(Heritage and Memory Studies - 22) Ron Eyerman - Todd Madigan - Magnus Ring - Vietnam, A War, Not A Country-Amsterdam University Press (2023)

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 41
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 con-
tacts. 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 au-
thors. 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
8 Vie tnam: A War, Not a Country
to describe the division of labor that made this book possible. Ron Eyer-
man 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.
1 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 Mo-

nique 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 con-
sciousness 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
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-as-
war—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).
Introduc tion: Cultur al Tr auma and the American-Vie tnamese War 11
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 atten-
tion 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.
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.
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
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 even-
handed—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).
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
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 conscious-
ness, 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
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 acknowl-
edged 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 American-
Vietnamese 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
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
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 power-
ful 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
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 represen-
tations 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,
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
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, value-
laden 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 recogni-
tion 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
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 col-
lective 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.
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 Viet-
namese 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 com-

peting 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
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 American-
Vietnamese 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
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
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 gen-
erations 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
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).
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 divi-
sion 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
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 instruc-
tions 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
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 ter-
ritory)—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—de-
veloped 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 assas-
sinations 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
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 com-
munists 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 authori-
ties 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
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 influ-
ence 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 under-
ground. 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
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
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 Ra-

shomon 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).
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 identi-
fied, 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 organiza-
tions—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 indi-
vidual 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).
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 memo-
ries 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
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.
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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, com-

memoration, 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
doi: 10.5117/9789463723084_CH02
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 Stu-
dent 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 Revolution-

ary 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.
Cultur al Tr auma and Vie tnamese Arenas of Memory 43
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 reconcili-
ation 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 Viet-
namese, and that the victory clearly is seen as a victory for the whole of Vietnam.
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 (alter-
natively 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 Libera-
tion 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).
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).
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 strug-
gle 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
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).
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 Viet-
nam 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).
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 humili-
ation 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.
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
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.
Catholics benefited under Diem, but he was nevertheless a strong op-

ponent 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 leader-
ship 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 considera-
tions 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)
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 differ-
ences 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 anti-
parliamentarism, 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
narratives that were constructed, where even the tactical considerations

made by the North Vietnamese in relation to the two communistic super-
powers 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, sum-
marized 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.
Giap’s optimistic summary finely illustrates the state of affairs just before
the 1968 Tet Offensive. At this point, the North Vietnamese expressed con-
fidence 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).
Armed Forces in the south.24 Their “nickname”, the Viet Cong, is somewhat
misleading despite the dominance of the communist faction, as the organiza-
tion 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).
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 resist-
ance—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 Of-
fensive 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).
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 com-
bination 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 Of-
fensive 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.
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
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
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 com-
plicated. 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).
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 hap-
pened,” 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 differ-
ently. 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).
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).
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 state-
controlled 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
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 memoriali-
zation 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 per-
spective: 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).
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
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 memo-
ries—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).
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 dimen-
sions. 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,
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. Addition-
ally, 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 guer-
rillas 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.
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, cover-
ing 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.
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).
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 “Vietnam-
ese 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 addi-
tion 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.
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 documenta-
tion 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
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”—estab-
lished 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.
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 perspec-
tive, 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
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 suf-
fering. 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).
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)
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 memo-
rial 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
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 strug-
gle 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).
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 hero-
ism, 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 post-
colonial 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 resil-
ience. All is arranged and presented in such a way as to convey a heroic
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).
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 performa-
tive 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 strengthen-
ing 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
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.
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 popula-
tion 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,
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 specta-
tors/witness. All are, to some degree, “mythological” parts of the narrative,
together with the imagined community of the nation, the “scientific” com-
munistic 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
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).
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.
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.
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 film-
makers 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/.

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).
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.
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).
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 in-
cluded 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
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 re-
establishment 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
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 dif-
ferent—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 nar-
rative, 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 nar-
rative 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
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 American-
Vietnamese 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).
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 experi-
ences 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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3 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
doi: 10.5117/9789463723084_CH03
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.
The Tr auma of Vie tnam: The American Perspec tive 105
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).
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 com-
memoration, 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 perspec-
tives 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.
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 impor-
tance 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
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 genera-
tion—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
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 ex-
ceptionalism 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 mis-
sionary 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.
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 end-
of-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).
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.
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 newslet-
ters. 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) prolifer-
ated, 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).
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.”
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
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).
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.
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,
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 Ameri-
cans 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 got-
ten 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.
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.
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.”
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 argu-
ment 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 Wash-
ington 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 entertain-
ment, 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.
(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 moral-
ity 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.”
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 American-
Vietnamese War.
Tet: A Breaking Point
Media coverage, even of bloody combat, can become routinized, dead-

