New Perceptions of the Vietnam War: Essays on the War, the South Vietnamese Experience, the Diaspora and the Continuing Impact

269 Pages·2014·8.109 MB·English

by  Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen

New Perceptions of
the Vietnam War
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New Perceptions of
the Vietnam War
Essays on the War, the South
Vietnamese Experience, the Diaspora
and the Continuing Impact
Edited by
Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA
New perceptions of the Vietnam War : essays on the war,
the South Vietnamese experience, the diaspora and the
continuing impact / edited by Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-9509-2 (softcover : acid free paper) ♾
ISBN 978-1-4766-1858-6 (ebook)
1. Vietnam War, 1961–1975. 2. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—
Influence. 3. Vietnamese diaspora. I. Nguyen, Nathalie Huynh
Chau, editor, author.
DS557.7.N377 2015
959.704'3—dc23 2014041002
BRITISHLIBRARYCATALOGUINGDATAAREAVAILABLE
© 2015 Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
On the cover: the Vietnam War Memorial of Melbourne, Australia,
2005 (photograph by Graeme Saunders); background map
© 2014 iStock/Thinkstock
Printed in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments 1
Introduction: New Perceptions of the Vietnam War
Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen 3
Part I: War and Politics
“A Short Road to Hell”: Thieu, South Vietnam and the
Paris Peace Accords
George J. Veith 21
An Intellectual Through Revolution, War and Exile:
The Political Commitment of Nguyen Ngoc Huy (1924–1990)
François Guillemot 41
Fifty Years On: Half- Century Reflections on the Australian
Commitment to the Vietnam War
Peter Edwards 72
Part II: Memorials and Commemoration
Side-by-Side Memorials: Commemorating the Vietnam War
in Australia
Christopher R. Linke 85
Vietnam: The Long Journey Home
Elizabeth Stewart 108
Part III: War and Women’s Writing
War Through Women’s Eyes: Nam Phuong’s Red on Gold and
Yung Krall’s A Thousand Tears Falling
Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen 129
v
vi Contents
The Postwar Body: The Literary Double in the Exile Literature
of Linda Lê
Alexandra Kurmann and Tess Do 151
Part IV: Identities and Legacies
The Vietnam War: A Personal Journey
Robert S. McKelvey 169
Recognition of War Service: Vietnamese Veterans and
Australian Government Policy
Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen 184
Indigenous Soldiers: Native American and Aboriginal
Australian Service in Vietnam
Noah Riseman 203
An Independent Command? Australia’s Ground Forces in
the Vietnam War and Contemporary Memories
Bruce Davies 229
About the Contributors 249
Index 253
Preface and Acknowledgments
This work examines the Vietnam War from new perspectives, includ-
ing those of the Vietnamese diaspora, and explores the ways in which
percept ions of the war have altered in recent years. International and inter-
disciplinary in scope, it differs from other titles on the Vietnam War in that
it acknowledges the South Vietnamese experience of the war, and encom-
passes the perspectives of the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States,
Australia and France, as well as the work of American, Australian and
French historians. The war is reinterpreted and reassessed through the lens
of history, politics, biography and literature. The effects of the Vietnam
War outside the boundaries of the Vietnamese state are ongoing. The pres-
ence of substantial Vietnamese communities in countries that participated
in the conflict is contributing to changing interpretations of the war.
Grouped under four headings, “War and Politics,” “Memorials and Com-
memoration,” “War and Women’s Writing,” and “Identities and Legacies,”
the essays in this book provide new insights into the reconstruction and
memorialization of the Vietnam War.
The idea for this work arose out of my Australian Research Council
Future Fellowship project on Vietnamese veterans in Australia. As part of the
fellowship, I convened and chaired an international symposium on “The Viet-
nam War: New Perceptions” at Monash University Prato Centre in Prato, Italy,
in October 2013, to which I invited scholars from Australia, the United States,
France and Canada. The symposium gave us the opportunity to meet each
other and to share ideas in a collegial environment, and it was a highly reward-
ing experience. I had originally intended to hold the symposium in Melbourne,
Australia; however a conversation in 2012 with Rae Frances, Dean of the Fac-
