Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allison Varzally
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Foster Family ◽  
Facial Hair ◽  
White Community ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Regular Contact ◽  
Over Time

Born to an American man and Vietnamese woman in 1970, Trista immigrated to the United States and was adopted by a young American couple, Nancy and Chuck Kalan, in 1973 after she and her younger brother, Jeffrey, spent a year in the care of a Vietnamese foster family. Although Nancy would eagerly accept and manage the details of Trista’s adoption, her husband, a veteran of the Vietnam War, had initiated their plans. Trista recalled her fear and shyness on meeting her new parents. “When I first saw my father, I cried,” she explained, “because he had a full beard and I wasn’t used to the facial hair.” Moreover, as a four-year-old, “I still had memories of my family,” she related. These memories would become less vivid over time as Trista learned English, became acquainted with American foods, and integrated into the mostly white community of Feasterville, Pennsylvania, but she retained cultural, political, and familial ties to Vietnam through regular contact with Jeffrey, who was adopted into the household of Trista’s aunt and raised as her cousin, as well as her foster family, who departed Vietnam among a wave of refugees and resettled in the Kalans’ household in 1975. Despite relationships and exposure that could have reinforced a Vietnamese identity, she admitted, “I probably actually repressed any of my culture and heritage growing up because I just wanted to fit in.”...

The Myth of the Troubled and Scorned Vietnam Veteran

1992 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric T. Dean
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Vietnam Veteran ◽  
War Zone ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
One Year

In the United States since the conclusion of the Vietnam War, the Vietnam veteran has become known as a neglected, troubled, and even scorned individual. According to this view, the Vietnam veteran's problems began in Vietnam where he was forced to participate in a brutal and disturbing war in which he was under fire twenty-four hours a day. The enemy, the wily and tenacious Vietcong and North Vietnamese regulars, were not always clearly defined nor were they above hiding behind or using civilians, leading to the unintentional – and sometimes intentional – killing by American forces of noncombatants, including women and children. Due to the military's policy of limiting the tour of duty in the war zone to one year, combat groups lacked cohesion and suffered from low morale, resulting in the excessive use of marijuana and heroin and an eventual breakdown of discipline, leading to the “fragging” of officers who attempted to reimpose order.

About Ghost Stories: The Vietnam War and “Rememoration”

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1700-1702
Author(s):  
Yen Le Espiritu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sociological Imagination ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Ghost Stories ◽  
The People ◽  
The Vietnam War

In her book Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination, avery gordon writes that “to study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it”—the experiential realities of social and political life that have been systematically hidden or erased. To confront the ghostly aspects of social life is to tell ghost stories: to pay attention to what modern history has rendered ghostly and to write into being the seething presence of the things that appear to be not there (Gordon 7–8). By most accounts, Vietnam was the site of one of the most brutal and destructive of the wars between Western imperial powers and the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Yet public discussions and commemorations of the Vietnam War in the United States often skip over this devastating history, thereby ignoring the war's costs borne by the Vietnamese—the lifelong costs that turn the 1975 “fall of Saigon” and the exodus from Vietnam into “the endings that are not over” (Gordon 195). Without creating an opening for a Vietnamese perspective of the war, these public deliberations refuse to remember Vietnam as a historical site, Vietnamese people as genuine subjects, and the Vietnam War as having any kind of integrity of its own (Desser).

Interlude V

2021 ◽  
pp. 143-148
Author(s):  
Trevor Davis Lipscombe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Case ◽  
Wild Ass ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Intelligent Life

I’m sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It’s just been too intelligent to come here. ARTHUR C. CLARKE (reproduced from an interview http://www.scifi.com/transcripts/aclarke.txt) The Vietnam War, during which American casualties ran extremely high, remains controversial in the United States. During the conflict, US forces estimated the strength of enemy forces based on the “SWAG” principle. At the war’s end, in a legal case, Colonel John Stewart took the stand. Lawyers grilled him, asking what, exactly, SWAG stood for. His reply, generating much amusement in the courtroom, was “Scientific Wild-Ass Guess.”...

