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Years ago, as I was being rather negative about the then (in my opinion)
gloomy state of the reconstruction of East Berlin by the reunified German
government, a German colleague said to me, “that is as much as they could
do.” I feel the same about this book. Solipsism and a failure to engage with
relevant literatures are widespread in Vietnamese Studies, and this book
reflects it. Despite the editor’s efforts, the contributors went their own way.
This is unfortunate. They should have been locked in a room and forced to
argue it out. There is a need for a decent and likely very noisy argument
about how best to analyze Vietnamese politics. This book is not that.

Adam Fforde, Victoria University

D A V I D K I E R A N

Forever Vietnam: How a Divisive War Changed American Public

Memory
Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 320. $26.95 (paper)

David Kieran’s Forever Vietnam: How a Divisive War Changed American

Public Memory is an ambitious work. It seeks to move “beyond existing
scholarship on the memorialization of the Vietnam experience in the United
States and the inevitable comparisons to it that every new crisis engenders.” It
seeks to do so by exploring how “this one event has created the conditions
according to which Americans have meaningfully remembered other seem-
ingly unrelated events” in ways that “foster their continued embrace of a for-
eign policy that endorses aggressive militarism to maintain American empire”
(). It purpose is quoted in full as Kieran applies it to six case studies that are
offered as evidence that militarism so haunts the patterns of remembrance of
the Vietnam War that it precludes meaningful conversations regarding Amer-
ican interventionism abroad. Kieran believes such conversations are necessary
to ensure that the United States uses its military power less “cavalierly” and
also enable it to more honestly and effectively confront “the struggles that
many veterans face” in the aftermath of its wars (). These case studies are
considered topically rather than sequentially so that the author’s intent can be
better understood from the perspective of the reader.
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The first of the six case studies, “How Far is Andersonville from Viet-
nam?” addresses the development of the Public Broadcasting Service’s ver-
sion of a play about the Confederate-run Civil War prisoner-of-war camp
where almost thirteen thousand Union soldiers died in Andersonville, Geor-
gia (The Andersonville Trial, ) and the Vietnam-related memorializa-
tion activities that now occur at the site of the camp. Kieran demonstrates
that the PBS drama’s script was influenced by public reaction to the Mỹ Lai
massacre courts-martial being held at that time about sixty miles away at
Fort Benning, Georgia. He establishes that the decision of the drama’s pro-
ducer, Lewis Freedman, to portray the camp’s commandant, Captain Henry
Wirz, as less a villain and more of a scapegoat was deliberately taken to
express how many Americans on both the political left and right then viewed
the accused perpetrators of the Mỹ Lai Massacre: Lt. William Calley Jr. and
his superior, Captain Ernest Medina. Kieran also shows how, despite the
efforts of the National Park Service to forestall it, the Andersonville National
Historic site was subsequently captured by, and made to serve the revisionist
concerns of the Vietnam-era POW/MIA movement. Thereafter, the site’s
“curatorial choices” included an exhibit whose focus was defining the Viet-
nam War’s exceptional nature as an uncivilized conflict characterized by the
“sadistic brutality” the North Vietnamese inflicted upon American soldiers
(). Kieran contends that by making American suffering “the war’s primary
tragedy, the impact of the conflict on the Vietnamese is forgotten and, more
important, the righteousness of the Vietnam War in particular and Amer-
ican militarism in general is confirmed” ().
The fifth case study, “It is Almost Like the Vietnam Wall,” explores the
debates over the design of the Flight  Memorial in Pennsylvania and
the tenor of items left there by American veterans. Kieran’s examination
of the debates over the memorial’s design (which included concerns that
a curving path was too Islamic) and the content of written comments,
military patches, and medals left on its boundary fence illuminates the
process by which “veterans of Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan have
persistently appropriated the site as a space in which they can affirm their
own patriotic citizenship.” Kieran’s study of that process reveals how the
desire of these veterans to heal from the physical and psychological wounds
of war became conflated with a national political rhetoric that views the
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“passengers and crew of that plane as archetypical Americans and models

