Episode 6: “What a Messy Story (Part 1)”
Today, we’ll be taking a deep dive into the U.S. war in Vietnam to tell the complicated story of the wars in Vietnam & the “secret wars” in Cambodia and Laos. We’re going to discuss why the wars happened and what made them so devastating. This episode is part 1 of a 2-part series on the U.S war in Vietnam. Guests include: Professor Karin Aguilar-San Juan (Macalester College).
Madeline Duckles interviews Madame Binh in 1968, courtesy of Pacifica Radio Archives.
Episode 6:
Today, we’ll be taking a deep dive into the U.S. war in Vietnam to tell the complicated story of the wars in Vietnam & the “secret wars” in Cambodia and Laos. We’re going to discuss why the wars happened and what made them so devastating. This episode is part 1 of a 2-part series on the U.S war in Vietnam. Guests include: Professor Karin Aguilar-San Juan (Macalester College).
Anya Steinberg: Hey everyone, welcome back to New Narratives: dispatches from Minnesota that highlight the stories of Asian America. I’m your host, Anya Steinberg. I’m the storyteller intern at Asian American Organizing Project, which is a non-partisan non-profit based out of St. Paul Minnesota and focused on supporting the Asian American Pacific Islander community in the Twin Cities area.
So, this episode we’re going to be doing something a little different. We’ll be taking a journey into part of Asian American history to help us understand more about Asian America today. I call this: a history deep dive. This episode is part 1 of our deep dive into the war in Vietnam. We’re going to look at why this war started, what happened, and how that has affected the lives of so many Asians and Asian Americans to this day. A warning: this episode contains mention of war, graphic descriptions of violence and sexual assault, and some explicit language.
[INTRO MUSIC PLAYS]
Anya: When I first learned about the U.S. war in Vietnam, it was in AP US history. I remember memorizing facts about the Gulf of Tonkin, the My Lai massacre, and learning that maybe, probably, potentially, I think we didn’t win the war. But all of this was buried in discussions about the Civil Rights movement and the Kennedy assassination and LBJ’s Great Society and Watergate, and on and on. Oh, and then I also watched Forrest Gump.
So, I could recall a few things about the war–some fact and some fiction–but I didn’t actually know anything about the war. I didn’t understand why it happened, and I didn’t know what happened after that. I was curious about how something so horrible occurs and how that affects people. I knew there were some pieces of the puzzle I was missing. This episode is my attempt to make sense of all these pieces. I sought out Professor Karin Aguilar San Juan, who teaches a class on U.S. imperialism at Macalester College. She’s Filipina-American and she knows a lot about Asian American history.
Within the first minute of our conversation, I learned something that changed the whole way I framed the war in Vietnam in my mind. Up until that point, I referred to this war as the Vietnam War. Textbooks did it, teachers did it, my parents did it–I mean, to me, it was just the name of the war. But Professor Aguilar San Juan immediately challenged me.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: I mean, first, one idea is that when people say “Vietnam War,” it’s not about the people of Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos, it’s really about the U.S. So, even when they say “Vietnam” in quotes, it means the Vietnam War. So those are some very, like, beginning misconceptions. Even the word “Vietnam” means the U.S. War in Vietnam. And from the Vietnamese side, they see it as a U.S. war, because they had many wars. They had the war against China, they had the war against the French. Sometimes we look at the Vietnam War as if it’s basically an American event and then Asian people fled to America for freedom, as opposed to seeing it as an Asian event in which the U.S. intervened and put itself in the wrong place. And then was seen to so-called lose a war, which wasn’t ever a war between two nations, but was instead part of a long chain of events that at least some historians have called a “sustained bid for dominance in Asia.”
Anya: Okay, so, woah. That left me shook. I couldn’t even speak the name of this war without already using an American-centric lens. That’s when I knew I was in for a deep dive.
So I want to start with something Professor Aguilar San Juan mentioned.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: …which wasn’t ever a war between two nations, but was instead part of a long chain of events that at least some historians have called a “sustained bid for dominance in Asia.”
