Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (11 page)

The kind of antiwar sentiment that keeps others in their (innocent) place also manages to keep the (guilty) West’s upper hand above the (pitiful) Rest. This maneuver toward continued superiority, through being able to feel guilt, and made the center of attention, is staged through Western dramas of self-flagellation. Thus, much of the American artistic and cultural work about the Vietnam War, even as it engages in anti-American criticism, places Americans firmly and crudely at the story’s center. Exhibit one: Brian de Palma’s film,
Casualties of War
, which depicts the true story of American soldiers who kidnap, gang rape, and murder a young Vietnamese woman. The result, cinematically, is a horrific rendition of victimization, where both the soldiers and de Palma brutalize the Vietnamese woman and silence her for good. Seen in one way, de Palma’s vision of the Vietnamese as victim forces viewers to confront what the journalist Nick Turse argues was standard American policy: “kill anything that moves.”
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But seen another way, de Palma’s story is not about the Vietnamese at all; it is about American guilt only, played out over a poor victim. He would go on to make
Redacted
, also based on a true story about American soldiers in Iraq who kidnap, gang rape, and kill an Iraqi girl. The movie not only repeats the graphic victimization, but also implies that the war in Iraq repeats the war in Vietnam. In both movies, the victim elicits pity and sympathy, but is silenced. Her lack of a voice allows Americans to talk on her behalf. She and all the others like her are transformed into perpetual victims interchangeable with their traumas, visible to Americans only when they stimulate American guilt.
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As victims, or as villains and revolutionary heroes, these others are never granted full subjectivity by the West, unlike those Westerners who hate them or sympathize with them.

An ethics of recognition involves a change in how we see the other, and in how we see ourselves as well, especially in relation to the other. “Ethics is an optics,” as Levinas argues, one intimately tied to war, violence, and the perception of the other.
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For Levinas, the “face of the Other” can either incite us to violence or invoke goodness and the possibility of justice.
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“Power, by essence murderous of the other, becomes faced with the other and ‘against all good sense,’ the impossibility of murder, the consideration of the other, or justice [
sic
].”
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He implies that the face of the Other—the sign of otherness itself—is found on actual others such as the widow, the stranger, and the orphan; we might say that the face of the other is found also on the slave, the refugee, the guerrilla, the enemy. This distinction between the other, who is a real person, versus the Other—a difficult philosophical concept expressing that which is prior to and beyond our selves—is the distinction Ricoeur glosses over when he says that memory is always for the other, always for justice. When speaking of justice, neither he nor Levinas are much concerned with actual others, despite briefly naming them as categories, in the case of Levinas. To deal with actual others, we would have to confront their lives, their cultures, their particularities, their names, and so on. In doing so, we would see that they are, like ourselves, generally self-interested. Their self-interest brings with it the uneasy, contradictory contaminations of worldly politics and histories.

Thus, while Ricoeur assumes that ethical memory is always oriented toward justice and the other, he avoids the question of what happens when competing claims to justice exist. Competing claims to justice always exist in regard to any contested event, such as war and its aftermath, but Ricoeur is not explicit about adjudicating justice, or at least the dirty, impure, pragmatic justice that actual others may care about. He is also silent on another, related question: if we deem some memories to be ethical, then must conflicting ones be unethical? Many on opposing sides of memory, presumably most, consider themselves ethical in regards to their remembrance of the past, although such subjective feeling does not mean they are indeed ethical. Implied in Ricoeur, and more explicit in Levinas, is the idea that these worldly claims to ethics and justice among actual others belongs in the realm of what Levinas calls “totality.” War, violence, and self-interest rule in totality, which is where we struggle for “freedom” at the expense of the other, whom we wish to turn into the “same.”
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For Levinas, the face of the Other belongs to “infinity,”
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where “the force of the Other is already and henceforth moral.”
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For Levinas and Ricoeur—and for Butler, too, who draws from Levinas—the ethical orientation and meaning of justice is not in dispute, for ethics and justice are always oriented toward others and an always-vanishing otherness, not toward the self or the same.
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The uncompromising, ethical demand for justice is inspiring and points toward the utopian horizon of a time when reconciliation, hospitality, and peace—all without limitations or compromises—is possible. But as Levinas says, and as Derrida says after him, and as so many of Derrida’s followers have repeated, that time is a future always yet “to come,” arriving under the sign of the Other.
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What is to be done in the present, with actual others, where the struggle over ethics and justice is often tied to people’s deeply rooted sense of past recriminations, where any ethical achievement will be inevitably compromised, where any act of justice has a limit, where small wars and total war continue to be fought? In this worldly realm of totality, many feel that they are the ones for whom justice needs to be done, even if they are the ones who invaded, conquered, or occupied. An ethics of recognition aims not only at the utopian world of infinity but also at this disagreeable and dirty world of totality, toward what the self has done, and the conditions that make those actions possible. Recognition draws on the visual language that Levinas uses when he thinks of ethics as optics, a way of seeing anew—in this case, seeing what we are capable of as individuals and collectives, given our role in creating the conditions for individual action. Without the latter kind of panoramic recognition, what Butler calls a reframing and what one might colloquially call seeing the bigger picture, the danger is that blame and responsibility would fall only on the self and the individual, rather than on societies, cultures, industries, states, and war machines.

