The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 12 (2001)

Reprogramming Memories: The Historicizationof the Vietnam War from the 1970s throughthe 1990s
Eikoh IKUIINTRODUCTION
It can generally be said that memories of the wars which took place
during the twentieth century differ signiﬁcantly depending on the viewpoint of the nations involved. There is more to this than merely the factthat in the memories of the populace of the winning country, it will beconsidered to have been a “good war” whereas in those of the losers the
opposite is true. The main factors behind this divergence are probably
suppression and forgetfulness. For example, the ofﬁcial Japanese stanceis to ignore or deny all the atrocities it committed in Korea and China
during its attempt to colonize Asia during World War II. A visit to the
National Museum of Japanese History in Sakura, Chiba Prefecture, theonly museum in the country to focus solely on domestic history, will
reveal the amazing fact that there is not a single display that deals withmaterial from the war. Even in the Showa-kan Gallery, a museum thatwas established in Tokyo jointly by the Ministry of Health and Welfare
and a group of relatives of the war dead, the exhibits focus on artifacts
belonging to the women and children who were left behind on the homefront, depicting them as victims of an oppressive government. Not onlyis the history of Japan’s fascist colonial expansionism entirely ignored,
Copyright © 2001 Eikoh Ikui. All rights reserved. This work may be used, withthis notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may
be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
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there is no mention even of the battles in which Japanese soldiers gave
their lives. The institution insists that its aim is to focus on the history of
the common people and their ordinary lives, but in actual fact it represents the suppression of an unsavory past, nostalgia for the small worldin which the civilians lived and “an absence of all memories of killingand being killed.”1
Starting in the nineteen-seventies, historians began to express an interest in looking at history “from the bottom up,” but due to the aforementioned constraints, this discipline continues to be subject to distortion.
Concentrating on the memory of ordinary people was once thought tobe a powerful device to overcome this distortion, but as can be seen fromthe memories of the Vietnam War that will be described here, such an
approach is not always effective. Memory is an art of recollecting and,particularly in this context, the way in which the war is remembered.
While it is possible for conscious effort to restore memory in a way thatcan open up new perspectives on history, this effort can simultaneously
have the opposite effect, namely, that of erasing factual events. Yet it is
this very dual nature of attempts to restore memory that gives meaning
to the discussion of memory in this paper. Memory is important to historical studies today not because it provides an alternative to the conventional concept of history, but because it provides a window onto theway the past is viewed today.
This paper starts by looking at the theoretical possibilities of focusing
on memories of the war, moves on to consider narratives of remembering Vietnam and the political revisionism they embody, and ends by
examining the way in which America went about revising the history of
the war at the end of the twentieth century. Tim O‘Brien once said, “after
a battle each soldier will have a different story to tell, vastly different
stories.”2 However, the way in which these stories resonate depends on
the historical and cultural milieu of the place in which they are told, andthis paper will critically examine such resonance.
I

WAR AND MEMORY“Memories help us make sense of the world we live in,” says John
Gillis, “and ‘memory work’ is, like any other kind of physical or mental labor, embedded in complex class, gender and power relations that
determine what is remembered (or forgotten), by whom, and for whatend.”3 Accordingly, memory is simultaneously a product of politics

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43

while also possessing a politics of its own. For instance, if we look at
the history of the Vietnam War as it is recorded in the United States, innearly every instance, it is still said to have ended in 1973, or at the very
least, that this was when the “American War” ended. Looked at from thepoint of view of the memories and mentality of the American people,
this might be said to be true, but if we are to talk of historical facts, itcannot be denied that from April 1973 to April 1975, United States military personnel, with the exception of regular ground troops, continued
to participate in the ﬁghting and to become victims of the war. Richard
Nixon announced “the end of the Vietnam War” in March 1973 by thewithdrawal of the regular ground troops along with his “Vietnamization”
policy, but this was merely propaganda aimed at voters who were
exhausted by the long-running war and its accompanying social confusion. There was no real change in America’s political presence inIndochina. In other words, it can be said that looked at from a global
viewpoint, the Vietnam War did not end when the American people’s
memories would have liked it to have ended. The majority of American
people, however, believe that the Vietnam War ended in 1973, and areconvinced that this is nothing less than a pure historical fact. This belief
illustrates how memory of a historical fact can actually be the productof political expediency and, therefore, the consideration of history
through the medium of memory is a critical examination of the politicalprocess.4
Another way to put this is that memory is an artifact that undergoes acontinuous process of reconstruction, with conscious or subconscious
suppression taking place under the name of forgetfulness. This line ofthought corresponds with Michael Foucault’s concept of the “reprogramming of popular memory,” which he deﬁned during an interview
for a French ﬁlm magazine in 1974. Foucault was discussing ﬁlmic portrayals of Nazism as an erotic and aesthetic subject and the dispute, current at the time, over claims that the political right was not in fact working
to revise and authorize a sanitized version of the darker side of history
concerning Nazi collaborators: “There is a battle for and around history
going on at this very moment which is extremely interesting. The intention is to reprogram, to stiﬂe what I’ve called the ‘popular memory,’ andalso to propose and impose on people a framework in which to interpretthe present.”5 Foucault deﬁned “popular memory” as belonging to those
who are at odds with the producers of ofﬁcial histories, “people . . . whoare barred from writing, from producing their books themselves, from

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drawing up their own historical accounts.”6 He stated that the traditionof popular memory as seen in the life of the nineteenth-century working
classes had been reprogrammed by television and the mass-market press,
saying, “People are shown not what they were, but what they must
remember having been.”7 In short, memory is a malleable artifact thatcan be altered according to emotions, convictions or resentments, and itis these very characteristics that make it a product of politics.8
This can be seen in how the memory of the Vietnam War in the U.S.
which has been reprogrammed in three phases. The ﬁrst phase occurredin the nineteen-seventies with the Americanization of the popular imageof the war. This process reﬂected frustration at the ambiguous way inwhich the war had ended and the ensuing period of forgetfulness. The
second phase was the rehabilitation of the Vietnam veterans as wounded heroes in the eighties when society found a way of recollecting the
war as one in which American foot soldiers were the victims. The controversy over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. in theearly eighties was mainly led by political neo-conservatives who tried
to glorify the memory of the war. But at the same moment in history,oral histories of actual foot soldiers were conveying an ungloriﬁed, fragmentary view of the “working-class war.” The third phase in the lateeighties and the early nineties was the justiﬁcation and ofﬁcial validation of the war as manifest in speeches by Ronald Reagan who called thewar a “noble cause” and by George Bush who said “That war cleaves us
still. But, friends, that war began in earnest a quarter century ago; andsurely the statute of limitations has been reached.”9 The success of the
Persian Gulf War gave revisionists conﬁdence to redeﬁne the “lessonsof Vietnam.” This ofﬁcial validation of the revised historical status of
the Vietnam War gradually began to melt into the popular memory of
the war; meanwhile growing numbers of Vietnamese-Americans, eachwith his/her own story, added many new facets to the memory of the war,and revisionists exploited these “other” voices to justify the “rightness”
of the war effort to the American nation. Thus, the newly established status of the war came to have a cultural inﬂuence on the popular image ofthe previous American wars in the twentieth-century.

