Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

4. On War Machines

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE WROTE THAT “if something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory.”¹ The war has burned itself into many of us, including myself, seared at too young of an age to know exactly where the scar is. Those born too young to remember with clarity, or to remember anything at all, may still see the war’s afterimages lingering on their retinas, a result of what W. G. Sebald so memorably called “secondhand memory.”² A German writer who expatriated himself to England, he spent his life trying to remember a war that ended before he crawled out of the crib. Secondhand memories are part of refugee baggage, too. At times, these memories are intimate legacies bequeathed to us by families and friends who saw the war firsthand; other times, these memories are Hollywood fantasies, the archetype being Apocalypse Now, a modern-day Grimm’s fairy tale where napalm lights the dark forest. Many Americans, and people the world over, assume they know something of Vietnam from watching movies like Apocalypse Now. For having paid the price of a movie ticket, they, too, can say, as Michael Herr did, “Vietnam, we’ve all been there.”³

I think this is true even for those with only the faintest of secondhand memories. They have been to Vietnam in the sense that they have seen it burn on screen and in photos, since the war is “the most chronicled, documented, reported, filmed, taped, and — in all likelihood — narrated war in history.”⁴ My students tell me that they have heard of this war, although they have little sense of what happened and how Americans got there. These students are not a postwar generation but a wartime one, born in the 1980s and 1990s and living through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For an American society that goes to war every couple of decades, the distinction among prewar, wartime, and postwar is blurred. Rather than a discrete event, war is a continuum, an ebb and flow in intensity that occasionally spikes. War has always been a part of our lives, a dull hum of white noise that blends in with the air conditioning, the computers, the hum of traffic. People like my students are accustomed to seeing a burning monk on an album cover or an iconic photo from the war on a rock star’s wall.⁵ The camera of the show MTV Cribs dwells on the photo, blown up to cover the entire wall, as the rock star describes the scene. “This is a famous image from Life magazine,” he said. “It’s obviously a guy getting shot in the head. I had this put here as a reminder of human suffering. I think when I walk out and see this every day, I kind of gain some gratitude for where my life is at.” He lives his life in a beautiful Hollywood Hills home with a view of all of Los Angeles. While at a rooftop bar of a chic downtown hotel, I looked at a similar view of Los Angeles and noticed Apocalypse Now being projected onto the wall of a neighboring building. The movie played silently as a mud-slick Martin Sheen emerged from swamp water to hack Marlon Brando to death. Nobody on the roof looked twice.

Even if the war no longer burns for many people, its afterimages are unforgettable. Another name for these kinds of glowing afterimages are what Marita Sturken, drawing from Freud, calls “screen memories.”⁶ These memories both screen out other memories and serve as the screen for the projection of our private and collective pasts, our own home movies. Although screen memories need not be visual images, most of our vivid screen memories from Vietnam are: Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the naked, napalmed girl running down a road in Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph; Thich Quang Duc, the Buddhist monk immolating himself on a Saigon street corner in 1963 to protest President Ngo Dinh Diem’s treatment of Buddhists, caught by both still and moving cameras; and the picture on the rock star’s wall of Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting Viet Cong suspect Nguyen Van Lem in the head during the Tet Offensive of 1968, an act captured by both Eddie Adams’ still camera and by a television crew.

These images are evidence not only of Vietnamese suffering, but of the power of the entire apparatus that delivers the images to us. This apparatus extends from the photographer to his equipment to the bureau that pays for his time and his film to the machines that airlift that film from outside the war zone to the homeland offices that copyright, distribute, archive, and circulate in perpetuity those images in which the Vietnamese are burned and scarred by what the filmmaker Harun Farocki called an “inextinguishable fire.”⁷ Their suffering is forever fixed, their images of pain overshadowing or eradicating memories of other victims of this war. These images, screen memories, and secondhand memories affirm not only what is literally printed on the film, shown on the screen, or indelibly scratched onto the glass of our eyes — they affirm the power of an industry of memory as well. These shots were seen around the world because Western media possessed the apparatus to helicopter journalists into and out of battlefields with endless film rolls, processing their negatives almost immediately, and printing them globally on the same day or the day after the event in question. In contrast, North Vietnamese photographers lived in the jungles, hoarded their handfuls of film rolls, and dispatched their negatives over treacherous land routes to Hanoi via messengers who were often killed by bombardment.⁸ These circumstances limited what North Vietnamese eyes saw and limited the kinds of Vietnamese that the world recognized.

Recognizing the individual’s face, or even a people’s collective visage, is important, particularly if we speak of faces destroyed by war machines. But equally important is understanding how recognition is produced, how an industry of memory creates memories. An “industry of memory” differs from a “memory industry” in the same way that a “war machine” is not the same as an “arms industry.” At worst, invoking a memory industry brings to mind a cottage industry, a provincial economy geared toward producing something easily bought and ironically forgettable: key chains, coffee mugs, t-shirts, animal or human safaris, or, in Vietnam, pens and necklaces supposedly made from American bullets. At best, a memory industry calls forth the professionalization of memory through the creation of museums, archives, festivals, documentaries, history channels, interviews, and so on. But the work that memory industries do is only part of an industry of memory. To mistake memory as just a commodity for sale, or information to be transmitted by experts, would be like considering a gun and its manufacturer, or a surveillance system and its designers, to be simply products of an arms industry. Arms industries are only the most visible parts of a war machine. In war machines, the bristling armaments are on display, but more important are the ideas, ideologies, fantasies, and words that justify war, the sacrifices of our side, and the death of others.

Likewise, an industry of memory includes the material and ideological forces that determine how and why memories are produced and circulated, and who has access to, and control of, the memory industries. Certain kinds of memories and remembering are possible because an industry of memory depends on, and creates, “structures of feeling.” That term by Raymond Williams pulls together both the concrete (a structure) and the immaterial (a feeling).⁹ A feeling, no matter how invisible, houses us, shapes us, lets us see the world through its windows. As structures vary from rich to middle class to poor, from wealthy nations and metropolises to colonies and hamlets, so do feelings themselves vary. The world pays attention to the feelings of the wealthy and the powerful, because those feelings matter when the wealthy and the powerful make decisions that can burn. The feelings of the poor and the weak are much less visible, except, of course, to the poor and the weak. As it is with feeling and its structures, so it is with memory and an industry of memory, where the memories of the wealthy and the powerful exert more influence because they own the means of production. As Marx and Engels said, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”¹⁰ So, too, are their feelings and memories the most powerful, made, packaged, distributed, and exported in ways that overshadow the feelings and memories of the weak.

While the memories of the weak matter to them, as the individual’s memory matters to the individual, they only matter for the world when an industry of memory amplifies them. This industry is more than a set of technologies or cultural forms through which memories are fashioned, like the novels, movies, photographs, museums, memorials, or archives populating this book.¹¹ This industry is more than the network of professionals who curate, design, and study memories, or the artists, writers, and creators of cultural works of memory. The industry of memory includes these and more, incorporating the processes of individual memory, the collective nature of memory’s making, the social contexts of memory’s meanings, and, ultimately, memory’s means of production. All these determine how — and whose — memories are made and the reach and impact of their distribution. The blast radius of memory, like the blast radius of weaponry, is determined by industrial power, even if individual will shapes the act of memory itself. So while Thich Quang Duc showed indomitable belief and discipline while fire and smoke consumed his body, the global fallout of his act occurred because Western media seized on it. People have immolated themselves since then, during the war and after, in the country and outside of it, even in America, but those self-sacrifices did not achieve the visibility of the burning monk. Sacrificing one’s self in order to be heard is not enough. Until those whose memories are left out not only speak up for themselves but also seize control of the means of memory making, there will be no transformation in memory. Without such control, those who speak up for themselves and others will realize they do not determine the volume of their voice. Those who control the industry of memory, who allow them to speak, set that volume.

Struggles for memory are thus inextricable from other struggles for voice, control, power, self-determination, and the meanings of the dead. Countries with massive war machines not only inflict more damage on weaker countries, they also justify that damage to the world. How America remembers this war and memory is to some extent how the world remembers it. Even if the United States is a reduced industrial base in an age of increasing competition from rising Asia, it is still a superpower in the globalization of its own memories, symbolized in Hollywood and its movies, which feature American memories as well as American armaments. By far the most powerful of its kind, the American industry of memory is on par with the American arms industry, just as Hollywood is the equal of the American armed forces. The global domination of weapons and memories by the United States leads other countries, regardless of their own memories of the war, to confront Hollywood goods and those instantly infamous snapshots that struck viewers between the eyes. As the essayist Pico Iyer noted, by 1985, “Rambo had conquered Asia … every cinema that I visited for ten straight weeks featured a Stallone extravaganza.”¹² The technology that makes possible this global distribution and world-class quality of American memories is embedded throughout American society, including at my own University of Southern California. The campus is home to the most advanced cinema school in the world, as well as an army-funded research center that develops high-tech virtual reality simulators for the military. In the same institution where Hollywood’s future directors learn their craft and where buildings carry the names of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, these virtual reality simulators allow soldiers to practice war via cinema or to be treated for trauma from war.¹³ The philosopher Henri Bergson implied that memory is a kind of virtual reality, and this simulator demonstrates that virtual reality is also the staging ground for battle and its recuperation.¹⁴ Weaponized memory becomes part of the war machine’s arsenal, deployed in the struggle to control reality.

Elsewhere on campus, students learn how to develop software for video games, a genre of weaponized memory not to be ignored when one thinks of the human mind as the most strategic of all battlefields. The mind must be won virtually before a real war can ever be fought. War has long been a subject for video game storytelling, and this war is no exception, as realized in the Call of Duty series. More successful than many Hollywood franchises, this $11 billion revenue product belongs to the subgenre of the first person shooter, a name that makes obvious how weapon and narration go hand in hand.¹⁵ In this subgenre’s iteration on the Vietnamese landscape, Black Ops, the gamer views the chiaroscuro world of heroes and villains through the eyes of an American warrior. The game’s trailer evoked movies, the most important one being Michael Cimino’s 1978 film The Deer Hunter, where Viet Cong torturers force American prisoners of war to play Russian roulette. Although no historical basis existed for this scene, there might have been an historical inspiration. When actor Christopher Walken presses the barrel of a.38 against his head, it evokes the iconic bullet to the head on the streets of Saigon during the Tet Offensive. Evokes and yet erases, for instead of Vietnamese shooting Vietnamese, the movie centers on an American about to shoot himself. Americans love to imagine the war as a conflict not between Americans and Vietnamese, but between Americans fighting a war for their nation’s soul. Russian roulette makes the solipsistic revision of the war a literal one, substituting American pain for Vietnamese pain. Black Ops goes further, for while the torturers in The Deer Hunter are Vietnamese, the chief villain in the video game trailer is Russian. If the Vietnamese are to be villainous, could they not at least be the chief villains?

But the importance of Black Ops is not only the power of its individual fantasy. More than this, Black Ops is the entertaining face of the war machine. Young people play games like this the way British lads played in the Boy Scouts, girding themselves to become the guardians of the empire on which the sun never set, except that one day it did. While not all American boys (or girls) will sign up to be tank gunners, drone pilots, or helicopter weapons officers, the ones who do will already know the principles of seeing the enemy through the eyes of a first person shooter. As for the overwhelming majority of Americans who do not join the military, many will enjoy the action and watch it on the screens of their personal devices, where the explosions and the deaths will not seem real but instead be a visual reverberation of the video games they already know. This is how the industry of memory trains people to be part of a war machine, turning war into a game and a game into war through the narration of the first person shooter.

While the novel and the movie are also parts of the industry of memory, the first person shooter outclasses them when it comes to seducing readers or viewers. The first person shooter exploits cinematic technology and changes it from a passive technology to an active one. A first person shooter combines the duration of A Remembrance of Things Past with the intensity of a movie, each minute more engrossing than reading a novel or watching a movie. The game is not about identifying with the other and feeling for another person, those moments of sympathy and empathy so vital for finding pleasure in the novel and the movie.¹⁶ Instead, the first person shooter is built on the aesthetics of sweat and viscera and is about identifying one’s self with the shooter and feeling the joy and excitement of participating in slaughter. The slaughter does not depend on enjoying the pain of the other because the other is so distant that one cannot even conceive of the other as capable of any feelings. The other is simply nonhuman, while the pleasure of the gamer is inhuman, as he or she takes pleasure in destruction.

It is not that we will destroy the nonhuman, just as feeling deep empathy for the characters in a novel may not inspire us to save actual human beings. But the novel and the first person shooter lure us, in different ways, to accept their underlying principles of salvation or destruction. A great novel about distant others persuades us of the need to save them, which, in our laziness, apathy, or fear, many of us will likely leave to someone else to do. A great first person shooter heats the blood to the proper temperature for killing others, which, in our attachment to our humanity and instinct for self-preservation, many of us will likely leave to our army to do.¹⁷ We become accustomed to seeing through the rifle scope, then through the crosshairs of a missile with a seeing eye, now through the unblinking gaze of a drone. The first person shooter is the autobiographical point of view of the war machine, a finite view of a society which accepts the necessity of armaments and of killing others as part of daily life, whether it is on the streets and in the schools of one’s own city or on the landscapes of others. As novelist Gina Apostol puts it: “The military-industrial complex … does it not suggest not only an economic order but also a psychiatric disorder?”¹⁸

If so, it is a common and pervasive disorder, this complex that refuses to recognize or analyze itself. It is hardly surprising that Americans are then disturbed when they see how others depict them. This is not unique to Americans. All war machines program their passengers to identify with the machinery. They take comfort and pride in their machinery via its ideological software while being fearful of the war machines of others. When they encounter the memories of their others, they, too, are likely to be shocked, suspecting a viral infection from a foreign bug. One can call this either the shock of misrecognition or recognition. One of these two shocks will most likely happen to the tourist when visiting the War Remnants Museum, touted in guidebooks as one of Saigon’s top tourist destinations. Of the museum’s wide range of exhibits, the one American tourists remember most is the one that greets them on the first floor lobby, titled “Aggression War Crimes” (tội ác chiến tranh xâm lược). The average American tourist is turned off by this title. Americans do not appreciate muddled English, even if that English is better than their own grasp of the local language. Even less do Americans like being accused of war crimes, because most Americans believe that it is categorically impossible for an American to commit a war crime. But the museum does primarily feature the war crimes of Americans — massacres, torture, desecration of corpses, the human effects of Agent Orange — captured in black-and-white photos by Western photographers during the war. Suddenly the American tourist becomes a semiotician, aware of how photographs do not simply capture the truth but are framed by their framers. When forced to look at these atrocities, a fairly typical American response is say we did not do this or they did this too.¹⁹ This is the shock of misrecognition, seeing one’s reflection in a cracked mirror and confronting one’s disordered self.

