Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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I used to think it was my re-memory. You know, some things you forget, other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone. But the place, the picture of it stays. And not just in my re-memory. but out there in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there, outside my head.
I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did or knew or saw is still out there. Toni Morrison, 11.
My own memories began very concretely in a refugee camp a few weeks after the fall of Saigon. We were actually boat lifted out of Saigon and then airlifted from Guam to Pennsylvania and ended up, you know, in a military base, Fort Indiantown Gap in Harrisburg. And that's where my memories begin.
Viet Thanh Nguyen was four years old when his family escaped from the Vietnam War, boatlifted out of Vietnam, then airlifted to a new life in the United States. The war fundamentally defined his life, even though his memories of it are hazy.
Before the end of the war, all I remember, because I was four years old, are just these fragmentary images, which I don't even know whether they really happened. For example, being on a boat... and seeing sailors shooting at a smaller boat approaching us. My brother, who was seven years older, said, never happened. So I have to trust that his memory is right and my memory is wrong.
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Chapter 2: How does memory of war shape individual experiences?
He has to trust it, even though what his brother says contradicts Fiat's own memories. And that tension has animated his writing.
I am a professor, a scholar, and a writer of fiction and nonfiction, probably best known for my novel The Sympathizer, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016, as well as its sequel, The Committed, a collection of short stories called The Refugees, and a nonfiction book called Nothing Ever Dies, Vietnam and the Memory of War.
Viet also calls himself a scholar of memory, someone who studies how we remember events of the past, both as people and as nations, and how those memories affect how we face the future. And no narratives are more contested than those of war.
The UN's refugee agency estimates over 3 million people have already been internally displaced in Iran, an additional million in Lebanon.
Today, the world is watching as the U.S. and Iran attempt to broker a peace deal after tensions erupted into a U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. A preliminary assessment by the Pentagon has determined the U.S. is at fault for a missile strike on a school in Iran on the first day of the war.
The conflict has claimed the lives of thousands and shut down the Strait of Hormuz, creating a supply chokepoint that's caused oil prices to skyrocket.
The war in Iran has caused the biggest disruption to oil supplies in history.
It also resulted in another conflict between Israel and Lebanon. The further we go, the more destruction from Israeli air and drone strikes we see. That is currently under a shaky ceasefire. How do you end a war when one of the warring parties shows no interest in ending it? And there's no end in sight for the war in Ukraine, which is ongoing after four years of fighting.
I'm talking about the war in Ukraine and about the Kremlin's consistent position that victory is inevitable, that it can keep throwing men and money at the fight, that Russia is in it for as long as it takes.
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Chapter 3: What personal memories does Viet Thanh Nguyen share about his childhood?
At the height of the war, over half a million American troops were stationed in Vietnam. In the end, the U.S. would suffer more than 58,000 deaths. Vietnam had over 3 million.
How many men who listen to me tonight have served their nation in other wars?
How very many are not here to listen? The war in Vietnam is not like these other wars. Yet, finally, war is always the same.
The U.S. withdrew combat troops from Vietnam in 1973, and the North Vietnamese captured Saigon in April of 1975. That year, 125,000 South Vietnamese refugees fled to America to begin new lives. Among them, four-year-old Viet Thanh Nguyen.
I was growing up in the United States in the 70s and 80s and the war was officially over. But it seemed to me that Americans were fighting the war again through most visibly Hollywood and the dozens of movies that it made.
Movies like Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, The Deer Hunter. All American films that tell the story from an American perspective. American tragedies, American trauma, but exported and consumed around the world.
Even a bad film or TV series will be seen by millions of people. That's really about the kind of cultural production that Americans can do versus other countries. So that, again, an American movie like Apocalypse Now will be seen all over the world, including in Vietnam, where people have seen Apocalypse Now. But a Vietnamese story will most likely not be seen outside of Vietnam.
So all these things became very, very personal for me, these politics of the nation. And I felt like I had to confront my own past in order to try to understand not just myself and my family, but also to try to understand the nations, Vietnam and the United States, whose conflicts shaped us.
For Viet, the political experience of the war was very personal, and his personal experience was always political.
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Chapter 4: How do differing narratives influence perceptions of war?
And I think the reason it took 14 years is because what started off as a very simple project became a very complicated one.
