Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (43 page)

43
. Sebald quoted in Schwartz,
The Emergence of Memory
, loc. 591–93.

44
. Panh and Bataille,
The Elimination
, Kindle edition, loc. 1547.

45
. Kundera,
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
, 85–87.

46
. Levinas,
Totality and Infinity
, 303.

47
. Ibid., “the Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which God is revealed” (79).

48
. Ibid., 261.

49
. Ibid., 233.

50
. Ibid., 71.

51
. Ibid., 51.

4. ON WAR MACHINES

1
. Nietzsche,
On the Genealogy of Morals
, 497.

2
. Sebald,
On the Natural History of Destruction
, 89.

3
. Herr,
Dispatches
, 260.

4
. Rowe, “ ‘Bringing It All Back Home,’ ” 197.

5
. The album is Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut album. The rock star is Dave Navarro of Jane’s Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. A video of the MTV Cribs episode can be seen on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXJVxwAdOUg
.

6
. Sturken,
Tangled Memories
, 8.

7
. Farocki,
Inextinguishable Fire
.

8
. An account of the work of and difficulties faced by North Vietnamese photographers can be found in
Requiem
, edited by Faas and Page.

9
. Williams,
Marxism and Literature
, 131–32.

10
. Marx and Engels,
The German Ideology
, 64.

11
. On technologies of memory and this war, see Sturken,
Tangled Memories
, 9–10.

12
. Iyer,
Video Night in Kathmandu
, 3.

13
. See “Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy” (no author) and Calverley, “Next Generation War Games.”

14
. Bergson, in
Matter and Memory
, speaks of how “representation is there, but always virtual” (28), while our perceptions are “interlaced with memories” whose existence is implied as virtual, for “a memory … only becomes actual borrowing the body of some perception into which it slips” (72).

15
. Makuch, “Destiny Reaches 16 Million Registered Users, Call of Duty Franchise Hits $11 Billion.”

16
. See Keen,
Empathy and the Novel.

17
. Grossman in
On Killing
lays particular blame on video games for desensitizing children toward violence. His stance of moral outrage at video games obscures the more disturbing reality that it is the war machine that produces video games and which encourages violence in children through a lifetime barrage of messages concerning patriotism, nationalism, the evil of unknowable others, the holiness of the Second Amendment, and so on.

18
. Apostol,
The Gun Dealers’ Daughter
, 122.

19
. The evidence of American and other tourist reactions is found in the guest books available in many museums, which invite visitors to record their reactions and sentiments. See Laderman’s
Tours of Vietnam
for a look at some of these American tourist reactions to the War Remnants Museum.

20
. See Becker, “Pilgrimage to My Lai,” for one account of this kind of journey.

21
. For accounts of American veterans and their returns to Vietnam, including their encounters with Vietnamese memorials and memories, see Bleakney,
Revisiting Vietnam
.

22
. McCarthy,
The Seventeenth Degree
, 268.

23
. Irwin, “Viet Reparations Ruled Out.”

24
. Johnson uses the phrase “empire of bases” several times, as a core concept of his argument, throughout
The Sorrows of Empire
.

25
. Coppola delivered these lines at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979, a moment recorded in his wife Eleanor Coppola’s documentary
Hearts of Darkness
.

26
. Baudrillard,
Simulacra and Simulation
, 59.

27
. Herr,
Dispatches
, 160

28
. Swofford,
Jarhead
, 6–7.

29
. Appy,
Patriots
, 216.

30
. Karlin, Khuê, and Vu, eds.,
The Other Side of Heaven
, 11.

31
. Fitzgerald in
Fire in the Lake
discusses the American military’s use of “Indian country” to describe areas outside of their control, 368.

32
. Virilio,
War and Cinema
, 26.

33
. Trinh, “All-Owning Spectatorship.”

34
. Espiritu,
Body Counts
, 83.

35
. Chin and Chan, “Racist Love.”

36
. “Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy at the Conference on Vietnam Luncheon in the Hotel Willard, Washington, D.C.”

37
. See Kim’s
Ends of Empire
for an accounting of how Asia and Asian Americans have been shaped by American Cold War conflicts and policies.

38
. Baudrillard,
Simulacra and Simulation
, 60.

5. ON BECOMING HUMAN

1
. Cumings’s
The Korean War
provides the historical information on the war for this chapter.

2
. See Gooding-Williams’s edited volume
Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising
for more on the events in Los Angeles.