Anya: The sustained bid for dominance in Asia. Professor Aguilar San Juan thinks that, in order to understand the beginning of the U.S. war in Vietnam, we need to go way back to 1493 and the Doctrine of Discovery.
In this doctrine, which was issued by the Pope, they came up with this idea that if you weren’t Christian, your claim to land was invalid. That meant any land you occupied was just open for the taking.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: And so, white colonialists, using that Christian ideal, justified that they could remove people, remove their culture, remove their lives, displace them, and settle. So, after 1862, the U.S. continued to move westward. Towards the end of the Spanish-American war (the U.S. got involved in that war for complicated reasons), the U.S. ends up reaching far into the Pacific and deciding that it wants to be in the Philippines. But the ruse was, first, let’s free the Filipinos from Spain. The Minnesotans formed a volunteer regiment and went to the Philippines because they also thought they were freeing the Filipinos from Spain and they got there and then the U.S. decided, “Hey, you know what? Let’s stay.” And when the U.S. decided to stay and form a colonial government in the Philippines, making it its first and only colony in Asian, then a lot of Minnesotans got really, really mad. Even the governor of Minnesota was like, that was not what we intended to do.
That became the first step in what we can refer to as the sustained bid for dominance in Asia. So from the Philippines, then it goes on to the Japanese aspect, the bombing of Japanese during World War II. And then goes onto the Korean War, which hasn’t ended, and extends into Vietnam and also Laos and Cambodia.
Anya: Professor Aguilar San Juan sees America’s involvement in Vietnam as connected to America’s other endeavors in Asia. The U.S., acting as a freedom crusader, has hopped from Asian country to Asian country, instigating conflict in the name of democracy. But what exactly made Vietnam America’s next target in the bid for dominance? To answer that, we need to go even further back.
A quick preface: this is an incredibly abbreviated history, but it’s also important. Vietnam has a long history of fighting for independence. For 1000 years, Vietnam was under Chinese rule. They successfully won their independence around 1000 A.D. It was another 500 years before portuguese missionaries arrived in Vietnam. And then, the French came in the late 1800s to colonize what they deemed Indochina, which was Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Remember, at this point, the Vietnamese had already been subjected to 1000 years of Chinese imperialism. They were not about to sit back and let the French take the wheel.
I’ll let Professor Aguilar San Juan take it away.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: So, for 1000 years, Vietnam wanted to see itself as independent. And at some point, the French came in and the French were there for a long time. As the Vietnamese kind of formed their sense of nationhood under Ho Chi Minh and other leaders, but especially Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh thought, “Well, maybe the U.S. will help,” because the U.S. has this whole idea of independence and all that.
When they fought against the French, Ho Chi Minh looked to the U.S., but the U.S. said, “Hell no, we’re going to back the French.”
Anya: Ho Chi Minh, who was the leader of the independence movement, tried to appeal to President Woodrow Wilson with no success. The vietnamese, at this point, were fighting the French for independence in the Indochina War.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: Basically the U.S. got involved by supporting France, and was paying for France’s military cost to fight the Vietnamese. FInally, in 1954, the Geneva Convention came in and divided Vietnam into two and siad, “You have to stay like this until you can have elections. And when you can have elections, then you can be free.”
Anya; So now the set-up looked like this: the North was controlled by Ho Chi Minh, and they were pitted against the South, whose leader was backed by the U.S. In the South, there were also guerilla forces called the Viet Cong, who were a pro-communist insurgency.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: But then, the U.S. saw that if there were elections, Ho Chi Minh would win. So they started backing the South. And, as they backed the South and pumped in all kinds of military in there, the North became the site of an independence movement, of a national liberation front, of a provisional revolutionary government, and eventually of a socialist Vietnam.
Anya: The U.S. was terrified of the North’s communist tendencies, so they backed the anti-communist President Ngo Dinh Diem, even though he had authoritarian leanings nad persecuted Buddhists. But hold on, why was the U.S. so invested in Vietnam’s leadership in the first place?
