"They Set About Revenging Themselves on the Population"
–– The “Huê' Massacre” ––
in Travel Guide Books, and the Shaping of Historical Consciousness in Vietnam
Scott Laderman
Doctoral Candidate, MacArthur Scholar
Department of
American Studies
University of Minnesota
© 2002 by Scott Laderman
During the 1968 Tet Offensive, American and Saigonese troops in South
Vietnam were taken aback by the extensive military campaign waged by the
combined forces of the southern National Liberation Front (NLF) and the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam ("North Vietnam"). Nowhere was the warfare more
sustained than the former imperial capital of Hue. While minor details may
differ, Western travel guidebooks today present a virtually uniform account of
the nationalist-orchestrated massacre that followed.1
Drawing on "detailed plans to liquidate Hue’s ‘uncooperative’ elements,"
the Lonely Planet guidebook reports, thousands of people were "rounded up in
extensive house-to-house searches conducted according to lists of names
meticulously prepared months before." 2 During the following three
and a half weeks of "Communist control," either 3000, "at least" 2800, or 14,000
people – depending on which guidebook one reads – were "massacred" as the "North
Vietnamese Army," according to Fodor’s Exploring Vietnam, "set about
revenging themselves on the population." 3 The campaign targeted
"anyone considered remotely sympathetic to the Southern regime," the author for
Fodor’s asserts. 4 "Foreign aid workers," "merchants, Buddhist monks,
Catholic priests, intellectuals, and a number of foreigners, as well as people
with ties to the South Vietnamese government," were "summarily shot, clubbed to
death," or buried or.3 burned alive. 5 Others were "beheaded."
6 The "victims were buried in shallow mass graves, which were
discovered around the city over the next few years." 7
Following a massive bombing campaign, the United States "regained Hue at
the cost of destroying it. The North Vietnamese had attempted to indoctrinate
Hue residents," the Moon guidebook maintains, "and had killed most of Hue’s
government officials. Neither side won any appreciable number of Hue hearts or
minds." 8 Today, the writer for Moon continues, tourists "can still
see symbols over doorways indicating where residents were killed."
9
In its calculated planning and ruthless execution, the "Hue Massacre"
typified Communist governance; as, by definition in the United States, Communist
movements could not enjoy popular support in a truly free society, resort to
widespread terror was a necessary precondition for political control. For tens
of thousands of Western tourists reared in Cold War ideology and reading about
the episode in their Vietnam guidebooks, the "cruelest retribution" exacted
against the people of Hue would seem to merely confirm this axiom. For these
individuals, it might then come as something of a surprise to learn that the
accounts of the massacre presented by their guidebooks are, according to a
leading Western scholar of the episode, a "complete fabrication." 10
The "enduring myth" of the "Hue Massacre," wrote Gareth Porter in a detailed
study later entered into the U.S. Congressional Record, "bore little
resemblance to the truth, but was, on the contrary, the result of a political
warfare campaign by the Saigon government, embellished by the [United States]
government, and accepted uncritically by the U.S. press." 11
It must be pointed out, as Porter did, that there were, in fact, executions
carried out by NLF – but not North Vietnamese Army (NVA) – troops in Hue during
the Tet Offensive, and these must certainly be condemned.12 However,
the "most careful estimate of the death toll," that by the journalist Len
Ackland, placed the number at 300 to 400, or about ten to fifteen percent of the
approximate figure of 3000 cited in nearly all of the guidebooks.13
Moreover, the available evidence suggests that the executions were nothing like
the indiscriminate slaughter represented above.14 The thousands of
civilians who died in Hue, according to the photojournalist Philip Jones
Griffith, were in fact killed by what he described as "the most hysterical use
of American firepower ever seen" during the U.S. effort to recapture the
city.15
The "undeniable fact," Porter asserted, "was that American rockets and
bombs, not communist assassination, caused the greatest carnage in Hue."
16 Robert Shaplen wrote in the New Yorker in March 1968
that "[n]othing I saw during the Korean War, or in the Vietnam War so far, has
been as terrible, in terms of destruction and despair, as what I saw in Hue."
