1.0 Introduction

‘Memory refuses to die...Depending on their age, sex, regional origins, political sympathies, and experiences, different Vietnamese have different versions of what happened over the last century and different ways of dealing with its legacy of memories.’1

The Fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975 remains a significant day in Vietnamese history, marking the end of the Vietnam War and subsequent re-unification of the country under communist governance. Its remembrance, however, is particularly contested because it also marks the collapse of the South Vietnamese state. Indeed, the Vietnam War was perhaps one of the defining conflicts of the Cold War era. Ideological division between the communist North and anti-communist South positioned Vietnam at the centre of a global conflict that sought to control and determine Vietnam’s future statehood. It was the division at the 17th parallel that laid the foundation for not only the character of the conflict, but also the deeply divergent perspectives that would emerge during the war and the commemoration of it post hoc.

In this paper, I contend that the Vietnam War in its complexities has features of a civil war. However, its complexity lays in its Cold War context, which saw foreign American interests interfere and escalate the conflict in an effort to define and control Vietnamese statehood. In particular, I will focus on the implications of American involvement in the war and how this redefined communist efforts and subsequent state-sanctioned narrative of the conflict. This paper will also explore how Vietnamese perspectives have changed following the war post- economic reform. In particular, I will draw from both memorials, memoirs, and short stories that illustrate the diversity and transnational character of how the war is remembered, and how contributions by Vietnamese in modern literary mediums universalise wartime experiences shifting collective memory of war towards a culture of reconciliation and humanising recognition of victims and survivors.

2.1 North and South Vietnam

Fundamental to understanding the Vietnam War is the 1954 Geneva Agreement which observed not only the end to French occupation and aggression, but also the division of Vietnam at the 17th parallel, which perhaps defined the conflict along civil war terms.2 In essence, the creation of these states was conceived as temporary - with reunification via democratic election in 1956 as the goal of these agreements.3 Arguably, however, this division inadvertently increased polarisation between two competing nationalist ideologies for Vietnamese independence, locating them within geographical distinctions; the North representing communist nationalism backed later by the Soviets, and the South representing an anti-communist nationalism, backed subsequently by the U.S.4 In the context of the Cold War, Eisenhower’s administration saw not only the consolidation of U.S. presence in Vietnam, but a commitment to defending the Southern state, a defining policy that would escalate the conflict through the 1960s.5 As explained by his ‘falling dominoes’ theory, establishing a Southern Vietnam and therefore American presence in the Southeast region would be geostrategic, acting as a bulwark against the larger threat which the Soviets and China posed to American hegemony.6 With the support of the U.S., Eisenhower subsequently gave Diem confidence to hasten the dissolution and withdrawal of French presence in Vietnam, which led to the beginnings of U.S. commitment to and alliance with Republic of Vietnam (RVM).7 In a letter to Diem, Eisenhower gave full confidence in Diem, promising military and economic aid to defend and prepare the South for war.8 In a bold move to antagonise and reassert Diem’s anti-communist stance against the North, Diem contravened the Geneva agreement to hold elections, citing his ‘policy of peace’ which vilified the North as ‘a regime of oppression’, incapable of holding free elections, and acting ‘against the will of the people’.9 In a purely civil war interpretation, Diem’s refusal to accept the political legitimacy of the Viet-Minh points to the heart of the political struggle between the North and South that would characterise the Vietnam War. However, upon closer inspection, this rhetoric would not have been possible were it not for U.S. support, recognition of the RVM, and their mutual anti-communist position. This would not only shape subsequent Vietnamese understanding of the conflict, but also fuel the North’s resolve for war, framing the conflict in anti-imperialist terms.10