for current American military interventionism.” Kieran’s research reveals
that the site now serves to transform Flight ’s dead and the living veterans
who honor them there into “American bodies fully recuperated from the
Vietnam Syndrome – strong, fearless, and willing to intervene forcefully to
protect themselves and others” (–).
The third of the case studies, “We See a Lot of Parallels between the Men
of the Alamo and Ourselves,” offers an examination of the commemorative
rhetoric employed by George Herbert Walker Bush and others at the site of
the Alamo designed to generate support for American interventionism in
Central America in the s. In one of the work’s most affecting passages,
Kieran describes the related contemporary effort of the “Lost Patrol” move-
ment’s Vietnam veteran members to re-write the history of the Alamo so as
to achieve their goal of validating their service in Vietnam and rehabilitate
that service in the public mind. Kieran observes that one of the ways veteran
leaders sought to accomplish this task via reference to the Alamo was by
casting the battle there “as politically and militarily insignificant” in com-
parison to their own service in Vietnam. Nonetheless, Kieran notes that one
advocate for Vietnam veterans declared that the defenders of the Alamo died
like so many soldiers in Vietnam, bound by duty to each other rather than
any wider cause. Kieran observes that this “band of brothers” rhetoric served
to isolate the defeat at the Alamo “from the larger Texas Revolution, depo-
liticizing the defenders’ motives by casting them as having fought for their
friends, and reenacting fundamental scenes in Alamo mythology” in ways
that addressed contemporary veterans’ concerns, such as their need to be
seen as “a welcomed patriot and agent of national renewal.” Kieran sees
these actions as paralleling what he believes are the efforts of national leaders
to laud the service of Vietnam veterans as part of a larger effort to erase the
national stigma of defeat in Vietnam through military interventions in Cen-
tral America. He thus views the remembrance activities at Alamo in the mid
s as establishing an “historical precedent for honoring heroic soldiers
without consideration of the political contours of the conflict in which they
fought in a manner that “facilitated the continued uncritical acceptance of—
and continued lack of attention to—troubling policies of the sort that led to
the Vietnam War” (–).
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The fourth and sixth case studies bring these issues forward in time
through an examination of the debates over American interventions in
Somalia and Bosnia and those still ongoing. The fourth case study, “We
Should Have Said No,” primarily addresses the behavior of those American
political leaders who had fervently argued that the United States did not do
enough to save Vietnam, yet evoked the memory of the Vietnam War as
a reason to do less in Somalia and Bosnia when expressing their “misgivings
about the possibilities of military commitments to ensure human rights in
the s” (). In the sixth and final case study, “The Lessons of History,”
Kieran unpacks the complex legacies of Vietnam as reflected in the continu-
ing search for lessons in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, largely through an
exploration of how some veterans “re-write critical moments in their Viet-
nam War memoirs in order to assert that soldiers fighting in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the military for which they fight, and the wars themselves share
little of the trauma, atrocity and ambiguity that dominate the Vietnam War’s
remembrance.”
In the fourth section, as well as the second section, “We Veterans of Mass
Murder and Stupidity” Kiernan explicitly relies “on discursive analysis to
show the more subtle ways which Vietnam’s has shaped Americans’ remem-
brance of other events” (). By discursive, Kieran’s means interpreting what
he believes to be the use of “the language and tropes of Vietnam” in Second
World War veteran memoirs written in the post-Vietnam era as an effort by
their authors to cast their wartime experiences as similarly traumatic. Yet,
his argument elides the fact that the Second World War writers he cites,
among them Paul Fussell, may have employed the terminology of the Viet-
nam era (such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) to describe their situation
because it supplied a vocabulary for their condition that was less understood
prior to the publication in  of Third edition of the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) which referenced it, and
thus enabled them to better advocate the needs of their cohort to medical
providers and government officials who had misdiagnosed their condition.
Of greater concern is Kieran’s deconstruction of Lieutenant General Harold
Moore and Joe Galloway’s We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang -
The Battle that Changed the War in Vietnam, () and Mark Bowden’s
Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (). In something of a non
376 REVIEWS