17 Approximately three out of every four houses in the city were
completely destroyed or seriously damaged by bombs and artillery, while there
were "bodies stacked into graves by fives – one on top of another." Bomb craters
40 feet wide and twenty feet deep were "staggered" in the streets near the walls
of the ancient Citadel, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site undergoing careful
restoration from the incredible damage wrought during the American and Saigonese
effort to reestablish control. 18
The Functions of the "Hue Massacre" in American Memory
I have begun with a detailed description of the alleged "Hue Massacre" and
its foremost scholarly critique because I wish to explore the continued
existence of the nationalist-sponsored atrocities as an historical reality in
contemporary travel guidebooks for Vietnam.19
Representations of the event in the tourism literature appear to serve
several purposes. Not only does the massacre’s ruthless nature confirm the
inherent malevolence attached to "Communists" in American popular consciousness,
but, it could be implied, the episode also demonstrates to tourists the
inability of postwar Vietnam to honestly come to terms with its own recent
history. In this respect, the "Hue Massacre" functions as what Dean MacCannell
designated a "truth marker." 20
By virtue of its absence in Vietnamese war museums, tourists are reminded
of the selectivity of Vietnamese representations of the conflict, which arguably
has the effect of casting doubt on the legitimacy of the rest of the nation’s
official historical narrative. 21
This is critical, as, contrary to most popular accounts in the United
States, the conflict is framed by the Vietnamese as a nationwide revolutionary
and anti-imperialist struggle for reunification and independence, and not, as
Newsweek characterized the war two years ago during the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the end of the conflict, an effort by "well-intentioned
policymakers in Washington" to "save" South Vietnam from its "North Vietnamese
invaders." 22
Several of the guidebooks explicitly make this connection between the
massacre’s absence in interpretive exhibits and the consequent unreliability of
Vietnamese public history. "There is, of course, nothing about [the massacre] in
Hue’s War Museum," the writer for Fodor’s observes, suggesting the purposeful
forgetting of Vietnamese curators and historians. 23 Nor, for that
matter, is the event acknowledged in the popular War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi
Minh City, whose "one-sided propaganda," according to another Fodor’s guidebook,
fails to include "information about some of the horrors perpetrated by the
National Liberation Front, particularly the 14,000 people massacred in Hue
during the 1968 Tet Offensive." 24 In writing about the disclosure of
atrocities at the same institution, the Lonely Planet guidebook is more
ambiguous, simply stating that "of course" there is "official amnesia when it
comes to the topic of the many thousands of people tortured and murdered by the
VC." 25
For tourists reading about the history of the country in their guidebooks –
which my fieldwork suggests is a majority of those persons independently
traveling in Vietnam – there are many such reminders of the problematic nature
of the official historical narrative in museums and at war-related sites. And
the guidebooks’ employment of the phrase "of course" to describe the lack of
information on the massacre suggests that one should naturally expect an
inaccurate depiction of the war at Vietnamese tourist attractions.
The inverse of this caution, never stated but nearly always implied, is
that the "objectivity" of popular Western accounts are not tainted by such an
adherence to official ideology.
In her semiotic analysis of contemporary travel guidebooks, Deborah
Bhattacharyya employed, among other theories, Erik Cohen’s notion of
communicative mediation in examining Lonely Planet’s guidebook for
India.26 As Bhattacharyya applied Cohen’s term, communicative
mediation involves the "selection of sights to be seen, providing information
about these sights, and interpreting the sights for the tourist." 27
She asserted that "[w]hile a guidebook shapes the image of the destination
through both selection of sights and providing information about them, it is the
process of interpretation that is perhaps most crucial in this regard." The
process of interpretation to which she refers "is a combination of
contextualization and evaluation." 28 This is especially critical as
a result of the perceived authority guidebooks claim to possess, as language,
according to Bhattacharyya, is used in such a way as "to present a particular
representation as the sole legitimate one." 29 In other words, the
portrait of Vietnam that emerges in travel guidebooks could be considered "a
straightforward, self-evident description of reality rather than … a socially
constructed representation." 30
The notion of communicative mediation is fundamental to understanding the
historical synopses provided by the Vietnam guidebooks. Take, for instance, the
volume published by Lonely Planet, which field research I conducted in 2000 and
2002 indicates is the most widely-used in the country.31 During my
interview with one of its authors, Robert Storey, he stated that, despite having
an opinion of the war, he strove for a "neutral" and "unbiased" account that
would "describe exactly what happened."
"For me, I think it’s very important actually to get to the real facts," he
asserted. "I have my bias, for sure. I’ve told you I’m pretty anti-Communist.