Recognition is more likely for American tourists who visit Son My, remembered by Americans as My Lai. The village is located many hundreds of miles north from Saigon and is distant from the easiest tourist route on Highway 1A, and only the particularly knowledgeable and curious American tourists will visit. A museum is built on the remnants of the village, where trails of footprints in the cement pathways evoke the ghosts of absent villagers. American troops killed more than five hundred of these villagers. An outdoor mosaic shows the villagers under assault from the sky by a science fictional war machine, black and bristling with engines and bombs, an open maw of a furnace in place of its nose. Giant drops of red blood drip from the bottom of the mosaic. In the museum, a diorama shows life-size black and white American soldiers, grimacing in fury as they shoot villagers who look surprisingly peaceful in the moment of death. Americans who make this pilgrimage to Son My already know of the massacre, and rather than being average tourists are more likely mourners come to pay respect.²⁰ They anticipate the shock of seeing this diorama. We did this, they think. We know we did this.²¹

In these and other postwar American encounters with Vietnamese memories in Vietnam, Americans find themselves shown in ways that bruise them. They no longer have the comfort of sitting inside their war machine, protected from the recoil of its weaponry by a suspension system of ideology and fantasy. In the Vietnamese landscape, as tourists rather than soldiers protected by armor, artillery, and airpower, they are the disremembered others — murderers, invaders, villains, and air pirates, in the punchy language of the museums and exhibits. Mary McCarthy, visiting Vietnam during the war, calls these names lobbed at Americans “Homeric epithets.”²² Not used to epic poetry in everyday spaces, and not used to being disremembered, many Americans feel that the entire war and their identities cannot be reduced to the atrocities commemorated all over the Vietnamese landscape. 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 unique. Every nation’s people are accustomed to their own memories and will react the same way when confronted with other people’s rememories. People protect and justify themselves, and their memories cast themselves in the best possible light. Negative memories are not necessarily forbidden but they are, however, negotiated. Americans may dimly know that some of their soldiers committed terrible acts, but such actions are mitigated by the circumstances that supposedly forced the soldiers into wrongdoing and by the American capacity for honest reflection. Americans may commit crimes, but they do not commit propaganda, or so they believe. No matter what form propaganda takes, it always belongs to someone else, which is not to say that all propaganda is the same. The American version is several grades better than the Vietnamese one, partially because American propaganda is not state-controlled. The industry of memory and the war machine work together, most of the time, to both acknowledge and justify America’s mistakes and crimes. The Soviets and the Chinese, for all their authoritarian power and massive war machines, were never as good at packaging their ideology, which came in a one-size-fits-all mode of drab fashion and bad haircuts. Communism’s message says to do as the party and the people tell you, while capitalism tells you to do whatever you want, its ideology ready to wear in any size. Everyone can agree to disagree, even if, in the last instance, this may be false. Sometimes the limits to the American belief in “freedom” are nakedly visible, as during McCarthyism, but mostly the limits are visible only out of the corner of one’s eye. These limits are found in the requirement to pay one’s taxes to fund the war machine and to concede that armed resistance against the war machine is futile.

A key part of American ideology is that all individuals are equal, even if American practice demonstrates that such is not the case, including in the realm of memory. Collective memories are not equal and individual memories are only equal so long as they remain segregated within one’s own mind. My memories feel as powerful to me as yours feel to you, regardless of any differences in our places in the world, but if you have access to the megaphones of industrial memory, your memories are more powerful than mine. So it is for Americans and Vietnamese, their memories equally meaningful to each of them but unequal on the global stage. Worldly memory is neither democratic nor fair. Instead, various kinds of power, none of which can be separated from each other, determine memory’s influence, reach, and quality. American power means that America can project its memories elsewhere, in the same way that it projects military force to render the lives of others less valuable than American lives. The empire of bases of which the scholar Chalmers Johnson speaks, some seven or eight hundred American military outposts, encampments, airfields, and black sites found all over the world, manifests this power.²⁴ And just as many countries let themselves become territories where American soldiers can operate, even more countries have let down their defenses against the intrusion of American memory, the soft power exports of cinema, literature, language, ideas, values, commodities, and lifestyles, the whole Hollywood — Coca Cola — McDonald’s network found in many big cities and not a few small ones, including in Vietnam, from its metropolitan centers to its new suburbs with their smooth sidewalks, fast food outlets, and detached single family homes.

Because of the reach of American military and mnemonic power, of the entire American war machine lifestyle and its assumptions, I always run into American memories. No matter where I go outside of Vietnam, if I want to discuss the war, even with intellectuals and academics, I often have to encounter their encounters with American memories. The Ivy League professor of contemporary literature who inquired about Tim O’Brien at my lecture on Vietnamese civilian war memories (because, she asked, what about actual war stories?); the Indian professor of Indian cinema who brought up Apocalypse Now when I mentioned Vietnamese cinema about the war; the young Vietnamese filmmaker training at my university who volunteered that he admires Apocalypse Now. How I would hate Apocalypse Now except for the fact that it is a damn fine movie, besides being the perfect example of the war machine’s industrial memory. The Indian professor even quoted from Francis Ford Coppola about the legendary making of the movie: “My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like. It was crazy. We made it very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.”²⁵ I can excuse Coppola for the sentiments. He was young, perhaps megalomaniacal, and certainly caught up in the creative struggle of his life. But was he fundamentally wrong? Jean Baudrillard took him at his word, saying that “Coppola makes his film like the Americans made war — in this sense, it is the best possible testimonial — with the same immoderation, the same excess of means, the same monstrous candor … and the same success.”²⁶ Apocalypse Now, nearly a disaster in its making but a box office triumph and a cinematic classic, can be read as an allegory for the fate of America’s ambitions in Vietnam: short-term failure during the war but long-term success in containing communism in Southeast Asia.

Movies and wars are related, and the American helicopter symbolizes this relationship. Michael Herr, who also wrote the narration for Apocalypse Now, had this to say of those American helicopters known as Loaches: “It was incredible, those little ships were the most beautiful things flying in Vietnam (you had to stop once in a while to admire the machinery), they just hung there above those bunkers like wasps outside a nest. ‘That’s sex,’ the captain said. ‘That’s pure sex.’ ”²⁷ Loaches appear in Apocalypse Now, too, a movie that is, cinematically and mnemonically, pure sex, and is unsettling for some as a result. Apocalypse Now and Herr’s Dispatches converge in their honesty about, or perhaps exploitation of, the nitty-gritty core of war, which is the fusion and confusion of lust and killing, sex and death, murder and machinery, resulting in homicides that were illegal at home but encouraged overseas in the war zone. For men and boys of a certain persuasion, “pure sex” is life and death, the mind-blanking climax that eradicates the self and may yet lead to its reproduction. Apocalypse Now depicts the desire for pure sex and conveys the lust to its viewer, the emblematic scene being the helicopter assault on a Viet Cong village, set to the diegetic soundtrack of The Ride of the Valkyries. Director D. W. Griffiths also used this Wagnerian music in his Civil War and Reconstruction era epic The Birth of a Nation, the score accompanying the heroic Ku Klux Klan as they ride to rescue whites besieged by lascivious blacks. Perhaps Coppola was criticizing American culture by comparing American soldiers riding on helicopters to the Ku Klux Klan on their steeds, but the seductive power of his cinematic, airborne assault makes that critique hard to see.

Just as Coppola quoted from Griffiths, the director Sam Raimi would quote from Coppola in Jarhead, the film adaptation of Anthony Swofford’s memoir of the Gulf War. Raimi picks up on the author’s depiction of young men’s erotic infatuation with pure sex and war movies:

Vietnam war films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended.… Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man; with film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his real First Fuck. It doesn’t matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are antiwar — the actual killers who know to use the weapons are not.… The supposedly anti-war films have failed. Now is my time to step into the newest combat zone. And as a young man raised on the films of the Vietnam War, I want ammunition and alcohol and dope. I want to screw some whores and kill some Iraqi motherfuckers.²⁸

Politicians, generals, journalists, think tank wise men (and women) do not deploy this language, but writers, artists, and filmmakers do. They recognize what cannot be said in polite company: war is pure sex, in addition to being politics by other means. On screen, Raimi shows an auditorium full of lustful young male Marines watching the helicopter assault from Apocalypse Now. Raimi’s camera cuts between the screen (which itself shows Apocalypse Now cross-cutting between helicopters and villagers) and the faces of Marines howling, cheering, and reaching cinematic orgasm while the air pirates blast the village. Then the lights suddenly come on, Apocalypse Now is suspended, and an announcer tells those in the auditorium a real war is about to begin — Desert Storm in Kuwait. It is not coitus interruptus after all, only the realization that the movie was simply foreplay to a war.

Both Swofford and Raimi depict the war machinery’s pure sex brilliantly. They recognize that war movies are part of the war machinery, with the helicopter at the center of my war’s iconography. Its rotors provided the war’s soundtrack, as filmmaker Emile de Antonio understood. In his 1968 cinematic poem In the Year of the Pig, the ripple of rockets and the whipping of helicopter blades are repetitious and minimalist. The collective drone is the war machine breathing, insinuating death, industrial production, and orgasm. Coppola popularized part of that drone, making the helicopter concerto of the whipping blades a motif of his movie and ultimately of the war itself for American memory. Material object and (sex) symbol, war machine and a star in the war machinery, bristling with machine guns and rocket pods, the helicopter gunship personifies America, both terrifying and seductive.

The Vietnamese certainly recognized the helicopter’s symbolic star power and tried to counter it themselves, most directly in the movie The Abandoned Field: Free Fire Zone, released in 1979, one year after Apocalypse Now. The screenwriter, Nguyen Quang Sang, survived American helicopter attacks and recounts that he most feared their death-dealing intimacy, “scarier than the B-52 attacks because those bombers flew so high they couldn’t see you.” Helicopter attacks were “terrifying” because they were so intimate, flying low enough that “I even saw the face of the door gunner.”²⁹ The writer and former helicopter pilot Wayne Karlin imagined the situation in reverse after he met the Vietnamese writer Le Minh Khue, who had fought for the other side: “I pictured myself flying above the jungle canopy, transfixed with fear and hate and searching for her in order to shoot her, while she looked up, in hatred and fear also, searching for me.”³⁰ While the thought of such intimate violence sickens Karlin, Apocalypse Now revels in this proximity. The camera looks over the shoulder of a helicopter gunner through his gun sight, lined up on the back of a Vietnamese woman twenty or thirty feet below. “Look at those savages!” says the pilot. Going out to battle was venturing into “Indian country,” an oft-repeated phrase among American soldiers that brought with it all the attendant sense of racial and technological superiority, as well as the mortal fear of being killed by savages.³¹ In Apocalypse Now, the Vietnamese woman targeted for death had just tossed a hand grenade into a helicopter. In The Abandoned Field, the Viet Cong heroine whose husband has been killed by an American helicopter shoots it down with an antique rifle, then walks away from the wreckage with gun in one hand and baby in the other. In these two films, it is intentional that the most dangerous savage and the most heroic hero is a native woman. For a war machine exuding pure sex, she is the collective object of masculine desire, hatred and fear, especially for white men.

People worldwide have watched Apocalypse Now and many accept its worldview, which is not merely that the other is a savage. The worldview is also that the self seeing the movie, as well as the self seeing the native in the crosshairs, is savage, and there is not much to be done about it, aside from giving in to the brutality or accepting that others do. So it is that the narrator of Apocalypse Now continues his fateful cruise up the river to confront his father figure, Kurtz, the white man who has become king of the savages and who must be killed because he has shown that the white man is no different than the savages. Of course Apocalypse Now intends for the images of savages and Indians to be ironic, a knowing commentary on how the white man is also a brute. Such is the white man’s burden, turned into a monster himself as he attempts to save the savage from her savagery or kill her in the process. This ethical recognition of the white man’s inhumanity gives Apocalypse Now its kick as well as its controversy. Enduring works of memory like this movie will force audiences to confront the simultaneity of inhumanity and humanity, rather than just one or the other.

But insofar as an ethical memory calls for remembering one’s own and remembering others, we also need to recognize that industries of memory constrain ethical vision. Apocalypse Now deploys a limited ethical vision that offers insight into the white man’s heart of darkness, where he is both human and inhuman, but at the expense of keeping the other simply inhuman, as either savage threat or faceless victim (as for the movie’s stepchild, the first person shooter, it dispenses with any pretense of sympathy for the savage in the crosshairs). Because industries of memory are integrated with their war machines, the war machine’s need to subordinate the other affects memory. By definition, the war machine cannot remember the other except in the instrumental ways necessary to kill her or subdue her, and so the other remains other, despite acknowledging one’s own savagery. In Apocalypse Now the American may know he is a savage, but he takes comfort in being at the center of his story, while the savage is only subject to the American story. The war machinery reveals the savage to be a savage, looked down on from on high. Earthbound, the savage can neither obtain those physical heights nor the moral heights of being a noble victim, because the faceless victim simply is not human. This is the crucial difference between looking through the crosshairs or being caught in the crosshairs, being the first person shooter or being the person shot. The white man perfects the technology that depicts his imperfections and the technology that kills the savage in a spectacle to be enjoyed and regretted simultaneously. The same industrial society produces the American movie and the American helicopter, spectacular machines that hover over alien lands, slaughtering to a haunting soundtrack, eliciting the reaction of pure sex from admirers. In the end, both the movie and the helicopter are more memorable to most of the world than the savages lined up in their sights.

While the American industry of memory is bigger than the movie, the movie is its most visible, spectacular embodiment, industrial memory par excellence. The American war movie in particular — a depiction of massive firepower and an example itself of massive firepower — shows how cinema has long collaborated with the war machine. As the philosopher Paul Virilio says, “war is cinema and cinema is war.”³² Modern war depends on cinematic technology, and cinematic technology thrives on depicting war. The camera allows mobile vision, especially remotely and on high, which is better for artillery, missiles, smart bombs, surveillance planes, and now drones to see the enemy before killing them. Conversely, the camera records war, depicts war, and documents war’s damage. Whether as documentation or entertainment, cinema is critical in disremembering the enemy and remembering war. Another way to say that war and cinema converge is to recognize that Vietnam became a spectacle for Western audiences, the claim of theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha.³³ In real life, Vietnam the country burned, and in photographs, on television, on celluloid, Vietnam the war burned again and again. Vietnam was a shocking spectacle and enjoyable too, eliciting moral repugnance on the part of some and erotic pleasure on the part of others, maybe even the same spectator. The eyeball doesn’t just store trauma, as Herr said — the eyeball is also the most erogenous zone of the human body, the distinction between pleasure and pain as thin as the membrane separating sex and rape. The tremor of that membrane is the thrill of watching a machine that embodies pure sex through its promise of high-tech death (for the enemy) and high-tech salvation (for those its own side), of deciding whether to push a button or squeeze a trigger that will tear the veil between life and afterlife. The spectacular war and the cinematic spectacle show how movies love war and how militaries love the visual image. If cinematic and military technology are inseparable, it is because they emerge from the same military-industrial complex, which is the real star of American cinema.

