Page 2 of 5 The ghosts of the American
War By Heonik Kwon
the death of an American soldier. For Vietnamese, on the contrary, war death
meant the death of everyone: young and old, male and female, communist or
anti-communist, partisan or non-partisan, combatant or non-combatant,
Vietnamese or foreigner. This was particularly the case in the southern and
central region of Vietnam where the frontiers of the battlefield were unclear.
The war experienced in this region, unlike that in the northern half, was not a
war against a single enemy or with a clear border. The frontier was not
somewhere out there, a place to which young
volunteer soldiers were sent and their bodies brought back
from, but practically within the sphere of everyday life. The community shifted
between the hands of opposite political and military forces as often as day
changed to night, and survival in this highly mobile battlefield meant being
able to relate to both sides of the conflict.
Xoi dau is the Vietnamese ceremonial food made of sticky rice and black
beans, and people use this black-and-white delicacy as a metaphor for the harsh
condition of the war in the village. When you eat this sweet, you are obliged
to swallow both the white and the black parts; you cannot separate the two.
Living in a war zone that, from the perspective of one side, is pacified, and,
from the perspective of the other, is liberated, you are forced to acknowledge
both realities.
The war against America, in the official history of Vietnam, was a "people's
war". This peculiar war united soldiers in combat uniforms with fighters
without uniform, and again with the families of non-uniformed local fighters,
who fed and supported the soldiers. The guerrilla fighters were fish, according
to a powerful metaphor, and the people were the water necessary to keep the
fish alive. In many villages of southern and central Vietnam, the relationship
between the water and the fish was far more complex and turbulent than the
idyllic image of the landscaped pond in a middle-class Vietnamese town house.
As the conflict escalated, "the water" was systematically pumped out to expose
"the fish". Often no fish were found at the bottom of the pond, and this
frequently led to tragic incidents of civilian killing. The dislocated water of
people, abandoned or concentrated in strategic hamlets, could not survive
without its homeland and was also pushed back to its place of origin to harbor
the fish. The agitprop propaganda activity to encourage war refugees to return
to their unsettled homeland was intense throughout the refugee camps in
southern and central Vietnam. As a Highlands tribal leader said, "We were
between hammer and anvil. The communists tried to resettle us ... The Americans
wanted to get free fire zones with the Montagnards."
Moving hazardously between the homeland and the refugee camp, those engaged in
the people's war left numerous traces and trails of sorrow. Makeshift shallow
graves and collective burial sites remain in the villages - in the sand dunes,
along the footpaths, in the gardens, and even beneath the mud floor of the
houses.
Some of these improperly buried dead belonged to the revolutionary side, others
to their foes, and many more to both-and-neither sides. Some of them were
soldiers, but these are greatly outnumbered by the remains of the dead who had
no war-related professional backgrounds. It is against this historical
background of generalized destruction and displacement of human lives that
people perceive ghosts of war in their environment today.
The ghosts of war
As a result of the violent polarization of society, the genealogical identity
and kinship memory in southern and central Vietnam rarely constitutes a
politically harmonious entity. Their genealogical unity is crowded with the
history of profound political disunity, relating to the bifurcated mobilization
for both the revolutionary American War against the foreign aggressors and the
US-backed war in South Vietnam against the communist aggressors associated with
North Vietnam. The former heritage was highly encouraged to continue in
post-war life; the latter was a stigmatized memory, excluded from public
mention and concealed in the domestic space.
The state-sanctified post-war politics of heroic death relegated a large
proportion of the war dead in the southern region to a status of ghosts. The
bodies of fallen revolutionary soldiers and prominent party activists were
brought home and buried at the state cemetery built at the center of the
village; their Hero Death Certificates replaced the ancestral tablets at
private homes. At the same time, the mass graves of ordinary villagers and the
graves of enemy soldiers were removed to the bamboo forest, the sand dune, or
elsewhere away from the village.
These tragic or politically impure deaths were also alienated from the domestic
ritual space, which turned, after the war, into a political shrine meant
exclusively for the memory of war heroes and national revolutionary leaders.
