Remembrance in the Aftermath of War

Charles E. Neu, ed.After Vietnam: Legacies of a Lost War. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xix + 166 pp. Notes and index. $34.95 (cloth); $15.95 (paper).

The attention accorded to recent charges that New School president and former senator Bob Kerrey ordered the massacre of women and children in the Vietnamese village of Thanh Phong in 1969 and to Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian Joseph Ellis's fabrications about his military service in Vietnam and involvement in the antiwar movement reveals a remarkable shift in American apprehensions of the war in Vietnam and its legacies. It is easy to imagine even a decade ago that Kerrey's case would have unleashed a vociferous debate between the war's critics and its defenders on the meaning and morality of American involvement in Vietnam. The tall tales Joseph Ellis has told his students at Mt. Holyoke College, though clearly of lesser ethical magnitude than Kerrey's alleged actions, might also have produced a firestorm of controversy.

Yet reactions, both within and outside the academy, to the Kerrey and Ellis revelations have been muted, even defensive. The presidents of the New School and Holyoke were initially quick to offer their full support to Kerrey and Ellis as "honorable" men. Kerrey's former colleagues in the Senate, Democrats and Republicans alike, were joined by the editorial board of the New York Times in exculpating Kerrey's behavior as exemplifying "the madness of a war that then, as now, seemed to lack any rationale." ¹ A small minority of voices has raised misgivings about the rush to exonerate both men, uneasy about the apparent unwillingness of Kerrey and Ellis's defenders to critically engage the hypocrisy and immorality that are a part of America's legacy in Vietnam. But the message implicit in most responses suggests an exhausted wariness about re-opening the societal divisions and wounds produced by the war.

After Vietnam: Legacies of a Lost War is shaped by this peculiar historical moment and suggests the interpretative possibilities and perils that animate contemporary retrospective examinations of the American war in Vietnam. The authors of the five essays that make up this volume, drawn from lectures they presented at Johns Hopkins University in 1998, self-consciously aim to critically and dispassionately re-examine the wider impact of the war. At its best, After Vietnam succeeds in its efforts to transform and deepen scholarly analysis of the war's legacies in both Vietnam and the United States. But just as the troubling implications of the Kerrey and Ellis cases have been largely elided in public discourse, the contributors to After Vietnam also leave key dimensions of the war's legacies and lessons unexamined.

Among the strengths of the volume is an excellent essay by Robert K. Brigham on the central place of the war in contemporary Vietnamese politics. For too long the Vietnamese themselves have been a shadowy presence in American efforts to come to terms with the nature and meanings of the war in Vietnam. Brigham is among the first of a younger group of scholars whose work on the war is as fully grounded in Vietnamese primary sources as it is in American materials. In his essay, Brigham explores the conscious construction of war memory by the Vietnamese state and the counter-memories that have increasingly challenged these state-based narratives. As he points out, the postwar period has proved to be a difficult one for the Vietnamese Communist Party. After the defeat of the Americans and the South Vietnamese regime in 1975, efforts to affect a socialist transformation of society quickly floundered. By the early 1980s, Vietnam was considered the third poorest country on earth with endemic corruption by party members and severe shortages of rice and other essential commodities. Compounding these problems was Vietnam's global isolation, in part the result of U.S.-led international opprobrium that greeted the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and its...