ening 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.
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).
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-execution-
photo/). 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.
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_Vi-
etnam_War#Public_opinion.
worth dying for a war that could not be won. The growing domestic opposi-
tion 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
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.
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.
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 sup-
port 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.
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 in-
creased, 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 decep-
tive. 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.
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 power-
fully 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
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.
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 move-
ment 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 long-
standing 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.”
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 pos-
sibility 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
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 responsibil-
ity 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 Intellectu-
als” 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 mount-
ing 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.
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 com-
memorative 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.
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 excep-
tionalism 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 Com-
munists 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.
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.
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 sup-
ported 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 increas-
ingly 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).
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).
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 corrup-
tion 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. Westmo-
reland believed Tet “had the effect of a Pearl Harbor,” in another telling reference to World War
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).
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 feel-
ing 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
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 establish-
ment—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.
published an article with the provocative title “Making the World Safe for
Communism.” This breathed life into fears of a new inward-turning isolation-
ism 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).
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.”
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 shock-
ing 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 follow-
ing 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.”
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 affect-
ing 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
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 hap-

pened, 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).
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.
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 activ-
ists 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 commemorat-
ing 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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
Popular culture is a medium of memory offering its own forms of commemora-

tion, 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 fic-
tional—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 identifica-
tion 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 audi-
ences, cinematic and narrative structures within each film work to minimize spectator difference
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 Hol-
lywood 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
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.
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.
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.
of art for public display (Sinaiko, 1998a). In the months following the dedica-
tion 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 com-
memoration 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.
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.
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
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/.
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 open-
ing 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.
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), represent-
ing 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).
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 experi-
ence, 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.
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 “fabricat-
ing 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 satisfac-
tion, 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.
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’.”
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 novel-
ist 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/the-
american-war-youve-watched-all-18-hours-of-the-vietnam-war-heres-what-ken-burns-
wants-you-to-remember/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-e%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_
term=.177cf02a04d5.
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 hap-
pened 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.”
The current consensus found amongst historians took years to estab-

lish, 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 Com-
munists 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 accept-
able 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 experi-
ence 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
“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 commemora-
tion. 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
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 profession-
als 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.
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 institu-
tions 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.
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 all-
volunteer, 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.
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 compel-
ling 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.”
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 lead-
ers. 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—Sec-
retary 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 rational-
ist 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
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 organiza-
tional 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
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.
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).
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 ex-
perience 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,
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.
Was Vietnam a moral failure? From a post-war perspective, the answer

must be yes, not least because the Vietnamese, both as victim and perpetra-
tor, 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
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 commemora-
tive 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 American-
Vietnamese War the annihilation of their governmental and political
institutions, military forces, economic system, and mode of social or-
ganization: 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.

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 The title of this chapter is taken from the film of the same name by Tran Ham (2007).
2 Thi Bui, 2017: 39-41.
doi: 10.5117/9789463723084_CH04
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 collec-
tive 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 Vietnamese-
American 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
Journey From the Fall 195
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 Vietnamese-
American 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.
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 sum-
marized 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 Vietnamese-
American 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 ter-
rifying 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
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).
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).
Closer to home for the majority of southerners was the massacre of civil-
ians 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 con-
tinuously 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
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 popula-
tion; 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 emer-
gency 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
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. Ambas-
sador 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
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, Ambas-
sador 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 neces-
sary 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.
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. govern-
ment). 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
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 Ambas-
sador 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
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. em-
bassy 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.
the place. Anything that wasn’t bolted down—and much that was—was
hauled off through the disordered crowds: chairs, desks, lecterns, refrigera-
tors, 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 aban-
doned 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
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 educa-
tion 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
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.
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
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
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.
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 Thai-
land, 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
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 com-
munist 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
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
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).
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 hard-
ships, 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)
In addition to the poverty, food shortages, and police-state tactics of social

control, the long hours of forced labor and the nightly compulsory propa-
ganda 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 resent-
ment, 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
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
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 re-
education 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
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
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
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
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
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 unaccompa-
nied 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).
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
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).
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 re-
education 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).
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 jani-
tors” (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.
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 Vietnamese-
American 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
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
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 autobio-
graphical 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
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 Vietnamese-
American 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, barber-
shops, 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.
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 Aguilar-
San 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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5 Cultural Trauma and Vietnamese-
American Arenas of Memory
Abstract
This chapter provides a fine-grained analysis of the competing narra-
tives 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 narra-
tive 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.