But, on the other hand, when writing a history I don’t think it’s fair to play
fast and loose with any historical facts. Like if we lost a battle, you have to
admit we lost a battle. If we did something wrong, we have to admit it. We did
do some big mistakes. Agent Orange I [already] mentioned. [The] My Lai massacre,
which was a fairly famous incident, obviously was a tragic mistake. Somebody
really blew it, and you have to own up to it." 32
There are, in the opinion of many scholars, problems with viewing Agent
Orange and the My Lai massacre as mere "tragic mistakes," as this seems to
suggest that the American war itself was an otherwise legitimate undertaking.
Nevertheless, and of much greater consequence, Storey admitted to disregarding
an influential segment of the historical literature because he found it
ideologically unpalatable. After volunteering that he excluded from
consideration the work of Noam Chomsky, who represents, in his estimation, the
"loony left" and who wrote "left-wing propaganda" and "terrible trash," Storey
then claimed that he similarly neglected the scholarship emanating from the
Indochina Resource Center (I.R.C.) in Washington, D.C., because it, too, was
"too left-wing." The problem with the I.R.C.’s focus on Vietnam, according to
Storey, was that "it was giving you the wrong impression of what was happening
there." 33 Storey’s nod to "neutral[ity]" clearly overlooks problems
with the "objectivity question," as the historian Peter Novick characterized it,
and with the selection of an explanatory framework as itself a subjective
construction.34
But Storey’s reference to the Indochina Resource Center is also important
when specifically considering the myth of the "Hue Massacre." At the time Gareth
Porter published his 1973 article on the episode, which has since informed
subsequent scholarship, the author was a staff member of the I.R.C., which
Storey readily dismissed as producing "left-wing garbage" unfit for
consideration.35
While I suspect that the writer for Lonely Planet was entirely unaware of
the existence of Porter’s study, it points to the problem of representing the
history of a tourist site after carefully selecting only those background
materials that express a favored view.
Myths and Memory for Americans Coming to Terms with the War
Scholarship on historical myths in American popular consciousness may help
illuminate the persistence of the "Hue Massacre" in the Vietnam tourism
literature. In his analysis of the collective memory of spat-upon Vietnam
veterans, for which the author argues no contemporaneous evidence exists, Jerry
Lembcke wrote that myths may function "to reverse the verdict of history, to
find the innocent guilty and the guilty innocent." 36 While I do not
wish to ascribe "innocence" to the NLF forces who did, it must be recalled,
execute several hundred individuals, this is nevertheless an important
consideration when contemplating representations of the "Hue Massacre" as an
historical actuality in both travel guidebooks and the popular historical
literature. 37
Over twenty-five years ago, Edward Herman and Gareth Porter speculated that
belief in the "Hue Massacre" was necessary, for it "permitted the creation of a
massive bloodbath if the revolutionaries were to win in South Vietnam, which …
in turn provided an important moral basis for [the] continued [U.S.]
intervention as the ‘lesser’ evil." 38
This message was not lost, for example, on the authors of the Footprint
guidebook, who were explicit in noting that the episode "lent support to the
notion that should the [North] ever achieve victory over the [South], it would
result in mass killings." 39
Yet at the same time that it justified continued U.S. militarism in
Indochina, Herman and Porter maintained, the alleged massacre also diverted
attention from what they referred to as the "real and massive bloodbath"
sponsored and executed by the United States in which, by the end of the war, an
estimated two to three million Vietnamese had been killed. In other words, the
"Hue Massacre" "was needed," the authors wrote, "to help convince us that
even if we were not quite as kindly toward the Vietnamese as in the rhetoric of
intervention, they were worse." 40
In much the same way, the myth of the "Hue Massacre" today serves as a
means of reversing – or at least balancing – the brutality of the war in
American memory.41
From their wartime image as popular resisters of American aggression, the
Vietnamese nationalist forces have since been transformed into perpetrators of
atrocities in Hue against "anyone connected with, or suspected of being
sympathetic to, the [U.S.-backed] government in Saigon," as the Footprint
guidebook identified those thousands of noncombatants allegedly subjected to NLF
terror. 42
David Hunt has addressed this issue perhaps more cogently than anyone else;
he wrote in his scholarly analysis of discourses in a number of leading texts on
the war:
Going beyond the fact of NLF assassinations (which no scholarly
study denies), the "Hue Massacre" is a Cold War narrative construction purporting
to demonstrate that enemy terrorism was qualitatively different from GVN
[Government of Vietnam, or "South Vietnam"] and U.S. attacks on civilians and
that it resulted in the most heinous atrocity of the war. Bombs and bullets were
flying on all sides and killers under every flag roamed the streets, but the
"Hue Massacre" signifies that the guerrillas killed more than the Americans and
the GVN and that they killed with a uniquely blameworthy premeditation and
relish. Their violence was "systematic," meaning that it was constitutive,
inevitable, and limitless in scale, in contrast to reactive violence on the
other side, intended to halt the depredations of the Foreign
Other.43
In other words, Hunt asserted in response to Douglas Pike’s original
account of the alleged massacre for the U.S. Mission in Saigon, "only ‘fiends’
could have committed the acts that he [i.e., Pike] describes, pinpointing
thousands of victims in advance, torturing and executing them, and dumping their
corpses into mass graves." 44 And as the massacre in fact happened,
according to the leading travel guidebooks, it is not difficult to speculate
about the "fiendish" impression of the nationalists with which tourists reading
about the atrocity would presumably be left. 45
It is crucial to note that the implications of this popular memory of the
war are not merely academic. For American policymakers and peace activists
alike, they are quite substantial. As the diplomatic historian Marilyn Young
observed, "The way the history of war is told is crucial to its continuation.
