Curating and re-curating the American war in Vietnam

Introduction

‘The discipline which makes claims to the conceptual territories of war and security … does not explore mortality despite its “academic ownership” of violent terrain’ (Heath-Kelly, 2015: 58). This is Charlotte Heath-Kelly speaking of the academic field of international relations – and, by implication, security studies within it – where, she argues, mortality associated with violent actions of international relations is ‘purposely effaced’ (Heath-Kelly, 2015: 58). I want to pursue the idea that an academic effacement of mortality on the violent terrain of war is part of a larger tendency in American society to hide war deaths behind a myth that the violence of war is a central element in making, securing and re-securing a country (Slotkin, 1973). The warrior is a central link in that re-securing process, so much so that mortality is withheld from soldiers who die in war. Instead, they become joined to the state and curated as eternal military heroes. Iraq war veteran Roy Scranton (2016) insists that in American culture, ‘war is how we show ourselves that we’re heroes. Whom we’re fighting against or why doesn’t matter as much as the violence itself, our stoic willingness to shed blood, the promise that it will renew the body politic.’

This myth is not new. Richard Slotkin (1973) traces elements of it back to the earliest days of the republic, but it clearly has been pumped up in America’s post-9/11 era. The obsession with terrorist challenges at home and abroad has created a pro-military sensibility about the nation as ultimately secured and renewed through military actions abroad against forces deemed threatening, and also through military-type actions in US cities (Sylvester, 2014). Whether a soldier lives or dies in today’s war on terror can seem less important than the fact that he or she has ‘served’. The details of war actions and experiences go unmentioned in ceremonies that surround military service. The public is not regularly given the tally of soldiers killed in America’s war zones today, nor are images of flag-draped coffins coming off military cargo planes shown as they were during the American war in Vietnam. There is none of the near-prurient obsession now with the body counts on ‘their’ side that characterized Vietnam War reportage (and encouraged rampant killing); journalists these days are tightly controlled in battle zones. The US military is all-volunteer, too, and thereby less accountable to the citizenry than the conscripted forces of the Vietnam era. Today’s Pentagon is like a corporation that guards its business plan from the prying eyes of the nation; more information is available about citizens killed in mass shootings than about citizens in uniform servicing war zones. Mortality finally dissolves in the formality of military funerals that overdub loss with words of valor and sacrifice, and fold the complexities of a soldier’s life and death into one supreme identity of military hero.

This process of skipping over mortality for a military-scripted afterlife is a key aspect of the contemporary curation of militarism and its subtext of permanent war. Militarism is said to be a mix of ‘the proclivity to favor, or rely on, military responses to “solve” the complex problems of the world, as well as the concomitant institutional structures and material forces (e.g. the military-industrial complex) and the accompanying set of attitudes and beliefs (a distinctive cultural complex)’ (Cunningham, 2004: 553). True enough. Yet the abstractions in this definition leave out people and their militarism, mortality, injury, loss, and mourning. Andrew Bacevich (2010: 182–183) begins to bring them in when he suggests that

over the course of George W Bush’s presidency, open-ended war became accepted policy, hardly more controversial than the practice of stationing U.S. troops abroad…. More extraordinary still [is] the extent to which the country’s military leaders, and the American people more generally, accommodate themselves to this prospect.

Johanna Tidy (2017) takes this a bit further, decrying the ‘ubiquitous and predominant viewpoint from which modern Western war is communicated and understood, with publics invited to identify with, respect, and endorse the “selves” that are positioned within war in this way’ (Tidy, 2017: 95). Bereaved families are expected to perform the pantomimes of eternal military service to America.

While it is common to link American militarism to the events of 9/11, war historian Christian Appy (2015) associates it with the revivification of America’s Vietnam veterans as honorable warriors. ¹ The ‘selves’ who launched this effort were veterans of the war and family members who pursued the idea of a memorial on the Washington Mall for Americans who died in Vietnam. On the day the memorial was dedicated in 1982, hundreds of the veterans paraded through the streets of Washington to the site. Enthusiastic crowds urged them on, belying the dominant story of Vietnam as the deviant war in American history – the one that was lost, the one the military was unable to win, the one that saw the US military napalming the very people it was meant to secure. The veterans – not the academics or Washington politicos – initially re-curated the record around the idea, as Appy (2015: 240) puts it, that Americans would have to learn how to ‘separate the warrior from the war’.

