Nothing Ever Dies – Vietnam and the Memories of War
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Making War, Making Peace, Confronting Trauma
Trauma, Personal Memory v. Collective Remembrance
Just Memory
● Vietnam War or American War → identity crisis, how will it be known and
remembered
● How to remember the dead, who cannot speak for themselves
○ “Their unnerving silence compels the living–tainted, perhaps, by a
touch or more of survivor’s guilt–to speak for them”
● “The problem of how to remember war is central to the identity of the
nation, itself almost always founded on the violent conquest of territory and
the subjugation of people”
● “The inclination is to remember wars like individuals, separate and distinct.
Wars become discrete events, clearly demarcated in time and space by
declarations of war and ceasefire, by the inscription of dates in history
books, news articles, and memorial placards” → “And yet all wars have
murky beginnings and inconclusive endings”
○ “Wars are as complex as individuals, but are remembered by names
that tell us as little as the names of individuals do”
“Each name [Vietnam War or the American War] obscures human losses, financial
costs, and capital gains, as well as how the war also blazed through Cambodia and
Laos, something both the Vietnamese and the Americans wish neither to
acknowledge nor remember”
→ “the ‘sideshow’ to the war” – William Shawcross
● “To deny it a name, as I will do by sometimes simply calling it the war,
clears a space for reimagining and remembering this war differently”
● “What these public memories show is that nations and peoples operate, for
the most part, through what I call an ethics of remembering one’s own”
● “This ethics of remembering others transforms the more conventional ethics
of remembering one’s own. It expands the definition of who is on one’s own
, side to include ever more others, thereby erasing the distinction between the
near and the dear and the far and the feared” (9).
“War involved so many because war is inseparable from the diverse domestic life
of the nation” (9).
– “So it is that a call for war is usually accompanied by a demand that the citizenry
remember a limited sense of identity and a narrow sense of the collective that
extends only to family, tribe, and nation. Thus, the inclusiveness of the American
Way is, by definition, exclusive of anything not American, which is why, even
today, American memories of the war usually forget or obscure the Vietnamese,
not to mention the Cambodians and Laotians” (10).
“Total memory is neither possible nor practical, for something is always
forgotten” (10).
● “The desert of organized forgetting” → Milan Kundera
○ “In this desert, memory is as important as water, for memory is a
strategic resource in the struggle for power” (10).
“[Nations] urge their citizens to remember their own and to forget others in order
to forge the nationalist spirit crucial for war, a self-centered logic that also
circulates through communities of race, ethnicity, and religion” (11).
→ “the ethics of remembering one’s own being the binary code that makes the
machine run, dividing the world into use versus them and good versus bad, the
more easily to build alliances and target enemies”
→ “Meanwhile, through rituals, parades, speeches, memorials, platitudes, and ‘true
war stories,’ the citizenry is constantly called to remember the nation’s own heroes
and dead, which is easier to do when the citizenry also forgets the enemy and their
dead” (11).
An alternative: those who resist war
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Making War, Making Peace, Confronting Trauma
Trauma, Personal Memory v. Collective Remembrance
Just Memory
● Vietnam War or American War → identity crisis, how will it be known and
remembered
● How to remember the dead, who cannot speak for themselves
○ “Their unnerving silence compels the living–tainted, perhaps, by a
touch or more of survivor’s guilt–to speak for them”
● “The problem of how to remember war is central to the identity of the
nation, itself almost always founded on the violent conquest of territory and
the subjugation of people”
● “The inclination is to remember wars like individuals, separate and distinct.
Wars become discrete events, clearly demarcated in time and space by
declarations of war and ceasefire, by the inscription of dates in history
books, news articles, and memorial placards” → “And yet all wars have
murky beginnings and inconclusive endings”
○ “Wars are as complex as individuals, but are remembered by names
that tell us as little as the names of individuals do”
“Each name [Vietnam War or the American War] obscures human losses, financial
costs, and capital gains, as well as how the war also blazed through Cambodia and
Laos, something both the Vietnamese and the Americans wish neither to
acknowledge nor remember”
→ “the ‘sideshow’ to the war” – William Shawcross
● “To deny it a name, as I will do by sometimes simply calling it the war,
clears a space for reimagining and remembering this war differently”
● “What these public memories show is that nations and peoples operate, for
the most part, through what I call an ethics of remembering one’s own”
● “This ethics of remembering others transforms the more conventional ethics
of remembering one’s own. It expands the definition of who is on one’s own
, side to include ever more others, thereby erasing the distinction between the
near and the dear and the far and the feared” (9).
“War involved so many because war is inseparable from the diverse domestic life
of the nation” (9).
– “So it is that a call for war is usually accompanied by a demand that the citizenry
remember a limited sense of identity and a narrow sense of the collective that
extends only to family, tribe, and nation. Thus, the inclusiveness of the American
Way is, by definition, exclusive of anything not American, which is why, even
today, American memories of the war usually forget or obscure the Vietnamese,
not to mention the Cambodians and Laotians” (10).
“Total memory is neither possible nor practical, for something is always
forgotten” (10).
● “The desert of organized forgetting” → Milan Kundera
○ “In this desert, memory is as important as water, for memory is a
strategic resource in the struggle for power” (10).
“[Nations] urge their citizens to remember their own and to forget others in order
to forge the nationalist spirit crucial for war, a self-centered logic that also
circulates through communities of race, ethnicity, and religion” (11).
→ “the ethics of remembering one’s own being the binary code that makes the
machine run, dividing the world into use versus them and good versus bad, the
more easily to build alliances and target enemies”
→ “Meanwhile, through rituals, parades, speeches, memorials, platitudes, and ‘true
war stories,’ the citizenry is constantly called to remember the nation’s own heroes
and dead, which is easier to do when the citizenry also forgets the enemy and their
dead” (11).
An alternative: those who resist war