One of the startling effects of the broad public rejection of the Vietnam war,
across the political spectrum, was to suggest that war itself was unnatural. If
war and violence are to be restored as normal human activities, it is essential
to associate them with norms: they must be seen as defending abiding values, the
values of peace which a peaceful policy would endanger." 46 The
problem "that has plagued successive administrations since the mid-1960s," Young
wrote, "is the way the Vietnam war broke through its official history, the
official history that accompanies all wars, and engendered a counterhistory."
47
Yet this counterhistory has been largely marginalized in popular historical
accounts since the war ended in 1975. And in contemporary travel guidebooks it
is virtually nonexistent. For thousands of American tourists traveling to
Vietnam every year whose familiarity with the scholarly literature is at best
fleeting, this counterhistory is to be found almost exclusively in the
narratives provided at the museums and historical sites that dot the country.
But uncomfortable with the awkward jargon in which it is often presented, and
warned by their guidebooks that it represents "one-sided propaganda," tourists
often turn to the only seemingly "objective" sources of information at their
disposal: the historical synopses of travel guidebooks. 48
However, Americans hardly arrive in Vietnam as tabula rasae entirely
unfamiliar with their nation’s history in Indochina. Rather, if it is true that
– as my field research suggests – tourists appear to have largely embraced the
historical synopses extant in their travel guidebooks, it is probably because
these synopses present discourses consistent with many of the largely
problematic representations of the war extant in most U.S. history textbooks and
in American culture. 49 Or, as Raymond Williams may have put it, they
conform to the American "selective tradition," which has constructed the
conflict as a tragic but well-intentioned mistake rooted in Washington’s benign
intentions for Southeast Asia.50 At its core, this selective
tradition has been shaped, according to H. Bruce Franklin, by "those myths,
celluloid images, and other delusory fictions about ‘Vietnam’ that in the …
decades [since the war] have come to replace historical and experiential
reality." 51 Political and popular culture thus possess the power,
according to Jerry Lembcke, "not only to rewrite history but to reconfigure
memory." 52
By the time they visit Vietnam, tourists have usually watched any number of
the countless Hollywood films or television programs that deal with the war, or
perhaps heard stories from their friends and relatives. Some might possess lived
memories – as combat veterans, members of the antiwar movement, South Vietnamese
refugees, or merely disinterested observers. For most first-time visitors, their
experiences in Vietnam are extraordinarily formative occasions influenced by the
people they meet, the sites they see, the things they read. And for many, if not
most, travel guidebooks are instrumental in framing and shaping their tourist
experiences and the memories with which they depart. Of the 94 tourists I
interviewed throughout Vietnam in June 2000, 84 were using a guidebook. And of
those 84 persons, 89 percent (75 persons) said they read their guidebooks for
historical information; the overwhelming majority (60 persons, or 71 percent)
claimed they knew little or nothing about the war before arriving in the
country.53 While it is impossible to gauge the precise extent to
which guidebooks serve as a generative source of historical consciousness among
tourists in Vietnam, my fieldwork in both 2000 and 2002 found that a
considerable number of those I interviewed were employing the same discourses as
those extant in their guidebooks, which are in turn reflective of those
discourses that characterize mass-mediated American representations of the
conflict.