Of course, it is not entirely reasonable or even possible to pull the one from the other into a neat binary: soldiers execute the violence of war when called upon to do so. That is to say, they do war. They make war. They train for war. One recalls US President George W. Bush encouraging Americans after 9/11 to go shopping and take vacations; leave the dirty work of retaliation, renewal, and the reconstitution of America to the generals. One might assume that efforts to separate dead soldiers from the nasty war that got them would be enshrined at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In fact, however, many remembrances that survivors bring to the Memorial hint of unresolved tensions over how an ordinary person who was a father, husband, brother, or friend got swept into the maelstrom of a war that achieved nothing. Now he (most of the American war dead are men) is eternally dead, gone, finished, out of sight – and that outcome cannot be effaced or sugar-coated by patriotics. Mortality kills celebrations of heroic afterlife. Or so it seems given the melancholic feeling that hangs in the air at the very memorial that was erected to honor the soldiers of the American war in Vietnam while withholding comment on the war itself. ² That approach to memorialization has brought out what Scranton (2016) describes as a contradiction ‘between our subconscious belief that righteous violence can redeem us, even ennoble us, and the chastening truth that violence debases and corrupts’. And there is no going back to square one to do the war over again with new rules.

That war, its memorialization, and the double-sided myth offer starting points for thinking through aspects of militarism as they pertain to Heath-Kelly’s concern with effaced mortality. In line with an interest in war as experience (Sylvester, 2011, 2013, 2015), I do not focus here on international relations or security studies per se, but rather on what international relations/security studies misses: the ‘ordinary curatorship’ of mortality that takes place at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial through memento mori that display what one is left with, and is mostly left without, as a result of that war. Ordinary people capture the memorial on a daily basis as their place to display the heart of war as an absent presence that silences hallelujahs of heroism. The objects they leave and stories they tell are powerful and compelling. They are also jingoistic in their own way, leaving out as they do war deaths and melancholic afterlives where the Vietnam War is called the American War. ³

Heroes created/heroes praised/heroes resisted

The emphasis on mortality at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial stands in contrast to the efforts of American statecraft to make mortality disappear or seem beside the point relative to the valiant sacrifices of war (see Auchter, 2014). The dominant messages are difficult to resist and destabilize, although some try. When her son died in the early days of the 2003 Iraq War, Cindy Sheehan refused to identify with, and quietly support, the notion that he and the war were heroic. She set up a personal anti-war camp outside the Texas compound of George W. Bush to protest the war and to insist that her son died in vain. When he did speak of mortality, Bush was prone to claiming that ‘our men and women who’ve lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan and in this war on terror have died in a noble cause and a selfless cause’. Sheehan retorted: ‘We all know by now that that’s not true, and I want to ask George Bush, “Why did my son die? What was the noble cause that he died for?”’ (Diebenow, 2005). He did not reply.

American anti-war groups have shown similar concern to lift the mortality-effacing veil that maintains the idea that soldiers live forever after enacting nation-securing violence in righteous wars (see Rowe, 2013). Yet increased acceptance of a militarist environment is evident in the roars of approval that greet miscellaneous members of the armed services who are now routinely lauded at major sporting events. Today’s veterans also get commercial discounts, early-boarding rights for flights, and frequent approaches from total strangers who want to ‘thank you for your service’. Thus are civilians positioned as grateful and indebted to military heroes in ‘unified and enlightened’ spirit, to use Scranton’s (2016) words. At such events and moments, no one asks and no one tells what a feted military person actually did in his or her war. Nor, until recently, has a single word been breathed about who funds the veteran celebrations and perks.

