American War in Việt Nam: We Are Besides Ourselves

Abstract

Growing up in a small Arizona town on the border of California and Mexico called Yuma, one of my favorite activities was accompanying my father on his regular weekend trips to the local flea market. While he scoured tables full of discarded electronic parts, scraps he would surely find useful for some project around the house, I squatted in front of boxes of dusty magazines. I was fascinated by the Time, Life, and Look magazines from the 1960s and 1970s that I found there. The photographs on the covers that com pelled me were powerful images of the civil rights movement or scenes from the American War in Việt Nam. I remember the first image of the war I saw which transfigured me and irrevocably altered how I saw myself (Figure 10.1). The image depicted a bloodied Vietnamese soldier, both arms up in the air, flanked by two American soldiers who held him—with some trepidation—by the back of his shirt. The Vietnamese soldier was disheveled and had a wild look of confusion and panic in his eyes. Looking at this image, I experienced a kind of disembodiment, a shock of recognition and misrecognition in this abject figure, this young Vietnamese: I saw myself and my family in his eyes while simultaneously being horrified at that awareness. It was the first time that I had ever seen an Asian person—much less a Vietnamese person—depicted in any images in the broader culture around me. It was shocking and mortifying. Over time, the repetition of the stories that I saw in those magazines, stories that depicted the Vietnamese as the cunning enemy, sedimented a notion of Vietnamese people that typifies the refugee condition: I am an enemy/I am not an enemy; I am to be killed/I am to be saved.