Lasting Legacy: Public Memory of the Vietnam War

When the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated over thirty years ago in 1982, it entered the U.S. cultural lexicon as a part of the memory of the war itself. Scholars such as Marita Sturken and Patrick Hagopian took up the topic in their works Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic and the Politics of Remembering (1997) and The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials and the Politics of Healing (2011), respectively. Yet it was not just the Wall that was studied. Several scholars have written on the history and memory of the Vietnam War. From the 1980s on, articles and books about the influence of the war on literature, film, foreign affairs, and more have been published.

David Kieran adds to this material with the excellently researched and well-written Forever Vietnam: How a Divisive War Changed American Public Memory. Kieran is able to contribute to this already extensive amount of material on the legacy of the Vietnam War because he looks at “the wider story of how the remembrance of one event has created the conditions according to which Americans have meaningfully remembered other, seemingly, unrelated events” (p. 6). He draws on the most prominent literature within the Memory Studies field and the history of the Vietnam War to argue that “the evolving and contested memory of the American War in Vietnam has shaped Americans’ commemoration of other events in ways that inform their understanding of themselves, the nation, and the global interests and obligations of the United States” (p. 3). A Who’s Who in the fields of study of the Vietnam War and of memory and trauma studies help guide the book. Included besides Sturken and Hagopian are Susan Jeffords, Kristin Ann Hass, Jerry Lembke, Elaine Scarry, and more. Yet Kieran’s greatest strength is addressing these historians and theorists while providing his own unique interpretation of the legacy of the Vietnam War. This is in no small part thanks to his extensive use of original research. He makes excellent use of interviews, site visits, newspaper articles, and archival resources to weave together an analysis of seemingly disparate events that come together to highlight the cultural permeation of the Vietnam War.

Through the use of these resources, Kieran opens our eyes to see how interpretations of the Vietnam War have shifted over time, while simultaneously demonstrating how those interpretations both have an impact on and are impacted by other events. This is done through the analyses of the memory and commemoration of six other events, each receiving its own chapter-length examination. Three of those events occurred prior to the Vietnam War, while three occurred afterwards, but all were interpreted through the lens of that conflict. This allows the reader to see how interpretations of the Vietnam War came to impact the United States politically, culturally, and socially. The number of events covered might lead the casual observer to think that too many are looked at so that no one event is analyzed enough. Yet it is through these numerous analyses that Kieran builds a larger picture of the collective memory of the Vietnam War, a memory that was already actively being shaped during the war itself.

As readers, we start our journey of understanding the memory of the Vietnam War when Kieran looks at the events at Andersonville Prison, the site of the Confederate prisoner-of-war camp during the Civil War. As early as 1966, the site was used by Americans to work through what legacy the Vietnam War would have. In 1966, Jimmy Williams, an African American Pfc, was buried at the Andersonville site because he could not be buried at the cemetery in his hometown of Wetumpka, Alabama. The national attention this garnered led to the evaluation that the nation had behaved responsibly and “appropriately honored American sacrifices in Vietnam” (p. 23). The language surrounding the connection between Andersonville and the Vietnam War remained introspective when PBS aired...