The Vietnam War for Those Who Did Not Experience It ① Memories of War
By
Shim
Ajeong
Published
Jan. 13, 2025
Translated
by Anastasia Traynin
The
Framework of “South Korean Military’s
Civilian Massacres vs. Vietnam-era Economic Boom”
Korean
society began paying attention to the Vietnam War again in May 1999, when the Hankyoreh 21 weekly magazine broke the
story of the South Korean military’s civilian massacres. After obtaining the
“Report on War Crimes: The Crimes of the South Korean Troops in South Vietnam”
from the Vietnamese Politburo, Vietnam-based reporter Ku Su-jeong had gone to
the massacre sites to confirm the findings. Hankyoreh
21 continued reporting the story through journalist Koh Kyoung-tae’s
interviews with war veterans who were involved in or witnessed the massacres.
For
24 years after the first report, stories of the civilian massacres appeared
intermittently in articles and the public sphere. Through the Korean-Vietnam
Peace Foundation’s “We’re Sorry, Vietnam” civic action campaign,
Koreans have visited the areas where the massacres occurred, participated in
memorials and listened to survivor testimonies. Survivors and bereaved families
have also visited Korea.
 |
| “I felt so guilty. ‘I won’t be able to go back and live with this’”. An interview with a war veteran who witnessed a massacre was played as evidence during the “People’s Tribunal on War Crimes by South Korean Troops during the Vietnam War” held on April 21-22, 2018. The veteran also took the stand as a witness in the lawsuit. Photo courtesy of the official blog of the People’s Tribunal on War Crimes by South Korean Troops during the Vietnam War (English page available) |
The “People’s Tribunal on War Crimes by South Korean Troops during the Vietnam War” was held in 2018. Following the tribunal, efforts to hold the government accountable for the civilian massacres included a lawsuit for state reparations in 2020 that resulted in a first-trial victory in 2023, four years after it was filed.
Nguyễn Thị Thanh, a survivor of the
civilian massacre perpetrated by South Korean troops on February 12, 1968 in
the Vietnamese village of Phong Nhị in Vietnam’s Quảng Nam Province, sued the
South Korean government for state reparations on April 21, 2020. Following nine
hearings held over the course of three years, the court ruled in favor of the
plaintiff, acknowledging that the South Korean military committed “illegal
acts” and affirming the state’s “responsibility of reparation.” This was
February 7, 2023, 55 years after the massacre took place. Furthermore, in
regards to the South Korean government representative’s invoking extinctive
prescription to claim that the statute of limitations had long passed and the
plaintiff could no longer exercise their legal rights, the court judged this as
abuse of power by the defendant. The government appealed the ruling by Seoul Central
District Court judge Park Jin-su in Civil Case 68. The appeals case is in
process, with the High Court scheduled to rule on January 17. [1]
For the past 20 years, awareness and discourse about the Vietnam
War in Korean society has mainly revolved around two opposing frameworks: the
South Korean troops’ civilian massacres and the Vietnam economic boom. The
latter is a reference to the period of 1964-1973 when South Korea’s participation in the Vietnam War
led to domestic economic prosperity through foreign currency earnings.
Given this limitation, though the 2018 People’s Tribunal was a non-legally binding civil procedure, it was
nevertheless in many ways a meaningful opportunity. First, it created a space
for back-and-forth testimony by the victims and perpetrators and held the state
legally accountable. On another level, beyond demanding the state take
responsibility, those listening to and recording the veterans’ eyewitness
accounts of perpetrated crimes began grappling with and discussing the concept
of “perpetratorhood.” Finally, the tribunal paved the way toward the current
lawsuit for state reparations.
 |
| Nguyễn Thị Thanh, the plaintiff in the Hà My Massacre case, is examined as an affected party during the 2018 People’s Tribunal. Photo courtesy of the official blog of the People’s Tribunal on War Crimes by South Korean Troops during the Vietnam War |
The Problem of State Violence Cannot Be Treated as a “Diplomacy Issue”
In recent years, volunteer citizens have participated in new
attempts to hold space for speaking, listening to, recording and sharing the oral testimonies of war veterans—see,
for example, Seok Mi-hwa’s 2023 book Classmates
Who Went to Vietnam. With the current outpouring of discourse surrounding
the climate crisis, there has also been an increased interest in ecology and
habitat destruction caused by the Vietnam War. In addition, reporter Shin
Da-eun’s cover story “Agent Orange Generational Aftereffects Ignored by the
State” in the September 30, 2024 edition of the Hankyoreh 21 weekly sparked some discussion about the affected war
veterans and their families.