Viet thought he would be plugging holes in the dominant American narrative of the Vietnam War, what Vietnam calls the American War.
I saw that the American way of thinking about the Vietnam War was deeply limited, and I wanted to compensate for that. I wanted to fill in a gap and talk about the Vietnamese American and Vietnamese refugee experiences.
When you say deeply limited, what did you feel was limiting about it?
The way that Americans deliberately or accidentally forget the people and the countries that they get involved in, I think has a direct correlation to the fact that Americans keep going to war. That Americans refuse to consider that other people are human beings with their own histories, cultures, experiences and predilections.
And then Americans get themselves into other people's countries one way or another, either through actual occupation or through drone strikes and what have you. proxy wars and all of that. And then Americans get surprised that they can't get themselves out of these kinds of situations. And then Americans forget and then they do it all over again.
If Vietnamese people were missing from America's memory, the best way to remedy that was to bring Vietnam's memory of the war to an American audience.
But the more I investigated this war, the more I realized that simply trying to fill in the Vietnamese perspective or at least the Vietnamese refugee or Vietnamese American or Southern Vietnamese perspective was not enough.
So he traveled through Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and he started to change the way he saw his whole project. Because when Viet went to Vietnam to visit museums and monuments and memorials and to talk to people at all those sites dedicated to remembering, he found that the Vietnamese perspectives were also selective.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of collective memory in shaping national identity?
Right. For it was almost like our country had a split brain.
Right.
around the Vietnam War, which is not all that different from how we felt about the Iraq War and the war in Afghanistan, right? And it makes sense that in its aftermath, we would also sort of have a split brain where on the one hand, we like valorize it. And there's also a deep skepticism about like, what were we doing there? What do we stand for as a country?
And what are our responsibilities in the aftermath?
I think that's the reason why is because more often than not, nations are founded on violence, on conquest. And what we see in war is oftentimes experiences that are contradictory to a nation's self-image.
The United States, for example, built on notions of democracy, freedom, equality, and so on, but only possible through wars of conquest and colonization that are fundamental to the nation's existence. And so we fight these wars again in memory because by narrating them in a way that makes them acceptable to our self-image.
So there's no getting around the fact that the United States would not exist without the fractious wars at the beginning, without genocide committed against Native peoples, but all that can be re-narrated again and again in American mythology as a war of independence and of freedom and of liberation. And again, I don't think the United States is unique.
If I think about Vietnam, I see that happen exactly with the Vietnam War in terms of how the victorious Vietnamese have chosen to narrate that war again in memory by erasing all kinds of contradictions to communist ideals. And that goes even back further in time to the founding of modern Vietnam as a nation built on conquest and colonization.
of other peoples, which the Vietnamese don't want to remember and instead would prefer to narrate the fact that we were colonized by the Chinese and we fought them off and therefore we became a free and independent people. So wars are fundamental to nation states and re-narrating wars are fundamental to nation states as well.
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Chapter 6: How does trauma affect personal and collective memory?
Seeing his family was complicated, especially for Viet, who moves through the world as both American and Vietnamese.
The difficulty that I find for myself is that I don't see the world the way that a Vietnamese person who grew up in Vietnam sees the world. So when I'm there, I have to constantly think about the fact that I'm both Vietnamese and American, that I share some similarities with people there and a lot of things I don't share with them. And that I come to Vietnam with my own set of hang-ups.
I don't have the same kind of hang-ups as another kind of American would have, but as an American... Myself, I still have this tendency to think of the country through the lens of the war.
Coming up, how Viet changed his lens and how he wants the rest of us to change ours.
Hello, this is Dermot Cease calling from Paris, France to tell you that you and I Part 3.
No happy forgetting.
As the war in Iran has gripped the world's attention this week, Russia's war in Ukraine has slipped from the headlines, but it is still grinding on into its fifth year.
Today, the media attention is on Iran and conflicts in the Middle East. And while the war in Ukraine and Russia continues to rage, the why and the what of that conflict is already beginning to blur and be forgotten. When we first spoke to Viet, the world was focused on Ukraine and in the process of forgetting another major conflict.
What we're seeing is at least partly a battle of narratives. Who gets to control the social media narrative? Who gets to control the global moral narrative about what's going on?
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