Professor Aguilar San Juan: It wasn’t like Vietnam came and said, “Hey,” and punched the U.S. in the face. It wasn’t like two bullies in a schoolyard. It was the U.S. going into what the French called Indochina and taking its prerogative to support the colonial powers with the ruse that we were trying to stop the fall of communism, right? So there was this idea of a domino theory. Like, Asia is a set of dominos and it goes all the way into Latin America, and if we let this one country become communist, all these countries will become communist. So that was what they call a “Cold War mentality,” which isn’t really a war. The Cold War is like an ideological set of stances, but it resulted in a lot of actual “hot wars,” which the U.S. got itself involved in and kind of really reanimated its desires to be the world’s police, to be the world’s superpower.
Anya: And that is where we get to the beginning of the full-blown U.S. war in Vietnam.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: The Gulf of Tonkin served as a kind of ruse or a pre-text. The Gulf of Tonkin was an event that was a story that kind of, just like the Battleship Maine allowed the U.S. to enter the Spanish-American War, and just like 9/11–which was a real event–became the reason for intensifying wars in the Middle East.
Anya: This is fact. The Gulf of fTonkin is an event where the U.S. alleged that two vessels, on separate days, were attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats off the coast of Vietnam. People were infuriated. It was the fuel that catalyzed the official start of war. It’s now been shown that, in the Gulf of Tonkin, it’s not clear that really anything happened. Who fired first when they fired, or if anyone fired at all–it’s all a mystery. And so, the war in Vietnam begins.
The first thing the U.S. has to do to convince Americans of the legitimacy of the war is to make them believe that the war is absolutely necessary. The Gulf of Tonkin is a part of this. The U.S. also tries to make Vietnamese independence seem like it would be harmful to America. I think it’s important at this point to talk about what the Vietnamese wanted, from the point of view of the revolutionary government.
The Vietnamese had this woman.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: Nguyen Thi Binh, or she was called Madame Binh. She’s still alive. What the Vietnamese did to have an international face of the Viet Cong, of the communists, is they picked this tiny petite woman who was very beautiful and very well spoken. And Henry Kissinger said he was afraid of her.
Anya: I found this old interview of Madame Binh from Pacifica Radio Archives with a reporter named Madeline Duckles. The interview was done in 1968. I had a good time chuckling at the odd and, frankly, problematic way that the interviewer talks about Madame Binh.
Duckles: The speaker is Madame Nguyen Thi Binh (pronounces it: New-yen Tea Bean), the one I came to know best. I wish Madame Binh (Bean) might have been televised, for she was a beautiful woman. The tiny size of the Vietnamese is always a surprise, and Nguyen Thi Binh (New-yen Tea Bean) is like a delicate oriental miniature carving. The planes of her olive skin reflect the light, and her sudden rare smile illuminates her whole being.
Anya: I just want to say that, for the record, Nguyen Thi Binh is already a very Americanized way to pronounce Madame Binh’s name. So I have no idea what Madeline Duckles thought she was saying. But anyway, here’s what Madame Binh had to say about the war from the perspective of the resistance.
[PERSON SPEAKING VIETNAMESE]
Madame Binh: In recent periods, President Johnson and the rulers of the White House have often spoken of negotiations and they say that they are ready to enter negotiations with Vietnam. But the South Vietnamese people always can see such words from Johnson and rulers of the White House as deceitful allegations, covering up the real intention to carry on the aggression in South Vietnam. Because nobody can believe that the U.S. government is sincere in its goodwill for peace when it always intensifies the war, the bombs of the population in South Vietnam.
We demand that the American government will let us decide ourselves of our destiny and settle our own affairs. They must withdraw from South Vietnam. And they must respect the national rights of the South Vietnamese people.
Anya: So, those are the two sides. On one side, America is trying desperately to maintain democracy in Asia. They’re doing this because communism is America’s existential threat, and because they want to maintain control in the region. The Vietnamese are looking to be independent. They want to decide their own future. And they’re trying to ward off American aggression.