However, there is yet to be any substantial research in Korea
regarding the gender-based violence perpetrated during the Vietnam War.
Furthermore, the focus in handling issues
related to the civilian massacres has been confined to the “diplomacy issue”
between Korea and Vietnam.
When specific individual victims are tied to a collective entity
called “the state,” the aggressors also lose their specificity and become
reduced to a group. During his talk “Living as Citizens of an ‘Aggressor Country’: The Vietnam War, the
State, and Us” on March 3, 2018 at the Institute for Korean Historical Studies (IKHS), historian
Fujii Takeshi referred to this phenomenon as “state violence becoming a
diplomacy issue.” The
phenomenon also appears in relation to the issue of the Japanese military’s “comfort women”, which still has the tendency to be
considered a “diplomacy issue” between Korea and Japan. While viewing state violence as a diplomatic issue between the two
nations means the Japanese government’s
apology can be considered “conclusive evidence” of guilt, it prevents further
consideration of the violence itself.
If the civilian massacres
committed during the Vietnam War are also thought of as a problem to be solved
between the governments of Korea and Vietnam, then the entire task of resetting
and changing this relationship based on coercive state violence is merely
passed back to the state by those within the relationship.
Toward a
Broader Perspective Beyond the Singular “South Korean Troops’ Civilian
Massacres”
There is notable research
that goes beyond the focus on civilian massacres
committed by South Korean troops and takes a critical look at
other issues related to the Vietnam War.
Yoon Chung Ro’s “The Making
of ‘Wol-nam Chaebol’ and Resistance of the Korean Workers with Vietnam War
Experience: A Case Study of Han-jin Group” (Society
and History, Vol. 79, 2008) examines the processes and methods through which the Korean economic boom during the Vietnam War was specifically realized at the company and individual levels, as well as their social and historical effects. These findings were published in Yoon’s 2023 book The
Second Vietnam War.
In “The Post-Cold War
Cultural Politics of Vietnamese Americans as ‘War Refugees’: Focusing on the
Works of Viet Thanh Nguyen,” (Journal of
Oriental Studies, Vol. 190, Yonsei University Institute of Korean Studies,
2020), Shim Juhyung studies the life and memories of Vietnamese Americans who
emigrated to the United States as “war refugees” after the end of the war. The
paper points to the possibility of establishing and practicing the ethics of
“just memory” to overcome the dichotomy between perpetratorhood and victimhood
and to break though the self-centered ethics of memory.
From the militarism and
gender point of view, Kim Mideok’s “The Activities of American Red Cross Women
during the Vietnam War” (Women’s Studies
Review, Vol. 32, Ehwa Womans University Korea Women’s Institute, 2012)
sheds light on women in the American Red Cross during the 1962-1975 Vietnam War
period.
 |
| In 1975, Vietnamese refugees entered the port of Busan. Here, they are arriving at the Protection Center for Vietnam Refugees. Photo taken on May 23, 1975, courtesy of the government archival photo collection. |
Nho Young Soon’s research on Vietnamese refugees who entered the port of Busan, “A Study on the 1975 Vietnamese Refugees of Busan,” (Sachong, Vol. 81, The Institute for the Study of History at Korea University, 2014) analyzes the circumstances of their rescue, government policy regarding their protection, their settlement in South Korea and the meaning behind their subsequent wave of emigration to third nations. It also looks closely at the special characteristics among these refugees, namely those who came by Landing Ship Tanks (LST) and those who came aboard the South Korean “Twin Dragon” cargo ship.
 |
| What does Korean society remember about the Vietnam War? The Protection Center for Vietnam Refugees operated as a refugee residence facility from 1975 to 1993 in the Jaesong-dong area of Busan’s Haeundae District. Courtesy of the Encyclopedia of Korean Local Culture. |
This article series will connect the links, or rather the chains, between the genocide, sexual violence and ecocide that took place during the Vietnam War. It seeks to expose the problem of Korean society’s narrow perception of war that is limited to its effects on national citizens and humans, as well as draw attention to the lives and deaths that couldn’t stand up in court and were inevitably missing from the people’s tribunal and the state reparations lawsuit. Through this lens, I question the meaning and call for an interrogation of the terms “wartime responsibility” and “postwar responsibility” by those of us who didn’t live through the Vietnam War yet are directly and indirectly affected by the current wars taking place all over the world. I aim to explore the possibility of mourning that doesn’t belong to the state.