Recent investigations reveal that the US Department of Defense quietly paid up to $6.8 million to professional and collegiate sports teams to hold military displays that it hoped would attract recruits to the armed forces. Senators Jeff Flake and John McCain from Arizona revealed this practice in November 2015 and denounced it as ‘paid patriotism’. Their investigative teams had to push against military secrecy to gather the relevant data: ‘the sports leagues were more cooperative with their efforts than the Pentagon, which “was unusually and especially aggressive when trying to withhold this information,” McCain said. That makes it hard to know exactly how much the Defense Department has spent on these activities, they said.’ The two Republican senators declared the practice a misuse of taxpayer money (see Barrón-López and Waldron, 2015). In May 2016, the National Football League announced it was returning over $700,000 to American taxpayers for military celebrations it had secretly been paid to put on over preceding years (Block, 2016).

It is not clear that anyone really cares that the military pays for patriotism. Cynthia Enloe (2010: 132) has written of another less clandestine tool of military recruitment, this one attached to the Bush education policy that was called ‘No Child Left Behind’. ‘Local school administrators were required not only to allow military recruiters access to students within their schools, but also to pass along to the Defense Department the names of all their high school seniors’, who would each receive a personal letter encouraging them to enlist. Had either of these practices been tried before the draft was instituted during the war in Vietnam, it is unlikely the public would have responded with benedictions of approval. The mood today is far different: the military is a sacred institution of the national security state. Civilians no longer seem to worry about Vietnam-era cases of military debasements that fed the anti-war concern that American soldiers were ‘baby killers’ or increasingly addled by drugs as the war dragged on. There is also little evidence of any bother that another anti-war protest movement could emerge today and rock the country as it did in the 1960s and early 1970s. Indeed, it has become an everyday cliché to say that even if you hate the latest war you must love the soldier.

As for the military itself, it seeps ever more into prosaic aspects of American society through films, video games, fashions, and sales of assault weapons to civilians. The Pentagon has banished its Vietnam Syndrome with technology-driven wars featuring network-centric ‘choreographed performances’ that replace what have been called the ‘confusing brawls’ of previous wars (Bacevich, 2010: 161; Der Derian, 2001). Today’s weapons systems can deal death very clinically, masking the role of soldiers as historical centerpieces of war. Of late, ‘it is the technology that is the instrument of violence, not the bodies of soldiers’ (Wilcox, 2015: 147). ⁴ Drones epitomize the wizardry: clean kills eviscerate a person beyond mortality and beyond any sense of life, death, or afterlife. The military still ‘hunts down our enemies and kills them’ (Scranton, 2016), but does so now with synchronization, agility, and cold precision.

The Vietnam War as walls of mortality

Vietnam is a crucial war for understanding militarism today. In an escalating effort mounted over at least 15 years, the American military tried to create and save South Vietnam from its northern communist kin as a way of securing America. It was a brutal war in numbers of American troops sent and numbers killed on both sides. And it was a war that successive American governments were slow to end, not having experienced defeat up to that point, and having ‘saved’ Europe and Japan from fascism a mere 20 years earlier. Vietnam remains America’s most unpopular war and greatest military humiliation to date. Its layered violences there were far from ennobling, from the use of Agent Orange and napalm to the massacre at My Lai, ⁵ eventuating in some conscripted soldiers refusing to risk mortality for leaders who could not admit the debasements of a lost cause. The American war in Vietnam was so toxic by the 1975 inglorious pullout that the US soldiers who died there could barely be acknowledged for almost ten years. Indeed, they were despised by many civilian peers, who believed that the real heroes burned their draft cards, refused induction and were sent to prison, or left America for Canada or Sweden. The veterans were also a reminder that ‘the cultural coding appended to the US military as a whole now read ‘incompetent’’ (Bacevich, 2010: 125).

More than 40 years later, with embarrassment in the past, the cultural code has turned pro-military and, if not pro-war, American society is certainly far more tolerant of long no-win-no-lose wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria than it was of a similarly long war in Vietnam. The different, more tolerant attitude has to do with a new sense of security threats. With the horrors of 9/11 as a backdrop, and with ISIS and sponsored terrorist attacks across the world, American national security today is experienced as deeply personal rather than abstract, ‘simply’ political, or restricted to the realm of foreign policy. The 2016 presidential campaigns indicate that many Americans identify with a dominant narrative reiterating that the country is in constant danger from overseas terrorists, who plot to ‘finish’ the 9/11 task of killing Americans. There are said to be threats from shadowy people called immigrants and from local ‘lone wolves’. Any one of these could, at any moment, shoot up an airport, shopping center, concert, sports event, or national holiday gathering, as Europe and parts of Africa have experienced; or they could run you over on a bridge.