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45

THE AMERICANIZATION OF THE VIETNAM WAR: IN FILMS AND
THE POPULAR MEMORY

According to George C. Herring, the withdrawal of regular American
ground troops from Indochina resulted in a “self-conscious, collective
amnesia”10 among the people of the United States. The media, whose
most important task up until that time had been to bring daily reports on
Vietnam, ignored the subject entirely and the columnist Joseph C. Harschnoted the following during the late seventies: “Americans have somehow blocked it out of their consciousness. They don’t talk about it. They
don’t talk about its consequences.”11
After the fall of Saigon in 1975, American society awoke from its
amnesia and began the task of recollection. The period from 1976 to 1979
saw a rash of ﬁlms on the subject of the Vietnam War—including Taxi
Driver (1976), Rolling Thunder (1977), Coming Home, The Deer Hunter(1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979)—that forced the American public toawaken from its amnesia. In particular, The Deer Hunter had a powerful inﬂuence on the collective memory of the Vietnam War. For example, Vietnam veteran Jan C. Scruggs was so impressed by the ﬁlm when
he saw it in 1979, that he was motivated to found the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial Fund (VVMF).12
In attempting to analyze the power of this ﬁlm, John Hellmann claims
it adopts the narrative structure of traditional American mythology. The
depiction of the hero of the ﬁlm (acted by Robert De Niro) as a young,drafted steelworker with Russian ancestry, makes him a marginal ﬁguresocially, culturally and geographically—a typically mythical American
Frontier Man. This depiction was seemingly chosen so as to make thestory more convincing. But, in contrast to the overwhelming acclaim
received in the United States, where it won ﬁve Oscars, it was strongly
criticized overseas for its racist description of the Vietnamese and Asianpeople, especially in the well-known Russian roulette scene.13 Hellmann,
however, does not regard the accusation as particularly valid, because
he asserts that the prisoners of the Vietnamese guerrillas in the scene
include both American and South Vietnamese soldiers. Rather, he would
have us take note of the narrative form of The Deer Hunter, that of the
traditional western, just as Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now relies onanother traditional Hollywood genre, that of the hard-boiled detective
story. “These [western and detective] formulaic genres, comprising
central moral fantasies of American culture, provide collective dreams

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through which the trauma of the Vietnam War may be re-experienced,
assimilated and interpreted.”14
On the other hand, Naoki Sakai, while recognizing that this movie had
the capacity to appeal to the American audience regardless of their diverse political leanings, pointed out that in actual fact it expressed ashrewd exclusion of Asian characters and an inventive form of denial inorder to sustain the “imperialistic nationalism of the U.S.” His analysis
focuses on the way in which the ﬁlm contrasts the sympathetic treatmentof the American soldiers with the disparaging portrayal of the Vietnamese.
First Sakai focuses on the fact that the America depicted in this movie
is singularly lacking in diversity. For instance, it shows the hero as living in a Pennsylvanian steelworking community, thereby appearing todisplay the immigrant ethnic diversity of the country, but there are no
Asians living in the town and therefore it results in creating the impression of the U.S. as being a homogeneous society consisting solely of
Caucasians. This view is conﬁrmed by the fact that there are no scenesof the infantry training school which would allow the audience to visualize the ethnic diversity of U.S. society or of the large cities that embody
class diversity. While there is nothing strange about the fact that there
may only have been a few Asians living in a small Pennsylvania town
during the 1970s, the movie is not a direct reﬂection of reality, but rather
a synecdoche of the small town. In this way, Sakai claims, the audience
was able to feel a rapport for the characters in this small town as anembodiment of all Americans.15 This appeal to sympathetic emotions
was a strong factor in the Americanization of the images of war.
In the same way, the Vietnamese people are depicted in this movie as
being a homogenous group who are sadistic in the extreme. In particular, Sakai says that in the narrative context of the movie, the Russianroulette scene is endowed with extreme tension and the urgency of thesituation which grips both participants and audience alike creates aninevitable feeling of antipathy towards Vietnam. This causes people to“transfer their opposition to the war to opposition to the enemy” and as
a result, this movie played a role in intensifying antipathy to Vietnam,
thereby reducing the psychological burden of guilt for America’s imperialistic intervention in Vietnamese affairs and the resultant atrocities
such as the My Lai massacre.16 In this context, antipathy could be channeled into sympathy for the heroes, thus aiding in the Americanizationof the images of the war.
Although Hellmann and Sakai hold opposite views concerning the

