A Bloody Solidarity: Nguyen Thai Binh and the Vietnamese Antiwar Movement in the Long Sixties

Abstract

This paper uncovers the history of antiwar activist Nguyen Thai Binh and the birth of the Union of Vietnamese after his death. As a former student at the University of Washington, Seattle, Binh participated in numerous antiwar protests against the U.S. military and imperialist government. On July 2, 1972, he hijacked Pan Am Flight 841 headed to Tan Son Nhut airport to protest American bombings of North Vietnam, but was assassinated in the attempt. Amidst the broiling anti-war movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, the Union of Vietnamese was the only group of Vietnamese in America to organize against the war following Binh’s death, suggesting the unique positionality of Vietnamese students and early immigrants among other marginalized groups in their struggles for liberation. In this paper, I reference the works of scholars Karen Ishizuka and Sylvia Shin Huey Chong to compare different methodological approaches to writing about the Asian American antiwar movement. Their texts frame my discussions of the invisibility of the Vietnamese antiwar narrative, the cross-cultural alliances that formed from political convergences, and the orientalist perception of the Vietnamese body. Thus, I argue that Nguyen Thai Binh’s activism and the Union of Vietnamese demonstrate a departure from the predominantly non-Vietnamese antiwar historiography. Through my analysis of letters, pamphlets, and government documents, I consider the ways in which Binh’s fatal devotion to ending American brutality in Vietnam and the Vietnamese antiwar movement both challenge American perceptions of race and ethnicity and critique the violent militarism of the war in Vietnam.