Vietnam War

The Deer Hunter's controversial representation of the Vietnam War reveals how violence figures an imaginary relationship between the American subject and its oriental other. This article examines the film's reception and relationship to media images of the war, particularly Eddie Adams's photograph "Saigon Execution."

This book is 480 pages proving that the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff plotted to kill JFK based on some 50 years of dedicated research by many authors and declassified files.  It is about the continuation of CIA’s political warfare and the assassination operations and CIA working with the North American mafia.  It is an edition as of Nov. 2019.

In memoriam of an extraordinary Vietnamese national hero and a friend of mine.
My piece covers Đặng Văn Việt, a young Vietminh colonel and his military commander and mentor, General Võ Nguyên Giáp, who helped shape Vietnam's recent history. I also was honored to meet General Giáp. 
Đặng Văn Việt led the regiment that inflicted the first great defeat on France's colonial army in 1950. It was a huge shock to France and the prelude to its final defeat as colonial power at Dien Bien Phu just four years later.

Ilmestyskirja: Vietnamin sodan kulttuurihistoriaa -teos on monipuolinen, syväluotaava ja lähestymistavoiltaan virkistävän ennakkoluuloton sukellus ihmismieleen, sotaan ja sen pitkiin varjoihin. Se onnistuu yhdistämään tieteellisen ja populaarimman omakohtaisen kirjoittamisen tavoilla, jotka saavat lukijan väistämättä ajattelemaan Vietnamin sodasta paljon laajemmin kuin mihin varsinkin pahimmillaan huomattavan yksioikoiset populaarikulttuurin representaatiot yksistään tarjoaisivat edellytykset.

It is said that there are three sides to every story. Each side has its own version, and the truth is the third somewhere in between those two. The study of war is no different, and therefore it is important to be very receptive to the messages being delivered by the narrators on each opposing side.

This paper discusses the failed policy of reconciliation carried out by the leadership in Hanoi after the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam (commonly known as „South Vietnam“) on April 30, 1975.
It argues that in spite of all promises to the contrary after the end of the war the victorious North systematically dicriminated Southern Vietnamese who had worked for the former Saigonese government or the United States in Vietnam. Furthermore, I will analyse in which way the leadership in Hanoi tried to write the Republic of Vietnam out of history by destroying „sites of memory“ (lieux de mémoire).
In the following I discuss how this policy together with the building of socialism in the southern part of the country led to serious social conflicts and finally to a massive exodus of approximately one million Vietnamese.
In the second part of the paper, I will show that since the beginning of the reform policy in Vietnam (đổi mới) in the 1980s the failed integration of many defeated South Vietnamese after the end of the war has increasingly been adressed in “memory debates” among Vietnamese abroad and at home. The fate of the former South Vietnamese war cemetery in Biên Hòa will serve as an example.

Christina Schwenkel's absorbing study explores how the "American War" is remembered and commemorated in Vietnam today―in official and unofficial histories and in everyday life. Schwenkel analyzes visual representations found in monuments and martyrs' cemeteries, museums, photography and art exhibits, battlefield tours, and related sites of "trauma tourism." In these transnational spaces, American and Vietnamese memories of the war intersect in ways profoundly shaped by global economic liberalization and the return of American citizens as tourists, pilgrims, and philanthropists.

Only excerpts available here. Full text is at https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/jcws_a_00819 (or through library access)
Abstract:
From the late 1950s until 1975, the war between North and South Vietnam had both domestic and international consequences. Unlike the Cold War divide between the United States and the Soviet Union, the war between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, the Communist North) and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, the non-Communist South) was an armed conflict between two polities that both identified themselves as Vietnamese. In this twenty-year-long struggle, the fates of the DRV and the RVN were tied to their success in producing new generations who would subscribe to their respective agendas. This was done through many venues, of which education was one of the most important.
          This article analyzes the educational systems at the primary and secondary school levels in the DRV and RVN after the division of the country, with a special focus on the years between 1965 and 1975. It considers their respective “divorces” from the colonial educational system and explores their goals, their problems, and the means they used to overcome these problems. Moreover, the DRV attempted to create an educational mini-empire with the DRV centered agenda—establishing a Vietnamese-based system in China, bringing into the DRV Laotian children, and exporting their ideology in the educational system established in the NLF-controlled territories of the RVN. The DRV created a rigidly politicized school system focused on the war and the construction of socialism. The RVN, creating an educational antipode of the North, endeavored to separate schools from the war, largely taking politics out of the curriculum and leaving pupils to figure out for themselves the aims of the conflict and their place in it, stranding many of them in ambiguity. If the DRV system was depriving pupils of the means to challenge the government, the RVN was supplying children with such means. Relying on archival materials and published documents, this article compares the educational systems at the primary and secondary school levels in the DRV and RVN after the division of the country, with a special focus on the period 1965–1975.

