Pod Insights Throughline How our memory of war can shape the future About this episode All wars are fought twice: first on the battlefield, the second time in memory," writes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen. This week on Throughline, we revisit our 2022 conversation with Nguyen about how the way we remember and selectively forget the ravages of war has the power to reshape our future.
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Transcript 8,404 words · 25 speakers
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0:20 Speaker 01 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.
0:56 Speaker 01 Toni Morrison, "Beloved."
1:07 Speaker 02 My own memories began very concretely in a refugee camp a few weeks after the fall of Saigon. We were actually boatlifted out of Saigon and then airlifted from Guam to Pennsylvania
1:24 Speaker 02 and ended up, you know, in a military base, Fort Indian Town Gap in Harrisburg. And that's where my memories began.
1:37 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
1:52 Speaker 02 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
2:05 Speaker 02 and seeing sailors shooting at a smaller boat approaching us.
2:09 Speaker 02 My brother, who was seven years old, that never happened.
2:13 Speaker 02 So I have to trust that his memory is right and my memory is wrong.
2:16 Speaker 04 He has to trust it, even though what his brother says contradicts Viet's own memories. And that tension has animated his writing.
2:24 Speaker 02 I'm 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.
2:43 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
3:00 Speaker 05 The UN's Refugee Agency estimates over 3 million people have already been internally displaced in Iran, an additional million in Lebanon.
3:10 Rund Abdelfatah? Today, the world is watching as the US and Iran attempt to broker a peace deal after tensions erupted into a US-Israeli war against Iran. A preliminary assessment by the Pentagon has determined the US 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 choke point that's caused oil prices to skyrocket.
3:37 Speaker 06 The war in Iran has caused the biggest disruption to oil supplies in history.
3:42 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
3:53 Speaker 07 How do you end a war when one of the warring parties shows no interest in ending it?
3:59 Rund Abdelfatah? And there's no end in sight for the war in Ukraine, which is ongoing after four years of fighting.
4:05 Speaker 07 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.
4:19 Rund Abdelfatah? Depending on where you are in the world and where you're getting news about a war, you're very likely getting a different narrative, sometimes a polar opposite narrative than someone else, somewhere else, about the very same conflict. And these differing narratives influence how that war will be perceived now and later on.
4:39 Speaker 04 Unlike any moment happening in real time, details are left out, context is missing. And what you think to be true may not be what's actually happening. All of this simplifies our memories of what happened. And Viet wants us not only to recognize that, but to challenge those memories. Because nothing, especially war, is that simple.
5:01 Rund Abdelfatah? I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Back in 2022, my co-host Ramtin Arablouei and I interviewed award-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen about how wars are experienced and remembered as conflicts rage around the world. I've been thinking about that conversation a lot. So this week on the show, we're going to revisit it and dig deep into how the memory of war can shape the future. Stay with us.
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7:53 Speaker 01 Part one, in the absence.
7:57 Speaker 10 I know that many of our friends around the world have the impression that the United States is being rash and irresponsible and reckless in Vietnam. I say on the contrary that what we are trying to do here is to stop aggression in Southeast Asia, because only by stopping aggression now will we avoid big war later.
8:19 Speaker 04 The US was involved in Vietnam from the 1950s well into the 70s. The conflict passed through the hands of five US presidents. What began as US fears of communism spreading to South Vietnam and the rest of Asia soon became what many called a quagmire, a long, drawn-out conflict that had no clear objectives.
8:39 Rund Abdelfatah? At the height of the war, over half a million American troops were stationed in Vietnam. In the end, the US would suffer more than 58,000 deaths. Vietnam had over 3 million.
8:52 Speaker 11 How many men who listened 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.
9:21 Speaker 04 The US 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, 4-year-old Viet Thanh Nguyen.
9:40 Speaker 02 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.
9:56 Speaker 04 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.
10:11 Speaker 02 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.
10:51 Speaker 04 For Viet, the political experience of the war was very personal, and his personal experience was always political.
10:58 Speaker 02 My memories really began very coherently when I was taken away from my parents.
11:07 Speaker 02 What happened was that in order to leave the refugee camp, we had to have Americans sponsor us, but there was no American willing to sponsor my entire family. So one sponsor took my parents.
11:18 Speaker 02 One sponsor took my brother. One sponsor took four-year-old me. Which, when you're four years old, is a traumatic experience.