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47

degree of racism expressed in this movie, their arguments share a common premise. That is to say, this movie did not touch at all upon how thepolitical and military intervention of the U.S. in Indochina failed, butrather it simply showed the war in a negative light from the point of viewof the drafted soldiers. By personalizing the war itself in the ﬁgures of
the heroes, The Deer Hunter transformed the Vietnam War into an“American” war, and all subsequent Vietnam War ﬁlms that were madein the U.S. can be classiﬁed as variations of this Americanized memoryof the war. First Blood (1982), featuring a famous hero Rambo, portrayed American soldiers/veterans as victims and Platoon (1986), a ﬁlm
which has been called the most “realistic” Vietnam War ﬁlm, used aseries of close-ups and point-of-view shots to lead the audience into thewar through the eyes of an “innocent” American boy.17 While perhaps
more realistic, it still conveyed the war through American as opposed toVietnamese eyes, and therefore also contributed in its own way to theAmericanization of memories of the war. Thus this war, which ofﬁciallyﬁnished with Nixon’s “Vietnamization policy,” has been reborn in popular culture as the American War.
IIISOLDIERS AS VICTIMS: THE MEMORIAL DEBATE AND THE
VETERANS’ ORAL HISTORIESThe fact that postwar recollections began with a process ofAmericanization was to inﬂuence the subsequent public image andmemory of the war. Especially, the view of the Vietnam War as an“American” tragedy led naturally to the Vietnam veterans being looked
upon as victims of this tragedy, whose families and friends had also suffered from the domestic conﬂict that surrounded it. It is a fact that
Scruggs himself discovered this logic in The Deer Hunter and used it
during his fund-raising campaign for the VVMF memorial to create thefeeling among the general population that American society as a whole
was also a victim, suffering from the trauma of a terrible tragedy. As aresult he succeeded in making the construction of the memorial a national event that drew together every section of society and transcended divisions of politics, race and class. However, although the collective
consciousness underwent a change from amnesia to recollecting memories of war, Scruggs did not necessarily achieve everything he wanted.
Herring writes that this war was “a humiliating and deeply frustrating
experience for a people accustomed to success.”18 The ongoing

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construction of the veterans memorial may have been able to offer relief
from the trauma, but it was unable to completely alleviate the frustration
or mend the wounded pride still felt by so many Americans.
Meanwhile, neo-conservatism was on the rise. This was a major trend
and in addition to involving such professional military leaders/analysts
as Harry G. Summers and Bruce Palmer, it also included critics such as
Norman Podhoretz and Gunter Lewy who offered revisionist interpretations of the Vietnam War. Unlike the early generation of conservatives
who had insisted that US forces at the Tet Offensive had won the battle,
neo-conservatives conceded the defeat but blamed the media for destroying the American war effort by covering the offensive almost “live”
everyday and thus acting as the “true” enemy of the nation. In otherwords, they were not interested in pursuing historical facts so much as
reinterpreting them, and they made a great effort to reprogram the way
in which people looked at history.19
The criticism that was directed towards Maya Ying Lin’s original
design for the memorial was a reﬂection of the confusion brought on by
the neo-conservatives’ revisionist interpretation of the war and the frustration being expressed by the patriotic veterans. It began with the “black
gash of shame” accusation by Tom Carhart, a VVMF member, in 1981,
and culminated with the addition of the Statue of the Three Servicemen
by Frederic Hart in 1984. Superﬁcially it appeared to be the result of aninternal VVMF difference of opinion over aesthetics—a controversy
between Scruggs and a co-founder of the VVMF, Jack Wheeler, andCarhart and James Webb, a well-known writer and a member of the
VVMF’s National Sponsoring Committee—but in actual fact, it was a
dispute over political beliefs and the view of history. For instance, Lin’s
original design called for the monument to display only the years andnames of the casualties without any other written explanations, a proposal to which Scruggs agreed. But Webb felt this would be insufﬁcientand demanded not only the addition of a ﬁgurative statue but also thatthe words “their pride in having served the cause of freedom” be included on the wall itself. In other words, Webb was not content merely toperpetuate the memory of the military servicemen and women who losttheir lives, but also intended to justify the “cause” of the war and create
an artifact that would justify and validate the war itself.20 Webb, who
was later appointed Navy Secretary under the Ronald Reagan Administration, obviously shared Reagan’s concept of the Vietnam War as a“noble cause,” and tried to revise the memory of war to that of being a
gloriﬁed one in the same way as other military leaders.

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49

Despite their work, however, it is important to note that popular memory was not to be so easily inﬂuenced by this revisionist logic. The people who viewed it with the most suspicion were what Christian Appyrefers to as the soldiers of the “working-class war”21 or what George
Lipsitz refers to as his evening school adult students “whose political
afﬁliations and career ambitions hinged on the success of the neo-conservative agenda.” Lipsitz says, “the dominant neo-conservative narrative of the 1980s conﬂicted with the experiences and memories of eventhose Americans who desperately wanted neo-conservatism to succeed.
The Vietnam War caused too much pain to be reframed as a singularly
heroic moment.”22 In Lipsitz’s view, if the gloriﬁed image of the war
which the revisionists portray were to conﬂict with the actual memories
of working-class veterans such as the heroes in The Deer Hunter, it
would suggest that the revisionist way of rewriting history would nolonger resonate with their frustrated experiences. This trend generated,according to James Olson, “a sizable collection of oral histories and recollections of secondary personnel—the working- and middle-class
Americans and Vietnamese who found themselves ﬁghting a war that
other men and women had made.”23
The ﬁrst group of recollections by “secondary” personnel to receive
attention was the literary personal narratives which began to appear in1973 immediately following the end of the “American” war. The best
known of these was Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973),
which was followed by Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July (1976)
and Philip Caputo’s Rumor of War (1977), with Tobias Wolfe’s best
selling, In Pharaoh’s Army (1994) continuing the trend. However,
although this kind of text offers an invitation to the reader to explore thedepths of the veteran’s personal feeling, the literary recollection has atendency to be limited by the ability of the authors. As Lipsitz stated,
many of the veterans “who desperately wanted neo-conservatism to succeed” were unable to write their memoirs as a way of healing theirwounds or of expressing themselves to society. With attention being
drawn to their existence by the whole of society in the early eighties, asa result of the memorial project, oral histories began to be used as a wayof presenting their recollections through their own “voices.”
Oral history has been developed as a method of research in anthropology and ethnology to explore the subjective values and traditions ofa society or community, but in popular readings it presents ﬁrsthandexperiences and is special in that it can only be told by the people who
were actually present at the scene of an event. History is the realm of

