The American War In Contemporary Vietnam

Christina Schwenkel's absorbing study explores how the "American War" is remembered and commemorated in Vietnam today -- in official and unofficial histories and in everyday life. Schwenkel analyzes visual representations found in monuments and martyrs' cemeteries, museums, photography and art exhibits, battlefield tours, and related sites of "trauma tourism." In these transnational spaces, American and Vietnamese memories of the war intersect in ways profoundly shaped by global economic liberalization and the return of American citizens as tourists, pilgrims, and philanthropists.

As suggested by the title, this collection of essays focuses upon American involvement in the Vietnamese War. These essays were originally written for a symposium in 1988 in which (for the first time since 1975) scholars from both the U.S. and Vietnam met to discuss and debate the war and its impact on their respective nations. Thus, these works (by American authors) though alternately probing and guarded, are always thought-provoking. They display the mind at work in its search for answers, explanations, and meaning. Questions of politics and history (diplomacy, the Tet offensive, Chinese involvement, U.S. war veterans) are considered and reconsidered by such authors as Allen Whiting, Jayne Werner, Nyo Vinh Long, and Paul Comacho.

A Companion to the Vietnam War contains twenty-four definitive essays on America's longest and most divisive foreign conflict. It represents the best current scholarship on this controversial and influential episode in modern American history. Highlights issues of nationalism, culture, gender, and race. Covers the breadth of Vietnam War history, including American war policies, the Vietnamese perspective, the antiwar movement, and the American home front. Surveys and evaluates the best scholarship on every important era and topic. Includes a select bibliography to guide further research.

On May 25, 2012, President Obama announced that the United States would spend the next thirteen years commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War and the "more than 58,000 patriots" who died there. The fact that 3 million Vietnamese--soldiers, parents, grandparents, children--also died will be largely unknown and entirely un-commemorated. U.S. history barely stops to record the millions of Vietnamese who lived on after being displaced, tortured, maimed, raped, or born with birth defects, the result of devastating chemicals wreaked on the land by the U.S. military. The reason for this disconnect lies in an unremitting public relations campaign waged by top American politicians, military leaders, business people, and scholars who have spent the last sixty years justifying the U.S. presence in Vietnam. The American War in Vietnam challenges all of us to stop the ongoing U.S. war on actual history. Marciano reveals the grandiose flag-waving that stems from the "Noble cause principle," the notion that America is "chosen by God" to bring democracy to the world. The result is critical writing and teaching at its best. This book will provide students everywhere with insights that can prepare them to change the world. --Cover.

In this anthology, Vietnamese writers describe their experience of what they call the American War and its lasting legacy through the lens of their own vital artistic visions. A North Vietnamese soldier forms a bond with an abandoned puppy. Cousins find their lives upended by the revelation that their fathers fought on opposite sides of the war. Two lonely veterans in Hanoi meet years after the war has ended through a newspaper dating service. A psychic assists the search for the body of a long-vanished soldier. The father of a girl suffering from dioxin poisoning struggles with corrupt local officials. The twenty short stories collected in Other Moons range from the intensely personal to narratives that deal with larger questions of remembrance, trauma, and healing. By a diverse set of authors, including many veterans, they span styles from social realism to tales of the fantastic. Yet whether describing the effects of Agent Orange exposure or telling ghost stories, all speak to the unresolved legacy of a conflict that still haunts Vietnam. Among the most widely anthologized and popular pieces of short fiction about the war in Vietnam, these works appear here for the first time in English. Other Moons offers Anglophone audiences an unparalleled opportunity to experience how the Vietnamese think and write about the conflict that consumed their country from 1954 to 1975—a perspective still largely missing from American narratives.

By the end of the American War in Vietnam, the coastal province of Phú Yên was one of the least-secure provinces in the Republic of Vietnam. It was also a prominent target of the American strategy of pacification—an effort, purportedly separate and distinct from conventional warfare, to win the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese. In Robert J. Thompson III’s analysis, the consistent, and consistently unsuccessful, struggle to place Phú Yên under Saigon’s banner makes the province particularly fertile ground for studying how the Americans advanced pacification and why this effort ultimately failed. In March 1970 a disastrous military engagement began in Phú Yên, revealing the enemy’s continued presence after more than three years of pacification. Clear, Hold, and Destroy provides a fresh perspective on the war across multiple levels, from those making and implementing policy to those affected by it. Most pointedly, Thompson contends that pacification, far from existing apart from conventional warfare, actually depended on conventional military forces for its application. His study reaches back into Phú Yên’s storied history with pacification before and during the French colonial period, then focuses on the province from the onset of the American war in 1965 to its conclusion in 1975. A sharply focused, fine-grained analysis of one critical province during the Vietnam War, Thompson’s work demonstrates how pacification is better understood as the foundation of U.S. fighting in Vietnam.

The first major synthesis of the war since 2001, drawing upon a host of newly declassified documents, presidential tapes, and overlooked foreign sources to give the most comprehensive look to date of the war that still haunts America.

The fall of Saigon in 1975 signaled the end of America's longest war. Yet in many ways the conflict was far from over. Although the actual fighting ended, the struggle to find political justification and historical vindication for the Vietnam War still lingered in American consciousness. A plethora of images from America's first "televised war" has kept the conflict all too fresh in the memories of those who lived through it, while creating a confusing picture for a younger generation. The political process of attaching meaning to historical events has ultimately failed due to the lack of consensus--then and now--regarding events surrounding the Vietnam War. Reviewing the record of American politics, film, and television, this volume provides a brief overview of the war's appearance in American popular culture. It examines the ways in which this conflict has consistently resurfaced in social and political life, especially in the arena of contemporary world events such as the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan, the Gulf War and the 2004 presidential campaign. To this end, the work explores the contexts and uses of the Vietnam War as a recurring subject. The circumstances and symbolism used in the rhetoric of the political elite and the news media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek, are discussed. Emphasis is also placed on the role of film and television as the book examines movies such as The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now and TV series such as M*A*S*H. In weaving together the political and screen appearances of the Vietnam War, the book reexamines the influence of a major episode in American history.