11:28 Speaker 02 It was only a few months for me. My brother, who was seven years older, didn't get to come home for two years.
11:37 Speaker 02 So these vast traumatic historical events like war and refugee experience manifest themselves for individuals and families in their particular individual emotional problems and crises that reverberate for generations.
11:56 Rund Abdelfatah? My parents are Palestinian refugees, and we had like a tense relationship with memory. On the one hand, it was like obsessively remembering so that we don't forget kind of like where we came from and things like that and what happened. On the other hand, there were like black holes in the discussions we had about their actual personal experiences. And I wonder, you know, as, as the child of refugees yourself, was that something that you also experienced?
12:25 Speaker 02 I think this is a very common experience for lots of people who have fled from some country due to some horrifying war or trauma or anything like that. And I think a lot of it does have to do with trauma. That one of the things that trauma does to us is that it makes us fixate on a particular kind of event. And one definition of trauma is that it's a memory that we cannot narrate ourselves out of.
12:52 Speaker 02 You circle around the traumatic experience and you can't get out of it. For example, the fall of Saigon. The fact that that event terribly disrupted and damaged my parents' lives and the lives of people of their generation rippled through me. But number one, my parents, like yours, didn't want to tell me everything. And number two, I often felt like I didn't want to ask because maybe they have good reason not to tell me. And what right do I have to try to pry into their own personal shadows and traumas and complications? Maybe they want to forget for good reason and maybe I should leave them alone.
13:28 Rund Abdelfatah? I think in talking to my own parents, I know that they did see horrific things also. But it was something that they didn't talk about for decades. And it makes me wonder if there's something to the fact that you almost need the distance. You need the physical and the temporal distance from something in order to begin to process it on an individual level and maybe on a collective societal level.
13:55 Speaker 02 I think that is absolutely true, that whether we're individuals or whether we're a part of a collective, when something terrible happens, we need time to recover, to process, to gain perspective on things. And that could be a very, very long time. And so the fact that your parents and mine did not talk about certain things, I think was, at least for me, I knew what the absence was. I didn't know what was in the absence, but I knew there was an absence.
14:25 Speaker 04 The narrative wasn't complete.
14:27 Speaker 02 The same thing was true for the Vietnamese refugee community. This was a community that was dominated by its veterans, that had veterans in military uniforms present during its community celebrations, where we had to sing the South Vietnamese National Anthem.
14:43 Speaker 04 The way nations remember their wars also affects how their veterans are treated. In the US, World War II veterans were seen as heroes in our collective memory, those who fought and won the good war. But on the other hand, Vietnam veterans were seen as damaged goods. And that loss in war not only followed them around, but was also seared into our collective psyche.
15:05 Speaker 02 This brought home to me this idea that just because a shooting has ended, it doesn't mean that the war is over. And that the people who survive a war, whether they're the winners or the losers, will want to keep refighting the war again in order to prove their own narrative, that the war was justified or that their defeat was not justified.
15:27 Speaker 04 Viet's personal narrative also wasn't complete because he had never been back to Vietnam.
15:34 Speaker 02 So the first time I went back, actually, was 27 years later, in 2002. I was an adult. And I decided that I was going to go back and just see Vietnam for the first time, but not my family, because it was just going to be so hard to see the family. And so I went for two weeks as a tourist, and it's great.
15:53 Speaker 02 I encourage everybody to go to Vietnam as a tourist because it's a lot of fun. There's great beaches and bars and nightclubs. The American dollar goes a long way, et cetera. And, you know, seeing the country that way in 2002 was really helpful because, number one, it allowed me to partly get past the hangup that a lot of Americans have about Vietnam, which is that it's a war and not a country. And in fact, going back as a tourist really helped me to see that most of the people in Vietnam don't want to think about the war. They want to move forward with their lives like everybody else does, make money, have families, and all that kind of thing. Americans as a whole talked constantly about the war in Vietnam, lots of movies, lots of books, all these kinds of things.
16:37 Speaker 02 And so I took that contrast between so much talk, on the one hand, about American experience, and so little talk about the Vietnamese experience very personally. And so that was partly the genesis for becoming a writer, the sense of resentment and anger and the sense of mission and purpose to tell our stories.
16:56 Speaker 04 To do this, he realized he had to go back again to try to figure out what was real and what wasn't, how the war stories were being told in Vietnam, and what that might mean for how people in both countries move forward.
