Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War

Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War

Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War

Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War

eBook

$22.49  $29.95 Save 25% Current price is $22.49, Original price is $29.95. You Save 25%.

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

In Four Decades On, historians, anthropologists, and literary critics examine the legacies of the Second Indochina War, or what most Americans call the Vietnam War, nearly forty years after the United States finally left Vietnam. They address matters such as the daunting tasks facing the Vietnamese at the war's end—including rebuilding a nation and consolidating a socialist revolution while fending off China and the Khmer Rouge—and "the Vietnam syndrome," the cynical, frustrated, and pessimistic sense that colored America's views of the rest of the world after its humiliating defeat in Vietnam. The contributors provide unexpected perspectives on Agent Orange, the POW/MIA controversies, the commercial trade relationship between the United States and Vietnam, and representations of the war and its aftermath produced by artists, particularly writers. They show how the war has continued to affect not only international relations but also the everyday lives of millions of people around the world. Most of the contributors take up matters in the United States, Vietnam, or both nations, while several utilize transnational analytic frameworks, recognizing that the war's legacies shape and are shaped by dynamics that transcend the two countries.

Contributors
. Alex Bloom, Diane Niblack Fox, H. Bruce Franklin, Walter Hixson, Heonik Kwon, Scott Laderman, Mariam B. Lam, Ngo Vinh Long, Edwin A. Martini, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Christina Schwenkel, Charles Waugh

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780822378822
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication date: 06/06/2013
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 344
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Scott Laderman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. He is the author of Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory, also published by Duke University Press.

Edwin A. Martini is Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of History at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty and Invisible Enemies: The American War on Vietnam, 1975–2000.

Read an Excerpt

Four Decades On

Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War


By SCOTT LADERMAN, EDWIN A. MARTINI

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5462-8


Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Legacies Foretold Excavating the Roots of Postwar Viet Nam

Ngo Vinh Long


Wars usually create all kinds of dislocations—physical, economic, social, and moral, to name a few—and leave a legacy of polarization. The longer a war, the worse the dislocation and the deeper the polarization. Hence, efforts at reconciliation and accommodation, for example, have to be promoted in times of war to lay the foundations for the building of a pluralistic and democratic country in times of peace. Without such foundations, but with a military outcome in which one party becomes "victorious," then—as the case of Viet Nam illustrates—the tasks of "nation building" become painfully difficult.

Viet Nam experienced nearly half a century of incessant warfare, with direct and indirect U.S. involvement from 1945 to 1990. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, the direct U.S. involvement in "South Vietnam" was justified in terms of nation building and promoting democracy. Yet the United States consistently supported efforts that destroyed every opportunity available for reaching these ends. Since it is not possible to cover such a long period in sufficient detail in this chapter, I will focus on a few aspects of the period since the United States, the Republic of Viet Nam (RVN; the South Vietnamese regime in Saigon), the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam (DRV; the government of North Vietnam), and the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) of the Republic of South Vietnam signed the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam in Paris on 27 January 1973.

Focusing on the last years of the war may seem odd in a book devoted to its legacies. But unless one understands how the policies of the rvn effectively destroyed the pluralistic potential of the south, one cannot understand the myriad developments that unfolded in Viet Nam in the years after the war came to an end. The repression that characterized South Vietnamese life from 1973 to 1975 mattered. It not only undermined hopes for a less violent end to the war—one that may have gone some distance in building a foundation for the reconciliation of the Vietnamese people—but it also indirectly empowered those elements of the revolutionary movement that pursued more hardline policies after 1975.

In signing the Paris Peace Agreement, the United States pledged that it would withdraw from Viet Nam both militarily and politically to allow the South Vietnamese people to "decide themselves the political future of South Vietnam through genuinely free and democratic general elections under international supervision" (Art. 9b). Article 4 stated that "the United States [would] not continue its military involvement or intervene in the internal affairs of South Vietnam." And Article 9c again stressed, "Foreign countries shall not impose any political tendency or personality on the South Vietnamese people." The agreement established two parallel and equal parties in South Vietnam: the RVN and the PRG. According to Article 11 of the agreement, immediately after the ceasefire went into effect on 27 January, these two parties had to "prohibit all acts of reprisal and discrimination against individuals or organizations that [had] collaborated with one side or the other" and ensure "personal freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of meeting, freedom of organization, freedom of political activities, freedom of belief, freedom of movement, freedom of residence, freedom of work, right to property ownership, and right to free enterprise."

