Beyond the Quagmire: New Interpretations of the Vietnam War

Abstract

The Vietnam War has spawned more than its fair share of scholarly anthologies (including one co-edited by me). So many edited collections have rolled off the presses, in fact, that one can easily discern subcategories. There are collections focused on political, international, military, cultural, and social dimensions. Others zero in on origins or legacies of the war or various time periods in between. A few ambitious anthologies, including projects undertaken in recent years by Columbia University Press and Cambridge University Press, attempt to do everything—to provide, that is, a comprehensive overview of the war via contributions from eminent scholars writing in their areas of expertise.Geoffrey W. Jensen and Matthew M. Stith deserve credit for finding their own niche in this crowded field. Beyond the Quagmire pulls together thirteen essays on a disconnected array of topics chosen not because they cohere around any particular theme but because they suggest fresh lines of inquiry into the history of the war. The chapters, undertaken by an unusual mix of junior and seasoned scholars, range from the development of antiwar sentiment in the American South to the impact of Chinese forces in North Vietnam's war effort to the role of music in Americans’ experiences and memories of the war.Given this diversity of topics, it is hardly surprising that the editors struggle to identify connective tissue that holds the book together. Jensen and Stith propose in their introduction that the book is intended to “dislodge” the historiography of the Vietnam War from the “morass” in which it currently finds itself (p. 2). By this, the editors appear to mean that scholars are stuck in tired ways of understanding the war, especially the notion that U.S. decision-makers ensnared themselves in a hopeless “quagmire” that promised no real avenues for success.In making this claim, Jensen and Stith overreach in their effort to establish their book's importance. They curiously ignore any number of recent scholarly works that take the history of the war in fresh directions and challenge old interpretations. Indeed, it seems fair to say that the history of the Vietnam War has been one of the liveliest areas of pathbreaking research in recent years in the historical study of U.S. foreign relations, as well as in the wider fields of U.S. and international history. The promise of taking an overdue leap “beyond the quagmire” rings hollow.Jensen and Stith are on sturdier ground with their second, more modest claim. The essays, they assert, delve into subjects that have long been “sideshows” (or “no shows at all”) in the history of the war and “advance our understanding of a variety of troublesome and complicated interpretive threads regarding the conflict in Vietnam and America” (pp. 2, 9). Because these “threads” are so diverse, some readers will undoubtedly—and understandably—dip into the collection selectively for its coverage of specific topics. Readers who digest the whole book, however, will be rewarded with a useful survey of new scholarly approaches, even if none are quite as groundbreaking as the editors suggest.Some of the chapters paint with a broad brush, aiming to synthesize recent scholarship or to advance sweeping lines of argument. Heather Marie Stur contributes one of the most elegant and striking essays of this sort, surveying the experiences of women from the United States who served in Vietnam. Working as nurses, as clerks, and in other roles, women had to negotiate “dominant gender ideas” that questioned their value in a war zone even though they were affected by the war just as much as male veterans, Stur argues (p. 184). Stith contributes another such wide-ranging entry, surveying the ways in which Vietnam's natural environment—its dense jungles, rugged terrain, and menacing fauna—shaped the U.S. experience of war. William Thomas Allison tells the history of memorial-building in the years since 1975, noting the abundance but also disappointing homogeneity of the monuments that U.S. communities have set up to honor those who died in Vietnam.Other chapters pursue narrower agendas built on focused archival research. One of the most valuable is Xiaobing Li's analysis of Chinese military assistance to North Vietnam. Although other scholars have written on this subject for more than two decades, Li's archival discoveries add detail about the extent and variety of Chinese involvement above the seventeenth parallel. A more wholly original contribution is the chapter by Nengher N. Vang, who delves into the vicissitudes of U.S. attitudes toward the Hmong ethnic group in Laos as geopolitical alignments in Southeast Asia evolved after U.S. military involvement ended.In a chapter focused on the Johnson administration's efforts to use conscription to create opportunity for impoverished U.S. citizens (“Project 100,000”), Jensen offers a convincingly balanced assessment of an initiative often dismissed as a failed exercise in social engineering. Sarah Thelen also explores the U.S. home front, analyzing the Nixon administration's manipulation of the U.S. flag and other patriotic symbols to encourage political support for its policies. Richard Nixon's successes helped pave the way for similar manipulation by later presidents, Thelen argues. Susan L. Eastman's meticulous study of The ’Nam, a comic book launched in 1986, stands out as the book's most unusual entry, though Ron Milam's chapter—a partially autobiographical account of the roles performed by U.S. military advisers working alongside South Vietnamese forces—ranks a close second.As this overview of the book's contents makes clear, the collection has more to offer readers interested in the U.S. experience than in Vietnamese or international dimensions. It would be grossly unfair, though, to complain of gaps or overrepresentation of certain themes. Comprehensiveness is not the point. Instead, the collection highlights what scholars, including younger historians looking to make their mark, can accomplish by seeking opportunities on the margins of well-trodden scholarly ground.