The Vietnam Wars Scholastic Update
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As the first hypnotic notes of The Doors’ “The End” played over a lush, idyllic Vietnamese jungle, 10-year-old Viet Thanh Nguyen’s eyes widened as the peaceful green palm trees erupted into a fiery, orange inferno. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, the young boy watched, mesmerized, taking in the drifting smoke and the rhythmic chopping sound of the United States military helicopters silhouetted against the hellish scene of destruction unfolding on the TV screen in his family’s cozy California home.It was 1981, and unbeknownst to his parents — refugees from Vietnam who fled to the U.S. Six years earlier with their then 4-year-old son when Saigon fell to the communists — Nguyen had rented Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now to while away a solitary weekend while his mom and dad worked long hours at their neighborhood grocery store in San Jose. Watching it changed the 10 year old’s destiny, setting him on the path to becoming a USC Dornsife professor and a Pulitzer Prize–winning author.“The World War II movies I’d watched weren’t horrific, and it was clear who was the good guy and who was the bad guy,” said Nguyen, Aerol Arnold Chair of English and associate professor of English and American studies and ethnicity. “Here that wasn’t clear to me, and what was worse, people like me were the ones being killed. My 10-year-old mind had no way to make sense of drugs, psychedelic rock, murder, atrocity, massacre and Playboy bunnies. It was a war movie that was horrific, and that placed me at the center of that horror.
An American soldier guides U.S. Army helicopters in to land through a haze of purple smoke. Photo by Bettmann/Getty Images.“Although a huge amount of work had already been done about the Vietnam War, I felt that no one had yet tried to write a novel that dealt with all sides, and with the problem of looking at a war from all sides,” Nguyen said.
“That was going to be my subject, not just the war itself, but how the war was regarded.”The question of perspective lies at the heart of Nguyen’s novel and is a vital one for anyone seeking to establish a more balanced, less-biased truth about the 20-year conflict. The cover of Life magazine from April 7, 1967, featured Hanoi residents taking shelter underground during an air raid. The headline reads “First American Photograph in North Vietnam Under Siege.” Photo by Lee Lockwood/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.“We asked our father ‘Dad, where are we?’ He said ‘We’re on a U.S. Carrier.’ We said ‘What does that mean?’ And he replied, ‘It means nothing in the world can harm you now.’”Standing on the deck of the Hancock, Luong said, he already knew he would serve in the U.S. Military to give back to the nation that had saved him and his family from almost certain death.
Doc Lap At Last Summary
Thirty-nine years later, he pinned on his first star as he was promoted to the rank of brigadier general.While Luong condemns the war, he pays tribute to the bravery and sacrifice of the American soldiers who fought in Vietnam.“They did a super job,” he said. “You can’t take anything away from those men and women who fought over there. It took a little time, but I think we’ve recovered from Vietnam and that, demonstrably, our men and women across the armed forces have done a great job in the last decade or more of war.”Nguyen, however, believes that the scars left by Vietnam, both in America’s psyche and on its soul, have yet to heal.Before Vietnam, he argues, the U.S. Saw itself as a world benefactor, a strong country that had never lost a war.“The aftermath of the Vietnam War meant that no longer could Americans be self-confident about either their military prowess or their good intentions,” said Nguyen, describing the conflict as “deeply divisive.”“I think of it as a civil war in the American soul,” he said. “American self-confidence still hasn’t been restored to the quality it had in the 1950s. A well-meaning American soldier from the 7th Marine Regiment tries to comfort a distraught Vietnamese child by giving her a doll, near Cape Batangan, Vietnam, 1965.
Photo by Paul Schutzer/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.“Covering up” is not a new concept where Vietnam is concerned, argues Steven Ross, professor of history and director of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life at USC Dornsife. While President Lyndon Johnson’s government maintained the official line, telling Americans that Vietnam was about saving democracy — that if Vietnam fell to communism, everything else would fall — it knew this to be untrue, Ross said.In fact, he added, according to a secret CIA memo, 70 percent of America’s reason for fighting the Vietnam War was a face-saving exercise to avoid a humiliating defeat to the U.S. Reputation as a guarantor.“Only 20 percent was to keep South Vietnam from falling into Red Chinese hands, while 10 percent of our war aims were committed to helping the South Vietnamese enjoy a better, freer democratic way of life,” he said.When such memos were revealed, the result, Ross said, was that Vietnam killed Americans’ confidence in the ability of American military power to fight the right wars. “Vietnam was the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place.”For many, the horrors of the Vietnam War were — and still are — unforgettably distilled in one unbearable image: that of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the 9-year-old Vietnamese girl running naked in the collective eternity of our imaginations down a road, wailing in agony. She is naked because she tore off her burning clothes after a South Vietnamese napalm bomb attack on her village on June 8, 1972. The photograph, which became emblematic of the anti-war movement, dominated the front pages of the American press.
Viet Thanh Nguyen as a small child in Vietnam with his mother, Linda Kim Nguyen, at a rubber plantation in Ban Me Thuot in 1973. Photo courtesy of Viet Thanh Nguyen.Luong first saw Apocalypse Now in his late teens. Unlike Nguyen, it had little effect on him. “To me it was just another movie, it didn’t have an impact on me either way,” he said.However, like Gustafson, he says he has been deeply moved by some of the documentaries made about Vietnam.
He cites Last Days of Saigon and certain combat documentaries. As an American soldier and a former Vietnamese refugee, seeing images of the war triggered conflicting emotions.“They made me feel absolutely torn and very committed to the cause in South Vietnam,” he said. While such images fueled the anti-war movement in the U.S., they served to reinforce Luong’s determination to continue his family’s legacy of military service. “That’s the ethos I was raised with — that as ugly as war is, it’s important to sign up to defend your country.”Luong believes that among Vietnamese who arrived in the U.S.
As young adults and those who served in the South Vietnamese army, anger still lingers over what is perceived as a sense of abandonment, even betrayal, by the U.S.“Resentment persists among the diaspora, especially among South Vietnamese officers and those left behind to suffer communist re-education camps and all the oppression that followed,” Luong said, noting that he personally doesn’t have those feelings, although his father and his father’s comrades certainly did.“Looking at the last years of that conflict and talking to some of the very few remaining U.S. Advisers in Vietnam, we learn that the South Vietnamese fought for the most part heroically. Yet, in movies and the media, they weren’t positively portrayed.” Luong feels the suggestion that somehow they didn’t do their part or were a bunch of cowards who didn’t defend their homeland, is very painful to his father’s generation.“That hurts even more than the sense of abandonment,” he said.Ross stresses that the film studios largely remained silent on Vietnam until after the war was over.“Hollywood is in the money-making business not the consciousness-raising business. It didn’t want to risk being accused of a lack of patriotism, so it avoided putting out films critical of the war until it was over,” Ross said. The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now — these films changed our post-war view of Vietnam, recasting it as our very own personal horror story.However, Nguyen warns there’s a real danger in arguing that any kind of atrocity or war is unique, or more horrific, than any other.
“What that means is that we’re personally invested in it,” he said. “Our war, our horror, is more unique than other peoples’ and that’s actually not true.”The deaths of 3 million Vietnamese and 3 million Cambodians and Laotians during and after the Vietnam War represent horror on a grand scale. Yet we must not forget, Nguyen reminds us, that 6 million Jews and 20 million Russians died during World War II, and that 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered during the Rwandan genocide.“What is really horrific about the Vietnam War is that it wasn’t unique,” Nguyen said.
“The fact that 6 million people died during a war was actually not unique during the 20th century. That is the most horrific thing about it.”.