ON VETERANS’ DAY last week, the Walt Disney company announced it was building a new theme park near Washington, devoted to a ‘serious fun celebration’ of American history. ‘This won’t be a Pollyanna view of America,’ said Disney vice-president Robert Weiss. ‘We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave. We want to make you a Civil War soldier. We’re going for virtual reality. And, look, we’ll be sensitive about the Vietnam War.’4
The Vietnam War, which was America’s longest war, will be part of a permanent exhibition entitled ‘Victory Field’. Just how the war will be ‘sensitively’ depicted is not explained in Disney’s handouts. Neither is there reference to other colonial wars and invasions, such as the assaults on civilian populations in Latin America, the Caribbean and the Philippines. These events are largely eradicated from primary and secondary education in the US, while the Vietnam ‘experience’ is taught, if at all, as a costly, well-intentioned ‘mistake’, even a ‘noble crusade’.
The ‘cost’ is frequently represented in mawkish, self-serving terms that concentrate on America as victim and the relatively few American casualties of the war (compared with the Vietnamese) and the fraudulent saga of Americans missing in action, which was the device for maintaining an 18-year embargo against Vietnam. Hollywood, thankfully, has tired of Vietnam angst and moved on to other box office concerns, leaving the sustenance of myths to others.
Last Friday, the Washington Post devoted almost all of its front page to the Disney announcement and to a story headlined: ‘Our place for healing’. This was the unveiling of a $4 million Vietnam War women’s memorial by Vice President Al Gore. ‘We never listened to the women’s story,’ said Gore, ‘and we never properly thanked them. This memorial does that.’5
The bronze memorial shows three American women helping a wounded soldier. In fact, most of the women who served in Vietnam were seldom near the fighting, contrary to what is now being suggested. They were nurses, secretaries, clerks, air traffic controllers and intelligence analysts. Eight were killed in fifteen years of war.
During the same period more than five million Vietnamese died, a disproportionate number of them women. These women died beneath a rain of American bombs and ‘anti-personnel’ devices that made Vietnam a laboratory for the new technology of ‘civilian wars’. They died in the paddies and fields, in fragile bunkers, trying to protect their children from the Napalm that struck their villages in great blood-red bursts. In North Vietnam, they died in all-woman militias, courageously putting up a curtain of small-arms fire as American F105s and Phantoms came in at 200 feet; and they died on hillsides such as Dong Loc, where I found the graves of an entire anti-aircraft battery, of young women . . . Vo Thi Than, aged 22, Duong Thi Than, aged 19. And they died in prison ‘tiger cages’, tortured to death, and from drug overdoses in brothels and bars that served the invader.
And they are still dying from the effects of the American programme of defoliation, which was known as Operation Hades until it was changed to the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand, and which destroyed almost half the forests, and poisoned the earth and food chain. As a result of the chemicals used, countless Vietnamese women continue to give birth to babies without eyes and brains.
So Gore is right when he says ‘we never listened to the women’s story’. In America there is no ‘place for healing’ for the women of Vietnam, just another reminder of how the historical truth can be manipulated in an open society. President Bush may have been right when he announced in 1991 that his ‘victory’ in the Gulf had extinguished the ‘Vietnam syndrome’, which is the euphemism for the deep misgivings of many Americans for what their government did in Vietnam.
I happened to be interviewing a former US government official, who served in South East Asia, the day after the Disney announcement and the memorial unveiling. A troubled man, he spoke about the killing of a third of the population of East Timor by the Indonesian dictatorship, which was armed and encouraged by the same Washington group responsible for the devastation of Vietnam; he mentioned Henry Kissinger’s name a great deal. Looking out at the falling leaves in Connecticut Avenue, he said, ‘You know, I walk past these memorials and I think it’s a real shame people are not aware that our dead are a fraction of those we killed or whose deaths we oversaw. This distance between myth, the big lie, and truth, is amazing to me, even after all these years.’
There will be no tableau for East Timor in Disney’s ‘Victory Field’. And I doubt if El Salvador will be represented, even though the truth of what happened there – and is still happening – made a brief public appearance last week. Some 12,000 official documents, released under pressure from Congress, revealed that Presidents Reagan and Bush conspired with the tyrants running the death squads in El Salvador. Some 75,000 people were killed between 1980 and 1991, most of them murdered by death squads and by government ‘security forces’, equipped, funded and often trained by the US. Today, El Salvador is said to be a United Nations ‘peace triumph’. In fact, friends of Reagan and Bush are still running the death squads. In August, they killed 271 ‘suspected leftists’.6 This is their contribution to the election next month, in which the left and popular forces have been persuaded by the UN to take part. President Clinton has promised to restore $11 million in aid to the new El Salvador regime.
And will the ‘sensitive’ treatment of Vietnam by Disney extend to Operation Restore Hope in Somalia? The similarities are striking. The American ‘gunship’ attacks on civilians are little different from Vietnam, where the helicopter ‘gunship’ was developed as an effective means of ‘pacifying’ people on the ground. And Clinton, who is said to have opposed the war in Vietnam, has strongly backed its rapacious echo in Somalia. Most of the dead are, of course, ‘local’ – a Washington term. In Vietnam, they were known as ‘merelies’, short for ‘merely gooks’.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the Vietnam War provides us with a unique historical context; it remains the touchstone for understanding modern imperialism. Those who were seduced into believing that George Bush sent the marines to Somalia for charitable purposes would have been spared their present disillusionment had they referred to the ‘saviour’ role of the marines in Vietnam in 1965. The places, personalities and immediate goals may change; the presumptions of power do not.
I think Disney should not be too ‘sensitive’ in its approach to Vietnam. It should proclaim that the war was at least a partial victory for America. Most of the American objectives were met. Vietnam was physically ruined and the ‘virus’ of its alternative development model stopped from spreading to the region. An American-led blockade forced the Vietnamese to all but abandon the gains of their system, such as universal health care and education, and to welcome the IMF and the World Bank, which are presently busy ‘restructuring’ the country to fit into the ‘global economy’. After a half century of repelling invaders, the Vietnamese now advertise themselves as ‘the cheapest labour in Asia’.7 I have never quite understood why Hollywood failed to acknowledge this achievement. Surely, in the ‘virtual reality’ of Disney’s Victory Field, the time is right.
November 19, 1993