War Without Soldiers: Assembling Unifying Meanings in American Cultural Memory of the

Vietnam War

Oliver Schantz

HIST 2166 The Vietnam Wars

25 April 2023
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The American War in Vietnam – abbreviated in the United States as the Vietnam War –

exists in American cultural memory and historical consciousness in ways that reflect its

divisiveness over the legitimacy and justification of U.S. military intervention. In remembering

the United States’decisions in Vietnam, cultural memory opts for an image rather than a record.

Through the processes of negotiating and consolidating the meanings of cultural memory, the

United States has rebuilt its understanding of itself as an international power and in doing so

separated the memory of the war from the memorialization of American soldiers.

Defining Cultural Memory

The formation of shared national identity is based on collective understandings of the role

of the nation among other nations and the relationship between the people and the state that are

formed through recorded and remembered behavior. A collective identity among the people of a

nation creates, develops, and continually edits a shared story of what the nation means as an

institution. These stories emerge from interpretations of a shared past that inform cultural

memories and representations of the historical record within a society. Processes of cultural

memory interweave the individual experience with the communal or national experience in ways

that influence how both experiences exist as part of a whole.

The selection and unification of memories into a shared story is a process of evaluating

how a culture is reflected in what it chooses to give credence to: “To define a memory as cultural

is, in effect, to enter into a debate about what that memory means…Cultural memory is a field of

cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history.”1 The shared

histories created by the development of cultural memory shape the way a culture defines itself,

but the process of remembering is complicated when factual histories differ from the prominent

1
Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: the Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of
Remembering (University of California Press, 1997), 1.
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cultural memories. The dissonance between cultural memory and factual or formal history arises

through collective processes of deemphasizing, playing up, or otherwise altering elements of an

event in memory to create a consistent and agreed upon understanding of what is shared between

members of a national culture. 2

American memories of the Vietnam War have undergone selective remembering and

reinterpretation because of dissonance between the experiential records and formal histories and

the forms of remembering that fit comfortably within a standardized national identity. The lasting

American cultural memories of the Vietnam War reflect an attempt to reconcile the facts of the

war with the dominant American culture because the war challenged and strained the United

States’ understanding of itself; “The war made citizens ask fundamental questions: Who are we?

What defines us as a nation and a people? What is our role in the world?”3 The unsteadiness of

this process of questioning in comparison to the prior standardized image of a militarily and

ideologically superior United States bred myth-making and simplification as ways of explaining

and resolving the tension of a nation that understood itself as exceptional being on the losing

side.

The Vietnam War in the American Cultural Landscape

Media and Memory

The formation and spread of a shared national American memory of the Vietnam War

was formed through the ways that information about the war was shared during wartime and in

the post-war era. Ways of understanding the American War in Vietnam and remembering it as

part of a shared past are transmitted through media, often in a way that focuses on the historical

subject as a representation of its participants; “The blurring of boundaries between the image of

2
Sturken, 8.
3
Christian G. Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (New York, New
York: Penguin, 2015), xii.
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history and history as an image, between the still and moving image, between document and

reenactment, between memory and fantasy, and between cultural memory and history is evident

in the construction of national memory.”4 Shared information among the American public shaped

understandings of the Vietnam War as it unfolded that remained into the post-war era and were

reinterpreted to justify new military interventions from the 1980s onward.

The proliferation of media about Americans in Vietnam during and after the war created a

participatory element among the broader nation that contributed to the formation of national

understandings.5 In particular, images were and are a rich focal point of American cultural

memory of the Vietnam War, and many press photographs, still images, and films have become

iconic representations of the war. As icons, these photographs are recognizable to many but

separate from their full context as both historical records and symbols. As a component of the

American experience of the Vietnam War, photojournalism was one of several social factors

blamed for the United States losing the war because the photographic record of American

brutality and of the gruesomeness of war supposedly turned public opinion.6 The construction of

a homefront civilian cause for the American loss and the isolation of icons are processes of

forming cultural memory that makes sense of the Vietnam War through the images it produced.

As the Vietnam War becomes more distant from the present, media – particularly movies

– are a significant means of transmitting American perceptions and memories of the war.

