Looking Back on the Vietnam War

Brenda M. Boyle, Jeehyun Lim

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780813579948
• eBook ISBN: 9780813579955
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

More than forty years have passed since the official end of the Vietnam War, yet the war’s legacies endure. Its history and iconography still provide fodder for film and fiction, communities of war refugees have spawned a wide Vietnamese diaspora, and the United States military remains embroiled in unwinnable wars with eerie echoes of Vietnam.    Looking Back on the Vietnam War brings together scholars from a broad variety of disciplines, who offer fresh insights on the war’s psychological, economic, artistic, political, and environmental impacts. Each essay examines a different facet of the war, from its representation in Marvel comic books to the experiences of Vietnamese soldiers exposed to Agent Orange. By putting these pieces together, the contributors assemble an expansive yet nuanced composite portrait of the war and its global legacies.   Though they come from diverse scholarly backgrounds, ranging from anthropology to film studies, the contributors are united in their commitment to original research. Whether exploring rare archives or engaging in extensive interviews, they voice perspectives that have been excluded from standard historical accounts. Looking Back on the Vietnam War thus embarks on an interdisciplinary and international investigation to discover what we remember about the war, how we remember it, and why.  

1

Vietnamese Refugees and Internet Memorials

When Does War End and Who Gets to Decide?

YẾN LÊ ESPIRITU

It should not surprise anyone that Vietnamese Americans would want to remember amidst all that forgetting. One does not become recognizably human until one acts in one’s history. And for that, one needs to have history.

—Nguyên-Vo Thu Huong, “Forking Paths”

When wars begin and end are not indisputable historical facts but contested rhetorical positions. In U.S. public commemorations of the Vietnam War, the fall of Saigon in April 1975 marks the official end of the war, as U.S. media and officials extolled and sensationalized the last-ditch efforts to evacuate the shell-shocked refugees and encamp them at U.S. military bases throughout the Pacific archipelago. Ayako Sahara has argued that the “end” of the Vietnam War and its aftermath were the moments that the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations represented Southeast Asian refugees as the white man’s burden, and the United States as the magnanimous rescuers, in order to facilitate national rehabilitation for the loss of the Vietnam War.¹ U.S. efforts to reposition itself as savior of Vietnam’s “runaways” suggest that humanitarian interventions are not merely about resolving a problem; they are also practices that “work principally to recuperate state sovereignty in the face of specific historical challenges.”² In this chapter, I challenge dominant U.S. representations of the war as being contained within a specific timeframe, particularly as being “over and done with.” As Stephen Whitfield notes, war has a geopolitical and a social temporality: even when war has ended in the geopolitical dimension, it has not necessarily done so in the social dimension.³ Against the U.S. dominant remembering of the fall of Saigon in April 1975 as the war’s unambiguous conclusion, I ask: when does war end and who gets to decide? Highlighting the ongoingness of the Vietnam War, I examine the Internet “memorials” that Vietnamese Americans have created and circulated online in order to remember their dead and to pass on their war memories to the next generation. These online memorials offer an alternative temporality: that the costs borne by the Vietnamese war witnesses, survivors, and their families linger long after the supposed ending of the war.

“Ghost Soldiers”: The “Disappeared” of South Vietnam

As scholars, public historians, and the media have repeatedly documented, Americans have been obsessed with the “Vietnam War” as an American tragedy. Despite the voluminous literatures on the Vietnam War and Vietnamese Americans, few scholarly works have critically engaged the war as an important historical and discursive site of Vietnamese subject formation. Addressing this gap, this chapter is concerned with the ways that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) dead—and their families’ grief—has gone officially unacknowledged in the United States.⁴ Following Judith Butler, I conceptualize grief not as a private or depoliticized sentiment but as a resource for enacting a politics that confronts the conditions under which “certain human lives are more grievable than others.”⁵ Commemorating the South’s war dead is not the same as valorizing them; rather, it is acknowledging that they are worthy of remembrance. As Hue-Tam Ho Tai exhorts, any study of the Vietnam War would need to include the dead of South Vietnam, lest we risk “turning them into the scholarly equivalents of the wandering ghosts of those who, dying unmourned, constantly haunt the living in an attempt to force their way into the consciousness of the community, to be acknowledged as worthy of being remembered if only because they once walked the earth.”⁶

I conceptualize the organized forgetting of the more than two hundred thousand ARVN dead as a form of forced disappearance.⁷ As scholars have documented, the state is eager to control the cultural production of war memories.⁸ In the United States, the ARVN soldier has been disappeared from almost all historical accounts of the war. According to Philip Beidler, a Vietnam veteran–turned–English professor, “the ARVN soldier remains at best a creature of scattered references, hand-me-down scholarship, supplementary statistics squirreled away in the odd military history archive or document collection.”⁹ Invoking the ARVN in the United States would amount to recalling American war failure: “They died for a nation called the Republic of Vietnam. And in so doing, they became the image of [American] failure.”¹⁰ Beidler argues that the American vilification of the ARVN as corrupt, cowardly, and incompetent—and the (mis)treatment of them as nonexistent “ghost soldiers”—became necessary because “it reinforced our eventual mythologizing of our own army of Vietnam as betrayed, sacrificed, used up, hung out to dry.”¹¹ In other words, the ARVN became the scapegoat for America’s defeat in Vietnam.¹² At the same time, those on the American Left have reduced South Vietnamese fighters into mere puppets of U.S. imperialism, thereby erasing any legitimate position or human agency for South Vietnamese acting in contradictory ways in extremely complex realities of what was also a civil war in Vietnam.¹³