During the war in Vietnam, most stateside Americans were safe from attack and from the collaterals of war, such as becoming refugees or being forced into the sex trade, as was the case for many Vietnamese (Nguyen, 2016: 114). Yet most Americans were aware of some war events through television newscasts that, as the media saying goes, brought details of ‘the war into our living rooms every night’. It was a war-educated public increasingly cognizant that deaths abroad were mounting on all sides. Not so today. Whipped into a panic about security issues at home, and with little knowledge of the details of America’s current wars, it can seem that Americans have lost perspective on war, on the military, and on the magnitude or otherwise of threats to individual Americans. In many quarters, the myth of noble violence trumps the recognition of war’s debasement that was part of a political picture of America in the late 1960s and 1970s.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a repository of important American memories of everyday people who experienced war through military mortality. Instead of the loud cheers that greet individuals feted at sports events who have served in a combat zone, about whose war experiences nothing is said, there are no hurrahs at the Memorial. The subject is death and aching remembrance from those who know a name carved into the memorial or recall the social uproar around the war. It is arresting and sobering to look upon objects and assemblages that in effect re-curate the war through the eyes of an American community of loss. The objects left at the Memorial are unlike those that often appear in professionally curated museum exhibits, and the stories of war the objects whisper are also unlikely to recruit ordinary curators to today’s militarist messages.

Museums and memorials

The Association of Art Museum Directors, which governs museum standards and practices in the United States, defines ‘an art museum as a permanent, not-for-profit institution – essentially educational and humanistic in purpose – that studies and cares for works of art and on some schedule exhibits and interprets them for the public’ (Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, 2016). Of course, museums exhibit more than artworks per se: some exhibit military weaponry, uniforms, and other objects of war that link to the nation’s history. As I note elsewhere, in nation-building ‘things are needed to provide tangible proof that the nation had a memorable past, an honorable past, a prestigious past, a past the world can mark and that the nation can protect today’ (Sylvester, 2009: 55). Technically, war memorials are not museums. War memorials are said to be structures commemorating traumatic social events (Edkins, 2003). Jay Winter (1998: 105) points out that war memorials enable people to ‘contemplate the timelessness, the eternal, the inexorable reality of death in war’. Once constructed, they have no curators in the manner of museums, and exist instead for the public to visit, sit on or around, and adorn with items of commemoration. War memorials, unlike war museums, are everywhere. Walk through any town in the USA, no matter how small, and the only monument you are apt to find will be for a war and an area’s war dead. It is as though there is little else worth memorializing concretely in everyday American history and life. Most war memorials fade into the background over time and draw some attention only during certain national holidays.

The American war in Vietnam is not a fading war even though it is now nearly 50 years in the past. That war still commands remarkable attention. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is the most visited site in the nation’s capital. Over the course of 2016 and into 2017, the New York Times has run a series of stories about all facets of war experience that took place in and around the year 1967. ⁶ The war also features in many museum displays, including at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. There, a large permanent exhibit called The Price of Freedom: Americans at War presents the American public and international visitors with a glimpse of every war the USA has been in from the country’s inception. The title is telling. It suggests the myth-substantiating narrative of the American nation constructed, reconstructed, and renewed in identity and spirit through war (Kim, 2015: 92; Nguyen, 2016). Two rooms are devoted to the war in Vietnam, with displays showing a mix of military and civilian objects, including a Huey helicopter, photos of war-related social turmoil at home, and a few videos of life-saving experiences in the war told by Americans. One story of a nurse who saved an injured Vietnamese infant found in the grasp of her killed mother is very affecting, although it brushes past the source of the infant’s injuries and of the mother’s mortality to reach a moment years later of redemptive reunion with the American nurse rescuer. That video ends with the nurse saying that anti-war protestors often accused American troops of killing Vietnamese babies; ‘here’s a picture that says we didn’t’. ⁷