Being only human, celebrities and actors die, but being inhuman, the military-industrial complex lives on. Two examples suffice to show this, one dumb, one smart. First, the dummy: Air America, released in 1990, a cinematic crime about two wild and crazy pilots for the CIA’s drug- and gun-smuggling airline, used to supply the Hmong army in Laos. Playing the loveable rogues are a handsome Mel Gibson and a young Robert Downey Jr. The airplane and the airline are the industrial symbols of America, and in the end, Air America — both airline and film — saves the Hmong rather than exploits them. The airplane is used not to smuggle guns and make illicit profits but to rescue Hmong refugees from the Pathet Lao forces attacking their mountaintop base. As explosions and gunfire abound, Gibson and Downey argue over whether to abandon their cargo of contraband weaponry in order to make room for the Hmong. These Hmong say nothing, a crowd in the backdrop standing silent as bullets whiz by and their would-be saviors wrestle with their moral dilemma. In reality, the CIA air-rescued a few hundred of their Hmong allies from their Long Chieng mountain base in the waning days of the war and left thousands more behind. The gap between history and Hollywood is so vast it is hardly necessary to belabor the point that Air America is naked propaganda clothed as entertainment, a silly atrocity about how Americans are neither quiet nor ugly but instead decent and good, as well as good-looking.

Now the smart example: Gran Torino, a movie about the Hmong that retouches history expertly. This movie also adapts the mechanical motif of Air America, named as it is after an American muscle car and set in declining Detroit, aka Motor City, heart and soul of a waning industrial-era America. The legendary Clint Eastwood plays Walt, a gruff, terminally ill Korean War veteran unloved by his own family whose life changes after a Hmong family moves in next door. When the Hmong son tries to steal Walt’s Gran Torino with his gangster friends, Walt catches him and whips him into manly shape, in the process befriending the Hmong family. The boy forsakes his Hmong gang, the gangsters rape his sister as punishment, and Walt takes revenge by going to their lair and provoking them into shooting him dead. The movie enacts the basic ur-myth of European (and American) colonialism, as well as the foundational story of Hollywood, the legend of the white male savior. As the critic Gayatri Spivak put it, this is the tried-and-true epic of the white man saving the brown woman from the brown man (although black or yellow can be substitute colors). But Gran Torino twists this epic, for the savior becomes a sacrificial figure. The old white man gives up his own life, but his fate is an example of what Yen Le Espiritu calls the “we win even when we lose” syndrome that characterizes American memory of the war.³⁴ Walt was already going to die, but now he dies quickly and heroically, bullet-riddled, on his back, his arms spread in crucifixion pose. When a Hmong American policeman arrives to restore order and arrest the gangsters, the moral and geopolitical allegories are clear: America has sacrificed itself to the bad Asians so that good Asians can live and prosper.

More artful than Air America, more sympathetic to the Hmong by granting them speaking roles, Gran Torino is also the more dangerous film. A low-budget movie that became Eastwood’s biggest box-office success before his mega-hit American Sniper, it is a small-tonnage smart bomb that hits its target. Air America is a big-tonnage dumb bomb that only throws up dust and thunder, leaving the enemy intact, a movie so bad it seems like a parody of a Hollywood blockbuster. In contrast, Gran Torino wins the hearts and minds of audiences and critics by allowing the natives to participate in their own subjugation, versus simply turning them into human props, as Air America does. Gran Torino illustrates the notion of writers Frank Chin and Jeffery Paul Chan that (white) America reserves “racist hate” for uppity blacks and “racist love” for docile Asians.³⁵ Racist love is what Walt practices, following in a long tradition that includes Kurtz, the king of the natives, as well as his comic relief descendants in Air America. Flinging insults at people of every ethnicity, Walt performs a supposedly endearing and entertaining xenophobia. Walt may be a racist, but he is an honest and paternal racist who loves his little friends so much he will die for them.

Walt embodies (white) America at home and abroad, or at least the way (white) America sees itself after the civil rights era. In this age, (white) Americans may or may not admit their racism, but they will insist that they defend the little guy, especially the poor and tired one from abroad. So it is that Walt wills his beloved Gran Torino not to his inattentive children and spoiled grandchildren but to the Hmong boy whom Walt has taught to be a man. This paternalistic American father figure who saves the Southeast Asian child is a staple of American industrial memory. An early example is Samuel Fuller’s film China Gate (1957), which opens with a hungry Vietnamese man threatening the puppy of a Vietnamese boy. The boy eventually finds protection with an American serving in the French Foreign Legion, and the film’s final frame shows the American walking off with the boy he has saved. John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968) echoes this ending when the Duke puts a green beret on a little Vietnamese boy. When the boy asks him what will happen to him, now that the soldier who has worn that beret, his adoptive father figure, has been killed, the Duke tells him, “You let me worry about it, Green Beret. You’re what this is all about.” John F. Kennedy foreshadowed this Hollywood sentimentalism in 1956:

If we are not the parents of little Vietnam, then surely we are the godparents. We presided at its birth, we gave assistance to its life, we have helped to shape its future.… This is our offspring — we cannot abandon it, we cannot ignore its needs. And if it falls victim to any of the perils that threaten its existence — communism, political anarchy, poverty and the rest — then the United States, with some justification, will be held responsible, and our prestige in Asia will sink to a new low.³⁶

Like the Vietnamese boy wearing his dead father figure’s green beret, the Hmong boy in Gran Torino has been gifted with his dead father figure’s most important symbolic possession. Clearly now his father figure’s son, the boy drives into the Detroit sunset at the wheel of the Gran Torino, the most anomalous and unbelievable image of all, for any self-respecting young Asian American man would much rather drive a Japanese car, preferably with deeply tinted windows, expensive rims, and customized stereos. Likewise, in the unbelievable ending of The Green Berets, John Wayne and his charge walk into the sunset off the coast of Vietnam, even though the coast of the country faces east.

That distortion of reality was a laughable mistake, but the setting of Gran Torino is a deliberate distortion built into the movie’s design, its purpose to advance the American industry of memory. While most of the Hmong refugees ended up in rural California and Wisconsin, in Gran Torino they arrive in Detroit, a city nearly dead from a heart attack induced by Japanese competition. This setting allows Gran Torino to sketch an outline of history that covers half a century of American involvement in Asia, beginning with Walt’s war experience in Korea, continuing through the allegory of the automobile to allude to Japan (whose industry was rebuilt from American bombing with American aid), and gesturing to Southeast Asia with the Hmong.³⁷ The movie is not really about the Hmong neighbors, for any Asian in need of help would have sufficed. Because of the historical timeline of their devastation, the Hmong were simply good candidates for rescue by the white man. This story of rescue erases American racism and violence by foregrounding Asian violence and American self-sacrifice, a tall tale told as a movie, a product America has perfected in its spectacular form. No kind of exportable entertainment is bigger and more expensive than an American movie, just as nothing is bigger than an American supercarrier or more expensive than an American fighter jet. The pure sex of hard machinery and high technology are part of the sexiness of superpowers and their memories. Small countries are sexy too, but in predictably exploitable and degrading ways, offering to the more powerful the thrill of employing cheap labor and buying cheap goods, including cheap prostitutes, the “little brown fucking machines” admired so much by Western men that they invented an appellation for them. These machines may be desirable and alluring, but they are no match for a war machine.

None of this surprises, but I am not asking anyone to be surprised. I am not asking Hollywood or the industry of memory to do more or better. They do exactly what they are machined for, exerting dominance for profit and pleasure. I am only asking that their enactment of a joint venture with the war machine be recognized. If Baudrillard understood one thing clearly, it was that a film like Apocalypse Now was “cinematographic power equal and superior to that of the industrial and military complexes, equal or superior to that of the Pentagon and of governments.”³⁸ Hollywood’s blockbuster strategy is only the cinematic equivalent of American military strategy, a celluloid campaign of shock and awe meant to obliterate all local competition, as American stealth bombers overwhelm enemy air defenses. Shock and awe was born out of the lessons of my war for young American field officers, who ultimately saw the war’s strategy of attrition and its escalation of violence as futile. Immediate, overwhelming force was needed to win wars, a lesson these officers, who became generals, applied against Panama, Grenada, and Iraq. Cinema-like technologies filtered shock and awe for the American public and the world, the vividly detailed and highly censored twenty-four — hour news feed that showed little of what happened to the enemy. As cinema conditioned audiences to see onscreen death and understand it as a simulation, so war now depended on audiences feeling that the death of others was neither real nor to be remembered. The industry of memory thus fulfilled its task of supporting the war machine by being its unofficial ministry of misinformation.

But industries are vulnerable to competition; war machines can be destroyed by asymmetric warfare; both can break down by falling victim to their own excesses of power, money, and greed. This is what one never learns in the war machine’s virtual reality world: total domination in industry and war can falter, especially when the others in the crosshairs fight back, oftentimes in unanticipated ways and from unanticipated directions.

5. On Becoming Human

THREE MILLION KOREANS DIED during the Korean War. Much of the country was laid waste by American bombing and by the attack and counterattack of armies from the north and the south, from the United States and from China, and from an array of states in the United Nations.¹ While Cambodians remembered their genocide with the mantra of three years, eight months, twenty days — the finite duration of the Khmer Rouge regime — Koreans point out that their war never officially ended. Korea was divided into the Republic of Korea (the south) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (the north), twins facing off for more than half a century in an ongoing Cold War drama. From the capitalist West’s perspective, contemporary South Korea is the success story of what capitalism can achieve. Perhaps it is hard to remember, then, that the country was so devastated by the war that in the 1960s it was poorer than South Vietnam. When the United States offered to pay South Korea to use its army in South Vietnam, the impoverished nation agreed. While some Americans call the Korean War the Forgotten War (forgetting that other Forgotten War in the Philippines), from the Korean perspective it is better to say that the Forgotten War was this one that Korea fought in Vietnam. In South Korea — which many simply call Korea — the Remembered War is the Korean War, which has assumed the status of a nation- and soul-defining event. In its shadow, the other Korean war in Vietnam is poorly remembered by Koreans, which only goes to show that amnesia and selective memory afflicts every nation.

Before I learned of the forgotten Korean war in Vietnam, I knew of Korea through its remembered Korean War. As an adolescent, I read Martin Russ’s The Last Parallel and watched American war propaganda, Rock Hudson starring in Battle Hymn and William Holden in The Bridges at Toko-Ri. Both actors played heroic Air Force pilots who helped save the country (the Air Force’s mass bombing of all of Korea was conveniently ignored). When I became vaguely aware of Korean students taking to the streets in political riots in the 1980s, Korea was simply another troubled foreign country that appeared briefly in American news broadcasts. During my college years, I along with many Americans had more pleasant encounters with Korea through its cuisine. But the full presence of Korean immigrants in the United States would arrive for the American public in 1991, with the Los Angeles riots, or uprisings, or rebellion. Koreatown was the unlucky star, Seoul USA, home to the largest Korean population outside of Korea and located in the midst of largely black and Latino neighborhoods. The unrest was provoked by two incidents: Los Angeles police officers beating a black man, their assault captured on video, and a Korean shopkeeper fatally shooting a black girl who had shoplifted a bottle of juice. Juries had acquitted both the officers and the shopkeeper. For many African Americans and Latinos, these injustices were the culmination of a history of oppression by the police and economic exploitation by ethnic outsiders. Korean and other shopkeepers became scapegoats for the poor and working class, and Koreatown burned.²

A few years later, the reputation of Korea and Korean Americans began to change. Hyundai, Kia, LG, and Samsung stormed the ramparts of global capitalism. Millions of consumers owned a bit of Korea in their homes or their pockets, and some began driving Korean cars. Korean capital infused Koreatown and Los Angeles, and some immigrants who had left a poverty-stricken Korea to come to America in the 1960s suddenly found that their relatives in Korea had overtaken them.³ These immigrants had sacrificed their college degrees to become shopkeepers in ghettoes, all in the name of their American-born children, or so the narrative went in America’s model minority myth. In this myth, Asian immigrants and their American-born children appear as superhuman students and workers, with Koreans being the latest Asian immigrant population willing to discipline themselves and to sacrifice their bodies and minds to dream the American Dream. In doing so, they became the model for the rest of America’s “unsuccessful” minorities and immigrants, at least in the narratives of the media, the politicians, and the pundits who argue that those who fail to achieve the American Dream have only themselves and the welfare state to blame.

For many conservative commentators, this welfare state is a cousin to the socialist and communist states. The Asian American model minority was important in the antiwelfare narrative not only because of what it said about America domestically, but also because of how it proved to the rest of the world the worth of the American ethos of self-driven capitalist success. Capitalism American-style was imitated and improved upon most successfully by certain countries in Asia, including Korea. In a capitalist worldview, Korea’s Asian tiger economy was matched by the Korean diaspora in America as a model minority. Koreatown was not alone in its function as an ethnic enclave that stood in for a poor country. Most ethnic enclaves in the American imagination played that role, including Little Saigon. What made Koreatown unique was being put to the torch, at least in the late twentieth century (the earlier incinerations of ethnic enclaves at the hands of whites having largely been forgotten). In this capitalist way of thinking, the modern-day sacking of Koreatown by the ungrateful dark masses could be seen as another version of the burning of Korea by the communists. In both cases, lines were drawn to prevent the fires from spreading, by the Los Angeles Police Department in America and by the armed forces of the “free world” and the “free market” in Korea.

Against these legacies of the Cold War and of hot racial relations, the Korean Wave rolled over Asia. Hallyu was the phenomenon of Korean soap operas and pop music that infiltrated Asian countries and Asian diasporas. Korean culture became the new cool, climaxing with the global video hit and dance craze of 2013, Gangnam Style. Youth all over Asia and Asian youth in America wore Korean fashion and Korean hair. Koreans themselves developed a reputation, fair or not, for reworking themselves with plastic surgery, a practice most visibly performed by the stars of Hallyu. Hallyu was the triumph of Korean soft power, enabled by Korea’s economic transformation. The rise of Korea impacted even me, for while I was usually mistaken for Japanese in Europe, in some parts of Asia I was mistaken for Korean, most ironically in my own homeland. Compared to my fellow countrymen, at least the ones who had never left, I was too tall and too pale and dressed in Western styles, my hair achieving Korean elevation. Even when I spoke Vietnamese, they routinely said, “Your Vietnamese is so good!” They assumed I was not one of them, which, perhaps, I am not.

In Seoul, no one ever mistook me for Korean. My impression was of a twenty-first — century city coated in a metallic sheen, the reverse of the frightening Pacific Rim metropolis of Blade Runner. The international facilities were superb, at least to someone who had agonized through the terminals in Saigon or Hanoi. The plush, air-conditioned limousine taxi that ferried me to my hotel had tinted windows, as did most of the slick cars that sped by. Seoul was clean, efficient, and intense in its display of light and smooth surfaces, its people’s designer clothing and handbags and eyeglasses. Traffic was orderly and citizens were courteous, at least to an outsider who did not speak the language. One need not worry about the water or the food or the air, and the threat of the north was like the threat of an earthquake in my California — everyone was blasé, except for the troops on the Demilitarized Zone, itself a must-see for tourists. I remembered how my first exposure to Korea was through M*A*S*H, the 1970s television series about wacky American military doctors in the Korean War, which my young refugee self did not recognize was also an allegory for America’s war in Vietnam. America wanted to save both countries but only convinced itself of success in the case of one.

