Forever Vietnam: How a Divisive War Changed American Public Memory by David Kieran (review)

Forever Vietnam is a work of memory studies, a meta-analysis that traces how the legacy of the Vietnam War shaped American remembrances of the Alamo; World War II and the belated acknowledgement of post-traumatic syndrome (PTSD); the infamous Andersonville prison camp of the Civil War; the “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia; Flight 93; and the War on Terror. In all of these case studies, author David Kieran demonstrates how the experience of the Vietnam War provided an interpretive construct. This book was written to call attention to the use/misuse of Vietnam War history in order “to delineate more fully the contours of many Americans’ enduring embrace of militarism, often uncritical acquiescence to the use of military force abroad, and continued failure to acknowledge the crises that those interventions prompted in the lives of veterans, their families, and the civilians who experience them” (13).

In certain respects, Kieran is following the trail that was blazed by Richard Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation, where it was shown how myths of the American frontier continued to shape American sensibilities, including how the Vietnam War was fought and perceived. Now the latter is material for myths in its own right. The research material for this volume includes newspaper articles, documents from archives, government publications, and primary and secondary works, including war memoirs. The work includes endnotes and an index as well as illustrations. Forever Vietnam is a fascinating study in that it unveils the shifting and often odd lessons that Americans have made about the war, but none of this is surprising since the war, televised and shown in everyone’s living room, was long, bloody, and expensive, ending tragically with the Fall of Saigon.

One of the problems with any such study is distinguishing the representative from the idiosyncratic. American society, as the poet Walt Whitman long ago noted, is large and teeming with multitudes and is thereby discordant. Not all voices speak for the general public, however. A politician’s remark, an old Vietnam veteran’s gesture (such as leaving a Purple Heart medal at the Flight 93 Memorial), a veteran group’s pseudo-event (to gain media attention in order to generate more interest in bolstering veterans’ benefits), or any author’s retelling of a war may or may not symbolize something larger or significant. Research can easily be a matter of cherry-picking, such as when Kieran quotes Pat Buchanan as well as an editorial from an Oklahoma City newspaper to demonstrate the public’s misgivings about President Clinton’s intervention in Kosovo.

Moreover, some readers will object that some of the particulars of Kieran’s analysis are nebulous. For instance, he suggests that certain texts on the Mogadishu incident of 1993, such as Mark Bowdoin’s Black Hawk Down, rely on tropes found in books retelling the Vietnam experience. After asserting that Bowdoin and others “directly and stridently challenge U.S. policy in language that borrows from and evokes contemporary Vietnam remembrance,” Kieran in the next paragraph writes that the “texts’ remembrance of the Somalia intervention does not rely on direct comparisons to Vietnam” (151). Some will appreciate the author’s remarkable ability to tease out Vietnam where Vietnam is not mentioned, but others might think that in such cases he is overreaching.

The author concludes that Iraq is on its way to becoming the new Vietnam, a lesson of the past that will be invoked whenever the American nation contemplates new challenges abroad or simply engages in national introspection. Probably all nations engage in this type of thing. For instance, due to their humiliating experiences of World War II, both Germany and Japan have for many years tended to be pacifistic. Sweden, with its long record of nonintervention, sees lessons of its past as validating a nonaligned approach, more or less, with respect to foreign policy. Some of the former Eastern Bloc nations rely on perceived lessons of the Cold War to justify NATO membership. Looking...