Vietgone @ Capital Stage

During the Fall of Saigon refugee immigration, the primary points of entry were those that Tong and others reference in the play: 

First, refugees were sent to Guam, a United States territory, from where US military personnel assigned refugees to camps on the mainland: Camp Pendleton (Southern CA), Fort Chaffee (Arkansas), Eglin Air Force Base (Florida), and Fort Indiantown (Pennsylvania). From there, the US government attempted to resettle refugees throughout the country.

As they resettled, many new Vietnamese-Americans found their way to California in part because the climate was rumored to be good and closer to home than the cold winters of the East and Midwest. Some of the largest communities of Vietnamese refugees grew up in Orange County and around San Jose/Silicon Valley.

The airport in San Diego was built in 1928, and flying commercial jets by 1960. San Jose's airport was built in 1949, but by 1968 had one million passengers travelling through it annually. 

In this essay the writer, Soya Jung, looks at “gook” as a racist tool of imperialism.

What struck me...was the breadth and depth of the word’s usage as a way to dehumanize native inhabitants of lands where the United States was the foreign colonizing force. It shows how Asia is less of a fixed, bounded area on a map, and more of a region (or an imagined set of regions) defined by U.S. military aggression. The word “gook” literally stretches from continent to continent to span the globe, long before the current-day, more commonly known reference to Asians in Korea and Vietnam. 

The word “gook” has not only a racial present, but a racial past. It was created as a tool of American war and conquest – a tool used to ensure the dehumanization of subject peoples, so that they could be killed and disappeared and stolen from with impunity. The word is, then, a symbol of racism and imperialism that has touched not only Asia, but also Latin America and the Caribbean, and by way of the slave trade, Africa. It has also extended, by way of war, to Arabs in Europe.

Jung heavily references another scholar’s investigation of the term, who cites its source as far back as the turn of the 19th century, during the Spanish-American War.

Irving Lewis Allen, in The Language of Ethnic Conflict, refers to goo-goo as "originally a Filipino in the Spanish- American War, 1899-1902" and some scholars of American English suggest that gook itself found usage during the same conflict. If so, gook developed among troops who were probably connecting contempt for natives with contempt for "promiscuous" women and for poor people generally. An 1893 citation from Slang and Its Analogues finds gooks to be "tarts" and particularly camp-following prostitutes or "barrack hacks" catering to the army. A 1914 source similarly defines a gook as "a tramp, low."

By the 1920s, gooks were French- and Creole-speaking black Haitians and Spanish-speaking Nicaraguans. Marines, as we have seen, made the Haitians into gooks. They also, after the 1926 invasion of Nicaragua, were responsible for so naming "natives" there. Into the 1930s in Costa Rica, goo-goo described the citizenry, at least to Americans. Such a term, in the Philippines or Latin America, could hardly have failed to conjure up an image of an infantilized subject population.

In this timeline, events from the Vietnamese perspective are in bold, events from the United States perspective are in plain text, and events concerning both perspectives are italicized.

August 19, 1945 Viet Minh reclaim Vietnam from Japanese troops

September 2, 1945 Ho Chi Minh declares Vietnam a free and independent country

July 1946 Ho Chi Minh rejects a French treaty which would give Vietnam limited self-government. War begins between the Viet Minh and French forces in Vietnam

February 1950 The Viet Minh recieve financial and military support from the Soviet Union

June 1950 The US identifies the Viet Minh as a communist threat and starts sending money, troops, and supplies/weapons to aid the French war effort in Vietnam

May 7, 1954 The Viet Minh defeat the French forces at the battle of Dien Bien Phu ending the French colonial rule of Vietnam

June 1, 1954 The Saigon Military Mission, a covert mission by the USA to engage in psycological warfare with Viet Minh forces in Vietnam, is initiated. This marks the begining of USA involvement in the Vietnam War

July 21, 1954 The Geneva Accords, which split Vietnam at the 17th parallel, are signed. Notably, South Vietnam did not sign the Geneva Accords. These accords split Vietnam into two zones: North Vietnam (which was governed by the Viet Minh and Ho Chi Minh) and South Vietnam (which is governed by the US-backed Ngo Dinh Diem). Part of the agreement states that in 1956, free elections will be held to reunify Vietnam (elections that were canceled by Ngo Dinh Diem who cited the fact that South Vietnam did not sign the Accords and therefore was not bound to uphold them).  

Throughout 1959 A specialized North Vietnamese Army (NVA) unit, known as Group 559, creates a supply trail from North Vietnam through parts of Cambodia into South Vietnam.This is known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. 

September 10, 1960 Le Duan replaces Ho Chi Minh as First Secretary of the Communist Party in Hanoi

November 8, 1960 JFK is elected President of the USA

December 20, 1960 The National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (AKA the Viet Cong) is founded in South Vietnam

December 11, 1961 American helicopters and troops arrive in South Vietnam

January 12, 1962 Operation Ranchhand, in which the USA dropped an enormous ammount of Agent Orange (a defoliant known to cause numerous health issues) on the Vietnamese countryside in an attempt to starve and uncover the Viet Cong bases, begins

February 1962 President Diem survives a bombing of the presidential palace in South Vietnam as Diem’s extreme favoritism toward South Vietnam’s Catholic minority alienates him from most of the South Vietnamese population, including Vietnamese Buddhists

May 1963 In a major incident of what becomes known as the “Buddhist Crisis,” the government of Ngo Dinh Diem opens fire on a crowd of Buddhist protestors in the central Vietnam city of Hue. Eight people, including children, are killed.

