Forever
Vietnam
How a Divisive War Changed American Public Memory
David
Kieran
Amherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
Paperback. xii+ 305 pages. ISBN 978-1625341006. $26.95
Reviewed by Françoise Coste
Université Toulouse–Jean Jaurès
David Kieran’s starting point in this book is the
centrality of the Vietnam War in the contemporary United States. To him, “the
war remains an enigma that must be explained, a trauma that must be healed, a
disaster that must not be repeated.” Forever
Vietnam : How a Divisive War Changed American Public Memory is
Kieran’s contribution to this momentous debate.
As he explains it in his introduction, Kieran wants
his book to “raise critical questions about the intersections of the legacy of
Vietnam, memorialization, and foreign policy in the contemporary United States.”
Thus Vietnam
becomes a prism through which one can understand and (re)interpret American
history and contemporary foreign policy. Kieran’s thesis is that Vietnam and its remembrance, because of the
ontological trauma America
suffered after its defeat in South-East Asia,
now shape the memory of all the main military events in American history,
including those that took place before
the 1960s.
More specifically, Kieran distinguishes between two
periods. From the end of the war to the mid-1980s, Vietnam
was largely remembered in the US
in a negative manner. Then, the mid-1980s saw the emergence of a revisionist version
of the war, which is defined in the book as a “narrative that obscures the
imperialist origins of the Vietnam
conflict and America’s
devastation of Vietnam
through claims that it was waged for peace and that American soldiers made the
primary sacrifices.” Vietnam
revisionism has now become the dominant vision in the United States
and explains the country’s “renewed faith in American militarism.”
To demonstrate this ambitious thesis, Kieran chose six
case studies. In the chapter devoted to the infamous confederate Andersonville
prison which operated in Georgia during the Civil War, Kieran introduces a key
figure of his book, that of the POW/MIA activist. The POW/MIA movement is one
of the central actors in Vietnam
revisionism: putting the focus on the need to locate prisoners allegedly left
behind after the war and to recover the remains of missing soldiers
participates in the denunciation of the way the American government supposedly
abandoned the courageous men fighting in Vietnam. So while the museum at Andersonville was initially conceived as a tribute to the
Union prisoners who died there during the Civil War, it became the National
Prisoner of War Museum in 1998. This museum’s main focus, through countless
Memorial Day speeches on the POW/MIA issue given there every year or exhibits
devoted to the famous ‘Hanoi Hilton,’ has turned it into a place commemorating
the experience and the suffering of Vietnam’s prisoners of war. A military
hierarchy consequently emerges. By placing a special emphasis on the violence
of the treatment the POWs endured, the museum implicitly depicts the Vietnamese
as the most sadistic enemy the US has ever known, which makes the sacrifices and
bravery of Vietnam War prisoners unprecedented in American history―and the war
a completely legitimate one.
The second chapter offers a fascinating reading of the
way Vietnam changed the remembrance of the Second World War in the United
States. Kieran had the great idea to study three World War Two memoirs written after Vietnam. Through many poignant, and
often horrifying, quotes, Kieran shows how the ‘greatest generation,’ that has
been so repeatedly celebrated for fighting the good war, actually committed numerous
atrocities in Europe and in the Pacific. But veterans allowed themselves to
reveal such acts only after Vietnam
veterans had published their own memoirs admitting to civilian massacres and
barbaric fighting on the battlefield. Even more interestingly, these WWII
memoirists have heavily borrowed from the narrative and lexical tropes of
Vietnam War literature to convey their own experience (like the detailed
description of dead bodies, the disillusionment with the goals of the war, or
the difficulties of returning home). In this case, Vietnam worked as a delayed trigger
for the previous generation of soldiers. But however accurate and interesting
this version of events may have been, it proved very difficult to accept for some
Americans, like the many Republican leaders who, in the 1980s and early 1990s,
stopped Congress from recognizing the existence of post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) in WWII veterans.
