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The Ghosts of the American War in Vietnam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Heonik Kwon
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Abstract

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The spiritual remains of the unknown war dead take on a vital presence in popular Vietnamese religious culture and their everyday ritual life. They are also a powerful means of historical narration and reflection in contemporary Vietnam. This article introduces some of their vigorous actions and claims for social justice, and explores how we can make sense of their existence in the terms of sociology of religion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , January 2008 , e23
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2008

References

Notes

[1] Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (New York: Willey, 1996 [1841]), p. 618.

[2] Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War (1994) and Duong Thu Huong's Novel Without a Name (1995) are good examples.

[3] Hue-Tam Ho Tai, “Monumental Ambiguity: The State Commemoration of Ho Chi Minh,” in K. W. Taylor and J. K. Whitmore, eds., Essays into Vietnamese Pasts (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1995), p. 273; David Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 285.

[4] Patricia M. Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 168.

[5] Shaun K. Malarney, Culture, Ritual, and Revolution in Vietnam (Surrey: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), pp. 108-47.

[6] Ibid., pp. 199-206.

[7] Hy Van Luong, “Economic Reform and the Intensification of Rituals in Two Northern Vietnamese Villages, 1980-90,” in Borje Ljunggren, ed., The Challenge of Reform in Indochina (Cambridge: Harvard Institute for International Development, 1993).

[8] George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

[9] James W. Trullinger, Village at War: An Account of Conflict in Vietnam (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 116-25; Heonik Kwon, After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 23-59.

[10] Hue-Tam Ho Tai, “Commemoration and Community,” in Hue-Tam Ho Tai, ed., The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 228.

[11] Kwon, After the Massacre.

[12] In official Vietnamese literature, the American War is called chien tranh chong My cuu nuoc (“The War of National Salvation Against America”) and the “French War” khang chien chong Phap (“The Resistance War Against France”). Although these two wars are understood as forming a continuum, the official term for the American War conveys the connotation of a full-scale war waged between sovereign states as well as the objective of national unification.

[13] Marilyn Young, “Epilogue: The Vietnam War in American Memory,” in M. E. Gettleman, J. Franklin, M. B. Young, and H. B. Franklin, eds., Vietnam and America (New York: Grove, 1995), p. 516.

[14] Of course, “the Vietnam ghost” or “the ghost of the Vietnam War” mentioned in US media is not the same as the ghosts of war discussed here. The latter are not merely an allegorical device for historical analogy, invoked to deliver the meaning of a new historical event against the similar or contrasting background of a familiar old one. Ghosts in Vietnam are primarily of concrete historical identities, whose existence, although belonging to a past era, is believed to continue to the present in an empirical, rather than allegorical, way. Michael Bibby, “The Post-Vietnam Condition,” in M. Bibby, ed., The Vietnam War and Postmodernity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), p. 149; Marilyn Young, “In the Combat Zone,” Radical History Review 85 (2003), pp. 253-64.

[15] Young, “Epilogue: The Vietnam War in American Memory,” p. 516.

[16] Jonathan Schell, The Real War (New York: Pantheon, 1988), pp. 193-204.

[17] Truong Chinh, Primer for Revolt (New York: Praeger, 1963), pp. 102-17.

[18] The Vietnamese phrase is: “Tinh quan dan nhu ca voi nuoc,” meaning “The affectionate relationship between the army and the people is like what fish feel for water.” In popular revolutionary slogans, the doctrine took on a more vivid image: “Without water, fish die. Without fish, the water is spoiled.”

[19] “Pump out the water and catch the fish” was one of the informal instructions given to foreign troops deployed to Vietnam. Village massacres, such as the incident in My Lai in March 1968, were widespread in the five coastal provinces of central Vietnam in 1966-1969. The South Korean forces as well as US troops were responsible for these atrocities, many of which were the result of rational and systematic military planning (within the moral and structural contradictions of the foreign intervention in Vietnam) rather than of a breakdown in military command and morale. See Heonik Kwon, “An Anatomy of US and South Korean Massacres in the Vietnamese Year of the Monkey,” available at Japan Focus.

[20] Georges Condominas, We Have Eaten the Forest: Story of a Montagnard Village in the Central Highlands of Vietnam (New York: Kodansha, 1994), p. xiii.