Nevertheless, ethical recognition is oftentimes intimate rather than panoramic, explicitly about individuals, beginning from face-to-face confrontation, particularly at the moment of violence. Ethical recognition’s visual dimension is matched by trauma’s visual shock, the sight of horrible things leaving trauma “stored there in your eyes,” as Michael Herr says.
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The killer, or even the witness to killing, is traumatized by the act of killing, especially the most intimate kinds where the victim’s face can be seen. Long-distance killing by artillery and missiles does not have the commensurate effect on gunners, pilots, and bombardiers as killing someone with a knife, a gun, or perhaps a drone, when the killer can see the face of the one being killed.
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The face of the other returns to haunt the killer, as in
Novel without a Name
, where Duong Thu Huong describes how the war dead “would never leave us, those faces … accusatory, demanding justice.”
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Perhaps that is why, in the republican cemetery outside of Saigon, somebody scratched out the eyes and faces of the South Vietnamese dead.

As for rape, it cannot be conducted except on face-to-face terms, which is one reason why it is traumatic for its victims, and perhaps for its perpetrators; it’s hard to say about the latter, since so few admit to rape, while many will admit to killing. The admission to rape is one of the most striking and disturbing parts of Larry Heinemann’s
Close Quarters
. Claymore Face’s nickname is telling, especially if we think, as Levinas does, that “violence can only aim at a face.”
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Her acne-scarred visage is ruined as if blasted by a claymore mine, an antipersonnel device that spews deadly bursts of pellets. Already defaced by the Marines through the image and language of her nickname, she will be defaced again by their choice to orally rape her. What happens to her, and what the reader feels about her fate, illustrates the claim by Levinas about the face “making murder possible and impossible” (we could substitute rape for murder, since rape is a violent act on a continuum with murder).
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On the one hand, her name evokes the face of the other as it incites the murderous, sexual, and industrial violence of the American military machine, embodied in the claymore mine and the Marines. On the other hand, her face should make murder or rape impossible, at least for those readers who feel rage, grief, or at least discomfort at what they have witnessed. That the face of the other makes murder and rape both possible and impossible shows that we who see the other as human or inhuman are ourselves both human and inhuman. We are tempted to identify with the other and also to eliminate the other, the two impulses able to exist in the same person, and certainly in the same culture.

The tendency to remember only the just, ethical part of ourselves that identifies with the other, and forget the unjust, unethical part which would kill the other, can be seen in yet another comforting cliché of memory: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
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Milan Kundera’s oft-quoted words are a beautiful statement concerning the human will. Everyone who agrees with Kundera identifies with man and memory against power and forgetting. The opposition, however, is false, beginning with its separation of man from power, with man on the side of “memory,” while power is interested in “forgetting.” Perhaps true power does not reside with any individual, as the philosopher Michel Foucault claims, instead circulating beyond the grasp of any individual, so that “power is everywhere.”
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But even on Foucault’s terms, man as a whole is inextricably intertwined with power. Notions of man or humanity are constituted through power, through the ability of some to claim their humanity (while denying the humanity of others). Outside of Foucault’s concerns, individuals do commit acts of power, and the state or the group that abuses power and wishes to erase the traces of its abusiveness is composed of individuals. Man, individual or collective, is just as interested in forgetting what he has done as he is in remembering what was done to him. And the powerful are not only interested in forgetting whom they have abused but also in remembering what they have accomplished. Man is ever and always implicated in power, and no one is innocent except the infant and the most abject victim. Power must be used, and the only question is whether it will be used ethically. Kundera’s epigram turns power into something that can only be abused, even as it foregrounds the struggle against power, which can itself only be a form of power. Rather than retreat from our implication in power, we should consider exercising power as a necessary action in need of ethical principles that look beyond the idealizations of heroes and villains, good and bad, and us and them. With neither ethical principles nor an awareness of our implication in power, we are tempted, as in Kundera’s epigram, to take up the humanist cry of remembering humanity against an inhuman state, conveniently forgetting that an inhuman state would not exist without the inhumanity within man, and vice versa. The state, of course, is us.

If we cannot recognize our ability to use and abuse power, then we make it easier to see ourselves purely as victims. Even more, we are able to justify vengeance against those who we believe have done harm to us. It is no coincidence that Kundera makes his claim in a Cold War environment, where his anticommunist statement circulates as cliché in an anticommunist world that cannot see itself as able to abuse power, unlike the communist world. The stereotypical, reassuring dynamic of memory and forgetting, of (free) man against the amnesiac state and its abuse of power, is inseparable from the Cold War climate, where trite claims make us feel warm and fuzzy about how we are on the side of memory and liberation, incapable of victimization. The War on Terror inherits these claims and the associated logic of seeing ourselves only as victims, as Americans did after 9/11. In one frame, it is true that Americans were victims. In another frame, as Butler argues, this point of view isolated 9/11 from the complicated history preceding it and justified unleashing inhuman acts of war by the United States on those deemed as enemies. But an ethics of recognition should apply not only to Americans; it should also apply to America’s enemies or perceived enemies, who also see themselves as victims. Any side in a conflict needs the optical character recognition provided by this ethics, the ability to see not only the flaws of our enemies and others but our own fundamentally flawed character. Without this mutual recognition, a genuine reconciliation will be difficult to achieve.

Perhaps such an ethics of recognition would lead only to retribution or resignation. Retribution can be seen in how some Americans in the postwar era learned that what they needed to do was to “empathize with the enemy,” in the words of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
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The implication is that such a mode of empathy helps us understand our other better in order to control him (or kill him). Thus, the counterinsurgency field manual for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was written by General David Petraeus, who drew on his experiences from the war in Vietnam to refine military techniques and to encourage greater cultural sensitivity among American forces toward the peoples of the lands they occupied. For Americans, multiculturalism at home finds an overseas corollary via culturally sensitive warfare. In both cases, studying difference and understanding the other are instrumental: they serve the purpose of domesticating others and rendering them harmless. As for resignation, it is the sense that if we are indeed human and inhuman, then nothing can be done about the inhumanities we commit. Resignation takes the form of inaction, which is the most common way by which those who see themselves as human condone inhuman behavior.