The “American aggression” that Madame Binh speaks of is driven by a U.S. war policy in Vietnam called a “war of attrition.” The approach the U.S. took in the war didn’t focus on gaining control of territory, instead it was more about killing as many people as we could. In order to justify this policy, the U.S. had to construct a certain idea of Southeast Asians. Professor Aguilar San Juan assured me that this is not a new tactic.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: You could do a whole study on the threads of white supremacy that go all the way back to white settler colonialism and then emerge again as the U.S. puts its feet into the Pacific, into Southeast Asia, into East Asia…what are the narratives, the racial stories?
You know, I really love Dr. Seuss. Cat In the Hat is one of my favorite books.
But the fact is that he made really racist cartoons about the Japanese that helped Americans think that it was okay to intern them. And so these ideas that they’re kind of, like, brutal, hate-mongering, uncivilized, dangerous…it’s the same ideas that are brought out every once in a while to kill Black people, kill Indigenous people. Now in the Middle East we have a whole complex narrative about terrorists, who are these terrorists there?
Anya: So, what were the consequences of this racialization? That’s where we get to the U.S. war crimes in Southeast Asia.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: From what I understand war crimes to mean is the killing of civilians. So, the most famous war crime that the U.S. committed in Vietnam is the My Lai massacre. 500 women and children were killed in a village by Lieutenant William Caulley, who ordered their killing, and who was never prosecuted. Even though everyone knows he did it.
Anya: The My Lai massacre was brutal. But Professor Aguilar San Juan isn’t quite right that Lieutenant William Caulley didn’t face consequences. He was brought to trial, and he was the only one found guilty in 1971. He was sentenced to life in prison, but then Nixon changed his sentence to house arrest, which he was paroled from after just three years.
The My lai massacre, at its very core, was an event born from the racialization of Vietnamese as less than human. Rather than punishing the culprits, the U.S. gave them an enormous break.
Now I want to turn our attention to a more environmental aspect of the war, which is one of the most destructive and long-lasting facets of the war in Vietnam. It was something called Agent Orange.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: I’m inheriting a white supremacist lens when I talk about the people and the land, but Indigenous people see the land as their ancestors, right? So, even in Asia, people also could see the land as their ancestors. So, you destroy the people and the land, you destroy the whole life and the whole culture.
A major part of the Vietnam War, because people were hiding in the jungle, the U.S. employed chemical companies like Dow, who makes Round-Up weed killer. I don’t know if Monsanto was involved then, too, but they made a chemical that we call “Agent Orange.”
These chemicals worked to defoliate the forest. Because if all the foliage was gone, then you could see the guerillas running. Imagine massively spraying defoliants without concern for what those defoliants are going to do in subsequent generations. Then that’s a major disregard of life, like, it’s not even…you don’t even care.
Three or four generations later, people have major birth defects. One of the things that, when you go to Hanoi, that they always want to show you is what they call their “friendship villages,” where they are taking care of people, children, still, four generations later, born with major birth defects. Like, terrible things.
Anya: And it’s not like Americans didn’t know this was happening. In my research, I came across countless accounts of Vietnamese leaders talking about the atrocities that were occurring, trying to appeal to the sympathies of American citizens. Remember Madame Binh? In that same 1968 interview with Pacifica Radio, she’s asked about how the war has affected Vietnamese children.
[PERSON SPEAKING VIETNAMESE]
Madame Binh: You know that hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and millions of tons of U.S. bombs are sent to South Vietnam to kill our innocent people. First, our women and children. During their operations, the American soldiers are carrying on the policy of killing all, destroying all, burning all. And they kill everybody they meet, including the children. Every day, thousands of American planes, including the B-52 bombers, rain thousands of tons of bombs–one million tons per year.
In such raids, the children are the first victims. They die with terrible death. It’s a great pain for their parents, who must witness such sight. At the end of the rain of bombs of the Americans, death is threatening our children. At every minute. When they are playing, when they have their classes, during their meals, during their sleep, or even when babies are suckling.
