The "We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose" Syndrome: U.S. Press Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the "Fall of Saigon"

Through analyses of U.S. press coverage of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, this article examines how U.S. popular culture has dealt with the "difficult memory" of the Vietnam War, a war that left the United States as neither victor nor liberator. As a morally controversial and unsuccessful war, the Vietnam War appears to offer an antidote to the prominent "rescue and liberation" narratives of World War II. However, instead of using the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary to critically analyze and assess the reasons for and ongoing consequences of the war, U.S. print media have opted to present an ahistorical account of America(ns) rescuing and caring for Vietnam's "runaways" that erases the role that U.S. interventionist foreign policy and war played in inducing this forced migration in the first place. Many American studies scholars have detailed how the recuperation of the Vietnam veterans has been central to the ongoing renovation of U.S. mythic innocence, this article extends this discussion by showing how popular narratives of Vietnamese refugees have also been deployed to rescue the Vietnam War for Americans. Although routinely forgotten in most U.S. public discussions and commemorations of the Vietnam War, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Vietnamese refugees became the featured evidence of the appropriateness and even necessity of U.S. world hegemony. The refugees—constructed as successful and anti-communist—recuperated the veterans' and thus U.S. failure of masculinity and re-made the case for U.S. war in Viet Nam: that the war, no matter the costs, was ultimately necessary, moral, and successful. The article concludes that it is this "we-win-even-when-we-lose" syndrome that has energized and emboldened the perpetuation of U.S. militarism around the world in the post-Cold War era.