Vietnam's Memory of War

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Most Americans now know the Vietnam War was a brutal, tragic, and unnecessary blunder.

It led to the deaths of millions of Vietnamese and – as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington attests – more than 58,000 American military deaths. Last year over three million people visited the site.

It is a somber place. As Bruce Springsteen sings in his 1984 lament “Born in the U.S.A.,” many a young man was sent off to a foreign land, To go and kill the yellow man.”

And while he was “Fighting off the Viet Cong, They’re still there, he's all gone.”

Yet, while the war has left a searing wound in the American psyche, it’s nothing compared to the pain the Vietnamese nation suffered.

The United States has now launched a ten-year multi-million-dollar clean-up operation at an air base in Vietnam it used to store the notorious chemical Agent Orange, a defoliant it sprayed to destroy jungles and uncover hiding places. More than 80 million litres are estimated to have been used over South Vietnam.

Vietnam maintains that several million people have been affected by Agent Orange, including 150,000 children born with severe birth defects.

“The fact that two former foes are now partnering on such a complex task is nothing short of historic,” declared U.S. ambassador to Vietnam Daniel Kritenbrink.

Last term, in a course of mine dealing with national myths, we heard an excellent presentation of a journal article on “Tourism and Nation Building at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam,” by Jamie Gillen, a professor at the National University of Singapore.

It provides the reader with a summary of the Vietnamese national myth regarding the Vietnam war -- known as the “American War” in Vietnam -- as well as a look into its dissemination to a wider audience through tourism.

This is accomplished through them visiting the War Remnants Museum, once known as Museum of American Atrocities, located in the city once known as Saigon, in the former South Vietnam, the now defunct state where most of the fighting took place.

The museum, as a friend of mine who visited it a few years ago told me, is staunchly anti-American, focusing on issues such as the use of Agent Orange or the cruelty endured by captured Vietnamese at the hands of Americans at prisoners of war camps. 

The museum, relates Gillen, portrays the American war on Vietnam as a military campaign “aimed at laying waste to the country.”

The museum also dedicates a significant portion of its space to displaying the international support, not just among Communist countries, that was shown toward Vietnam during the war. 

This is certainly true, for much of the New Left student radicalism in Canada, the United States, and other Western countries, was fueled by opposition to the war, seen as being motivated by the risible so-called “domino theory” propagated by American decision-makers at the time.

It suggested that a Communist government in one nation would quickly lead to Communist takeovers in neighboring states, each falling like a row of dominos.

The museum also highlights American hypocrisy in its attitude towards Vietnam, which, it asserts, was simply fighting for its sovereignty.

It does this by prominently displaying Communist leader Ho Chi Minh’s 1945 declaration of the independence of Vietnam from France, which borrowed heavily from the document of another colonial nations’ declaration of independence, the United States.

Thus, argues the museum, the United States “disobeyed its own words” when it invaded Vietnam, becoming itself a colonizing power.

While the museum makes the claim that Vietnam was the country most negatively affected by the Cold War, it goes on to show the massive rebuilding of Vietnam after the war as a testament to the strength and unity of its people.

The U.S. invasion was destructive and powerful, the exhibit stresses, but the resistance and fortitude of the Communist Party ensured eventual triumph. 

The War Remnants Museum, writes Gillen, is a deliberately provocative and one-sided presentation of a well-known episode in history, but it also uses tourism “to generate ‘new’ truths about what the American war is and how it affects Vietnam today.”

In this way, it explores the presentation of the “American War” in the construction of nationhood. And aimed as it is for a foreign audience, it is a critical platform for the Communist government to educate tourists of this position.