Anya: While all of this American-inflicted violence is occurring in Vietnam, more is happening in Cambodia and Laos. This was a part of the war called the CIA’s Secret Wars. I’ll let Professor Aguilar San Juan talk about it.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: It was back to, I think, 1963 that the U.S. was present in Cambodia and Laos. The CIA goes to Laos and Cambodia, which were neutral territories, the U.S. wasn’t supposed to be there, that’s why they were called “Secret Wars.” The North Vietnamese were going on the border. The North Vietnamese, I mean, I have a lot of admiration for the North Vietnamese. When you think about it, the U.S. shouldn’t have been there. It used all its military might and lost many lives to go to a place where they don’t know the territory, they don’t even really know anything about these people.
And the North Vietnaamese, with very little…okay, the support of the Soviets, but with very ancient equipment and only their own bare fists and knowledge–they became the heroes of the Third World at that point. It was like a flea fighting off this gigantic mammoth. They developed something called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was going into the borders of Vietnam. And so, the U.S. wanted to bomb those borders to draw them out. What happened was that it pushed them into Cambodia and Laos.
Anya: Laos is the most bombed country in the entire world. Out of all wars. More than 2 million tons of bombs were dropped on Laos. That’s the equivalent of a planeload of bombs, every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day for 9 years. Reading that, I was furious. LIke, at so many points during this war, it didn’t seem like it was a bout a concern for protecting American lives or preserving the fate of democracy. Maybe it never was about those things. It was about asserting U.S. dominance in the world, and it was made possible by a pervasive disregard for humanity. The consequences of these Secret Wars continued after America left Southeast Asia.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: A student named [unintelligible] wrote a paper for me that I am citing right now for you. She wrote about the U.S. in the 1970s–basically because they bombed Cambodia, they tried to shift Cambodia’s neutral stance. So they backed this guy Lon Nol. They gave legitimacy to the Khmer Rouge, which was calling itself an anti-imperialist force. They had this guy named Pol Pot. In 1975, Pol Pot basically destroyed 25% of the Cambodia population.
The U.S. facilitated that. The U.S. facilitated the decimation of one quarter of the Cambodian population by its attempt to kind of shift this region.
Anya: One of the questions that came up for me, researching the war, is the question of war crimes. The more ugliness I read about, the more I wondered if this ugliness was considered right or wrong. And that sounds silly, but I mean, genuinely. There are some conventions of war that are considered socially acceptable. And so, how do we view what the U.S. did? Were there some parts of the war in Vietnam that were legitimate? Was it all considered for a good cause?
Professor Aguilar San Juan: I guess the question of war crimes, um, yeah. I think that’s something to investigate, although I guess it’s assuming that there was some kind of legitimate purpose to the U.S. presence in Indochina, but then they went above-board and committed a war crime. But I would say that, from the very start, it was already not legitimate.
Anya: As a high schooler, I definitely did not grasp the gravity of what the U.S. was doing in Vietnam. The way the information was presented to me was with so much uncertainty. And I think that’s because, for some of my teachers, it’s possible that their brothers or their parents served in this war. My mom remembers when she and my uncle would play Viet Cong versus Americans with their Barbies and G.I. Joe toys. The nation is literally just beginning to muddle through how to conceptualize the war. Even today, nearly 50 years later, we barely know how to teach and talk about it.
But we already know the end to the story. The warfare in Vietnam did stop. It became too costly for a lot of people, both in terms of capital and in terms of American lives. By its end, the war was insanely unpopular. I’m talking about mass demonstrations of the kind that might only be rivaled by the Black LIves Matter protests of 2020. Veterans were casting off their war medals into bonfires at protests. Then, there was the Kent State and Jackson State massacres, where national guard members opened fire on college students protesting the war and killed them. The American people turned their backs on the war. They didn’t buy into the mythos anymore.