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historians, but veterans and refugees are the only ones capable of conveying actual memories.
Studs Turkel was one of the ﬁrst popular oral historians to achieve
success in the literary market with The Good War (1976) and American
Dreams: Lost and Found (1980), but in the case of the Vietnam War, it
was left to a single veteran to gather together the voices of the “silent
majority” and present them to the public. This was Al Santoli, an army
sergeant who experienced two tours of duty in Vietnam before going on
to become a journalist. He worked for the social rehabilitation of the veterans and his oral histories were the ﬁrst to become best sellers. In his
ﬁrst book, Everything We Had, published in 1981, he gathered together
the recollections of thirty-three veterans, including one nurse, and thetechnique he developed was to delete everything said by him, the interviewer, thereby producing a series of monologues. While scholars presenting oral histories are required to make clear the time, place, lengthof recording, and names of the participants and other information, Santolipresents the conversations of the veterans as if they are talking directly
and spontaneously to the readers themselves. As a result they seem very
familiar and are imbued with a sense of reliability and authority.
In the preface to this book, Santoli asks his readers to follow the experiences of the veterans emotionally. He writes that: “now as parents andas citizens we feel an obligation . . . to say what we could not or did not
say in the past,” that “we were once idealistic young people confronted
by the awesomeness of ﬁghting other human beings.” He also says: “Inour book we hope you will see what we saw, do what we did, feel what
we felt . . . The American people have never heard in depth from the soldiers themselves the complicated psychic and physical realities of what
they went through in Vietnam.”24 Here, he is asking of his readers thatthey follow the experiences of the veterans emotionally, a demand thatis common to all oral histories of Vietnam veterans. For instance in the
introduction to NAM, which was published in the same year, Mark Baker
writes that while many memoirs by generals, politicians and diplomats
were published in the 1970s, “something is missing from their story,
something personal and palpable . . . What happened in Vietnam? What
did it look like? How did it smell? What happened to you? Vietnam veterans know ﬁrsthand the statistics, the heroism, the evil and the madness. They are the ones qualiﬁed to look inside the casket and identity
the body for what it is—a dead boy killed in a war, who had a name, apersonality, a story all his own.”25

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In fact, the personal histories of Santoli and Baker are quite opposite.
Santoli was himself a Vietnam veteran and he tries to transmit the veterans’ experiences from the “inside,” whereas Baker spent the war years
as a college student and so his recollections are anything but ﬁrsthand.
Therefore, Baker has no choice but to present the work as an observer
standing outside the subject he is presenting. Nevertheless, both men present their readers with the same thing: the realities of war, especially theimage of the veterans as victims. They present the stories of “grunts”
who suffer from horrible memories, such as that of having to kill an
American soldier who had been tortured by the enemy on the battleﬁeld,
or of the rage they felt at being labeled “baby-killers” in their hometowns. Thomas Myers points out that using collective testimonies in theoral histories presents less continuous narrative and more accumulative
impact than the individual personal memoirs and give the impression of
being “the raw, unﬁltered stuff of true history, the sort of ﬁrst-person
comprehensiveness that any single interpreting or re-creating imagination may only artiﬁcially emulate.”26 In this way, a torrent of oral histories began to ﬂow from the victimized veterans around the mid-eighties.
Another important point concerning these memories of Vietnam is thatthey explored the subject through the diversity of race, gender, locality
and political belief. For instance, Wallace Terry’s Bloods (1984) deals
with black veterans; Keith Walker’s A Piece of My Heart (1985),
Kathryn Marshall’s In the Combat Zone (1987), and Dan Freedman and
Jacqueline Rhoads’ Nurses in Vietnam (1987) all concentrate on women
veterans; Harry Maurer’s Strange Ground (1987) handles civilian veterans including secretaries, diplomats, clerks, missionaries, reporters,
teachers housewives, doctors and nurses; James Wilson’s, Landing Zone
(1990) looks at veterans from the Southern States; Otto J. Lehrack’s No
Shining Armor (1992) treats the Marine Corps veterans; and James W.
Tollefson’s The Strength Not to Fight (1993) focuses on the recollections of conscientious objectors. The oral history movement that was
begun in order to facilitate the reinstatement of the victimized Vietnam
veterans into the social fabric spread until it included even those who
had refused to take part in the war.27
IV DIVERGENT MEMORIES: AMERICANS AND VIETNAMESE
The developing diversity of oral histories drawn from veterans could
be said to mirror the enlargement of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

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project. To “The Wall”, as the ﬁrst part of the memorial was to become
known after it was completed in 1982, was added the Statue of Three
Servicemen in 1984. However, this addition highlighted the plight ofanother class of “forgotten” veteran, leading to the further addition of
the Vietnam Women’s Memorial with the Statue of the Three Nurses bysculptor Glenna Goodacre which was ﬁnally completed in 1993. This
diversiﬁcation of memories of the war resulted not only in a light being
shone on the forgotten victims of the war but also pointed to the fact thata political reprogramming of the public’s consciousness was taking
place. In the words of Diane Carlson Evans, one of the directors of theVietnam Women’s Memorial Project, which was responsible for theplacing of the Statue of Three Nurses; “The Wall in itself was enough,but when they added the men it became necessary to add women to complete the memorial.”28
In this way, the relationship between the Wall and the Statues can besaid to represent that characteristic of our memories which changes inaccordance with the times. Pierre Nora stated that, “memory always
belongs to our time . . . the eternal present,” while history is a “representation of the past,”29 and we could also say that in “our time” we havea tendency to only recall convenient memories. The works that Santoli
has produced since the completion of the Wall reﬂects this fact clearly.
Everything We Had was limited to the memoirs of American military
servicemen, but To Bear Any Burden, published in 1985, included a larger community of veterans: soldiers, revolutionaries, foreign aid advisors,
journalists, diplomats, relief workers, and refugees from North and South
Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Santoli writes: “I have chosen these people because . . . they share a common humanity that transcends their differences. All of them bear the scars of battle or betrayed idealism. . .
They have journeyed through the dark night of memory to present theirstories here. With some tears and laughter, they have looked back, withcourage, so that we might learn from the trials they have endured.”30
It is obvious that his intentions here are different from those in his
previous book. The earlier work used the pain-ﬁlled confessions ofAmerican veterans as a form of protest against society with the object ofachieving their social rehabilitation. In other words, its message wasaimed at a society which treated them coldly. However, with the completion of the Wall, society’s attitude towards the veterans underwent a
major change and it became necessary for Santoli to move on to the nextstage—to show that the veterans were proud to have fought as soldiersREPROGRAMMING MEMORIES

