On the last day of April 1975, North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Quang Than crashed his tank through the wrought-iron gates of the Presidential Palace in the centre of Saigon, marking the end of what is called the American War in Vietnam and the Vietnam War everywhere else. Although he could not have known it at the time, his iconic action also marked the beginning of the war being mythologised in the country that lost it, and instrumentalised by its victors.
In his seminal book “Mythologies” Roland Barthes explains that myth is by its very nature historical, in that it is backward-looking, but at the same time it is apolitical as its purpose is to give ‘a historical intention a natural justification’, to present historical and social realities as nature.
Of the plethora of American Vietnam movies which came out in the 1970s and 1980s, the film that is widely regarded as having stood the test of time, both commercially and critically, is also the one that best exemplifies the myth-making Barthes was writing about: Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Loosely based on the Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness the movie tells the story of Captain Willard who travels deep into Cambodia with orders to assassinate Colonel Kurtz who has gone rogue commanding a shadow army of local tribesmen. The movie undoubtedly is a cinematic masterpiece. The journey up the river becomes a journey back in time from hyper realistic war scenes at the beginning to the allegorical tableaus in Kurtze’s jungle hide-out at the end. Scenes like the helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village to the soundtrack of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, the Playboy Playmates entertaining GI’s at a remote military outpost, the psychedelic spectacle of slaughtering a buffalo intercut with the assassination of Kurtz, have seared themselves into our collective cultural memory.
At the same time Apocalypse Now is deeply reactionary and racist. At a most basic level, the Vietnamese in it are simply expendable props to Coppola’s vision of how war damages the Western warrior. Their function is to get blown up or shot. They are literally canon-fodder. Barthes famously declared that a myth is not a concept or idea, but a message. Here it is delivered by Colonel Kurtz, played by an overweight and bald Marlon Brando, sweating profusely and muttering ‘The horror, the horror’. War is not the result of historical forces, but a pre-historical spectacle that turns men into beasts.
This constituted a fundamental shift from the position of the progressive left in the 1960s. Then, the Vietnam War served as a foil for hopes of revolutionary liberation, with Che Guevara urging to ‘Create one, two, three Vietnams’ and 1968 demonstrators chanting ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’ while charging police lines. It was well-intentioned, if uninformed of the complex origins of a conflict that was as much a civil war as it was an attempt by the United States and its allies at imposing American hegemonial power.
The origin of the Vietnamese War, also referred to as the second Indochina War, can be traced back to the separation of the country following the crushing defeat of the French colonial forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 – the end of the first Indochina War which started with Ho Chi Minh’s August Revolution in1946. The Geneva Conference in 1954, designed to deal with the fall-out of the end of French colonial rule, decreed for the country to be temporarily separated at the 17th parallel with free elections to follow. The communist forces under Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Minh, took power in the north. The south was governed by a regime led by Catholic strongman Ngo Dinh Diem and later a number of army heads, all propped up financially and militarily by the United States. The propaganda campaign by the south and its allies around the time of partition triggered an exodus of about one million refugees, nicknamed the “54 Generation”. About 60-80% of Catholics, fearing religious persecution, as well as up to 300, 000 Vietnamese connected to the French colonial forces fled to South Vietnam with the help of the French and American navy.
In an era of Cold War paranoia, exemplified by the so-called “Domino Theory” – suggesting that if one South-East Asian country fell to Communism, its neighbours were destined to follow – an election in which Hi Chi Minh’s communists were likely to win, was never going to happen. Instead, the US steadily increased its military presence, culminating in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the exact circumstances of which are now widely disputed. At the time, the supposed naval confrontation between a north Vietnamese torpedo boat and an American destroyer served as welcome pretext for the US to escalate the war culminating in more than half a million soldiers being stationed in Vietnam in 1969 and fighting alongside the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). In the end, fifty-eight thousand American soldiers died, compared to a staggering total loss of life of about three million Vietnamese. Over a million Vietnamese tried to flee the country by boat in the two decades after 1975. About 800,000 resettled around the world, many of them in Australia, while 200, 000 to 400,000 are thought to have perished at sea.
Vietnam suffered a bitter victory from which it took the country decades to recover. Much of its infrastructure had been destroyed and an economic embargo, put in place by the United States as an act of revenge for the humiliating loss it had experienced, kept the country in abject poverty for the two decades after the war had officially ended. The embargo was finally lifted in 1994, five years after the end of the Cold War, and since then Vietnam has worked hard to shake off the legacy of the war and rejoin the international community. Now the country has become both a low-cost manufacturing hub and a desirable tourist destination.
It has often been said that Vietnam is more than the war, and that is of course true. It is a welcoming country of natural beauty with a rich history and culture. However, it is equally true that Vietnam cannot be understood without a sense of the legacy of the war. In his book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Pulitzer-prize winning author and academic Viet Thanh Nguyen reminds us ‘that all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.’ In a country in which every single family has been touched by the war in one way or another, uncoupling its violence from the historical conditions that gave rise to it, like in the mythologies of Western popular culture, was never an option. The ‘sorrows of war’, to borrow the title of the famous Vietnamese novel by Bao Ninh, might not be widely discussed with visitors but they are deeply embedded in personal memories both in Vietnam and within the Vietnamese diaspora: for those who stayed, there is the pain of a victory that carried an immeasurable human cost, and for those who left, there is the trauma of loss and dispossession.
The country is dotted by war memorials, martyr’s cemeteries and an extraordinary number of small, local military museums displaying the hardware that was used to achieve victory. The pain the war has caused is mainly confined to the private realm, though. In the public domain, the Vietnam War has been instrumentalised both politically and commercially. As Vietnam celebrates the 50th anniversary of the end of the war with military parades and TV specials, the official version of history comes to the fore – a celebration of patriotism and resilience, a hero narrative of achieving national independence, a David and Goliath struggle of a small country defeating the might of the super-power that is the United States in a morally just war. It is a true, if incomplete story. It is also a necessary one, given that in the absence of free elections, the communist government still derives much of its legitimacy through its role in the two Indochina Wars for independence.
At the same time, the legacy of the war has also been monetised. Street vendors have been selling fake engraved GI zippo lighters since the country opened up to tourists in the 1990s. For equally as long a time tours for Western tourists to the so-called demilitarized zone just south of the 17th parallel, which ironically saw the heaviest fighting, have been offered. As the tourist industry in Vietnam has become more sophisticated, an amusement park version of the conflict has developed playing to the ghoulish fascination with a war in which the vast majority of visitors had no personal investment. In Hanoi Apocalypse Now was a bar in which the ceiling was obscured by camouflage netting, the DJ booth above the small dance floor was a helicopter fuselage, and the walls were adorned with assorted war paraphernalia. In Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City in 1975, the Cu Chi Tunnels, which served as hide-away and military base for communist insurgents, are one of the most popular tourist attractions. Now widened in places to accommodate the bodies of large Western tourists, tours also include a visit to the shooting range where for less than three dollars per bullet visitors can fire an M16, all in the name of providing an immersive experience of history.
This aspect of the country’s culture of remembrance might be considered bad taste, unbecoming attempts at educating visitors, or an illustration of the famed entrepreneurial spirit and pragmatism of the Vietnamese people. But, who is to pass judgement? As it is universally known, to represent history remains, as always, the privilege of the victor.