But that wasn’t the only piece, as Professor Aguilar San Juan reminded me.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: The war stopped because the Vietnamese won, is what I would say. The war stopped because the U.S. could not defeat Vietnmaese, even militarily. That’s why it stopped. But the Vietnamese–one of the brilliant things they did that is not being done by the Palestinians or anyone in Syria or anywhere else, the Vietnamese had an active diplomacy with the anti-war movement all over the world. So, even though they were isolated and nobody could talk to them or they couldn’t put their view out there, they invited anti-war activists from all over the world to come to Vietnam, even during the war. And they said, “You just have to get here, and then we’ll let you see what’s going on. And with your own eyes, you tell people what you see.”
At least 200 Americans went during the war. They risked their passports, they risked being called traitors, and they saw what they saw. That was a big, big component of the anti-war movement with their own eyes, saying, “This is what we saw. Bombing civilians.” All the things you say are war crimes. Bombing of a hospital, the Bach Mai Hospital. Things like that.
So, 1971, with the killing of students at Kent State. That really put in everyone’s minds, like, “Wow, they’re going to really just kill people here, too.”
Anya: What comes after a war like that ends? How do you rebuild? Where do you go from there? The truth is, it’s complicated.
Some people left Vietnam and some people stayed. But I don’t think it was necessarily a matter of choice. Professor Aguilar San Juan explains why.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: I come from a different generation and I come from a different perspective. I guess I could say, like, maybe if I were born Vietnamese, I would have to deal with whatever side my parents chose.
First of all, you don’t choose your parents. And you don’t choose your grand-parents. And you don’t choose what side they picked. And also, they don’t choose what side they picked. You just end up on a side, I think that’s what I’ve learned. You just end up on a side, and I think, over the generations, we don’t necessarily reconcile all these stories. I think it is important to talk about them.
Anya: Right, people don’t choose their parents. So, they don’t really choose what side of the war they were on. And sometimes they didn’t really choose to stay or go.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: The idea of deciding to go frames it as individual decisions, versus the fact of a war. Like you said, the U.S. hasn’t really experienced one here. If you would think of Hurricane Katrina, or the fires in Oregon, or even COVID, right? How much is our individual decision and how much are we just being forced to deal with what’s going on in front of us?
So I think putting it in that lens helps us to understand what people were responding to. And also knowing that the U.S. was so invested in portraying itself as the savior, when in fact, the U.S. had a major hand in creating the situation that people are having to flee.
Anya: Refugees, in fleeing Southeast Asia, became something that the U.S. could hold onto that something, anything useful came out of the war. Regardless of the fact that they created the refugee crisis in the first place. Professor Aguilar San Juan spoke to me about the complexity of the refugee narrative. Just a quick note, she is not Vietnamese. She wanted to preface the following by acknowledging that.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: Those who left became a kid of beacon or story for the U.S. to say, “Well, we might have lost the war, but we saved all these refugees.” And so then, in my opinion, refugees had terrible losses and also, they became part of a story for the U.S. to say, “Well, we actually kind of had a victory. We had a victory because we saved all these people. Look at how grateful they are, they’re kind of tragic and really sad, and a little bit pathetic–but we can make them model minorities, too.”
That’s how this really terrible, twisted idea of refugees climbing the ladder, working really hard, becoming the Vietnamese valedictorian–which, you know, is a dangerous story. It has people feeding into this essentially anti-Black idea that they can become white. They can become white because they’re special, they’re allies, and blah, blah, blah. But in fact, they’re also facing racism. And that’s the thing that a lot of Southeast Asian refugee communities don’t want to say. Because, it’s rude, right? Here’s the country that saved you and helped you and offered you refuge. You can’t say that you’re being treated as racist.
There was a whole backlash in the 1980s against Asian people because lots of people couldn’t distinguish which were refugees and which were allies. As far as we knew, the Vietnamese were the enemies. So why are they here in the U.S.? Especially for Southeast Asian Vietnamese, Hmong, and Laotian–there’s nobody here already like them. There’s nobody here who speaks their language. There’s nobody here who has their religion, really, unless they’re Catholic. They come as very, seemingly, foreign and very exotic. For Hmong in Minnesota, it’s an especially weird story.
Anya: How so?