The objects exhibited matter. The sense of the war conveyed by displays of official military uniforms is very different from that conveyed by the everyday objects individual soldiers fitted inside those uniforms, held onto to ‘keep safe’ or to remember life at home (O’Brien, 2009). David Allison, the project director of The Price of Freedom, says his team sought to balance various elements of a controversial war and time in American history. But it is a crooked balance that has a Viet Cong bicycle displayed behind and under the tail of the Huey helicopter; after all, the bicycle won, not the Huey, a point Allison says few viewers pick up (Interview 1). Vietnamese visitors might not note the ironic juxtaposition of these two very different strategic vehicles of war because the Huey ‘rotors provided the war’s soundtrack’ for them as well as for Americans (Nguyen, 2016: 119). Of course, viewer subjectivities influence how the objects and information that museum curators provide will be interpreted; the take-away from any exhibition can differ greatly from what was intended by professional curators (Pugliese, 2006). On the other hand, visitors enter a museum and usually look at what museum expert Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (1992: 7) notes are ‘fully completed and immaculately presented displays’. Viewers have as little knowledge of the decision rules of the curators as the public today has about America’s wars. Curators do the displays. We look. They have the knowledge. We admire, accept, imbibe, and only perhaps feel insecured epistemologically or emotionally by displays of their expert knowledge.

Although distinctions between memorials and museums can be rigid, Hooper-Greenhill (1992: 1) pointed out years ago that ‘it is a mistake to assume that there is only one form of reality for museums, only one fixed mode of operating’. Like their changing object displays, museums are also objects of social construction and they can and do change. Memorials can be museums, as some Holocaust museums aim to be, or they can evolve into museums. To my mind, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a museum in two respects. Its conscientious curators, ordinary as they are, have special knowledge of at least one name publicly inscribed on the wall, and they create personal displays associated with the personhood behind the name. The curators do not aim to teach viewers about the war through their exhibits, and yet the collective displays shed light on the militarized mortalities of Vietnam ‘service’, and their effects on the ongoing lives of survivor/curators so many years later. As new materialist accounts suggest, ‘things’ have power to connect viewers to emotional forms and experiences of knowledge (see, for example, Turkle, 2007). Patti Smith (2015: 161) writes about the power of things associated with loss that can ‘claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday’. At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, visitors can view objects of loss, touch them, pick them up to read (if unsealed), and help arrange the exhibit, detecting aspects of indisputable mayday as they go. At that ‘museum’, object displays can merge curator with spectator, military with civilian, war expert with war novice, memorial with museum, and security with insecurity – at a personal level.

The second element of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as museum is collecting, which is a practice at the heart of any museum. Every evening, members of the US Parks Department, the federal agency charged with maintaining the Washington Mall, gather up all the non-perishable objects remaining behind, take them to a warehouse in Maryland, and add them to vaults containing the thousands of items left over the years. In effect, the memorial is a museum with pop-up exhibits that are usually on view only for one day. Every evening an exhibit ends. The next day another one starts. Every night the American war in Vietnam ends, and every morning it is re-curated through new objects of war that mortality leaves behind. The objects all disappear, seemingly never to be seen again. The Vietnam Veterans Fund, the organization behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, has been raising money for an Education Center it would like to locate beneath the Memorial. Its mission would be to teach visitors about the war and show a wide range of the objects left at the wall over the years. Though this goal is far from being achieved at the moment, any such Center would have to address questions about how the American war in Vietnam should be construed and conveyed. Whose stories of the war would feature and whose could be effaced or minimized? ⁸

In some regards, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a personal museum of the type Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist and museum curator, terms the ‘small museum’, also the ‘sentimental museum’, the ‘poetic museum’. Pamuk is the 2006 Nobel Prize–winning author of The Museum of Innocence, a long tale that follows a determined love-sick suitor through many decades of obsessive, life-ruining dedication to a woman he will never entirely win. Substituting for his possession of her are the objects surrounding her that he collects and treasures, most of them mundane – her cigarette butts, locks of hair and the hair-pins that held it, her dead yellow canary, a salt shaker that was always on her table. He assiduously collects and, like many a museum curator historically, he also occasionally steals the objects he wants.

