Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory

by Scott Laderman, Gilbert M.Joseph (Series Editor), Emily S.Rosenberg (Series Editor)

In Tours of Vietnam , Scott Laderman demonstrates how tourist literature has shaped Americans’ understanding of Vietnam and projections of United States power since the mid-twentieth century. Laderman analyzes portrayals of Vietnam’s land, history, culture, economy, and people in travel narratives, U.S. military guides, and tourist guidebooks, pamphlets, and brochures. Whether implying that Vietnamese women were in need of saving by “manly” American military power or celebrating the neoliberal reforms Vietnam implemented in the 1980s, ostensibly neutral guides have repeatedly represented events, particularly those related to the Vietnam War, in ways that favor the global ambitions of the United States. Tracing a history of ideological assertions embedded in travel discourse, Laderman analyzes the use of tourism in the Republic of Vietnam as a form of Cold War cultural diplomacy by a fledgling state that, according to one pamphlet published by the Vietnamese tourism authorities, was joining the “family of free nations.” He chronicles the evolution of the Defense Department pocket guides to Vietnam, the first of which, published in 1963, promoted military service in Southeast Asia by touting the exciting opportunities offered by Vietnam to sightsee, swim, hunt, and water-ski. Laderman points out that, despite historians’ ongoing and well-documented uncertainty about the facts of the 1968 “Hue Massacre” during the National Liberation Front’s occupation of the former imperial capital, the incident often appears in English-language guidebooks as a settled narrative of revolutionary Vietnamese atrocity. And turning to the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, he notes that, while most contemporary accounts concede that the United States perpetrated gruesome acts of violence in Vietnam, many tourists and travel writers still dismiss the museum’s display of that record as little more than “propaganda.”

312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tours of Vietnam is a good, solid history of the Vietnam War and its aftermath as mediated by Western and internal tourism literature and the tourists who use it. It is also Scott Laderman's thesis in book form, so it is academic as all get out; at the beginning he really struggles between concise writing and using as many words as possible like an undergrad, but that settles down by Chapter 3: "They Set About Revenging Themselves on the Population."

The first bit explores French colonial and post-colonial Vietnam as a nascent tourist destination. It suffers from a lack of French-language guidebooks but explains that Vietnam attempted to bring legitimacy to itself as a nation through stopover travel to the point of ignoring an oncoming war in its tourism literature. The second chapter is about internal US military travel guidebooks as political indoctrination. The third chapter leaves travel literature to discuss US propaganda surrounding the purported Hue massacre. The last chapter describes the War Remnants Museum's centering of the Vietnamese War on the Vietnamese people's experience of the war and how upsetting that is to some American tourists.

I still don't know why Vietnam and Korea were partitioned after WWII but I assume it has something to do with a vacuum left by the Japanese? I should go look that up. But I did learn a bit more about recent Vietnamese history and our reaction to it from an interesting perspective. And this was a good challenge read because it was not written in a compelling manner at all. Good job though, Scott Laderman.

[Whitney Borup · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I think the topic (travel guides and tourism in Vietnam before, during, and after the war) has potential, I think his attitude gets in the way of a very interesting study. I don't know much about anything, except film. So when I saw that he continued to use Hollywood films to back up his argument without citing some of the most interesting films on the topic (Apocalypse Now, for example) that may fudge his succinct thesis, I knew that his research was quite biased. What comes out is a kind of snotty, privileged look at the war that seems to dismiss every nuanced view from regular citizens (both Vietnamese and American). That's fine, unless you're claiming to do the opposite.

[Lu]

War, travel guides & Memory

[James · Rating 1 out of 5]

About as scattered and boring as a book can get.