Returns of War

South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory

Long T. Bui

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479849956
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Vietnam War
• Index: History

The legacy and memory of wartime South Vietnam through the eyes of Vietnamese refugees

In 1975, South Vietnam fell to communism, marking a stunning conclusion to the Vietnam War. Although this former ally of the United States has vanished from the world map, Long T. Bui maintains that its memory endures for refugees with a strong attachment to this ghost country. Blending ethnography with oral history, archival research, and cultural analysis, Returns of War considers how the historical legacy of a nationthat only existed for twenty years is being kept alive by its dispersedstateless exiles.

Returns of War argues that Vietnamization--as Richard Nixon termed it in 1969--and the end of South Vietnam signals more than an example of flawed American military strategy, but a larger allegory of power, providing cover for U.S. imperial losses while denoting the inability of the (South) Vietnamese and other colonized nations to become independent, modern liberal subjects. Bui argues that the collapse of South Vietnam under Vietnamization complicates the already difficult memory of the Vietnam War, pushing for a critical understanding of South Vietnamese agency beyond their status as the war’s ultimate “losers.” Examining the lasting impact of Cold War military policy and culture upon the “Vietnamized” afterlife of war, this book weaves questions of national identity, sovereignty, and self-determination to consider the generative possibilities of theorizing South Vietnam as an incomplete, ongoing search for political and personal freedom.

1

Archival Others

The Vietnamese as Absent Presence in the Historical Record

In the desolate Texan desert stands the beautiful, lush campus of Texas Tech University, located in the city of Lubbock. Tucked away on one side of the school stands the Vietnam War Center and Archive (VNCA), separate from the main library. Upon entering the hallway of the stately building where this site dedicated to preserving the history of the Vietnam War is housed, one is confronted with an impressive visual display: a cowboy figure stands over a cliff facing out toward the High Plains, eyeing the Western expansion of the United States under a sense of Manifest Destiny. This display is courtesy of the school’s Southwest Historical Archive, which provides temporary physical space for my current concern, the Vietnam War archive. In the adjacent window display is a hand-illustrated picture of a U.S. soldier in Vietnam facing the opposite direction; this one is overlooking the foreign virgin lands of Southeast Asia, standing at the service of the country’s global expansion overseas. Holding the same countenance, the two soldiers are a split image of American empire, twin personifications of the nation—one that calls to mind U.S. soldiers calling Vietnam “Indian country” and how the Indian Wars were the precursor to later wars with foreign nations. Symbolically, these two iconographic figures prompt reflection about “the frontier” myth that animates so much of U.S. colonial culture as well as questions about the public faces of history, what gets remembered, and who or what gets to represent history.

The archive holds a vast trove of documents filled with unknown information. The main public entry point is a giant study room with only a few file cabinets and tables, a noiseless, musty place that belies the archive’s humming public activities, community events, and political relationships outside the school. A peaceful and serene mood envelops me as I enter the air-conditioned room, a relief from the searing heat outside. I arrived in pursuit of learning how Vietnamese people are represented, sorted, and categorized in this archive dedicated to the Vietnam War, not expecting to find much more than perhaps a plethora of items dedicated to military missions. Most visitors, I assumed, come seeking information, but I came to find out how that information takes shape within the archive as an ethnographic space, one with transnational boundaries. In this quiet institutional space of learning, I contemplated my family’s history while looking up data related to “refugees,” “Vietnamese American,” or “South Vietnam” on a computer terminal. Depending on the high-profile status or fragility of the materials, I sorted through a portfolio alone, or a staff member physically handed me the files for my sit-down viewing. Interviews with several staff members and a private tour through the physical storage room led me to amazing findings, both in a conceptual and material sense. Soon enough, I gained a deeper appreciation for the Vietnam archive not as a place to simply learn about the past, but as a “living memorial” to a war without peace.

