South Vietnamese Soldiers: Memories of the Vietnam War and After by Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen (review)

For oral historians who work with war veterans specifically and for those who are interested in documenting intergenerational and diverse cultural experiences generally, South Vietnamese Soldiers: Memories of the Vietnam War and After provides an interesting perspective on the issues of memory and commemoration in the aftermath of war; it illustrates how repression and forced migration shape the stories that South Vietnamese soldiers tell about their service in the Vietnam War and their lives thereafter. Author Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, an associate professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow for the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, poses the following questions, which the oral histories collected in this book attempt to answer: With their histories silenced and their war dead forgotten in postwar Vietnam, how do South Vietnamese veterans remember the war? On what resources of self-reliance or resilience are they able to draw in order to share their experiences after years of repression and forced migration without fear or judgement? How do they commemorate the country and the armed forces that they served? Through Nguyen's work, then, the veterans are able to bear witness to the undocumented history of the war.

This book does what oral history enables one to do: it adds to the historical record the experiences and perspectives of groups of people who might otherwise have been hidden from history. While historical studies in the United States have focused principally on how American soldiers engaged with the war, Nguyen's book offers another perspective, that of the former soldiers of the Republic of Vietnam. Since the South Vietnamese lost over a quarter of a million soldiers in the war, Nguyen's intent for her work is to highlight the historiography of the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF) and their role in the Vietnam War from soldiers' own perspectives. As historiographic as Nguyen's work may be, there is also a personal aspect to her book: she wrote and dedicated this book to the memory of all the men and women who served in the RVNAF and to her father, Nguyen Trieu Dan, who served his country with distinction and was the last Republic of Vietnam Ambassador to Japan in 1974-1975 (he died in 2013 while she was writing this book).

The book is based on fifty-four oral history interviews, sixteen from two separate projects conducted between 2005-2010 and 2010-2011, and forty for this book specifically (Nguyen re-interviewed two people from the earlier projects, hence fifty-four interviews instead of fifty-six). Nguyen's colleague, Boitran Huynm-Beatttie, who passed away in 2012 before Nguyen completed the book, conducted detailed preproject interviews in Vietnamese. While Nguyen did not include excerpts from all fifty-four of the interviews in the book, her work nevertheless provides extensive firsthand accounts from two generations of soldiers—parents and their children who served—and from narrators who represent all branches of the service—Army, Air Force, Navy, Ranger, Marine Corps, Airborne Division, Regional and Popular Forces, and the Women's Armed Forces Corps (WAFC).

South Vietnamese Soldiers also includes twenty-three illustrations and epigraphs scattered throughout the eight chapters of the book that reveal poignant aspects of the veterans' experiences of the war. These chapters cover the experiences of three veterans from different generations; combat in the field; the experiences of military doctors who served in elite frontline units; the stories and experiences of women who served in the WAFC; friendship and sacrifice; uncovering war crimes and the excavation of a mass grave; comparisons of the experiences of Vietnam-based veterans with those of veterans overseas, specifically the consequences of war for RVNAF soldiers injured during the war; Australia's recognition of the formal status of RVNAF veterans; and the children of RVNAF veterans as understood through intergenerational war memories.

According to Nguyen, "The oral histories and testimonies gathered here...