America’s Wars in Vietnam and Iraq

This chapter reviews American wars in Vietnam and Iraq from critical social and political history sources and from people who experienced these wars. How America remembers and renders accounts of itself, relative to how others remember America in these wars, is key to learning whose war knowledge gets attention and whose wars languish unacknowledged. The chapter reconstructs the wars from memories of ordinary people close to or distant from combat, rather than positioning war only as a matter of state interests, military strategies, and geopolitics that collateralize people. In doing so it considers three contemporary paintings that can convey ideas related to Americans and their post-911wars

Introduction

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.

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.

The Smithsonian Curates America’s Wars in Vietnam and Iraq

This chapter explores the evolution of the Smithsonian museums, including failed attempts to establish a national war museum, before focusing on one exhibition at its National Museum of American History. The Price of Freedom: Americans at War is a permanent display of objects related to every war Americans fought from colonial times to the 2003 war in Iraq. At issue is how that exhibition depicts the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Ten years before Price of Freedom opened, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum planned an exhibition on the American bombing of Hiroshima that collapsed from controversy over whose war and which victims should be shown. The Price of Freedom cautiously focuses only on the American side of each war. The Vietnam rooms offer impressive American technologies while rooms dedicated to the American war in Iraq are remarkably absent of objects and seem barely curated.

Remembering, Forgetting, Curating, and Re-Curating War

The final chapter reviews the main conclusions of the book and raises one more pathway, by Elaine Scarry, into understanding war through people’s experiences and curations Those who die in war can be interpreted and revivified by many people, groups, and institutions, each curating loss in its own terms. That there are many contenders for war memory and authority reflects a social institution that is highly decentralized in its sites, experiences and effects. To grasp this institution and the wars of our time requires gathering knowledge from locations ordinary and official, expert and everyday, profound and prosaic, literary, journalistic, and artistic—and on all sides of a war.

Bodies of War Curate the American Wars in Vietnam and Iraq

This chapter considers selected literary works on the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq that throw light on an array of people living in war and navigating its aftermaths. Novels and memoirs curate through stories that miniaturize and narrow war to a few featured characters and experiential moments of larger conflicts. Importantly, literary sites of war knowledge bring to the fore dark essentials of war, including torture, rape and the abject corpses that war museum exhibitions and official memorials to war veterans avoid showing. The novels and memoirs featured here are classics by Americans, Iraqis and Vietnamese, soldiers and civilians, among them works by Bao Ninh, Sinan Antoon, Kevin Powers, Helen Benedict, and Riverbend.

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.