Vietnam - The Scar That Will Not Heal

Ed. D. Quentin Miller. American Literature in Transition, 1980-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017

The Vietnam War cast a long shadow over U. S. society and culture while it was being fought overseas, and it has cast an even longer one since it was lost over 40 years ago. The struggle over the significance of this fact and its adequate interpretation has not yet ceased. The initial reaction after the fall of Saigon in 1975 was one of collective shock, trauma, denial, and deferral; for several years, Vietnam was neither a topic for discussion nor for academic research. It was swept under the carpet, together with the veterans, who were – more or less explicitly - blamed for losing the war, stigmatized as ‘baby killers’ and drug addicts, and often generally marginalized. Only towards the end of the 1970s did the war begin to surface again in private and public discussions; they focused on a wide variety of topics and employed various approaches, yet they all, one way or other, emphasized the uniqueness of the Vietnam experience, both with regard to traditional "war stories" and to mythical American self-concepts. The 1980s witnessed what was probably the most intense discussion of the heritage of the Vietnam War and also illustrated the continuing divide in attitudes towards the lost war and those who fought it. The controversy around the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D. C., in 1982, clearly showed the diverging political and ideological views of what symbolic message the monument was supposed to send. When the U.S. hostages from Iran were welcomed home with a ticker-tape parade in 1981 – a public acknowledgment that Vietnam Veterans up to that point in time had not received – veterans deeply resented this; only in 1984 were they given a bittersweet ticker-tape parade in New York, and many thought this was too little, too late. Similarly, the passing of the Amerasian Homecoming Act in 1987, giving children born from U. S. and Vietnamese parents legal U. S. citizen status, was a rather delayed acknowledgement; the arrival of about 25,000 Amerasians following this regulation made Americans aware of yet another consequence of the war that had been kept quiet for too long. In popular culture as well as in politics and academia the decade sees strong revisionist movements developing parallel to continuing critical investigations. Not until 1982 does the first scholarly U. S. study of American Vietnam War literature appeari. Differing opinions and explanations still abound, and every new military involvement of the U.S.A. abroad since 1975 has conjured up the ghosts of Vietnam. They overshadow presidential election campaigns, color the “culture wars” of the 1980s, spawn paramilitary journals like Soldier of Fortune and concomitant paramilitary groups, and have become quite pervasive in video and online games, on YouTube, and on blogs. Over 2.6 million Vietnam War veterans continue with their civil lives as best they possibly can and hold jobs across the complete spectrum of professions. Many of them, and with them their families, are suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), trying to come to terms with an experience that includes youthful idealism turned into disillusion, anger, and frustration.

2020

The 20th century can be perceived as a highly unstable and conflict-ridden period: most notably, the First and Second World War, but also many local conflicts which, in fact, had global significance. The role and the involvement of the United States in most of these military actions was a prominent one, but it can be claimed that the Vietnam War was the historical event that served as a primary inspiration for contemporary American authors and cinematographers. Starting from examining the ambiguities of official historiography, the paper attempts to determine whether the commonly repeated facts concerning the war in Vietnam are reliable and even knowable, which opens the question whether there is such a thing as a single, universal, objective truth. To prove these hypotheses, we have analyzed the historiographical discourse on the Vietnam War, primarily that of Johnson and Zinn, by relying on the metahistorical theory of Hayden White. The above mentioned served as a basis for literary analysis of the following texts: Dispatches by Michael Herr and The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, but more importantly, it allowed us to examine not only the complex relationship between the objective and subjective, but also the importance of storytelling.

Acad. Quest., 2008

By the early 1990s, when I began studying the Vietnam War, the American public had largely lost interest in the history of that conflict. The Civil War and World War II were the wars that historians were advised to cover if they wanted to reach the public. Among government officials, military officers, and political scientists, Vietnam was considered irrelevant, because the United States would never get caught in protracted counterinsurgency warfare again. Iraq changed all that. Ever since the outbreak of insurgency in the former empire of Saddam Hussein, people of all persuasions have been mining the history of Vietnam for information that will support their preferred Iraq policies. Hundreds of thousands of American troops sent to Iraq and Afghanistan have received more instruction on Vietnam than on any other historical subject. Although more than thirty years have passed since the end of the Vietnam War, historians today are as divided on what happened as the American people were during the war itself. During the 1960s and 1970s, huge numbers of antiwar Americans entered academia and the media, while few Vietnam veterans and other supporters of the war obtained jobs in those professions, in many cases because veteran status or pro-war sentiments were considered unacceptable. As a result, most academic and journalistic accounts of the war written during and shortly afterwards depicted Vietnam as a bad war that the United States should not have fought. Antiwar history of the Vietnam War thus acquired the label of "orthodox" history.

H-Diplo, 2024

is an ambitious work which seeks to comprehensively and systematically examine the cultural trauma and memory discourses of what the authors call the "American-Vietnamese War." 1 Building on the contemporary sociological works of Jeffery Alexander, Jeffrey Olick, and Eviatar Zerubavel, 2 as well as classic sociological studies by Maurice Halbwachs, Karl Manheim, Pierre Nora, the three authors of this volume contribute the concept of "arenas of memory" to the scholarship on collective memory. 3 Adapting Nora's concept of lieux de memoire, the authors emphasize the social and discursive spaces within which memory narratives are articulated, circulated, and contested. 4 A sophisticated analytical tool, "arenas of memory" is deployed by the authors as a "heuristic device…[which] demarcate[s] the social spaces where different narratives of collective memory interact" (24). 5 Addressing the cultural trauma of one of the most controversial and contested military conflict in recent history, the chapters, which are written by the individual authors, rightly emphasize the conflicting and politicized nature of memory and how different social actors and groups organize and mobilize to advance particular interpretations and claims regarding the meaning and significance of the war. Extensive in scope and design, the book centers on the three main belligerents of the conflict, namely the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV or North Vietnam during the war years, subsequently the Socialist Republic of Vietnam), the United States, and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN or South Vietnam during the war years, subsequently Vietnamese Americans). 1 I quote the authors' term "American-Vietnamese War" throughout this work as it is a novel term. The Vietnam War (1963-1975) has been referred to as the Second Indochina War. In the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, it is commonly known as Kháng chiến chống Mỹ ("Resistance War against America").

Argues that the examination of contemporary American war narratives can lead to newfound understandings of American literature, American history, and American national purpose. To prove such a contention, the book blends literary, rhetorical, and cultural methods of analysis.