Abstract
The Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, D.C. is one of the most famous and most moving war memorials in the world. As millions of visitors to “the Wall” can attest, its emotional power derives partly from the simplicity of its form. Eschewing the monumentalism of traditional war memorials, designer Maya Lin crafted a simple, low, black wall of reflective granite, etched with the names of all of the U.S. military personnel who died in the war. The result is a profoundly personal memorial, one that allows visitors to conduct their own acts of commemoration, often with an individual name in mind. Intended by Lin to be “non-political,” the focus is simply and overwhelmingly on the U.S. soldiers who went to Vietnam and did not come home.
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Notes
Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History. New York: Penguin Books, 1983; quotation from Karnow in Tom Bowman, “Is the Afghanistan conflict akin to Vietnam?” October 10, 2009, National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/ story.php?storyId=113405187 [accessed December 5, 2013].
For an overview of American Vietnam War films, see Jeremy Devine, Vietnam at 24 Frames a Second. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1999.
H. Bruce Franklin, MIA, or Mythmaking in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993;
Michael Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Shawn Kingsley Malarney, “‘The Fatherland Remembers Your Sacrifice’: Commemorating War Dead in North Vietnam,” in Hue-Tam Ho Tai, ed. The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001, pp. 46–76.
Francois Guillemot, “Death and Suffering at First Hand: Youth Shock Brigades during the Vietnam War (1950–1975),” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 4 (October 2009): 17–60.
Christina Schwenkel, “The Ambivalence of Reconciliation in Contemporary Vietnamese Memoryscapes,” in Scott Laderman and Edwin Martini, eds, Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013, pp. 105–17; Heonik Kwon, “Cold War in a Vietnamese Community,” in ibid., pp. 84–102.
See also Heonik Kwon, Ghosts of War in Vietnam. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Christina Schwenkel, The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009, pp. 79–101; Laurel B. Kennedy and Mary Rose Williams, “The Past without the Pain: The Manufacture of Nostalgia in Vietnam’s Tourism Industry,” in Tai, The Country of Memory, pp. 135–63.
For an excellent overview of the history of Agent Orange and the main interpretive problems that surround it, see Diane Niblack Fox, “Agent Orange: Coming to Terms with a Transnational Legacy,” in Laderman and Martini, eds. Four Decades On, pp. 207–41. See also Edwin Martini, Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty. Amherst, MA: University of Massachussetts Press, 2012.
Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde, Transnationalizing Vietnam. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012, pp. 12–14.
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© 2015 Edward Miller
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Miller, E. (2015). Across the Pacific and Back to Vietnam: Transnational Legacies and Memories of the Vietnam War. In: Johnson, R.D. (eds) Asia Pacific in the Age of Globalization. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137455383_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137455383_17
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