Dans une approche historique, cet article s’efforce de montrer en quoi la politique mémorielle qui suit les deux guerres américaines en Corée et au Vietnam (1950-1975) est une démarche principalement orchestrée par les vétérans de guerre. Le premier mémorial national du Vietnam, inauguré en 1982, témoigne d’un contexte particulièrement militant où les vétérans cherchent avant tout une forme de reconnaissance de leur engagement et la commémoration de leurs compagnons d’armes tombés au front, dans une nation divisée par la guerre qui les a laissés dans l’oubli. Pourtant, la création de ce mémorial sera à l’origine d’un vaste débat sur la légitimité d’un tel monument et les critères de représentation de l’héroïsme des soldats. Cette construction mémorielle par et pour les vétérans illustre un processus qui sera repris lors de la construction du mémorial de la guerre de Corée en 1995 et, dans une certaine mesure, les mouvements contestataires et commémoratifs de l’actuelle guerre d’Iraq.

This paper looks at how marijuana operates as a symbol of dissidence and an idiom of counter-culture in America in the 1960s and 1970s. At the onset of the Vietnam War, when the nation was sharply polarized, the strengthening of anti-drug laws under President Nixon’s rule reduced marijuana to an excuse to prosecute whoever disagreed with the state apparatus. The use of drugs, especially marijuana, also became a means to leave the battlefield in one piece, if not a strategy to avoid flying to Vietnam at the first place. Through three war memoirs – Things They Carried, Passing Time, and Busted – produced respectively by Vietnam veterans Tim O’Brien and W.D. Ehrhart, the cultural history of marijuana is tracked in light of the social, medical, and psychological studies conducted on marijuana around that time. It is argued that the soldier’s docile body, as Foucault explains, becomes a site of resistance against the war-mongering government with the consumption of cannabis. Ehrhart’s Bu...

Si torni a guardare questo film allora, non come un documento interno alle vicende del comunismo italiano ma come un dramma, una lotta in cui l’uomo rischia di smarrirsi ritrovandosi prigioniero di quel consumismo che passo dopo passo lo consuma.

Women on all sides of the US war in Vietnam pushed for an end to the conflict. At a time of renewed feminist fervor, women stepped outside conventional gender roles by publicly speaking out, traveling to a war zone, and entering the male-dominated realm of foreign affairs. Even so, some claimed to stand squarely within the boundaries of womanhood as they undertook such unusual activities. Some American women argued that, as mothers or sisters of soldiers and draft-age men, they held special insight into the war. They spoke of their duty to their families, communities, and nation to act in untraditional, but never­ theless feminine, ways. But women did not act uniformly. Some joined the military as nurses or service personnel to help in the war effort, while others protested the war and served as draft counselors. By the end of the war, some anti-war protestors developed feminist critiques of US involvement in Vietnam that pointed to the war as a symptom of an unjust society that prioritized military dominance over social welfare. As in wars past, the US war in Vietnam created upheavals in gender roles, and as nurses, mothers, lovers, officers, entertainers, and activists, women created new spaces in a changing society.

In 1961, the US Department of Defense (DOD) introduced the use of tactical herbicides in Vietnam with the objective to improve visibility, prevent ambush, disrupt enemy food supply, as well as secure and facilitate the construction of military bases. This essay argues that the use of Agent Orange corresponds to a state-initiated state-corporate crime against health and safety and against nature, and could also be related to war crime. To support this argument, the paper exposes links between criminology theories and the use of tactical herbicides.

Reviews "Air Base Defense in the Republic of Vietnam, 1961-1973," by Roger P. Fox, Washington: Office of Air Force History, 1979.  This official history describes how the ten U.S. Air Force bases in Vietnam -- Phu Cat, Da Nang, Tuy Hoa, Nha Trang, Cam Ranh Bay, Phan Rang, Pleiku, Bien Hoa, Binh Thuy, and Tan Son Nhut -- were defended by USAF Security Police Squadrons.  Tacticians and planners looking for "lessons learned" will find it useful. So will the veteran or family member who wants to see the whole picture of air base defense during the war.

The following article explains that the only way to avoid a disaster was to develop the economy and finance of the country. It is made with excerpts from my book “Viet Nam- Political History of the two wars- Independence War (1858–1954) and Ideological War (1945–1975)” prefaced in the English version by Professor Janet Hoskins (USC, LA) and in the French version by Historian Pierre Brocheux.

This article is dedicated to the most prominent American commander of the Vietnam War, or to be more precise, to the treatment of General William C. Westmoreland in modern American historiography. Ridiculed and accused of lying to the American public during his lifetime, General Westmoreland still remains one of the ‘villains’ of the Vietnam War. In recent years it has changed slightly, and now on the publishing market we can find books both attacking and defending the MACV commander and his decisions. However, mainstream historiography continues to judge him through the prism of the American trauma caused by the Vietnam War, and not his real merit and achievements. This article aims to dispel at least a few myths persisting both about General Westmoreland and his strategy to win ‘an unwinnable conflict.’