Memories
of War Patched Together by the “Hero Narrative” and the “Victim Narrative”
Violence
and Victimization Unrecorded in the Official Vietnam War Narrative
Even within the
contradictory ways that people refer to the Vietnam War lies a history of
highlighting certain facets of the war and covering up others. While some call
it “the Vietnam War” and others “the Anti-US War of Resistance for National Salvation,” neither of these
names reveal the clear fact that the participants in this war were not only the nations of Vietnam and the United States. They make no mention of
either the fratricidal massacres and violence that occurred between Vietnamese
people nor the wartime experience and suffering of ethnic minorities and
non-human animals mobilized outside of the “citizen” framework.
After the reunification of
the country that followed North Vietnam’s victory, the experiences of those
from South Vietnam were excluded from the official memories of both the United
States and Vietnam. Within the United States’ dichotomous discourse of winners
and losers, perpetrators and victims, the postwar lived experiences of the
South Vietnamese have taken the limited form of “immigration history.” In Vietnam,
on the other hand, due to the influence of reeducation, forced migration and
various other discriminatory postwar policies implemented against natives of
South Vietnam, the experiences of defeat and death without honor have been
erased from the official narrative as a history that is seldom discussed. The
same historical erasure applies to ethnic minorities’ experiences of forced
migration, mobilization and the resulting family separations for the war labor effort and postwar recovery.
Those killed and injured during North
Vietnam’s sending of munitions through Cambodia and Laos and the United
States’ bombings
to deter this are not counted in the recorded 3.1
million casualties from the “Anti-US War of Resistance for National Salvation.” Furthermore, the
two names for the war mentioned above erase the possibility of accountability
for war veterans from other participating countries, namely South Korea,
Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, Russia,
North Korea and China.
Within this context, writer
Viet Thanh Nguyen embraces his heritage as one of the “boat people” who
emigrated to the United States after the defeat of South Vietnam and rejects
any specific names for the war, choosing to call it “the war,” “this war,” or ultimately
“my war.” He does this to pave a different way for the people who are living
the bygone war in the here and now to
re-imagine and remember it in the context of their own lives and
situations.
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born
in South Vietnam in 1971. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, his family
emigrated to the United States as sea refugees. Nguyen’s unique story of
learning English and American culture as a child of parents from the losing
South Vietnamese side became the basis for his 2015 novel The Sympathizer, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016. The Korean
translation by Kim Heeyong was published by Mineumsa in 2018. The Sympathizer was adapted into a 2024
HBO television mini-series of the same name, directed by Park Chan-wook.
 |
| From left: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s books Nothing Ever Dies and The Sympathizer; a poster for HBO’s The Sympathizer adaptation, directed by Park Chan-wook. |
Every year in Vietnam, April 30, the day the war was won, is celebrated with various events and memorials, and the Vietnamese Party-State holds a state festival officially commemorating it as “Victory Day” or “Liberation Day.” But among the 4 million diasporic Vietnamese, especially the whopping 1.5 million in the United States whose community was formed through the war and Vietnam becoming socialist, April 30 is remembered as the “National Day of Resentment” or the “Day of Shame” (“Uprooted Mourning, Endless War: The 1968 “Huế Massacre” in Vietnam.” Juhyung Shim. Korean Cultural Anthropology. Vol. 50-2, Korean Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2017).
However, it is important to
point out that while sorrow over losing their nation has
led to the overseas Vietnamese community continuously denying North Vietnam’s
victory and solidifying their identity as victims of political repression, the
reality is that a large number of South Vietnamese had a hand in the war as bureaucrats, politicians, soldiers and police, and many were also perpetrators of torture and violence.
In the same vein, North
Vietnam has used the concept of “realizing justice against foreign invasion and
injustice” as a rationale for the war. Through many exhibits and monuments, as well as the national constitution, the war’s victory
has been enshrined as an historic achievement of the people, the nation and the
party. To construct a heroic narrative of memory around victory, the people of
Vietnam are positioned as oppressed victims. Within this victim narrative,
emphasis on foreign invasion and only seeing themselves as “the oppressed”
leaves no room for reflection on the crimes committed against one another.
