FORGOTTEN MEMORIES: RE-CONSTRUCTING THE VIETNAM WAR IN FILMS

As many scholars have written about the Vietnam War, this thesis, Forgotten Memories: Re-Constructing the Vietnam War in Films, explores a different approach to this topic by examining films. Historical films are becoming increasingly important in shaping the way the past is understood and remembered. After the war ended, many Hollywood films have continued to capture the atrocities of the war that affected the war narrative of the Vietnam War. American politics and the public suffered from the Vietnam Syndrome, and they lost confidence in the military and government structures. These emotions are translated into Hollywood films about the Vietnam War. The victory of the Gulf War in 1991 finally helped them to get out of the shadow of that psychological fear in foreign intervention. The Vietnam War films have made its comeback after the September 11th attacks. Many scholars have compared the war against terrorism is similar to the war against communism in the 1950s.

Challenging the Hegemony of the Symptom: Reclaiming Context in PTSD and Moral Injury

Although post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is now constituted by a set of characteristic symptoms, its roots lie in Post-Vietnam Syndrome, a label generated by a Vietnam-era advocacy movement that focused not on symptoms but on war’s traumatic context. When Post-Vietnam Syndrome was subsumed into the abstract, individualistic, symptom-centered language of DSM-III and rendered as PTSD, it not only lost this focus on context but also neglected the experiences of veterans who suffer from things done or witnessed, not primarily from what was done to them, in war. This agent-related trauma has been rediscovered in contemporary work on moral injury, but moral injury too is increasingly subjected to the hegemony of the symptom. Focusing on symptoms, however, unhelpfully pathologizes and individualizes trauma, neglects traumatic context, and legitimates problematic therapeutic approaches. Trauma researchers and clinicians should decenter the language of symptoms and focus instead on context and on alternative accounts of trauma.

Post-Vietnam Syndrome: Psychiatry, Anti-War Politics, and the Reconstitution of the Vietnam Veteran

Using primary source materials from medical, government, and journalism archives, this study of public medical discourse reveals the role of argumentation in posi­tively shaping public perceptions of traumatized soldiers and locates the contem­porary origins of the trope of “soldier as psychological victim of war”—a perception that continues to inform public policy and medical research. Using Jasinski’s (1998) concepts of interior and exterior constitutive potential to analyze the public writ­ings, interviews, and Congressional testimony of VVAW-affiliated psychiatrists, the study finds that the radical psychiatrists’ interior (directed at veterans) and exte­rior (directed at public and medical institutions) rhetorics were (and arguably remain) mutually effective in creating an identity for veterans to occupy that exculpated them from their involvement in war, while allowing them to garner benefits for their ser­vice. The article concludes with two examples of the “veteran as psychological vic­tim of war” trope as it shapes the contemporary rhetorical ecology of former servicemembers.

The Vietnam Syndrome and Its Effects on the U.S. Public and Foreign and Domestic Policy Decisions During the Post-Vietnam Era Between 1975-1991

First, the Vietnam Syndrome had a significant cultural impact on the American public which altered the U.S. public’s collective cultural view of war from an interventionist to an anti-interventionist stance. Naturally, this shift in public perception influenced U.S. presidents’ foreign and domestic policy decisions from President Gerald Ford to President George H.W. Bush. Second, the Vietnam Syndrome’s anti-interventionist effect challenged the established security of containment policy through military intervention, forcing presidents and their administrations to implement different rhetorical approaches and messages to unshackle, in their view, America from the anti-interventionist effects of the Vietnam Syndrome on foreign policy decisions. Third, as a means to defeat the lasting impacts of the Vietnam Syndrome, the Bush administration and the U.S. military enhanced U.S. domestic policy through a multi-stage propaganda and media censorship campaign to rally public, congressional, and international support for the Persian Gulf War; which, upon America’s victory in the war, established the New World Order and re-established America’s security abroad.

THE VIETNAM SYNDROME IN FORREST GUMP MOVIE SCRIPT

Considered the most controversial war in the 20th century, the Vietnam War deeply divides the American society. Especially, it causes the Vietnam Syndrome which still is an obsession of American people until today. The research is carried out on a movie script of one of the most famous Hollywood films about the Vietnam War, Forrest Gump. The collected data are analyzed on the basis of Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework for critical discourse analysis (CDA). The study aims to reveal the different aspects of the syndrome considered as a psychological trauma expressing in many factors such as the topic, the plot, the characters, the setting, the genre, the theme songs, and the language of the whole movie. Moreover, the movie script exposes a long period of problematic and tragic time in the history of the United States.