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
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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 conflicts 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 objectivethe 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).
Hagopians 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 Historians reviews section strives to dene the current state of the
eld of public history. To that end, we select for review those works that re-
f lect 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 subelds. The studies under review are most often books,
but the journal also seeks to identify and review writings in every form that
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tions on all aspects of the review enterprise.
L.S.
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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 nations capital, the Washington
siteknown to many Americans simply as the Wallhovers at the center
of Hagopians 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 wars 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 Hagopians 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, 19752000 [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
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Public historians will find a great deal to interest them in Hagopians 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 Vietnamthough only Americans,
not Vietnamesethey 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 of tourists who are generally ignorant of the
Vietnamese past other than the discourses deduced from Hollywood films and,
in fewer instances, long-ago school study (11). Although the Vietnam war is
familiar terrain for most American historians and laypeople alike, Laderman
focuses his analysis upon the ways in which Vietnam-oriented travel guides
served as a rhetorical tool. In doing so, he examined a variety of travel guide-
books (Lonely Planet and Lets Go, among others) and official U.S. and Re-
public of Vietnam (RVN) publications produced during the last fifty years.
These documents often advanced a wartime or postwar narrative at odds with
contemporary historical scholarship or current economic realities. Laderman
110 I THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN
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