53

and to further restore the honor due to them. Simultaneously, he tried toillustrate how the American servicemen had been deceived by politicians
who had no understanding of guerrilla warfare or Vietnamese culture. In
this way, he included the recollections of those who had once been enemies, people who shared the same memories but from opposite sides,
thereby seeking to create bonds between them. This book represented akind of reunion; its role was not to transmit a particular message to thereaders, but merely to show the veterans from both sides shedding tears
and embracing.
In a book review in 1986, Herring suggested that literature about theVietnam War can be divided into three distinct phases. The ﬁrst phase,
represented by Herr’s and Caputo’s books from the 1970s, reﬂected the“national disenchantment”; the second, which included Santoli’s ﬁrst
work, in the early 1980s, expressed the “rage they [the veterans] had bottled up for years,” and the third, which began in the mid-eighties with
Santoli’s new work, Bernard Edelman’s Dear America, Tom Mangold
and John Penycate’s The Tunnels of Cu Chi, and Truong Nhu Tang’s A
Vietcong Memoir, presented “a fragmentary view of the war from theVietcong side and offer[ed] important insights into the interaction between Americans and South Vietnamese.” According to Herring, this“fragmentary view of the war” of the third phase was produced as a resultof a process of revisionism that was “the national effort to justify involvement in Vietnam and to rationalize failure that ha[d] reached its mostobnoxious form in Rambo.” This is particularly true of Santoli’s work,
which was the “most blatantly revisionist” and tried “to reafﬁrm therightness of the war as a cause and by showing how a war that could havebeen won was lost to help the nation learn how to use its power more
wisely.”31 In other words, the diversiﬁcation and fragmentation that took
place in the mid- and late eighties suggests an effort to justify and validate the war effort.
Monique T. D. Tru’o’ng made a close examination of the way in which
Santoli managed the “voice/text” of the respondents, how he noted thepeople’s titles or biological data and how he brought all the information
together to create a story. Then she used this data to try and understandSantoli’s subconscious intentions. Her conclusion was that all the Southeast
Asians who appear in his work, even the Vietnamese-, Cambodian-, or
Laotian-Americans “remain foremost Southeast Asians . . . [who] arecontextualized as either a citizen of South Vietnam or a Viet Cong.”
Moreover, by quoting a General of the South Vietnamese Army who

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said, “I understand what could have happened to Lieutenant Calley at
My Lai . . . I know the tactics the VC used to harass you,” Santoli tried
to present the My Lai massacre as “just another case of communist‘Counterterror’-ism, with the Vietnamese people and Lieutenant Calley
as the unfortunate victims.”32 In this way, in the process of justiﬁcationof the Vietnam War, even a murderer could become a victim.
Revisionism is not unique to the United States. At the time, ﬁnding
itself politically and economically impoverished by its invasion of
Cambodia and the Sino-Vietnamese War, Vietnam realized that it wasnecessary for it to improve diplomatic relations with the rest of the world,
particularly if it hoped to win war reparations from the United States. In
order to achieve this end, it began, from around 1982, to welcome scholars and journalists while also inviting veterans groups to visit the country. In addition, with the introduction of the Doi Moi policy (an “OpenDoor” policy that introduced the market enterprise system to the economy while retaining communist principles) the Vietnamese exhibited awillingness to “share the memory” in much the same way as Santoli.
This resulted in a strengthening of the “comradeship” between the exmembers of the North Vietnamese Army and the National Liberation
Front (Vietcong) and also a sharing of grief between the Vietnamese andthe refugees who now lived in America or France. According to Akio
Imai, this tendency became quite pronounced in ﬁlms and literature during the nineties and although it still did not stretch as far as depicting
reconciliation with the ex-members of the South Vietnamese Army, it“functioned to provide a powerful opening” for the new politicaldemands to relieve the frustration of the conservative veterans who
oppose the Doi Moi policy.33 Here again, the main interest lay not somuch in talking about the memories themselves as in talking about how
these memories could be utilized as a political device.
The nineteen-nineties found memory of the war entering its new phasein the United States. This was due to the existence of immigrant communities that had sprung up as a result of an increase in the numbers ofVietnamese Americans who had come to the U.S. as immigrants andrefugees. Their existence had become quite noticeable to the larger society and the new generation who were growing up in the U.S. lived lives
that differed completely from those of their parents. Their social conditions were recorded in Le Ly Hayslip’s bestseller, When Heaven andEarth Changed Places (1989), which was later made into a movie by
Oliver Stone. Paul James Rutledge summarized their lives in The

REPROGRAMMING MEMORIES

55

Vietnamese Experience in America (1992). For more popular reading,
the refugees’ life histories were portrayed in documentary mode inThomas A. Bass’s Vietnamerica (1996). At the same time, Steven
DeBois’s Children of the Enemy (1995) presented the oral histories ofnumerous “Amerasians” and their mothers. Born of American military
servicemen and Southeast Asian women, these children themselves
could be said to be products of the war, and DeBois, who worked at thePhilippine Refugee Processing Center, looks at them carefully from bothan American and a Vietnamese viewpoint, recording oral texts that
display their ambiguous identities of being both “American” and“Vietnamese.” This work demonstrates that oral history can be an effective tool in this type of extremely ﬂuid socio-cultural situation.34
This experiment by DeBois represented a new phase in the U.S. sociocultural scene and shows that it was a subject that could no longer be
explained through the conventional framework of diversiﬁcation. However, while these new conditions provided the driving energy, what weneed to pay attention to here is what was happening in the conventionalsocial space. Because the diversiﬁcation of society not always seems tohave real effect on the social structure, it has no more meaning but toexpand the physical and social space to contain the newcomers. This may
reﬂect the fact that while new things sometimes become old, old things
always remain old. When thinking along these lines, we are faced once
more with a ﬁgure familiar in this context, that of Al Santoli. After his
To Bear Any Burden received a lot of criticism from reviewers, hepublished in 1989 a new oral history entitled The New Americans. This
book had two main characteristics. First is that the birthplaces of thetwenty-three Americans who appear in the book are spread over ﬁve continents, including such countries as Poland, Italy, England, Russia,
Mexico, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, South Korea, Ethiopia,
Guatemala, Haiti, etc., meaning that Santoli’s longstanding interest inand connection with the Vietnam War becomes comparatively muted.
The Vietnamese immigrants who appear in this book came from among
the elite military families who had been favored by the Ngo Dinh Diemand Nhu brothers in the 1950s and did not contradict Santoli with regard
to their political beliefs or the quality of their memories. The strongest
impression created by this book is that of a mosaic, consisting of all thesepeople who have come to North America from ﬁve continents for various reasons and motives. Meanwhile, the rage and mortiﬁcation that are
the hallmark of his previous two books have been diluted.35