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 nar-
ratives 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
doi: 10.5117/9789463723084_CH05
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 organ-
izing 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 Vietnamese-
American 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,” comment-
ing 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
Cultur al Tr auma and Vie tnamese-American Arenas of Memory 239
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 Re-
public 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 politi-
cal 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
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).
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 Viet-
namese 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).
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).
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 dis-
placed 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.
The Endless War
One of the most startling contrasts between those within the Vietnamese-
American 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-California-
based 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.).
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 com-
munity 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).
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 spec-
trum, 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.

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
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 situ-
ation 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 con-
tinued 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
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 Com-
munist 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
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 com-

menced. 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 domina-
tion” (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:
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
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-yet-
triumphant 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 com-
munists 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.
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 com-
munist 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.
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 full-
fledged 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, includ-

ing 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 (Provi-
sional 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.
he has retained up to the present.10 In 2005, the off icial PNVG website
claimed that
Nowadays, many Vietnamese patriots, including Ex-Vietnamese com-

munists 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).

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 “in-
tervene 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 appear-
ances at Vietnamese-American community events. He leads processions,
makes speeches, sits as an honored guest, and accepts awards and com-
mendations. 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 actu-
ally 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 Govern-
ment 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
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, com-
munist 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).

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).
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 Vietnamese-
American 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 becom-
ing 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.
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 promo-
tion 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)
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 American-
Vietnamese 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
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 Vietnamese-
American 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
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 narra-
tive 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 increas-
ingly 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
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”).
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 pro-
empire 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 opin-
ions….” (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).
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 American-
Vietnamese 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 af-
filiated 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
penetrated South Vietnamese society, forging unequal economic relation-

ships 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 through-
out 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,
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
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).
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 de-
struction, 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 twen-
tieth century and beyond, the U.S. has positioned itself as an “us” vis-à-vis a
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 liberal-
imperial 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
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 Vietnamese-
American 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 high-
way, 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
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
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 com-
munist 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 assimila-
tion of refugees into the American landscape simultaneously served both
domestic and foreign policy in promoting the United States as a democrati-
cally 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, minimum-
wage employment, welfare dependency, and participation in the informal
economy” (2014: 99)—has often been disseminated through the trope of
“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 choco-

late. 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
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 philoso-
pher 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
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 perpetra-
tors and victims, where the victims are—by virtue of their victimhood—de-
void 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 human-
ity 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 Asian-
American 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).
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 Vietnamese-
American scholars tend to adopt a memory of the war whose narrative
begins with foreign domination and subjugation, moves through a cata-
strophically 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 docu-
ments and treaties. War and its consequences continue to affect the lives
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.
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 Vietnamese-
American 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 situ-
ates the American-Vietnamese War within a larger geopolitical and historical
context, and it features a broad critique of nearly all the participants. And
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).

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 enu-
merates 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 suf-
fering 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
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 play-
ing 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 over-
simplifications 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 nar-
rator describes how the previous generation had been radicalized when
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 es-
timation, 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 crea-
tion 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
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 confes-
sion 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
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)
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 com-
munists 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,
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 rice-
growing 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 Vietnamese-
American 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
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 liter-
ary 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 con-
structing a twenty-acre rehabilitation center for the homeless and
handicapped amid the white and tall pines of China Beach. (Hayslip:
1993: 366)
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 much-
coveted 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 short-

hand—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
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 similari-
ties 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
was interned for a long, degrading period in a re-education camp. Eventu-

ally, 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,
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 Vietnamese-

American 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
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 commu-
nity 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 repre-
sentations 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.
1. The Vietnam Heritage Flag
In the introduction, we highlighted Durkheim’s concept of collective represen-

tations: 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
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 lob-
bied 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 Vietnamese-
American community united to proclaim Garden Grove a communist-free
zone, the veneration for the Heritage flag has led to the defamation of the na-
tional 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.

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).
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 Vietnamese-

American 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
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)
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 American-
Vietnamese 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 recrimina-

tions 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 adop-
tion outside the Vietnamese-American community. In 2008, the California
State Legislature passed Resolution SCR-110 proclaiming April 23 through
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 Memo-
rial 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 freedom-
loving 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 Westmin-

ster, 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.

