Invisible Enemies: The American War on Vietnam, 1975-2000

Introduction

As the revolutionary forces of Vietnam draped and raised their flags throughout Saigon on April 30, 1975, the sound of gunfire continued. Although the sound was nothing new to the city, the meaning was different. Fired in celebration by troops outside the former Presidential Palace, these were the sounds of victory: the second Indochina war was finally over. Several of the men surrounding Republic of Vietnam General Duong Van Minh were nevertheless understandably startled by the noise. As Colonel Bui Tin of the Revolutionary Forces of Vietnam accepted the formal surrender by the general, he told his former adversaries, “Our men are merely celebrating. You have nothing to fear. Between Vietnamese, there are no victors and no vanquished. Only the Americans have been beaten. If you are patriots, consider this a moment of joy. The war for our country is over.”1 It’s unlikely that Minh and his South Vietnamese colleagues were put at ease by Tin’s remarks. What none of the men could possibly have realized was that despite, and in fact because of, the successful campaign against the United States, the war for their country was in fact far from over. Although free from foreign occupation for the first time in over a century, Vietnam remained surrounded by hostile regimes and faced the difficult task of rebuilding a nation devastated and deeply divided after thirty years of sustained warfare. The challenge of national reconstruction would have proven daunting enough under any circumstances ; it would have been long and arduous even with the billions in American aid that had been promised as part of the 1973 peace accords; it would have been a financially imposing project even with the full and unfettered access to sources of international economic and humanitarian aid they were not only in dire need of, but to which they were entitled. But, as the Vietnamese quickly learned in the years immediately following the American withdrawal, one of the few things worse than fighting a war against the United States is winning a war introduction 2 introduction against the United States. In contrast to Germany and Japan, which after World War II received billions in American support, Vietnam found itself quickly cut off from American-controlled sources of economic assistance, humanitarian aid, and development loans. Had the United States simply abandoned the nation altogether, rejecting calls for reparations, aid, and trade, the Socialist revolution in Vietnam might still have failed. The United States, however, instead maintained an aggressively hostile policy under which the nation and people of Vietnam would continue to suffer. Before the guns had even gone silent in Saigon, policymakers in the United States initiated a series of punitive policies that would define the course of relations between the two nations for the next two decades. As the Vietnamese war for national independence reached an end in the spring of 1975, a new phase of the American war against Vietnam began. Far from ending the war after the defeat of its South Vietnamese client regime, the United States continued to wage economic, political, and cultural war on Vietnam long after 1975. In this book, I examine this post-1975 phase of U.S. relations with Vietnam, which I call the “American war on Vietnam” (1975–2000). In particular, I examine the ways in which cultural representations intersected and interacted with the formation of foreign policy during this period. Both of these activities, I argue, were driven by the same cultural logic of “normalizing” the historical memory of the war, reinserting recuperative American narratives at the center of public discourses about the war while marginalizing and silencing Vietnamese and other alternative and oppositional voices. By rendering Vietnamese subjects silent or invisible in American films, television shows, and comic books about the war, while ignoring the real impact of U.S. policies on Vietnam, the different “fronts” of the American war on Vietnam combined to reconstruct the cultural, political, and economic work of American empire in the wake of a long, devastating, and divisive war. The American war on Vietnam was thus as much a battle for the cultural memory of the war in American society as it was a lengthy and bitter economic, political, and diplomatic war against the nation and people of Vietnam. I use a range of primary sources to reconstruct the policy history of this period, focusing in particular on many previously overlooked congressional hearings where the principles governing U.S. policy toward all of Southeast Asia...