Looking Back on the Vietnam War: Twenty-first-Century Perspectives

War

Introduction

Looking Back on the Vietnam War

BRENDA M. BOYLE AND JEEHYUN LIM

The American War in Viet Nam radically impacted the United States, its allies, and the Southeast Asia region during the Cold War, and its effects have continued to be felt in the United States and Southeast Asia for decades following. Even after the U.S. withdrawal from Viet Nam in 1973, the war continued to influence, via the Vietnam syndrome, U.S. foreign policy and the constitution of U.S. military forces; the nation’s conduct of war expanded, and the war had significant bearing on U.S. cultural narratives, memorialization practices, and attitudes toward authority. It likewise continued to impact Southeast Asian countries. Not only were landmines, disabled South Vietnamese veterans, Amerasian children, and Agent Orange left behind, but also millions of Vietnamese people were forced to flee the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam beginning with the fall of Saigon in 1975 and heightening in the 1978–1979 boat people crisis.

Although scholars continued to engage with the war and its effects in the United States following the war, with the Soviet Union’s 1990 demise and the end of the Cold War, critical attention to the Vietnam War and its outcomes dwindled in the 1990s. In the United States at least, the war seemed to be a settled or an inconsequential matter of the past. That Bill Clinton could be elected president of the United States in 1993 with no U.S. military service on his record, let alone in the Vietnam War, exemplifies this seeming inconsequentiality. However, with the normalizing of relations between the United States and the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam in 1995, the opening of archives in the United States and Southeast Asian and former Soviet Bloc countries, and the U.S. initiation of similarly long-term wars comparable to Vietnam in Iraq and Afghanistan, this scholarship has rebounded. Much of that scholarship is based on discovery of new archival materials, often resulting in reconsiderations of the historical record of the war era.¹ Much of it, too, has been founded in the firsthand war experiences of its chroniclers.

Looking Back on the Vietnam War not only joins the scholarly rebound by tracing specifically social and cultural impacts of the Vietnam War, it also reconsiders what we think we know about the war. It questions who determines when war begins and ends, how war-incurred disability can determine a life, and why local cultures of death and commemoration are influenced both by battlefield clashes and later interpretations of those clashes. Crucially, the collection manifests the centrality of diasporic narratives to understandings of war. Consequently, this volume revisits received ideas, includes voices and circumstances from the war era that previously might have been regarded as insignificant, and reveals and reflects on twenty-first-century outcomes of the Vietnam War. In looking back from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the collection looks anew at the war and its outcomes, bringing fresh insights to understanding war generally and the Vietnam War specifically.

Like the scholarly ones, cultural representations of the war also fluctuated in number after the mid-1990s, with those by Vietnamese Americans and other Southeast Asian people increasing as mainstream U.S. representations dwindled. By 2015, still in a time of war in the Middle East, the fortieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon generated many remembrances of the war. The documentary In Country (2014) may be the cultural product marking the March 30, 1975, fall—the ostensible end of the Vietnam War—that was the most widely discussed in mainstream media.² Made by two documentary filmmakers, Mike Attie and Meghan O’Hara, who followed a group of Vietnam War reenactors in Salem, Oregon, over the course of a single cycle of their reenactment, In Country suggests the Vietnam War may have joined the list of historical wars in modern reenactment.³ While the documentary suggests that the Vietnam War maintains an important place in popular culture, after decades of movies, TV shows, films, and fiction on one or another aspect of the war, In Country also suggests that the place of the Vietnam War in the popular imagination may be in flux. The reenactors who have gathered to play out scenes of conflict in the imaginary jungle of Southeast Asia are a variegated group of men whose relationships to the Vietnam War as well as what they want from the reenactment vastly differ. A few are veterans of the Vietnam War; a few are current or ex-military men who have toured or are touring in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; a few are men who either have enlisted in the armed forces or who want to experience combat without enlisting. Their different identities are reflected in their different needs, and the reenactment at once serves as entertainment, therapy, and fantasy in letting these men vicariously (re)experience the Vietnam War. In fact, the world of the reenactors in the documentary may well be a microcosm of the multiple functions, narratives, and desires of the Vietnam War in contemporary society.

The multiplication and fragmentation of the meaning of the Vietnam War as illustrated in the documentary calls to mind Fredric Jameson’s well-known characterization of the Vietnam War as the first terrible postmodernist war.⁴ Referring to the fusion of a whole range of contemporary collective idiolects in the language of Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Jameson suggests the Vietnam War initiated the search for a new language of representation.⁵ Of course the multiplicity one finds in In Country is quite different from what Jameson saw in Herr’s communiqués from the Vietnam War. The sense of urgency and immediacy that leads to the breakdown of all previous narrative paradigms of the war novel or movie, so palpable in Herr’s 1977 book, is absent in the documentary’s portrayal of the Vietnam War.⁶ To put it slightly differently, Herr’s Dispatches and the 2014 documentary inhabit different temporalities in the cultural work of mediating the Vietnam War to an American audience. The postmodernist sensibilities of the documentary, then, should be understood primarily in the historical context of today, not that of the war era. When this current context prevails, what stands out in the documentary’s attempt to grasp at the meaning of the Vietnam War is the corroding of the majority view that the Vietnam War was fundamentally wrong and immoral.⁷ According to Fred Turner, national surveys on American attitudes toward the Vietnam War from 1975 to the early 1990s have consistently noted that more than half of all Americans (and often as many as 70 percent) had misgivings about the morality of the war.⁸ If anyone finds the idea of Vietnam War reenactment shocking, this response is due to the moral taboo generated by the enduring public opinion in the couple of decades after the war.

