Confronting Trauma and Toxins, Rejecting Closure: Three Recent Investigations of America’s War on Vietnam

In June 2013, Vietnam War veteran Sam Axelrad traveled from his Houston, Texas home to Hanoi, Vietnam to find what he and many of his peers call “closure.” ¹ Similar trips by former US military personnel have become common over the last three decades because of veterans like Axelrad, who were the first US citizens to visit Vietnam in significant numbers when the socialist republic began promoting tourism in the mid-1980s. Although these journeys still arouse some controversy in the US (especially among those who claim Vietnam holds prisoners of war and refuses to account for America’s missing in action, despite no evidence of the former and in contradiction to Vietnam’s record of assistance with the latter), they have lost most of their capacity to polarize and they rarely surprise.

However, Axelrad’s quest for emotional resolution had an unusual physical relic at its center. This was a human arm, the skeletal remains of a limb belonging to Nguyen Quang Hung, whom US forces brought to a field hospital in Phu Cat, Vietnam, in 1966. At that time, Nguyen was a twenty-six-year-old soldier in the North Vietnamese Army, close to dying from infection. Axelrad, then a twenty-seven-year-old physician working at the hospital, amputated Nguyen’s right arm and helped save his life. After Axelrad finished, medics boiled the severed limb down to bones and reassembled them into a souvenir for the doctor. Upon returning to Texas to pursue a career in urology, Axelrad locked the keepsake away and did not handle it again until 2011, when he started planning his reunion with Nguyen.

According to an Associated Press story appearing in several publications including USA Today, Nguyen and Axelrad enjoyed their time together after a nearly fifty-year gap. The latter found some closure; the former was as surprised by the return of his arm as he was when US personnel treated him in 1966. Nguyen also said he was “proud to have shed blood for my country’s reunification. I consider myself very lucky compared with many of my comrades who were killed or remain unaccounted for.” His statement brings gravitas to an article that could have wound up in “weird news” sections of US newspapers. Despite its headline’s awful pun, Mike Ives’s report has a serious tone Nguyen underscores with a speech act that does three things unfamiliar to many US readers. He affirms Vietnam’s revolution, mourns its human toll, and points to lack of closure on the Vietnamese side.

As an illustration of dis/embodied remembering, “Humerus Reunion” helps introduce this discussion of three recent and important books on the Vietnam War. Like Nguyen, authors Edwin A. Martini, Sylvia Shin Huey Chong, and William Thomas Allison care about the war’s impact on Vietnamese bodies and Vietnam, the country. This contrasts with the memory work of too many US citizens, who have learned to recall and resent how the Vietnam War traumatized their country and its soldiers, to the exclusion of Vietnam’s people, what they endured, and their continuing struggles. By making space for Nguyen’s trauma and the victory he helped achieve, Ives’s account suggests different and perhaps better possibilities for remembering. An elderly man who fought for a unified, self-determined Vietnam is present in experience, perspective, and voice. Readers should acknowledge what Nguyen says and what was done to his body. Yes, Axelrad upheld his profession’s ethics by operating on Nguyen in 1966 and did the right thing by returning his arm bones in 2013. But should those bones have been his souvenir in the first place? Should Axelrad have waited so long to...