Throughout the United States, the war in Vietnam remains enshrouded in
myths that seem to lack any empirical support or that defy diplomatic common
sense. As recently as 1993, for instance, two thirds of the Americans surveyed
in a nationwide poll believed that U.S. POWs were "still being held in Southeast
Asia." 54 During my own research in Vietnam, one knowledgeable
American tourist I interviewed in Hanoi – a wartime conscientious objector who
is now a teacher and was visiting Vietnam for the seventh time – was insistent
that there were still POWs in Southeast Asia, but that they had been moved to
Laos by the Vietnamese following the normalization of relations by the United
States and Vietnam in 1995. 55
Also widespread in the United States is the belief, to which I alluded
earlier, in returning American veterans being spat upon by hateful antiwar
demonstrators. This is a particularly powerful myth and one that has been
especially useful in mobilizing support for U.S. interventionism. For example,
cognizant of the war in Vietnam, antiwar activists during the Persian Gulf
conflict of 1991 were specifically implored to "support our troops,"
obliterating the historical actuality of a movement two decades before that by
and large embraced, and was in significant part constituted of, veterans
returning from Indochina. One American soldier in the Gulf was quoted in the
New York Times as stating: "If I go back home like the Vietnam vets did
and somebody spits on me, I swear to God I’ll kill them." 56
To myths such as these must be added that of the indiscriminate
nationalist-orchestrated slaughter, meticulously planned months before, of
thousands of civilians in Hue during the Tet Offensive of 1968. The years since
1975 have witnessed a remarkable reimaging of the war in American memory. From
the demonic cruelty of the Vietnamese nationalists in The Deer Hunter
to their subordination to the Soviets in Rambo: First Blood Part I ,
the United States has, in the decades following the war, projected what some
might adjudge its own wartime criminality onto the elusive Other it failed to
subdue in Indochina. The "Hue Massacre," in this respect, has provided a
necessary salve for America’s wounded collective conscience. Over thirty years
after the U.S.-led devastation of Hue, travel guidebooks continue to present the
gruesome details of a massacre that possesses only a passing connection to
historical reality. In this sense, the episode continues to serve as a
neutralizing agent, reminding Americans that as horrible as "we" acted during
the war, "they" most certainly were worse.
1 Throughout this paper I refer to the National Liberation Front (NLF) and
the forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) as the "nationalists"
instead of the "Communists," as they are characterized in most of the
guidebooks. The term "Communists" not only retains a pejorative connotation in
the United States, but it is also somewhat inaccurate, as there were many
non-Communists involved in the war against the Americans, although the Communist
Party in its various manifestations was certainly the most effective and most
dominant segment of the nationalist movement. In using "nationalists" as a
designation for the forces arrayed against the Americans, I do not mean to imply
that nationalism was an attribute exclusive to the NLF and DRV.
2 Mason Florence and Robert Storey, Vietnam, Fifth Edition
(Hawthorn, Victoria [Australia], 1999), p. 314.
3 Fiona Dunlop, Fodor’s Exploring Vietnam (New York: Fodor’s Travel
Publications, Inc., 1998), p. 114. On the figure of "at least" 2800, see Jacques
Népote and Xavier Guillaume, Vietnam, Second Edition (Hong Kong: Odyssey
Publications Ltd., 1999), p. 134. On the figure of 3000, see Michael Buckley,
Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos Handbook, Second Edition (Chico, California:
Moon Publications, Inc., 1997), p. 255; John Colet and Joshua Eliot, Vietnam
Handbook (London: Footprint Handbooks, 1997), p. 175; Jan Dodd and Mark
Lewis, Vietnam: The Rough Guide (London: Rough Guides Ltd., 1998), pp.
249-250; Dunlop, op. cit., p. 114; and Florence and Storey, op. cit., p. 314. On
the figure of 14,000, see Natasha Lesser, ed., Vietnam (New York: Fodor’s
Travel Publications, Inc., 1998), p. 181.
4 Dunlop, op. cit., p. 114.
5 Dodd and Lewis, op. cit., p. 249; Florence and Storey, op. cit., p. 314;
Colet and Eliot, op. cit., p. 175.
6 Buckley, op. cit., p. 255. Fodor’s Exploring Vietnam notes that
the victims’ "fate was either execution by firing squad, decapitation, or being
buried alive." Dunlop, op. cit., p. 114. The Footprint guidebook also mentions
decapitation. Colet and Eliot, op. cit., p. 175.
7 Florence and Storey, op. cit., p. 314.
8 Buckley, op. cit., p. 258.
9 Buckley, op. cit., p. 255.
10 D. Gareth Porter, "The 1968 ‘Hue Massacre,’" Indochina Chronicle
33 (June 24, 1974), p. 11.