3
. For an account of Korean immigrants in Los Angeles, see Abelmann and Lie,
Blue Dreams
.

4
. Jager, “Monumental Histories,” 390.

5
. Moon describes militarized modernity thus in relation to South Korea: “The core elements of militarized modernity involved the construction of the Korean nation as the anticommunist self at war with the communist other, the constitution of members of the anticommunist body politic through discipline and physical force, and the intertwining of the industrializing economy with military service. The militarization of national identity as such revolved around the ideologies of anticommunism and national security. In other words, South Korea was founded as an anticommunist nation against the ‘archenemy,’ North Korea. This ideological construction of the nation enabled the modernizing state to deploy disciplinary techniques of surveillance and normalization, as well as institutionalized violence, in its remolding of individuals and social groups. It also resulted in the ascendance of militarized national security over any other sociopolitical issues and justified the construction of the strong modern military and the integration of men’s military service into the organization of the economy” (
Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea
, 24).

6
. Cumings connects Korea’s sanitized memory of the Korean War with its sanitized memory of its role in this war in his article “The Korean War.”

7
. See Lee’s “Surrogate Military, Subimperialism, and Masculinity,” 657, for the characterization of South Korea as a subempire. The idea of East Asian nations, particularly Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, as subempires who have a neocolonial relationship with the United States comes from Chen’s
Asia as Method
.

8
. The book was first translated into English in 1994 and then again in 2014, both with the same translator. I cite from the later edition. For more on the significance of this novel, see Hughes’s “Locating the Revolutionary Subject.”

9
. Korean names have been romanized in different ways. Hwang Suk-Yong, for example, also appears in different editions or critical discussions as Hwang Suk-Young and Hwang Seok-young. I follow the romanization of author, director, and character names according to the way they appear in the editions of the texts, covers, and movies I cite.

10
. Hwang,
The Shadow of Arms
, 65.

11
. Ibid., 66.

12
. Park, “Narratives of the Vietnam War by Korean and American Writers,” 76.

13
. Hwang,
The Shadow of Arms
, 137.

14
. As both Moon (
Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea
) and Choi (“The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory”) argue in different ways, South Koreans have an ambivalent relationship to the West and what it represents. For Moon, the South Korean embrace of Western modernity is tinged with an awareness that Western modernity is a legacy of colonialism. Choi argues that South Korea still suffers from a neocolonial relationship with the United States. This ambivalence about being formerly colonized, but implicated in helping the United States colonize or dominate other countries, helps shape Korean attitudes toward the Vietnamese.

15
. Hwang,
The Shadow of Arms
, 41.

16
. Ibid., 399.

17
. Ibid., 46.

18
. See Ryu (“Korea’s Vietnam,” 106) for the full lyrics and for an account of the song’s popularity and the eventual movie based on it. Kwon (
After the Massacre
, vii) affirms the song’s popularity, recounting how he sang the song as a youngster during wartime. In popular cultural accounts circulating within Korea after the war, the Korean veteran of the war is featured in “proud, boastful reproductions of the legendary ROK,” or Republic of Korean soldier (Ryu, “Korea’s Vietnam,” 102). Perhaps this is not surprising, given how the Korean public did not oppose the war and, according to Moon, did not participate in the global movement against the war that was strong even in nearby Japan. Instead, that public was subject to the Korean state’s efforts at “mass mobilization and propaganda,” whereby “students were exhorted to send comfort letters and comfort goods to Korean soldiers serving in Vietnam. The mass media produced a plethora of images and stories supporting the everyday mythology of brave and ferocious Korean soldiers fighting in the war” (
Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea
, 26).

19
. Hwang,
The Shadow of Arms
, 67.

20
. The presence of soldier and prostitute are evidence of what Lee calls “sexual proletarianization,” where Korea encouraged poor rural men to volunteer for Vietnam as “military labor” and poor women to export themselves as sexual labor (“Surrogate Military, Subimperialism, and Masculinity,” 656). Hwang mentions Korean soldiers sending appliances home on p. 239 of
The Shadow of Arms
.

21
. On Korean attitudes toward whiteness and blackness, and how those have been shaped by the United States and its military presence in South Korea, see Kim,
Imperial Citizens
.

22
. Armstrong accounts for the movie’s Korean title of
White War
(
Hayan chonjaeng
) in “America’s Korea, Korea’s Vietnam,” 539n22.