The Phenomenology of Redemptive Violence

When we occupy the spaces of war memorials, we respond with certain bodily comportments that relay the “truth” of those killed by war violence. Through a phenomenological examination of embodied responses to two war memorials, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, I argue that social institutions employ bodies as a means of legitimizing a violence that is seen as redemptive. More specifically, I demonstrate how the redemptive quality of certain types of violence is an assumption replicated in social practices where individuals have learned the particular bodily skills of discourses surrounding redemptive violence.

Defining a War: INDOCHINA, THE VIETNAM WAR, AND THE MAYAGUEZ INCIDENT

Only two weeks after the fall of Saigon in May 1975, Khmer Rouge forces seized the American merchant ship SS Mayaguez (1944) off the Cambodian coast, setting up a Marine rescue and recovery battle on the island of Koh Tang. This battle on 12–15 May 1975 was the final U.S. military episode amid the wider Second Indochina War. The term Vietnam War has impeded a proper understanding of the wider war in the American consciousness, leading many to disassociate the Mayaguez incident from the Vietnam War, though they belong within the same historical frame. This article seeks to provide a heretofore unseen historical argument connecting the Mayaguez incident to the wider war and to demonstrate that Mayaguez and Koh Tang veterans are Vietnam veterans, relying on primary sources from the Ford administration, the papers of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, and interviews with veterans.

The American Wars in Vietnam and Iraq at a Memorial, Cemetery, and a Traveling Tribute to Veterans

This chapter considers the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq as remembered and curated at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, and its traveling Wall That Heals, plus Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery. Of interest are memory-bearing objects communities of loss curate that show dead soldiers as ordinary people who lived civilian lives before and during their associations with the military and one of its two failed wars. In Arlington Cemetery, some ordinary curators have insisted on exhibiting their memories of killed family members and friends in violation of cemetery rules. A different, heroic framing of military loss is curated at the mobile Wall That Heals. All of these memory exhibits undertaken by “ordinary curators” re-curate aspects of the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq through civilian displays of the war they experienced.

Curating and Re-Curating the American Wars in Vietnam and Iraq

Who is an authority on the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq? The Pentagon? Leading politicians? Allies? Academic specialists? The media? American soldiers? Vietnamese and Iraqis? Protesters? Families of war dead? Curators of war exhibitions? War novelists? This book considers locations of war knowledge that are often overlooked by scholars in the social sciences and also by civilians who have an interest in understanding these wars. It takes readers to a permanent exhibition of war at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and its traveling facsimile, to Section 60 of the Arlington National Cemetery where military killed in Iraq are buried, and to well-regarded novels and memoirs about these wars. Across vastly different sites of war knowledge, the book considers whose war appears where, how it is curated, and whether some sites re-curate commonplace understandings of these wars by highlighting experiences war experts can neglect.

Museums, Memorials, and Novels as Sites of War Knowledge

Curations of war objects and stories can direct observers to a culturally prescribed view of America’s wars in Vietnam and Iraq; or, contrarily, they can challenge, revise, and destabilize associations and memory politics around these wars. This chapter focuses on the role of cultural institutions and material object practices in curating and re-curating America’s wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Examples appear from a Smithsonian museum and the Australia War Memorial and museum, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and traveling facsimile, pop-up exhibitions critical of the war in Iraq, displays at Arlington National Cemetery, and selected novels about the two wars.