This essay is divided into two sections. First it will discuss how the current historical narrative attributes the American defeat in the Vietnam war towards the Civil Rights Movement, the Moritoriums and the undercurrent of social tensions in the U.S mainland. Next it will argue how bureaucratic inefficiencies with defence expenditures, and incoherent policy objectives in Washington lead to a long and drawn out war. As the war dragged on in Vietnam this sapped the political support of the war from the populace at home.  By examining how the shift from LBJ's to Nixon's presidencies affected the war. It becomes apparent that Washington had no clear and coherent response to managing a protracted guerilla war.

North and South Vietnamese youth had very different experiences of growing up during the Vietnamese War. This book gives a unique perspective on the conflict through the prism of adult–youth relations. By studying these relations, including educational systems, social organizations, and texts created by and for children during the war, Olga Dror analyzes how the two societies dealt with their wartime experience and strove to shape their futures. She examines the socialization and politicization of Vietnamese children and teenagers, contrasting the North's highly centralized agenda of indoctrination with the South, which had no such policy, and explores the results of these varied approaches. By considering the influence of Western culture on the youth of the South and of socialist culture on the youth of the North, we learn how the youth cultures of both Vietnams diverged from their prewar paths and from each other.
https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/south-east-asian-history/making-two-vietnams-war-and-youth-identities-19651975?format=HB

Through six intensive and semi-structured interviews, this research paper examines the role social support networks may or may not have played in facilitating the resettlement experiences of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees living in Canada after the Vietnam War. It was observed that those who were privately-sponsored emphasized the instrumental role their benefactors played in assisting their successful resettlement, whereas those who were government-sponsored were forced to adopt a more independent mindset of forming their own social support systems. Regardless of sponsorship type, the notion of hard work was a commonality found amongst the participants. They arrived at the receiving country expecting and willing to accept conditions of underemployment and downward mobility. The effects of pre-migration enabling factors such as marital status and educational attainment are also acknowledged. Within a social support framework, theories of social capital and resiliency are used to analyze the lives of the participants after the traumatic experience of forced migration.

Keywords: Chinese-Vietnamese refugees, resettlement, Canada, social support network, resiliency theory

This article discusses the divergent developmental outcomes among postwar South Korea, Taiwan, and South Vietnam. While U.S. aid has correctly been identified as a key factor in the rapid postwar development of South Korea and Taiwan, the failure of aid to establish strong institutions in South Vietnam calls for a closer analysis of how different historical and geopolitical factors explain the greater political stability and institutional capacity of South Korea and Taiwan. In particular, the legacies of Japanese colonialism are seen as having played a key role in establishing the strong developmental states of South Korea and Taiwan, while the postcolonial South Vietnamese state was more fragile. As such, there was greater political resistance to land reform in the latter, and large amounts of U.S. economic and military aid were unable to quell domestic insurgency and establish the basis for economic development.

Western historians have focused on a series of supposed “lost moments” when America could have changed the character of Ho Chi Minh and the post-colonial Vietnamese state. Foremost among these is the “Wilsonian Moment” during the Versailles peace conference in late 1919 and early 1920. Some western historians argue that Ho preferred the American president’s concept of self-determination above all other political philosophies. Only later, after suffering Wilson’s indifference, did French socialists radicalize Ho and he begin his migration to the communist world.

This narrative, however, is contradicted by newly digitized archival and library resources on Ho Chi Minh’s actions in 1919-1920. In fact, Ho never referenced the American president. Instead, he was advocating for Lenin’s concept of political development at this time. This new picture of Ho Chi Minh’s activities not only demonstrates that Woodrow Wilson did not factor into his political vision and challenges notions that the metropole and Europeans were a unidirectional force of radicalization. Indeed, Ho Chi Minh was himself an agent of radicalization, pushing French socialists to join Vladimir Lenin’s Third International as the Versailles conference closed.

"Pure Land is a project that took over a year in the making, and it started, as most exhibitions do, as a conversation with the artist. In late 2017 I had expressed my interest to Dinh on the works he had developed in previous years about the effects of Agent Orange, namely, the series Damaged Gene (1998) and Lotus Land (1999).  My interest in developing this subject further, perhaps in a new body of works, was greeted with reciprocal interest."  What follows is an excerpt of the interview between Dinh Q. LE and Loredana Paracciani in preparation for the exhibition at Tang Contemporary Art in Bangkok. The aim of this conversation is to unpack some of the crucial elements of this new body of works as well as to situate Pure Land in the context of Dinh’s ongoing art practice. The full-length interview can be found in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Pure Land: A Solo Show by Dinh Q Le (January-February 2019) at Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok.

The plot of The A-Team is straightforward and repetitive: fugitives from the government for a crime they did not commit, members of a former Vietnam War special-forces unit roam America as mercenaries, using over-the-top, cartoonish violence to protect small business owners from exploitation. The team’s positioning as roving gunslingers using interventionist violence to regenerate ideal communities directly references the Western. However, while the self-reflexive artificiality of the team’s violence ridicules the Western, the righteousness of the team’s perpetual success paradoxically embraces it. This paper argues that The A-Team challenges the Western only as a means to reaffirm it, negotiating post-Vietnam American society’s conflicting desires to reject and recuperate the past—in this case, the myth of “regeneration through violence” that Richard Slotkin argues underpins both the Western and America’s national identity.