Sixty years after the truce, thirty years after the television show, Korea now jostles with America for cash and coin even as it depends on America for military protection. This history of East and Southeast Asia tempts the counterfactual, presents the lurking possibility of alternative times and universes, of roads and choices not taken, of the different family I could have had and the different self I could have been. How many times have I heard Japanese and Korean businessmen and tourists say that Vietnam reminded them of their country thirty or forty years ago? They visit another country and go back in time to see what might have been: if only the war had not happened, if only the communists had not won, if only the country were still divided, at a stalemate. Isn’t division and stalemate what happened to Korea, and for its own good? Korea and Vietnam are both capitalist fables, but with opposing morals. Vietnam lost forty years and fell behind because of the wars against the French and the Americans, and for what? Now a reunified, independent, and communist Vietnam suffers from capitalist jet-lag, behind the times, striving to become China or (South) Korea or perhaps Taiwan or Hong Kong or Singapore, where an authoritarian government at least keeps the country clean and precise, unlike the case in authoritarian Vietnam. Of course my impressions of (South) Korea are faulty and tourist-thin. Turbulence, poverty, and uneven development roil beneath the cosmetic façade, but at least a façade exists. Vietnam has most of Korea’s problems but only a measure of its success, and even to cross the mad streets, one must take one’s life into one’s hands.

Anyone who remembers America’s forgotten war in Korea and Korea’s forgotten war in Vietnam must feel the possibility of the counterfactual, the point where the histories of Korea and Vietnam intersected and diverged. If (South) Korea had not gone adventuring in Vietnam, would it be the country it is today? If (South) Korea was not the country it is today, could it rewrite its past as it has? If (South) Korea were not a global powerhouse, would anyone care about its memories? The upshot is that (South) Korea’s success in waging a brutal and dehumanizing war in Vietnam helped it to become a capitalist and industrial stronghold that can do more than alter faces. The surgeons of history have been at work in Korea, fashioning war memories that efface brutality and implant humanity. From the remembered war to the forgotten war and on to the present, (South) Koreans have reinvented themselves through developing an industry of weaponized memory. They are no longer ugly and sad objects of pity or subjects of terror that people once saw in the world’s newspapers during the years of obliteration. Instead they have become human, unlike those other (North) Koreans. The northerners cannot contest the stories told about them by the West and by the southerners. Thus, for most of the world, they remain alien. The case of the two Koreas shows how soft power cuts, tucks, and transforms memories, as necessary to the hard power of the war machine as the people who run it.

In Seoul, the War Memorial of Korea explicitly shows how hard and soft power work together to tell a story about being human. This gigantic, angular edifice is a perfect example of weaponized memory, resembling an armored bunker or a movie set from Hitler’s Germany. Its imposing grandeur is itself a story, a mnemonic fortress symbolizing the military-industrial complex, a creation made possible by military success and industrial triumph. The War Memorial praises that military success and is silent testimony to that industrial triumph, a behemoth whose massive footprint on the Seoul landscape proves the power of Korea. Arrayed around its walls and in its courtyards is enough weaponry to equip a small army: missiles, airplanes, tanks, cannons, and ships, most of American manufacture. The weaponry itself bears silent witness to American capitalist success, the United States being the world’s largest exporter of arms. A psychoanalytic reading of the nationalist, masculine pride and anxiety on exhibition would be overkill because it is obvious: the victorious nation’s weapons are polished and ready for visitors to sit on or sit in, triggers and barrels ready for eager hands, while the weapons of the communist enemy, at least in the case of Vietnam and Laos, are often left in states of disrepair and destruction. For Korea, the display of enemy defeat is not necessary outside the bunker’s walls because inside the story told is clear enough.

The War Memorial is mostly devoted to the Korean War, with professional-grade videos, dioramas, photos, placards, uniforms, and artifacts curated by a highly competent staff. Their effort shows the war to be a confrontation between a North Korea backed by the communist world and a South Korea backed by the free world of democratic and capitalist societies. The hero of the memorial is the Korean army and what scholar Sheila Miyoshi Jager calls its “martial manhood.”⁴ In the words of the memorial’s promotional brochure, the purpose of the memorial is to “cherish the memory of deceased patriotic forefathers and war heroes” who “devoted and sacrificed their life for the fatherland.” The memorial urges the idea that Korea owes a great debt to its army in the country’s quest to defend and reunify the homeland against communist threat. A plaque in the courtyard sums up the price of heroism and patriotism that was paid by the army and its men: “Freedom Is Not Free.” Human sacrifice is presumably required. While it may be expensive in terms of human life to guard and celebrate freedom, the memorial implies that freedom also rewards its defenders with material well-being. Freedom’s economic charge, both in terms of cost and profit, runs throughout the polished halls of the memorial. As proof, the memorial offers itself, a military-industrial complex if there ever was one.

The bulk of the War Memorial focuses on the south defending itself against the north, but a room after the main exhibits on the Korean War chronicle Korea’s “Expeditionary Forces.” Here, Vietnam is one of many countries that Korean troops have helped, including Japan, China, Kuwait, Somalia, Western Sahara, Georgia, India, Pakistan, Angola, and East Timor. After exiting the Expeditionary Forces exhibit, I concluded the tour by walking through displays of contemporary Korean weapons and uniforms, while videos celebrated the Korean Army’s professionalism and expertise. The memorial’s narrative is clear: after a brutal Korean War in which United Nations forces helped Koreans, the Korean Army learned how to defend the freedom of others in Vietnam. By doing so, contemporary Korea becomes a full-fledged member of the world’s first-rank nations, enjoying what the scholar Seungsook Moon calls “militarized modernity,” or the intertwined ways by which the country’s rise to global prominence is tied to its militarization, particularly in the standoff against North Korea.⁵ Is this martial modernity not what the war memorial embodies? Those impressive Korean armaments and vehicles, and the video screens that showed them, were manufactured by the Korean megacorporations known as chaebol. The cumulative effect was the simultaneous expression of Korean military, capitalist, and memorial power, a fearsome weaponized memory aimed at the tourist, me.

Still, the memorial provides the clues to unravel its own making, like the mysterious tag in one’s shirt that says Made in China, or Vietnam, or Cambodia, or Bangladesh. In the case of the memorial, that tag is the Expeditionary Forces room, which obliquely admits that what is commemorated in this room was Made in Korea. Despite its name, the room focuses mostly on the Korean war in Vietnam, as if the curators of the memorial simply could not excise that memory but had to include it in order to excuse it. One enters through a hallway decorated with jungle foliage, the classic sign of the country and the war. Photographs, dioramas, maps, and mannequins provide a historical account of some of the war’s events, its participants, and Korean and National Liberation Front bases of operation. In the background a soundtrack of rotating helicopter blades hums, a motif borrowed from Emile de Antonio and Francis Ford Coppola. In sharp contrast to the Korean War exhibits that revel in human sacrifice, from the struggles of refugees to the heroic soldiers who volunteered for suicide attacks, the Vietnam exhibit is remarkably bloodless. The mannequins dressed in enemy uniforms pose stiffly, the illustrations of booby traps are only technical, and the dioramas of guerilla tunnels present the everyday life of the Viet Cong rather than gut-wrenching combat.

The most dramatic image shows Korean soldiers disembarking from a Huey helicopter, familiar to any viewer of documentaries, movies, or news reports that show American soldiers doing the same. Here, though, the disembarkation happens in a glass-encased diorama with toy-sized figurines, as if created by very talented children for a school project (in the dioramas devoted to the Korean War, the human figures are life-size). Elsewhere the captions on photographs depicting South Korean soldiers — none in battle — read as public relations statements: “Korean forces in Vietnam also took great pride in improving public services and contributing to developmental projects. They earned a reputation for fairness and kindness among the Vietnamese people.” Or:

Through the dispatch of armed forces to Vietnam, we gained confidence and experience in building a more self-reliant defense force. It also increased the momentum of our economic development, strengthened the US commitment to the defense of the Republic of Korea, and solidified South Korea’s politico-military status vis-à-vis the United States. Furthermore, the impressive performance of the Korean forces in Vietnam enhanced our international reputation.

The perfect English of these statements is not to be dismissed. In most museums and memorials in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia during the postwar years until recently, the English was comically flawed, as if provided by one of Hollywood’s chop suey stereotypes. Precise translation and excellent curatorial work are simply further signs of Korea’s modernity. Still, these finely trained translators and curators cannot, or will not, deviate from their country’s dominant memory. So it is that the rest of the exhibits devoted to Vietnam recount how, after participating in a number of skirmishes and battles, all described in dry language, the South Korean soldiers “returned home in triumph.” This usually happens because soldiers vanquished the enemy, but the exhibit is silent about the heroism of these Korean troops. The exhibit is so reluctant to address Korean participation in combat that it does not even acknowledge the toil and trauma of Korean troops, much less that of Vietnamese enemies or civilians. Bringing up the heroic violence of Korean soldiers might dredge up their other, more embarrassing deeds.⁶

While the United States waged the war to contain communism, this small exhibit contains that war’s implications for Korea. The most disturbing of those implications points to what Korean soldiers did during their forgotten war, which played a crucial role in Korea’s emergence as a subimperial power, as some scholars put it.⁷ Imperial powers conquer large swathes of the globe, while subimperial powers settle for regional domination. But even subimperial power can prove that one’s country and one’s people are not subhuman, but fully human. The paradoxical evidence of that humanity lies in one’s ability to bomb others, as Koreans can do now, versus being bombed by others, which is what happened to Koreans before they became subimperial. Subimperial power makes Korea’s War Memorial possible, but benevolent power is what this kind of memorial remembers (although those in power always remember themselves as being benevolent). This benevolent power allows one to defend one’s own country and other countries, versus having others defend or invade it. But one cannot own all the tanks, weapons, cannons, missiles, and other fine armaments on display in the War Memorial without using them, and one cannot use them without harming innocents or committing atrocities. Given its role as the bunker of state memory, expensive to build and just as expensive to maintain, the War Memorial will not and cannot acknowledge this reality of inhuman behavior on the part of its heroic soldiers.

If weaponized memory tends to be as costly as the state can afford, antiwar memory is affordable out of necessity. At most it will cost no more than people’s time and lives. Time and life, of course, are all that is required to write literature, and so it is no coincidence that two of the most notable efforts to counteract Korea’s weaponized memory are found in novels. The first is Hwang Suk-Yong’s The Shadow of Arms, published in two installments in 1985 and 1988.⁸ They appeared during two successive and repressive regimes led by presidents who served as army officers in Vietnam, Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo.⁹ Given the political climate, the novel was daring, indicting the American presence in Vietnam as a source of utter corruption for all involved, including Koreans. The novel leaves no doubt that American-style capitalism and racism is at the heart of this war, waged not for a Pax Americana but for the American PX, the post exchange or military shopping mall. “What is a PX?” the novel asks. “A Disneyland in a vast tin warehouse,” the novel says. “A place where they sell the commodities used daily by a nation that possesses the skill to shower more than one million steel fragments over an area one mile wide by a quarter mile long with a single CBV.” What does the PX do? “The PX brings civilization to the filthy Asian slopeheads.”¹⁰ Even more than any tank or plane, the PX “is America’s most powerful new weapon.”¹¹ While the PX is the military-industrial complex’s legitimate face, the black market is its illegitimate face. The black market welcomes everyone, including the communists and nationalists, and corrupts them with the benefits of a wartime economy inflated by American imports and dollars. The Vietnamese of all sides suffer because they cannot leave, unlike the Americans and the Koreans. These outsiders are what scholar Jinim Park calls “colonized colonizers,” the middlemen who help both the Americans and, inadvertently, the Japanese, who supply many of the goods for sale.¹² “In Vietnam everything is Japanese.”¹³ So it is that Koreans learn a key lesson, which the Japanese, their former colonizers, already know: American wars in Asia can be profitable.

But the profits come with a price, not the least of which is racial inferiority. The American subjugation of the Vietnamese reminds the Koreans of their own past treatment by Americans, one reason why Koreans are both drawn to and repulsed by the Vietnamese.¹⁴ As an American soldier tells Yong Kyu, an enlisted man at the center of the novel, the Vietnamese are Gooks. “They’re really filthy. But you’re like us. We’re the allies.”¹⁵ When Yong Kyu recalls how Americans first used “Gook” in Korea, he understands that “it is the Vietnamese that I am like.”¹⁶ A fellow Korean even says, “You look fine, black as any Vietnamese.”¹⁷ Perhaps the novel is referring to the popular 1969 Korean song “Sergeant Kim’s Return from Vietnam,” where the eponymous hero comes back as “black-faced Sergeant Kim.” He was the most memorable character from the Korean effort to promote Korean soldiers in Vietnam as heroic and virtuous, but his blackness is an ambiguous sign. He has been exposed not only to tropical sun, but also to violent war and contamination by the anti-Asian racism of Americans.¹⁸ In the case of the My Lai massacre, which the novel recounts in detail, “it is racism, in the end, that makes a person insist that a massacre is justified.”¹⁹ The Koreans in the novel do not commit atrocities against the Vietnamese, but Hwang implies they are one step away from doing so, complicit as they are with a racist American military.

What the Koreans definitely do is prostitute themselves, literally or through the black market. While the Vietnamese characters die or are imprisoned, Yong Kyu is alive and free at novel’s end, helping the prostitute Hae Jong ship a considerable quantity of illicit goods to her family in Korea, as many Korean soldiers also did.²⁰ With only minor regret, Yong Kyu obeys the hierarchy that men exploit women, whites subjugate Asians, and Koreans mistreat Vietnamese. “Black” becomes the sign of corruption and inferiority, from the black market to black or blackened people.²¹ Blackness is also important to the other major Korean novel about this Korean war, Ahn Junghyo’s White War, which the author translated himself into English as White Badge.²² But while blackness lurks in the novel, whiteness is the prevalent concern. The narrator, Han Kiju, is an intellectual, unlike Yong Kyu and most of the Korean men who volunteered for Vietnam. He is enthralled with Western, white culture, having read Homer, Remarque, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Montaigne, Dryden, and Coleridge. Befitting an intellectual, he is a man whose masculinity is questioned by himself and others. After the war, he is an “alien” in Korean society, his literary knowledge useless, his career stalled, his adulterous wife having left him because of their inability to reproduce, eventually revealed as a failure of his virility.²³ A phone call from a veteran comrade, Pyon Chinsu, forces him to remember the war and to realize the cause of his malaise: the “blood money” paid to soldiers who went to Vietnam.²⁴ Privates who volunteered for Vietnam earned $40 a month when the average family’s annual income was $98. The United States paid about $1 billion for these Korean soldiers, or around $6.6 billion today.²⁵ This money “fueled the modernization and development of the country. And owing to this contribution, the Republic of Korea, or at least a higher echelon of it, made a gigantic stride into the world market. Lives for sale. National mercenaries.”²⁶

In both these novels, the Koreans sell themselves to the United States, a “swaggering idol, a boastful giant.”²⁷ To Han Kiju’s observant eyes, if Americans are giants, then Koreans are dwarves, wearing American uniforms, eating American food, and using American weapons too large for them.²⁸ The ironies of being a colonized colonizer abound in this white war, certainly for the narrator, who depicts the sole black American in the book as “a Negro soldier with thick, primitive, pinkish lips.”²⁹ Like Americans, some Koreans absorb American racism, calling the Vietnamese “gooks” and a “yellow-skinned, dwarfish race.”³⁰ Like Americans, Korean soldiers cannot tell the difference between friendly Vietnamese and enemy Vietnamese. They pursue the American strategy of punishment and patronization, forcibly removing villagers from their homes to strategic hamlets while also trying to win hearts and minds by building clinics, throwing parties, and distributing rice. But what Koreans do to the Vietnamese is what others did to Koreans: “what did we, or our parents, think when the UN forces, the Americans and the Turks swarmed into our village during the Korean War to liberate us from the Communists and then raped the village women at night.”³¹ As if to avoid committing the same atrocity, Kiju takes a Vietnamese mistress, a virtuous but compromised woman named Hai. Figures like Hai are staples of foreign literature about Vietnam, the most famous being Phuong in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. With Hai, Kiju can be a man, but the illusion of this masculinity is revealed when she begs him to take her to Korea, which he cannot do.³² Perhaps he simply will not. As the novel later shows, there are Vietnamese refugees living in poverty in postwar Seoul, including women abandoned by Korean lovers.³³ This history continues today, as poor Vietnamese women come to Korea to be matched with Korean men whom no one else will marry, oftentimes farmers left behind by the modernization and urbanization of their country.