Generations of Americans who are too young to have experienced the Vietnam War as it

happened receive a dramatized version through film that often reverses the role of the aggressor

to produce images of American soldiers being victimized and brutalized by the North

4
Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: the Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of
Remembering (University of California Press, 1997), 24.
5
Sturken, 24.
6
Camille Rouquet. “The Legacy of American Photojournalism in Ken Burns’s Vietnam War Documentary
Series,” Interfaces, no. 41.
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Vietnamese when the reality was that most often that the United States and U.S.-backed South

Vietnam were responsible for much more widespread attacks on North Vietnam.7

Film depictions of military heroism in the 1950s contributed to the cultural concept of an

“all-powerful, always victorious armed services”8 and established a genre of films rooted in

World War II that told stories of moral wars won through the power of the United States. Movies

about the Vietnam War tend to follow this same format with the addition of somewhat more

varied archetypes of soldiers and veterans.9 Fictional and fictionalized depictions of the Vietnam

War in film continue the post-war reinterpretation that lionizes the United States military.10

Relating the Individual

Personal, communal, national, and academic records of the war contribute material and

interpretation to a process of understanding. The meaning and analysis created within and among

each of these records contributes to a larger understanding of the relationship between the event

and its actors. Because social and individual memory are intertwined through the individual’s

participation in the social world, the memory of the society in which an individual lives impacts

the way they approach and understand how their experiences fit into the larger whole of a shared

history.

For veterans of the Vietnam War, the national discomfort around discussing the war in

detail and meaningfully integrating the war into the cultural memories that inform national

identity created an undefined and unacknowledged role for returning soldiers. The lack of

acknowledgement compared to veterans of the world wars was most visible as the Vietnam War

7
H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2000), 17.
8
Robert Moses Peaslee, “My (Collective) Memory,” in The Vietnam War in Popular Culture: The Influence
of America's Most Controversial War on Everyday Life, ed. Ron Milam, vol. 2 (ABC-CLIO, 2017), pp. 1-19,
5.
9
Peaselee, 13.
10
Lindy G. Poling, “Encouraging Students to Think Outside the ‘Box Office,’” in The Vietnam War in
Popular Culture, ed. Ron Milam, vol. 2 (ABC-CLIO, 2017), pp. 161-185, 164.
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became more unpopular and in the decades that followed the war; “Within the historically

traumatic event of the Vietnam War, trauma can be seen and heard in the image of the Vietnam

Veteran…He is the symbol of a history that America struggles to reconcile.”11 This struggle to

face a living symbol of war appeared in unflattering media representations of veterans as

“drug-addled and violent”12 and in the lack of collective acknowledgement of their return; “There

were no collective rituals of return, no national homecoming ceremonies, no official

acknowledgement that millions of Americans were returning from war. And for all the

war-related controversy, veterans returned to a country that was carrying on with business as

usual…”13 Individual veterans’ experiences of the Vietnam War were not part of the immediate

national narrative formation of the war, in part because an acknowledgement of their return

would have required an understanding of their experiences that faced the imminent American

loss in the latter part of the war.

The positive representation of Vietnam veterans in American cultural memory followed a

reexamination of homecoming rituals in light of national celebrations at the end of the Iran

hostage crisis; “The hostage homecoming triggered the gradual reemergence of a broad desire to

repair the social and political divisions of the Vietnam War era by honoring Vietnam veterans.”14

In the 1980s, memorials were constructed, veterans’ organizations were established, and a

primary method of remembering the war was established as properly honoring these veterans’

military service. This outlining of a specific kind of cultural memory as important and useful in

the process of national healing required a narrow image of veterans’ relationship with the war.

The model of reconciliation through the honoring of military service categorically separated
11
Christina D. Weber, Social Memory and War Narratives : Transmitted Trauma among Children of
Vietnam War Veterans, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 15.
12
Christian G. Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (New York, New
York: Penguin, 2015), 239.
13
Appy, 238.
14
Appy, 239.
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veterans from opposition to the war although anti-war sentiment was common among American

soldiers and veterans.15 In order for the post-war restructuring of cultural memory to work,

military service had to be unquestionably patriotic and separate from any doubt about the war’s

legitimacy.

