Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (21 page)

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.
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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.”
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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?”
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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.
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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.”
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Black soldiers fought in American wars, and now, “America, we are simply asking you to guarantee our freedom.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.