To Pamuk’s anti-hero, the ‘pains of true love reside at the heart of our existence; they catch hold of our most vulnerable point, rooting themselves deeper than the root of any other pain, and branching to every part of our bodies and our lives’ (Pamuk, 2009: 315). ⁹ When his love dies, the protagonist creates a museum to hold all the objects that have grown branches in every part of his body and life. His museum principles, made clear at the end of the novel, include these: ‘Museums are (1) not to be strolled around in but to be experienced, (2) made up of collections expressive of the soul of that experience’ (Pamuk, 2009: 721). Experiences of actual people, he later writes, are key. These are the things missing from what he calls museum ‘institutions that fill me with a sense of the state’; he wants ‘to experience the private world and the vision of a passionate individual’ (see Hammer, 2014: 112), not just the vision of nation-building through credentialed experts.

The Price of Freedom at the National Museum of American History matches Pamuk’s description of an institution that fills one with a sense of the state more so than of its people and their private experiences of war. The exhibition is ordered chronologically by all the wars of state in which the country engaged. Organized by the Armed Forces History section of the museum, it leads with military aspects of each conflict while striving to include some objects that indicate the social dynamics surrounding each war. By contrast, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is an open-air museum of ordinary war experience. It is not a building but rather an area of the Washington Mall that features two slabs of polished black granite joined at an oblique angle forming a V and covered with orderly lists of carved names. The walls cut into the ground on a downward slope culminating in a claustrophobic joint crammed with the names of American military personnel who died at the beginning and end of the war. It is a location of mortality, sadness, and the open acknowledgement of these. ¹⁰

The experience is augmented by the passions that the ‘ordinary curators’ ¹¹ display through the very personal and mundane objects they put on view – unopened cans of beer to drink with their lost buddies, notes to a brother, pictures of all the family children born since the war, Christmas trees, wrapped presents. I have seen vials labeled Agent Orange at the Memorial. Veterans were once known to leave motorcycles with names on them, perhaps so buddies could buzz away from mortality for a while. People also leave fragile flowers – lots of flowers that give off a short-lived sweetness like the ones that must have been blooming in Saigon in April 1975, amid ‘the funk of defeat so pungent it overwhelmed the air conditioners’ (Nguyen, 2015: 5). These are the workaday shortcuts to longer stories of pain and loss through war. They draw the viewer into spaces of mortality as war experience and as moments of afterlife that circumvent military scripts. When visitors ask about the objects, the curators speak in fragments – ‘he died from Agent Orange – it was terrible’; ‘I never met my father but always drive up from Tennessee to leave something for Father’s Day. Can you touch his name with this rose – I’m too short.’ The snippets come out in a tumble, without undue sentimentality, and are tearless at this point in time.

The mise-en-scène at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is social and diverse. Americans are there, to be sure, and so are groups of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, as well as Vietnamese Americans. One looks at these groups curiously, trying to imagine the Memorial from so many points of view. The atmosphere radiates appreciation and community rather than the separateness and rancor that characterized the war and the disruptions around it in Vietnam, the region, and the USA. Yet some people and things are unmistakably missing from that Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Nguyen (2016) calls what is missing from this and other war memorials ‘just memory’.

Just memory: The blank side of memorials

I have been quietly nodding to Viet Thanh Nguyen throughout this essay. Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in literature for his novel The Sympathizer (Nguyen, 2015), he also is known for a non-fiction book on the American war in Vietnam. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Nguyen, 2016) is a graceful rumination on the legacies of the war written from a Vietnamese-American point of view. He mentions the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the interactions there as a ‘congregation, a communal experience of memory’ (Nguyen, 2016: 48) that the names and visitors form and re-form at every encounter. He is disgruntled, however, that the Memorial honors ‘the selective memory of a country that imagines itself as a perpetual innocent’ (Nguyen, 2016: 51). He is less interested in the objects left on view and their ordinary curatorial significance than in what is not available to see. More than 58,000 combat soldiers are there as victims of a war that in fact took the lives of 3 million Vietnamese. Many of those Vietnamese worked for the American military, and many only worked their fields and got slaughtered there. If the mortality rates in the war’s spillover countries of Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand are counted, the mortality tally rises to more than 4 million.