Article 12 further stipulated, "Immediately after the ceasefire, the two South Vietnamese parties shall hold consultations ... to set up a National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord of three equal segments. The Council shall operate on the principle of unanimity. After the National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord ... assumes its functions, the two South Vietnamese parties will consult about the formation of councils at lower levels." This National Council would have the task, among other things, of achieving "national reconciliation and concord and insurance of democratic liberties." The third "segment" identified in the agreement was generally understood as the "Third Force," composed of individuals and organizations that were not aligned with either the RVN regime under President Nguyen Van Thieu (the First Force) or the PRG (the Second Force).

The National Council, or Hoi Dong Quoc Gia (lit., Council of State), was thus supposed to represent the various political forces in South Vietnam and function with higher authority than both the Saigon regime and the PRG in certain areas of the south's political life. Three days before the signing of the Paris Peace Agreement, however, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger still insisted at a press conference that the policy of the United States was against "impos[ing] a coalition government or a disguised coalition government on the people of South Vietnam." President Richard M. Nixon meanwhile ruled out any role for the PRG in the future government of South Vietnam. As Gareth Porter, an American specialist on Viet Nam, explained: "In his radio and television address on January 23, 1973, Nixon ... announced that the United States would 'continue to recognize the government of the Republic of Vietnam as the sole legitimate government of South Vietnam.' ... The statement that Nixon recognized the RVN as the 'sole legitimate government' in South Vietnam bore the seeds of a new war." Emboldened, if not encouraged, by Kissinger and Nixon, President Thieu reiterated his "Four No's" policy as soon as the Paris Peace Agreement was signed: no recognition of the enemy, no coalition government under any disguise, no procommunist neutralization of the southern region of Viet Nam, and no concession of territory to the communists.

Later, in an interview published in the 15 July 1973 issue of Vietnam Report, the English-language publication of the Saigon Council on Foreign Relations that was distributed by the RVN regime's embassy in the United States, Thieu stated: "The Viet Cong are presently trying to turn areas under their control into a state endowed with a government, which they could claim to be the second such institution in the South. They probably also hope that when this government has achieved a degree of international recognition, international opinion will force the two administrations to merge into a coalition government. If that were to happen, they would only agree to a pinkish government of coalition, which then will try to enter negotiation with Hanoi easily." Thieu stated in the same interview: "In the first place, we have to do our best so that the [National Liberation Front] cannot build itself into a state, a second state within the South." In the second place, he continued, his government should use all means at its disposal to prevent the creation of a Third Force, branding all Third Force personalities procommunist.

In late April 1973, Hoang Duc Nha, Thieu's cousin and most trusted adviser, had declared, "If you're not a Communist, then you're a Nationalist [i.e., pro-Thieu]; if you're not a Nationalist, then you're a Communist. There is no such thing as a third component or fourth component." Again, in early October 1973, Thieu declared that all Third Force groups were "traitors," with their "strings pulled by the communists." Deputy Nguyen Ba Can, chairman of the National Assembly's Lower House in Saigon and one of Thieu's most effective supporters, said, "There is no such thing as national reconciliation and national concord" with other political forces. These were the RVN's public answers to the proposal by Nguyen Van Hieu, head of the PRG delegation to the fourteenth session of the Consultative Conference for Implementation of the Paris Peace Agreement between the two South Vietnamese parties held on 28 June 1973 in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France, that the National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord be set up as soon as possible. The proposal stated, among other things, that "the National Council [should] consist of three equal segments having the same footing. Each of the two South Vietnamese parties [should] nominate its delegates to its segments of the Council. The third segment [should] include those persons of different political and religious trends who belong to neither side but who approve the Paris Peace Agreement. It must be ensured that the abovementioned political and religious trends be heard, that this segment be truly representative and that it must have an independent role and enjoy an equal status in the Council."