Parallel Politics and Characterizing the 1960s

The confluence of human rights movements and the Vietnam War increased the stakes of

recognizing how the United States was reflected in its wartime decisions. Intersections between

the leadership and the tactics of the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement developed

some unified activism.16 Many representations of the civil rights movement and the anti-war

movement in cultural memory rely on flashbulb memories involving brief and consequential

memories of those outside of social movements learning about some consequential activity.17

This form of memory works to reinforce cultural memory of soldiers’ attitudes toward the war

by separating the circulated concepts of what it meant to be a soldier from the concepts of what it

meant to participate in civil rights or anti-war activism.

Remembering Vietnam veterans as patriotic because of their military service and the

anti-war and civil rights movements as valiant in retrospect is an aspect of a cultural memory that

paints the activism of the 1960s as a series of easily categorized social and political interests that

were isolated to a decade.18 This categorization is part of the simplification inherent to cultural

memory, but the emphasis on a straightforward patriotism in remembering Vietnam veterans as

15
H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2000), 62.
16
Franklin, 59.
17
Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: the Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of
Remembering (University of California Press, 1997), 25.
18
H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2000), 49.
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separate from the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement contributes to the exclusion

of dissent in the reconstructed United States national identity.

Reinterpreting the Vietnam War

Established cultural memory and the maintenance of a national identity often impact the

form and tone of how formal histories are presented. The Vietnam War contradicted the prior

standards of cultural memory that broadly upheld a national identity through the presentation of a

shared history; “During the Vietnam War a growing number of Americans questions the version

of national history so vividly enshrined in high school textbooks of the 1950s – the idea that the

United States was a peace-loving nation that had ‘accepted’ world ‘leadership’ only with the

greatest reluctance and only to help other peoples secure the blessings of liberty.”19 The shift

away from the image of an unquestionably upright and well-intentioned United States was

followed by attempts to revise, explain, or return to the pre-war concept of the U.S. as both

benevolent and a military power.

The lasting legacy of the Vietnam War in American collective memory has shifted

alongside changing social and political landscapes that reinterpret and reuse memories of the war

to understand the United States’ role as a world power. The domestic rifts of the Vietnam War

era concerned the legitimacy of American intervention and the justification of American

scaffolding for South Vietnam. In the post-Vietnam era, these deliberations over how and when

the United States should intervene shadowed foreign policy decisions. As a blemish on the story

of the United States as supremely powerful, the Vietnam War appears as a reference point in

developing new understandings of what it means for the United States to be a world power.20

19
Appy, 228.
20
David Kiernan, Forever Vietnam: How a Divisive War Changed American Public Memory, (University of
Massachusetts Press, 2014), 4.
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Prevalent interpretations of the American war in Vietnam ascribe its failure to the

government’s unwillingness to commit to continuing the war, a series of ineffective strategies

that begot ineffective strategies, or a fundamental flaw in the United States taking over a French

colonial war.21 Each of these interpretations undermines the trustworthiness of the U.S.

government, particularly in foreign policy. This overall decrease in Americans’ trust in their

government was due to a combination of political and economic factors, but the policy decisions

in Vietnam created a hesitance and a resistance to using military force unnecessarily. This

hesitance to use military intervention unless strictly necessary was labeled “Vietnam syndrome”

by proponents of U.S. militarism. Still, the United States government was averse to starting

another war.

Following a sense of stagnation in the Ford and Carter presidencies, Ronald Reagan’s

conservatism and “small government” rhetoric resurrected the idea of honorable and benevolent

leadership as a central aspect of American national identity. Reagan’s characterization of

Vietnam syndrome and his influence on the shape of American understanding of the Vietnam

War are contradictory to some of his decisions as commander-in-chief, but his presentation of the

anti-war movement as shameful and anti-American held fast as part of a reinterpreted cultural

memory of the Vietnam War; “To revive a proud faith in American exceptionalism required some

serious scrubbing of the historical record…He had to find a way to make even that bleak

experience fit into a narrative of nobility and pride. His answer was to paint those who opposed

the war as guilt-ridden losers who betrayed and dishonored heroic American soldiers.”22

