Remerciez-le!

Remerciez @Admin pour avoir partagé cet document gratuitement, de la manière la plus simple, en partageant sur les réseaux sociaux.

The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of He

The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of Healing by Patrick Hagopian Review by: Scott Laderman The Public Historian, Vol. 32, No. 1, Where Are the Bodies? A Transnational Examination of State Violence and its Consequences (Winter 2010), pp. 108-110 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the National Council on Public History Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/tph.2010.32.1.108 . Accessed: 26/04/2014 01:53 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . University of California Press and National Council on Public History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Public Historian. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 152.12.30.4 on Sat, 26 Apr 2014 01:53:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of Healing by Patrick Hagopian. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009; 560 pp.; clothbound, $49.95. Patrick Hagopian has written a wonderful book. Broadly addressing Amer- ican memory of the war in Vietnam, Hagopian, a lecturer in American Stud- ies at Lancaster University, argues that postwar national efforts to promote “healing” and “reconciliation” have elided a necessary reckoning with the di- visive politics of the war itself. The elision has often been subtle. By ascrib- ing to the conflict’s aftermath such terms as syndrome, trauma, and healing, millions of Americans have chosen to treat “political problems as medical ones, shifting the discursive terrain from the strategic to the therapeutic arena.” So- lutions were thus to be found “not in the critique of American power but in ameliorative care” (74). At the center of this process, Hagopian skillfully shows, has been the effort to honor Vietnam veterans’ military service through a wide array of memorials, service programs, and cultural productions. National in scope, the commemorative project has claimed to be apolitical. Yet in “dis- avowing politics” in the pursuit of “healing,” writes Hagopian, an “irreducibly political objective”—the “reforging of national unity damaged by the war”— has been the result (16). Not a trifling matter, this effort has “furthered the hegemonic project of rehabilitating the Vietnam War itself” (21). Hagopian’s work suggests that the national unity sought by honoring vet- erans’ service must have been a welcome development to White House pol- icymakers in the 1980s, for it enabled a resurgence of American militarism in Central America despite popular concerns about Washington stumbling into 108 Book Reviews The Public Historian’s reviews section strives to deﬁne the current state of the ﬁeld of public history. To that end, we select for review those works that re- flect a wide range of theory and practice in public history, as well as selected works from other disciplines that are of particular note to public historians. Reviewers evaluate research in terms of its contribution to historical inquiry as well as for its value as a work of public history. Reviewers are also en- couraged to identify emerging trends, problems, and opportunities for public history and its related subﬁelds. The studies under review are most often books, but the journal also seeks to identify and review writings in every form that public historians produce. The editors welcome your comments and sugges- tions on all aspects of the review enterprise. L.S. This content downloaded from 152.12.30.4 on Sat, 26 Apr 2014 01:53:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions “another Vietnam.” Yet if this sort of “healing” was embraced by some ele- ments of the political Right, other right-wing activists, such as the billionaire H. Ross Perot or the influential House staffer (and current senator) James Webb, offered vehement resistance. They were interested not in unity but in victory. Of course, the sites to which they objected were not apolitical. While they may have avoided “explicit statements” about the war, “the me- morials implicitly valorized military service as worthy of honor, irrespective of the behavior of individual troops, the conduct of particular operations, or the purposes of the fighting” (17). The most obvious example of this was the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Given its prominence and its influence on memorialization outside the nation’s capital, the Washington site—known to many Americans simply as “the Wall”—hovers at the center of Hagopian’s analysis. The creation of the Washington memorial became fraught with controversy. Unlike the Left, which remained largely quiescent about the memorial in the early 1980s, much of the Right chose to object publicly to a comme morative project that seemingly refused to render a political judgment about the war. Perot, Webb, and others made clear their desire that the memorial celebrate U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia as a “noble cause.” Revanchist veterans, writes Hagopian, “wanted to vindicate those who had served in Vietnam and to justify the U.S. war itself, banishing the guilt and shame that they said wrongly tainted memories of the cause for which Americans fought and died” (11). The stakes were greater than they may have seemed. The national disunity that the war revealed, after all, made the use of American military power dif- ficult after 1975. And with the American imperial project fundamentally reliant on a ready resort to military force, this “Vietnam syndrome” was, in the eyes of Washington policymakers, completely unacceptable. It thus became imperative to foster a climate of national reconciliation that ignored the war’s more “trou- bling aspects” (405), instead placing the notion of wronged American veterans at its center. Memorialization of these veterans, as opposed to the war in which they served, was central to this endeavor. Hagopian skillfully shows how this ef- fort unfolded from Washington to the various states, culminating in a “com- memorative principle” that assumed a “strategy of historical denial” (405). The research in Hagopian’s study is wide-ranging and impressive, and a number of the issues he examines, such as his analysis of the much-under- studied Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program, clearly set his book apart from other excellent works on postwar memory and commemoration. (See, for example, Kristin Ann Hass, Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial [1998]; Edwin A. Martini, Invisible Enemies: The American War on Vietnam, 1975–2000 [2007], chap. 6; and Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering [1997], chap. 2.) The rare errors in the book are minor, more- over. Operation Dewey Canyon was not the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970 (28), for example, but an earlier campaign near the border separating Viet- nam from Laos. BOOK REVIEWS I 109 This content downloaded from 152.12.30.4 on Sat, 26 Apr 2014 01:53:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Public historians will find a great deal to interest them in Hagopian’s book. Effectively illustrating how commemorization often tells us more about those who are commemorating than the object of their commemoration, Hagopian dissects the inevitable politics of a commemorative movement that ostensi- bly sought to be apolitical. It is no accident, he writes, that virtually every American memorial to the war in Vietnam is not about the war at all. Rather, in their effort to honor those who served in Vietnam—though only Americans, not Vietnamese—they cannot escape the presence of the war itself. Memo- rials that feature Vietnamese children being aided by American servicemen, for instance, cannot help but conjure memories of the 1968 My Lai massacre, Hagopian argues. Through astute analysis of both the creation of and recep- tion to memorial projects, The Vietnam War in American Memory shows how even the most self-professedly apolitical public history can be deeply infused with political meaning. Scott Laderman University of Minnesota, Duluth Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory by Scott Laderman. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009; 289 pp.; clothbound. Historians of U.S. foreign relations continue to produce expertly researched and persuasively written works that demonstrate the linkages between diplo- macy and cultural phenomena. In this vein, Scott Laderman is no exception. In Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory, Laderman places travel within a broader transnational context, suggesting that travel affords Ameri- cans “the opportunity to learn about the global role of their nation from what, for most of them, is an astonishingly unique per spective: that of its subjects” (188). Travel holds out the potential that an American tourist will both rec- ognize the extent of American power in the world and rethink assumptions or narratives about U.S. interactions. This learning process is often accompa- nied and aided by travel guidebooks, which can function as an interpretative device for the tourist, as well as providing concrete information about historic sites and attractions. Travel writers, Lader man asserts, “have possessed the power to define his- torical knowledge for thousands uploads/Geographie/ the-vietnam-war-in-american-memory.pdf