Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. ix, 334 pp. (Figures.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5474-1.
This outstanding collection of eleven essays focuses on the legacies of the Vietnam wars in postwar America and Vietnam, with emphasis on the American choice of denial over closure, illustrating the aptness of Socrates’ comment that it is worse to commit a crime than to be the victim of one. The collective conscience of the Vietnamese, despite their far greater suffering, is clear; in the US, though the wounds it suffered were borne “only” by its veterans and their families and communities, guilt remains the unremembered legacy of every American.
The essays constitute a handbook for teaching and learning about how the Vietnamese have coped with the after-effects of the war and how different US administrations have handled their humanitarian responsibilities. A number of the essays merit study by every citizen.
The focus is on Vietnam and the US. We learn little about the two other Indochinese nations, Laos and Cambodia, and almost nothing about China, which looms in the background. Before the war China had aided the Vietnamese communists, furnishing Washington with a rationale for waging war against Vietnam: stopping Chinese aggression. Afterwards, Vietnam gravitated to Russia and China to the US, and Sino-Viet relations turned antagonistic in tandem with Sino-Russian relations. During the war Russia and China had conflicts, but overall did more to help than hurt the Vietnamese.
Only one essay goes into the last years of the war showing how Washington foreclosed possibilities of a more pluralistic politics. In “Legacies Foretold, Excavating the Roots of Postwar Viet Nam,” Ngo Vinh Long writes, “Unless one understands how the policies of the RVN [Republic of Vietnam / South Vietnam Government] effectively destroyed the pluralistic potential of the south, one cannot understand the myriad developments that unfolded in Viet Nam in the years after the war came to an end” (17). The Paris Peace Agreement, signed January 27, 1973, contained promises and commitments that were not kept. Four days before the signing Nixon announced publicly that Washington would recognize only its own Thieu regime as the “sole legitimate government.” This negated beforehand the Agreement’s commitment to allow the Vietnamese to “decide themselves the political future of South Vietnam . . . through general elections” and Washington’s promise not to “continue its military involvement or intervene in the internal affairs of South Vietnam” (17). The Agreement further provided for a National Council to supervise a “national reconciliation” “of the two South Vietnamese parties,” meaning the Thieu ruling group and the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong). To give these prospects a chance to come to fruition Hanoi restrained its forces (32). However, massive US military aid to the Thieu regime continued and so did Congressional funding, so that the eventual outcome was the continuing imposition of the Thieu regime’s dictatorship. As in China 1945–1949 the population, war-weary, demanded peace, not ongoing civil war, and was alienated from Washington and its governments. This suggests why Thieu’s regime crumbled so quickly under the final onslaught from the north: it could no longer hold the allegiance of the population or of its own army.
In the second essay, “Viet Nam and Vietnam in American History and Memory,” Walter Hixon shows how the state, media and film industry worked to erase the actually existing Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian victims of Washington, leaving the Americans as victims not the losers of the war. To what end? “As the history and memory of ‘Vietnam’ were being repackaged, the United States resumed its normal interventionist course in foreign policy . . . first Carter and then more aggressively Reagan intervened to roll back reformist governments in Central America” (52).
In addition Washington pursued a policy of revenge against the Vietnamese, supporting the Khmer Rouge dictatorship in Cambodia and its military action against Vietnam. At the same time sanctions and other penalties were imposed on Vietnam, until, in the early 1990s under Clinton, normalization was achieved. Washington had up to then maintained a hostile attitude toward Hanoi, claiming that prisoners of war were still being held, a largely if not completely mythological assertion. Once it was shown that no such large body of missing American soldiers actually existed, American objection to normal relations dwindled. (Though the author does not mention it, Vietnam was also being courted as a counterbalance to China. In “Missing in Action in the Twenty-first Century,” H. Bruce Franklin offers a detailed narrative of how the POW/MIA issues were falsified and exploited to make unreasonable demands of Hanoi and then to evade responsibility for the catastrophic damage done to the land, economy and people.
Another instance of Washington’s unfair treatment concerns Vietnamese catfish, a product lured into the American market on the basis of free trade and then subjected to tariff discrimination at the behest of domestic fishing interests. This cruel trifling with norms of “free trade” and “rule of law” illustrates the hypocrisy of politics in US commercial practice, the subject of Scott Laderman’s “A Fishy Affair: Vietnamese Seafood and the Confrontation with U.S. Neoliberalism,” an essay suitable for every Economics 101 class worldwide.
Other essays offer enlightening commentary on literature, on film, agent orange, and the environment. Each of the eleven is a gem, for which the editors are to be congratulated. Since the book is balanced between American and Vietnamese issues, it is fitting to close this review with a note on Heonik Kwon’s “Cold War in a Vietnamese Community,” which shows how Vietnamese veterans on both sides of their civil war learned to come to terms with their tragedies and to acknowledge, even respect, the pain and losses of former enemies to achieve closure and reconciliation through mourning and remembrance.
From the US a good number of veterans and others have gone to Vietnam to share grief and memory across the artificially created boundary of “enemy nation” and also to contribute financially and personally to easing the continuing suffering there. The day may come when the conduct of official America rises to that level of humanitarianism and transcends its narcissistic denials. For that, however, the habit of scapegoating others, especially the Chinese, must be transcended. Is the drumbeat of negative reportage on China and its past really about deflecting attention from the harm that Washington has done in Indochina?
Moss Roberts
New York University, New York, USA
pp. 639-641