Chiến tranh ký ức và sự thất trận ở Việt Nam của Mỹ

America’s memory wars and the Vietnam debacle

by Jeff Kingston

Special To The Japan Times

       Có p/v Lan Cao, Viet Thanh Nguyen.. .  (Điểu oái oăm là nhiều hồi tưởng cuả người ngoại quốc, kể cả một số người ngoại quốc gốc Việt, về cuộc chiến tranh tranh này... có vẻ sâu sắc và khách quan hơn của nhiều người Việt Nam!)

               

April 30 marks the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, as Americans remember it — the day that the North Vietnamese army captured the capital of South Vietnam and reunified their country.
Wars, as the old adage goes, are fought twice: first on the battlefield and later in the remembering. While April 30 is celebrated as a national holiday in contemporary Vietnam, some Vietnamese expatriates refer to it as Black April, a day of U.S. abandonment and ongoing betrayal. Their war stories are now finding a voice in talented American writers who are complicating and indicting the blinkered remembering that has prevailed in the United States: Killing 3 million Vietnamese is an awful stain, while forgetting the 240,000 allied Vietnamese soldiers that died at Washington’s behest adds to the national shame. Their names are not etched in Washington’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and perhaps they should be, but for now they have their own site in Orange County, California.

 

 

 

 

A few years ago I was wandering through the cemetery for the fallen soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam located on the distant outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon). It is a desolate and depressing place, largely overgrown and neglected, brightened here and there by flowers placed at relatively few of the graves. These dead soldiers fought for Washington’s succession of puppet governments, died for a losing cause and are now forgotten pawns of Cold War machinations.
President Richard Nixon extracted the U.S. from the war in 1973 because he had bigger geopolitical fish to fry: normalization of ties with Beijing and detente with the Soviet Union. America’s Vietnamese allies were left holding the bag in a classic bait-and-switch; they grudgingly agreed to the withdrawal/peace deal in exchange for massive amounts of aid, but the Americans didn’t live up to their promises. Although many Vietnamese who worked with the U.S. were evacuated in 1975, numerous so-called collaborators were not and faced often brutal reprisals.
The U.S. defeat led to what is called the Vietnam Syndrome, referring to a less interventionist U.S. foreign policy due to domestic political opposition to sacrificing “blood and treasure” for dubious and elusive goals. Well, memories are short. Iraqis and Afghans are learning all about another aspect of the Vietnam Syndrome: Once you are no longer useful, compliant and grateful, you’re roadkill. Those who take huge risks for Washington and become pieces on the geopolitical chessboard should have no illusions that it will end well and that the U.S. will reciprocate. Semper fidelis (always faithful) indeed.
Lan Cao is the author of two haunting novels that poignantly unravel torn loyalties, treachery and lingering pain that cross generations, eras and continents — “Monkey Bridge” and “The Lotus and the Storm.” She is a refugee from South Vietnam who, as a professor at Yale Law School, is emblematic of the American dream. Her novels are about the second wind of war and America’s selective amnesia, awakening readers to the yearning for dignity and understanding among Vietnamese who lost much and deserve better. She says her epiphany came in 1980 while attending a five-year commemoration conference at the University of Massachusetts.
“I was astounded when one of the speakers said that today we celebrate the victory of the Vietnamese people,” Cao wrote in an email. “I was astounded because at that moment, the exodus of boat people was ongoing. These were people who were not necessarily part of the elite — whom you could denigrate as ‘puppets’ or imperialist lackeys of the U.S. or Western powers.”
In her view, “Americans of the left believed that the U.S. was on the wrong side. That Viet Cong and North Vietnam was the right side. The mainstream (not the left) believed that the war wasn’t worth the effort.” However, these views elide inconvenient truths, especially the postwar brutality.
“Ironically and tragically, when peace came to Vietnam, more people left the country in search of freedom than ever,” she said.
Cao draws attention to the U.S. mind-set regarding its Vietnamese allies, blaming their flaws for American failure.
“To sustain the myth that the U.S. is always noble and always wins wars, it had to create the myth of ignoble, unreliable, effete, cowardly allies — those are the unreliable ones that dragged the U.S. into the quagmire. This allows the U.S. to exit with honor,” she said.
Perhaps not much honor, but at least a comforting alibi.
Douglas Karsner, a professor of history at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, explains that in the United States many of his students are not taught much, if anything, about the Vietnam War in high school, where the word “defeat” is often unspoken.
“Americans are still fighting the Vietnam War,” Karsner wrote in an email. “For many Americans, the outcome of the war contradicts the myth of American exceptionalism … the loss cannot be explained other than looking for a scapegoat.”
He notes that the media is frequently blamed for turning the public against the war, while others blame politicians for tying the military’s hands.
Cao has little sympathy for this narrative because she believes her people were framed.
“Nothing the South Vietnamese did was right,” she said. “U.S. newspapers gleefully recorded every flaw, every story of corruption, every battle lost, every suppression of demonstrators, etc.”
She mordantly notes that in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. government was quickly willing to “suspend civil liberty and enact all kind of actions, which, because it was done by the U.S., were somehow deemed by the government to be ‘reasonable.’ Waterboarding? Of course, reasonable. National Security Agency eavesdropping? Yes, reasonable too. This is a war, after all, not a crime. Guantanamo? OK too.”
Paradoxically, she adds, if another country had done these things, especially a non-Western, poorer country, “It would have been immediately condemned as tyrannical and unworthy of U.S. support.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, a professor at the University of Southern California, points out that it would be hard to find “a more patriotic bunch than us, from the man who helped write the Patriot Act to the woman who designed a bunker buster bomb for the Iraq War.”
Nguyen is the author of “The Sympathizer,” a spy thriller set in Vietnam that is slated for release on April 7 and is already garnering accolades.
“We can argue about the causes for these wars and the apportioning of blame, but the fact is that war begins, and ends, over here, with the support of citizens for the war machine, with the arrival of frightened refugees fleeing wars that we have instigated,” Nguyen wrote in an email. “Telling these kinds of stories, or learning to read, see, and hear family stories as war stories, is an important way to treat the disorder of our military-industrial complex. For rather than being disturbed by the idea that war is hell, this complex thrives on it.”
Problematically, Nguyen laments, uplifting (and self-exonerating) stories of redemption are more appealing in the land of the defeated.
“This fantasy of Americans as rescuers has re-emerged in Rory Kennedy’s documentary ‘Last Days in Vietnam’ … telling a story that is good for the American soul. The movie depicts how, in the final hours of American involvement in Vietnam, a handful of courageous Americans initiated the rescue of 130,000 South Vietnamese allies from the clutches of evil communists.”
A glorious tale no doubt, but what’s a drop of good in a tsunami of bad?

Jeff Kingston is the director of Asian Studies, Temple University Japan.