Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) by Yen Le Espiritu

Abstract

Reviewed by: Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) by Yen Le Espiritu Bunkong Tuon (bio) Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es), by Yen Le Espiritu. Oakland: University of California Press, 2014. Xiv + 249 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 978–0-520–27771-7. Yen Le Espiritu concludes the first chapter of Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) with the following refrain: "Amid the organized forgetting of the Vietnam War and its people, this book is an act of remembering—and remembrance" (23). A 1.5-generation Vietnamese American, Espiritu began her career writing about Asian American lives, labor laws, Philippine and Filipino American histories, and Asian American panethnicity. It was during the U.S. War in Iraq that "the shock of recognition" brought her back to the American War in Vietnam and the discourse surrounding the refugee figure (172). One of the main goals in Body Counts is to remind the West that refugees do not emerge out of a vacuum; political, economic, and military ties bring refugees to European and U.S. shores. Since the American War in Vietnam, U.S. films and news media have developed a discourse where Vietnamese refugees are portrayed as victims to be rescued and saved by the American government, to be grateful for what Mimi Thi Nguyen terms "The Gift of Freedom." Such kindness and generosity on the part of the U.S. government elides its history of violence and warfare in Southeast Asia, Espiritu argues. Furthermore, this "organized forgetting" justifies and perpetuates American involvement in other parts of the world. This is why Body Counts is timely, required reading for our troubled times. Body Counts comprises seven intricately woven chapters. The first chapter makes two important moves in refashioning the field of critical refugee studies. One, Espiritu shifts her focus away from the dominant discourse of refugees as victims devoid of any kind of agency, the "damaged-centered approach," to one that pays attention to refugees as agents rebuilding their lives and cultural traditions in refugee camps and the United States. Two, while acknowledging the validity of moving the field away from the scope of war and to the study of identities shaped by gender, sexuality, race, class, exile and transnationalism, she worries that such a move engenders a kind of forgetfulness of the [End Page 332] historical and political reasons why Vietnamese refugees are in the United States. Writing against such systematic forgetting, Espiritu proposes a "critical juxtaposition" methodology that traces the silent and ghostly presence of the Vietnamese in American narratives about the war, by "bringing together of seemingly different and disconnected events, communities, histories, and spaces in order to illuminate what would otherwise not be visible about the contours, contents, and afterlives of war and empire" (21). Chapter 2 examines "the most-traveled refugee route via military aircraft [with] a critical lens through which to map, both discursively and materially, the transpacific displacement brought about by the legacy of U.S. colonial and military expansion into the Asia Pacific Region" (26). In a comparative examination of the colonial histories of Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines and Anderson Air Force Base in Guam, Espiritu illustrates how the legacy of U.S. colonialism played a critical role during the war: with planes from these military bases carpet-bombing Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia during the war and rescuing Vietnamese refugees at the end of the war. Chapter 3 writes against the discourse of refugees as agentless victims of war by examining the various ways second-wave Vietnamese refugees rebuilt their lives in refugee camps. Using oral histories, blogs, commentaries, and memoires, she demonstrates the particular ways Vietnamese refugees reconstructed their homes while being displaced. In the next two chapters, Espiritu turns her critical lens to "memory-making practice[s]" in the United States. Chapter 4 examines U.S. mainstream press coverage of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. Using her methodology of critical juxtaposition, Espiritu places newspaper articles on veterans, "the rescuers," alongside those on the Vietnamese refugees, "the rescued," identifying two interrelated strands: veterans were seen as the innocent and heroic soldiers and Vietnamese...