Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War Read Online Free Page B

mufti rather than military gear. Male and female, they were mostly young, lean, pleasant, and fit, the older ones among them resembling suburban American fathers on vacation, pleasantly padded. Their forebears bombed this country, and the Plain of Jars in particular, with apocalyptic force. The enlisted man I mentioned this to did not want to talk about this history, while the clean-cut Air Force Academy graduate knew only some vague details. I wonder if they noticed the poster in the airport terminal, which advertised bracelets for peace, small things made from the metal of munitions. Is there anything more asymmetrical than air war waged against those without an air force, or a people forced to make a living by selling the fragments of bombs to those who bombed them?
    A memory industry built on war might, in general, be called ironic, although greed or survival would be the more important elements. On Phonsavan’s single street, for example, there was a bar named Craters where the airmen gathered for a drink. The bar was not unique in turning the memory of massive carpet-bombing into the name for a site of rest and relaxation. This was small-scale memory work, pitching the past to those passing through, the way street vendors sold pirated copies of English-language classics about the war and these countries to tourists who wanted some education with their entertainment. At least the entrepreneurs in Saigon had been wittier and postmodern, naming their raucous, crowded, sweaty, and admittedly fun bars Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness, which the police occasionally raided to show that they were cracking down on what the government called the “social evils” of prostitution and drug use (I haunted these bars enough to witness each one being shut down by the police, who, clad in chartreuse green, win my award for the ugliest uniforms in the world). Turning horror into entertainment is a signature feature of the American industry of memory, as can be seen and heard in the “me so horny” line of dialogue from Stanley Kubrick’s jagged masterpiece Full Metal Jacket . This line inspired 2 Live Crew’s lewd, memorable rap smash “Me So Horny,” prosecuted for obscenity by Florida authorities, the irony of ironies, given how no one was prosecuted for obscenity for anything that happened during the war. Perhaps inspired by these examples, Southeast Asians have done their best to apply principles of capitalist exploitation to even the most dreadful past.
    Some of the most memorable and remarked upon ways that these Southeast Asians mine the past are the tunnels and caves from where the war was fought or where civilians sought refuge from the bombing. As Mbembe says of the wars waged by necropolitical regimes, “the battlegrounds are not located solely at the surface of the earth. The underground as well as the airspace are transformed into conflict zones.” 7 From the perspective of the emperors of the air, the subterranean is the retreat of the inhuman, where American soldiers called “tunnel rats” hunted for the human rats who lived in the tunnels, waiting to pop up from their spider holes to ambush American troops. But even the Americans grudgingly acknowledged that what they found were veritable cities, an underworld that was an uncanny reflection of the American camps above them, replete with kitchens, hospitals, bunkrooms, granaries, and the like. Perhaps these tunnels or others before them in the history of war influenced the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari when they came up with their notion of the “rhizome” to describe resistant social structures that were horizontal and root-like versus the arboreal, top-down, vertical structures of authority. War machines dislike tunnels, which literally undermine them, taking away their advantages and their pretense to humanity. The tunnel encounter, for the tunnel rat, inverts what Levinas asks for in seeing the other’s face. Instead of seeking conversation, an