June 1963 A 73-year-old monk immolates himself while sitting at a major city intersection in protest, leading other Buddhists to follow suit in coming weeks

November 2, 1963 South Vietnam President Diem and his brother are murdered in a coup organized by other South Vietnamese generals and tacitly supported by the US

November 22, 1963 JFK is assasinated and Lyndon Baines Johnson is sworn in as President of the US

August 2, 1964 After an alleged attack by the North Vietnamese on two US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, the USA passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which allows for a massive increase of US involvement in Vietnam

February 13, 1965 LBJ authorizes Operation Rolling Thunder (a bombing offensive in North Vietnam which sought to discourage North Vietnamese aid to the Viet Cong)

November 14, 1965 The Battle of Ia Drang is fought. The guerilla tactics used by the North Vietnamese in this battle would set the course of the rest of the war

April 15 - Oct. 21, 1967 Protests against US involvement in the Vietnam War begin to ramp up in the USA

January 30, 1968 The North Vietnamese army and Viet Cong launch a surprise attack on the South Vietnamese and US forces during the Vietnamese New Year (known as the Tet Offensive)

February 1968 In the ancient imperial capital of Hue, communist forces execute 2,800 people (mostly South Vietnamese)

March 16, 1968 US forces kill 500 civillians in and around the village of My Lai 

November 8, 1968 Nixon is elected at US President on a platform of ending the Vietnam War

May 4, 1969 Four students are killed at an anti-Vietnam War protest on the Kent State campus

Feb 8 - Mar 25, 1971 The South Vietnamese launch operation Lam Son 719 against North Vietnamese forces in Laos, which ends in their hasty retreat and defeat

March 30 - Oct. 22, 1972 The Easter Offensive invasion by North Vietnamese forces is successfully repelled by South Vietnamese

January 27, 1973 Cease-fire agreement is reached between U.S. and North Vietnam, US POWs begin to return home

March 29, 1973 Last American troops leave South Vietnam

August 9, 1974 Nixon resigns

Photos taken at Fort Chaffee between 1970 and 1980

Footage from April 30th, 1975 depicting the fall of Saigon. The footage shows ARVN and American forces trying to defend the Newport Bridge as well as the death, destruction, and chaos taking place in Saigon as the North Vietnamese forces closed in.

Canadian Broadcast Company news report on the fall of Saigon.

News footage of the fall of Saigon and the first 15 days of communist rule in South Vietnam. Content warning: this video contains images of wounded and dead soldiers/civilians.

The following videos are clips of documentary footage of ARVN soldiers in their daily military life.

US Army 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) 1st Special Forces base in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam. ARVN Special Forces trainees. An ARVN Special Forces instructor demonstrates hand to hand combat positions and maneuvers in a field. Trainees follow instructions and practice. Trainees observe as two students practice hand to hand combat maneuvers. The instructor and students demonstrate hand to hand combat. Trainees stand in a circle with arms spread out. The instructor guides and supervises. He removes his helmet and demonstrates. Trainees practice maneuvers lying on their backs on the ground. Location: Vietnam. Date: June 23, 1970.

ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) Special Forces Training Center in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam. Trainees march along side of the highway. Trainees in fatigues and camouflage hats march with guns. Two wheelers pass by on the road. Trainees march through a field towards the training area. Trees on either side of the path. The trainees rest in the shade of a tree. Location: Vietnam. Date: June 23, 1970.

ARVN Airborne repel a Vietcong Attack, Saigon, South Vietnam (1968). Content warning: this video contains images of wounded and dead soldiers/civilians.

ARVN Ranger Training By American Ranger Advisory Team 77 in 1964

In this first-hand account, Army Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) solider, Private 1st Class Bui Manh Cuong describes the many hardships that faced ARVN soliders.

Country Joe's Anti Vietnam War Song Woodstock

This NY Times opinion piece, The Four Stages of the Antiwar Movement, gives a clear, first-person perspective of what the movement’s perspectives, goals, and practices were.

The Vietnam antiwar movement, famous for its sound and fury, deserves credit for more. We were the first mass movement against a war in American history and one of its great moral crusades, yet most Americans recall only enormous protests and social chaos.

An opinion piece, also writen by Thanh Tan (Second Wave podcaster), covering similar ground to the “Good Guys, Bad Guys” episode of the podcast - her dad’s impressions of the Ken Burns Vietnam War documentary.

Read Nguyen’s NY Times pieces here

Viet Thanh is a novelist and a regular contributor to the New York Times Opinions section where his commentary on Vietnamese-American culture is focused primarily on the arts. In particular, check out his recent piece “Why We Struggle to Say ‘I Love You’”. It’s a poignant reflection on something that we see in a great juxtaposition in Vietgone between the imagined and “American-ed” interactions between Quang and Tong, and the more reserved interaction between the playwright and Quang at the end of the show.