Nguyen writes about remembering and forgetting as simultaneities of memory. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial remembers Americans and just forgets about 4 million others. The usual explanation for this is that the memorial is in the USA and therefore honors American veterans of the Vietnam War. That rationale, however, is incautious given how many Republic of Vietnam Vietnamese were with American troops against the Hanoi government. Nguyen’s is a critical ethics angle on a memorial that has not escaped criticism on other grounds, including its dark walls that suggest defeat, the abstract design, ¹² and an absence of attention to veterans who survived the war – were initially safe – and then succumbed to war-related injuries, including post-traumatic stress disorder (Moua, 2002; Sturken, 1997). Nguyen is critical of the widely accepted ethical ‘right’ to forget the fallen in war if they cannot be designated as ‘ours’, which repeats across memorial sites to Vietnam veterans throughout the USA. Not only are there no names of Vietnamese at the memorial in Washington, as recently as 2003 American veterans of the war refused a request by Vietnamese veterans to be included in a new memorial in Kansas City. It seems that non-Americans who perished for our national security cannot be allowed to contaminate our memories.

At the same time, Nguyen recognizes that a similar formal forgetting occurs in Vietnam, too. Memorials there emphasize the heroism of the North Vietnamese military and ‘forget’ about the Vietnamese who fought with the Americans against it. There are many cemeteries holding the bodies of Republic of Vietnam soldiers, but all are systematically ignored by the victorious nation-building state. Nguyen (2016: 37) writes of one such cemetery as ‘the ugly, beaten, closeted cousin of the one celebrating the victors across the highway’. As for the Americans, they are formally remembered in Vietnamese museums as colonial occupiers who nearly destroyed the country in their effort to secure it and then went home. At ‘the state-controlled public institution of commemoration … one sees no records of deaths from what the Vietnamese call ben kia (“that side,” meaning the American side)’ (Kwon, 2011: 85).

Again, it is the ordinary curator who fills some of the gaps there in memory, myth, and memorialization of the war. Heonik Kwon (2011), a war anthropologist, has collected stories of ordinary Vietnamese people’s experiences of the war and finds intriguing instances among these of outlaw memorializing. Some families ignore a state admonition to memorialize only North Vietnamese heroes and covertly stage what Kwon (2011: 84) calls rituals of ‘imaginative reciprocity’. One poignant tale features a grandmother who prayed throughout the war that her two sons, one fighting for the north and the other for the south, would not meet each other in the war: ‘The goddess listened. The boys never met. The gracious goddess carried them too far. She took my prayer too far…. To be absolutely sure that the boys don’t meet in this world, the goddess took them to her world, both of them’ (Kwon, 2011: 84). Their imaginative reciprocity became concrete through an act of ordinary curating inside her house that was, in fact, a small re-curation of the official war. She took a photo of the shamed son of the southern forces from her bedroom and placed it, for the first time in 2008, on the ancestral altar next to a photo of the son who fought for the north and his Hero Death Certificate from the government. This humble case of imaginative reconciliation is, like most such cases, restricted to one’s own lost sons. We need to broaden it.

Memory and militarism

Small reconciliatory exhibitions within private spaces in Vietnam show a coming together that undermines those Cold War wars ostensibly fought against communism that in reality were colonial-style interventions. Ordinary curatorial acts in the home refuse hardened lines of ideology, identity, victory, loss, and national military honor. In that, they can be examples of Nguyen’s (2016: 17) claim that just memory is a process that ‘constantly tries to recall what might have been forgotten, accidentally or deliberately, through self-serving interests, the debilitating effects of trauma, or the distraction offered by excessively remembering something else, such as the heroism of the nation’s soldiers’. One might add to the forgets of today the effects of America’s resurgent militarism, which makes the Huey the main object in a museum room dedicated to a war the USA did not win, its impressive air power notwithstanding. Exhibits such as The Price of Freedom harbor many meanings, but the overarching message of the Vietnam War rooms is that American combat personnel are to be admired for trying to do right in the face of numerous challenges on the ground and at home, as well as wrongs committed by one’s own. They and the members of America’s armed forces who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq occupy a special status in society as the ones who can secure the country. Other potential heroes, such as cancer researchers or teachers who die trying to protect children from mass shooters, do not have comparable status. The individuals in military uniform cannot take off that uniform or their military identity if they die in service. They are always alive and worthy – if, that is, they come from ‘our’ people.