17:13 Rund Abdelfatah? When we come back, Viet returns to Vietnam. This time, not as a tourist, but as a writer.
17:27 Speaker 12 This is Okelomukua from Denver, Colorado. You're listening to True Line from NPR. Thank you.
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19:01 Speaker 01 Part Two, Split Brain.
19:06 Speaker 01 I used to think it was my re-memory. You know, some things you forget, other things you never do. But it's not.
19:16 Speaker 02 "Nothing Ever Dies" is special to me because the title actually comes from Toni Morrison's beloved.
19:23 Speaker 01 If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place, the picture of it stays. And it's not just in my re-memory, but out there in the world.
19:32 Speaker 02 She has an idea called re-memory. This idea that memory is out there, that we can actually run into it.
19:40 Rund Abdelfatah? When he first returned to Vietnam, Viet Thanh Nguyen set out to run into memories. But understanding them took much longer than he anticipated.
19:50 Speaker 02 "Nothing Ever Dies" actually took 14 years from start to finish. And I think the reason it took 14 years is because what started off as a very simple project became a very complicated one.
20:03 Rund Abdelfatah? Viet thought he would be plugging holes in the dominant American narrative of the Vietnam War, what Vietnam calls "the American War."
20:11 Speaker 02 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.
20:22 Rund Abdelfatah? When you say deeply limited, what did you feel was limiting about it?
20:26 Speaker 02 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.
21:03 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
21:12 Speaker 02 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.
21:27 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
21:47 Speaker 02 And in fact, that what I was doing was, in many ways, a mirror image of what Americans did, which is that Americans, when they're attacked, or when they go to war, they feel themselves to be victims. And then they focus on their own experiences at the exclusion of everybody else. And the Vietnamese, of all sides, do exactly the same thing.
22:06 Rund Abdelfatah? If Viet brought that perspective back to the US, he would just be pairing one victim narrative with another. And that's not what he wanted to do. He wanted to point out that that's what all sides of a conflict are still doing, that they're missing the larger point. That no one is just a victim, and no one is just a hero.
22:24 Speaker 02 14 years is a long time for an individual. It's not a long time for a nation. And I think for me, the larger lesson from this is that, as difficult as it is for an individual to see past their own predilections, their own desire to identify with their own people, nations are doing the same thing. And that's why it's really, really hard for the United States or Vietnam to recognize their own ethnocentric and nationalist preoccupations and their blind spots to other nations and other cultures.
22:58 Rund Abdelfatah? The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the US is in Washington DC. I've been there many times. It's down by the National Mall. And it's this beautiful, massively long, black granite wall, designed by the architect, Maya Lin.
23:12 Speaker 13 She conceived of two joined walls of dark reflective stone set into the ground.
23:18 Speaker 13 And engraved with the names of the more than 58,000 Americans who died in that war.
23:23 Speaker 02 And so when you visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, what you see there is a beautiful commemoration of 58,000-plus American dead. And a total erasure or refusal to remember that millions of Southeast Asians of all sides, including hundreds of thousands of America's allies, also died during the war. So by not remembering those people, it allows Americans to think of their own soldiers and through their soldiers themselves, Americans themselves, as victims of this terrible war.
23:55 Speaker 13 And with all those names carved so permanently into stone, there is no way any of us can ever forget the sacrifice of those who served.
24:05 Speaker 02 Now, if you go to Vietnam, it's exactly the same thing. If you go to the major historical museums, war memorials in Vietnam, what you'll discover is a very consistent narrative, which is that the Vietnamese were the victims of foreign aggression, whether that was the French or whether it's the Americans. And that this narrative of victimization is what allows and justifies the Communist Revolution and the current Communist government by implication.
24:33 Speaker 04 The War Remnants Museum is in Ho Chi Minh City, the city formerly known as Saigon. It was originally called the Exhibition House for U.S. and Puppet Crimes, back when it was founded in 1975. But the name was eventually changed as relations improved with the U.S. Over half a million people visit the museum each year, most of them tourists. Still, it's criticized for lacking balance in its focus on atrocities committed by the U.S. compared to the North Vietnamese.
25:03 Rund Abdelfatah? This bias is also seen in some memorials in other parts of Vietnam, like the Khan Son Island Prison Complex. There you walk through the prison and see statues of Vietnamese people being tortured by Americans, whether it's a depiction of someone locked in a small cell or being beaten with sticks and fists. The message is clear, that the Vietnamese were victims of American cruelty.