Many scholars have written about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, built in 1982 as a controversial piece of national commemoration, both in the way it was built and the way it sanctifies the memory of an embarrassing American war that was too hard to remember due to a lack of consensus about its purpose and value (Griswold and Griswold 1986; Wagner-Pacific and Schwartz 1991). John Carlos Rowe (2002) says that the Vietnam War is “the most chronicled, documented, reported, filmed, taped, and—in all likelihood—narrated war in history, and for those very reasons, it would seem, the least subject to understanding or to any American consensus” (197). Plainly stated, the discourse of “Vietnam” as a war and not a country in the United States has no singular meaning, and its history is defined by a lack of information (during the Cold War, many documents were redacted and shrouded in government secrecy).

For a certain sector of Americans, the Vietnam War morally and financially bankrupted the country with little to gain in terms of national pride; it was a war that had to be forgotten for the sake of national healing, but for antiwar activists, it was a remarkable lesson in humility and a necessary reminder of American imperial hubris. With greater lapses in time and the memory that comes with the passing of time, there is a greater momentum and desire to confront the war’s lingering issues head-on, rather than avoid its embarrassing aspects, such as the U.S. treatment of the South Vietnamese or the neglect of the South Vietnamese side of the war’s memory.

One potential site through which nations try to remember and work out the war’s problematic history is the archive. Housed at Texas Tech University, the VCNA expends much energy to document the experiences of all of those involved in the Vietnam War, preserving the testimony and material record of everyone, from veterans and their families to American antiwar protesters and Vietnamese refugees. Yet, few ever come to archives dedicated to war. While millions of tourists have visited the Vietnam Memorial and the National Archives in Washington, DC, and the ways those sites corral the nation to remember the war and grieve for its dead (Wagner-Pacific and Schwartz 1991; Tatum 1996), the archival repositories of the war have received much less attention. Archives like the one at Texas Tech are far less prominent—and perhaps, for most of us, far less glamorous, or perhaps even banal—but they are equally important spaces for national commemoration and public memory.

While the National Archives in the nation’s capital aims to document all facets of the nation’s history, as it contains the largest trove of government documents related to the Vietnam War, the VCNA in Texas is the largest standalone entity and archival repository for all aspects of the study of the Vietnam War.1 It contains the personal belongings, written record, and testimonies of soldiers and civilians during and even after the war. As a site for understanding U.S. history, the archive is not just a physical site or a place of memorialization for a war that shook the core of the country; it is also an axiological site for thinking about national space itself. Within the confines of this state-funded public archive,2 everything from mementos recovered on the bodies of dead soldiers to audio recordings of Vietnam’s communist leaders discussing the impact of the war on their country is included. The archive is blatant in its desire to document all facets of the war . . . and yet there is one noticeable omission . . . the South Vietnamese themselves. Despite archivists’ concerns with capturing this “other side” of the historical equation, the full inclusion of America’s Vietnamese allies is challenged by the dearth of personal materials collected as much as it is vexed by the political question of how best to represent them. The fact that the South Vietnamese lost the war and lost their country makes them the victims of the Vietnam War, and so their history becomes the “vault of tragic metaphors” (Lam 2007). The South Vietnamese story of independence, translated in the U.S. context as the Vietnamese American refugee story, has become imperceptible, as writer Andrew Lam (2005) reasons, because “our side lost, we became exiles, enemies of history . . . what is epic in one country is inconsequential in another,” the South Vietnamese have “no real biographies in the American narrative, no real history. Invisibility, it seemed, was our fate” (30).

In the following, I first give a brief history of the genesis of the archive, recognizing its founding need to preserve the memories and stories of U.S. American veterans, analyzing how the archive serves as a site of memorialization of war. Second, I look at the ways the archive tries to incorporate Vietnamese Americans in its conferences, heritage project, and oral history program. I offer reflections on the stumbling blocks the VNCA encountered in working on and with Vietnamese refugees, and how the institution is at a loss to find a proper place for the Vietnamese within its operations. In doing so, I regard this archive dedicated to an ignoble war as cognizant of the fact that not all historical subjects can be easily immortalized in space and time, and that archives themselves can bear responsibility in shaping the political economy of memory, where refugees are not easily folded into an all-inclusive sense of national history. Upon closer inspection, we discover how the center’s efforts to “Vietnamize” its holdings cannot abrogate the peculiar status of the Vietnamese as “archival others” within the U.S. historical record.

