Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) by Yen Le Espiritu (review)

In 2006, when Yen Le Espiritu published her seminal piece, “The ‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome: U.S. Press Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the ‘Fall of Saigon’” in American Quarterly, she was at the cusp of the wave of important new scholarship in critical refugee studies. Body Counts represents not only a fuller extension of her work on the topic, but also a thorough elaboration of her deeper meditations about U.S. Empire and war for nearly two decades. A seasoned scholar of ethnic studies, Espiritu has produced numerous volumes on ethnic and immigrant experiences. This, however, is her first full-length exploration of refugees from Vietnam and she does it with commanding authority.

As we approach the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, questions still linger as the United States engages in war in various parts of the Middle East. This timely and “explicitly interdisciplinary” book situates war within a complex web of empire, politics, militarism, and state policies that affect polities and populations. Her insistence on alternative ways to think about the history and memory of the Vietnam War powerfully reimagines remembrance by refugee subjects. Espiritu’s feminist approach to illuminating “private grief and public commemoration” requires a methodology that engages in a “critical juxtaposing” of events, stories, and cultural practices that stitch together and make visible histories that were previously unexamined (21). Drawing from traditional and nontraditional sources such as her personal (often haunting) memories of the Vietnam War, oral interviews, archives, newspaper accounts, and sociological surveys, Body Counts pieces together what has been missing from dominant memories of the Vietnam War.

Chapter One introduces readers to the field of critical refugee studies by discussing the significance of the title of the book. Espiritu poignantly flips what was commonly referred to as “body counts,” a military practice of counting “confirmed kills” that connoted progress during the Vietnam War, to insist that Vietnamese bodies be counted and accounted for throughout her study. Espiritu argues that the figure of the Vietnamese refugee should function “not as an object of investigation but as a site of social critique” (3) that enables a theoretical unraveling of the refugee category. Scholars have historically dealt with refugee subjects as a “problem” to be resolved by the nation-state. Critical refugee studies shifts the burden away from refugee subjects and challenges the role of the nation-state. Rather than completely eradicate the use of the term refugee itself, Espiritu suggests that we “imbue it with social and political critiques that call into question the relationships between war, race, violence, then and now” (16). Chapters Two and Three engage in vigorously reframing refugee studies by re-focusing on the historical aspects of colonization and militarization that created the refugee crisis. Her useful term “militarized refugees” enables a productive deconstruction of the processes by which refugees were evacuated and resettled while it demystifies the humanitarian impulses so often connected to trite narratives of refugee rescue and liberation. In chapter Four, Espiritu interrogates the construction of “good refugee subjects” who are used by the state to legitimate U.S. involvement in Vietnam. For chapters Five and Six, Espiritu actively remembers the lives lost during the Vietnam War. Since it was forbidden for Vietnamese to publicly mourn the dead during the war, her private and public remembrance of both personal and communal loss is particularly affecting.

In rereading Vietnamese refugee public commemoration practices in the United States, Espiritu repositions refugee memory in diaspora and argues that the space that Vietnamese Americans take up in constructing memorials (either virtually through the Internet, or literally in American public landscapes) ensures that their memories of the war are free from silence and erasure. Body Counts concludes with the contested terrain of postmemory between those who experienced it first hand and the generations that come after. Espiritu reminds us that mourning the dead and remembering traumatic events of the past are processes always full...