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 Vietnamese-
American 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 an-
nual 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
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 Vietnamese-
American 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 Vietnamese-
American 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 compet-
ing 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 Vietnamese-
American 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
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 Vietnamese-
American 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 commemora-
tion 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 memo-
rial “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.
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 demonstra-
tions 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).
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 Vietnamese-
American 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.
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 confine-
ment 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 Vietnamese-

American 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,
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.
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).
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 menac-
ing 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 im-
migrants, 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)
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 justifica-
tion, 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 narra-
tive 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.
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.
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 Hou-
ston, 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 Vietnamese-
American 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,
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 commit-
ted 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 strug-
gle 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
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 Viet-
namese-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
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 Vietnamese-
American 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.
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 symboli-
cally 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
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—al-
though 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
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 Vietnamese-
American 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 com-
munist 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,
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 Vietnamese-
American 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 direc-
tions 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 reconcili-
ation 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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6 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 develop-
ment 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 taken-

for-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 ca-
tastrophe—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
doi: 10.5117/9789463723084_CH06
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 commemora-
tion 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—re-
member, 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-Vietnam-
ese 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
Conclusion: War, Tr auma, and Beyond 329
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 continu-
ation 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
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 identi-
fied 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
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 suf-
fering 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
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.
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
countryside of foreign domination, and the resilience of the local popula-

tion 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
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
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 govern-
ments 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
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 car-
ried 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 discus-
sion 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.
The issue of collective responsibility appears more straightforward in