2.2 U.S. Escalation and North Vietnam

Central to the North’s justification for war against the South was the U.S.’s increasing presence in the affairs of Vietnamese independence and statehood. In many ways, the U.S. Indochinese policy during Eisenhower’s administration reflects national concern and interest in a Vietnam that was geopolitically anti-communist. This is reflected in Eisenhower’s resolve to not only provide South Vietnam military and economic aid, but in their 1948 policy, predating the agreement. It expressed U.S. obligations to ‘eliminate’ communism and ‘instal[l]...a self-governing nationalist state which will be friendly to the US’ in the interest of protecting national security against the backdrop of the Cold War.11 This of course became more evident as the U.S. increasingly escalated their military operations within Vietnam in the 1960s in order to end the war.12 In Johnson’s administration, their desire to bend Vietnamese sovereignty under U.S. terms eventually came to the surface in their military campaigns that saw ecocide and the use of Agent Orange,13 indiscriminate air raid bombings across Laos and Vietnam, civilian casualties, and most infamously the war crimes committed against civilians in the 1968 My Lai massacre.14 U.S. hubris and eagerness to end the war saw the implementation of a series of aggressive air raid bombings across the North between 1965-68, known as ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’.15 And despite warnings in 1966 by experts of the ‘backfire’ it would cause, the bombings continued, releasing an average of 800 tonnes of bombs a day across the Northern state.16

Indeed, understanding the war in American imperialist terms emboldened the North’s resolve to continue their efforts for reunification. From the North’s perspective, the South had been held captive by imperialist interests, that Johnson was ‘turning South Vietnam into a neo- colony’.17 As Vu explains, the Vietnamese-Worker’s Party (VWP) had held a rather consistent ‘binary worldview’ that followed Leninist-Marxist thinking, where the communists represented progress, a linear historical path leading away from exploitation and suffering caused by capitalism, and imperialists and capitalists represented all that was ‘back-wards’ about society.18 For them, reunification and the efforts to achieve this end was justified, progressive, liberalising and in the revolutionary spirit of it all – even inevitable.19 Framing such a conflict in these terms emphasised the prevailing of communist rule as a legitimate nationalist movement, even if it had meant killing their own compatriots in the South. It is to this end that in the Fall of Saigon in 1975, which would reunify Vietnam under the Northern socialist leadership,20 Vietnamese perspective emphasise these points in both their collective memory and historical understanding of the war. For mainland Vietnamese, this became the dominant and public facing narrative, enforced by the subsequent institutions of the newly reunified Vietnam.

Contesting Wartime Narratives 3.1 Heroism and the Just War

In the immediate period after the Vietnam War in 1975, wartime narrative in public spaces were institutionalised and centred on the themes of heroism and sacrifice of North Vietnamese troops and the Viet-Cong. Focused on commemoration of Vietnamese independence and statehood, it was necessary for the state to self-reflexively bolster its own legitimacy.21 Indeed, a ‘new history’ discourse on Vietnamese history would become the hegemonic framework for understanding the Vietnam War in the years to come.22 Using Leninist-Maoist understandings to promulgate and maintain the revolutionary or ‘national’ spirit of the new state, wartime narrative focused on the moral character of the war to legitimise the state. emphasising themes of Vietnamese decolonisation and independence.23 Established after the 1945 August Revolution, when Ho Chi Minh had proclaimed his Declaration of Independence, ‘new history’ discourse within the Institution of History sought to produce a historiography that would instil Marxist ‘linear-progress’ thinking in the Vietnamese self-reflexive interpretation of its own history.24 Understood in these terms, the Vietnam War was officialised by the state as the ‘War Against the Americans’, almost as a continuation of its resistance against imperial forces: the Chinese, the French, the Japanese, and subsequently the Americans.25 By chronology, history in this sense privileged the revolutionary inevitability of the emergent and prevailing state. Post-war understandings of the Vietnam War, therefore, self-reflexively legitimated itself by institutionalising its own history within its own ideological framework. Commemorative shrines that serve ideological purposes to the wartime narrative, such as Ho Chi Minh, preserve a political commitment to the state-sanctioned narrative, as a visual ‘embodiment of its memory’,26 honouring the ideas of sacrifice and the cult of martyrdom. As Malarney rightly points out, in the immediate aftermath of the war commemorative practices did not stop after the war, which had been officialised during the war to cope with the significant loss of lives and mourning of living relatives of the deceased.27 The continuation of these practices can be seen in state- sponsored monuments in communes and districts that inscribe words such as ‘The Fatherland Remembers You Sacrifice’ or ‘Eternally Remember the Debt to the Martyrs’.28 Culturally, it also exists in local customs and rituals reflected in the ceremonies held in Thinh Liet on War Invalids and Martyrs Day,29 and altars for the dead.30 These public commemorative practices of these soldiers and wartime heroes form Vietnamese perspectives and through official narrative, it publicly reinstates patriotism,31 allegiance with the emergent Vietnamese victors and therefore party-state, and the war premised on Vietnamese right to self-determination.

