10 - The Strategic Concerns of a Regional Power

Summary

The overwhelming proportion of what has been written and recorded about the Vietnam War has been about America's war in Vietnam. Given the size, the significance, and the cost of America's commitment, this is understandable enough, but it has two unfortunate outcomes concerning the way in which Australia's involvement in the war is remembered. First, it means that it is all too easy for Americans and other non-Australians to read any number of books about the war and, unless one's eye is caught by a minor footnote, to remain quite unaware that Australia was even involved in the war. The commitment is remembered in diplomatic and defense circles in Washington - not an unimportant point, given Australia's motives for participation - but otherwise probably few Americans are conscious that Australians fought alongside Americans in this as in every other major war this century. And few from other countries are aware that the United States had a willing ally in Australia during this most controversial of conflicts.

The second misperception concerns Australians themselves. Most Australians are generally aware that their country was involved in the war, but they are in danger of losing sight of the distinctiveness of that experience, for many Australians now receive most of their images of the war from American sources. In this, perhaps the only war of which the history has been written predominantly by the losers, there has been a flood of material relating and interpreting the American experience, ranging from works of meticulous scholarship to Rambo movies. Amid the plethora of history books, memoirs, novels, television series, documentaries, Hollywood movies, and comics, Australians are coming to assume that Australia’s Vietnam story was essentially identical to that of the United States, albeit a little less severe and more slowly paced.