Vietnam itself. Given the long-term violent struggle against foreign domina-
tion, 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 neces-
sity 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 geo-
politics 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
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
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 na-
tions. 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 forgiv-
ing, 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
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 forget-
ting 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
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 implica-
tion 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.
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 per-
haps 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 recon-
ciliation 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
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 human-
ity 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 acknowl-
edging 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
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 expres-
sion, 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
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 American-
Vietnamese 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 fu-
ture. 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
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).
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 col-
lectively 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
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
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) sug-
gests, 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
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 homecom-
ing 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
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.
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. Authori-
tarian 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 policymak-
ers 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
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.
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.
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.
Index
1.5 generation 227, 231, 330 China 28-31, 33-35, 44, 46n.9, 47n.9, 50, 53-54,
Afghanistan 107, 178n.89, 205n.9, 205n.9, 54n.20, 54n.22, 61, 62, 62n.32, 63, 63n.33,
268, 349 86, 89, 95, 111, 180, 217-218, 227, 255-256, 266,
Agent Orange 45, 76, 96, 167n.82, 244-245, 273, 286, 301, 332
264, 270, 282 China Beach 135n.39, 289
Aguilar-San Juan, Karin 208, 232-233, 245, Corson, William 144n.51, 162, 177
253, 268, 294, 297, 300, 302, 304, 311-312 Chomsky, Noam 117n.12, 137
Alexander, Jeffrey 16, 38, 65 Cold War 47, 49-50, 53, 68, 108-109, 110n.6,
American Exceptionalism 106, 108-109, 111, 111-113, 118-119, 121n.21, 122, 136, 138n.42, 157,
118, 128, 133-134, 136-137, 139, 146, 153, 330, 173, 179, 182, 266, 273, 345
345 collective effervescence 19
Anderson, Benedict 15, 66, 81, 108 collective identity 16-17, 21-24, 28n.8, 36, 38,
ao dai 316 67-68, 79, 82, 115, 184-185, 187, 194-196, 207,
Apocalypse Now 149 233, 238, 294-295, 298, 315, 317, 319-320,
Appy, Christian 114n.9, 115, 135 327-330, 336, 339, 349
April 30 14, 24, 41-44, 61, 104, 144, 195n.4, 197, collective memory 11-12, 16, 18-28, 36-37,
205, 207, 210-212, 214, 218, 221, 239, 241, 246, 45-46, 56, 63-66, 67n.36, 68, 71, 73, 78, 81,
249, 251, 268, 283, 298-299, 301-302, 317-318, 85, 88, 94, 104, 107-108, 112, 125, 158, 163, 176,
320, 335, 339 184, 187, 193-194, 196, 207, 220, 243, 260-261,
Army of the Republic of Vietnam 265-266, 279-280, 287, 293-294, 302-303,
(ARVN) 12, 60, 92n.56, 119n.15, 125, 142, 305-306, 313-314, 316-317, 319-320, 328, 340,
142n.48, 143, 143n.49, 197, 199, 202, 212-214, 348-349
217, 219, 240-242, 242n.3, 246-248, 256, 270, collective representation 18-23, 134, 290, 295,
283, 296 333
As Seen By Both Sides 11, 167 collective responsibility 337-338, 350
Assmann, Aleida 22, 154, 339-340 collective trauma 82, 91-92, 94-96, 168, 329
Bacevich, Andrew 178, 350 Cronkite, Walter 127
Bao Dai (Emperor) 32-35, 47, 47n.11, 50 cultural death 17
Black April 24, 37, 238, 298-305, 317-318, 340 cultural trauma 11-12, 15-18, 23, 36n.11,
boat people (boat person) 37, 206, 222, 227, 37-38, 91, 93, 106, 169, 186, 196, 295, 298, 315,
231, 269, 288, 303, 318, 339 319-320, 327-330, 333, 336, 348-349, 351
Broderick, Ned 165, 166, 166n.81, 167 DeGloma, Thomas 26
Boot, Max 181 Demmer, Amanda C. 197n.5, 203, 208, 215n.11,
Buddhism (Buddhist) 45, 50n.16, 51, 51n.16, 62, 224n.13, 226n.14, 244, 244n.5, 248