25:27 Speaker 02 So when Americans go visit these museums, oftentimes they're totally shocked because Americans have existed in their own... Ecosystem of propaganda that they never realized was propaganda. Which is that when Americans think about the war in Vietnam, they think of themselves as the victims. Then they go to Vietnam and see these memorials and museums where they're being depicted as the people who committed atrocities. And for a lot of Americans, it's a complete short circuiting. They just don't know how to deal with this.
25:53 Speaker 04 You can see this in the museum guestbooks, where visitors write down reflections of their visits.
25:58 Speaker 02 Half of the Americans who write things down say, this is just communist propaganda. What about all the atrocities that the communists committed? And it's true, the communists did commit atrocities. But so did the Americans. Both of these things can exist at the same time. But in an either or universe, they don't. And it was painful for me to realize that. Because I wanted, I think, when I started writing the book, to see the world in a more simple fashion of Americans doing the wrong thing and Vietnamese doing the right thing and Americans doing forgetting and the Vietnamese needing to remember. And then understanding that the Vietnamese of all sides have done very much exactly the same processes of exclusion, forgetting, erasure, self-privileging. That took a while for me to understand.
26:42 Speaker 04 It's a challenging concept, one with huge implications for national identity, both Vietnamese and American.
26:51 Rund Abdelfatah? It feels like there's something really powerful about war memory because it has the capacity, on the one hand, to unite a country, right? Because when you have a common enemy, it's somewhat the easiest way to unite people is to say, here's a common enemy. But as we know with the Vietnam War, it was also incredibly divisive, right? It was almost like our country had a split brain 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 valorize it, and there's also a deep skepticism about like, what were we doing there? What do we stand for as a country?
27:34 Rund Abdelfatah? And what are our responsibilities in the aftermath?
27:38 Speaker 02 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 wars oftentimes...
27:50 Speaker 02 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 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 the American mythology as a war of independence and of freedom and of liberation.
28:32 Speaker 02 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.
29:15 Speaker 04 Viet calls that re-narration "the memory industry." He argues that the way nations remember and re-narrate their pasts isn't random or coincidental. It's intentionally curated. Memorials, monuments, museums, even the keychains and mugs in the gift shop. But all that pales in comparison to Hollywood.
29:37 Rund Abdelfatah? It must have been an odd experience, I guess, to have absorbed these cultural reference points as an American and then to kind of, all those years later, go and encounter sort of the realities on the ground. And I wonder what you feel about this memory industry, what role it played for you personally and what kind of role it plays more generally in shaping the narratives we have about these big events that kind of affect us all as a society.
30:10 Speaker 02 In the case of something like Apocalypse Now, for example, I think it's a great work of art. I also think it's racist when it comes to Vietnamese people.
30:17 Speaker 04 Apocalypse Now is a movie about the Vietnam War, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. It was released in 1979. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won two. Many consider it one of the greatest films ever made. Viet calls it "the archetype of a Hollywood fantasy."
30:36 Speaker 14 I love the smell of my pum in the morning.
30:43 Speaker 04 The film demonstrates the horrors of war for sure and far from celebrates the American military. But at the very least, American soldiers are depicted as fleshed-out individual characters in the film. Compare that to the South Vietnamese people, who are barely recognized at all. In fact, there's only one single line of dialogue spoken by a South Vietnamese person in the entire two-and-a-half-hour film.
31:09 Speaker 15 This audio is dirty, PC. He wants water. He can drink petty water.
31:16 Speaker 15 Get out of here! Give me that, give me that canteen.
31:20 Speaker 02 So that kind of irony and contrast, these inequities, in terms of whose stories get circulated, whether as novels or films, or whether as American stories or Vietnamese stories, is very much on my mind.
31:30 Speaker 04 Especially because Viet benefits from the cultural power that his Vietnamese-American identity offers.
31:37 Speaker 02 Being an American means that I have a lot of privilege. And I think for a lot of Americans, oftentimes, we don't realize how much privilege we have. So for example, one of the basic privileges as an American is the reality that what Americans think and feel and the kinds of stories that we tell are things that get exported all over the world. And I thought about that a lot because I'm an American writer, writing in English. I'm not a Vietnamese writer, writing in Vietnamese. And it's made a huge world of difference, literally a world of difference, because my book can be read in 25 or something different languages all over the world. And most Vietnamese writers don't have that kind of opportunity. And it's very much a function of American privilege
32:20 Speaker 02 that I earned or got given to me as a refugee from a war. And so I bring that privilege with me into Vietnam, that I'm Vietnamese there, but I'm also an American. And the Vietnamese there are very clearly aware of all this.