President Reagan formalized and legitimized this way of remembering opposition to the Vietnam

21
H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2000), 41-43.
22
Christian G. Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (New York, New
York: Penguin, 2015), 285-286.
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War, but the reasons why remembering the anti-war movement as anti-American and the war as

regrettable but justified are broader than an individual presidency. By understanding opposition

to the war as opposition to American soldiers as figures, symbols, or individuals, this way of

remembering redirects attention away from the government’s relationship with soldiers and

instead focuses on individual honor and responsibility. In the post-war years, the reshaping of

American cultural memory was based in the revitalization of a caveated picture of American

superiority.

Politics of Memory

In the United States’ memory of the Vietnam War, memory and record are suspended

between individuals’ experiences and the meaning of the war to the nation as a collective and as

an idea; “The act of remembering an event like the Vietnam War exposes emotional investments

in the cultural meanings and representations of the war.”23 Because of the national discomfort in

recognizing how American presence in Vietnam impacted both American soldiers and the

Vietnamese, many ways of remembering the American War in Vietnam are explicitly apolitical.

The ways of memorializing, understanding, and representing the Vietnam War on the

national scale attempt to unify a story of a divisive and changeable war in a way that separates

the recognition of veterans from the recognition of the war. The national Vietnam Veterans

Memorial in Washington D.C. was explicitly designated by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Fund as “...a form of commemoration that would avoid making an explicit political statement

about the war. To regain national unity, they believed, Americans would have to learn how to

‘separate the warrior from the war.’”24 The national Vietnam Veterans Memorial reinforces the

23
Christina D. Weber, Social Memory and War Narratives : Transmitted Trauma among Children of
Vietnam War Veterans, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 27-28.
24
Christian G. Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (New York, New
York: Penguin, 2015), 240.
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form of cultural memory solidified in the 1980s that “...the deepest shame related to the Vietnam

War was not the war itself, but America’s failure to embrace its military veterans.”25 While other

memorials like the Angel Fire Vietnam Veterans Memorial promote a broader or international

view of how the Vietnam War should exist in American memory,26 the memorial placed

alongside the United States’ other memorials and monuments deemphasizes an understanding of

the American War in Vietnam as a government decision. Instead, the national Vietnam Veterans

Memorial focuses on reinforcing the cultural standard for remembering the Vietnam War as

respect for the suffering of Americans rather than examination of that suffering as part of a larger

whole.

The American War in Vietnam challenged the United States’ exceptionalism by

demonstrating how the U.S. can undermine itself. The instability of this challenge to the United

States’ concept of itself and the formation of its culture necessitated that the processes of cultural

memory foreground ways of understanding the war that recognize the American loss without

requiring a shared resolution of why and how the United States went to war.

25
Appy, 241.
26
Patrick Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of
Healing, University of Massachusetts Press, 2009.
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Bibliography

Appy, Christian G. American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity. New

York, New York: Penguin, 2015.

Franklin, H. Bruce. Vietnam and Other American Fantasies. Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press, 2000.

Hagopian, Patrick. The Vietnam War in American Memory : Veterans, Memorials, and the

Politics of Healing. University of Massachusetts Press, 2009.

Kieran, David. Forever Vietnam: How a Divisive War Changed American Public Memory.

University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.

Peaslee, Robert Moses. “My (Collective) Memory.” Essay. In The Vietnam War in Popular

Culture: The Influence of America's Most Controversial War on Everyday Life 2, edited

by Ron Milam, 2:1–19. ABC-CLIO, 2017.

Poling, Lindy G. “Encouraging Students to Think Outside the ‘Box Office.’” Essay. In The

Vietnam War in Popular Culture 2, edited by Ron Milam, 2:161–85. ABC-CLIO, 2017

Rouquet, Camille. “The Legacy of American Photojournalism in Ken Burns’s Vietnam War

Documentary Series.” Interfaces, no. 41 (2019): 65-83.

Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: the Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of

Remembering. University of California Press, 1997.

Weber, Christina D. Social Memory and War Narratives: Transmitted Trauma among Children of

Vietnam War Veterans. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

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