Four decades on

In American visions, the larger conflict known as the second Indochina War is frequently masked by the name “the Vietnam War.” As Laderman and Maritini (2013) argue, though thousands of works have been published on the subject, the long term affect of publication to date, has been to eliminate Vietnamese voices from history, in favor of monolithic portrayals spurred by political interest rather than historical accuracy. For America, this has driven toward re-establishing a support of military intervention (pp. 3-6). For Viet Namthe current reshaping has been dominated by “export oriented trade” (p. 9).[i] For both Viet Nam and the United States “forgetting, and even ‘historical error’” have been “crucial” factors to the manufacturing of nationalist mythos (p. 12). The problematic history of the Second Indochina War is not easy for anyone to address, Vietnamese or American. It is deeply rooted in national education systems, deeply rooted in nationalist oriented societies. As Walter Hixon notes in his contribution to this volume: “While only a small minority of Americans have read a basic history of the Vietnam War, tens of millions of them have seen the Rambo films or the Chuck Norris Missing in Action series” (p. 48). However, even to those who are familiar with the realities that there was “A My Lai a Month”[ii] and that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was utterly manufactured through botched intelligence reports, Four Decades On provides a deep, updated analyses on a wide variety of topics that drive, in the end, toward the reconstruction of the narrative of the Second Indochina War through an emphasis on social history that brings new light to a troubling past.

 

Even in existing studies of the Vietnam War in American historical mythos, the blowback created by the American backing of the Ngô Định Diệm regime has been generally well examined. However, as the essay from Ngo Vinh Long[iii] demonstrates, it is equally important for a reconsideration of the blowback created by the American support of the southern regime from 1973 to 1975 as it “undermined the hopes for a less violent end to the war…” and “…indirectly empowered those elements of the revolutionary movement that pursued more hardline politics after 1975” (p. 17). There was not a single “Third force” at this point in time, but rather a conglomeration of ‘third forces’. Most were urbanized. Others were not. Meanwhile, the erasure of the temporary potential for political diversity is often overlooked. While president Thieu was quote by the Washington Post as saying that there were no political prisoners at the time in the South, Tran Van Lam noted there were 100,000. According to prisons expert Ngo Cong Duc, there were 200,000 (p. 24-25). Resettlement programs reminiscent of the Diệm regime continued while the American government poured in aid. 660,000 Vietnamese were planned for relocation to construct Hamlets and “DevelopVirginLand” (p. 29). These two factors combined to intensify the politics of the southern as reunification came, where Ngo Vinh Long concludes that “Had the repression of the third force not occurred from 1973 to 1975, the political legacies of the war might have been quite different for postwar Viet Nam” (p. 39).

 

Socially accepted strategic amnesia

 

In the post-war climate, one might note that American politics tended to underscore the narrative that the United Stateswas ‘driven’ to enter Vietnam. Hixon’s essays begins by emphasizing that there has been a group of American scholars who have found this few to be inaccurate, as a clear ‘choice’ was made (p.44). Hence, the “search-and-destroy operations, artillery strikes, chemical warfare, and a bombing campaign unprecedented in human history…[that]…[r]avaged the Indochina region” (p. 46) ought to be seen in light of this choice.  Furthermore, the forgetting of the productions Go Tell the Spartans (1978) and PBS’s Vietnam: A Television History (1983) must be seen in this light as well. It was productions like those that combined with a turn of the role of journalists in the late 1960s that combine to create the framework for the contemporary analysis of journalists and scholarship that continue to uncover “disturbing new evidence of the depth of American malic there” (p. 54).[iv] Almost as frustrating as lack of coverage for such discussions, in favor of “remembering national heroes” had been the insistence of American politicians, presented in Alexander Blooms essay, passionately attempting to kick an imagined “Vietnam syndrome” displaying what J. William Fulbright, former Senate Chair of the Foreign relations committee once critiqued as “self-centered arrogance” (p. 67), that consistently ignored the reconciliation process that has needed to occur within Vietnam as well.

 

Even as the idea of “resolution” for the Vietnamese-American relationship is a difficult question to tackle as Christina Schwenkel highlight that, at the base level, even the very “memory landscape” of Vietnam is altered for foreign tourists who, while they are encouraged to visit “national landmarks” are also directed towards geographies that would not be at all important for the Vietnamese imaginaire, when compared to their importance in American imaginings. As Schwenkel argues, these include the DMZ, Montagnard communities, Hamburger Hill and others made famous by the accounts of American soldiers and popular culture (p. 199). Meanwhile, even Vietnamese popular culture has repackaged the war for American envisioning. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s contribution points out the ironic use of the title “Last Night I dreamed of Peace” from the republication of the diary (Nhật Ký) of Đặng Thùy Trâm, a Vietnamese martyr who died in 1970. When the diary was released inVietnamit sold an astonishing 430,000 copies, in a country where most publications run between 500 and 2,000 copies. The irony comes from, as Viet Thanh Nguyen argues, that although the title of the diary could be repackaged, the content, which mentions dreaming of peace only a select number of times and instead frequently focuses on the inherent “animal” nature of Americans. The presentation was too simple, the title for Americans, the content for Vietnamese. Nguyen cautiously points out that this sole example strikes a tune for the continued repercussions of American intervention inAfghanistanandIraqand highlights that. Nguyen uses this point to make his argument that  The kind of dreaming that peace and reconciliation requires “will not happen without cosmopolitanism and its persistent, irritating reminder that it is easier to wage war than fight for peace” (p. 146)

