The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation

Notes

N OTES Introduction 1. The text of this interview can be found at http://vietnam.usembassy.gov/ pv11192000e.html. President Clinton’s speech at the National University, as well as other briefings and remarks made during his visit, can be found at http://vietnam.usembassy .gov/speech_briefing.html. 2. The text of Lê Khả Phiêu’s remarks was printed in Lao Ðộng [Labor] newspaper on November 20, 2000. On November 18, 2000, the Nhân Dân [People] newspaper printed on the front page a Vietnamese translation of Clinton’s speech and a speech by President Trần Ðức Lu ̛ơng. 3. This tension between explaining the war through the lens of “communism” or “imperialism” was not new in 2000. It had also emerged as a key point of discussion at the historic 1997 conference in Hanoi, “Missed Opportunities? Former U.S. and Vietnamese Leaders and Scholars Reexamine the Vietnam War, 1961–1968,” which former U.S. secretary of defense Robert McNamara attended. Reporting on the conference, Shipler writes: “The Vietnamese listened closely, but they seemed truly puzzled by the American obsession with the spread of Communism and sought more explanation. ‘If the reason was to fight Communism,’ they asked in a list of questions submitted beforehand , ‘why did the U.S. not help China in 1949, or why did the U.S. not help the Batista regime in Cuba in 1959?’ They never got an answer, only a litany of conflicts, including two that nearly took the superpowers to war: the Berlin and Cuban missile crises of 1961 and 1962” (1997, 35). 4. For scholarly literature on Vietnam that supports such claims, see in particular Giebel (2004), Kwon (2006), Pelley (2002), Malarney (2002), Werner (2006), Leshkowich (2008), and the volumes edited by Tai (2001a) and Taylor and Whitmore (1995). 5. For a broad and cogent theoretical overview of scholarship on memory, see Klein (2000). For anthropological studies of memory in relation to histories of violence and/ or colonial encounters, see, for example, Malkki (1995); Handler and Gable (1997); Yoneyama (1999); J. Cole (2001); Spyer (2000); Mueggler (2001); Trouillot (1995). 6. For this reason, scholars of postsocialism in Eastern Europe view social change in former East Bloc nations “not as transition from one order to another but as transforma- 208 NOTES TO PAGES 26 –32 tion—rearrangements, reconfigurations and recombinations that yield new interweavings of the multiple social logics that are a modern society” (Stark and Bruszt 1998, 7; see also Verdery 1996; Burawoy and Verdery 1999). 1. Return to Vietnam 1. On Hồ Chí Minh in the United States, see Quinn-Judge (2002, 20–21) and Duiker (2000, 50–51). According to Marilyn Young, the U.S. provided France with $160 million in aid in 1946 to fight the war in Vietnam (1991, 22). Nguyễn Khắc Viện estimates that U.S. economic support increased to $385 million—covering 60% of the total costs of the war—by 1953, and by 1954, 80% of the costs (2007, 274). On Norman Morrison’s life and death, and the impact of his act on Vietnam, see Morrison-Welsh (2006). 2. All quotes are paraphrased and translated from detailed field notes written in Vietnamese and English at the time of interviews and conversations. 3. See A. Young (1995) on traumatic memory as a modern, nineteenth-century invention , and its reformulation in 1980 as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). 4. In her conclusion, Curtis notes that certain veterans feared she would represent themas“agroupofmaladjusted,hand-wringingVietnamvetswhowerehere[inVietnam] for emotional closure” (2003, 251). Instead, she claims her interlocutors were on a historical mission only: “[T]he tours I accompanied were squarely focused on the discussion of operational level battle histories and on understanding veterans’ roles in those histories ” (2003, 12). While many of my interviewees spoke of returning to “find closure,” they were in no way disinterested in history or representative of “maladjusted vets.” Curtis seems correct to be wary of the predominance of stereotypical images of alienated and unstable veterans, though an emphasis on healing or closure need not imply such a condition . Veterans can be “well adjusted” citizens and still be concerned with closure (as well as with their place in history). 5. Tours of Peace, a nonprofit veteran humanitarian organization, offers trips back to Vietnam to “help veterans and families heal and recover from the trauma” of war. Programs integrate “emotional and humanitarian components,” such as the recovery of U.S. war relics and participation in charitable projects...