Admittedly, there are still quite a few differences between more popular historical reenactments like the Civil War reenactment and the Vietnam War reenactment in In Country. While most Civil War reenactments are now public and often include a tourist industry, the Vietnam War reenactment in the documentary is private.⁹ For scholars who study historical reenactment, the question of whether an audience is allowed or not is an important measure of the authenticity the reenactors seek. To the extent that reenactors seek an authentic experience of ‘time-travel’ with their devotion to proper period attire, equipment, behavior, and battle conditions, says the historian James Farmer, every audience is a hindrance.¹⁰ In contrast to Civil War reenactors who mak[e] a public statement about the honor of the men, and the cause, they are replicating by having an audience, the Vietnam War reenactors seem focused on the performance of authenticity.¹¹ Yet, if the Vietnam War reenactment seems to be on the fringe in the world of historical reenactments by virtue of its closed quality, it does suggest a fraying of the moral taboo regarding the war. For all the reenactors’ quest for authenticity, the war in the world of reenactment depicted in the documentary is unmistakably a simulacrum and the authenticity that is pursued an imagined one. As one reviewer put it, "In Country after all is a documentary not about war, but about war games."¹²

What the rules of the game for reenacting the Vietnam War are, however, may be worth a close look. For while historical reenactments are far from historiography, they reveal the felt connections between the past and the present. Examining the prehistory of modern historical reenactments in the eighteenth century, Simon During suggests that it is the historicization of everyday life that stimulates the view that the past requires forms of empathy to be understood.¹³ While the reenactors in In Country do not give lectures to public audiences at the traditional, pedagogical arenas of educational institutions like Civil War reenactors do, there is a vernacular history lesson embedded in the game of reenactment.¹⁴ This can best be seen in an early part of the documentary when one of the reenactors, a collector of Vietnam War memorabilia, lectures the reenactors on the lexicon of infantry soldiers in the Vietnam War. This is the lexicon they will likely adopt for the reenactment, summed up in such words as antiestablishment and hippy and the disturbing resurrection of the racial slur dink, used by U.S. soldiers to refer to the Vietnamese during the war. That this slur should resurface in the transformation of war into play destabilizes the end of history discourse, the often triumphalist touting of liberal capitalism’s victory with the demise of the Cold War’s East–West geopolitics.¹⁵ The incorporation of the Vietnam War reenactment into what James W. Gibson calls a masculinist paramilitary culture that sprang into existence after the Vietnam War period may be a sign of capitalism’s capacity to absorb past conflicts into present entertainment industries. Yet the specters of the dink also obstruct a wholesale absorption of the Vietnam War into the culture and industry of entertainment, demanding instead a renewed attention to the vicissitudes of historical knowledge and the past’s relationship to life in the present.¹⁶ The historicization of the everyday life that undergirds the Vietnam War reenactors’ forays into the past points to a contemporary culture of militarism that seemingly corresponds to what scholars variously term the new American empire or new American militarism.¹⁷

In Country refrains from overt editorializing on the part of the filmmakers and instead focuses on communicating the varied perspectives of the reenactors. This technique has prompted at least one reviewer to complain that it lacks an angle.¹⁸ What story about the Vietnam War reenactment does the documentary want to tell? The multiple threads in approaching the meaning of the war, however, may be the point of the documentary as it provokes the viewers to imagine what their own relationship is to this war, easily the most contentious war of the twentieth century. This volume is also a provocation to the readers to rethink the meaning and significance of the Vietnam War for today, although it is clearer about what story it wants to tell. What are the specters of the dink that complicate an easy consumption of the Vietnam War as an event of the past?

The documentary incorporates several examples of what we call the specters of the dink. The sole Vietnamese reenactor, Vinh Nguyen, who served in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), speaks of his unaccounted-for grief at the loss of his comrades and the Republic of Vietnam. Lucien Doc Darensburg, a young African American veteran who spent two tours in Iraq as a medic, speaks of enlisting to pay for college and the brutalities of combat he witnessed. Charles Tuna Ford, a white American man, married with three young boys, is troubled by the alienation from his wife caused by his deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan but asks what other job would provide his family with health care and put food on the table. The specters of the dink can be seen in elements of the Vietnam War that have inadequately been reckoned with yet continue to influence not only the lives of those directly affected by the war but also the culture of militarism that pervades contemporary society. For instance, the Vietnam syndrome tainted the American image of itself as a rescuer of the Third World and made it difficult for the South Vietnamese who resettled in the United States to narrate their experiences other than through scripts such as the narrative of the grateful refugee. Although the social anxieties caused by the draft during the Vietnam War are a thing of the past as the U.S. military now fills its ranks with volunteer soldiers, still the burden of enlistment and combat is unequally distributed across society in what the economist Christian Marazzi calls the "war