The real drama of White Badge is not between Koreans and Vietnamese, but between Koreans. Han Kiju’s former comrade, Pyon Chinsu, has contacted him in order to ask a final favor — shoot him and put him out of his postwar misery, which occurs against the backdrop of democratic struggles opposed to the military dictatorship of Chun Doo Hwan. The novel closes with the meeting between Pyon Chinsu, peasant, and Han Kiju, intellectual, without letting us know whether Kiju can pull the trigger. Either way is defeat for soldiers who are neither rewarded nor recognized by their fellow citizens, especially the businessmen that benefited most from the war. Unlike the War Memorial of Korea, White Badge shows the costs and myths of martial manhood. Whether this manhood succeeds or fails is due in both cases to its submission to the American giant “who had never learned how to live outside his own world” and who has demanded that Koreans live in his, via his capitalism, his literature, and his (white) war.³⁴ In return, this giant offers Koreans the opportunity to exploit what historian Bruce Cumings calls “El Dorado,” or Vietnam, where Korean engineers from Daewoo rented rooms from my parents in our amiable provincial town.³⁵

The disgust with both Americans and Koreans is profound in these antiheroic novels, but there exists a heroic trend in Korean memory about this war found in songs such as “Sergeant Kim’s Return from Vietnam.” This heroic version of Korean war memory does not circulate outside of Korea, however. Instead, audiences outside Korea are most likely to know these antiheroic novels and the movie adaptation of White Badge. In this way, the Korean case is similar to the American one. Perhaps the global image of the war was so negative that heroic stories did not match the expectations of global audiences. White Badge’s 1994 movie adaptation (also called White War in Korea) is still perhaps the best-known Korean film about the war, and retains the novel’s antiheroic, anti-American qualities.³⁶ At the same time, the movie signals how Korean memories of the war increasingly emphasized the way that Koreans experienced the war. While the novel is remarkable in the war’s global literature for its Vietnamese perspectives, the movie eliminates most of them. Han Kiju’s mistress vanishes and the Viet Cong woman whom the soldiers sexually humiliate becomes a suicide bomber. Without sympathetic Vietnamese women, the movie, even more than the novel, becomes a drama about and between Korean men. Their struggle is not so much about their own moral ambiguity in Vietnam but about their postwar relationship to a Korean society poised between dictatorship and democracy in the 1980s.

The movie portrays these struggles and is also an outcome of these struggles. It depicts a war which helps transform Korea into a muscular capitalist society and enables Korea to tell more powerful, more expensive stories. The movie is part of an art form that says as much about its society through its technical achievement, made possible by the development of an industrial complex, as it does by its narrative. As with the War Memorial of Korea, however, the spectacular language of cinema oftentimes comes with more than just a financial cost. Film, as an industrial production, must return profit on investment more so than literature, where the stakes are smaller. While literature can more easily afford to take risky steps such as empathizing with the enemy, film oftentimes lags far behind, as in the big-budget movie White Badge. This movie, for all its antiwar qualities, was part of the “New Korean Cinema” that was one more sign of Korea’s global competitiveness.³⁷ New Korean Cinema has made Korean directors the darlings of the international film circuit and captured the attention of Hollywood. This cinema tells Korean stories and is itself a Korean story. As shiny as the latest line of Hyundai cars, this cinematic soft power is a material artifact of Korean accomplishment and affirms Korea as worthy of inclusion among the world’s first rank. Framed in this way, White Badge the movie erases Vietnamese characters and by its very presence as a movie about Koreans in Vietnam contributes to the global dominance of the Korean point of view over the Vietnamese, a dominance maintained by Korea’s ability to export this and other movies overseas.

Three more Korean movies about the war would follow White Badge, together signaling the convergence of memory and power through the industrial art of film: R-Point (2004), a horror movie; Sunny (2008), a romantic melodrama; and Ode to My Father (2014), a historical melodrama and box office hit. These polished, sleek movies, considerably more advanced than anything coming out of Vietnam, are technically on par with Hollywood movies and share a similar theme. As American war movies of the 1980s engaged in what scholar Susan Jeffords called the “remasculinization of America” after the emasculating loss of the Vietnam War, critic Kyung Hyun Kim argues that postwar Korean cinema likewise remasculinized.³⁸ All three movies show an embattled Korean masculinity in Vietnam and also embody a rising Korea through cinematic flashiness. R-Point follows a squad of Korean soldiers searching for a missing squad of their fellow troops. In an abandoned colonial villa, they encounter a ghost who has caused the deaths of those missing soldiers, a Vietnamese woman wearing a white ao dai who possesses these soldiers and makes them turn their weapons on each other.³⁹ As in American war movies, the Vietnamese woman is the most frightening figure of all. The most famous depiction in American film of the threatening woman is Full Metal Jacket, where a female sniper decimates an American squad until they capture and kill her. But in R-Point, the threatening ghost lives on, destroying all but one of the Korean soldiers for their sexual and territorial transgressions.⁴⁰ Ironically, the death of the Korean soldiers is also an absolution. Victims of their own “friendly fire”—even the last survivor is blinded — they cannot be held responsible in the same way that living American soldiers can.⁴¹

The theme of absolution is also at the heart of Sunny, a strange and entertaining war film about recently married Soon-Yi, whose husband volunteers for the army because he believes his wife doesn’t love him (and she believes he has a mistress). Rejected by her in-laws and her family as a result of his abandonment, Soon-Yi travels to Vietnam to get him back. The only route is through becoming an entertainer for Korean and American troops, and she ships out with a bandleader who renames her Sunny, a name more appropriate for the Americans. Their degradation of her, and all Koreans, is driven home when an audience of American soldiers howls and leers at Sunny as she sings “Susie Q.” After the delirious GIs shower her with money, Sunny sleeps with their officer in exchange for his help in saving her husband. Her bandmates acknowledge her literal prostitution and their own figurative prostitution when they burn the dollars with which they have been paid. American villainy is rendered even more vividly when American soldiers shoot a little girl in the back and murder a Viet Cong commander who has spared the band members’ lives. In contrast to the evil Americans, Korean soldiers in the movie never commit atrocities. Shot, shelled, and ambushed in several battles, they are almost always on the defensive, terrorized by the enemy until Sunny’s husband is the last survivor of his ambushed squad. When Sunny finally meets this traumatized husband on the battlefield, she does not embrace or kiss him; instead, amid gunfire and shelling, she slaps him until he falls to his knees, the final frame of the film. As in R-Point, Korean men are the ones to be punished, both by Vietnamese and by women. But unlike R-Point, Sunny refuses to believe that Korean men did more than fight in self-defense.

Ode to My Father is the story of Duk-soo, a refugee from the north who feels responsible for the loss of his father and sister during their flight. After his family is rescued by American forces, he takes on the responsibility of supporting his mother and siblings. He endures great personal sacrifice as a coal miner in East Germany and as a contractor in wartime Vietnam, but his hard work enables his economic success. His rise from beggar to middle-class patriarch mirrors the rise of South Korea from the 1950s until the present. The Korean war in Vietnam plays a small but crucial role in the transformation of both Korea and Duk-soo. As the war ends, communist forces trap him and other Korean contractors in a Vietnamese village. During a battle where Korean marines fight off the communists and rescue the contractors and friendly Vietnamese, Duk-soo is wounded when he saves a Vietnamese girl from drowning. Although he is permanently disabled, he is now the rescuer rather than the rescued, as is South Korea in relationship to South Vietnam. The story of Ode to My Father is harmonious with the story of the War Memorial of Korea in showing how South Koreans went from being abject and inhuman, in need of help during the Korean War, to human defenders of freedom during the Korean war in Vietnam. While the transformation of Korea is evident to all, Duk-soo’s heroism is unknown to his children, who also take for granted their father’s labor and suffering for them.

With these portrayals of wounded, victimized Korean masculinity beginning in White Badge, Korean cinema functions like American cinema of the war. Even if Americans depict themselves in criminal ways, the depiction is always shown through Hollywood’s bright light. Likewise with Korean war movies. As part of a New Korean Cinema that is not reluctant to depict Koreans antiheroically, some of these movies show that self-representation of the darkest kind is better than no representation at all. But viewing these films in sequence, from 1994’s White Badge to 2014’s Ode to My Father, what we see is a narrative that decreases darkness and increases revision of the past. Koreans are human in these movies, but more so, they are victims too, proxy warriors who do the bidding of the real villains, the Americans. This cinematic recasting of the other Korean war fits neatly with how Koreans can claim to be a “victim state” of the United States and its Cold War policy.⁴²

While Korea of the past may have been a vassal, Korea of the present pushes back, a competitor who demands worldwide recognition, both for its people and its products. In a world of global capitalism, commodities are more important than people and often travel more easily than people do. Like people, commodities are valued in different ways, expensive Korean goods more fashionable than cheap Chinese ones. In the case of Vietnam, one can find both expensive Korean products and expensive Korean people. Koreans have returned in unarmed force, as tourists, business owners, and students. Korea is seen everywhere, in hairstyles, pop music, movies, melodramas, and malls. For most Vietnamese, Korea and Koreans are spectacular images of a beckoning modernity, regardless of the realities underneath. For both Koreans and Vietnamese, this modernity requires amnesia about their previous shared past. Thus, while Korean commodities can be seen everywhere, memories of the Korean war in Vietnam are still hard to come by, even in their cinematic form.

When Vietnamese do recall Koreans, the memories are negative. At the Museum of the Son My Massacre, better known as the My Lai Massacre, a plaque in English and Vietnamese remembers the “violently atrocious crimes of the American aggressor and the South Korean mercenaries.”⁴³ The South Vietnamese who fought alongside Korean soldiers did not care much for them either. Nguyen Cao Ky, air marshal and vice premier of the Republic of Vietnam, accused them of corruption and black marketeering.⁴⁴ Average soldiers resented that American soldiers favored the Korean troops, whom they thought more aggressive. To add insult to injury, the Americans even made the South Vietnamese army buy Korean soy sauce to replace Vietnamese fish sauce.⁴⁵ The Vietnamese civilian view of the Korean soldiers was worse, for some of the Vietnamese remembered how, during World War II, when the country was under Japanese occupation, Korean soldiers were in charge of the prison camps.⁴⁶ And, according to Le Ly Hayslip, a peasant girl caught in the ground war in central Vietnam:

More dangerous [than the Americans] were the Koreans who now patrolled the American sector. Because a child from our village once walked into their camp and exploded a Viet Cong bomb wired to his body, the Koreans took terrible retribution against the children themselves (whom they saw simply as little Viet Cong). After the incident, some Korean soldiers went to a school, snatched up some boys, threw them into a well, and tossed a grenade in afterward as an example to the others. To the villagers, these Koreans were like the Moroccans [who helped the French] — tougher and meaner than the white soldiers they supported. Like the Japanese of World War II, they seemed to have no conscience and went about their duties as ruthless killing machines. No wonder they found my country a perfect place to ply their terrible trade.⁴⁷

As anthropologist Heonik Kwon notes, this behavior by Korean troops was hardly surprising. Their slogans included “kill clean, burn clean, destroy clean,” “children also spy,” and “better to make mistakes than to miss.”⁴⁸

This litany of memories testifies to the ways that the Vietnamese remember, but mostly forget, Korean soldiers. These fragmentary memories are overwhelmed by the general Vietnamese indifference to the Korean war in Vietnam, and outnumbered by the stories found in Korean novels, films, and even music videos such as that of pop star Jo Sung Mo’s 2000 smash “Do You Know?”⁴⁹ This epic account of Korean soldiers giving their lives to rescue Vietnamese civilians ends with a Viet Cong firing squad massacring the last living soldier and his Vietnamese lover. “Why is this happening to us?” the soldier cries. The video’s postscript renders explicit the sense of Korean victimization: “The Vietnam War was a pure tragedy,” it says. “There’s no winner or loser.” At least when it comes to remembering Koreans, the Vietnamese, for the most part, appear willing to agree.⁵⁰ After all, both money and marriages must be made between Korea and Vietnam in the postwar era, and memories of murder only interfere.

Korean stories of the war allow Korea to criticize the United States, acknowledge some degree of Korean complicity, and absolve Koreans of any crimes committed in Vietnam. Cleansed by these narratives, Korea embraces its new role in global capitalism, where money powers memory and memory powers money. As a nation’s wealth makes its memories circulate ever wider, weaponized memory in turn justifies how the nation’s money was earned, effacing the bloody traces left by those who fought to make those profits possible. The reach of Korean popular culture, in novels, films, music, and commodities, testifies to an emergent Korea’s power. Korea may like to think of itself as a victim — of Japan, of America, of North Korea — but it is also more than that. Koreans may have been cronies, surrogates, or proxies in the Cold War and afterward, but Korea has learned well from its masters. A good student, Korea has graduated from subhuman to subimperial status, and its graduation influences how Korea deals with Vietnam of the present, the Vietnam of its past, and the shadow of its American patron. Once a backwater province humiliated by Japan and subordinated by the United States, Korea has become a chic and sleek global minipower whose projection of itself takes place not only in the factory, the boardroom, the stock market, and the United Nations but also in movie theaters, on televisions, in books, and in architecture signifying might and prowess, intended to intimidate and impress both citizen and tourist.

This weaponized memory foregrounds the humanity of the ones who remember, but inhumanity is in the background of its operations too. The most obvious inhuman acts by Koreans were directed at the Vietnamese people, but becoming subimperial for Koreans also involved absorbing the inhumanity of Korea’s imperial patron, the United States. A trace of that inhumanity is found in the words “Freedom is not free,” which come from America and are featured on the Korean War Memorial in Washington, DC, dedicated in 1995, a year after the War Memorial of Korea debuted. This slogan has circulated widely, appearing also on the Lao Hmong American War Memorial of Fresno, California, dedicated in 2005 to the American allies who fought in Laos during the “Secret War.” One is also likely to hear “freedom is not free” on many American patriotic occasions, although its original context from 1959 is rarely given or remembered: “I am afraid that too many of us want the fruits of integration but are not willing to courageously challenge the roots of segregation. But let me assure you that it does not come this way. Freedom is not free. It is always purchased with the high price of sacrifice and suffering.”⁵¹ Black soldiers fought in American wars, and now, “America, we are simply asking you to guarantee our freedom.”⁵² Martin Luther King Jr. is saying that America wages wars overseas in the name of protecting the freedom of others, but is reluctant to wage war against racism at home. In the capitals of both the United States and Korea, beneath the stirring calls for freedom, unfreedom echoes.