64, 93, 119n.15, 129, 141-142, 144, 233, 347 Derrida, Jacques 342-343, 347
Bui, Thi 193n.2, 281-283, 287 Diem, Ngo Dinh 35, 44n.4, 50-51, 51n.16,
Burden, Chris 155, 156n.67 51n.17, 52, 52n.18, 53, 55-56, 83, 110, 129,
Burns, Ken 10, 12, 36, 54n.22, 106n.3, 114n.10, 139-142, 142n.49, 181, 201, 339
118n.13, 162n.78, 172, 172n.86, 242, 244, 334, Dien Bien Phu 34, 47-48, 54n.21
338, 345, 350, 351 Dinh Q Le ̂ 88, 89
Calley, William 126-127, 148, 161, 336 Doan, Brian 307-308, 308n.24
camp, labor 218 Doi Moi 62
camp, re-education (re-education) 44, 61, and art 90
61n.30, 82, 90, 198, 212, 214, 215, 215n.11, Dragonfish 292
216-217, 220, 225, 227, 247-248, 260, 262, 266, Duong, Van Minh 42, 43n.2, 104, 197, 201-202,
269, 278, 283, 285-286, 288, 292, 308, 335, 207, 210, 239-241, 241n.2, 242
344, 347 Durkheim, Emile 18-20, 295-296, 315
camp, refugee 212-213, 222-224, 226-227, 248, dust of life (bụi đời) 224
256, 260, 274, 282, 292, 317, 333, 348 Eisenhower, Dwight 47, 110-111, 112n.8
Caputo, Philip 114, 116-117 Elliott, Duong Van Mai 242
Cao, Lan 12, 288, 320n.28 Embassy, American (in Vietnam) 104, 123-124,
Catfish and Mandala 227, 288, 290 161n.78, 204-206, 208-209
Catholicism (Catholic) 16, 29-30, 35, 45, 50-51, Espiritu, Yen Le 10n.2, 67, 118n.13, 143, 147n.57,
51n.16, 52, 112, 112n.7, 137, 141-142, 144, 228, 155n.66, 156, 244, 246n.6, 265, 267-270,
230, 261 273-275, 278
Eyerman, Ron 16, 36, 38, 119n.17, 147-148, Kerry, John 116, 127, 131
151n.60, 161, 337, 341 Kiernan, Ben 13n.6, 32, 47n.11, 49, 52n.18,
Fitzgerald, Frances 45, 141, 174 52n.19, 53, 55n.23, 57, 57n.27, 57n.28, 97,
F.O.B. 293, 305, 305n.22 111, 119n.18, 139, 140n.44, 141, 142n.49, 198,
F.O.B. II 305, 306, 307 215-216, 248
Ford, Gerald 104-5, 137, 200-201, 203, 208, King, Martin Luther 129, 136
226-227, 240, 246, 269, 348 Kipling, Rudyard 271
Freud, Sigmund (Freudian) 317, 340-341 Kissinger, Henry 144, 179, 179n.92, 181, 197n.5,
Fulbright, William 131, 131n.36 200, 203-204, 334, 343
Garden Grove 256, 258, 263, 298, 304, 311, 313 Korean War (Korean conflict) 17, 109, 111, 114,
Geneva Accords (Geneva Agreement) 34-35, 118n.14, 138n.42, 157,178n.90, 179
47, 49-50, 52, 55, 74, 112, 139, 197-198, 329 Ky, Nguyễn Cao 28n.9, 141-143, 182, 207, 228,
Griswold, Charles 342-343 240-242, 249, 262-263
ghosts 91 Lam, Andrew 228, 233, 251-252, 290-291, 298,
Goldwater, Barry 176 320
Golub, Leon 165 Le, Duan 58, 125n.26, 176n.88, 338
Good Guys Electronics (hostages) 252 Lewy, Guenter 147, 344, 346
Goscha, Christopher 32 Lieu, Nhi T. 226, 245, 253, 259, 265-267, 270,
Hagel, Chuck 168-9 274-275, 296
Halberstam, David 123, 173 lieux de mémoire 36, 294-295, 298, 316
Halbwachs Maurice 18, 20-22, 25, 64, 66 Lin, Maya 154n.64, 302
Hauser, William 178 Linh, Dinh 286-287
Hawthorne, Lesleyanne 197, 204, 213-214, Lippard, Lucy 122, 162, 164-165, 167-168,
216-218, 230, 242 168n.84
Hayden, Tom 133-134 Little Saigon 232-233, 245, 258, 258n.12, 295,
Hayslip, Le Ly 144n.51, 289, 338 297, 303, 309, 312, 315-316
Heinemann, Larry 169 Little Saigon Daily News 244, 258, 258n.12
Heritage flag 295-296, 300, 302, 305, 308-309, Love Like Hate 286-287
316 Madigan, Todd 11n.3, 16, 36n.11, 279n.17
Herring, George 199, 344 Mannheim, Karl 22, 27
Hi-Tek Video 309, 311 Manyon, Julian 200, 205
Hmong 45n.7 Marlantes, Karl 10, 172, 182, 351-352
Ho Chi Minh 13n.6, 28n.9, 31-35, 41, 47, 47n.10, Martin, Graham (U.S. Ambassador to the
50-51, 52, 52n.19, 56-58, 72, 72n.41, 73, 81, Republic of Vietnam) 104, 201, 203-204
81n.46, 83, 86n.48, 113, 118n.14, 217, 253, 256, McCain, John 173
277, 281, 285, 307-311, 331, 338 McKelvey, Robert 224-225, 230
Ho Chi Minh City 11n.4, 41-42, 64, 66, 73-74, McMaster, H.R. 145, 180-181
225, 264, 289-290, 293 McNamara, Robert 118n.14, 125, 127, 145,
Ho Chi Minh Trail 44n.5, 57, 60, 70 145n.56, 180-181, 334, 343
Hoang, Co Minh 249-251 mnemonic alignment 26
Hoang, Doan 221 mnemonic battles 23-24, 306, 309, 312, 315
Hue 30, 33, 58, 119n.16, 125n.26, 199, 335, 347 mnemonic community 316
Huynh, Chau 305-306, 309 mnemonic products and practices 21, 36
Indochina (First Indochina War, French model minority 230, 274-275
Indochina War) 11n.4, 13n.6, 44, 46 Monkey Bridge 288
(Second Indochina War) 14n.6, 43, 46 Montagnards 45n.7, 248
(Indochina Communist Party) 28n.9 Museum of the Boat People and the Republic of
Iraq 107, 149, 175, 178n.90, 268-269, 349 Vietnam 37
Jamieson, Neil 30, 298 My Lai 109, 126, 147-148, 161, 336-337
Japan (Japanese) 31-33, 35n.10, 44-45, 47n.10, narrative 13, 16-18, 21-26, 28, 35n.10, 36-38,
51n.16, 110, 162, 177, 181, 185n.97, 200, 266, 281, 43-44, 45n.6, 45n.7, 46, 53-54, 54n.20, 62-63,
284, 331 63n.33, 63n.34, 64-65, 67-69, 69n.38, 70n.39,
Johnson, Lyndon 105n.1, 110-111, 111n.7, 113, 71-74, 77, 79-83, 85, 87, 90-96, 96n.57, 97, 106,