56

EIKOH IKUIThe other characteristic is that among these immigrants and refugees
who give America such a diversiﬁed face was Santoli’s own father.
Having arrived from Italy in 1921 in the arms of his mother, Albert
Santoli Sr. was more than merely “Americanized.” He had volunteered
for armed service during WWII, spent the 1950s as a mechanical engineer, then became a supervisor of the Space Program Division for theNASA Apollo project. “My family was becoming a part of the American
melting pot,” he recollects in an optimistic tone because as the American
war front grew in Southeast Asia, he was involved in the “space front”
which was expanding in a different direction. Written in the monologue
style, Albert Sr.’s oral history only touches on the topic of “Vietnam”
once, when his Al, Jr. married a Vietnamese woman whom he had met
at a refugee camp in Thailand. The main theme that runs through his reminiscences is that of the golden days of the NASA space program from1963 to 1969 that culminated in the ﬁrst successful landing on the moonby Apollo 11.36
The people who appear in this book range from an Afghan refugee toSantoli’s British-born editor at Viking Press, but what they nearly all
share in common is that they all were recent immigrants or refugees. The
fact that there is only one person who arrived immediately after WWI
and moreover, that the person is his father, indicates that he, Santoli, Jr.,
must have had some special intention. Looked at in this light, it would
appear that the book had three objectives. The ﬁrst was to reafﬁrm theconcept of America as a “melting pot.” This was a cultural myth that
arose during the time of massive immigration at the end of the nineteenth-century, but it is still strong in American popular culture and isﬁrmly believed by the descendants of the immigrants at the time. The
second objective was a reconﬁrmation of the “American Dream,” which
represented an even stronger cultural myth. All the people who appear
in the book enjoy American life no matter what their situation, and are
all blessed with work, family and numerous friends. The New York Times
Book Review looked favorably upon this work by introducing it under
the headline “Remade in America”, commenting that “the word ‘education’ rings magically through all their accounts.”37 The third objective
was to reinforce the “Kennedy myth.” Like so many of his contemporaries, including Philip Caputo and Oliver Stone, Santoli was so moved
by John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address that he volunteered for the war
corps rather than the Peace Corps. It is quite apparent from the title ofhis previous book, To Bear Any Burden, that the JFK myth also serves

REPROGRAMMING MEMORIES

57

as a metaphor here. Albert Sr.’s recollections suggest that Santoli, Jr., isnarrating an historical fantasy, where only the space frontier exists andno mention is made of the dark side of JFK’s legacies, such as theVietnam War. The Kennedy myth including the idea that JFK presented in his book, A Nation of Immigrants (1964), seems to have provided
a role model for Santoli, Jr.’s approach to “diversity.” If we deﬁne Al
Santoli as a revisionist whose ideology revolves around the Kennedy
myth, we are able to understand the meaning that racial diversity holds
within his oral histories. That is, the ofﬁcial validation of the Vietnam
War that sprang from political revisionism differs from the conservative
nationalism of the past in that it does not try to deny diversity—it merely uses it.38
AFTERMATH: THE HISTORICIZATION OF THE VIETNAM WAR
In the fall of 1990, the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Central
Command in Saudi Arabia, Gen. Norman H. Schwarzkopf, was engrossed by a television documentary series that had been delivered fromhome. Simultaneously, his superior, the secretary of the Joint Chiefs ofStaff, Gen. Colin Powell and the Commander-in-Chief of all U.S. Forces,
President George Bush, Sr., were also watching the same eleven-hourseries in their ofﬁces in Washington D.C. The program that caught all
their attention was The Civil War by Ken Burns, every installment of
which enjoyed an estimated audience of approximately fourteen million
Americans. What most deeply shocked viewers, including the American
generals on the eve of the Gulf War, was “its deep emphasis on thecasualties of this historical American tragedy.”39 After achieving remarkable success with this documentary, Burns expressed his longstanding fascination with looking at “history from the bottom up” innumerous interviews, repeating his sentiments in such phrases as: “Ibelieve ﬁlm is uniquely equipped to transmit that kind of power. It canbe our Homeric form, and we’ve tried to tell this particular Illiad, ourCivil War, in a Homeric way, not only from the aerial perspective of thegods and kings but from the level of the spear carriers as well.”40
It can be said that this incident not only contained signiﬁcant points
concerning American history and its memory, but simultaneously it hinted at the way the Vietnam War was remembered after 1990. Immediately
after it ended, the Vietnam War was often compared to the Civil War.
While one was clothed in an aura of history and the other was portrayed

58

EIKOH IKUIas an unhonorable and undeclared war, both split the nation and bothwere great tragedies that brought conﬂict to the people. Like the reconstruction years following the Civil War, the aftermath of the Vietnam
War brought with it a period of hardship.41
On the other hand, when talking about the Gulf War, people often referto the “lessons of Vietnam.” President Bush said in his inaugural address,“The ﬁnal lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to besundered by a memory.”42 Indeed, his administration was very consciousof these lessons and made every effort to insure that the Gulf War would
provide a new opportunity for the United States to regain its prestige andthat the resulting victory of the allied army, led by the United States, provided the Vietnam veterans the chance to reclaim their honor. The reason for this is that Powell, Schwarzkopf and the majority of the othergenerals and colonels who took part in the Gulf War were all Vietnam
veterans. Actually, both of Powell and Schwarzkopf reinforce bitter
experiences of their Vietnam tours in their autobiographies.43
But what about the “spear carriers” of the Vietnam War? In order toﬁnd the answer to their dilemma, we must turn once more to the workof Santoli. He was quick to react to this change, and two years after theend of the Gulf War, in 1993, he published a book entitled Leading theWay: How Vietnam Veterans Rebuilt the U.S. Military. In this work hewrites: “I have known the crushing feeling of being among those [soldiers in Vietnam] asked to put their lives on the line without having the
support of our superiors, or the beneﬁt of a coherent policy. The experience created a bond that unites most survivors of the Vietnam War . . .
It inspired a core group of young ofﬁcers and sergeants not to abandon
a military community in shambles in the aftermath of Vietnam.”44 In this
discourse, the Gulf War became symbolically the Vietnam War redone.
Thus, Santoli was able to put the “aftermath of Vietnam” to rest. He
was ﬁnally able to step out from under the long shadow of the war andhis memories no longer had the power to intimidate him. The terrible
memories he had of his personal experiences were reshaped and reprogrammed by the Gulf War. At the same time, his generation began toworry about the gradual erosion of their memories of the war. For instance, Gen. Charles Horner, who is one of the respondents in Leading
the Way, spoke about the way in which memories of the “Nintendo War,”as the Gulf War was named after a computer TV game, would inﬂuence
the future. “I sometimes worry about the generation of leaders who cameinto the service after the Vietnam War. Because they haven’t experi-