Koreans became human in the time of global capitalism, but at what cost, and to whom? This is a question not just for Korea. When Koreatown burned in Los Angeles, the question of human life and its value had to be asked, too. Korean businesses suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, and the pain for Korean Americans was real. But while property defined Korean losses, at least Koreans had property to lose. While Latinos lost property too — about 40 percent of the total damages, compared to 50 percent for Koreans — their losses were also measured in terms of crime and life, as was the case for African Americans. Most of those arrested were black and Latino, as were most of those who died. One Korean American died.⁵³ The body count matters, as it did during the wars in Vietnam and Korea, because that count tells us whose lives were worth more. In the process of serving as foot soldiers on the front lines of a battle fought for capitalism, Korean and Korean Americans became more valuable — more human — than blacks or the blackened, at least in the militarized memories of America and Korea. To be human not only means the capacity to bomb others in long-range wars of pacification, or exercise overwhelming industrial firepower, or profit from capitalism. In America, it also means being remembered as the model minority; in Korea, it means having the capacity to conduct strategic memory campaigns, to exercise surgical memory strikes, to reinvent the past. Korean veterans of that other Korean war can even erect a small memorial in Vietnam, though that country does not have the power to remember itself in Korea. Memory, like war, is often asymmetrical.

I found that lonely memorial after some effort, on a trail off of a side road from Highway 1A, soon after it passes through Da Nang on the way to scenic, charming Hoi An. Many Korean troops fought near Da Nang, but they might have a hard time recognizing Highway 1A now. Once rural and sparse, the road is now a luxurious stretch of resorts and golf courses, some built by Korean corporations. Few of the tourists who come to these places would want to visit Ha My, if they even knew of it or could find the memorial. Whereas martyrs’ cemeteries abut roads, the memorial at Ha My is placed far back, away from sight. My driver drives by twice before I spot its peaked roof. To reach the memorial from the road, I have to dismount and then walk past village homes and across rice paddies. In the summertime, under a hot midday sun, the paddies are dry and brown. As I trudge on a dirt path to a small, ornate temple in a courtyard with yellow walls, only a single farmer is visible in the fields. The blue metal gates have fallen off their hinges, one propped on a wall, the other lying on the courtyard’s pavement. An elevated dais occupies the center of the square courtyard, with sixteen pillars holding up two green-shingled roofs. In the middle of the dais, a memorial wall commemorates the victims of January 24, 1968. The oldest victim was a woman born in 1880, and the three youngest died in 1968, perhaps in their mothers’ wombs. Vo Danh — without a name — takes the place of their given names. The memorial names 135 people “who were killed” (bị sát hại), but on the matter of who killed them, the memorial is silent. The villagers wanted the statement to say that Korean soldiers killed the villagers. Korean veterans, paying for the memorial, did not.⁵⁴

6. On Asymmetry

KILLING IS THE WEAPON OF THE strong. Dying is the weapon of the weak. It is not that the weak cannot kill; it is only that their greatest strength lies in their capacity to die in greater numbers than the strong. Thus, it did not matter, in terms of victory, that the United States only lost fifty-eight thousand or so men, or that Korea only lost five thousand or so men, while the Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians lost approximately four million people during the war’s official years (rounding American casualties in this way acknowledges what novelist Karen Tei Yamashita charged when it came to the death statistics for American boys versus everyone else involved in this war, namely that “numbers for Vietnam are rounded off to the nearest thousand. Numbers for the Boys are exact”¹). Americans could not absorb their losses in the same way that their enemies simply had to do. While the American public would not tolerate a casualty count in the thousands, and knew that the United States could always leave Vietnam, the Vietnamese who opposed the Americans were fighting for their country and had nowhere else to go. The American war machine ran aground on the bodies of its own men as well as the bodies of those it killed, with the specter of the Vietnamese body count mobilizing global opposition. In the war’s mnemonic aftermath, this paradox of the strong and the weak continued. The American industry of memory triumphed in dispatching its machines of memory all over the world, but they could not completely eradicate those bodies that had brought the war machine to a halt, those bodies that turned the name of Vietnam into a symbol of revolutionary victory against empires. Likewise, within Vietnam and Laos, the industrial efforts by the victorious regimes to remember their war as being heroic triumphs against the Americans could not completely erase those same bodies that the American war machine crushed. The bodies lingered, too many of them to be avoided, evoked by both the Americans (who killed them) and the Vietnamese and Laotians (who sacrificed them). Sometimes those bodies appeared in gruesome form as a “legion of angry ghosts,” in the words of anthropologist Mai Lan Gustafsson.² Sometimes they were resurrected as heroic statues.

Unlike the industries of memory for superpowers or aspiring powers, the industry of memory for a small country does not export its memories on any great scale. This industry’s memories appear unpolished on the global market, and its makers recognize that asymmetric memory fights best on its own soil. The small country depends on luring foreigners to its own territory through offering itself cheaply, as a locale for budget tourism that includes the surprise tourist trap, where the tourist is ambushed by history as seen from the local point of view. But like most other industries of memory that turn their attention to war and its afterlife, the smaller one shares a similar emotional register with the more powerful ones, alternating between horror and heroism, with sorrow occupying the middle register. Revolutionary icon Ho Chi Minh, symbol of memory and amnesia, personifies how a small country’s industry of memory functions asymmetrically, outmatched as it is by a large country’s more powerful memory. His body, or as some rumors suggest perhaps just its replica, can be visited in a mausoleum in Hanoi. There he is the sole occupant, a luxury in a land where it is common for whole families to live in one room. His body lies encased in what I imagine is a refrigerated crystal sarcophagus, face not quite pressed against glass, unlike those deformed fetuses, victims of Agent Orange, that one encountered in the War Remnants Museum until recently. There is no heat, no smell, and no noise in his mausoleum. The Vietnamese, who never queue for anything, silently and orderly move in single file past the body. No one is allowed to take pictures because photographs take on lives of their own that are separate from the dead.

Is this body a heroic statue or a gruesome zombie, kept alive against its will by a state that defied Ho Chi Minh’s wishes that he be cremated, his ashes spread over the country? Both. His body, or its facsimile, is a stage prop for the Communist Party, its war machine, and its industry of memory. His body is either heroic or horrific, neither quite living nor quite dead, a stone-cold, inhuman embodiment of what the scholar Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics.” In necropolitical regimes, states wield the power of life and death by determining who lives and who dies, including those unfortunates caught in between life and death. Think of refugees encamped in the limbo of the stateless, or those targets of drone attacks and supposedly surgical missile strikes, or those populations under authoritarian regimes or occupying powers. The victorious Vietnamese saw the American war machine as the tool of a necropolitical regime, dispensing death, incarcerating prisoners, and creating refugees at will. The defeated Vietnamese saw the Communist Party as the necropolitical power that consigned them to reeducation camps and new economic zones, forced them to flee abroad as refugees, and sometimes caused them to linger for years and decades in camps. To them, Ho Chi Minh symbolizes not heroism but horror. They call him the devil or compare him to Hitler, and displaying his picture to communities of exiles incites rage. To these exiles, his chilled afterlife and the betrayal of his wishes amount to an ironic act of justice, a horror committed on the horrible.

Like every historical artifact, Ho Chi Minh — or his body, or its facsimile — is haunted and animated by its own ghost, which is both inhuman and human, inasmuch as the ghost belongs to us, the living, the issue of our belief, fear, guilt, or paranoia. This blurred line between the inhuman and the human is the place of the inhumanities and the necropolitical. By keeping Ho Chi Minh’s body on ice, the triumphant state plays a dangerous game of the inhumanities, gambling that it can tame his ghost and use its human face to pacify a people who may not be satisfied with the regime. In doing so, the regime allows his inhuman face to haunt the land and the memories of the people. When his body is a memorial and his resting place a site of pilgrimage, the people can hardly forget him and everything he lived and died for, mythically or in reality. Powerful symbols have multiple meanings which resist the attempts at complete legislation by critics and apparatchiks. Necropolitical regimes believe or hope that they can control the symbolic meanings of war, subduing the horror and foregrounding the heroic, instilling in the people a sense of sorrow for their dead rather than anger over the fate of those dead. This effort to control symbolism is the reason why the government forbids photographs of the sacred relic that is Ho Chi Minh’s body. The spirit of this injunction applies in a peculiar way to his statue in the nearby Ho Chi Minh Museum. This golden, inhuman figure — not lifelike because it is much larger than life — towers over the tourists, who are allowed to photograph it until noon. Then the museum closes for a short time and the cleaners arrive. They extend long-handled mops toward the statue’s head, which is the moment when a security guard demands that I put away my camera. It is my greatest missed opportunity, the sight of a custodian running his mop over the great man’s forehead.

Heroes are immortal, which is why reminders of their mortality must be censored, from the mundane need to be clean to the pressing need to die. But while Ho Chi Minh in his mausoleum appears to defy death, appearing only to sleep, is there anything more inhuman than that vampire-like position, shielded from sunlight? And if his nearby statue is larger than life, the gigantic one of him in the city of Vinh is as large as his legend, which is exactly the opposite of how the human man lived, or performed, his humble life. This legend of Ho Chi Minh also pervades the Fine Arts Museum of Hanoi, where he is ubiquitous. He is the subject of statuary, oil paintings, watercolors, and lacquered panels, always heroic, noble, and empathetic. The other major subjects of the museum collection are peasants, workers, women, and soldiers, who work or fight heroically, or else mourn sorrowfully. Their statues appear throughout the landscape, particularly the soldiers, gazing ferociously at the future in front of them. These symbols of the victorious revolution are not human, even though they depict human beings. They are hardened industrial products wearing the guise and shape of softer human beings. As forms of weaponized memory, they condense the heroic and the human, excising any sign of the subhuman, nonhuman, or inhuman. They demand only the ethics of remembering one’s own, never the ethics of remembering others (except as inhuman enemies) or the ethics of recognition (of one’s own inhumanity), both of which are required, even as shadows, to fully animate the human. These statues represent the most important part of the revolutionary war machine, the collective human being, unified in propaganda posters and in murals like the one at the Cu Chi tunnels that narrates Vietnam’s history. That history culminates in revolutionary victory and in the unification of the people in their diversity. Thus we see, besides the typical triumvirate of soldier, worker, and peasant, a range of others: priest and monk, man and woman, old and young, majority and minorities, gathered under Uncle Ho’s benevolent gaze. This is the heroic people, the greatest of history’s flat characters, an embodiment of the inhumanities told by the revolutionary story, where the spirit of the people live on even if millions died in the flesh.

If the heroic people’s collective humanity is only a façade, then it is no surprise that the nation’s revolutionary industry of memory also gives life to things that are not human. By this I mean the inhuman weapons affixed to the landscape and given central place in many museums, notably cannons, tanks, airplanes, helicopters, and missile launchers. These assembly-line industrial products hint at the economy of scale for weaponized memory. No matter how powerful an individual’s memory may be, that memory will not move outside of a small circle unless it enters a mode of mnemonic reproduction. Sometimes that mode is massive and industrial, aimed explicitly at creating stories and memories, as with Hollywood or hallyu. Sometimes that industrial mode produces memories inadvertently, as by-product or side effect, a mnemonic halo around a thing. Some of the most memorable characters of the war were thus not people but weapons like the M-16 and the AK-47. Along with the great men, their names are inscribed in history, while the names of millions of individuals will be found on a memorial wall, if at all. In the museums of Laos and Vietnam, many of these weapons even have their individual biographies celebrated on placards that detail their great feats and their presence at historical events. The tanks that smashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon on the last day of the war are the most famous examples of weapons with biographies. But the tank that means the most to me is outside the entrance to a wing of Hanoi’s Military History Museum. This Soviet-built T-54 fought in the Western Highlands campaign of March 1975, when my birthplace, Ban Me Thuot, was the first town to fall in the final invasion from the north. A vague, blurry image of a tank with soldiers riding on it flickers in my memory, but whether this tank is that tank, or whether this memory is real or a mirage, I do not know. But I remember this tank more than I do any of the people from my infancy, including the (adopted) sister we left behind as we fled the invasion. (Someone once told me a cruel rumor, that I was adopted. The Vietnamese are good at cruel rumors, which they like to deliver with a smile. “Do you know why you’re not adopted?” my older brother said. “Because we didn’t leave you behind.”)

This tank, these planes, these guns, these inhuman things have more purchase on the collective memory of the human species than 99.9 percent of the human beings who lived through, or died in, the war. These weapons are big things produced by big countries, and as Marx said, things take on lives of their own in capitalism, accruing value even as the workers who make these things lose value in capitalism’s race to the bottom. Things become invested with, and animated by, the human labor that went into their making, labor that is invisible to almost all who will encounter them. The thing that is bought, used, cared for, even loved, becomes the medium by which human beings interact. Things exist even when humans die, and thus museums often give more space to things than people. Even in an ostensibly communist society, where machines are celebrated not as products of alienated labor but as products of heroic labor, the practical outcome is that the machinery is oftentimes more important than the humanity. Either in capitalist or communist societies, these things provoke memory and are themselves memories. What else is a land mine in the earth but a bad memory left behind by an industrial mode of production, the seed of a war machine? Or the car in which the monk drove to his final, incendiary destination, appropriated by the revolution for its own purposes? The metallic object is a synecdoche of the war machine, as is the gun, the tank, and the collective human being, whose only hope to defeat the industrial weapon lies in becoming a revolutionary synthesis that is one-dimensionally inhuman and heroic.

If things are industrial products, they also stand in for their industries, both in triumph and defeat. Thus what the local and the tourist often see on the Laotian and Vietnamese landscape are captured weapons and downed airplanes, totems of the industrial giant brought low. Rusting American and French tanks litter old battlefields and museum grounds, and the bones of American bombers and jets are splayed like the fossils of a vanished species on the neglected property of the Air Defense Museum and the B-52 Victory Museum in Hanoi. The most triumphant display of all is featured in the Military History Museum of Hanoi, where the taxi drivers waiting outside the gates on their motorbikes greet me like a long-lost cousin when they discover that I am an overseas Vietnamese, squeezing my arm and slapping my back with grinning enthusiasm. Inside the gates is an artfully arranged heap of junk, the engines and fuselages of French and American warplanes shot down by antiaircraft fire. If an American museum displayed this heap, it would be called art, as is the case with the assortment of aerial junk arranged by Nancy Rubins at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the creation of an individual at the service of the Western art industry. The display of destroyed warplanes is the anonymous creation of collective revolutionary struggle, authorized by the state. At the front of the heap is a black-and-white photograph of a young woman with a rifle slung across her back, hauling a part of an airplane with American insignia. “When the enemy comes, even the women must fight,” goes the old slogan (like most nationalist slogans, it has an invisible postscript — when the enemy leaves, the women return home).³ The contrast between the woman and the destroyed American machinery reverses the American predilection for seeing young Vietnamese women, alternately seductive and castrating, as the most terrible of inhuman enemies. The Vietnamese industry of memory depicts the Vietnamese as human, humane, and heroic, while showing Americans to be inhuman, both in behavior and in terms of their massive, indiscriminating weapons. If Americans want to learn how much of the world will resent their nation’s drone strikes, then they only need visit the museums of north Vietnam, where the greatest resentment is reserved for the “air pirates.”