[21] Lady Borton, After Sorrow: An American among the Vietnamese (New York: Kodansha, 1995), p. 16; Malarney, Culture, Ritual, and Revolution in Vietnam, p. 180; Derek Summerfield, “The Social Experience of War and Some Issues for the Humanitarian Field,” in P. J. Bracken and C. Petty, eds., Rethinking the Trauma of War (New York: Free Association Books, 1998), p. 26.

[22] Huu Ngoc, Dictionnaire de la culture traditionnelle du Vietnam (Hanoi: The Gioi, 1997), pp. 147–48; Huynh Sanh Thong, ed., The Heritage of Vietnamese Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 25-30; Nguyen Khac Vien, Nguyen Van Hoan, and Huu Ngoc, eds., Anthologie de la literature vietnamienne, book 2 (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2000), pp. 200-6; Phan Ke Binh, Viêt-Nam phong-tuc (Moeurs et coutumes du Vietnam), book 2, trans. by N. Nouis-Hénard (Paris: Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient, 1980), pp. 134-35.

[23] Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think (London: Allen and Unwin, 1926).

[24] Sherry B. Ortner, “The Foundings of Sherpa Religious Institutions,” in E. Ohnuki-Tierney, ed., Culture Through Time: Anthropological Approaches (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 89.

[25] The Vietnamese conceptualize am and duong as a relation of mimetic alterity. They have many idioms describing the two cosmological spheres as mirroring each other, but there are an equal number of poignant expressions about their being contradictory.

[26] Michael Fischer, “Ethnicity and the Arts of Memory,” in J. Clifford and G. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 199.

[27] Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 143-9.

[28] Ibid., p. 145.

[29] Malarney, Culture, Ritual, and Revolution in Vietnam, p. 179.

[30] Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 7.

[31] Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. K. E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995 [1915]), p. 280.

[32] Ibid., p. 277.

[33] Ibid., p. 276.

[34] Maurice Bloch, Placing the Dead: Tombs, Ancestral Villages, and Kinship Organization in Madagascar (New York: Seminar Press, 1971), pp. 37-72.

[35] Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

[36] Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 164-65; also Stephen F. Teiser, The Ghost Festival in Medieval China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 217-21.

[37] Edmund Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma (London: Bell, 1954), pp. 12-3.

[38] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 75-9.

[39] Edward S. Casey, Spirit and Soul: Essays in Philosophical Psychology, 2nd ed. (Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, 2004), p. 324.

[40] Gerald C. Hickey, Village in Vietnam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 121.

[41] Léopold Cadière, Croyances et pratiques religieuses des viêtnamiens, vol. 2 (Saigon: Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient, 1957), p. 59.

[42] For a complete text of Nguyen Du's “Calling All Wandering Souls” (called Chieu Hon, Chieu Hon Ca, or Van Chieu Hon), see Huynh Sanh Thong, The Heritage of Vietnamese Poetry, pp. 25-30. The abbreviated popular version cited above is from Tan Viet, Tap Van Cung Gia Tien (The prayer book for ancestor worship), (Hanoi : Nha suat ban van hoa dan toc, 1994), pp. 71-5.

[43] Cited from Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, eds., Death and the Regeneration of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 15-16; see also Bloch, Placing the Dead, pp. 164-65.

[44] Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 132, 140-1.

[45] Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand (London: Cohen and West, 1960 [1909]), p. 86.

[46] Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, p. 7.

[47] See Philip Taylor, Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), p. 206; Thien Do, “Unjust-death Deification and Burnt Offering: Towards an Integrative View of Popular Religion in Contemporary Southern Vietnam,” in P. Taylor, ed., Modernity and Re-enchantment: Religion in Post-revolutionary Vietnam (Singapore: ISEAS, 2007).

[48] Some readers may wonder whether death in a civilian massacre such as that in My Lai should be considered politically unambiguous death whose meaning is close to the heroic death of revolutionary combatants given the fact that they were killed by enemy troops and also that the state has taken the initiative to commemorate their sacrifice. In local political reality, however, civilian victims take on myriad unsettling politically ambiguous identities. In My Lai as well as in other villages affected by large-scale killings, some officials hold the view that the mass graves of the victims include both those who supported the revolution and those who did not, and even those who they characterize as phan dong (counterrevolutionary). In the context of an unconventional “people's war” and a violent bipolar conflict waged within the village, there are no politically pure civilian mass graves if purity is defined in the logic of conventional warfare.

[49] This statement does not account for the significant informal practices of death commemoration developed among the villagers during the postwar years. See Kwon, After the Massacre, pp. 115-19.

[50] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 332.

[51] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. P. Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), p. 17.