Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

These Americans regard the War Remnants Museum and the Son My diorama as propaganda, which they certainly are. Official and unofficial versions of Vietnamese memory show little interest in commemorating others in any way (note the absence of any outraged dioramas anywhere in the country depicting what the victorious Vietnamese inflicted on the defeated Vietnamese). But these Americans are wrong in denying the truths found in propaganda, specifically that American soldiers committed atrocities in Vietnam and that the rest of America never fully grappled with its complicity in them. The war was not one where “the destruction was mutual,” as President Jimmy Carter claimed and as many Americans of all political backgrounds want to believe.23 In fact—and not as a matter of interpretation—this war’s destruction was not mutual in terms of costs and deaths. It is ethical and just to confront those numbers, and the following realities: no massacres committed on American soil, no bombs dropped on American cities, no Americans forced to become sex workers, no Americans turned into refugees, and so on. It is unethical and unjust to refuse to acknowledge these inequalities in the matters of death and damage, but it is difficult to confront or acknowledge inequalities when the memories of these events are themselves unequal. Exposed only to their own memories, Americans who come across the rememories of others often react with fury, denial, and countercharge. In this, they are not uniqu...