reviewsWar

How Wars Are Fought Again in Memory

A year ago, the Vietnamese-American author Viet Thanh Nguyen published The Sympathizer, a novel set in the Vietnam War and its aftermath. It is a brilliant piece of fiction, one of the very best to come out of that conflict. (As this review was being written, it was announced as the winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.)

Nguyens new book is harder to characterize. Nothing Ever Dies is an extended essay about war and memory, focusing primarily on Vietnams war but detouring occasionally into other conflicts. It ponders how people remember wars, how those memories are shaped by personal history and human nature and by national history and culture, and how they are transmitted in literary and visual art. It also explores how memories are weaponized, as Nguyen calls it, by a “memory industry” he views as part of a larger “war machine” that promotes war, violence, and oppression and undermines the quest for a more peaceful world.

Nguyen did not just pursue those ideas in the United States and Vietnam. He also journeyed to Cambodia and Laos, whose wars were and remain overshadowed in the rest of the world by the larger conflict in Vietnam but brought terrible devastation to both countries. And he looked for memories of the war in South Korea, which (although very few Americans remember it) had significant forces in Vietnam during much of the U.S. war there.

Americans on the other side of the argument have striven to create a more conventionally patriotic narrative of the U.S. war in Vietnam, largely through focusing on the sympathetic figure of the American soldier

This is a book with significant strengths and significant weaknesses. A particularly notable plus is its ruthlessly clear-eyed vision that sees through all sides mythologies of the war Nguyen was born into.

In communist-ruled Vietnam, he writes, the victors and their descendants endlessly repeat their heroic legend of defeating U.S. imperialism but remain “conveniently stricken with amnesia” about what they did to their countrymen on the losing side (or to the people of Laos and Cambodia). The Vietnamese-American community in which Nguyen grew up remembers the suffering that came with South Vietnams defeat and the flight to America, but not “the venality of the southern Vietnamese regime” that was a critical weakness in the war against the communists. And in America, myths descending from the opposing sides in the national Vietnam debate both falsify the past.

Nostalgic American memories of the anti-war protests, Nguyen reminds us, forget that the movement “elevated Ho Chi Minh to iconic status, waved the flag of the National Liberation Front, praised the communist Vietnamese as heroic revolutionaries defying American imperialism, accepted communist propaganda that the South Vietnamese were traitors or puppets, and was mostly blind to the Stalinist direction of the Vietnamese Communist Party.” Meanwhile, Americans on the other side of the argument have striven to create a more conventionally patriotic narrative of the U.S. war in Vietnam, largely through focusing on the sympathetic figure of the American soldier. Their myth detaches the soldiers and the veterans experience from every other piece of the story, the better to forget all the things that were wrong and painful to remember.

In writing about that phenomenon, one could wish Nguyen had expressed a bit more empathy for the soldiers. Its human, after all, to try to find some good reason for bad experiences and some positive outcome in less-than-successful efforts. But even if Nguyens commentary is somewhat lacking in compassion, his conclusion on the “support the troops” cult and its effect in recent American history is hard to argue with:

“What lies behind the slogan is not only support for the troops but the absolution of the same civilians who utter the