ulty of Arts at Monash University, changed my mind. She suggested Prato as
a venue for the symposium and I am glad that I followed her advice, as Monash
Prato Centre provided a beautiful and congenial setting for the symposium.
1
2 Preface and Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the Australian Research Council for the time and
resources with which to focus on a substantial research project on Viet-
namese veterans and the Vietnam War. At Monash University, I owe grateful
thanks to Rae Frances, Dean of Arts, for her support in funding the costs
of the symposium as well as approving financial assistance to three invited
speakers to the symposium. I would like to thank the heads and staff of the
former School of Journalism, Australian, and Indigenous Studies—in par-
ticular Tony Moore and Halina Bluzer—as well as the director and staff of
the National Centre for Australian Studies, for their collegial support. At
Monash Prato Centre, I would like to express my gratitude to its director,
Cecilia Hewlitt, and all her staff for providing such a warm welcome, and
for responding promptly to any queries. I gratefully acknowledge the sup-
port of Margy Burn, Assistant D irector-G eneral of Australian Collections
and Reader Services at the National Library of Australia, and her staff while
I conducted several months of research at the library in 2012. I would like
to thank Peter Edwards, Peter Stanley, Jeffrey Grey, Joanna Sassoon, Peter
Hamburger and George J. Veith for referring me to potential symposium
participants and/or contributors to the volume, Ashley Ekins for inviting
me to the Australian War Memorial in 2013, as this enabled me to meet several
military historians, and Helen MacDonald and Eve Herring for providing
a sympathetic ear. My grateful thanks to all those who either spoke at the
symposium and/or contributed chapters to the final volume (in alphabetical
order): Bruce Davies, Tess Do, Peter Edwards, François Guillemot, Alexan-
dra Kurmann, Christopher R. Linke, Robert S. McKelvey, Frank Palmos,
Noah Riseman, Elizabeth Stewart, Thanh- Van Ton That, Kieu- Linh Caro-
line Valverde, and George J. Veith. I am grateful to all the reviewers who
provided reports for the essays in the collection and am especially indebted
to the following colleagues for their advice and support throughout the
peer review process: Kate D arian-S mith, A nne-M arie Medcalf, Robert
O’Neill, Toby Garfitt, and Pierre Journoud. I owe particular thanks to Gio-
conda Di Lorenzo for reading the introductory essay. My thanks to Sherry
Dowdy at the U.S. Army Center of Military History for providing the map
of South Vietnam that appears at the beginning of the book, and to Erik
Villard for referring me to her.
Introduction: New Perceptions
of the Vietnam War
Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen
Forty years after the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the Vietnam War
remains the subject of continued reflection, research and analysis, with his-
torians providing conflicting interpretations about the policies, motivations
and actions of participants as well as the rights and wrongs of the war. The
history of the Vietnam War is one that has been complicated by politics,
and it is a history that is still being written and rewritten. The war involved
a fratricidal conflict between the communist Democratic Republic of Viet-
nam (North Vietnam) and the non- communist Republic of Vietnam (South
Vietnam), and extended to neighboring Laos and Cambodia; however, it
was also a proxy war in a Cold War contest between the communist bloc
and the western bloc. North Vietnam had the massed support of the Soviet
Union and China and their satellite states while South Vietnam had the
backing of the United States and its allies. The echoes of the war extended
well beyond Vietnam and the countries that participated in the conflict.
Vietnam was a transformational event and became an international symbol
for the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The war had a ripple
effect that spread outwards from Vietnam to other countries and continents,
an effect that was temporal as well as geographic, reaching not only the
wartime generations but also postwar generations.
The history of the war has been a partial one, underscored by the
American dominance of the English- language historiography of the war
and the focus on American policies and the American experience of the
war, coupled with a mostly negative assessment of South Vietnam.1While
recent studies have focused on North Vietnamese policies and goals,2and
3