But one does have to visit Vietnam to see this other kind of memory, or else dig for it in books as a specialist or a hobbyist interested in this war. For casual encounters with the war, one is still most likely to see the past through the eyes of the air pirates or their inhuman prostheses, the drone and the satellite. This is the difference between a super-powerful industry of memory with a global reach that exports its products anywhere in the world, versus a middling industry of memory whose products stay within its own borders, or, when exported, are damned by poor reputations. A super-powerful industry of memory makes it easy for people to access its products, delivered to their doors, their televisions, their screens, their shelves, their newspapers, even when they do not want these memories or seek them out. Memory does not work this way for the weaker industrial power, which must either turn itself into a tourist destination to lure the unsuspecting tourist into mnemonic traps or export cheap products that few are likely to encounter or appreciate.

Nancy Rubins, Chas’ Stainless Steel, Mark Thomson’s Airplane Parts, about 1,000 lbs. of Stainless Steel Wire & Gagosian’s Beverly Hills Space at MOCA, 2002. ©Nancy Rubins. Photograph by Brian Forrest.

Director Dang Nhat Minh’s oeuvre illustrates this distinction between strong and weak industries of memory. He is the most famous auteur of the revolutionary generation, and his 1984 film When the Tenth Month Comes is likely the best-known Vietnamese movie or work on war and memory. Set in the years after American involvement, when Vietnam fought border clashes with Cambodia, and then invaded it, the movie tells the story of a young woman whose husband dies in one of these conflicts. Living with her father-in-law and young son, she keeps his death a secret, unable to break their hearts as her own has been. The movie is intimate, tender, and focused on the consequences of war for a woman and her family. Many Vietnamese war movies, unlike American ones, foreground women and children, although usually to emphasize their heroic, revolutionary spirit, like The Abandoned Field: Free Fire Zone. Unlike that film, in which a husband and wife fight off American helicopter attacks, heroism and noble sacrifice are absent in When the Tenth Month Comes. The prevalent mood is one of sorrow for the widow and her dead husband, who returns to her one night as a ghost. But no matter how pleasing or moving or full of human feeling, this is a black-and-white movie, the best that Vietnamese cinematic technology could do in 1984, the year when Beverly Hills Cop, a black and white buddy comedy shot in full color, topped the American box office. Except for the academic, the movie critic, the art house aficionado, and those with some deep abiding interest in this country, not many outside Vietnam watched When the Tenth Month Comes.

In 2009, Dang Nhat Minh made a bid for a larger international audience with the full color Don’t Burn, an epic film based on the diary of a young North Vietnamese woman, an idealistic doctor who volunteered for war and was killed by American troops. Instead of telling only Dang Thuy Tram’s story, Dang Nhat Minh also depicted the story of the American officer who recovered her diary and brought it back to her family more than thirty years later. Don’t Burn met the ethical demand to recognize both one’s own and others, although it was, perhaps, flawed, at least from my inhuman perspective. In standard biopic fashion, the film treated Dang Thuy Tram as a saint and cast amateurish white American actors, a move typical in Asian movies and television. Nevertheless, the movie deserved wider attention for doing what no other film had ever done, give equal screen time to Americans and Vietnamese. Unfortunately, the movie was released in Vietnam on the same weekend that Transformers 2 premiered. As the director noted ruefully: “We were crushed like a bicycle.”⁴ The metaphor is perfect: super-advanced transforming robots, starring in a movie where the human actors are inconsequential, destroy a movie that struggles to foreground the humanity of mutual enemies. Adding insult to injury, this crushing was done on home territory, where Vietnamese audiences prefer watching technically polished inhuman violence imported from abroad than a dramatically imperfect human story from home. These same Vietnamese people would, at the first opportunity, avail themselves of the most advanced mechanical transportation possible. By the millions beginning in the 1990s, they ditched the bicycle for the Honda Dream motorbike and now yearn for the automobiles at the heart of Transformers 2. Whether one’s fantasy of the good life is the two-wheeled Honda Dream or the four-wheeled American Dream, both are fantasies of consumption, cyborg fantasies of being the human cog in an industrial machine.

The power of industry and the industry of memory may seem overwhelming when one rides a bicycle, dependent on physical strength and muscle memory. The bicycle, however, does not exist only to be crushed. Americans should heed the lessons learned by the French, also convinced of their own technological superiority. French generals amassed an army in the valley of Dien Bien Phu, hoping to tempt their enemies into a battle where they would be destroyed. What the French had not anticipated was the Viet Minh’s ability to haul artillery onto the heights of the mountains that surrounded Dien Bien Phu. But, piece by piece, up those mountains on bicycles pushed by human porters, the Viet Minh transported the artillery. This insurgent army, dependent on bicycles (as well as foreign weaponry), bombarded the French war machine into defeat. In the annals of decolonization and national self-determination, this legendary battle was matched only by the myth of David and Goliath, the original example of asymmetric warfare. An army always wants to be Goliath, but the world will often cheer for David.

Thus the defeat of the French and the Americans has managed to stay in many people’s memories despite the victors not having access to powerful industries of memory. While the inhuman robots usually crush the human-powered bicycle, sometimes — rarely — the bicycle does win. In the case of the communist Vietnamese, they won partially because they fought the war on their own terrain. So much depends on terrain, including warfare and memory. Against the asymmetric warfare of an industrial giant deploying supersonic fighters, napalm, white phosphorous artillery shells, aircraft carriers, strategic bombers, herbicides, and helicopters equipped with so-called miniguns that could fire six thousand rounds per minute in a blaze of lightning and thunder — almost none of which the communist Vietnamese had, except for some fighters and missiles — the Vietnamese deployed the asymmetric warfare of guerilla insurgency. Asymmetry manifests itself mnemonically as well. Globally, the American industry of memory wins. People the world over may know the Vietnamese won the war, but they are exposed to the texture of American memory and loss via projected American memories. More importantly, the American industry of memory wins the matter of war memory even when its products do not concern the war. Obliterating most of the cinematic competition it faces, Transformers 2—or 1, or 3, or 4—performs crucial mnemonic work for American culture, distracting the world’s gaze from actual American wars through its own spectacular existence. Transformers 2 makes evident the backstory of the war and its aftermath — the triumph of inhuman capitalism, gloriously realized through the spectacle of massive machinery depicted by a cinema-industrial complex in thrall to a military-industrial complex. Together these complexes conquer new territories by inserting themselves into other countries via military bases, trade agreements, and movies, the twin-fisted punch of hard and soft power.

But the Vietnamese have a fighting chance on their own landscape, where they control the memorial apparatus of museums, monuments, schools, cinema, and media. Against foreigners, overseas Vietnamese, and its own people, the state’s industry of memory engages in asymmetric war. This is precisely why some visiting Americans feel shock when they encounter themselves as savages. They see themselves as the other, or they see themselves through the eyes of the other, a vertiginous experience. Still, the tourist, like the soldier, comes to this country at significant expense and time, versus the foreign movie-goer who, for the price of a few dollars, is exposed to American culture. Unless he chooses not to be, the Westerner is protected from the memories of others, while those others are periodically, oftentimes regularly, irradiated by Western memories whether they want to be or not.

As for scholars like me, collecting Vietnamese memories means repeated trips to Vietnam, to libraries, and to film festivals such as the one where I saw Living in Fear, the 2005 movie by the talented Bui Thac Chuyen. The plot is based on the true story of an unemployed South Vietnamese veteran in the postwar years who defuses landmines by hand, which echoes the story of Aki Ra in Cambodia. A former Khmer Rouge child soldier who turned himself into an unorthodox, self-taught one-man demining operation, Aki Ra founded the Land Mine Museum in Siem Reap. But whereas Aki Ra only had one wife, the hero of Living in Fear must support two, and after his close encounters with death, he is compelled to run home and make love to those wives. The movie combines sex and death with human feeling and drama, but beyond that, it exemplifies the industry of memory and its inequalities through the landmine as synecdoche for memory and industry. One country places landmines in another because it can, and the mined country lives with lethal memories embedded in its earth. Meanwhile, the industrial powerhouse that sows the bad seed can ignore the demand in movies such as Living in Fear that attention be paid.

Regardless of American neglect, the mined country must continue its own efforts at rebuilding a war-torn economy, from its industries to its leisure activities, which are sometimes the same, as is the case on the island of Con Son. I caught a plane for a short trip from Saigon to find quiet beaches, green mountains, and tranquil lakes. The landscape is too inviting to believe that the island will not become a tourist haven, where foreigners can snorkel, hike, get drunk, get laid, and pay an obligatory trip to one of the many moss-walled prisons, which, for now, can only be visited with a tour group. The French, who called the island Poulo Condor, originally built these prisons. After the South Vietnamese and their American advisors took over the prisons, they housed Viet Cong prisoners, both men and women. Most of the famous communist revolutionaries spent time here, and thousands of prisoners died within prison walls, including one of the most famous martyrs of all, Vo Thi Sau, the revolution’s Joan of Arc, who was executed as a teenager. One can visit her grave and comb one’s hair with plastic combs left on her tomb, an allusion to how she loved to brush her long, beautiful hair.

In these prisons, the heroism and sorrow that are fundamental to the revolutionary industry of memory are reconfigured in the preserved torture chambers and prison cells. Instead of golden statues of heroic revolutionary soldiers, one sees life-sized wax mannequins of nearly naked Vietnamese prisoners shackled or being beaten. These prisoners, also found in a more accessible place like the Hanoi Hilton, are crude, even cartoonish, which is fair, given that the torture they endured was crude and cartoonish. Americans remember the Hanoi Hilton as the prison where American pilots such as John McCain were kept and tortured, forgetting, or never knowing, that the French imprisoned Vietnamese revolutionaries first. But the Hanoi Hilton was small compared to the system of prisons on this island, which, before the jet age, was a remote island whose name must have struck fear into people’s hearts, the kind of place parents warned their disobedient children about. Con Son, the French predecessor to the American Guantanamo, was an island where terrible things happened, now reenacted through the dramatic poses and arrangements of mannequins. While the Hanoi Hilton depicts only the prisoners, here the American and South Vietnamese guards are also shown, standing aloof in guard posts, watching over prisoners at work, and pouring lime onto prisoners locked into tiger cages.

As I wander out into a prison yard, I see a scene of two men beating another, enacted on gravel. At a barred entrance to a cell, I see four men in fatigues kick and punch a half-naked, bleeding prisoner. I am watching scenes from a horror movie, captured and frozen in dioramas, as if cinema foreshadowed grisly memories of kidnapping, imprisonment, and torture. Of course these things happened first. Torture porn franchises such as Hostel and Saw and Texas Chainsaw Massacre are only stories, but a virulent, contaminated source has nurtured them. The terrors of the past that a war machine created has seeped into and infused the American unconscious. The trauma of war returns through the American industry of memory as horror movies that seem like ghosts themselves. They are bloodied and terrifying, often without history, except in cases such as George Romero’s 1968 zombie classic, Night of the Living Dead, where a white militia of good old boys wipes out the zombies in what they call a “search and destroy operation,” an unambiguous reference to the American strategy of the same name happening exactly at that time during the war. Romero understood necropolitics before Mbembe coined the term. He recognized that America needed zombies of the literal or figurative kind, the living dead whom one could kill or pacify without guilt. They are now everywhere: Hollywood has released an endless stream of zombie movies, and zombies are also the craze of television showrunners and highbrow novelists. These zombies were resurrected, unsurprisingly, in the age of the War on Terror, where they serve the same purpose they did in Night of the Living Dead, as allegories of the demonic other against whom Americans are fighting a war. But for the most part, outside of explicit allusions such as Romero’s, one has to go to this country, my birthplace, to see the torturous history of the living dead that many first glimpse in the movies, where the horrors of history have been transformed into entertainment.

While it is easy to forget foreign wars, it is not so easy to forget wars fought on one’s own territory. Reminders are everywhere — those statues, those memorials, those museums, those weapons, those graveyards, those slogans. While one might not remember history, one cannot avoid its reminder. One must willfully turn one’s eyes away, or insulate them with filters that the state provides through ready-made stories of heroism and sacrifice. Their message is that the proper position toward the venerable past is to kneel on one knee of sorrow and another of respect. In Hanoi’s Fine Arts Museum, the acknowledgment of the dead is expressed through these emotional registers, as in Nguyen Phu Cuong’s sculpture Tuong Niem, or Commemoration, its hooded maternal figure cradling a bo doi’s helmet, the mother herself absent, emptied by loss. Dang Duc Sinh’s 1984 oil painting, O moi xom, In Every Neighborhood, expresses similar sentiments by featuring three women wearing the sorrowful visages of widows or heroic mothers of the dead. While the Fine Arts Museum portrays death in a solemn and respectful fashion, elsewhere the victorious revolutionary regime cannot let go of the horror, or at least not yet. That is why the wax mannequins exist in the prison museums and in the diorama at the Son My Museum commemorating the My Lai massacre, or why photos of atrocities continue to be exhibited in numerous museums, most notoriously at the War Remnants Museum in Saigon. The state demands that its citizens remember the dead and how they died.

It is always a little disorienting, then, to leave these exhibitions of horror or even sorrow and enter the gift shop. Almost always there is a gift shop, selling the usual tourist trinkets that embody some supposed essence of the country, from lacquered paintings of young women in ao dai to dinner plates, chopsticks, opium pipes, and so on. One is also likely to encounter war memorabilia, American airplane and helicopter models sculpted from recycled Coke and beer cans, in the poor old days, or now, in the somewhat better days, made from brass. There are bullets and dog tags, advertised as the real things from the real war. These are small memories, produced on a lesser scale than what comes forth from the massive industrial production lines of nations and corporations. This is what we might think of when the term memory industry comes up — the cottage industry, the arts and crafts of the mnemonic world.

The best-known of these small memories are the ubiquitous Zippo lighters supposedly handled by a real American GI and imprinted with real GI slogans such as “Yea Though I Walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I Will Fear No Evil Because I Am the Evilest Son of a Bitch in the Valley.”⁵ The tourist who buys this kind of war remnant is presumably looking for a shred of the war’s aura. Whoever made these know that they are trading on a certain kind of authenticity when they take leftover Zippos, etch them with (in)famous GI slogans, and rough them up to give them the bruises of war and age. Cheap, mass produced, easily portable, the Zippo’s uses ranged from lighting cigarettes to torching huts to serving as the template for the American soldier’s imagination. These uses are not the only reason that the Zippo became one of the most popular symbols of the American occupation. The Zippo’s symbolic power comes from its mass-produced nature. While Ho Chi Minh is one of a kind, the Zippo is one of tens of thousands, its owner long forgotten. Its aura arises not just from the individuality of its purported owner but also from his being a member of the military’s rank and file, just like the consumer is a member of the tourist masses. Like the M-16, the Zippo is an industrial product with a memorable name, imbued with the antiheroism of slogans such as “When I Die, I Will Go to Heaven Because I Have Already Spent My Time in Hell.”

