A Time for Peace: The Legacy of the Vietnam War (review)

This relatively short book is a good brief introduction to some of the historical issues left over from the American war in Vietnam. Very readable, with four sections of essays grouped around different kinds of postwar “legacies,” it will make a useful textbook in college classes on the war or on recent United States history in general. Students will find it an informative companion to Schulzinger’s 1997 A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975. They will learn, as Schulzinger promises, how a variety of “troubled and conflicted recollections colored numerous aspects of public life and culture in the United States” (p. xv). That said, A Time for Peace is marked as much by its limitations as it is by its best features.

The book’s best feature is a collection of three essays exploring the diplomatic and political mechanisms that, first, froze governments in Vietnam and the United States into their bitter postures of 1973–75, and then, twenty years later, brought them together into normal diplomatic relationships. With information drawn from a broad and solid range of secondary sources, Congressional documents, and presidential records, these chapters recount the emotionally- and politically-charged struggles to establish a basis for realistic peaceful relations between two angry—but tired—enemies. Issues traditional to power politics intersected concerns unique to the situation—America’s unaccustomed frustration with defeat, for example—and were overshadowed by the mythology of abandoned soldiers and forever-jailed POWs. Neither government was monolithic in its attitudes towards its erstwhile enemy; but the fault lines dividing Americans over the war and the way it ended were obstacles to reconciliation as formidable as those that separated Americans from Vietnamese. Schulzinger renders a great service by recounting the hostility that grew between some members of Congress, the National League of Families [of POW-MIAs] on the one side, and what a member of Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council Staff called “the Rambo faction in Congress.”

Schulzinger’s chapters on postwar social history are also very useful surveys of the new lives that confronted Americans who returned from Vietnam and those Vietnamese who migrated to the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century. His assessments of the conflicting ways in which these two groups saw each other, and the equally contradictory ways in which Americans who had never been to Asia saw them, make fascinating reading, although these chapters are more clearly efforts at synthesis than the research presented in the international affairs section. They do, however, smartly recollect a series of stories and themes that have begun to recede from public attention, including the difficulties veterans faced managing the mental and physical wounds they suffered and the racial conflict that often greeted newly transplanted Vietnamese communities.

Schulzinger’s work with the cultural history of the postwar era is less successful, although his chapter on the controversial design and construction of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial is very moving. His writing on American-authored literature and film on Vietnam and the Vietnam War will amply fulfill the requirements of a textbook; but breaks even less new ground than the social history that precedes it. One should make an exception to that observation for Schulzinger’s inclusion of pulp fiction and even pornography with Vietnam War settings in his analysis of Vietnam literature; but one does miss coverage of some areas the author chose not to explore. The military’s efforts to rebuild after an unprecedented defeat might have made a useful addition to the collection of post-war experiences assessed here. So too would be the historiographical review of Vietnam War scholarship Prof. Shulzinger is admirably equipped to provide.