The Filmed Wars

2016 ◽  
pp. 130-150
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Television News ◽  
Production Equipment ◽  
Video Production ◽  
Distribution Model ◽  
Broadcast Television ◽  
The Past ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Network Broadcasts

In the late 1960's, unfamiliar people, exotic places and violent battles—all part of the Vietnam War—appeared on television screens around the world, in living color. Film cameras and sound equipment captured shocking images and stories audiences had never seen before. The Vietnam War, presented by popular networks like CBS and told through the words and expert storytelling abilities of respected broadcasters like Walter Cronkite, “magically” appeared in our living rooms. This top down delivery method (i.e., “one to many” mass broadcasting rather than the UGC bottom up distribution model common in YouTube's digital sphere) made the television viewing experience live rather than pre-recorded in terms of the news cast itself. The audience experienced the Vietnam War narrative as if they were actually there but also in a passive way. However, today, YouTube offers the Vietnam War story as an on-demand active experience and the original network broadcasts have been repurposed, rebroadcast, altered, and appended with YouTubers' textual comments and mashed-up videos about the Vietnam War and current worldwide military conflicts. YouTube provides a bridge between the past, present and future, using words, images and sounds that teach us a great deal about the Vietnam, Persian Gulf, and Iraq wars. Important conclusions can be drawn about how these events connect and relate. YouTubers have a lot to say about the Vietnam War and their comments on broadcast television news shows and programming from the past illuminate that time and the future. Broadcast television news video production technology, specifically the reduction in equipment size, accessibility and production equipment cost has facilitated new ways of telling war stories. Today, the concept of the embedded news reporter is common in war reporting and, in fact, very desirable in terms of driving viewers to broadcast network programming as embedded reporting is an effective and engaging story-telling technique. The embedded reporter has evolved and empowered the average YouTuber to take an active role in producing breaking news content and uploading that content live to YouTube and other websites.

Translating Philippine history in America's shadow: Japanese reflections on the past and present during the Vietnam War

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-245
Author(s):  
Takamichi Serizawa
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Allied Occupation ◽  
Southeast Asians ◽  
Postwar Japan ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Second World ◽  
Philippine History

In the 1970s, during and right after the end of the Vietnam War, more works by Filipino writers, especially historians, were translated into Japanese than works by any other Southeast Asians. In Southeast Asia, it was in the Philippines that the Japanese and the American forces had fought their fiercest battles during the Second World War. The Japanese translators who translated prominent Filipino nationalist historians such as Gregorio Zaide, Teodoro Agoncillo and Renato Constantino, had personally experienced war, defeat, and postwar life under the US-led Allied occupation of Japan. This article compares the original texts of some of these key Filipino works and their Japanese translations, and examines the ‘noises’ produced in the process of translation. This noise includes strategies such as the deletion and addition of information, opinions, and deliberate misreadings. This article suggests that these strategies reveal the translators’ views on the past as well as their contemporary experience of postwar Japan against the background of the ongoing Vietnam War.

From Grief to Gratitude

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phuong Tran Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
American Nation

The 130,000 Indochinese evacuated out of Saigon and resettled in America were encouraged to become “good refugees” by forgetting past traumas in order to move forward, the same advice Americans were allegedly giving themselves. This chapter argues that the losers of the Vietnam War, both Americans and Vietnamese alike, affirmed the past not by forgetting it, but by rewriting it. Through camp newsletters and other primary sources, we get a close glimpse of the profound sense of guilt and dishonour that compelled the US to employ selective memory in the shaping of a new collective memory, so that the rescue of 130,000 refugees—rather than the war that killed millions of people—would come to define America. As a result, refugees entered a charitable sponsorship bubble that come to shape their expectations vis-à-vis a guilt-ridden American nation. Refugees were expected to be on their best behaviour—exemplified by gratitude and promises of assimilation—by a country compelled by guilt to be on its own best behaviour.