32:46 Rund Abdelfatah? The first time he returned to Vietnam, Viet chose not to see his extended family.
32:52 Speaker 02 Because I was deeply afraid. Most of my family never left Vietnam, couldn't leave Vietnam, and they were poor. My family was, my parents were supporting them for decades during times of starvation. And so I was really, really worried about going to Vietnam and encountering all these kinds of emotional complications because I'm not good at emotional complication.
33:11 Rund Abdelfatah? But eventually, he decided it was time.
33:14 Speaker 02 I went and I met my adopted sister, who had been left behind in 1975. And I met dozens of my relatives, who led completely different lives than mine. You know, many of us who come from these traumatized countries, when we go back, as Americans, we're expected to bring suitcases full of stuff and money. My father, in preparation, gave me a whole list of relatives with dollar amounts and said, "You're going to give this person this much money and that person that much money."
33:43 Speaker 04 Seeing his family was complicated, especially for Viet, who moves through the world as both American and Vietnamese.
33:50 Speaker 02 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.
34:17 Speaker 02 And that I come to Vietnam with my own set of hangups. I don't have the same kind of hangups 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.
34:38 Speaker 04 Coming up, how Viet changed his lens and how he wants the rest of us to change ours.
34:52 Speaker 16 Hello, this is Dermot Seacall from Paris, France, to tell you that you and I are listening to Throughline from NPR.
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36:25 Speaker 01 Part Three: No Happy Forgetting.
36:29 Speaker 06 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.
36:41 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
37:01 Speaker 02 So 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? And it's my role as an author to try to make the stories more nuanced and get us to think about how, you know, we also have been involved in Afghanistan and created lots of refugees and have abandoned a lot of our Afghan allies. And all of that has been swept under the rug in this moral fervor around Ukraine.
37:29 Rund Abdelfatah? In August 2021, two decades after the first bombs were dropped, the US withdrew from Afghanistan. It was the longest war in US history. But for Viet, it's not just the forgetting that's the problem. It's how we forget.
37:44 Speaker 17 My fellow Americans, the war in Afghanistan is now over.
37:50 Speaker 02 I can't imagine many traumatic events that end simply because of history books say, well, the war ended on such and such a date. Wars continue in people's feelings, emotions, politics, and so on. We carry our wars with us and their consequences. And the refugee experience and the experiences of displacement and loss are part of the war experience. So that leads us to the next question of how do we achieve what the philosopher Paul Ricur calls happy forgetting? And he says it's possible to have happy forgetting versus unhappy forgetting, which is what we have now in the United States.
38:33 Speaker 02 Happy forgetting, Ricur argues, is possible through justice and through working through the past, through all these kinds of things that a lot of people don't want to do because then we have to confront the past. Then we have to figure out, you know, what constitutes justice for the past? Is it reparations? Is it memorials? Is it certain kinds of narratives? All these things are on the table. And so a happy forgetting is something that we have to work for, work through, to get to.
39:06 Rund Abdelfatah? You wrote an opinion piece. It was around the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. And you were actually drawing a parallel between the fall of Saigon and the withdrawal from Kabul. And I found it very striking. And I wonder if you can explain sort of what you were thinking in that moment and since that moment.
39:26 Speaker 02 I felt so much rage and anger and also deep empathy for Afghan people. And the reason why I felt so much rage and anger is because I felt that as soon as 9/11 happened and we went to war in Afghanistan, that this was exactly the outcome that was going to happen. There was no other outcome that was going to happen. And it just was a tragedy, not only that it happened, but that it took 20 years for all of this history to unfold in Afghanistan and in other countries.
40:01 Speaker 18 At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.
40:12 Speaker 17 The developments of the past week reinforced that ending US military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.
40:22 Speaker 17 American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.
40:34 Speaker 02 And I felt that it's so utterly predictable what the United States will do to other countries and how the United States will absolve itself of what it has done to other countries.
40:48 Speaker 02 And that my experiences as a Vietnamese person coming out of the Vietnam War, deeply skeptical of American idealism, prepared me to think this way.
40:59 Speaker 19 Throughout the day, Chinook helicopters ferried United States embassy staff to the International Airport. It harked back to the images of the ignominious retreat of the US from Vietnam.
41:10 Speaker 20 Some Vietnamese veterans see echoes of their experience in this withdrawal in Afghanistan. Do you see any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam with some people feeling...
41:22 Speaker 17 None whatsoever. Zero.
41:25 Speaker 02 And so, when the fall of Kabul happened, I felt that the United States is responsible. And so that was why it was important in that piece to say, "Well, we need to rescue them because we bombed them, literally, in the first place, and made the country the way that it is." And part of the strange experience for me as an American to feel on a very regular basis is this contradiction between being a refugee from an American war in Vietnam and being a citizen of a United States that is at perpetual war. I think for a lot of people, particularly Americans, who are insulated from war, they think of war as something that happens somewhere else in a very discreet period of time. But anyone who's actually survived a war knows that's not the case.
42:17 Speaker 02 I think about how refugee stories remind us of the human consequences of war. I think most nations prefer to remember the stories of their soldiers, which, even if terrible, nevertheless continue to affirm the importance of the nation through the sacrifices of the soldiers.
42:35 Speaker 21 Your fellow citizens are proud of you, and so is your commander in chief. Because of your service and sacrifice, we took the fight to Al Qaeda and we brought Osama bin Laden to justice.
42:46 Speaker 14 Thank you for keeping America safe, strong, proud, mighty, and free.
42:51 Speaker 17 The extraordinary success of this mission was due to the incredible skill, bravery, and selfless courage of the United States military and our diplomats and intelligence professionals.
43:04 Speaker 02 I think that we live in countries that privilege and honor soldiers and look down on refugees. Because refugees remind us of how close we ourselves could be to those circumstances if, for some unfortunate reason, we happen to fall victim to war or to climate catastrophe or things like this.
43:28 Speaker 02 I think that if we shifted our perspective from the view of great men and soldiers and battles and so forth to the experience of refugees, what we would realize is that war inevitably kills civilians and that war also inevitably produces refugees. War inevitably affects civilians. War is this horrible, daily, unforgiving grind for millions and millions of people who do not ask for war and whose lives are completely upended by war and who will never receive any kind of glory or recognition for what they have been through.
44:06 Speaker 04 Refugee stories are war stories as much as soldier stories are. Not either/or, but both-and.
44:15 Speaker 02 And so the solution to this kind of inequity is not simply to say, "Tell your own story," which is true, that's why when I wrote a novel. The solution is also to say, "You actually have to transform society so that more people have the opportunity to tell their stories." These two things are inseparable. Tell your story and transform the society so that more people have the opportunity to tell their stories. Another way of thinking about this is that when my novel, The Sympathizer, got published and became successful, some people said, "Oh, Viet's the voice for the voiceless." And I thought, "That's not a compliment." Because all that really indicates is that people just want to hear from one voice, when in fact, there's thousands of voices. And a happy forgetting would be achieved
44:59 Speaker 02 not by having Viet be the voice for the voiceless and having his one novel out there. A happy forgetting would be achieved when we've abolished the conditions of voicelessness so that thousands of voices are being heard. But that's a lot more complicated than the more simplified narrative of, "Let's have one person speak for Vietnamese people." Or, "Let's have one movie, like Apocalypse Now, speak for the entire American perspective."
45:27 Rund Abdelfatah? I think it's something that a lot of people would nod along and be like, "Yeah, absolutely," right? And it's like, on a theoretical level, and some people would be like, "Honestly?" Some people would roll their eyes at that, right? So I guess my question is, how do we actually make it so that this is just the way we talk about history? It's not like something where we're like, "Here's the appendix with all the like, extra stories that you need to fill in the gaps," but it actually becomes part of the way we actually think of ourselves and think about our history.
45:57 Speaker 02 My view is, look, where we're at in American society has taken us centuries to get here. Centuries of exploitation and inequity, but also centuries of struggles for freedom and liberation.
46:10 Speaker 02 But I do have this optimism that in 100 to 200 years, we will see a substantial transformation if we struggle for it, if we keep imagining what a different world and a different future looks like.
46:26 Speaker 01 So they forgot her, like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep. Occasionally, however, the rustle of a skirt hushes when they wake, and the knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep seem to belong to the sleeper. Sometimes the photograph of a close friend or relative looked at two long shifts, and something more familiar than the deer face itself moves there. They can touch it if they like, but don't, because they know things will never be the same if they do. This is not a story to pass on.
47:02 Speaker 02 I think, again, back to Beloved and Toni Morrison and the final refrain in Beloved as the novel talks about slavery. And that refrain is that this is not a story to pass on, in the sense that this is not something that we want to give to another generation, but also this is not a story that we can avoid or ignore.
47:25 Speaker 02 And so that paradox that she identifies is true here as well. We have to both be able to forget and to remember simultaneously. And how do we do that? For us as individuals, it's one question, but as a nation, it involves trying to figure out some program of justice to achieve that equilibrium of happy forgetting.
47:52 Rund Abdelfatah? That was also a goal of Viet's book, "Nothing Ever Dies", to search for what that future might look like. And he found it.
48:02 Speaker 02 So what happened is that I was doing research, which included going to Laos.
48:06 Speaker 22 This is the battlefield in Laos. These are government troops, supported and financed by the United States, fighting and losing ground to communists.
48:15 Speaker 02 And of course, the United States fought the so-called "secret war" in Laos. So I was there to look at some of these battlefields and the remnants of bombs and things like this.
48:25 Speaker 23 During Vietnam, the US dropped more explosives on Laos than it did on Germany and Japan combined in World War II.
48:33 Speaker 02 And I was being driven through the country by a driver. And he said, "Oh, look, we should stop off here at this cave." So the story is that during the war in Laos, hundreds of people, civilians, took refuge in this deep, deep cave. And then an American rocket was launched, and it went into the cave and killed a whole lot of people.
49:00 Speaker 02 So we stopped off. And I was the only person there at this hill, except for these four schoolgirls, Laoxian schoolgirls. All of us were going hiking up this hill. And I was ahead of them, and they were teenagers. And they were doing what teenage girls do, which is, you know, they were after school. They had their cellphones out. They were giggling and talking and taking photographs and texting. And I was on my very serious mission to get to this cave at the top of the hill.
49:31 Speaker 02 So I got into the cave, and I was really struck by what I saw. Because there was no blood or bones or anything like that. It was just an empty cave. But I walked into the cave to the moment where the sunlight met the darkness.
49:51 Speaker 02 And I stopped. And I couldn't bring myself to go any further. And this is what I'm going to read.
49:59 Speaker 02 What had it been like with hundreds of people? The noise and the stench, the dimness and the terror? What was in the void now? I stood on the side of presence, facing an absence where the past lived, populated with ghosts, real and imagined. And in that moment, I was afraid.
50:29 Speaker 02 Then I heard the laughter. The girls stood at the cave's mouth, profiles outlined by sunlight, making sure the shadows did not touch even their toes. Turning my back on all that remained unseen behind me, I walked towards their silhouettes.
50:57 Speaker 02 I think that moment was very striking for me because in this cave of horrifying history, at the mouth of it, there were these girls who probably did know what happened in that cave, they grew up in that area. But for them, it was the past. And they were more concerned with whatever it is that 13-year-old girls are concerned with, and rightfully so. And I thought that was actually a moment of hope, that these girls would have a different kind of a future, that they would not have to be shadowed by death and by war, and that they could carve out their own lives, hopefully free in some ways from the past.
51:50 Rund Abdelfatah? That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Arablouei. This episode was produced by me, Ramtin, and?
52:01 Speaker 02 Lawrence Wu.
52:01 Rund Abdelfatah? Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Julie Kane.
52:04 Speaker 02 Victor Iveyez.
52:05 Rund Abdelfatah? Monsi Karano. Casey Minor. Kumari Devarajan. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vokel. Special thanks to Michael Sullivan, Connor Donovan, Michael Levitt, Courtney Dornig, Mary Louise Kelly, Christina Buie, Tamara Charney, and Anya Grunman. Thanks also to Johannes Dergi, Leana Simstrom, Julia Redpath, Beth Donovan, Yolanda Sangueni, and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Josh Newell. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes- Anya Mizani.
52:41 Speaker 24 Navid Marvi. Sho Fujiwara.
52:44 Rund Abdelfatah? And finally, if you have an idea or liked something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected] . And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number, too. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. Also, make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.
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