Vietnamizing the American Memory of War

As a place for considering the limits of national belonging, the Vietnam Center and Archive finds itself at pains to convert the Vietnamese into “native informants” with information palatable for the U.S. nation-state, while trying not to enfold them into the “intellectual sovereignty” of Western knowledge-production (Warrior 2009). Archival efforts to give historical value to America’s former allies, the South Vietnamese, is rebuffed by the ahistorical tendency of the United States to forget them. While the archive contains a rich amount of material documents, ranging from soldiers’ personal memoirs to military atlases and equipment donated by American soldiers such as family heirlooms, oral histories occupy a special place in the archive; according to one archivist, individual stories bring into focus “people’s views and what they have to say on a personal level.”3 My excavation of the archive speaks to the tunneling of memory, regarding the archive as both a physical space and a polyvalent site of meaning about the war and its people (Yoneyama 1999; Klein 2000; Blight 2002). I add my observations of it alongside interviews with several key members of the staff,4 which include the archive’s founder, the main reference staff member, and director of the oral history project. My findings will make readers privy to the ways archival institutions like the VNCA function as a U.S.-centric enterprise, where public meanings about history are Americanized, even as this very American archive is also undergoing a form of Vietnamization to now include the South Vietnamese perspective, and even globalization to include the North Vietnamese who won the war and now rule over communist Vietnam.5

Vietnamization refers to the Cold War policy of Americans arming the South Vietnam military and lending recognition to its foreign allies as independent nations. This military program represented the South Vietnamese as agents and later deterrents of their sovereignty who could not hold onto their own territorial power. In saying that the Vietnam War archive is Vietnamizing itself, I am purposely invoking this problematic geopolitical history—indeed, one cannot, I believe, speak of South Vietnamese people without addressing how they have become historically invisible in the first place—speaking to how certain sources of authority breed forms of power that determine the ways the South Vietnamese people become visible. As I later explain, the challenge in procuring participation by former exiles of South Vietnam is complicated by the fact that some staff members prefer that the archive is isolated from large Vietnamese ethnic enclaves, due to the rabid anti-communist politics that consume the community, as the archive does exchange information with the socialist government of Vietnam, which includes inviting communist officials to its conferences and forums—an unpopular idea with refugees who fled socialism.

Like any scholar researching information, I immersed myself mentally and physically in the archive, but instead of being a neutral researcher standing distant from my object and site of study, my embedded role as an analyst of the archive required me to study physical exhibits and interview staff about the mechanics of archiving and running an archive. What I learned is that the archive serves as a cultural (and political) medium for transmitting not only history but also memory. Indeed, as the official mission statement for the archive reminds us, there must be a full account of what happened in Vietnam, so future individuals “can study and better understand the people, places, and events of this critical time in history” (“About the Vietnam Center and Archive”).

According to the center’s mission statement: “The Vietnam Archive stands as a living memorial to all those who played some part in the nation’s ‘Vietnam experience.’ We want to preserve a complete history of the war. To do otherwise would be a disservice to history” (“About the Vietnam Center and Archive”). This early desire to take hold of sometimes unwieldy histories of the Vietnam War and put them into one collection always included the Vietnamese refugee perspective, if at least to provide a more accurate historical view. Studying the archive as a space for the representation of history requires figuring out what materials are contained there, how it’s organized, who organizes it, and for what purpose. The Vietnam Center and Archive is today the premier institute in which personal and donated materials from the war are kept, with more than three million pages of scanned material, as well as everything from U.S. military apparel to the clothing of ethnic minorities in Vietnam.6