The spiritual remains of the non-heroic dead were displaced not only because of
this political exclusion from an existing home (where they are remembered in
appropriate rites), but also because of the loss of home. This last point
relates to the mass civilian killings during the war, which terminated many
family lines, causing the destruction of the social foundation of
commemoration. The vital existence of war ghosts in today's Vietnamese
communities should be considered against the background of a catastrophic
destruction of human lives and a representational crisis in social memory.
Ghosts are called by various terms (ma, hon, hon ma, bong ma, linh hon, oan hon,
bach linh bach linh or con ma) in Vietnamese, translated in literature
typically as "lost souls" or "wandering souls", but in popular ritual idiom of
the central region, with the interpersonal referential terms of co bac (meaning
literally "aunt and uncle"). The latter is conceptualized in distinction to ong
ba (grandfather and grandmother), referring to the ancestors or deities
who are placed in the household altar, community temple or elsewhere.
The "aunts and uncles" are dead, but not really dead in the sense of being
settled in the world of am, the world of the dead; they are not alive,
but have not yet left the living world, duong. These beings are neither
really there in am nor here in duong, and, at once, are in both.
The idea of "wandering" in terms of wandering souls of the dead points to the
imagined situation that these spirits are obliged to move between the periphery
of this world and the fringe of another world. In short, ghosts are ontological
refugees who are uprooted from home, which is a place where their memory can be
settled.
Someone's real-life encounter with these placeless identities did not raise a
question of credulity in the community but instead generated intense curiosity
about the specific identity of the ghost and the practical implications of the
apparition. It was believed that ghosts had wishes and purposes of their
own and that they partook of community life. They desire, in the mind of the
living, the goods and facilities that the living require for their living:
money, clothing, hat and shoes, food, and sometimes, a bicycle, a Honda, and a
house. Sharing wealth and worldly pleasures was a primary relationship between
ghosts and humans in popular conceptions. The exchange of goods and services
between the dead and the living, in turn, contributed to making wandering
spirits appear more familiar and human-like.
Ghosts were also very much public figures in a Vietnamese village. Most private
encounters with an apparition typically developed into varying forms of public
commemoration. The story of the apparition and its further historical
background traveled widely in the area to become public knowledge. No one,
except an outsider, walked carelessly in such a place. Placing incense sticks
on the site of the apparition was itself a demonstratively public gesture,
which transformed the place to a site of consolation. This could last a few
months, or a few years, until the story was resigned to oblivion and the site
reverted to being just another ditch. The acknowledgement varied from incense
burning to food and money offering, to a full-scale spirit-consolation ritual.
In proportion to the intensity of acknowledgement, the spirit became an
integral part of local history.
The above should not be taken to mean that ghost beliefs in Vietnam represent
some kind of pre-conceptual magical thought, such as that imagined by
Levy-Bruhl, dominated by the fear of death and unaware of the differences
between the real and the imaginary. On the contrary, the Vietnamese discourses
about war ghosts abound with critical historical meanings, and they gain
currency precisely because they relate to pressing moral and political issues
in contemporary life. The apparition of the party official's brother acted upon
the absence of his memory in the domain of kinship, and this relates to the
legacy of a civil war/international war, concealed and unaccounted-for in the
official paradigm of a unified people's war against a common, foreign enemy.
The episode of the family of spirits was mainly a family affair, but it is also
inseparable from the wider social issues relating to the difficulties in
domestic and communal life caused by the hero-centered institution of
commemoration. In these contexts, the individual apparitions of the dead are
reflections on the predicaments in the collective memory of the living. If the
living respond to the apparitions and improve their social and ritual space,
moreover, the fantastic actions of spectral identities become interwoven with
the transformation of the material world. The stories about them are then no
longer "just stories" but part of the social action with the capacity to
structure the patterns of social life.
In order to imagine how ghosts and humans become partners in social and
political action, however, we need to come to terms with the conceptual
structure that separates the two. Ghosts in a Vietnamese village are supposed
to be attentive to the social affairs among their living neighbors, just as the
latter are fond of telling stories about their phenomenal existence. This
relationship of reciprocal attention assumes not only an existential proximity
between the two groups of beings but also a certain formal distance between
their habitats. In this scheme, ghosts and humans are interested in each other
because they are unlike (as well as like) each other.
The bipolarity of death
In the dual conceptual scheme of ong ba versus co bac, the beings
belonging to the latter category are considered to be near and remote at once.
They are physically close but distant in
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