Militarism pumps up noble elements of myth and hides all chastening elements, most especially mortality. Appy (2015: 335) concludes his American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity with a warning aimed at the American public’s willingness today to ‘easily acquiesce to the misuse of power, all too readily trust[ing] that our force is used only with the best intentions for the greatest good’. If we continue along that path, he says, ‘a future of further militarism and war is virtually guaranteed’. The machinery is in place. Secrecy about America’s current wars has been normalized. The calls to arms through faux displays of patriotism and soldier-love – it is all installed. Even what Appy (2015: 323) terms ‘the most modest cautionary lessons of the Vietnam War’ have been trampled by ‘an inflexible commitment to militarism and intervention’ since 9/11 that masquerades as security. ¹³

There are many other versions of the war in Vietnam that can be pieced together through objects of war that ordinary curators keep piling on at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Their sense of the war need not supplant the military’s war, or Washington’s war, but their war deserves prime viewing space and serious analysis. While expertly curated exhibitions in famed museums tend to lead with the state’s story of war, exhibits composed by individual curators from a community of loss lead with the dead soldier and enlarge the scope of war as a range of experiences that extend forward and backward from that soldier. This is a lesson the academic field of international relations has recently begun to take on board, namely, that international relations manifest in the bodies and actions of those who are out in the often violent international and those who stay at home and are made to suffer or celebrate its politics. International relations has long studied some aspects of war (e.g. causes, types, frequencies, strategies, weapons systems) but not mortality and other less final types of damage. The heart of war – violent injury (Scarry, 1985) – lies on international relations’ cutting-room floor ready to be picked up and carried out for review. That the Vietnam Veterans Memorial re-centers attention on the war damages done to people and those who care about them is a lesson international relations could learn.

As for American militarism and its effects on larger society, the war dead live if they have ‘served’, and many among the living honor that service as heroic even in the face of losses that hurt hard and induce some rage. It is noteworthy, though, that hollowed-out patriotism and heroic couplets are not what one sees, reads, and hears at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Rather, a changing variety of people can be seen authorizing themselves to curate fragments of the war by working with mortality as its main cost. Through their forfeited objects, carefully constructed collages, and daily pop-up exhibitions, curators at the Memorial bring stories to the public of ordinary people continuing to remember and actively miss other ordinary people of war. They do the work of what James E. Young (2016: 15), one of the jurors for the 9/11 memorial in New York, terms ‘everyday historians’. They keep searching through their lives and belongings for overlooked evidence of a life or lives that ended with the American war in Vietnam. Individual memories enacted year upon year in changing motifs could penetrate the masquerade of eternal warrior life that militarism promotes if viewed as sources of war knowledge.

Young (2010) suggests that when ‘visitors bring objects of memory to the memorial, they are living it and living in themselves at the same time, as well as redefining the monument’. Memories shift and evolve. What would happen if, in the interest of just memory, some ordinary curator/historians were to bring objects to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that reflect the larger catchment areas of the war – the Vietnamese in the USA and the Vietnamese in Vietnam, the Koreans, Thais, Laotians, Cambodians, and Australians, the last of America’s allies to leave Vietnam (who feature in their own massive national war memorial). Add in the millions of civilians whose names are uncarved onto lists of war dead, even though war always delivers mortality to those who are not in the fight. Hosts of uncited and unsighted people haunt memorials to the American war in Vietnam beyond the boundaries of American heroism. If statecraft relies, as least in part, ‘on the emphasis of presence and the making absent of something else’, as Jessica Auchter (2014: 128, emphasis in original) argues, then it is important to pay heed to ordinary curators and their knowledge. They are present and know the names of the absent ones and stories from places relegated, effaced, and plowed under by myths and military machineries that refuse inconvenient facts of mortality and corrupting denials of contradiction.