REPROGRAMMING MEMORIES

59

enced the type of adversity that bonds my generation of senior leadership.”45
The way in which Ken Burns’s The Civil War expressed the reality
and truth answered the call of people who feared the erosion of memories. Born in the mid-ﬁfties, Burns came of draft age just as the withdrawal of U.S. ground troops was completed and so it could be said that
he belongs to neither the Vietnam generation nor the post-Vietnam
generation, but falls somewhere in between.46 His ﬁlm-making style,which utilizes abundant audio-visual graphics, combined with his interest in history may also be said to be typical of his particular age-group.
He is a man who, although fascinated by the “myth and symbol” of the
Brooklyn Bridge, turned his back on the Hollywood style of movie-making in which present-day actors are used to recreate an actual past. It is
hardly surprising that he should be attracted to a marginal ﬁeld of social
history, while simultaneously reacting against conventional academism.
The result was that when he set out to rescue history from the academy
by saying that contemporary historical studies were “devastating . . .
national memory.”47 His reasoning merely echoed that of the revisionists when they turn their eyes towards the Vietnam War. In an interview
for the The Journal of American History, he said: “Think of Homer,
singing the epic verses of his people—verses that included not only thegods in the pantheon but the ordinary foot soldiers.” According to him,
the history as “our his-story has been murdered by an academic academy,” and he wants to be “a narrative historian or narrative amateur historian—that is to say, I’m interested in telling stories, anecdotes.”48
The cultural inﬂuence of memories of the Vietnam War can today beseen in this kind of representation as well as in its commemoration. The
latter is most clearly illustrated by all the other memorials that have been
erected in the Washington National Mall since the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial—the strangely shaped Korean War Memorial, which resembles a combination of the Wall and the Statue and the WWII Memorial
Project which is chaired by the WWII hero, Senator Bob Dole and cochaired by the Vietnam veteran, Frederic W. Smith, president and CEO
of FedEx Co.49 These allow us a glimpse of the national psyche towards
the old wars after they were affected by the memories of the Vietnam
War. That is to say, it shows that reprogramming memories is a retroactive effort to recast the national memory and popular imagination to thehistory. But, it sometimes yield ironic results. James Russell, a critic of
The New York Times, pointed out that the rush of constructing memorials

60

EIKOH IKUIin the Mall has been “transforming the Nation’s capital into a kind of
necropolis of special pleading.”50 The Vietnam War, the longest war in
American history, has still cast the long shadow over the nation’s history.
NOTES
1Kaori Chino, “Senso to Shokuminchi” (War and Colonies), Akira Kurihara, et. al.,eds. Ekkyo suru chi Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Univ. of Tokyo Press, 2000), 121–124.
2
Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato (New York: Laurel Books, 1978), 236–237.
3John R. Gillis, Introduction to Gillis ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National
Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994), 3.
4
Today, internet websites provide a vast storage area for popular memory and they
are now beginning to overtake ﬁlms or popular novels in inﬂuence. However, most ofthem display the American (un)consciousness by stating that the war ended in 1973. For
example, see the “Remembrance” section of Vietnam Veterans Homepage, an ofﬁcial
website of the Vietnamese Memorial Association (http://www.vietvet.org/remembrance.htm).
5Michael Foucault, “Film and Popular Memory,” Sylvere Lotringer ed., Foucault
Live (Interviews, 1966–84), trans. Martin Jordin (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 130.
6
Ibid., 123.
7
Ibid.
8
In another essay, Foucault described the memories that stood in opposition to reprogrammed memories as being “counter memory”—“a transformation of history into a
totally different form of time,” that it “must record the singularity of events outside ofany monotonous ﬁnality,” “it must seek them in the most unpromising places, in what
we tend to feel is without history—in sentiments, love, instincts.” Michael Foucault,“Nietzche, Geneology, History,” in his Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected
Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press,
1977), 160, 139.
9
The Reagan quotation is from James William Gibson, The Perfect of War: Technowar in Vietnam (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), 5; George Bush, Inaugural
Address, 348.
10
George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam,
1950–1975 (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1979), 237.
11
Joseph C. Harsh, quoted in the above.
12
Jan C. Scruggs and Joel Swerdlow, To Heal A Nation: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (New York: Harper, 1985, 1992), 7.
13
Although The Deer Hunter was a Oscar-winning ﬁlm in the United States, it was
severely criticized by the East-European judges of the Berlin Film Festival who camefrom socialist countries including the Soviet Union, Hungary and Cuba, for the prejudice it displayed against the Vietnamese people and this fact was received coverage evenin Japan. See Gilbert Adair, Hollywood’s Vietnam: From The Green Berets to Full Metal
Jacket (London: Heinemann, 1989), 88; Leonard Quart, “The Deer Hunter: The Superman in Vietnam,” Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, eds., From Hanoi To Hollywood:
The Vietnam War in American Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1990),
165–166.