One day in 1989, Professor James Reckner recounts, he was teaching at Texas Tech University when he asked his class of undergraduate students about the Vietnam War and was shocked by their lack of knowledge about it. Most of his students had no idea who General Westmoreland was, despite the notoriety of this controversial public figure as the commander of the U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968. Students’ lack of historical awareness inspired Reckner to start an archive to preserve the U.S. experience in Vietnam, culling materials from American veterans he knew in the local area.7 In 1989, Reckner convened the first meeting of local Vietnam veterans to discuss creating an archive using those vets’ personal materials, to show his students. From the start, the archive’s founder worked closely with Vietnam veterans, but there were no South Vietnamese organizations or cultural groups in the panhandle region, even though Texas is the state with the second largest population of Vietnamese in the United States, after California, mostly living in urban centers like Austin, Dallas, and Houston. A general information section about the archive found online states:

The Vietnam Center seeks to provide a forum for all points of view and for all topics relating to Indochina, particularly—but not limited to—the American military involvement there . . . We encourage participation by our former allies in South Vietnam but also offer the same participation to those who supported the government in Hanoi. Similarly, we place equal importance upon preserving records relating to all aspects of the Vietnam War. (“About the Vietnam Center and Archive”)

While the center supports the participation of Vietnamese officials, it encourages greater activity from its former allies and friends, the South Vietnamese, many of whom now reside in the United States. The center now includes a Vietnamese American Heritage staff member and a big official endorsement for obtaining more materials, which began in full force in 2008 with a large donation of Vietnamese political prisoner records, including the thousands of state-released records donated from the now defunct organization called Families of Vietnamese Political Prisoners Association (FVPPA), which kept track of refugee family reunification.

This chapter is rooted in an analysis of one specific archive, examining its ideological work and material contents, finding out what it can say about the real biographies and invisibility of the South Vietnamese people. The Vietnam Center and Archive, as both a center of scholarly public activity and an archive of stored materials, presents a fertile source for assessing contemporary archival practices and norms that shape the representation of historical memory. There has been no analysis of the VNCA itself, despite its salience for so many scholars and everyday people who have used its vast resources to construct their own sense of history. The VNCA could be understood as a highly political site involving disputes over the position or role of Vietnamese Americans in relation to what Marita Sturken observes as “the war with the difficult memory” (1997: 122).

But despite the VNCA’s genuine desire to consider the Vietnamese and Vietnamese American story, there are stumbling blocks to efforts at inclusion. This remains true, despite the more than one million South Vietnamese who have come to the United States since the end of the war, becoming “Vietnamese Americans” in the process, either through refugee asylum or family reunification. Many of these refugees are viewed as politically conservative and reactionary to all things communist, since many were forced to leave after the United States abandoned South Vietnam under the policy of Vietnamization, which handed over the regime’s fate to its people. In wanting to represent their story, the archive presents a possible authentic home for stories about the South Vietnamese, helping to “Vietnamize” the overly Americanized sense of U.S. military involvement overseas. Tracing Vietnamese refugee history as a “constitutive outside” or “invisible inside” of Vietnam War archival work, my research into the archive concurs with the prudent warnings of Laura Kang (2002), who claims that even when an attempt is made to invoice history’s past dues, the cultural tension over who can remember the war and who is remembered in the war “calls attention to inaccessibility of the past as self-evident fact” (225). Those of us who believe in the power of the archive may be tempted to believe that once the South Vietnamese experience is documented therein, the South Vietnamese people will secure some fungible form of recognition or value. As Edward Miller and Truong Vu (2009) noted, the “Vietnamization” of Vietnam War studies and American history should be “driven by much more than just a desire to give equal time to Vietnam and the Vietnamese” (10).

As a site of historical memory, the archive provides an opportunity to honor those who served in the war. Photos placed in official newsletters stand out in their customary portrait of former war veterans shaking hands and meeting at the many community events hosted at the archive over the years. In my comprehensive review of the Friend...