Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (31 page)

Both exist at the fringes of war memory, for as difficult as rape is to imagine or remember, banality is too boring to be recalled. Most Americans who served in the military during the war never saw combat, serving on ships, guarding bases, delivering supplies, pushing paper, condemned as “rear echelon motherfuckers” in the rich lingo of the combat troops. The epithet is meant to satirize their cowardice and privilege, and perhaps the envy of the combat troops, but something else lurks in the obscenity—the dim realization that contemporary war is a bureaucratic and capitalistic enterprise that requires its bored clerks, soulless administrators, ignorant taxpayers, contradictory priests, and encouraging families. If we understood that a war machine is a pervasive system of complicity that requires not only its front line troops but also its extensive network of logistical, emotional, and ideological support, then we would understand that all the politicians and civilians who cheer the war effort or simply go along with it are, one and all, rear echelon motherfuckers, including, perhaps, myself.

The obsidian myth of the heroic warrior allows rear echelon motherfuckers to see themselves as red-blooded patriots from the heartland. That myth took a near-fatal wound during the war for Americans, who tried to repair it by turning soldiers who were not seen as heroic warriors into wounded warriors. But soldiers are not warriors in the mythic sense, where every able-bodied man had a spear or battle-axe in his home, ready for the call to arms. Instead the rank-and-file soldier is a manifestation of the modern era, faceless, anonymous, at once an individual and a part of a mass, representing the entire nation. A true war story must not be only about what happens to combat soldiers and their guts, but also about the nation and its guts, about running one’s refrigerator, which might use a refrigerant made by Dow Chemical, the company that manufactured Agent Orange. This herbicide debilitated thousands of American soldiers and their progeny, as the U.S. government admitted, and also thousands of Vietnamese and their offspring, as the U.S.overnment will not admit. The quotidian story about opening one’s refrigerator and peering into its guts, stuffed with the plastic-packaged wonders of capitalist life, is just as true as and arguably more unsettling than the blood and guts story of throbbing disembowelment. The quotidian reminds us that war’s obscenity lies not only in broken bodies but also in the complicity of the citizenry. Under what might be called compulsory militarism, even those who oppose war still end up paying its costs, for while everyone can intellectually understand that war is hell, few can resist owning the refrigerator. This complete domestication of war is part of war’s identity, in the same way that some family, somewhere, has nurtured every rapist. We are all witnesses to banality and complicity, which is why we do not wish to recall them.

I am most interested in the kinds of true war stories and war memories capacious enough to include the blood and guts as well as the boring and the quotidian. True war stories acknowledge war’s true identity, which is that while war is hell, war is normal, too. War is both inhuman and human, as are its participants. Photographer Tod Papageorge’s
American Sports, 1970: Or How We Spent the War in Vietnam
portrays war in exactly this fashion. The book features seventy photographs, all but one capturing American sporting events: the players and the fans, the press conferences and the team buses, the dugouts and the locker rooms, with the participants being men, women, young, old, black, white, ugly, beautiful. The last photograph is the one that does not depict a sporting event or its participants. It is of the War Memorial in Indianapolis, with these words on the facing page: “In 1970, 4,221 American troops were killed in Vietnam.” This is horror as an appendix to the banal, which is how many civilians experience war. Papageorge suggests that even as American soldiers die abroad, life continues at home, an experience repeated decades later with America’s wars in the Middle East, which often hardly feel like wars at all in the United States. While O’Brien’s stories may be true war stories from a soldier’s point of view, Papageorge’s photos are true war stories from a civilian’s point of view. The spectacular gore of a certain kind of true war story distracts us from the dull hum of the war machine in which we live, a massive mechanism greased with banalities, bolted together by triviality, and enabled by passive consent. To tell and hear these kinds of banal and boring true war stories is necessary for what philosopher William James called “the war against war.”
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So far as we imagine wars to be dangerous (but thrilling), wars will not end. Perhaps when we see how boring wars actually are, how war seeps into everyday life, then we might want to imagine stopping wars. The citizenry can end war at any time by refusing to go along with it, which is no easy matter—perhaps even utopia itself, versus the passive consent to the contemporary global dystopia of perpetual war.

If American war stories favor frontline vividness, for many Southeast Asians, wherever they happen to be, true war stories are both vivid and banal, since the war was fought on their territory, in their cities, on their farms, within their own families. For some readers or viewers, these kinds of true war stories are not “good” war stories because they lack the vicarious thrill found in stories about soldiers killing and being killed. Simply by their content, true war stories about civilians and banalities are, for some, boring and hence forgettable. This is true for large numbers of Southeast Asians, many of whom were born after war’s end and are impatient with their elders’ stories. But for many who lived through the war, its memory remains as bright as a magnesium flare, illuminating darkness and signaling danger. For those Southeast Asians cast overseas as losers, the need to remember their war stories is even more urgent. They sense that the war may be forgotten, or narrated differently than the way they remember. The genre of the true war story as told by (white) Americans frustrates them. Artist Dinh Q. Lê speaks eloquently of this frustration when he discusses his series
From Vietnam to Hollywood
, which

