Mending the WAR-TORN
landscape | re - writing viet nam by gerald forseth
repair tourism memory
decolonisation reconfiguration
Can beauty and peace emerge from the horrors of war experienced in Viet Nam from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century?
Images of the Vietnam War, black and white, unremittingly violent, have be- come iconic: the Trang Bang children fleeing after their house had been napalmed, the Saigon Chief of Police shooting a Viet Cong prisoner in the head. Right, is the Ho Chi Minh Trail on February 18, 1971 showing over- turned Viet Cong trucks after a US bombing. Such photographs, which flooded the media and living rooms of North America, have remained as our image of Viet Nam. The war lives in our minds, largely unchanged, simply through the shock carried by these images which, had they hap- pened to us, would have obliterated our future. Or would it have? What is the capacity of human beings to keep surviving war and carrying on?
Overturned Trucks After Bombings. Several trucks, belonging to communist forces, lay overturned on a rural road, part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, after the US Air Force bombed the road in 1971. Beside the road are many bomb craters. February 18, 1971, Laos
From the end of the Sino-French War in 1887 until 1954 and the battle of Dien Bien Phu, France ruled the vast Indochine française, which included Viet Nam. From 1946 to 1954, Ho Chi Minh’s communist north Viet Nam army fought for and won independence for the region from France. The Geneva Accord of 1954 partitioned Viet Nam, separating the communist north from the southern Republic of Viet Nam until elections could be held to form a government of unification. Because of the fear that the quite popular and still communist Ho Chi Minh would win, the United States began its interventionist support of the south, blocking unification and protecting the abundant and cheap resources that fed the western economy. And so, from 1960-74, parts of this region became the most bombed, shelled, gassed, napalmed, defoliated and devastated area in the history of warfare. Soil and water were polluted by endless military incursions. A generation of Vietnamese lost limbs
or suffered emotionally. The poorly armed, hapless villager- soldiers were up against a superpower with an endless supply of specialty-trained troops and sophisticated arsenals of weaponry. For a while this asymmetry seemed to doom the cause of north Viet Nam for the hoped re-unification of north and south, but as we know the final results turned out poorly for the American forces and the south Viet Nam government. It was the first war in a distant land beamed via satellite into the homes of the developed world which watched, on 30 April 1975, south Viet Nam officially fall to the North Vietnamese. In 1978 Viet Nam invaded Cambodia defeating the Kmer Rouge, and in 1979 China invaded Viet Nam, leading to the Third Indochina War. Viet Nam is now re-unified under a working balance of communist politics and capitalist economics. There are visual and experiential transformations that have taken both the country and its people from war into peace, from ugliness to beauty.
16 On Site review 22: WAR
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