The forced disappearance of South Vietnam’s soldiers is also evident in the steep opposition directed against Vietnamese American attempts to monumentalize their status as America’s allies and collaborators. In 2009 Vietnamese Americans in Wichita, Kansas, fundraised to erect a monument in the Veterans Memorial Park of Wichita. They had envisioned a modest-sized bronze statue depicting an American service member with his arm “protectively” around the shoulder of a South Vietnamese comrade, with a plaque expressing their gratitude to their American allies and friends. To their surprise, American veterans objected to the proposed placement of the monument, insisting that the Memorial Park is reserved for “America’s veterans who fought America’s wars for America’s armed forces.” A compromise was struck: the monument would be placed on city-owned land adjacent to but separated from the Memorial Park by an earthen wall, referred to by one offended Vietnamese American as “the Berlin Wall.”¹⁴ In another case the original design of the Texas Capitol Vietnam War Monument, approved in 2005, featured four American servicemen representing different ethnic groups and a soldier of the Republic of Vietnam being treated by a U.S. medic. However, in July 2012 the executive committee unilaterally changed the name of the monument to the Texas Capitol Vietnam Veterans Monument and replaced the South Vietnamese soldier with an Asian Texan soldier—a belated and insulting attempt at “completing the ethnic diversity by adding the Asian American.”¹⁵ Although the figure of the South Vietnamese soldier was depicted as an object of U.S. rescuing mission, and its inclusion would have solidified the narrative of the “grateful refugee,” its removal angered the local Vietnamese American community, for whom the ARVN figure represented “an important symbolic element concerning the suffering of the Vietnamese.”¹⁶ An online petition requesting that Gov. Rick Perry restore the original design, published by Vietnamese veteran Michael Do on October 6, 2012, characterizes the decision as “an insult to many Vietnamese American veterans and people in the Vietnamese American community.”¹⁷ These protests notwithstanding, the revised version of the monument, with the South Vietnamese soldier omitted, celebrated its groundbreaking in March 2013. In an effort to appease the Vietnamese American community, the committee points to a panel on the monument’s pedestal that features three South Vietnamese soldiers: a wounded soldier being cared for by his two comrades. Not surprisingly, for Vietnamese Americans, the placement of the panel on the monument’s pedestal undercuts the message of South Vietnamese soldiers serving as allies alongside U.S. troops.¹⁸

The only successful attempt thus far to erect a monument commemorating South Vietnamese soldiers took place in 2003 in Westminster, California—home of the largest Vietnamese community outside Vietnam. However, it is instructive to review the staunch opposition that the community faced along the way.¹⁹ Unable to secure public funding, the $1 million statue was financed almost entirely with donations from the Vietnamese community. Even once the money was raised, most city officials and about 70 percent of non-Vietnamese residents in Westminster continued to oppose the project.²⁰ As in the Wichita case, the Westminster city officials and residents wrangled over the location of the memorial, with some balking at the initial proposal to place it at the Civic Center, complaining that it would be “too visible” there and that a “private memorial” was inappropriate for city property.²¹ Angering the Vietnamese community, council members ultimately relocated the project away from City Hall to a vacant lot on the far side of the Westminster Civic Center—a decision that required the community to raise an extra $500,000 to improve the site, which was “full of potholes and in need of leveling,” for the statue installation.²² The term “private memorial” is telling, as city officials and news reporters consistently referred to the memorial as a mourning place for only the Westminster Vietnamese community and Little Saigon visitors.²³ In other words, the Westminster Vietnam War Memorial, even when explicitly designed to honor the bond between South Vietnamese and American soldiers, could neither be designated nor perceived as deserving a place within America.²⁴

The memorial design—a pair of fifteen-foot, three-ton, somber-looking bronze soldiers, one white American and one South Vietnamese, standing side by side and flanked by flags of the United States and the former Republic of Vietnam—also provoked resident ire. In an interview published in the Los Angeles Times, then-Westminster mayor Frank Fry intimated that “his council colleagues and other civic leaders always had a problem with the notion that the statue would show the Vietnamese and American together.”²⁵ While some residents wanted to remove the South Vietnamese soldier altogether, others suggested that it might be more appropriate to replace the soldier with a refugee family “to convey the message that America freed them . . . and they are here now”—an attempt to assimilate the refugee experiences into the benign narrative of immigration and multiculturalism.²⁶ In 2003, after seven years of bitter struggle and twenty-eight years after the fall of Saigon, the Vietnamese community in Little Saigon was finally able to unveil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chronology
• Note on the Text
• Introduction: Looking Back on the Vietnam War
• 1. Vietnamese Refugees and Internet Memorials: When Does War End and Who Gets to Decide?
• 2. Broken, but Not Forsaken: Disabled South Vietnamese Veterans in Vietnam and the Vietnamese Diaspora
• 3. What Is Vietnamese American Literature?
• 4. Việt Nam and the Diaspora: Absence, Presence, and the Archive
• 5. Liberal Humanitarianism and Post–Cold War Cultural Politics: The Case of Le Ly Hayslip
• 6. Ann Hui’s Boat People: Documenting Vietnamese Refugees in Hong Kong
• 7. “The Deep Black Hole”: Vietnam in the Memories of Australian Veterans and Refugees
• 8. Missing Bodies and Homecoming Spirits
• 9. Agent Orange: Toxic Chemical, Narrative of Suffering, Metaphor for War
• 10. Re-seeing Cambodia and Recollecting The ’Nam: A Vertiginous Critique of the Military Sublime
• 11. Naturalizing War: The Stories We Tell about the Vietnam War
• Appendix A: Archives
• Appendix B: Publications since 2000
• Notes on Contributors
• Index