is drawn from the merging of my personal memories, media-influenced memories, and Hollywood-fabricated memories to create a surreal landscape memory that is neither fact nor fiction. At the same time I want the series to talk about the struggle for control of meaning and memories of the Vietnam War between these three different sources of memories. I think my concepts of what constitutes memory have changed over the years, from thinking of memory as something concrete to something so malleable. But the one concept I still hold on to is that, because Hollywood and the U.S. media are constantly trying to displace and destroy our memories about the Vietnam War to replace it with their versions, I must keep fighting to keep the meanings of these memories alive.
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These memories range from the horrific to the reassuring, the aesthetic spectrum for the war stories of Southeast Asians whether in their countries of origin or in their adopted countries. On the horrific end, the most powerful scene from Ham Tran’s epic film
Journey from the Fall
illustrates something that O’Brien gestures at. In O’Brien’s stories, the job of the living—at least the living writer—is this: “We kept the dead alive with stories.”
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But what if the living are already dead, and the dead are somehow alive?
Journey from the Fall
examines this convergence of living and dead through the war’s impact on one family after the fall of Saigon. After the husband is sent to reeducation for having been a soldier in the southern army, his mother, wife, and son flee as boat people. In a marginal American neighborhood, they suffer their losses in isolation from Americans and from each other, traumatized by the loss of country and patriarch, as well as the sufferings endured on the boat, which include rape. When the young son accuses his mother of forgetting the father, treating him as if he were dead, she says

Do you know what I’ve been through to be with this family today? Do you think your mother is still alive? She’s dead already. Dead already! I died the day they took your father. I died again out on that ocean, Lai. This person you call your mother is nothing but a corpse, living only to take care of you. But your real mother is already dead, son. I hope you know. She’s dead, son.

Tears do not come to my eyes often, but they did for this scene, the mother weeping at her confession, the son weeping at the revelation. This domestic scene set in a prosaic living room dramatizes war’s dreadful cost for civilians, women, refugees, children, and, ultimately, all those people in living rooms who think they are not at war when their country is at war.

The mother’s speech reveals that beneath the façade of the human lurks the inhuman, the undead among us and within us, which Westerners typically only confront through watching stories of the undead in zombie movies and television shows. As philosopher Slavoj Žižek says, “the ‘undead’ are neither alive nor dead, they are precisely the monstrous ‘living dead.’ ”
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Among the refugees, some are the living dead. If one wants sociological evidence, look at how 62 to 92 percent of Cambodian refugees in America endure posttraumatic stress disorder, or how some of them suffer from a science fictional illness called hysterical blindness, where, for no apparent medical reason, those afflicted cannot see, or how some Hmong refugees, healthy by all appearances, and of youthful age, go to sleep and never wake up, their black hair turned white overnight.
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What has traumatized, blinded, or killed these people? Memories. What turns people into zombies? Memories. Because these people might be infectious and threatening, Americans may wish to quarantine their memories and war stories, their tales of being the living dead, which remind us that the inhuman is present within us. As Žižek tells us, there is a difference between not being human, which is “external to humanity, animal or divine,” and being inhuman, “which, although it negates what we understand as humanity, is inherent to being human.”
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Riffing on Žižek’s insights, critic Juliana Chang says inhuman “implies dread and horror not only because we find it strange but also because we find it overly proximate … the inhuman is the alien that permeates the human, and the human that finds itself alien.”
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This human, xenophobic fear of the alien and the refugee is based not on how they are unlike us, but on how they are too much like us. Not only is their condition something for which we might have some responsibility, but their wretchedness might become ours if something catastrophic happens to us. Even more, as Papageorge’s photos imply, isn’t there something inhuman and monstrous about carrying on our daily business—indeed, in enjoying ourselves—while people die because of our war machine? Do we look that different from zombies in our pursuit of oblivious pleasure? If the victims of a war machine made zombie movies, wouldn’t they cast themselves as the humans and the war machine’s soldiers and citizens as the zombies? Can the war machine’s soldiers and citizens see themselves as zombies, as inhuman? In short, do we who think we are human know that we are also inhuman?

At least some refugees know they are inhuman, the living dead, and perhaps some soldiers do as well, like novelist Larry Heinemann, the war veteran whose novel
Close Quarters
scarred me at so young an age. He wrote the even more troubling
Paco’s Story
about a disabled veteran who is the burned, scarred, sole survivor of a company that is wiped out in a massive battle with the Viet Cong. Paco is a drifter who comes into a typical American small town whose citizens look down on him. These are the same people who shouted their support for their troops. The reader’s sympathies are with Paco until near the end, when he remembers the brutal gang-rape his company inflicted on a captured Viet Cong sniper, a girl of fourteen or sixteen years, who killed two Americans. Each of the soldiers line up for their turn to rape her, and when they are done, one of them executes the girl with a bullet to her head. Shortly after the gang-rape, Paco wounds another Viet Cong with a grenade, and then finishes the kill with a knife. The soldier pleads with Paco not to kill him, to no avail. “I am dead already,” the man says, right before he dies.
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Heinemann describes both scenes in excruciating detail, setting the stage for what happens next, Paco reading the diary of a young woman, his neighbor. She has written down her fantasies about making love to Paco, until the moment she imagines his scars touching her. “And then I woke up. I just shuddered.… It made my skin crawl.”
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By the next page, the novel is over. Paco leaves this typical American town to drift again. He cannot stand what we witnessed, his forced recognition of his inhumanity, his skin-crawling monstrosity, himself as alien. He removes himself but small town America has already cast him out, sensing the dis-ease he carries after having fought a dirty war in small town America’s clean name.