114n.10, 117-118, 118n.14, 119-120, 120n.19, 108-109, 111, 117-118, 120n.20, 124n.25, 132n.37,
125, 128n.31, 129, 129n.31, 129n.32, 131n.36, 135n.40, 137-138, 138n.42, 139, 143, 145-148,
134n.39, 137, 145, 180-181, 181n.94, 271 148n.58, 149-150, 153-154, 158n.70, 164, 177,
Karnow, Stanley 139, 199, 203 185n.97, 186, 194-195, 195n.4, 196, 207, 220,
Kennedy, John 110-111, 111n.7, 114, 119, 138, 233, 238-239, 245-246, 249, 251-254, 256-265,
140-141, 145n.56 265n.15, 266-269, 274-275, 278-281, 283-284,
Index 359
286-288, 290-294, 297-300, 302-306, 309-315, 239-240, 240n.1, 241, 241n.2, 242, 244-246,
319-320, 328, 330-332, 339-340, 347, 349 248-249, 251, 256, 259-260, 263, 270, 273-274,
National Liberation Front (NLF) 44, 44n.4, 278, 281, 286, 289, 298-299, 306, 316-320, 337,
52-53, 55-56, 56n.25, 57, 57n.28, 59-60, 62, 339, 353
70n.39, 76, 86, 92, 97, 124n.25, 142n. 49 San Jose 12, 37, 264, 296, 314
Nguoi Daily News 258n.12, 305 Schechner, Richard 35n.10
Nguyen, Bich Minh 198, 289-290 Schwenkel, Christina 10n.2, 12, 67, 77
Nguyen, Lien-Hang 59, 63, 176n.88 Selective Service Act 114
Nguyen, Mimi Thi 267, 270-273 Sheehan, Neil 123, 143
Nguyen, Nathalie Huynh Chau 196, 198, 215 Smelser, Neil 16, 295
Nguyen, Viet Thanh 10, 103, 115n.11, 159n.73, Snepp, Frank 200, 202-203, 205
237, 243-244, 265-270, 275-276, 279, 283-285, South China Sea 206, 209-210, 219, 226
287-288, 297, 299, 312, 345, 349 Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.) 31, 33, 50, 53-54,
Ninh, Bao 26, 54n.22, 91, 91n.55, 93-94, 106n.3, 54n.22, 63, 70, 87, 95, 106n.3, 111, 340
115n.11, 172, 172n.86, 338 Spector, Ronald 150
Nixon, Richard 26, 72, 110-111, 114n.10, 118, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner 12, 289
118n.14, 126, 125, 129n.31, 131, 144, 144n.52, Stone, Oliver 27, 144n.51, 159, 159n.70, 159n.73,
144n.53, 146, 160n.76, 179-182, 187, 200, 160, 160n.74
242n.3, 337 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) 129,
Nora, Pierre 21, 36, 64, 294 133
Nothing Ever Dies 26 Tai, Hue-Tam Ho 72n41
Novick, Lynn 10, 12, 36, 54n.22, 106n.3, 118n.14, Takaki, Ronald 247-249, 262
162n.79, 172, 242, 344, 338, 345, 350-351 Tan Son Nhut Airport 203-204, 207-208
O’Brien, Tim 116, 164, 169-172 teach-in 130
Oh, Saigon 221 Tet (New Year holiday) 247, 256, 310
Olick, Jeffrey 21, 184 Tet Offensive 12, 54n.22, 55-57, 57n.28, 58-60,
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous 292 63n.33, 109, 119n.16, 122n.22, 124, 124n.25,
Operation Baby Lift 208, 263 125, 125n.26, 126-127, 138, 143n.50, 144n.50,
Orange County 228, 231-233, 245, 301, 310-311, 160, 187, 199, 203, 233, 331, 337, 353
314 The Best We Could Do 193, 281, 283, 287
Paris Peace Accords 61, 138, 201, 246 The Gangster We Are All Looking For 292
peace with honor 22, 144 The Sympathizer 283-288
Pelaud, Isabelle Thuy 207, 218, 269, 278 Thieu, Nguyen Van 42, 104, 142, 200-202,
Pentagon Papers 52, 52n.19, 109, 113, 119n.18, 239-240, 240n.1, 242, 260-262
123, 129n.32, 157, 179, 181, 344 Thompson, A.C. 249-250, 312-314
Pham, Andrew X. 227, 288 totem 18-19, 295, 315
Phan, Aimee 293 Tran, Ham 193n.1
Phuc, Phan Thi Kim 160n.76, 272-273 Tran, Vu 292
pirates 220-221 Truman, Harry 33, 110-111, 271
Platoon 26, 159, 159n.70, 160n.74 Truong, Monique T.D. 9
Podhoritz, Norman 113, 139 Truong, Nhu Tang 26
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 15, Turse, Nick 94
148-149, 244, 351 Valverde, Kieu-Linh Caroline 265, 277, 298,
Rabe, David 169-170 305-306, 308-309
racism 144, 226, 260, 269-270 Viet kieu 264, 290
Rashomon 35n.10 Viet Minh 28n.9, 31-34, 47, 47n.10, 48, 48n.12,
Reagan, Ronald 105, 108-109, 112, 183-184 50, 51n.16, 55, 56n.25, 73-74, 281-282
Republic of Vietnam Military Forces Veith, George 199, 205
(RVNMF) 28n.9, 37, 197, 208, 211, 214, 228, Vietnam Combat Artists Program 164-168
246, 248, 251, 299, 316 Vietnam Military History Museum 69-71
Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam Museum of Revolution 71-74
Vietnam 11, 11n.4, 12, 77, 79n.44 Vietnam Veterans Memorial 105, 138, 148,
Ricoeur, Paul 17, 276, 294 148n.58, 151-152, 152n.62, 155, 157-158, 162-163,
Saigon 10n.2, 22, 30-31, 33, 37, 41-43, 51, 56, 58, 182, 272, 302, 334
61, 69-70, 74-75, 97, 104, 106, 117n.12, 119n.16, Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey 281, 283
123-124, 124n.25, 126, 126n.27, 132, 137-138, Vietnamese-American Vietnam War Memo-
140n.44, 141-146, 147n.57, 150, 157, 160-161, rial 37, 157, 301-304
161n.78, 162, 168, 183, 195n.4, 196-197, 197n.7, Vietnamese Arts and Letters Association
198-200, 202-209, 212-215, 217-218, 226-227, (VAALA) 305, 305n.22, 305n.23, 308
Vietnamese Organization to Exterminate Westminster 37, 258, 262, 296, 302-304,

