Vietnam by Removes: Storytelling and Postmemory in Minh Tran Huy

2018 ◽  
pp. 96-111
Author(s):  
Catherine H. Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
American Military ◽  
French Woman ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Immigrant Narrative ◽  
Military Engagement

Minh Tran Huy participates in the production of a second-generation Vietnamese French literature that departs from the first-generation’s autobiographical immigrant narrative. In two novels, La Princesse et le pêcheur [The Princess and the Fisherman] (2007) and Voyageur malgré lui [Travelers in Spite of Themselves] (2012), Tran Huy engages with the postmemory that interrogates war and the trauma of the French colonization of Indochina, the American military engagement during the Vietnam War and refugee displacement from Vietnam to France that parents and families experienced. Attending to Tran Huy’s position as a second-generation Vietnamese French woman writer, I argue that she (re)presents the second generation’s postmemory through the mode of storytelling. Storytelling highlights the interpersonal exchange and transmission that occurs through the spoken word between generations despite traumatic silence.

‘Because it's easier to kill that way’: Dehumanizing epithets, militarized subjectivity, and American necropolitics

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 583-603
Author(s):  
Janet McIntosh
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Service Members ◽  
Global War On Terror ◽  
American Military ◽  
Folk Wisdom ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Global War

AbstractThis article examines the blunt conceptual instrument of dehumanizing American military terms for the enemy in the context of the Vietnam War and the Global War on Terror. I examine language that dehumanizes American service members themselves, who are semiotically framed as expendable. Next, I explore the essentialist, semi-propositional qualities of derogatory epithets for the enemy and the affectively charged, deadly stances they encourage. I examine how generic references to the enemy during training make totalizing claims that risk encompassing civilians in their typifications. And I show that, in the context of war, the instability of derogatory epithets can manifest itself when the servicemember is confronted with the behavioral idiosyncrasies and personal vulnerabilities of actual ‘enemies’ on the ground. The putative folk wisdom found in generic references to the enemy can thus fall apart when confronted with countervailing experience; in such cases, service members may shift stance by renouncing military epithets. (Military language, epithets, slurs, generics, othering, dehumanization, necropolitics)*

The Irony of Protest: Vietnam and The Path to Permanent War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Preston
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Advanced Technology ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
American Military ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Vietnam Syndrome ◽  
Aerial Warfare ◽  
Revolution In Military Affairs ◽  
The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was one of the most controversial issues in 1968. The intense and polarised debate between anti-war demonstrators and defenders of the Vietnam War cast a shadow on US foreign policy, engendering what came to be termed the “Vietnam Syndrome” amongst policy-makers and the public. This chapter assesses the legacies of pro- and anti-war activism, arguing that the debates that took place during the late 1960s remained relevant long after US troops had left Indochina. Yet the possibility that direct action could prevent or divert American military intervention diminished over time due to two fundamental adjustments made in the wake of the turmoil of Vietnam: the end of the draft and the shift to an all-volunteer military; and a revolution in military affairs that used advanced technology to wage aerial warfare in place of the mass deployment of ground troops. Resistance to the Vietnam War thus had an ironic long-term effect: the US government found a way both to intervene militarily and blunt the effectiveness of popular antiwar protest.

scholarly journals From the Green of Vietnam to Toes Painted with Nirvana

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 10-15
Author(s):  
Susan Straight
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
American Military ◽  
Vietnamese Women ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Nail Salons

Thousands of women who survived the Vietnam War, whose husbands were sent to reeducation camps after working with American military, now live in the US, where nail salons anchor almost every strip mall and flourish inside luxury malls as well. The history of how Vietnamese women came to work in the nail industry and how Americans became accustomed to manicures and pedicures is entwined with the loss of home and landscape.

The Vietnam War and American Military Strategy, 1965–1973

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory A. Daddis
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Power ◽  
Military Strategy ◽  
True Nature ◽  
American Military ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Cold War

For nearly a decade, American combat soldiers fought in South Vietnam to help sustain an independent, noncommunist nation in Southeast Asia. After U.S. troops departed in 1973, the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 prompted a lasting search to explain the United States’ first lost war. Historians of the conflict and participants alike have since critiqued the ways in which civilian policymakers and uniformed leaders applied—some argued misapplied—military power that led to such an undesirable political outcome. While some claimed U.S. politicians failed to commit their nation’s full military might to a limited war, others contended that most officers fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the war they were fighting. Still others argued “winning” was essentially impossible given the true nature of a struggle over Vietnamese national identity in the postcolonial era. On their own, none of these arguments fully satisfy. Contemporary policymakers clearly understood the difficulties of waging a war in Southeast Asia against an enemy committed to national liberation. Yet the faith of these Americans in their power to resolve deep-seated local and regional sociopolitical problems eclipsed the possibility there might be limits to that power. By asking military strategists to simultaneously fight a war and build a nation, senior U.S. policymakers had asked too much of those crafting military strategy to deliver on overly ambitious political objectives. In the end, the Vietnam War exposed the limits of what American military power could achieve in the Cold War era.

scholarly journals American military slang: the influence of the Vietnam war

2015 ◽  
pp. 37-43
Author(s):  
P.J. Mitchell ◽  
◽  
I.S. Kholdaenko ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
American Military ◽  
The Vietnam War

Setting Up Shop

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Parsons
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
American Military ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Important Site

This chapter describes the impetus behind the GI coffeehouse concept, following writer and organizer Fred Gardner as he and other activists begin building a coffeehouse network in a number of base towns around the country. In 1968 a "Summer of Support" brings more people and resources, as large national antiwar organizations join the effort to bring attention to the growing GI movement against the Vietnam War. Placing the coffeehouse phenomenon within the wider context of GI and military dissent in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this chapter shows how antiwar groups began to focus on the American military as an important site of resistance.

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