'War Stories': False Atrocity Tales, Swift Boaters, and Winter Soldiers - What Really Happened in Vietnam

Abstract

Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War Scott Laderman, Edwin A. Martini, eds. Durham, NO Duke University Press, 2013 334 pages $24.94 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The American War in Vietnam continues to engage creative scholars from across diverse academic disciplines to rethink both the legacies of the war and the war itself. The editors of Four Decades On have assembled an impressive collection of scholarship in this vein, drawing from the transnational study of identity, memory, film, culture, tourism, and economy. The contributors explore boundaries, official histories and counter-narratives, and remembrance and reconciliation to assess the enduring legacies of a ten-year war, now literally Four Decades On, and they go beyond traditional, though still useful, American or Vietnamese-centric approaches. The resulting collection compels reflection on how assumptions and myths influence memory, and emphasizes the illuminating conclusions of new, cross-disciplinary approaches applied to understand better the deep and fingering legacy of this war. In this, the editors succeed. Christina Schwenkel, for example, an anthropologist at the University of California, Riverside, argues transnationalism influences the evolving narrative of the war exhibited at museums, memorials, and other war-related sites in Vietnam. As Vietnam's economy becomes more global and war tourism gains popularity among American visitors, narratives at these sites (which Schwenkel calls memory-scapes) have shifted from the older hurray-for-we-defeated-the-Americans to a softer, more American friendly tone, often focusing on mutual victim-hood of combatants and non-combatants, regardless of nationality. For Schwenkel, reconciliation, ironically, may be the most important if not unintended consequence of Vietnam's desire to open markets with the United States and court American tourists. Analyzing cultural legacies looms large in this collection. Historian Walter Hixson, of the University of Akron, examines how Americans have emphasized healing and overcoming the Vietnam Syndrome through a variety of means, but most interestingly through film, which tends to focus on the American soldier as victim and the Vietnamese as nearly invisible. These cultural influences allow revisionist history to take root, which can deflect attention from real questions of American intent in Vietnam and American militarism in general. Fitting well into this rubric of memory, narrative, and reconciliation are the divisive issues of Agent Orange and accounting for POWs/ MIAs. The legacies of both have been strewn with myth, politics, and manipulation. Diane Niblack Fox, an anthropologist who also teaches Vietnamese Studies at the College of the Holy Cross, offers one the better article-length studies of this controversial issue. Fox looks at the impact of the use of chemical defoliants from multiple perspectives--science, medicine, public policy and law, the work of non-profits, history, and most interestingly the actual experience of those directly affected. …