Communists and Restore the Nation 308-309, 311, 313
(VOECRN) 312-314 Westmoreland, William 26, 111, 111n.7, 121,
Vo, Nguyễn Giáp 54, 54n.21, 55, 58, 125n.26, 124n.25, 125, 125n.26, 129n.32, 140, 140n.46,
338 143, 144n.50, 145, 334, 344
Vuong, Ocean 292 White, Hayden 194-195
Wayne, John 113-4, 138, 147 White Man’s Burden 269, 271
War Remnants Museum 74-80 Willbanks, James 199-200, 202
We Should Never Meet 293 William Joiner Foundation 167
Webb, James 117, 335 Wright, James 107, 110
Zerubavel, Eviatar 23, 316-317

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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

Amsterdam University Press

Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden

isbn 978 94 6372 308 4

1 Introduction: Cultural Trauma and the American-Vietnamese War 9

2 Cultural Trauma and Vietnamese Arenas of Memory 41

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

Book production is always a collective effort; this book in particular. The

Keywords: Vietnam War, cultural trauma, collective memory, cultural

At the close of the twentieth century, Vietnamese-American novelist Mo-

1 Cited in Kunzle, 1991: 23.

3 See Madigan (2020) for a detailed discussion of competing understandings of cultural

The Theater of War

For most Americans, mention of “the Vietnam War” conjures up images of

involvement in Vietnam, so powerful are these representations that it is

the War of National Independence, the American War of Aggression, the

government of Vietnam, Vietnamese-Americans to refer to those Vietnamese

and consists of damage to the integrity of the group’s collective identity. In

occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a

An episode of cultural trauma, then, has two interrelated moments: first

It is a process that aims to reconstitute or reconfigure a collective identity,

In other words, in order to count as an episode of cultural trauma, a shared

group members, binding them together by enabling certain thoughts,

to command a certain level of respect: many shudder at the sight of spilt

the goals of professional history—regardless of whether they are actually

of the three principal people groups, we examine the social processes

The victorious Vietnamese of the SRV have also fashioned a founding

In order to expose the often impassioned mnemonic battles between com-

distinct conversations in which specific individuals and groups use specific

Historical Background and the March Toward War

In order to better understand the collective memories of the groups we

militant Vietnamese anti-imperialist organization that aimed for a national

authority to Ho Chi Minh’s government. A few days later, the agitation by

Annan and Tonkin—the area of Vietnam north of the 16th parallel—while

arrangement was signed by representatives of France and the DRV, while

The Book’s Approach

The American-Vietnamese War “was a war of many perspectives, a Ra-

numerous war-related museums, monuments, and memorials throughout

Keywords: Collective memory, Vietnamese history, war museums, com-

April 30, 1975: The Moment of Triumph

We are the representatives of the Saigon—Cho Lon—Gia Dinh Revolution-

This quote is telling in many ways, as it reveals a nationalistic ideology of

A Brief Historical Background

As already pointed out in the previous chapter, there is an immense literature

the nation, as we will discuss, as it marked the nation’s historical identity

U.S., France attempted to implement a “Vietnamization” of the war—or, in

Catholics benefited under Diem, but he was nevertheless a strong op-

narratives that were constructed, where even the tactical considerations

The National Liberation Front

As mentioned before, the National Liberation Front (NLF) was formally

organization as a whole was incorporated into the institutions of the Socialist

The Tet Offensive

Many observers have noted the importance of the American escalation

1 Introduction: Cultural Trauma and the American-Vietnamese War 9

2 Cultural Trauma and Vietnamese Arenas of Memory 41

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