3.2 Doi Moi Post-War Vietnam

No doubt the political and social understandings of the Vietnam War have changed since the aftermath of the war. In Tran’s memoir, he writes about his experiences as a filmmaker and the difficulties of creative expression in the face of communist censorship of wartime representation. However, specifically after the Doi Moi reform in 1987, creative licence was slowly liberalised,32 leading to projects which focused on personal stories of suffering and loss such as in A Violin at My Lai and The Story of Kindness.33 Despite setbacks and harsh censorship policies, its emergence in film festivals and critical acclaim in Vietnam demonstrate a changing attitude for how the war is remembered in a collective sense.34 Initially, cultural representations of the war focused on triumph and the just-ness of war, as represented in art and public monuments constructed during the post-war reconstruction era.35 His documentaries which sought to personalise wartime narrative is one of many instances of a subtle change in domestic Vietnamese perspectives that would emerge on the subject of the Vietnam War. Arguably driven by the state’s move away from Marxist-Leninist purity in their economic and international politics, meditations on these themes not only universalise Vietnamese war experiences but also provide a shared dialectical space on the war in terms of profound human loss and suffering, beyond political and ideological loyalties. Arguably, with the passage of time, and new generations of Vietnamese followed by the reform era, the revolutionary spirit which the communist victory in the war had rallied behind, had softened, allowing for more diverse meditations on the cost of war to enter mainland Vietnamese perspectives, particularly in the cultural domain.36

3.3 Commemoration of South Vietnamese Troops

In many ways, official war narrative of the U.S. and allies is reflected in public memorials of the South Vietnamese within diasporic communities.37 In reference to the Cabramatta Vietnam War Memorial, which was built in response to the digger statue – representing all soldiers in wars fought by Australians – Hamilton and Ashton argued that the memorial itself was an attempt at integration by the Vietnamese-Australian community into the annals of Australian war remembrance.38 Their representation was not merely to represent Vietnamese troops, but specifically, South Vietnamese ARVN soldiers, asserting recognition for their war efforts and supporting the Australians and the U.S. Arguably, just as memorials in mainland Vietnam commemorate their own troops and exclude South Vietnamese, these memorials also similarly integrate South Vietnamese troops into a broader hegemonic historical understanding of the Vietnam War. As Nguyen argues with a similar war memorial in Westminister, Orange County, California, the war memorials commemorates ARVN contributions ‘by integrating them with traditional American narratives of war, heroism sacrifice, nationalism, and anticommunism’, while also vilifying the communist regime.39

