Exterminate Communists and Restore the Nation (VOECRN) 312-314 Vo, Nguyễn Giáp 54, 54n.21, 55, 58, 125n.26, 338 Vuong, Ocean 292 Wayne, John 113-4, 138, 147 War Remnants Museum 74-80 We Should Never Meet 293 Webb, James 117, 335

Vie tnam: A War, Not a Country

Westminster 37, 258, 262, 296, 302-304, 308-309, 311, 313 Westmoreland, William 26, 111, 111n.7, 121, 124n.25, 125, 125n.26, 129n.32, 140, 140n.46, 143, 144n.50, 145, 334, 344 White, Hayden 194-195 White Man’s Burden 269, 271 Willbanks, James 199-200, 202 William Joiner Foundation 167 Wright, James 107, 110 Zerubavel, Eviatar 23, 316-317