Curating and re-curating the American war in Vietnam

Abstract

The American war in Vietnam killed 58,000 US military personnel and millions of people on the ground, creating a troubling war legacy that has been ‘resolved’ in the USA through state strategies to efface military mortalities. Drawing on Charlotte Heath-Kelly’s work addressing mortality denied or ignored in the field of international relations and that of Andrew Bacevich and Christian Appy on American militarism, I explore the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, as a site of war re-curations that refuse the effacement of mortality and disrupt the militarist myths that sustain it – namely, that America is renewed and revitalized through war, and that soldiers live on as American heroes when they sacrifice for the country. With the Vietnam Syndrome long since replaced by insistence on loving all soldiers, even if not all the country’s wars, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is dedicated to remembering those who were not publicly acknowledged for fighting and dying in America’s failed war. Assemblages of pictures, letters, and other items that a community of loss leaves at the Memorial re-curate the war by showing the lingering pain that war mortality inflicts on those who experience it decade upon decade. Taken together, the objects of war shown at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and collected each evening put mortality at the heart of war experience. The Memorial is therefore a key location of knowledge that challenges militarist appeals and state effacements in favor of what Viet Thanh Nguyen calls ‘just memory’ of war.