11 Ibid., p. 2. The study was reprinted in the Congressional Record
of February 19, 1975.
12 "[A]ll the accounts agree that NLF rather than North Vietnamese units
were responsible for the executions." Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars,
1945-1990 (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991), p. 219.
13 Ibid., p. 217. According to Edward Herman and Gareth Porter, "Len
Ackland and Don Oberdorfer have documented cases of individuals who were
executed when they tried to hide or otherwise resisted the NLF in the early
occupation. But these acts seem to have reflected individual decisions by NLF
soldiers and cadres, rather than any policy decision to execute large numbers.
According to residents of Hue, interviewed by Len Ackland in 1968, the number of
executions early in the occupation was small. In the later phase, when the NLF
was being forced out under military pressure, some officials and anti-Communist
political leaders, earlier marked for ‘re-education,’ were executed, but the
numbers still appear to be a very small fraction of the propaganda claims. And
there is no evidence in documents, graves, or from individual witnesses which
suggests any large and indiscriminate slaughter of civilians by the NLF at Hue."
Edward Herman and D. Gareth Porter, "The Myth of the Hue Massacre,"
Ramparts 13:8 (May-June 1975), p. 10. I cannot account for the
origins of the figure of "14,000 massacred" in Fodor’s Vietnam, which is
nearly five times greater than the already inflated estimates cited in the other
Vietnam guidebooks. Lesser, op. cit., p. 181.
14 "There is little question," wrote Marilyn Young, "that there were
executions in Hue, both in the initial stages of the occupation and in the last
days of the battle there. And it is unseemly, even obscene, to argue about the
numbers. Nevertheless, an effort to understand what happened is essential if we
are to be able to grasp the war and its aftermath. The task of the NLF in Hue
was not only to destroy the government administration of the city, but to
establish, in its place, a ‘revolutionary administration.’ The disposition
of those who had controlled the city until its takeover was carefully laid out:
there were lists of those in the Saigon government police apparatus at all
levels (to be rounded up and held outside the city); lists of high civilian and
military officials (the same; both to await study of their individual cases);
lists of ordinary civil servants (those ‘working for the enemy because of their
livelihood and who do not oppose the revolution’ who were destined for
reeducation and possible later employment); lists of those low-level civil
servants who had at some point been involved in paramilitary activities (to be
held for reeducation, but not employed). In the early days of the occupation,
there were indeed summary executions…. And as the occupation ended in the
firestorm of artillery and aerial bombardment, retreating NLF troops executed
many of those they held in custody (rather than either releasing them or keeping
them prisoner), not in the numbers Saigon and Washington charged, but certainly
enough to have posed troubling questions for the people of Hue who survived…."
Young, op. cit., pp. 217-219. Gareth Porter wrote in a letter to the New York
Times in 1987 that "[m]any of [the executions] were apparently revenge
killings by Buddhist activists and the former Hue police chief, who fled from
the military suppression of the Buddhist struggle movement in 1966 and returned
with Communist forces at Tet." Gareth Porter, "Little Evidence of 1968 Tet
Massacre in Hue," Letter, New York Times, October 29, 1987, p. A30.
15 Quoted in Young, op. cit., p. 219.
16 Porter, "The 1968 ‘Hue Massacre,’" op. cit., p. 8.
17 Quoted in ibid., p. 8.
18 Journalist Don Tate quoted in ibid., p. 8.
19 An important analysis of the "Hue Massacre" in recent survey texts of
the war is provided by David Hunt, "Images of the Viet Cong," in Robert M.
Slabey, ed., The United States and Viet Nam from War to Peace: Papers from an
Interdisciplinary Conference on Reconciliation (Jefferson, North Carolina:
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 1996), pp. 54-57.
20 MacCannell wrote that truth markers "function to cement the bond of
tourist and attraction by elevating the information possessed by the tourist to
privileged status." Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure
Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), pp. 137-138.
21 In referring to an "official" historical narrative, I do not mean to
imply that there is a single Vietnamese perspective of the American war. Rather,
I am referring to the dominant narrative of the conflict that appears in the
discourses of museum exhibits and at war sites and memorials throughout the
country.
22 Evan Thomas, "The Last Days of Saigon," Newsweek, May 1, 2000, p.
36.
