7. Dudziak, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences, 8.
8. These percentages are based on my own calculations of Vietnamese casualties in relationship to census counts for northern and southern populations. For a more detailed exploration of casualties for Americans, Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians, see Turley, The Second Indochina War, 255–58.
9. Ginzburg, A Place to Live, 58.
10. For an account of the United States’ allied troops from Korea, Thailand, Australia, the Philippines and New Zealand, see Blackburn. For a discussion of the war’s international dimension, see Bradley and Young’s Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars.
11. For an account of how spaces of memory are limited for immigrants to the United States, see Behdad, A Forgetful Nation.
12. For additional important works on collective memory, see Olick, The Politics of Regret, and Lipsitz, Time Passages.
13. Young, The Texture of Memory, xi.
14. Bercovitch, Rites of Assent, 1–67, particularly 19–22.
15. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 218.
16. These ideas about the ethics of remembering one’s own and others appeared in an early form in my essay “Just Memory: War and the Ethics of Remembrance.”
17. For an illuminating exploration of the nuances of nostalgia, see Boym, The Future of Nostalgia.
18. For surveys of the idea of a memory industry and a memory “boom” that has exploded since the 1970s, see the following essays from The Collective Memory Reader, edited by Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy: Rosenfeld, “A Looming Crash or a Soft Landing? Forecasting the Future of the Memory ‘Industry’ ”; Nora, “From ‘Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory’ ”; and Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy, “Introduction.”
19. On the memory industry and its relationship to power, see Sturken, Tourists of History.
20. Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 4.
21. Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through.”
22. For some of these critiques of identity, see Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity and Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America.
23. Charles Maier, for example, in his article “A Surfeit of Memory?” blames fragmentation and grievance — the telltale signs of identity politics, or “narrow ethnicity” (444) — for preventing an orientation toward the future and transformative politics. But perhaps it is these movements for transformative politics that have not adequately dealt with the wounds of the past, or which have not been inclusive enough, which would limit their transformative ability for those afflicted with “narrow ethnicity.”
24. Many scholars of memory have made the case for the mutually constitutive relationship of memory and forgetting. To name just two: Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting,” and Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory.
25. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 57.
26. Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 10, italics in original.
27. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 68.
28. Borges, “Funes the Memorious,” in Ficciones, 107.
1. ON REMEMBERING ONE’S OWN
1. For an overview of how Vietnam has dealt with its war memories, see Tai’s edited collection The Country of Memory.
2. Augé, “From Oblivion,” 473–74.
3. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 217.
4. For more on the mourning practices for dead revolutionary soldiers, see Malarney, “The Fatherland Remembers Your Sacrifice” and Culture, Ritual and Revolution in Vietnam.
5. Didion, Blue Nights, 13.
6. Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, 8.
7. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, Kindle edition, loc. 735–850.
8. For a more detailed study of Vietnamese practices of remembering the American war, see Schwenkel’s The American War in Contemporary Vietnam.
9. For a detailed account of “Uncle Ho,” see Duiker’s Ho Chi Minh.
10. Ninh, The Sorrow of War, 232.
11. Ibid., 42.
12. Ibid., 57.
13. On trauma and its repetitive remembering, see Caruth, Unclaimed Experience.
14. Ninh, The Sorrow of War, 180. On trauma and the possibilities of a victim repeating the violence, which might explain Kien’s violent behavior, see Leys, Trauma.
15. Ninh, The Sorrow of War, 204. On the prevalence and traumatic impact of rape, see Herman, Trauma and Recovery; on the shame of sexual stigmatization, and the haunting legacies of sexually traumatized women in the parallel case of war-torn Korea, see Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora; on rape in the Vietnam War, see Weaver, Ideologies of Forgetting.
16. Ninh, The Sorrow of War, 94.
17. Ibid., 233.
18. Vo’s The Bamboo Gulag, 209, provides more information on the statue’s sculptor Nguyen Thanh Thu.
19. Herr, Dispatches, 330.
20. Ninh, The Sorrow of War, 88.
21. Ibid.
22. Aguilar-San Juan, Little Saigons, 64.
23. Nhi Lieu, The American Dream in Vietnamese.
24. On postwar American policies in regard to Vietnam, see Martini, Invisible Enemies.
25. Nora, “Between Memory and History.”
26. Quoted in Ch’ien, Weird English, Kindle edition, loc. 819.
27. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, viii, 41–48.
28. Davey, “In Kansas, Proposed Monument to a Wartime Friendship Tests the Bond.”
29. Cargill and Huynh, Voices of Vietnamese Boat People, 151–52.
2. ON REMEMBERING OTHERS
1. Ecclesiasticus 44:8–9, King James Bible. On the relationship of religion to memory and this war, see Tran, The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory, particularly the section on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (212–35).
2. Some useful accounts of the making of Maya Lin’s memorial, the controversies around it, and the power of its aesthetic, can be found in Ashabranner, Always to Remember; Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics; Griswold, Forgiveness; Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory; Hass, Carried to the Wall; Huyssen, Present Pasts; Lin, Boundaries; Marling and Silberman, “The Statue at the Wall”; Menand, American Studies; Shan, “Trauma, Re(-)membering, and Reconciliation”; Sturken, Tangled Memories; and Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial.”
3. Isaacs’s Vietnam Shadows is an informative account of this postwar period and the impact of the war on American memory and life.
4. See McMahon’s “Contested Memory” for a pithy summary of how the war’s memory was transformed politically and culturally.