To better understand the reasons and intentions behind the statements by Thieu and his officials, it is necessary to say a few words about the Third Force, or "third component," and why the Paris Peace Agreement stipulated that, "immediately after the ceasefire, the two South Vietnamese parties [should] hold consultations ... to set up a National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord of three equal segments." The term Third Force or Third Solution had come into being with urban opposition to the various regimes in Saigon since the early 1960s. According to Jacques Decornoy, a reporter for the French newspaper Le Monde, the term troisième composante (third component) came into existence during the fall of 1969 to indicate a group of people who opposed the Thieu regime and who supported the direction of "national reconciliation" for which former General Duong Van (Big) Minh was seen as the representative. 8 "Third component" or "third segment" was then used by the negotiating team of the drv in Paris from 1968 until the agreement was signed to push for a coalition government of three equal segments. It was not until 1972 that foreign-language publications in Hanoi began to use the term Third Force to indicate, as a whole, all of the urban groups in the south that were opposed to Thieu's regime. For example, Vietnam Courier, a monthly publication of the drv's Foreign Ministry, stated in December 1972 that "in Saigon, a third force was coming into being as a challenge to that tinhorn dictator [Thieu] who persisted in denying its existence."

From 1969 until the signing of the Paris Peace Agreement, about one hundred Third Force groups of varying sizes and political leanings had come into being in the urban areas in the south, and some of them had taken even more radical positions than those of the DRV and PRG in certain areas. This occurred partly because the Nixon administration escalated the war through the so-called Vietnamization program and the "Accelerated Pacification Program," which brought increased suffering to most strata of the rural and urban populations in South Vietnam. The Vietnamization program involved the massive buildup of the Saigon forces in an attempt to get Vietnamese to kill Vietnamese or other Indochinese, or "to change the color of the corpses." This was being done not simply to save American lives but also to save American dollars. It cost the United States $38,000 to send an American to Viet Nam to fight for one year. But it cost only $400 a year to hire an Asian mercenary or to support a Saigon soldier. Saving American lives and dollars would serve to persuade the American public that the war was winding down and that it should be more patient with the administration's policy of "getting out." The press-ganging of Vietnamese youth into the army also served to deny the National Liberation Front (NLF) fresh supplies of troops. For these reasons, within a short time the Nixon administration increased the regular forces of the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN) to more than 1.1 million men and the local forces to more than four million. These local military forces, called by American military men "Oriental Minutemen," were the Regional Forces, the Popular Forces, and the Popular Self-Defense Forces (PSDF). The first two groups were full-time soldiers organized into companies and platoons under provincial and district control, respectively. The third group consisted of part-time militia, supposedly boys and men age fifteen to eighteen or older than forty-three, operating at the subdistrict or village level. In reality, anybody who could carry a gun was good enough for the PSDF.

The Saigon troops were forced to go out on some three hundred mop-up operations in South Vietnam every day in 1969 to draw enemy fire so that American tactical air support and artillery strikes could destroy them. Such mop-up operations were also designed to "pacify" the countryside. As a result, increasingly large demonstrations that involved participation by groups with various social and political backgrounds broke out in most cities of South Vietnam, opposing the press-ganging of youths into the armed forces, calling for an end to all mop-up operations, and demanding an "immediate end to the war." One example is that when the strike by 124 labor unions with more than 100,000 members was declared on 25 June 1970, other labor unions, the Disabled Veterans Organization, the An Quang Buddhist Church, the Saigon Student Union, and other organizations promptly joined them. The Saigon Student Union and the various labor unions issued a joint declaration that included demands for an immediate end to the war, the immediate and total withdrawal of all U.S. and allied forces, and the immediate termination of all military training programs. This made Thieu so nervous that on 15 July 1970 he ordered all-out repression of all movements calling for peace. He vowed to "beat to death" those calling for "immediate peace," saying, "I am ready to smash all movements calling for peace at any price because I'm still much of a soldier.... We will beat to death the people who are demanding immediate peace." On the same day, Brigadier-General Tran Van Hai, the national police chief, told his police chiefs to use "strong measures, including bayonets and bullets," to smash all demonstrations "at any price." Despite the threat, on 11 November 1970 more than one thousand representatives from many organizations met at the Minh Mang University campus in Saigon to form Mat Tran Nhân Dân Tranh Thu Hòa Bình (People's Front in the Struggle for Peace) with the aim of "rallying all strata of the population, irrespective of ethnic, social, political and religious backgrounds to bring about peace to the nation."

