A Remembrance of War

The recent events in Little Saigon illuminated a complex set of feelings for those whose lives the Vietnam War touched. More than two decades later, an act of free expression has galvanized the Vietnamese American community like nothing before. By hanging and worshipping Ho Chi Minh’s portrait and the Communist flag, a video store owner tortuously stripped away the dressing and reopened the wounds of a war that has never healed for Vietnamese expatriates.

To most Americans, the Vietnam War was about America, American politics and American perspectives: a camouflage-clad veteran slumping in a wheelchair, a middle-class parent crying at a photo of her only son--a pilot shot down over Hanoi--a former hippie and conscientious objector burning his draft card and Hollywood’s continually twisted, perplexing fascination with the evil underbelly of the war.

For those Vietnamese who came to America, coming to terms with the war’s outcome and its aftermath has proved to be equally difficult--for protesters and nonparticipating Vietnamese alike.

For years after the end of the war, no one talked about Vietnam at the dinner table. Our families were too sad, too hurt, too poor and too busy to recover our suppressed memories of Vietnam and our exodus. Children endured a difficult dual challenge: the pain of American assimilation and Vietnamese cultural preservation.

The way we left Vietnam and arrived in America remained a faint memory until we sat in crowded theaters and saw “Platoon” or “Miss Saigon.” But neither offered an accurate portrait of the Vietnam that we had known or the Vietnam that we would like to know again.

Images from the war and its outcome have left indelible marks. In Westminster, the portrait and the flag unavoidably triggered memories of suffering and close brushes with death. A Vietnamese soldier loses his entire family during the Hue massacre of 1968. A teenage girl hides in fear behind her grandparents as Thai pirates ransack their fishing sampan. A cousin inches through the thick Laotian jungles to escape military conscription. A tearful former colonel gazes at the undulating Communist flag atop his labor camp while being forced to confess his alleged crimes against the people.

Flash forward to Westminster. “Down with Communists!” and “Freedom! Freedom!” exclaimed a youth donning surplus-store GI gear and a headband made of the yellow and red-striped flag of the former Republic of Vietnam. Another young community leader proclaimed “This time we are going to win against the Commies.” Rhetoric echoing sentiments of the elderly can be heard throughout the protests. But the truth is painful. Just like Americans, the Vietnamese expatriates must confront the demons of war and accept responsibility for the loss of our motherland. Proclaiming decades-old dreams of liberating Vietnam through the younger generation will be detrimental to the healing process of our community.

Some Americans do empathize with the refugees, especially those who expended their youth on the battlefield of Vietnam. James Webb, a Vietnam veteran and former secretary of the Navy, summed it up best in 1991: “Vietnam is the great unfinished morality play of our time. We have never before abandoned an ally on the battlefield--an ally, incidentally, whose casualty rate as a nation was 40 times ours.”

Until the day Americans are forced to flee their homeland after fighting a bloody, 30-year war in their backyard without the lasting support of their best friend, it will remain difficult to explain the anguish of the refugees. Our torment is further ignited by a senseless perpetrator who happens to be one of our own.