3.4 Collective Memory in Story-Telling

However, contesting these official and perhaps divisive perspectives of the Vietnam War are not public or official remembrance of heroes or fallen soldiers, but Vietnamese memoirs and stories by survivors and kin, which makes intimate the experience of the Vietnam War. Arguably these represent more accurately evolving Vietnamese perspectives on the Vietnam War as evidenced in mainland Vietnam’s diversifying of experiences. In a memoir by Mai Elliott,40 she details her experiences of living through the conflict. Perhaps, most interesting about the memoir is how her family ended up being on opposing sides of the conflict. Her sister who was a passionate communist left the family and decided to fight alongside the Viet-Minh, while the rest of her family had decided to move South in the partition. Perhaps, most prominent in the book, was the theme of surviving and the hardships they endured in the South as a result of ongoing war and possible threat of death and further displacement. In perhaps, analogous to the Southern experiences, Birds in Formation, the short story by Nguyen takes the perspective of a young boy living decades after the war in Vietnam. In a moment of epiphany, the boy recalls the moment he found out his father had in fact ‘fought for the South’.41 Grief, in this short story, is illustrated with feelings of guilt and trauma, specifically Southern Vietnamese survivor’s guilt post-war Vietnam:

‘He knew that sometimes we had to pay a huge price for a small mistake. Because of his experience, he’d always had a fear of separation. And I think he suffered from a crushing feeling of self-loathing.’42

Arguably, stories and personal accounts demonstrate not merely the complex experiences as a result of wartime survival, but also represent a transnational culture of collective memory by the Vietnamese after the war.

Conclusion

This paper contends that U.S. interests and military involvement had in fact played a major role in justifying the North’s resolve and subsequent framing of the conflict in anti-imperialist terms. The result of this complicates the civil war interpretation, polarising Vietnamese perspectives on the Vietnam War. Eventually, as memory of wartime becomes more distant, it allowed for shifts in Vietnamese understanding of the war. Engagement of stories and films have powerful consequences on retrospective understandings of war, and memoirs in particular, transnationally promote and dialectically transcend binary Vietnamese perspectives beyond the basis of political struggle. The effect of this is a transformative and inclusive space, where Vietnamese perspectives are humanised, holding potential for challenging and superseding dominant wartime Vietnamese perspectives of both sides of the conflict.

FOOTNOTES

1 Tuong Vu, “Introduction: Situating Memory,” in The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, ed. Hue-Tam Ho Tai (University of California Press: Los Angeles, 2001), 8.

2 Jessica M Chapman, Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and 1950s Southern Vietnam (Cornell University Press: New York, 2013), 162.

3 “Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference, July 21, 1954,” in Vietnam Documents: American and Vietnamese View of the War, ed. George Katsiaficas (Taylor & Francis: New York, 1992), 43.

4 DR Sardesi, Vietnam: Past and Present (Westfield Press: Los Angeles, USA, 1998), 68-9.

5 “Department of State Policy Statement on Indochina, September 27, 1948,” in Vietnam: A History in Documents, ed. Gareth Porter (New American Library: New York, 1981), 144.

6 “Eisenhower Counts the Dominoes, April 7, 1954,” in A Vietnam Reader: Sources and Essays, ed. George Donelson Moss (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1991), 38-39.

7 Keith W Taylor, “China and Vietnam: Looking for a New Version of an Old Relationship,” in The Vietnam War: Vietnamese and American Perspectives, ed. Jayne S Werner and Luu Doan Huynh (Taylor & Francis: New York, 1993), 279.

8 “Eisenhower’s Letter of Support to Ngo Dinh Diem, October 23, 1954,” in A Vietnam Reader: Sources and Essays, ed. George Donelson Moss (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1991), 44-45.

9 “Ngo Dinh Diem’s Rejection of a Consultative Conference,” in Vietnam Documents: American and Vietnamese View of the War, ed. George Katsiaficas (Taylor & Francis: New York, 1992), 50-51.

10 Tuong Vu, ““To be Patriotic is to Build Socialism”: Communist Ideology in Vietnam’s Civil War,” in Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia, eds. Tuong Vu and Wasana Wongsurawat (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2009), 45.

11 “Department of State Policy Statement on Indochina, September 27, 1948”, 144.
12 James P Harrison, “History’s Heaviest Bombing,” in The Vietnam War: Vietnamese and American Perspectives, ed. Jayne S Werner and Luu Doan Huynh (Taylor & Francis: New York, 1993), 131.