Professor Aguilar San Juan: Okay, so Vietnamese, especially the Vietnamese in the cities were kind of side by side with French. So maybe they spoke French, maybe they were educated in the city. They already have this kind of awareness or interaction with the West. Hmong people were basically tribal Indigenous people who were living in the mountains and moving about. They’re nomadic peoples. They’re not living in the city, speaking French, educated and all of that. They also have a language that was transmitted orally.
So when Hmong came, there was a big, big, big change for them. They were gonna live in a city of Lake Wobegon, where it’s a bunch of Swedes and Germans who are… you know, how could it be more different? I don’t want to make it sound like, you know, we have this idea of ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized.’ The fact is that these were not urban people living in the West. There was a huge, huge shift for them.
Anya: Professor Aguilar San Juan went even further. She sees repercussions of the war beyond the refugee crisis. The U.S., in their warfare, they totally disrupted life. They destroyed communities, they permanently disfigured the topography, they forced families to choose side and live with the consequences.
And so, the scars of war can be seen in way more communities than just the Vietnamese refugees in America.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: War veterans, war refugees, and anti-war activists have to be able to learn from each other about what happened and why did this even happen and where we are now. In some ways, I feel like George Floyd is an extension of those wars. It’s an extension of those wars in the sense that militarism is becoming a big part of police. The racial animosities have been rehearsed already in those wars. When the CIA went to Laos and Cambodia, when the U.S. went to Vietnam, when Black soldiers were sent to Vietnam en masse to die on the frontlines…those kinds of animosities are entrenched and we need to see them and process them and try to understand them.
You can’t really ignore it. On May 14th, 2020, just 11 days before George Floyd was killed, Governor Walz made a special day to remember the Hmong guerilla units who fought side bys side with the CIA. So, in the same month there’s an honoring of Hmong as military allies, it’s not really disconnected from the fact of Tou Thao. He himself has a history of beating a Black guy. I’m drawing a tentative line between Tou Thao’s role as an accomplice to this terrible racist police killing and the history of the Hmong special guerilla units being an accomplice, being the special bodyguards, of U.S. soldiers in Laos and Cambodia.
Anya: These leftover scars aren’t just found in refugee communities in the U.S. Of course, they live abroad as well. Southeast Asia is still dealing with unexploded bombs, they’re dealing with cleaning up the toxins left from Agent Orange and from the explosive. They’re also grappling with health issues from all of the pollution, like cancer and birth defects. But I don’t want this to be just a struggle narrative, because there’s also beautiful things too.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: A beautiful thing is that Vietnamese people, the bomb craters, they’ve turned them into lakes and ponds and then they fish in them. So, there are artists and farmers who have had this creative, life-affirming, loving response to the terrible things that happened to their land.
Anya: Like I said, we’re still puzzling through this historical event and figuring out the way it’s shaped Americans. And I mean all Americans, because we were all touched by this. So, yeah, I’m talking about the white Americans at the upper echelons of government that engineered this destruction, but I’m also talking about th Black and Latinx Americans that were purposely sent to the deadliest battlefields and the Indigenous Americans who fought for a country built on their ancestors’ stolen homelands. And, of course, Asian Americans of all origins are grappling with the ways this has influenced their racialization in America, their experiences as refugees, their relationships with their family, and their political ideologies.
Something that I’m left wondering after all of this is, who’s been hurt more? Like where were the wounds of war bigger? Here in America, or in Southeast Asia? And I don’t really think that’s even an answerable question, cause like, who’s tos ay? How do you even measure that? But Professor Aguilar San Juan sums it up perfectly.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: So, I’m just hypothesizing about your question of whether the wounds of war are as big there as they are here. Maybe they’re bigger here because we don’t really talk about the war so we’re so misinformed. And, we’re so laden with these distorted narratives about the U.S. saving refugees. So then the refugees themselves have inherited this really distorted, twisted story that is so hard to work through which is: we have to be grateful to this country, we tried to bring democracy to Asia– now we’re here facing racism, and many of us are still in alliance with the U.S. security state. For perfectly reasonable reasons, that’s kind of how we got here!
What a messy story that is. And, that’s a divide created by war.