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5 The ghosts of the American
War By Heonik Kwon
The
Vietnamese call what the outside world refers to
as the Vietnam War "the American War", and many of
them believe that the ghosts of those who died
tragic deaths in this war abound in their living
environment. While a generation has passed since
the war ended in 1975, stories of apparitions and
other assertive actions by these ghosts of war are
common in rural communities. The places associated
with a history of fierce battle or large-scale
civilian killing are believed to harbor a mass of
grievous and hungry ghosts; the rumors of spirit
possession generate intense curiosity in the
community about the spirit’s identity and the
meaning of the event. Consider one of the
commonplace stories of
an
apparition from a rural area in the coastal
central region.
A man saw his late wife
and children in the early morning on his way to
the paddy. This was in the spring of 1993, and by
this time some villagers had begun to remove the
remains of their relatives from improper shallow
wartime graves to newly prepared family
graveyards. The apparition was at the site of the
man's old house. The house was burned down during
the tragic incident of a village massacre in early
1968, which destroyed his family. His wife, seated
on a stone, greeted him somewhat scornfully. The
three children were hidden behind her back, afraid
that their parents might start quarreling.
The meaning of the apparition was
immediately clear to the man: he must rebury the
remains of his lost family without delay. If he
had no means to do so, according to the local
interpretation of the apparition, the spirits
would help him find a way. The man decided to
spend the small sum of money that he had saved in
the past years from selling coconuts and
negotiated to obtain a loan from a neighbor. At
that moment, a wealthy businesswoman and a
relative of his wife arrived from a distant city
and offered to share the cost of reburial. On the
day of the reburial, the woman told the visitors
how the family of spirits had appeared to her in a
dream and urged her to pay a visit to their home.
Whereas these spectral identities and
their vigorous actions are common in villages and
towns of Vietnam, their stories have rarely
appeared in the public media. Like any modern
nation-state, the state apparatus of Vietnam has
looked down upon them as remnants of old
superstitions and a sign of backwardness. John
Law, the mid-19th century English writer, compiled
a large number of stories of haunted houses that
were then popular in European cities and set out
to debunk them one by one.
He hoped to
prove through this exercise that the stories
resulted from the delusion of the uneducated mind,
and he proposed that the law and the government
exercise their power to eradicate this "madness of
crowds". The post-colonial Vietnamese state has
made enormous administrative and political efforts
to pursue this militant enlightenment way of
thinking to battle against the traditional ritual
customs and religious imaginations, first in the
north after the independence of 1945 and then in
the southern and central regions after the
unification of the country in 1975.
The political campaigns
focused on substituting the commemoration of
heroic war dead for the traditional cult of
ancestors. The memorabilia of war martyrs and
revolutionary leaders replaced the ancestral
tablets in the domestic space; the communal
ancestral temples and other religious sites were
closed down and these gave way to the people's
assembly hall. In the latter, ordinary citizens
and their administrative leaders discussed
community affairs and production quotas surrounded
by the vestiges of the American War, in a
structurally similar way to how peasants and
village notables earlier talked about rents
and
the ritual calendar in the village's communal
house surrounded by the relics of the village's
founding ancestors.
The campaigns also
strongly rejected any ideas and practices
associated with ghosts. Until recently, making
offerings to ghosts in public space and trading
votive objects were considered criminal and were
sometimes punished. Even in recent years when the
earlier punitive policy has been moderated, some
ghost stories still infuriate state officials.
Whereas other ghost stories are allowed in print,
literary works that introduce the ghosts of the
American War are severely censored.
A
journalist working for an official newspaper of a
central province recently set out to investigate a
rumor of spirit possession. His superiors quickly
reprimanded him. There was nothing extraordinary
about the rumor, which was about a man
encountering the ghost of his brother; such
incidents can be widely heard across Vietnamese
villages and towns. In this particular incident,
the man was an acting official in the provincial
Communist Party and the ghost happened to be of
his elder brother, who was killed in action as a
soldier of the former South Vietnamese forces.
Several observers have highlighted the
conceptual relationship between heroes and
ancestors in discussing Vietnam's recent political
history. The state hierarchy put great emphasis on
controlling commemorative practices and propagated
a genealogy of heroic resistance wars, situating
deaths in the American War within a line of
descent from the earlier armed struggle against
the French colonial power and in further
genealogical depth leading to the legendary heroes
of ancient victories. Every local administrative
unit in Vietnam has a war martyrs' cemetery built
at the center of the community's public space. In
each, "The Ancestral Land Remembers Your
Sacrifice" is inscribed on the gothic memorial
located at the center of the place. Pelley notes
that this construction of national memory shifted
the focus of commemoration from the traditional
social units of family and village toward the
state.