13 Sardesi, Vietnam, 93.
14 Harrison, “History’s Heaviest”, 131-133.

15 Ibid., 131.
16 “Excerpts from the Institute for Defence Analysis Bombing Evaluation, August 29, 1966,” in A Vietnam Reader: Sources and Essays, ed. George Donelson Moss (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1991), 97-99.

17 “President Ho Chi Minh’s Response to President Johnson’s letter, February 1967,” in A Vietnam Reader: Sources and Essays, ed. George Donelson Moss (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1991), 105.

18 Vu, “To be Patriotic is to Build Socialism”, 33-35.
19 Ibid.
20 Sardesi, Vietnam, 90.

21 Vu, “Introduction,” 4.
22 Christina L Schwenkel, The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation (Indiana University Press: USA, 2009), 151-52.

23 Shaun K Malarney, ““The Fatherland Remembers Your Sacrifice”: Commemorating War Dead in North Vietnam,” in The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, ed. Hue-Tam Ho Tai (University of California Press: Los Angeles, 2001), 47-48.

24 Christina L Schwenkel, The American War, 151-52.
25 Malarney, “The Fatherland”, 48.
26 Schwenkel, The American War, 122. 27 Malarney, ”The Fatherland”, 59-60. 28 Ibid., 67.
29 Ibid., 68.
30 Ibid., 63-64.
31 Ibid., 67.
32 Van Thuy Tran and Thanh Dung Le, In Whose Eyes: The Memoir of a Vietnamese Filmmaker in War and Peace, ed. Wayne Karlin, trans. Eric Henry and Quang Dy Nguyen (University of Massachusetts Press: Boston, 2016), 96-97.

33 Ibid., 130-33; Ibid., 103-105.
34 Ibid., 71.
35 Christoph Giebel, “Museum-Shrine: Revolution and Its Tutelary Spirit in the Village of My Hoa Hung,” in The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, ed. Hue-Tam Ho Tai (University of California Press: Los Angeles, 2001), 98.

36 Vu, “Introduction”, 4.
37 Christopher R Linke, “Side-by-Side Memorials: Commemorating the Vietnam War in Australia,” in New Perceptions of the Vietnam War: Essays on the War, the South Vietnamese Experience, the Diaspora and the Continuing Impact, ed. Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen (McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers: Melbourne, Australia, 2015), 85-87.

38 Paula Hamilton and Paul Ashton, “On Not Belonging: Memorials in Sydney,” Public History Review 9 (2001): 23.

39 Viet Thanh Nguyen, “What is the Political? American Culture and the Example of Viet Nam,” in Asian American Studies After Critical Mass, ed. Ono Kent (Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 27.

40 Duong Van Mai Elliott, The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family (Oxford University Press: New York, 1999).

41 Ngoc Tu Nguyen, “Birds in Formation,” in Other Moons: Vietnamese Short Stories of the American War and Its Aftermath, ed. Quan Manh Ha and Joseph Babcock (Columbia University Press: New York, 2020), 42.

42 Ibid.

REFERENCES

Primary Sources

“Department of State Policy Statement on Indochina, September 27, 1948.” In Vietnam: A History in Documents, edited by Gareth Porter, 144-48. New American Library: New York, 1981.

“Eisenhower Counts the Dominoes, April 7, 1954.” In A Vietnam Reader: Sources and Essays, edited by George Donelson Moss, 38-39. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1991.

“Eisenhower’s Letter of Support to Ngo Dinh Diem, October 23, 1954.” In A Vietnam Reader: Sources and Essays, edited by George Donelson Moss, 44-45. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1991.

“Excerpts from the Institute for Defence Analysis Bombing Evaluation, August 29, 1966.”In A Vietnam Reader: Sources and Essays, edited by George Donelson Moss, 97-101. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1991.

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“Ngo Dinh Diem’s Rejection of a Consultative Conference.” In Vietnam Documents: American and Vietnamese View of the War, edited by George Katsiaficas, 50-52. Taylor & Francis: New York, 1992.

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