sequitur, Kieran maintains that because these books were best-sellers they
are proof of the correctness of his interpretation of them as typifying the
demonization of the Vietnamese foe in American discourse on the war. To
make this point with regard to We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young, Kieran
ignores the praise that Moore and Galloway give to the enemy’s skills. Their
positive evaluation of the Vietnamese foe as combatants was so commonly
understood that Mel Gibson’s film of the book (We were Soldiers, )
followed its literary source in treating enemy commanders in a respectful
light. Moreover, any study devoted to demonstrating a book’s influence on
historical memory must clearly establish whether the popularity of a book
impacts historical memory in the manner that study ascribes to it. Kieran’s
treatment of We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young does not meet that
standard, nor, in this writer’s opinion, does Kieran’s treatment of Black
Hawk Down. These perceived failings do not entirely invalidate Kieran’s
readings of these works, but they do suggest that his analyses may not hold
the interpretive weight he places upon them.
On firmer ground are Kieran’s efforts throughout in the book to direct
American historians to look more closely at the ways American militarism
influences American memory so as to prevent fulsome deliberations of the
conduct, meaning, and cost of America’s wars–past and present. He makes
a compelling case that such militarism has engendered patterns of remem-
brance at the Maya Lin-designed Vietnam Veterans Memorial, as well as at
Andersonville, at the Alamo, and at the Flight  Memorial, that may serve to
justify the next American war; possibly, Kieran speculates, in Syria (–).
As Kieran remarks in his introduction, this work was not intended to be
comprehensive, but it is important to note that it does not address what
historian Stephen Vlastos identified as “The Absent Presence” in much of
American writing on the Vietnam War: the Vietnamese themselves. Given
the focus of Kiernan’s book is on American perspectives on the remem-
brance of the war, there is a need to consider the shape and meaning of the
memorials constructed by Vietnamese veterans of the Vietnam War living in
America. Moreover, it would seem appropriate to give consideration to the
views of the subsequent generations of Vietnamese American citizens, many
of whom may have participated in the memorialization of their parents’ (and
grandparents’) war and may have been deployed as American combatants
 REVIEWS 377

abroad in later wars. Does the Vietnamese-American commemoration of the

Vietnam War and the Vietnamese-American veteran response to the initial
forms of remembrance of their service in Afghanistan and Iraq reflect the
cultural tropes Kieran has found among other American veterans and their
communities? Have they been affected by the long-established American
militaristic values that Kieran argues prevent a more “robust” debate of the
costs of American interventionism? At least a start in the direction of greater
inclusiveness has been made by Viet Thanh Nguyen in his Nothing Ever
Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, (). While it has some of the
same weaknesses as Forever Vietnam, Nothing Ever Dies, it includes Viet-
namese, Cambodians, Koreans, and Laotians in its interpretation of the way
the demonization of the foe and valorizing of the sacrifices of veterans’ in the
memorialization of war can serve to enable future wars.
Despite the caveats offered here, Forever Vietnam is a major contribution
to the study of how the American War in Vietnam is remembered in the
United States and how the manner in which it is remembered has shaped,
and is likely to continue to shape future American discourse on global
affairs. It is accessible to general and undergraduate readers, and highly
recommended for senior seminars and graduate students in American Dip-
lomatic and Military History and International Relations.

Marc Jason Gilbert, Hawaii Pacific University

L A U R E N T C É S A R I

Le problème diplomatique de l’Indochine, –

Paris, Les Indes savantes, 2013. 424 pages. 36,00 €

Laurent Césari is one of France’s most notable specialists in the international

history of the Indochina wars. In , he published an excellent diplomatic
history of the three Indochina Wars: L’Indochine en guerres, –
[Indochina in Wars, –] (Paris: Editions Bélin, ). A decade
later, he carefully examined the diplomatic crisis over Laos, which brought
the world’s big powers to the brink of war in the early s in a book titled
Les grandes puissances et le Laos, – [The Great Powers and Laos,