23 Dunlop, op. cit., p. 114.
24 Lesser, op. cit., p. 181.
25 Florence and Storey, op. cit., p. 462.
26 Erik Cohen, "The Tourist Guide: The Origins, Structure, and Dynamics of
a Role," Annals of Tourism Research 12 (1985), pp. 5-29. Cohen identified
the "four principal elements" of the communicative component of the guide’s role
as selection, information, interpretation, and fabrication. Ibid., pp.
14-16.
27 Deborah B. Bhattacharyya, "Mediating India: An Analysis of a Guidebook,"
Annals of Tourism Research 24:2 (1997), p. 378.
28 Ibid., p. 381.
29 Ibid., p. 375.
30 Ibid., p. 376.
31 Of the 94 tourists I interviewed throughout Vietnam in June 2000, 74
percent were using a guidebook published by Lonely Planet; of the total number
of travelers using a guidebook – 10 of the 94 people I spoke with were not – 83
percent had a Lonely Planet. Research data on file with the author.
32 Interview of Robert Storey in Jiafeng, Taiwan, May 30, 2000. Tapes and
transcript on file with the author.
33 Ibid.
34 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the
American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988).
35 Interview of Robert Storey, op. cit.
36 Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of
Vietnam (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 184. In his effort
to resurrect the reality that many Vietnam veterans became active in the antiwar
movement, at least one leading historian claims that Lembcke went too far in
minimizing the suggestion that many veterans were victimized by their
experiences in Vietnam and have suffered from psychological trauma as a result.
Another pointed to the irony in Lembcke’s reliance on the controversial Winter
Soldier Investigation sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, about which
substantial questions of veracity have been raised. For more on these aspects of
Lembcke’s book, see Christian G. Appy, "The Muffling of Public Memory in
Post-Vietnam America," Chronicle of Higher Education 45:23 (February 12,
1999), p. B5; and Marilyn B. Young, "The Forever War," Itinerario 22:3
(1998), pp. 87-88.
37 Stanley Karnow’s companion volume to the ten-part PBS series on Vietnam
is perhaps the most prominent example of this disdain for Vietnamese denial, as
Karnow chastised the Vietnamese for not being forthcoming about the alleged
massacre. He wrote: Revisiting Vietnam in 1981 and again in 1990, I was able to
elicit little credible evidence from the Communists to clarify the episode.
General Tran Do, a senior Communist architect of the Tet offensive, flatly
denied that the Hue atrocities had ever occurred, contending that films and
photographs of the corpses had been "fabricated." I heard the same line from
General Tran Van Quang, who commanded the Communist forces in the region. In Hue
itself, a Communist official claimed that the exhumed bodies were mostly of
Vietcong cadres and sympathizers slain by the South Vietnamese army after the
fight for the city. He also blamed most of the civilian casualties during the
battle on American bombing. But he hinted that his comrades had participated in
at least a share of the killing – resorting to familiar Communist jargon to
explain that the "angry" citizens of Hue had liquidated local "despots" in the
same way that "they would get rid of poisonous snakes who, if allowed to live,
would commit further crimes." Balanced accounts have made it clear, however,
that the Communist butchery in Hue did take place – perhaps on an even larger
scale than reported during the war.
Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History , Revised Edition (New York:
Penguin Books, 1997), p. 543. According to his notes, Karnow’s source – i.e.,
the "more balanced accounts" to which he refers – is Don Oberdorfer, Tet!
(Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1971). According to Herman and Porter,
Oberdorfer, who was a Vietnam correspondent for the Washington Post ,
relied on fabricated documents provided by Douglas Pike in writing his book,
which was reissued in 2001 by Johns Hopkins University Press. Oberdorfer’s
account is discussed in Edward Herman and D. Gareth Porter, op. cit.; and in
Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World
Fascism, Volume I of The Political Economy of Human Rights (Boston:
South End Press, 1979), p. 347. David Hunt refers to Oberdorfer’s treatment of
the "Hue Massacre" as "just warmed over Pike," and he writes that the decision
by Karnow and other authors to cite Oberdorfer rather than Pike is "a device
that evades rather than resolves the problem of documentation." Pike’s study,
according to Hunt, "is, by any definition, a work of propaganda." Hunt, op.
cit., pp. 56-57. Karnow’s acceptance of the alleged massacre is particularly
troubling in this context, as his book, judging from similarities in language,
appears to have possibly been the source of the accounts provided by several of
the guidebook authors.
