Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War, edited by Scott Laderman and Edwin A. Martini

Abstract

Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War, edited by Scott Laderman and Edwin A. Martini. Durham, Duke University Press, 2013. x, 334 pp. $24.95 US (paper). The American war in concluded almost four decades ago, yet its memory continues haunt participants on all sides. This conflict remains one the most active fields in American foreign relations history, yet the dearth of material on US-Vietnamese relations since the fall of Saigon in the spring of 1975 stands in stark contrast the abundance on the war years. Making sense of how the war affected the people of both and the United States in the grander scheme is no mean feat, but this is what the editors set out do in Four Decades On. Four Decades On is a collection of eleven essays from a respected group of professors working in the disciplines of history, anthropology, English, languages and comparative literature, as well as American and Asian studies. The volume covers a diverse range of transnational topics that go beyond state-to-state relations, including the environmental consequences of the war, Vietnam Syndrome in the United States, cinematic influences, and trade. For the most part, the authors seek add a layer of cultural analysis existing literature rather than work from new archival or primary material. Each of these essays has its own individual merits, but two particular themes stand out: the first, in chapters by Walter L. Hixson and Alexander Bloom, addresses how the war shaped American national and in turn foreign policy; the second, in chapters by Diane Niblack Fox and Charles Waugh, examines the environmental legacy of a war in which American forces engaged in the most relentless aerial bombardment in world history and deployed massive quantities of chemical defoliants that poisoned the landscape. In Nam and 'Vietnam' in American History, Hixson correctly writes that Americans the conflict had little do with Viet Nam itself. Indochina functioned as a site, one of many through a long history of intervention, in which the United States carried out the drives of its military national identity (p. 44). The war was ill-advised and ended in a clear defeat as many have previously argued, but Hixson writes that an American victory culture went on to obscure the reasons for the American defeat ... ensure that few lasting lessons were learned from the conflict, elide the unprecedented devastation it had heaped upon the region, blame critics for the defeat, and thus make possible the next wave of US foreign intervention less than a generation later (p. …