Conservatives are much more at ease with establishing
parallels between Vietnam and the battle of Fort Alamo, the next topic Kieran
discusses. The Alamo memorial in Texas serves Vietnam revisionism in two
different ways: first, the values traditionally associated with the Alamo
soldiers (bravery, heroism, coming to the rescue of a small country threatened
by a tyrannical enemy, sacrificing one’s life for a democratic ideal, losing
the battle but winning a moral victory) have been transferred to the soldiers
who fought in Vietnam in order to rehabilitate them in the eyes of the American
population, erase the stigma of defeat, and justify the war a posteriori; second, the memorial has
become another center of POW/MIA activism, especially through the efforts of a
group called the Lost Patrol (“People are always saying ‘Remember the Alamo,’
but we say ‘Remember the POWs and MIAs’”)―another proof that, in the 1980s, as
Kieran writes, the POW/MIA issue was so predominant that it became “a
meta-identity” for all Vietnam veterans.
Kieran also has the good idea to include in his book a
chapter on an episode which is often neglected, as it is overshadowed by the
tragic events that happened a few years later: the American intervention in
Somalia in 1993. Somalia is an
interesting case because it offers a counterpoint to the general narrative of Vietnam
revisionism. One key revisionist tenet is that the war had actually been winnable―defeat
was due to the lack of support for soldiers on the part of timid politicians in
Washington. But
the difficulties the United States
encountered in Somalia
(symbolized by the famous ‘Black Hawk Down’ episode) saw a return to the idea
that Americans should not get involved in ill-defined missions abroad, even for
humanitarian purposes. For the majority of American journalists, and for a
large part of public opinion, the famous ‘ Vietnam
quagmire’ came back in the guise of the ‘Somalia
quagmire’: the United States
should have learned its lesson in Vietnam, but it had forgotten it by
the 1990s. However, this interesting revisionism of Vietnam revisionism did not last.
It did not survive 9/11, to which Kieran devotes the last two chapters of his
book.
The memory of 9/11 is obviously still in the making,
but Kieran already finds many elements which confirm his thesis. Vietnam looms
large in the remembrance of 9/11 and the wars that followed. Kieran first
analyzes the memorial in Shanksville,
Pennsylvania, on the site of the
crash of United Airlines Flight 93. He is particularly interested in the
temporary memorial which was erected there (he speaks of “temporary
memorialization”), before the completion of the official monument in 2011. There,
many visitors (including a disproportionately large number of Vietnam
veterans) left mementos, like military medals. Their political message was unambiguous:
the passengers of Flight 93 were the first victims of the War on Terror, but
also the first Americans to fight back; the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were consequently justified,
they had to be fought in their memory. In other words, the Flight 93 victims
had become conservative heroes (“personifications of the Bush doctrine”). Vietnam also played a central role in the public
debates leading to the adoption of a permanent memorial, as the Vietnam Wall in
Washington D.C.
has become the modern template for war memorials in the United States. As it happens, the
Shanksville memorial is organized around a wall featuring the names of the forty
Americans who died there―an unmistakable echo. Kieran also finds many echoes of
Vietnam in the political debates surrounding the War in Iraq, especially in the
counterinsurgency strategies developed by the highest echelons of the US
military and in the openly revisionist rhetoric George W. Bush used when
calling for the Surge in 2007. Kieran also interestingly notices the conscious
effort, on the part of the first Afghanistan
and Iraq memoirists, to
explicitly break with the language of Vietnam memoirs by openly and
proudly supporting these wars and minimizing their violence, especially
regarding civilian casualties.
Despite a puzzling omission―the 1991 Gulf War which
did so much to help the US overcome the Vietnam Syndrome―Kieran’s six examples
work well. They prove Vietnam
has become a narrative and historiographical black hole when discussing and
remembering American military history. The result is, according to Kieran, a
largely “depoliticized, uncritical celebration of the military,” which he
regrets. He takes pains to make clear that his stance is neither antimilitary
or anti-interventionist, that he only wishes for a more objective and
dispassionate relationship between the nation and its military, if only to
protect the lives of American soldiers. Yet, even if his sympathy for veterans
and their families, and his concern for their specific health needs, is obvious
through these pages, it is also sometimes difficult for Kieran to hide his more
negative feelings. Vietnam
revisionism exasperates him, as it downplays the role of militarism in US history and the often conservative political
agenda of those celebrating Vietnam
as a “noble cause,” to quote Ronald Reagan. He also seems to have little
patience with some Vietnam
veterans who appear to him as excessively paranoid, convinced as they are that
they are still rejected by the mainstream of American society “although [they]
have been publicly venerated at least since the dedication of the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial in 1982.”
In this sense, this book goes against the grain and asks questions which will
undoubtedly continue to affect the United States
as the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq
have bestowed upon the country a new generation of veterans.
