Organizer: Lien-Hang Thi Nguyen, Harvard University

Chair: Larry Berman, University of California, Davis

Discussant: Edward G. Miller, Dartmouth College

This panel highlights new approaches to the study of the Second Indochina War and its consequences by making use of previously-neglected South Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian experiences. In contrast to the dominant historical narratives that focus on American and Vietnamese communist perspectives, this panel addresses other relationships and entanglements between the South Vietnamese and their allies. Using ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and oral histories, the papers on this panel present a more nuanced understanding of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and the allies who fought alongside it.

Lien-Hang Nguyen (Yale University) analyzes relations between Khmer and Viet soldiers during the early 1970s and the tensions that emerged between the Indochinese allies in their joint struggle against communist forces. Rick Ruth (Cornell University) assesses the claim that Thai volunteer troops possessed a "local knowledge" of South Vietnam and the South Vietnamese that their American allies never possessed or even considered. Christina Schwenkel (Stanford University) analyzes how former ARVN soldiers grapple with the return of American veterans to Vietnam and how the former continues to be left out of the healing process and commemorative practices. This panel will also include comments by two scholars, historian Edward Miller (Dartmouth College) and political scientist Larry Berman (UC Davis) whose scholarship exemplify the new approaches and new sources on South Vietnam, ARVN and their allies.

Lien-Hang Thi Nguyen, Harvard University

Although Cambodian and South Vietnamese forces in the early 1970s were engaged in a joint war against communist forces, relations between the Indochinese allies were fraught with tension. Following the overthrow of Norodom Sihanouk in March 1970, the RVN under the Nguyen Van Thieu administration ostensibly inherited an anti-communist ally in the Lon Nol government. Instead, historic animosities between the Khmers and Vietnamese dominated the interaction between Saigon and Phnom Penh as well as their armies, fatally weakening the war against the Asian communists.

Based on Vietnamese archival sources on the Second Republic of South Vietnam, this paper analyzes South Vietnamese perceptions of their Khmer allies. By treating the Khmer Republic as a client rather than an ally, the RVN administration and its army committed many of the mistakes that the US committed in South Vietnam. The superior attitude displayed in the "they need us more than we need them" belief as well as the inability to transfer the war in Cambodia over to the Khmer Army resulted in poor relations between the RVN and the Khmer Republic at a time when a strong alliance was needed.

Richard A. Ruth, Cornell University

Of all of the countries who contributed troops to the war effort in South Vietnam, only Thailand had ever had any direct and prolonged military contact with the Vietnamese. Long before Cold War alliances put North Vietnam in the Communist bloc and Thailand in the "free world," their two peoples had met repeatedly in wars that had absorbed the greater and lesser states of the Southeast Asian mainland. For some contemporary observers, the appearance of Thai soldiers in South Vietnam during the late 1960s could be read as a modern chapter in an older story of competition between the Tai and Viet rulers in their struggle for regional hegemony. Thailand was also unique among these participants in that its country was home to a population of ethnic Vietnamese minority whose culture and history was familiar to many of the majority Thais.

But how accurate are these historical assumptions? Did the Thai government and military planners who sent these forces see the circumstances of the war through the lens of along-term historical past? Did the 37,644 Thai troops who served in South Vietnam come armed with a "local knowledge" that allowed them to win favor with civilians while giving them battlefield advantages against the Viet Cong? Using original research from interviews with Thai participants in the Vietnam War, this paper examines the relationship between the Thai troops and various segments of the South Vietnamese population while assessing Thai claims to culturally specific advantages in prosecuting the war.

Journeys of Reconciliation through Landscapes of Memory in Vietnam

Christina Schwenkel, Stanford University

Since the "normalization" of diplomatic relations between the United States and Vietnam in 1995, collaborative U.S. Vietnamese projects that aim to "heal the wounds of war" and bring closure to the past have significantly increased in numbers and in scope. Joint efforts between citizens, especially veterans, of both countries to reconcile and build postwar relationships have engendered new transnational practices of memory-making and the formation of unconventional monuments and memorials. The Vietnamese and U.S. press have contributed to a growing recognition of such activities, with coverage highlighting reconciliatory meetings and actions between former adversaries and their "shared" memories of the battlefield. Looking at variously positioned historical actors who fought in the U.S. war in Vietnam, this paper will analyze representations and rhetorics of "healing" and "reconciliation" that permeate these collaborations to ask: For whom is the past resolved and who makes peace with whom? Drawing from ethnographic data gathered during two years of fieldwork in Vietnam, the paper will discuss how ARVN veterans are conspicuously absent from these projects and processes of reconciliation that primarily occur between former U.S. soldiers and Vietnamese liberation forces. Despite such exclusion, ARVN veterans are also actively engaged in reconciliatory acts and cathartic practices to commemorate the past and work through their own marginalized trauma from the war.