Encouraged by the political atmosphere in the southern cities, on 10 December 1970 Foreign Minister Nguyen Thi Binh of the PRG proposed a ceasefire if the United States agreed to withdraw its troops by 30 June 1971 and the regime in Saigon agreed to the establishment of a provisional government composed of three equal segments: the RVN, the PRG, and representatives of groups that were not aligned with either government. But Nixon and Thieu did not want a ceasefire and a peaceful solution based on political competition in a coalition government for fear that eventually they would lose out. Instead, they wanted to escalate the war and increase the repression in the hope of wiping out the political opposition. On 8 February 1971, Saigon forces invaded Laos, with the United States supplying air support, including planes and helicopters to transport parachutists and commandos. Two thousand U.S. planes and helicopters, the best Saigon units (the paratroopers, rangers, armored units, and the First Infantry Division) and strong U.S. ground units—together totaling more than forty-five thousand men—were involved in the front along Route 9, which runs near the Seventeenth Parallel from the coastline of South Vietnam to the Mekong River. The aim of this gigantic invasion, as Nixon and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird phrased it, was "to protect the Vietnamization program." A U.S. State Department declaration the same day explained that the mission would "make the enemy less able to mount offensives, and strengthen South Vietnam's ability to defend itself as U.S. forces are withdrawn from South Vietnam. It will protect American lives. This ground operation by the South Vietnamese against the sanctuaries will thus aid in the Vietnamization program."

But this grandiose mission, whose maximum aims were to cut Indochina in two at its "narrow waist" by occupying southern Laos right across to the borders of Thailand and then pushing east to occupy North Vietnam at a point just north of the Seventeenth Parallel, was strongly opposed by the Vietnamese population even before it started. Word of the campaign had leaked to the general population days before the actual invasion. According to most Saigon newspapers, on 5 February 1971 three major organizations in South Vietnam—the Women's Committee to Demand the Right to Life, the People's Movement for Self-Determination, and the People's Front in the Struggle for Peace—strongly denounced the expansion of the war into Laos in a joint declaration issued in Saigon. The declaration stated, "By sending South Vietnamese troops into Laos, the United States has taken another serious step along the line of the Nixon doctrine which seeks to use the Indochinese people to destroy one another." To end the senseless massacre, the groups demanded that all U.S. and allied troops be withdrawn from Indochina immediately and totally.
(Continues...)


Excerpted from Four Decades On by SCOTT LADERMAN. Copyright © 2013 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: National Amnesia, Transnational Memory, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War / Scott Laderman and Edwin A. Martini 1

1. Legacies Foretold: Excavating the Roots of Postwar Viet Nam / Ngo Vinh Long 16

2. Viet Nam and "Vietnam" in American History and Memory / Walter L. Hixson 44

3. "The Mainspring in This Country Has Been Broken": America's Battered Sense of Self and the Emergence of the Vietnam Syndrome / Alexander Bloom 58

4. Cold War in a Vietnamese Community / Heonik Kwon 84

5. The Ambivalence of Reconciliation in Contemporary Vietnamese Memoryscapes / Christina Schwenkel 103

6. Remembering War, Dreaming Peace: On Cosmopolitanism, Compassion, and Literature / Viet Thanh Nguyen 132

7. Viêt Nam's Growing Pains: Postsocialist Cinema Development and Transnational Politics / Mariam B. Lam 155

8. A Fishy Affair: Vietnamese Seafood and the Confrontation with U.S. Neoliberalism / Scott Laderman 183

9. Agent Orange: Coming to Terms with a Transnational Legacy / Diane Niblack Fox 207

10. Refuge to Refuse: Seeking Balance in the Vietnamese Environmental Imagination / Charles Waugh 242

11. Missing in Action in the Twenty-First Century / H. Bruce Franklin 259

Bibliography 297

About the Contributors 313

Index 315
From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews