a presence of departed acts
We walked past the tank that bulldozed the fence—the same model if not the same one—on our way up to the Palace, an elegant Modernist structure that looks more like a government archive or an art gallery. It was an August morning in Ho Chi Minh City, heavy with smog and sweat. We wandered with a crowd through some side entrance and ambled through the humid rooms. Informational plaques described the functions of each room and touted the victory of the North Vietnamese, but were scant on facts about The American War, as it’s called in Vietnam. There were reception halls with silky curtains and blocky, gold-upholstered chairs; studies with enormous bureaus; meeting rooms with long tables; recreation rooms with mod décor; a bunker full of maps and radio equipment. A movie theater, even, with thick red curtains. Whenever I tried to wonder what had been screened there—CIA training videos? Midnight Cowboy?—my jetlag and ignorance short-circuited my imagination.
Despite the narrow focus of the plaques, the well-preserved rooms prompted visitors to imagine What Things Were Like. There were black and white photographs of Ho Chi Minh and Thiệu, French diplomats and US Presidents. You got the sense that you were supposed to think about History, Reunification, Imperialism. Instead, all I could think about was interior design. There was a UH-1 helicopter on the roof, evocative of the famous photograph. But what I remember most clearly is the mahjong table in the game room, its handsome chairs with curved backs that would make a perfect circle if they touched.
That may sound flippant, but the feeling should be recognizable to even the most earnest tourist. All tourists assume a state of receptiveness that borders on gullibility, bafflement, even boredom. Besides, I wasn’t alone. In the bunker downstairs, domestic tourists pointed delightedly at faded tactical maps, perhaps looking for familiar places or hometowns. Selfies abounded, often with the most banal items. One room in the bunker was walled with typewriters, like some steampunk computer. I had no idea what it was all for. Or, I assumed that it was all for making war, but how exactly? And where were the weapons? Another short circuit.
The Independence Palace is that odd thing: the historic site. Neither museum nor memorial, it retroactively attempts to be both. The Palace was the site of the end of the War—the Vietcong flag flew from the Palace on April 30, 1975—and was even renamed Reunification Hall, a postwar rechristening not unlike the change of Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City. But, unlike a museum or memorial, it was not built for this purpose. Like all historic sites, it is a vessel backfilled with meaning, the aura of its antique objects—nightstands, armchairs, photographs—never quite powerful enough to conjure the people who once used them.
These historic sites, however, despite their comparative emptiness, can be more humbling than other historic places, revealing one’s ignorance in surprising ways. Museums dispense facts or tell stories, which give visitors a narrative confidence, the sensation of learning. Memorials consecrate spaces through symbols, inscriptions, ceremony. They are both concerned with interpretation rather than mere preservation or reenactment. Historic sites, on the other hand, are like deserted film sets that you must fill in with the past, only to find that the past exists in your head as a preposterous coagulation of movies, novels, phrases, magazines, and random assumptions. (For me, in the case of The Vietnam/American War: The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), Fullmetal Jacket (1987), Rescue Dawn (2006), some Tim O’Brien stories, half of a Bảo Ninh book, a fistful of violent photographs, two episodes of the Ken Burns & Lynn Novick series, an Ocean Vuong poem, childhood memories of people calling the war “a tie,” Blood Meridian.) The historic site reveals how much of our knowledge about the past is not really knowledge at all. Instead, it is a kind of filler, much like the random archival footage used in documentaries—grainy 16mm footage of helicopters, home videos of some irrelevant family, undated street scenes of Saigon—to create historical authenticity through texture rather than fact.
We came to one bunker room, much like the others, with maps of VIET NAM on burnt umber walls, a large green desk in the middle with two cradle telephones and an answering machine. Staring at the desk, imagining myself writing at it, counting the white floortiles and wondering about the precise term for their dark, square-crossed pattern, I knew I had entered that place. I was standing in that conceptual lobby where tourists wait in vain for their appointment with History, glossing over its facts and coveting its furniture. Stuck in the Now, we shuffle toward the exit, photographing household objects. As if that, of all things, might make the past come alive.
My only real flash of imagination came on our way out of the bunker, standing before another nondescript room, which was vacant save for some desks and chairs and a wooden sawhorse painted blue or white. The plaque by the door simply said Security. A few seconds after I read it, the empty rifle-rack suddenly revealed its purpose, and my imagination sprang to action, lining up the guns, their butt plates notching neatly into the rack’s small, half-moon grooves.
When we walked out of the bunker, we emerged into an industrial kitchen full of large devices. It’s crazy how inhabiting the past can make you a tourist of the present; how instead of thinking about the military junta, or French Indochina, or whatever, we just stood there awhile, marveling at the gleaming machines, the retro soda fountain, the enormous mixing bowl.
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Not far from the Palace, a large concrete block sits on black pillars, surrounded by American tanks and airplanes, which are gathered like a chthonic mirror-display of some airshow back home. A former US Information Agency building, the blocky structure is now The War Remnants Museum. When it opened in 1975, it was called the Exhibition House for US and Puppet Crimes,1 which remains a more accurate description of what is inside: a brandishing of horrors, a forcing to look.
The effect of the Museum, a few dingy rooms full of death, is impossible to achieve in writing, but it is worth listing some of the things we saw. There were rocket launchers, rifles, machine guns, mortars, even a French guillotine. A display case full of dirty bombs used by the US, each one a different shape, like ciboriums for minor gods of death. A dilapidated diorama with a lifesize wax figure of an American soldier.2 A sewer pipe where children hid from Navy SEALs on an indiscriminate killing spree. Jars containing human fetuses deformed by Agent Orange, the highly toxic defoliant that the US sprayed on 12,000 square miles of Vietnamese forest.
Back at the Independence Palace, ordinary objects had been kept in place for the imagination to repopulate with History, catching tourists between nostalgia for its relics and ignorance of its events. At the War Remnants Museum, objects were laid out as death-totems, cursed beyond words. If the Palace exposed a limit of knowledge, the Museum also suggested a limit of imagination, its displays of violence daring you to imagine anything worse. Though some visitors and US veterans have complained about the one-sidedness of the displays (our Fodor’s guidebook warned of bias, but it also suggested Apocalypse Now as a resource for learning more about the War), the thesis of American atrocity and excessive force is undeniable and unrelenting.
The thesis was as familiar as many of the photographs, which wall each room with horror. Like Ron Haeberle’s photos of the Mỹ Lai massacre, first published by the Cleveland Plains Dealer, in which women and children, raped and mutilated by US soldiers, spill into the road. Or Eddie Adams’s “Saigon Execution,” of the moment a bullet entered the brain of Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Vietcong captain. There were many, though, that I had never seen: dozens of photographs of children—of Vietnamese and Americans alike—deformed by Agent Orange. Dignified portraits of Vietnamese victims of massacres. A child in a forest withered by defoliant. Three in a row haunted me for the rest of our vacation: a soldier smiling next to a human skull he’d mounted on his tent, naked bodies of Vietnamese people lashed to a tank and dragged to death, and—most of all—a US soldier holding, in disbelief or disgust, the shredded remains of a Vietnamese man.
Before entering, you might expect this to be a place of bombastic propaganda, but for the most part these objects speak for themselves. Even the captions, in Vietnamese and English, are more collage than combativeness, pulling quotations from Anglophone media and American officials. There are quotations from Eisenhower, McNamara, Life magazine, Ron Haeberle, Bertrand Russell, Newsweek, Hans Goran Frank, Gunnar Myrdal. One room begins with a dark joke: the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence next to a photograph of Americans rounding up Vietnamese villagers—doubly dark, since Ho Chi Minh began his own 1945 Declaration by quoting from the American one. All men are created equal, that old punchline, its implied asterisk so large it capsizes the whole phrase.
The overall effect of these exhibits is a mounting polemic of self-damnation. Perhaps the most flagrant example of this are the photographs and text assembled on the walls above the sewer pipe. The most prominent photo is of former US Senator Bob Kerrey, the Navy SEAL who led the rampage. He confessed to killing innocent women and children at Thanh Phong in a 2001 New York Times Magazine profile and in his 2002 memoir, When I Was a Young Man. His confession hangs on the wall, surrounded by photographs of his victims. In the 2001 profile, Times reporter Gregory L. Vistica wrote:
As an inexperienced, 25-year-old lieutenant, Kerrey led a commando team on a raid of an isolated peasant hamlet called Thanh Phong in Vietnam's eastern Mekong Delta. While witnesses and official records give varying accounts of exactly what happened, one thing is certain: around midnight on Feb. 25, 1969, Kerrey and his men killed at least 13 unarmed women and children. The operation was brutal; for months afterward, Kerrey says, he feared going to sleep because of the terrible nightmares that haunted him.
It’s one hell of a semicolon. When I first read “The operation was brutal;” I expected the brutality to apply to the unarmed women and children, not their killers who struggled to sleep. The piece is awfully sympathetic to Kerrey. Even the title of the piece, “One Awful Night in Thanh Phong,” sounds more like an episode of drunkenness or food poisoning than a violation of the Geneva Convention. Like many things written by Americans about the War, even decades later, the profile is more concerned with Kerrey as a tragic figure—the event was apparently “so traumatic that he says it once prompted fleeting thoughts of suicide”—than the tragic deaths of the slain villagers.
One reason that the one-sidedness of the War Remnants Museum feels less acute, perhaps, is that Americans have been living on the other side for years. You don’t really need propaganda to make the point that all kinds of Americans—from Kerrey to Kissinger to the scientists at Dow Chemical and Monsanto cooking up Agent Orange—did not get the comeuppance they deserved, that the country does not merely overlook atrocity but often rewards it with impunity. For his actions, Kerrey received no less than the Medal of Honor, and his family got to be there when Nixon pinned it on his chest. As recently as 2016, Kerrey was appointed chairman of Fulbright University Vietnam, a nonprofit university in Ho Chi Minh City.
At the time of his appointment, novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen argued against it, pointing out that—much like the tone of Vistica’s profile—High American Tragedy has been the dominant mode of mourning the War, regardless of political affiliation, at the expense of the Vietnamese who died, four for every one American:
It is true that Americans have been more forthcoming about some of their crimes than anyone in the Vietnamese government and Communist Party. But it is equally true that Americans tend to remember the war as an American tragedy, as I saw distinctly while watching “Platoon,” “Apocalypse Now” and other movies as a boy growing up in California.
I lived among many Vietnamese refugees for whom this war was a Vietnamese tragedy. President Obama’s speech on the war’s 50th anniversary in 2012 focused on the deaths of over 58,000 American soldiers; I wondered why more than 200,000 South Vietnamese and more than one million North Vietnamese and Vietcong fighters who died were not mentioned, nor the countless thousands of civilians who perished.
The Museum, then, feels less like a revision of Western narratives than its shadowy double. The captions that surround its photographs and weapons have a notably dissonant quality, as if to refuse the easy explanation one might find on glossy placards in an American museum. The captions vary in tone and content, from pure metadata (“Ham Rong bridge, Thanh Hoa in 1967”) to contextless outrage (“Even Schools were bombed”). Horror ranges from understatement (“US. soldiers rounded up the highland inhabitants and put them aboard the helicopters”) to a near-Homeric mode (“American soldiers tied up persons to their tank and dragged them on roads to death”).
This unsettling combination of text and image was not lost on Harrell Fletcher, an American artist who traveled to Vietnam for a residency in 2005. Captivated by the Museum—like me, even the term The American War surprised him—he decided to rephotograph it all. Fletcher:
I just went through with a low-tech digital camera and rephotographed all of the images in the exhibition and all of the text. Other people were photographing the images as well. And actually on the first day that I went there, I remember thinking, like, Why are all these people taking photographs of these photos? That seems really strange to me. But then, when I went back, I went through and methodically photographed all of them.
He took photographs at an angle, in an effort to keep his flash from reflecting in the originals. In these rudimentary rephotographs, Fletcher recognized a formal quality that felt true to his experience, one that I also felt: an over-awareness of looking, of looking badly. Fletcher’s photographs would become a touring installation called The American War, a traveling copy of a museum that could never exist in the US. It was also a protest piece. The Afghanistan and Iraq Wars were already underway, and, as Fletcher said later
my sense was that somehow we had forgotten something about what had occurred in Vietnam […] And many of the images were echoing the events going on in the Middle East. So, for instance, waterboarding was a big issue at that time and there was an image of US soldiers waterboarding a Vietnamese person in the field. Also because there had been a lot of censorship around images from Iraq and Afghanistan, it seemed like this was a way of looking at what was going on there by looking, by examining historical documents about the previous war.
Understanding not by looking but by looking elsewhere—Fletcher’s The American War makes the name of a specific conflict sound like one long string of disasters. The Museum, for lack of similar ones elsewhere, inevitably becomes metonymic, whether or not it should.
Visiting the museum as an American, I felt the familiar shame of implication, the embarrassment of not knowing—How had I never heard of Bob Kerrey?—and the dread of sheer scale, the knowledge that you could fill skyscrapers with this stuff. I found myself thinking something like that passage in Michael Herr’s classic memoir Dispatches, that “you couldn’t use standard methods to date the doom; might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter[.]” Particularly given the fact that Vietnam turned out to be, not a perimeter at all, but a stop along the road to the Middle East, it was hard in these rooms not to feel the full weight of Achille Mbembe’s grim axiom: “No democracy exists without its double, without its colony.”3
—
My sense of transhistorical dread, Herr’s unbelief in legible origins of American violence, and Fletcher’s oblique peering at two American wars at the same time—these are all open to the same criticism: that they threaten to reduce each specific record and victim of violence into an interchangeable emblem of US overkill. Much critical writing about photography by Westerners, particularly during the Vietnam Era, was deeply suspicious of photography for such reasons: the way that looking at suffering can provoke excitement rather than empathy, the way it can inoculate a political reaction with an aesthetic catharsis, and the way it can abstract the specific into something universal.
In his 1972 essay about Vietnam War photos, “Photographs of Agony,” John Berger addresses at least two of those concerns:
The most extreme examples […] [of war photographs] show moments of agony in order to extort the maximum concern. Such moments, whether photographed or not, are discontinuous with all other moments. They exist by themselves. But the reader who has been arrested by the photograph may tend to feel this discontinuity as his own personal moral inadequacy. And as soon as this happens even his sense of shock is dispersed: his own moral inadequacy may now shock him as much as the crimes being committed in the war. Either he shrugs off this sense of inadequacy as being only too familiar, or else he thinks of performing a kind of penance […] In both cases, the issue of the war which has caused that moment is effectively depoliticised. The picture becomes evidence of the general human condition. It accuses nobody and everybody.
For Berger, shock is absorbed by dismay or banal guilt more than it spurs action. Susan Sontag would pick up where Berger left off, writing in her 1977 book, On Photography, that “In these last decades, ‘concerned’ photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.” She would revisit the subject in her 2003 book Regarding the Pain of Others, another response to the War on Terror that, like Fletcher’s, looked for clues in violent images of the past.
Sontag’s suspicion, however, has an abrasive and moralistic quality, as when she characterizes photographs as “mental pollution” or “sublimated murder” (not unlike Berger’s above use of the verb extort). More recently, Susie Linfield has pushed back against such provocations, as well as others by critics like Fredric Jameson (e. g., “The visual is essentially pornographic”) as Puritanical and dishonest, not to mention responsible for dismal trends in American media criticism at large. She also points out the irony that critics in the Vietnam Era were writing about one of the last American Wars in which images actually had an effect on public opinion. Linfield’s own dictum, however, that “Documents of suffering are documents of protest,” is devastatingly naïve in a world so benumbed by such documents.
Like Berger’s dichotomy of the reaction to a photograph of agony—either shrugging off inadequacy or donating to charity—Sontag’s conception of viewers other than herself was often unimaginative. (One of her own dubious dichotomies: “There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.”) In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag describes a photograph of a World War I veteran with his face blown off, writing that
there is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it—say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken—or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.
Sontag, whose structuralist clarity is often cover for a scolding Platonism, here lists three possible positions of the viewer, in decreasing order of morality: someone who could act on it, someone who could learn from it, and someone who gains mere, automatic pleasure in looking. Notably, only the first two classes have “the right to look.” It apparently does not occur to her that everyone who looks at a photograph is someone who could learn from it.
I tend to agree with the cynics, that violent photographs trigger an emotional catharsis that further alienates you from their subjects. I certainly felt that at the War Remnants Museum, unable to hold names and facts in my head as easily as scorched limbs and deformed bodies. But I also think that Linfield is correct when she writes that “it is hard to get our feelings ‘right’ when it comes to photographs.” It’s hard to know how you’ll feel until you look at something, hard to remember what you’ve seen after you see it.
Sontag would have dismissed such ambiguity, writing instead that “The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.” In my own limited experience, I have not found this to be the case, even for the Pulitzer-winning photographs of Haeberle and Adams. I recognize a photo more like a face than a proverb. I know it instantly but it does not stay perfectly in my memory; I could not draw or recreate it too well. I struggle to imagine it right and, in that struggle, misremember it. A photograph is retained through effort, and only ever incompletely. It is not some coin in the mind.
I suppose I find photographs too soluble in memory to agree with many of Sontag’s notions. Like her idea, in Regarding the Pain of Others, that “Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.” It is no surprise that the inverse of distrust in photography is overconfidence in narrative. I find it telling that the narrative of The War Remnants Museum is not really its main concern. Its argument is too blatant for storytelling. Its concerns are facts, events, witnesses, and “Historical Truths,” as one room is labeled—all of which would strain the imagination without its photographs. If anything, as I wandered through those rooms, narrative felt like the thing that had kept me from understanding. Like Vistica’s generous description of Bob Kerrey as “inexperienced,” or the exculpatory title of Kerrey’s own memoir; like the willful omissions in Presidential speeches and guidebooks; like the authority of Hollywood over History—narrative is no cure, no less easily manipulated than photography.
And can it be true that photographs are not much help if the task is to understand? It is difficult for me to imagine someone seeing that photograph, the one of the heavy coil of bone and flesh bearing a dead man’s face, held at arm’s length by an invading soldier like a wet and stinking tentcover—to see that and not understand. Even if you don’t want to. Even if what you understand is non-narrative, futile, or half-correct. Even if what you understand is obvious or crude or muddled. Even if it feels less like understanding than the distant rumblings of some ordnance deep in the tunnelshafts of your mind. At the very least, it brings you closer to understanding than two telephones and some floortiles in a vacant bunker room.
The evidence of photography’s power does not lie in how it haunts you like a recurring nightmare, one same awful image over and over again, but by how quickly it becomes some other image. By how your brain denies it, blurs and alters it, censors sections of it, collages it with other images, and layers thoughts on top of it like facepaint or clay. I sometimes wonder if much of the hand-wringing about photography’s failure and our supposed voyeurism is a wishful inversion of what is actually the case: that a violent photograph is so inadmissible to our stunted imaginations and edited memories that we must theorize it as a taboo pleasure instead of incorporating it into ourselves, in all its horror, as information. Of course it would be easier if refusing to look were braver than looking. It’s not like looking was all that brave to begin with.
When I went looking for that awful photo for this piece, the one of the man reduced to shreds, I was shocked when I found it. Berger might say that I was shocked at my own “moral inadequacy,” perhaps even that this whole piece constitutes a kind of penance. But he would only be half-right. I was shocked by how badly I had remembered it. The photograph is so much worse. It is always so much worse.
ben tapeworm
1 The building only dropped the term “War Crimes” in the mid-1990s, after Vietnam and the US normalized relations.
2 Another chthonic mirror-display, if you will, this time of the Hall of Asian Peoples at the American Museum of Natural History.
3 It’s something even LBJ seemed to get the gist of. As he said long after the war: “If I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home […] But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.”