According to Malarney, the process
was equally about bringing the state into the
living space of the family and the community,
ensuring that people felt and experienced the
national memory within their most intimate domains
of life. For these scholars, the contemporary
situation reverses the earlier trend in that the
focus of commemoration is now shifting from the
state back to traditional local social units.
Malarney observes that ancestral rites, having
been a locus for state action in revolutionary
Vietnam, became a principal site for a contest of
power between the state and the family after 1989.
For Luong, the demise of the centrally-controlled
socialist economy resulted in the revival of
ancestral rituals as a way of strengthening the
moral basis of the family - the principal unit in
the new economic environment of privatization and
market competition.
These observations
commonly draw on examples from the northern region
in discussing Vietnam's ritual politics. In
southern and central Vietnam (the former South
Vietnam), the revival of ancestor worship has
added complexity compared to the equivalent
process in the north, and this relates to a
variance between the two regions in the historical
experience of the recent war. The idea of a
"national experience of war" is a myth, as Mosse
writes with reference to the European experience
of the World Wars, particularly for a civil war.
The war from 1960 to 1975 was clearly a legitimate
war for national liberation from the viewpoint of
northern Vietnam, which regarded it in continuum
with the earlier anti-colonial struggle against
France, whereas communities in southern Vietnam
were not entirely united on this stated objective
of the American War and they were driven to fight
against it as well as in support of it.
Against this background of a
bipolar conflict waged in the form of a vicious
civil war with heavy foreign interventions, I will
argue that
changes in the ritual politics involving
family and state cannot be adequately assessed if
we limit our analytical attention to the domain of
ancestor worship. The postwar institution of
heroic war death relegated a significant part of
genealogical memory to a politically engendered
status of ghosts in the southern regions, one
excluded from the new political community of the
nation-state and, by extension, alienated from the
family and community-based commemorations that
were engulfed by the politics of national memory.
The memories of the war dead, which were excluded
from the post-war institutions of commemoration,
were not merely those of fallen soldiers on the
wrong side of the war, such as the party
official’s brother. As I discuss elsewhere, the
huge civilian sacrifice to the war also faced many
difficulties in the hero-centered post-war
politics of memory.
It is therefore
necessary to consider the revival of ancestral
worship in this region within a relational
framework with ritual actions for ghosts rather
than merely in connection with the dominant
institution of hero worship.
This article
argues that the political transition from hero
worship to ancestor worship should be assessed
within the relational moral symbolic structure of
ancestors and ghosts, of which ancestor worship is
only a part. To this end, it critically reviews a
theory of ancestral worship that relegates ghosts
to a socially marginal and analytically irrelevant
category. If the ritual attention to ghosts partly
defines how the practice of ancestor worship
becomes truly distinctive from the institution of
hero worship, the vitality of ghosts has profound
implications for communities in southern and
central Vietnam when it concerns the ghosts of the
American War.
The American
War The Vietnamese call the Vietnam-America
conflict the American War (1960-1975), partly to
distinguish it from the preceding French War, in a
similar way that the Vietnam War (1965-1975) is
referenced to the war before it in Korea
(1950-1953) in the history of the Cold War.
Americans, Young observes, remember the Vietnam
War mainly as conflicts among Americans: "The
Vietnam war, in short, was a civil war, but - and
this may puzzle Vietnamese, who are currently
discovering the extent to which it was a civil war
for them - it was an American civil war".
The radical division of the nation as to
the objective and the conduct of the war has a lot
to do with how American memory of this war came to
take on the metaphor of "Vietnam ghost", which is
perceived to "continue to haunt American culture"
and to return to the public consciousness in the
wake of a new international conflict. Young
writes, "More divisive than any conflict Americans
have engaged in since the Civil War, the Vietnam
War raised questions about the nation's very
identity. These questions have not been settled.
The battle over interpreting the Vietnam War is a
battle over interpreting America and it continues
to the present day."
The historian is
absolutely right also to raise the point that the
Vietnamese, a generation after the war formally
ended, are discovering the hitherto unpublicized
domestic dimensions of what they were taught to be
a clear, united self-defense against foreign
aggressors.
Young adds that death in
Vietnam, for Americans, meant mainly
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and
the ritual calendar in the village's communal
house surrounded by the relics of the village's
founding ancestors. 
changes in the ritual politics involving
family and state cannot be adequately assessed if
we limit our analytical attention to the domain of
ancestor worship. The postwar institution of
heroic war death relegated a significant part of
genealogical memory to a politically engendered
status of ghosts in the southern regions, one
excluded from the new political community of the
nation-state and, by extension, alienated from the
family and community-based commemorations that
were engulfed by the politics of national memory.
The memories of the war dead, which were excluded
from the post-war institutions of commemoration,
were not merely those of fallen soldiers on the
wrong side of the war, such as the party
official’s brother. As I discuss elsewhere, the
huge civilian sacrifice to the war also faced many
difficulties in the hero-centered post-war
politics of memory. 