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61

14John Hellmann, “Vietnam and the Hollywood Genre Film: Inversions of American
Mythology in The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now,” Michael Anderberg, ed.,Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press,
1991), 78–79.
15
Naoki Sakai, “Kyokan no kyodotai to hinin sareta Teikokushugiteki-Kokuminshugi”(The Community of Sympathy and the Negation of the Imperialistic Nationalism)
Gendai Shiso, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Jan., 1991), 120–123.
16
Ibid., 124–125.
17
For the ﬁlm technique of Platoon, see Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, “America’s
Vietnam War Films: Marching toward Denial,” Dittmar and Michaud, eds., From Hanoi
To Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film, 9.
18
Herring, op. cit., i.
19
For the general observation over the neo-conservatism, see John Patrick Diggins,“The Changing Role of the Intellectuals in American History,” The Changing Role ofthe Intellectuals in the U.S.A. (Sapporo Cool Seminar, Hokkaido Univ., 1986), 29–33.
For the recent situation of the arguments about the Vietnam War by the neo-conservatives, see John Norton Moore, ed., The Vietnam Debate: A Fresh Look At the Arguments(New York: Univ. Press of America, 1990).
20
See “Department of Defense Interview with James Webb, part 3” in the WWW
homepage of Webb (http://www.jameswebb.com on the date of Mar. 15, 2001).
21
Christian Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam(Chapel Hill, NC: The Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1993), 319–321.
22
George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1990), xii–xiii.
23
James S. Olson, The Vietnam War: Handbook of the Literature and Research(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 29.
24
Al Santoli, Everything We had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Thirty-Three
American Soldiers Who Fought It, (New York: Random House, 1981), xvi.
25
Mark Baker, Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Soldiers Who Fought There(New York: Berkeley Books, 1981, 1983), xii.
26
Myers, op. cit., 74–76.
27
Wallace Terry, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (NewYork: Random House, 1984); Keith Walker, A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of 26
American Women Served in Vietnam (Novado, Calif.: Presido Press, 1985); Kathryn
Marshall, In the Combat Zone : An Oral History of American Women in Vietnam, 1966–
1975 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987); Dan Freedman and Jacqueline Rhoads, Nurses inVietnam: The Forgotten Veterans (Austin, Tex.: Texas Monthly Press, 1987); Harry
Maurer, Strange Ground: Americans in Vietnam, 1945–1975, An Oral History (NewYork: Henry Holt, 1987); James Wilson, Landing Zone: Southern Veterans Remember
Vietnam (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1990); Otto J. Lehrack, No Shining Arms:
The Marines at War in Vietnam (Lawrence, KS: Univ. Press of Kansas, 1992); James
W. Tollefson , The Strength Not to Fight : Conscientious Objectors of the Vietnam War- In Their Own Words (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993).
28
Diane Carlson Evans, quoted in Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam
War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of
California Press, 1997), 68.
29
Pierre Nora ed., Les lieux de la memoire, vol. 1 (Paris: La Republique, 1984), xix.
30
Al Santoli, To Bear Any Burden: The Vietnam War and Its Aftermath in the Wordsof Americans and Southeast Asians (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press, 1985,
1999), xxiii.

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EIKOH IKUI

31
George C. Herring, “Vietnam Remembered,” Journal of American History, Vol. 73,
No.1 (June, 1986), 153, 161.
32
Monique T. D. Tru’o’ng, “Vietnamese American Literature,” King-Kok Cheung,
An Interethnic Companion To Asian American Literature (New York: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1887), 224–228.
33
Akio Imai, “Doi Moi ka no Vietnam niokeru ‘Senso no Kioku” (Memory of the War
in Vietnam Under the Doi Moi Policy), Quadrante, No. 2 (Mar., 2000), 62.
34
Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Woman’s Journey from
War to Peace (London: Pan Books, 1989); Paul James Rutledge, The Vietnamese Experience In America (Bloomington, ID: Indiana Univ. Press, 1992); Steven DeBois’sChildren of the Enemy: Oral Histories of Vietnamese Americans and Their Mothers(Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1995); Thomas A. Bass, Vietnamerica: The War
Comes Home (NY: Soho Press, 1996).
35
Al Santoli, New Americans, An Oral History: Immigrants and Refugees in the U.S.
Today (New York: Viking, 1989).
36
Albert Santoli, Sr., “The Apollo,” ibid., 293–304.
37
Andrei Codresci, “Remade in America,” The New York Times Book Review, Apr.
2, 1989, 32.
38
For the relationship between the Vietnam war and the Kennedy myth, see John
Hellmann, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: Columbia Univ.
Press, 1986); Idem., “Rambo’s Vietnam and Kennedy’s New Frontier,” Anderberg,
op.cit., 140–152; J. Justin Gustaines, American Rhetoric and the Vietnam War (Westport, CT: Prager, 1993).
39
Gabor S. Boritt, “Lincoln and Gettysburg: The Hero and the Heroic Place,” Robert
Brent Toplin, ed., Ken Burns’s The Civil War: Historians Respond (New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1996), 84.
40
Bernard A, Weisberger, “The Great Arrogance of the Present Is to Forget theIntelligence of the Past: An Interview with Ken Burns,” American Heritage, Vol. 41,
No. 6 (Sep.-Oct., 1990), 99.
41David W. Levy, The Debate Over Vietnam (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 1991), 51–54, 176–177.
42
Bush, op. cit., 348.
43
H. Norman Schwartzkopf and Peter Petre, It Doesn’t Take A Hero (New York:
Bantam, 1992, 1993), 248–252; Colin L. Powell and Joseph E. Persico, My American
Journey (New York: Ballantine, 1995, 1996), 126–145. For the inﬂuences of theVietnam War on the military leaders in the Gulf War, see James Kitﬁeld, Prodigal
Soldiers: How the Generation of Vietnam Revolutionized the American Style of War(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
44
Al Santoli, Leading the Way: How Vietnam Veterans Rebuilt the U.S. Military, An
Oral History (New York: Ballantine, 1993), xv.
45
Ibid., 352.
46
For the biographical data of Ken Burns and his professional career, see Weisberger,“The Great Arrogance of the Present Is to Forget the Intelligence of the Past:” Gary
Edgerton, “Ken Burns’s American-Style, Authorship and Cultural Memory,” Journalof Popular Film and Television, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Feb., 1993).
47
David Thelen, “The Movie Maker as Historian: Conversation with Ken Burns,” The
Journal of American History, Vol. 81, No. 3 (Dec., 1994), 1032, 1035.
48
Ken Burns, “Four O’Clock in the Morning Courage,” Ken Burn’s The Civil War:Historians Respond (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 161.

REPROGRAMMING MEMORIES

63

49
For the basic information of the WW II Memorial, see its ofﬁcial website (http://
www.wwiimemorial.com/ on the date of Mar.15, 2001).
50
James S. Russell, “Art and Politics Vie In a Battle to Honor A Monumental War,”The New York Times, Apr. 4, 1999, G1.