For the local craftsperson, however, the Zippo is just one more piece of American hardware to be recycled and sold to foreign tourists who deserve no better. Squeezing profits from tourists is another weapon of the weak in this asymmetric war, a sneaky tactic from a present scene that is a dark and comic repetition of the American war itself, when the grunt first faced off against the native. The native won that struggle by using the popular warfare of people’s struggle and, oftentimes, stealing the grunt’s own weapons. In the the war’s aftermath, the native faces off against the soldier’s descendant, the tourist, in an environment where a memory industry built on tourism replaces the war machine.⁶ My visit to the Plain of Jars in Laos was marked by the juncture between this memory industry and the war machine’s detritus. I flew into the small airport on a propeller-driven passenger plane carrying a multicultural contingent of U.S. Air Force medical volunteers on a humanitarian mission, clad in mufti rather than military gear. Male and female, they were mostly young, lean, pleasant, and fit, the older ones among them resembling suburban American fathers on vacation, pleasantly padded. Their forebears bombed this country, and the Plain of Jars in particular, with apocalyptic force. The enlisted man I mentioned this to did not want to talk about this history, while the clean-cut Air Force Academy graduate knew only some vague details. I wonder if they noticed the poster in the airport terminal, which advertised bracelets for peace, small things made from the metal of munitions. Is there anything more asymmetrical than air war waged against those without an air force, or a people forced to make a living by selling the fragments of bombs to those who bombed them?

A memory industry built on war might, in general, be called ironic, although greed or survival would be the more important elements. On Phonsavan’s single street, for example, there was a bar named Craters where the airmen gathered for a drink. The bar was not unique in turning the memory of massive carpet-bombing into the name for a site of rest and relaxation. This was small-scale memory work, pitching the past to those passing through, the way street vendors sold pirated copies of English-language classics about the war and these countries to tourists who wanted some education with their entertainment. At least the entrepreneurs in Saigon had been wittier and postmodern, naming their raucous, crowded, sweaty, and admittedly fun bars Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness, which the police occasionally raided to show that they were cracking down on what the government called the “social evils” of prostitution and drug use (I haunted these bars enough to witness each one being shut down by the police, who, clad in chartreuse green, win my award for the ugliest uniforms in the world). Turning horror into entertainment is a signature feature of the American industry of memory, as can be seen and heard in the “me so horny” line of dialogue from Stanley Kubrick’s jagged masterpiece Full Metal Jacket. This line inspired 2 Live Crew’s lewd, memorable rap smash “Me So Horny,” prosecuted for obscenity by Florida authorities, the irony of ironies, given how no one was prosecuted for obscenity for anything that happened during the war. Perhaps inspired by these examples, Southeast Asians have done their best to apply principles of capitalist exploitation to even the most dreadful past.

Some of the most memorable and remarked upon ways that these Southeast Asians mine the past are the tunnels and caves from where the war was fought or where civilians sought refuge from the bombing. As Mbembe says of the wars waged by necropolitical regimes, “the battlegrounds are not located solely at the surface of the earth. The underground as well as the airspace are transformed into conflict zones.”⁷ From the perspective of the emperors of the air, the subterranean is the retreat of the inhuman, where American soldiers called “tunnel rats” hunted for the human rats who lived in the tunnels, waiting to pop up from their spider holes to ambush American troops. But even the Americans grudgingly acknowledged that what they found were veritable cities, an underworld that was an uncanny reflection of the American camps above them, replete with kitchens, hospitals, bunkrooms, granaries, and the like. Perhaps these tunnels or others before them in the history of war influenced the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari when they came up with their notion of the “rhizome” to describe resistant social structures that were horizontal and root-like versus the arboreal, top-down, vertical structures of authority. War machines dislike tunnels, which literally undermine them, taking away their advantages and their pretense to humanity. The tunnel encounter, for the tunnel rat, inverts what Levinas asks for in seeing the other’s face. Instead of seeking conversation, an elaboration of shared humanity, the tunnel rat comes to kill, and comes face-to-face not only with the inhuman enemy but with his own inhumanity. Hence the terror of the tunnel for those who must go hunting in them, that they will be pried away from the armored protection of the war machines that provide an illusion of technological superiority, and through it, humanity.

For those who call the tunnels home, the experience is not necessarily inhuman or subhuman. Tunnel life becomes heroic in memory for both soldiers and civilians. The Vinh Moc tunnels near the demilitarized zone celebrates the endurance of the local civilians who hid there and rebuilt their lives underground, complete with schools and exits to the nearby beach. The most famous of the tunnel networks, at Cu Chi, two hours from Saigon by bus, were built for war and had armories and command bunkers. In the war’s aftermath, they, as well as the Vinh Moc tunnels, have become tourist attractions for both locals and foreigners. On my first visit to Cu Chi, I traveled with a popular company whose tour guide gave a rousing rendition of the heroic revolutionary struggle of the tunnel fighters. “We were victorious!” he proclaimed on the bus, fist pumping in the air. (During a rest stop, he lit a cigarette, ordered a coffee, and told me that he was a helicopter pilot for the southern army who trained in Texas). At Cu Chi, gunfire echoed through the groves above the tunnels. At a nearby shooting range, tourists were firing weapons from the war at a dollar a bullet. Another guide in green fatigues led our tour group of mostly Westerners and some locals to a spider hole from where the guerillas had once emerged to ambush Americans. One of the American tourists actually fit into the hole. Perhaps it had been widened for the American butt, like the tunnels, which, our tour guide said, had been both widened and heightened for visiting foreigners. The foreigners laughed. When the guide invited us to descend into a tunnel, the locals, although they did not laugh, declined. Only the Westerners eased down into the dank, steamy recesses, where all that could be seen were earthen walls and the sweaty buttocks of the tourist in front of you.

Crouched in that hot tunnel, amused by the experience but annoyed by the heat, I did not appreciate that the soldiers who fought here crawled in a much more claustrophobic space, without the benefit of the light bulbs illuminating my way. The earth was musty but the reek of terror had been ventilated, the darkness dispelled, the boredom forgotten. And to what end? “They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it’s not true,” Milan Kundera says of those in power. “The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy it or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past. We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and history.”⁸ In the present case, the retouched tunnels lead toward a future — there really is a light at the end, when one emerges into fresh air — and close off the past, for one cannot feel the ghosts, chased off by the electrical lighting and the curious tourists. The industry of memory’s labs dispel the ghosts of the past or tame them, as the black wall in that other nation’s white capital arguably does. The more powerful the industry of memory, the more capacity it has to amplify light and chase away shadows, to foreground the human face of the ghost and forget its inhuman face. The smaller industries of memory will try to do the same, for the weaker will also try to be more powerful than someone else, even if it is only the dead.

And yet … against the industrial memories of the great and small powers, something survives. The reason Dang Nhat Minh made his movie was that Dang Thuy Tram’s words lived in spite of the American bullet that killed her. The South Vietnamese soldier who first read her diary told his American superior, “Don’t burn it. It’s already on fire.” Every writer wants to write the book that cannot be burned, the book that is a palimpsest underneath which can be seen the shadow of a ghost. Or take the case of North Vietnamese photographer The Dinh, whose picture concludes the book Requiem, edited by Horst Faas and Tim Page to commemorate the photographers of all sides killed in the war. A howitzer intrudes on the left and points toward a jumble of crates and equipment. The barrel of the howitzer is parallel to a dead soldier, his body difficult to distinguish from the ruins, his face hidden or destroyed, one of his legs bent at the knee while the other is partially buried in the dirt. The fabric of his pants is darker than the fabric of the rest of his uniform. Over the landscape The Dinh’s shadow hovers. On the back of the only torn print of the photograph is this pencil-written obituary: “The Dinh was killed.”⁹

As Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag have observed, photographs are recordings of the dead — not the actual dead, in most cases, but the living who will eventually be dead, and who are dead for many of the photograph’s viewers. The Dinh’s photograph is haunting because it fulfills the fatal prophecy found in the photographic genre, and because it foreshadows fatality through the self-portrait of the shadow, grafted into a picture with the obscured body of the dead. During wartime, photography’s mortal power is realized most graphically because it deals with the dead and because its artists risk death. He was only one of the 135 photographers on all sides killed during the war. Requiem acknowledges that although seventy-two of the dead photographers were North Vietnamese, it is mostly the photographs of the Western and Japanese photographers that survive. The inequities of industrial memory are evident in both death and art. Westerners and Japanese could airlift their film to labs on the same day it was shot, but the film of the North Vietnamese photographers was often lost along with their lives. In The Dinh’s case, this self-portrait of a shadow, this premonition of his own ghost, is his only surviving work. The ghostly absence of the Asian photographers is even more visible in their biographies, one of the most poignant sections of the book. While substantial obituaries are devoted to the Western photographers, the words given to the South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, and especially the twenty Cambodian photographers are so brief they often amount to no more than epitaphs. One Cambodian named Leng is not unusual in having no birth or death date, his entire career described thus: “A freelancer with AP, Leng left no trace.”¹⁰

Except for the trace of his absence. One encounters the haunting absence again in a window looking down on a stairway of the Vietnamese Women’s Museum of Hanoi. In the tinted glass stands a blank space in the shape of a woman from a famous photograph, Nguyen Thi Hien, nineteen years old. The militia fighter walks away from Mai Nam’s camera, looking over a shoulder on which is slung a rifle, her hair under a conical hat. The photograph became an emblem in the world imagination of 1966 for how “even the women must fight.” But in the museum, her photo, marked by her presence, has become an absence in the form of the blank space. That absence inadvertently symbolizes how the Vietnamese Women’s Museum, crowded with words and images of the heroic lives of Vietnamese women, cannot help but be a reminder of how that heroism is far in the past. The girl in the photograph has vanished, as has the revolution itself, now only a memory, a cutout, an empty tracing in a communist state running a capitalist economy. The museum proves what Paul Ricoeur argues, that memory is presence that evokes absence. While a memory is present in our minds, it inevitably points to what is no longer there but in the past.¹¹ Industries of memory seek to turn this absent presence of memory, always and forever elusive, ghostly, invisible, and shadowy, into what one could call the present absence of characters, stories, movies, monuments, memorials. These icons assume the comforting stability of flesh, stone, metal, and image, animated by our knowledge of the absence toward which their comforting presence gestures.

The relationship of absence to presence is the invisible dimension of the asymmetry of memory, existing beside the visible dimension of great powers dominating smaller ones. Whether a country is great or small, each one’s war machine and industry of memory seeks to establish control over memory itself. But what is stronger in this asymmetrical relationship, industrial memory or the absent presence of the past? The war machine or the ghost? The war machine seeks to banish ghosts or tame them, but unruly specters abound, if one looks carefully, if one recognizes that spirits exist to be seen by some and not by others. I encountered them in Laos, a country whose mere mention brought light to the eyes of the many Vietnamese who spoke of it as a paradise, so peaceful and calm. In some ways Laos appears to be a satellite of Vietnam, at least in the official Laotian industry of memory, which commemorates Vietnam as the country’s greatest ally. Prominent place is given to the Vietnamese flag and Ho Chi Minh in Vientiane’s museums, which follow much the same narrative as Vietnamese ones. Under the bright lights of industrial memory found in museums such as the Lao People’s Army History Museum, all white walls and chrome handrails, the presence of ghosts is weak. Their presence was likewise vague in the far caves of Vieng Xai in northwest Laos, at least in the daytime hours when I visited. The Pathet Lao took shelter here in a vast and impressive cave complex, greater than anything found in Vietnam, a subterranean metropolis replete with a massive amphitheater carved from rock. Under American bombardment, with the smells of humanity and fear, with the dust and earth falling on one’s head, with electricity faltering, the caves must have been much less tranquil than they are for the tourist whose greatest challenge is adjusting his camera for dim lighting.

Hewn from rock and fashioned into a tourist site, the Vieng Xai caves are industrial memory on a grand scale, a successful attempt to conquer the past, to banish the ghosts. Standing on the amphitheater’s quiet stage, it seemed to me that we did build these memorials to forget, as scholar James Young would have it.¹² Many of us want to forget the complexities of the past, as well as its horrors. We prefer a clean, well-lit place that features the orderly kinds of memory offered in the temples of the state, where the line between good and evil is clear, where stories have discernible morals, and where we stand on humanity’s side, the caves within us brightly lit. But even as we memorialize the dead, perhaps what we want to forget most of all is death. We want to forget the ghosts we will become, we want to forget that the hosts of the dead outnumber the ranks of the living, we want to forget that it was the living, just like us, who killed the dead.¹³ Against this asymmetry of the dead and the living, the industries of memory of countries large and small, of powers great and weak, strive against ghosts. These industries render them meaningful and understandable when possible through stories, eliminating them when necessary. In most cases, though, the industries of memory avoid them. The number of places where the living remember the dead must surely be outnumbered by the places where the dead are forgotten, where not even a stone marks history’s horrors, where there are, Ricoeur says, “witnesses who never encounter an audience capable of listening to them or hearing what they have to say.”¹⁴ But what draws our attention are those memorials and monuments, those obelisks and stelae, those parade grounds and battlefields, those movies and fictions, those anniversary days and moments of silence, those outnumbered spaces where the living can command the dead.

Sometimes the ghosts assert their authority, in consecrated spaces of memory yet to be fully industrialized. I did not feel ghosts at Vieng Xai but I did on my way to those caves, on the journey from Phonsavan, when my driver told me I should stop at Tham Phiu. Here, in another mountain cave, an American rocket strike had killed dozens of civilians. This much I knew from my guidebook. I had not intended to stop here, for I was not moved by the prospect of yet another cave of horrors, after the many caves and tunnels that I had already seen. But it was on the way, so why not? There was an exhibition hall, but fortunately I did not see it on my way to the cave. Missing the exhibit meant that I missed the official narrative that would try to tell me what to feel, and what it told me was not surprising, about the innocent civilians and the heartless Americans. The stairs and the handrail were signs enough that the cave had been prepared for tourists, though I was the only one of that kind at the moment. The four schoolgirls I encountered on the way up the mountain were not tourists but locals, making their way leisurely, giggling and snapping pictures of themselves with their phones. I made it to the cave before them, a black mouth through which a truck could be driven. Daylight threw itself a few dozen feet into the recesses, where there was no artificial lighting. There were no steps, no rails, no ropes to guide me over rough ground, unlike the killing caves of Battambang, in Cambodia. Nor, as in Battambang, was there a memorial or a shrine; nor pictures, photographs, placards, or memorials; nor a hungry boy asking to be a tour guide. At Tham Phiu, I was alone in a cave where the local industry of memory, already fragile, stopped at the threshold. I made my way to where light met its opposite and I looked into the darkness. What had it been like with hundreds of people, the noise and the stench, the dimness and the terror? What was in the void now? I stood on the side of presence, facing an absence where the past lived, populated with ghosts, real or imagined, and in that moment I was afraid.

Then I heard the laughter. The girls stood at the cave’s mouth, profiles outlined by sunlight, making sure the shadows did not touch even their toes. Turning my back on all that remained unseen behind me, I walked toward their silhouettes.