Refugee Assets

2018 ◽  
pp. 57-86
Author(s):  
Long T. Bui
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Political Prisoners ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Past Wrongs

This chapter explores the challenges of memory work for Vietnamese diasporic subjects in the face of postwar historical amnesia and trauma. It analyzes Aimee Phan’s The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, which tells the story of two families that fled from the Vietnam War still grappling with the messiness of their war-torn past. Offering a powerful analytic for situating gendered practices of remembering and forgetting by mostly women, the term “reeducation” suggests that refugee memory work never simply takes the form of nostalgia or denial of the past but is a constant negotiation of history as interpreted through past wrongs or obligations. As a hermeneutic for critically reading the refugee as a figure of debt, “reeducation” links the programmatic indoctrination of South Vietnamese political prisoners by communists to the Western pedagogical program to civilize refugees from South Vietnam, recognizing the psychic and material debt survivors of war owe to the sacrifices and suffering of others, and the political agency found in that recognition.

Endings

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Greene
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Centrifugal Forces ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Robert Duncan ◽  
Denise Levertov

This chapter details the life and career of Denise Levertov from 1972 to 1975. This period was marked by critical endings for Levertov, an extraordinary time of emotional turmoil and confusion. Three centrifugal forces—the end of the Vietnam War, her break with mentor Robert Duncan, and her divorce from Mitch—could have overwhelmed her. In the end they did not. She survived, and haltingly searched for a new life. Two books of poetry appeared. Footprints (1972) and The Freeing of the Dust (1975) both attested to her longing for freedom and desire to leave the past behind, and a collection of essays, The Poet in the World (1973), established her preeminence in poetics. As she groped toward the future, Levertov carried a talisman with her, a new understanding of her name Denise. Previously she assumed Denise derived from the Greek “Dionysus.” Now to her delight she discovered that in Hebrew its origin was in “Daleth,” meaning “door,” “entrance, exit/way through of/giving and receiving.” Obliquely she began to live into this new self-understanding.

Violence, Non-Violence, and Political Strategy

Worldview ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-9
Author(s):  
Mulford Q. Sibley
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Violent Crime ◽  
American History ◽  
Political System ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Violent Conflict ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
History Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Vietnam War

The problem of violence in American culture has been a subject of increasing concern during the past two decades. In the fifties, there was rampant the school of “consensus” history writing, which tended to deny the existence of conflicts about basic issues in American history. More recently, the past has been portrayed in an entirely different light: Conflict, and particularly violent conflict, are seen as having been virtually endemic. Against the background of violent crime and civil disturbance, several presidential commissions have investigated violence, and they usually emerge with the conclusion that Americans are a peculiarly violent people. The atrocities of the Vietnam war, and police and ghetto violence, have led many to wonder at the same time whether the alleged merits of the American political system are as great as its defenders have insisted.

scholarly journals Hybrid Warfare in Vietnam: THE U.S. AND SOUTH VIETNAMESE SUCCESS AGAINST THE VIET CONG INSURGENCY

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-83
Author(s):  
Ismaël Fournier
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Hybrid Warfare ◽  
The Past ◽  
Conventional Warfare ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The U.S

In the past decades, most conformist studies dedicated to the Vietnam War were overly critical of the U.S. military’s so-called reliance on conventional warfare in a country deemed to be plagued by an insurgency. Counterinsurgency programs were labeled weak and powerless to shift the Americans’ momentum against the Viet Cong, which outsmarted the U.S. military. This article opposes these theories and suggests that by 1969, the U.S. force’s reliance on conventional warfare against the guerrillas progressively morphed into a strategy that fully supported the military’s counterinsurgency initiatives. Vietnam was a hybrid warfare theater, which required the Americans to fight both the Viet Cong guerrillas and Hanoi’s conventional forces. Through the analysis of U.S. and Communist documents, this study suggests that the Americans succeeded in offsetting the Communists’ tactical approach to hybrid warfare. As they skillfully synchronized regular warfare with counterinsurgency, the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces succeeded in defeating the Viet Cong insurgency by the spring of 1972.

Dreamer: An Exercise in Extrapolation 1989–2019

1998 ◽  
pp. 35-59
Author(s):  
Gwyneth Jones
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
British Telecom ◽  
Technology Systems

‘Dreamer: An Exercise in Extrapolation 1989-2019’ was first commissioned by British Telecom Information Technology Systems Division in 1988. Writing in the late 80s, the essay analyses the ways in which science fiction writing attempts to build a future based off what is known about the world from both the present and the past. To establish her argument, Jones references science fiction texts that discuss America’s imaginary future while drawing on it’s past, i.e. the Vietnam War. The essay concludes with the short story Dreamers.

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