38 Herman and Porter, op. cit., p. 12.
39 Colet and Eliot, op. cit., p. 175.
40 Herman and Porter, op. cit., p. 12. Emphases in original.
41 Instances of the "Hue Massacre" being cited in the media as evidence of
Communist brutality are legionary. For one such example, see Barbara Crossette,
"Where Tet Meant Death, Life Goes On," New York Times, August 26, 1987,
p. A1. See also the responses by Reed Irvine ("Hue Massacre of 1968 Goes Beyond
Hearsay," Letter, New York Times, September 22, 1987, p. A34) and Gareth
Porter ("Little Evidence of 1968 Tet Massacre in Hue," op. cit.). Irvine,
chairman of the organization Accuracy in Media, has argued for the historical
actuality of the "Hue Massacre" on numerous occasions.
42 Colet and Eliot, op. cit., p. 175.
43 Hunt, op. cit., p. 55.
44 Ibid., p. 55. Pike’s original reference was to "Vietnamese communists as
fiendish fanatics with blood dripping from their hands" – thus Hunt’s placement
of "fiends" in quotation marks.
45 One former tour guide from Hue that I interviewed, who spent
approximately two years as an English-speaking guide in that area, estimated
that perhaps "2 out of 10" tourists would ask her about the "Hue
Massacre.".19
46 Young, "The Forever War," op. cit., p. 80.
47 Ibid., p. 81. Young wrote: The challenge the war posed to America’s
foundational account of its own history was so powerful it could not be allowed
to stand. Almost before the war had ended, a series of reversals – in language
and imagery – turned the war on its head. Far from being an aggressor, the
United States was a victim, its prisoners of war, helpless hostages, Vietnam
itself a "quagmire" which had inexorably sucked the country down and under.
President Carter, more generously, announced that the destruction had been
"mutual," though what balance scale he was using – given the two to three
million Vietnamese dead, the hundreds of thousands of refugees, the heaviest
bombing in history – it is impossible to imagine. In the press, television, the
movies, returning American veterans came to stand for the way the Nation (with a
capital "N") itself had been victimized: victims of the antiwar movement, said
to have spit upon them; of an Executive that forced them to fight with "one hand
tied behind their back"; of a cowardly Congress which would not send more
reinforcements; of a shameful populace that would not stage victory parades. The
Rambo series embod[ies] a final reversal: the guerrilla is now an American, the
planes and heavy weaponry are all in the hands of the Vietnamese, and the
mission he pursues is not war, but rescue. Thus Americans in Vietnam buy
momentos of their own suffering, symbols of their victimization. Ibid., pp.
84-85.
48 Many tourists I interviewed expressed their discomfort with the language
employed by a number of museums in discussing the American war. For instance,
the National Museum of Vietnamese Revolution in Hanoi, which is one of the
country’s seven national museums, repeatedly refers in its exhibits to the
"American imperialists," the "puppet regime" or "Ngo Dinh Diem clique" in
Saigon, "America’s invasion of Vietnam," et cetera. Whatever their merit, the
sentiments contained within such designations seriously conflict with many
popular American representations of the war in Vietnam.
49 There have been numerous studies of the war’s treatment in American
schools. For a recent analysis of high school history textbooks, see James W.
Loewen, "The Vietnam War in High School American History," in Laura Hein and
Mark Selden, eds., Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan,
Germany, and the United States (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), pp.
150-172. A more recent study of survey texts on the war than David Hunt’s
previously-cited analysis is David Hunt, "War Crimes and the Vietnamese People:
American Representations and Silences," in ibid., pp. 173-200. For an
examination of travel guidebooks’ representations of the American war, see my
"Shaping Memory of the Past: Discourse in Travel Guidebooks for Vietnam,"
Mass Communication & Society 5:1 (February 2002), pp. 87-110. The
number of scholarly texts addressing the war’s representation in American
culture is enormous. Among them are H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other
American Fantasies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000); Keith
Beattie, The Scar that Binds: American Culture and the Vietnam War (New
York: New York University Press, 1998); John Carlos Rowe and Rick Berg, eds.,
The Vietnam War and American Culture (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991); and Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender
and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
50 Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London:
Verso, 1980), pp. 38-39.
51 Franklin, op. cit., p. 3.
52 Ibid., p. 169.
53 These findings should not be construed as scientific, although I suspect
they are reasonably accurate. I cannot claim to have interviewed a
representative sample of tourists in Vietnam, if such is even possible, although
I did make an effort to speak with as wide of a cross-section of tourists as
possible. Research data on file with the author.
54 Franklin, op. cit., p. 200.
55 Interview with the author, June 2000.
56 Quoted in Lembcke, op. cit., p. 11.