 

 

 

Ironies of the struggle for peace

 

Fighting for peace is exactly the sort of topic that one finds accounted for through the reemphasis on social history in the later half of Fourty Years On. In Mariam B. Lam’s contribution, readers receive an excellent reconsideration of the topic of cinema, as Lam reveals that Saigon private collection from the forgotten 1960s “range from Yoko Ono-like abstract videos to films that tackle contemporary issues of sexuality, drugs, religious practices, peace, music, miniskirts, and the military-industrial complex” (p. 160). Lam then uses this topic to highlight an institutional problem facing contemporary Vietnamese cinema, for all its admitted increased influence from Hollywood and Soeul: there is a gap in Film studies between the Ford foundation sponsored program in Ha Noi (which closed in 2008), the Ho Chi Minh contemporary affiliate of the same program and the actual filmmakers, as the majority of Vietnamese film makers are now coming out of Ho Chi Minh City College of Theater and Cinema (p. 165).

 

As institutional and educational gaps continue to hinder the process of international relations, Scott Landerman’s essay reveals that this problem is not solely an artistic, cosmopolitan concern as he examines the ban of Vietnamese catfish that was raised just after the release of a Mississippi State University study that reported three out of four American consumers preferred the taste of Vietnamese farmed fish (p. 182). Racially, politically, and economically oriented propaganda was then mobilized in the United Statesto place harsh restriction of America’s “free economy,” while at the same time, the American government called for Vietnamto lift restrictions. The unequal economic relations between the United Statesand Vietnambecome even more evident through reading the essays of Charles Waugh and Diane Niblack Fox.[v]

 

The ever so popular “Agent Orange” – generally remembered as “orange poison” (chất độc da cam), as noted by Waugh, actually refers to, as Fox reveals, the TCDD form of dioxin that contaminated the defoliants Agents: Orange, Purple, Pink and Green. As if it would not be disappointing enough for readers to be reminded of the fact that real breakthroughs in the treatment of TCDD related illnesses did not come until as late as the fall of 1999 (with the introduction of IFRC programs), Fox also reminds us that the very same companies that were hired to produce defoliants during the Second Indochina War remain two of the largest companies in Vietnamese economy, now producing chemical sprays for mass agriculture (p. 213, 299). Taking this environmentally concerned theme as a focus, Waugh then adds that traditionally, Vietnamese culture has maintained a close relationship between individuals and their environs, as seen through the contents of ca dao folk songs. However, after the war, perhaps the experience of being disjointed from their environs could be shared between those Vietnamese abroad and those at home who might share a similar sense of disjuncture (p. 254). Nevertheless, even in the midst of the “onwards and upwards” development rhetoric, Waugh does highlight that some environmental consciousness was raised in Vietnam in light of the calls to halt Bauxite mining (2009 – although these calls were also politically and economically motivated) and calls to halt new developments in Lenin Park in Ha Noi. Nevertheless, Waugh’s essay does not address the more potentially disastrous environmental debate of the development of wind power vs. nuclear power along the Vietnamese coastline, the result which, will no doubt be a turning point, deciding whetherVietnam’s officials put any weight to the words “Xanh-Sạch-Đẹp,” or rather place short-term solutions ahead of real potential innovation.

 

If Waugh’s essay highlights one of the most pressing concerns in Vietnam today, the concluding essay to the volume, by Bruce Franklin reveals one of the most pressing concerns for American society: the occurrence of two flags: The POW/MIA flag and the American Flag. This commentary is not meant to disrespect the POW/MIA flag in anyway, but rather highlights the inappropriate and factually inaccurate assertions of “POW’s” that “remained behind” in Vietnam, after the final release of the last 561 POWs at the end of the Second Indochina War. The effect of these false accusations, made popular by certain American administrators, in light of the end of the war, brings to mind the continued relevance of Vietnam to the global community in light of the war, and in light of a continued perseverance for American strong-arm interventionalism, as Franklin concludes “the true history and crucial lessons of the Vietnam War are now missing in action” (p. 289). Thus, one can assert, based on this volume, that just as “forgetting” might temporarily aid the process of reconciliation, continued research and scholarly production on the Second Indochina War, such as those reflections produced in this volume, are integral to the creation of a regional and international discourse of reconciliation.

 

 

 

 

 

William B. Noseworthy,UniversityofWisconsin-Madison, Center of Khmer Studies

 

 

 

 

[i] The editors have noted only to use “Vietnam” as in reference to “American discursive constructions” – thus the use of “Viet Nam” refers to the country – leaving the choice of diacritics up to the authors (p. 14)

 

[ii] This common catch phrase is taken from the title of: Nick Turse “A My Lai a Month,” The Nation (New York), November 18, 2008. [http://www.thenation.com/article/my-lai-month]

 

[iii] See also Ngo Vinh Long’s earlier essay: Ngo Vinh Long, “Vietnamese Perspectives,” in Stanley Kutler, ed., Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (1996), pp. 591-611.

 

[iv] As a qualification the author of this essay notes: ““While mostU.S. servicemen did not engage in atrocities (90 percent did not even engage in combat), and many were appalled by them and duly reported them, it is no longer possible to treat “My Lai” as an aberration” (p. 54)

 

[v] Fox is one of the reigning experts in field regarding the history of “Agent Orange.” See also:  “Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the United States: Stories of Trauma and Survival.” In Wynn Wilcox, ed. Vietnam and the West: New Approaches. Cornell. 2011.