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Christine Sylvester
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
Abstract Painting ◽  
The Vietnam War

This chapter begins the book by considering the knowledge on war that a seemingly unrelated abstract painting can harbor. That relationship introduces readers to the major theme of war authority as a decentralized and multilocated phenomenon. Background overviews provide information on America’s two wars studied here—in Vietnam and Iraq—the rise of militarism in the United States after the Vietnam War, and the heroization of soldiers today. The research sites for the study come into view along with the concepts that frame the study, including war as experience, memory, curation, and material objects as bearers of curator-coordinated war knowledge. The key argument to be sustained throughout the book is: war is experiential injurious politics that produces numerous sites of war expertise, many of which are overpowered by stories that gain truth through technical dominance, repetition and practice.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 150-168
Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Culture ◽  
American Business ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Political Landscapes ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter explores the transformed religious, economic, and political landscapes in Europe and the United States at the time of Graham’s return to Berlin and London in 1966. It explains why Graham was now facing sharper criticism: the theological climate had shifted even further away from Graham’s rather fundamentalist theology, which now appeared outdated. The 1960s counterculture articulated an increasing consumer critique that zoomed in on Graham’s unconditional support for American business culture and the American way of life. And the Vietnam War, from which Graham never really distanced himself, loomed large over his revival meetings, where he now faced open political protest. But even more so, the increasing secularization of crusade cities such as London and Berlin made it significantly harder to rally support for Graham’s revival work at the same time when Graham’s highly professionalized revivalism was increasingly perceived as secular and formulaic.

From Reeducation Camps to Little Saigons

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tuan Hoang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Critical Mass ◽  
The United States ◽  
Vietnamese History ◽  
The Vietnam War

This article re-examines Vietnamese diasporic anticommunism in the context of twentieth-century Vietnamese history. It offers an overview of the Vietnamese anticommunist tradition from colonialism to the end of the Vietnam War, and interprets the effects of national loss and incarceration on South Vietnamese anticommunists. These experiences contributed to an essentialization of anticommunism among the prisoners, who eventually provided a critical mass for anticommunist activism in the United States since the early 1990s.

“Mourning a Loss: Conservative Support for Ngo Dinh Diem”

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-284
Author(s):  
Seth Offenbach
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Conservative Movement ◽  
Great Hope ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Ngo Dinh Diem ◽  
The U.S

The U.S. conservative movement in the mid-20th Century argued that the United States needed to continuously get tougher in the fight against communism worldwide. It remained supportive of U.S. efforts throughout the Vietnam War. However, in the period immediately preceding Americanization of the war in 1965, conservatives were uncertain about the outcome of any fighting in Vietnam. Specifically, they claimed that optimism for the Republic of Vietnam was lost with the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. Without Diem, conservatives claimed, the Vietnam War was likely lost before it began. This article discusses how Diem went from a barely talked-about anti-Communist ally prior to his death to becoming posthumously the last great hope for Southeast Asia. Conservatives argued that without Diem, the only way the United States would be able to stop Communist expansion in Indochina would be to engage in a massive aerial bombing campaign and find a regional partner to deploy troops. Had he survived, this might not have been necessary. Learning why and how conservatives supported Diem after his death helps us better understand how conservatives reacted to the Vietnam War once Americanization began in 1965.

“…And on the Fourth Day They Spotted Us”: The macv Recondo School and the lrrps in Vietnam

2016 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-165
Author(s):  
James A. Sandy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Training Program ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Personal Relationship ◽  
Significant Shift ◽  
United States Military ◽  
Military Experience ◽  
Conventional Warfare ◽  
The Vietnam War

The United States military experienced a watershed moment during the Vietnam War, where special and conventional warfare came together. The macv Recondo School represents a significant shift in the mindset of the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, illuminating a change that saw American commanders like General William Westmoreland attempt to spread Special Warfare ideals into their conventional line units, demonstrating the growing acceptance and importance of such warfare within the U.S. military. William Westmoreland’s influential role in the construction and implementation of this school and its training program sheds new light on both his personal relationship to such forces as well as the entire military experience in Vietnam. The wide reach of Recondo graduates represents the significant impact that this school had on the U.S. Army and multiple foreign military forces. Ultimately, the story of the Recondo School highlights the beginning of a trend that joins the two separate worlds of special and conventional warfare together.

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