The Past/Present Vietnam War

Abstract

The Past/Present Vietnam War Roger Chapman (bio) GENE BASSETT'S VIETNAM SKETCHBOOK: A Cartoonist's Wartime Perspective. By Thom Rooke. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015. LOOKING BACK ON THE VIETNAM WAR: Twenty-first Century Perspectives. Edited by Brenda M. Boyle and Jeehyun Lim. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016. Because I'm still in SaigonStill in SaigonI am still in SaigonIn my mind —Dan Daley (but sung by the Charlie Daniels Band), "Still in Saigon" (1982)1 I had to coax Thang and Hau—and later, my other relatives in Vietnam—to reminisce about the war, which had become distant to them. They preferred to focus on the present … —Duong Van Mai, a Vietnamese American (1993)2 [End Page 19] The year 2025 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon and by that time there may be nothing left to say about the Vietnam War. Piles of books have been published on this conflict. As Thom Rooke explains in the preface of Gene Bassett's Vietnam Sketchbook, the books (as well as articles) written about Vietnam "are enough … to fill a C-130 Hercules transport plane" (xi). He should have suggested the larger C-5 Galaxy, but his point is understood as he continues: "It seems that any lesson Vietnam can teach has, in some fashion, already been taught" (xii). Meanwhile, the longest American war is no longer the longest, as it was superseded by the "War on Terror" (specifically the "forever war" in Afghanistan, which in 2019 was in its eighteenth year).3 So lessons taught may have been lessons forgotten, though Heraclitus might say, "No nation ever steps in the same quagmire twice, for it's not the same quagmire. …" It would seem that the events following September 11 would relegate the Vietnam War to the dustbin of academic inquiry, but according to editors Brenda M. Boyle and Jeehyun Lim, in the preface of their anthology Looking Back on the Vietnam War, "renewed academic conversations on the legacies of the Vietnam War … have emerged with the opening of previously inaccessible archives and the comparisons drawn between the Vietnam and Iraq wars" (5). Why that "old crazy Asian war"—to borrow from a classic country hit by Kenny Rogers—has long been a fixation of American culture, including academic inquiry, is a question yet to be definitively answered.4 Rooke's interest in Vietnam turned out to be happenstance. He befriended an older man, Gene Bassett, who in 1965 spent several months in Vietnam as an editorial cartoonist for Scripps Howard News Service. One day Bassett casually shared with Rooke about his seventy or eighty sketches he did while touring Vietnam and Rooke got inspired to put together a book. Rooke attended the University of Michigan, the birthplace of the antiwar Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but he was of the class of 1978, the first "post-draft" class (xii). He feels that because he was younger, he "was left with a relatively unbiased perspective" (xi). Probably this is less the case than he realizes, considering that his tabulation of "consequences" of the war includes American war dead (60,000) and American wounded (300,000) while offering no tally of the fatalities and casualties of the other side. The volume by Boyle and Lim, however, turns attention to the lasting impact "on ordinary people" (5) or "the people who experienced the Cold War as a balance of terror" (6). Bassett's sketches, it can be noted, do at least include some imagery of the Vietnamese. The chapters offered by Boyle and Lim tend to be heavily focused on the Vietnamese diaspora. In actuality, these two quite different works are emblematic of the approach taken in remembering the Vietnam War. Rooke is focused on the war from an American perspective and seeks to preserve a body of memory—the Bassett sketches are primary documents and represent a reproduction of a type of archival material. Boyle and Lim, on the other hand, narrow "ordinary people" to generally exclude American GIs while seeking to remember the war from the vantage point [End Page 20] of Vietnamese in the years of aftermath. When the...