Furthermore, under the name
“Anti-US War of Resistance for National Salvation,” the constructed
narrative conceals such uncomfortable truths as the war’s westward expansion to involve Cambodia and Laos, the
memory of a unified Vietnam invading Cambodia and the subsequent border war
with neighboring China, as well as the internal Huế massacre committed by North Vietnamese
troops. Even after the official end of the war, an additional 7,000 people
living within Quảng Trị province’s demilitarized zone
which was the Ho Chi Minh Trail died from residual landmines, and many more
have been maimed and disabled. Yet there are no memorials or mourning for these
victims. This legacy is described in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s first novel Nothing Ever Dies.
Names Not Carved Into a Monument: Can There Be
Mourning That Doesn’t Belong to the State?
In unified Vietnam, there are no official memorials for either
the victims of civilian massacres, who are considered “deaths without honor,” or
the South Vietnamese ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) troops who died in
battle. The reproduction of the war victims’ hero narrative led by the
party-state effectively excludes deaths with no record or political value. Also
continuously absent from the official narrative are the fierce battlegrounds of
the Central and Western Highlands, as well as the victims from the South.
In the United States, the black wall that architect Maya Lin
designed for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. has the inscribed
names of 58,000 fallen soldiers yet no space for mourning the veterans who
returned from the war but committed suicide from their lingering trauma. The
list of 5,000 Vietnam War veterans’ names at the War Memorial of Korea in
Yongsan also excludes the returning troops who took their own lives.
Additionally, the Hmong soldiers who died fighting for the CIA are not properly
recorded within the official history of the Vietnam War.
 |
| The Vietnam K9 Memorial Wall at the Michigan War Dog Memorial. Photo courtesy of the Memorial’s homepage. |
That’s not all. Until now, there has yet to be any accountability for the forced displacement of non-citizens during the war, such as the various ethnic minorities of the Central Highlands, let alone the forests, rivers, seas and non-human animals who were deprived of their habitats due to bombings and the spraying of Agent Orange. These beings with no voice to speak out are considered unavoidable “collateral damage” of war.
So then would it be impossible to create an alternative form of
mourning, one that goes beyond petitioning and begging the state to acknowledge
these unmourned deaths that exist outside of the official record? Wouldn’t
inscribing into a state monument the existence and deaths of those excluded
from the state narrative just be another way of slapping together and
standardizing these individual war experiences under the labels “citizen” and
“human”? How can we move beyond campaigns for official commemoration of someone’s achievements
or victimhood by having their names carved into a
state monument?
I believe that the contours of the Vietnam War may just barely come into view if considered from an analytical framework with more diverse layers, from a space of speaking, hearing,
recording and sharing more experiences of the war and from the questions
generated within continuous discussion between those
who did and did not experience it. Above all, I hope these
kinds of questions could be the starting point of the discussion.
*This is a supplemented and revised version of the author’s presentation manuscripts from the May 18 International Forum “The Future of Memory,
Commemoration, and Solidarity” held on August 29-30, 2024 by the May 18
International Research Institute and the 67th annual conference of the Korean Historical Association, “War and Peace.”
About the Author: Shim Ajeong is an independent researcher focusing on
animals, refugees, women and perpetratorhood. She is a member of the civic
group Majung that regularly
visits the detainees in the Hwaseong Detention Center, the Itda translation
collective, the International Law & Comfort Women seminar team and the
Memory and Peacebuilding Archive. She is interested in building a path of
practical life and knowledge with colleagues. Her recent co-written books
include Fighting Back Against Violence: The
Japanese “Comfort Women” Issue and Language, Memory and Solidarity (Research
Institute on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, 2024); What We Don’t Say About the Military: #Masculinity #Gender #Queer #Animals
#AI and Detention, Isolation,
Deprivation: Internal Exiles Around the World, the Story of Internment Camps
and Refugees in East Asia (both Booksea Publishing Co., 2024). She also
published the solo paper “NOW-HERE-Feminist’s Re-reading of Seo Kyung-sik to
Inquire about the Komatsugawa Jiken and Colonialism from a Gender Perspective”
(Sai, Vol. 37, 2024).
*Original
article: https://ildaro.com/10091
[1] Translator’s Note: On January 17, the appellate court ruled
in favor of plaintiff
Nguyễn Thị Thanh. For an analysis of the case, see the Hankyoreh editorial by Nguyen Thi Thanh’s attorney Lim Jae-sung: https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/english_editorials/1181105.html
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