[Note to TomDispatch Readers: We have an interesting offer today and I’d like to give you the “Engelhardt guarantee” on it. When my kids were young and nervous about doing something that I was certain would work out well, I would assure them that they had the “Engelhardt guarantee.” It was ironclad. Now, I’m offering the same guarantee on a new work by historian (and today’s TD author) Christian Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity. I just finished it and it’s a hell of a book! I wrote about Vietnam at length in my Cold War history, The End of Victory Culture, but to my surprise I found myself repeatedly caught off guard by the information Appy has to offer and his insights into how that war helped shape our world. We’re offering signed, personalized copies of American Reckoning to TD enthusiasts in return for contributions of $100 (or more) to this site. (Check out our donation page for the details.) If you have any interest in the Vietnam War, you should get your hands on this book. (Click here for one path to doing so.)
I asked TD Managing Editor Nick Turse, who -- someone told me -- knows a tad about Vietnam himself to write today’s introduction. I would also insist that you get your hands on his bestselling book, Kill Anything That Moves, The Real American War in Vietnam, if I didn’t think that all TD readers had already done so! Tom]
Suddenly he appeared, riding in the back of a truck, his arms thrust to the heavens, his fists clenched tight. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was Ho Chi Minh, modern Vietnam’s founding father... and he was holding dumbbells.
It was 2010, the eve of the 35th anniversary of the fall of Saigon -- though it was known in Vietnam as Liberation Day -- and the city was readying itself for a major celebration: a massive parade, fireworks, the whole shebang. That float, adorned with Olympic rings, was apparently designed to exhort Vietnamese onlookers to embrace physical fitness, though no reputable fitness trainer in the world would teach the form of standing shoulder presses being performed on that truck by that papier-mâché “Uncle Ho.”
Nations sometimes commemorate their war victories in strange ways. Not that I have first-hand experience. I grew up in the wake of the Vietnam War, so -- like all Americans since the end of World War II -- I never saw the celebration of a major victory. Perhaps somewhere, someone commemorated the triumphs over the tiny island of Grenada and the minimalist forces of Panama. There were, apparently, celebrations of the Gulf War before it was clear that meddling in Iraq would turn into a decades-long American debacle, though they didn’t make an impression on me.
What I remember, instead, was a different kind of celebration, a long, meandering moment famously labeled “it’s morning again in America” in a TV ad for Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign. A nation hobbled by the real Uncle Ho, deindustrialization, and a raft of poorly conceived policies that had come home to roost was being gilded back to greatness by a spinmeister-in-chief in the Oval Office -- and Hollywood and the toy companies loved it. For me, it meant rousing times watching Rambo and “G.I. Joe” and Red Dawn. Rocky took on a towering Soviet superman, the Evil Empire’s boxing champ, and chopped him down to size. The president flipped the script after the phrase “Star Wars,” taken from George Lucas’s trilogy, was slapped on his fantastical “high frontier” defense boondoggle by critics. “If you will pardon my stealing a film line,” he said, “the Force is with us.” And if Mr. Gorbachev wouldn’t tear down that wall -- you know, the one in Berlin -- well, Mr. Reagan might just blow it to smithereens with an MX missile. It was a celebratory time, but remind me now, what exactly were we celebrating?
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175953/tomgram%3A_christian_appy,_%22honor%22_the_vietnam_veteran,_forget_the_war_/
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