Abstract
Throughout the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, American cultural representations of war were highly militarized. When war was depicted in popular culture, state-sanctioned armed forces were the central actors. However, toward the end of the Vietnam War, two new cultural paradigms emerged, and each of them de-centers the role played by the military. Across the broader American society, paramilitary culture began to proliferate. In this paradigm, war is portrayed as distinct-from-but-analogous-to the conventional wars fought by the military. It features a hyper-masculine male who uses extreme violence against his enemies and the perceived enemies of society, and this warrior metes out his vigilante justice in mundane civilian settings. My argument is that at the same time paramilitary culture was surfacing, another paradigm was emerging within the Vietnamese-American community, a paradigm I call epimilitary culture. In this cultural form, the warrior is almost entirely absent, and while war remains central, combat violence is radically deemphasized. In fact, the idea of war itself is expanded to include not just the armed forces, but all of the additional aspects and consequences of armed conflict (e.g., both the resulting political, economic, environmental, and humanitarian crises, and the more mundane aspects of civilian life during wartime).
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Notes
- 1.
Other potential sources of epimilitary culture beyond that of the Vietnamese-American are surely likely but remain beyond the scope of this particular chapter.
- 2.
See “Cultural Trauma, Collective Memory and the Vietnam War” for a detailed examination of how the war gave rise to cultural trauma in both the Vietnamese-American community and the broader American society (Eyerman et al., 2017).
- 3.
In The Bourne Legacy (2012), Jeremy Renner plays Aaron Cross, the protagonist of this particular Bourne installment.
- 4.
Note that other chapters in this volume describe how paramilitary culture has burgeoned outside the USA.
- 5.
For an exploration of divergent theories of cultural trauma, see “Theories of Cultural Trauma” (Madigan, 2020).
- 6.
The US military had been actively involved in Vietnam since the 1940s, when the country was still considered a colonial possession of France that was being occupied by the Japanese during World War II. After the Japanese left at the end of that war and Ho Chi Minh rallied the Vietnamese under the banner of communism, the USA fought against the Vietnamese communists, first through the direct funding of the French war effort, then through the active support of the newly formed Republic of Vietnam (i.e., “South Vietnam”). Finally, in 1965, the USA committed large numbers of ground troops to South Vietnam with numbers peaking at around 540,000 in 1969 before eventually withdrawing in early 1973.
- 7.
Exceptions to the new warrior’s being male include Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in the Alien films, Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor in the Terminator films, Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider video games and films (played by Angelina Jolie in 2001 and 2003 and Alicia Vikander in 2018), and Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa in the Mad Max: Fury Road film. It is notable that in recent decades, the percentage of women who fit the new warrior ideal seems to have increased in paramilitary culture, but through the second decade of the twenty-first century, the depictions continue to be overwhelmingly male.
- 8.
Kim Thúy fled Vietnam by boat in 1978 at the age of ten and settled as a refugee in Canada, so her work is “Vietnamese-American” in a broader sense that encompasses all of North America. Regardless, her novel Ru falls squarely into the epimilitary genre I describe, here.
- 9.
In order to find works by Vietnamese-Americans that center the military, one must usually turn toward other genres, such as histories or the memoirs of the military leadership of South Vietnam, such as Nguyen Cao Ky’s How We Lost the Vietnam War (1978), Tran Van Don’s Our Endless War: Inside Vietnam (1978), or Tran Van Naut’s An Loc: Unfinished War (2009).
- 10.
While many individual Vietnamese-American essays, short stories, and poems make no obvious reference to the Vietnam War, book-length collections will often include at least a few pieces that do.
- 11.
Viet Kieu is the term used by the Vietnamese to designate the “overseas Vietnamese,” that is, the Vietnamese who fled Vietnam after the end of the war and who now live abroad.
- 12.
Interestingly, far more graphic than the occasional attenuated violence doled out by the central characters of Vietnamese-American literature is that which this literature portrays the Americans wreaking upon the natural environment during the Vietnam War. As just one example: “The massive trees along the side of the road were devoid of leaves, killed by defoliants dropped from American planes. Twisting upward, their dried branches silhouetted against the sky looked like bones from some prehistoric animal. Here and there a few charred, lifeless trunks still stood, oddly and grotesquely, between bomb craters scattered at random over the flat fields. Each cavity had the same circumference and gave the appearance of having been meticulously bored into the ground by patient hands. The winds carried down the distressed cries of wild birds as they circled over the forest for prey” (Nguyen, 1994: 109).
- 13.
Occasionally, the antagonists are in the end eliminated from society through imprisonment, but only after they have suffered bodily violence at the hands of the protagonist.
- 14.
It is beyond the scope of this project to speculate on whether these cultural forms might have existed in the past, either in the USA or elsewhere.
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Madigan, T. (2021). Epimilitary Culture: Vietnamese-American Literature and the Alternative to Paramilitary Culture. In: West, B., Crosbie, T. (eds) Militarization and the Global Rise of Paramilitary Culture . Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5588-3_9
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