[āLifton identifies two distinct forms of guilt: static and animating. Static guilt traps the individual in a closed world in which they cannot fully confront their past actions yet continuously anticipate punishment, while animating guilt, propelled by the āanxiety of responsibility', emanates from āa formative dissatisfaction with the self and the world' that makes it possible to criticise past actions and so imagine a life beyond them. For Lifton, animating guilt among veterans further allowed them to situate their psychological sufferings in a broader social context: āChanges in the self required an altered relationship to the external world.' Antiwar veterans were not seeking to displace their feelings of guilt from inside to outside as a form of exculpation, but transforming their guilt involved,' confronting the responsibility of society as a whole, and of its leaders in particular, for the killing and the dying'. He credits the rap group participants with perceiving that politics could not be separated from' personal growth and well-being': Indeed for antiwar veterans a believable critique of society lived out in some form of political protest, became crucial to psychological health.
In the opening pages of Home from the War Lifton notes that when he began working on the project,' despite all of the American writing on Vietnam, very little was understood about what either GIS or Vietnamese really experienced there'. His book is dedicated to twenty-four people (presumably rap group participants), plus' Hoang', who is described as a child survivor of My Lai, but though Home from the War includes disturbing self-reflective testimonies from GIS about their role in the My Lai massacre, Vietnamese perspectives remain largely absent from its pages.
So vast is the psychiatric and historical literature on PTSD and US veterans of the American war in Vietnam that attempting to search library or academic journal databases for English-language materials that discuss the mental impact of the war on Vietnamese people is difficult. Among the huge volume of publications on US veterans, it is possible to find studies by psychiatrists based in the US and Australia that discuss PTSD in Viet- namese refugee communities (focusing on the trauma of fleeing and relocating). One can also find a 2012 paper on the long-term health impact of the war on people in northern Vietnam that concluded that both veterans and civilians may have been shielded from trauma by āmoral certainty (that the war was justified), common purpose (fighting for independence), and victorious outcome', which ācan lend resilience that heals and buffers from physical and psychological ills in the long run'. Though the latter paper acknowledges differences in context between the US and northern Vietnam, it does not frame the differences of experience in terms of culturally distinct vocabularies and practices for working through extreme experiences. It also fails to consider how much more devastating the war was for people in Vietnam, affecting the entire population rather than a small subsection of it; their home was the site of the war.
Anthropologist Heonik Kwon takes the 'simple fact' that however difficult and damaging the war was for some US veterans, it was self-evidently more violent and devastating for people in Vietnam where everything and everybody was impacted, as his starting point for asking if Vietnam therefore saw a similar surge of interest in the psychic impact of the war in its aftermath. After the unification of Vietnam following victory over the US in 1975, official commemorations encouraged by the socialist political authorities focused on celebrating revolutionary heroism. Memorials and cemeteries dedicated to revolutionary martyrs proliferated but the state rhetoric emphasised the bright and prosperous future over the dark and violent past. Public expressions of grief and sadness were discouraged and the lines demarcating mournable from unmournable deaths were sharply drawn. Kwon identifies a shift that came about as a result of liberalisation in the 1990s, when people living in rural communities in central Vietnam began to rebuild traditional ancestral temples and domestic shrines where they practiced their own commemorative rituals that related to war deaths in a manner that departed from the state-sanctioned image of heroic sacrifice.
At the same historical moment that humanitarian PTSD programmes were proliferating globally, residents of My Lai spoke of their experiences of violent conflict in a very different register. They described living alongside āgrievous ghosts', āinvisible neighbours' and āthe spirits of the dead in pain'. They described hearing lamentations coming from the site of the killings. They reported seeing old women ghosts sucking the limbs of ghostly children as if to soothe them and young women ghosts carrying the limp bodies of small children in their arms. People killed at My Lai did not receive proper burials but were thrown into mass graves without funeral attire. Without coffins, their bodies became entangled and unidentifiable, making funeral rites impossible and severing genealogical lineages. Villagers in My Lai performed rituals and gave offerings to these ghosts, whose existence they explained through the concept of āgrievous deathā or āunjust deathā [chet oan]. The dead continued to suffer their traumatic experiences, ācaptivated by the memory of injustice', and the living had an obligation to intervene to help free them from their incarceration in an eternal present of historical pain.
Kwon claims that understandings of commemoration and grieving in My Lai evince a āculturally specific conception of human rights, the right of the dead to be liberated from the violent history of death'. This process of liberation that sets the dead soul free from repeating pain is called ādisentangling the grievance' [giai oan]. The process of working through the violent past does not take the form of individualised therapy in this context but of a collective ritual practice; traumatic memory is not located in the individual brains of the living but in the ghosts of the dead generations who continue to exist as part of the social world. Kwon is clear that this relationship to the traumatic past should not be understood as a metaphor, nor can it be translated into the medicalised register of PTSD:
In this milieu of interaction with the past, the apparitions in My Lai are more than history's ruins or uncanny traces. Rather, these ghosts are vital historical witnesses, testifying to the war's unjust destruction of human life, with broken lives but unbreakable spirits. The sufferings endured by My Lai's ghosts are not the same as those we gloss over as traumatic memory. However, we can imagine that their collective existence is a reflection of the historical trauma this community as a whole suffered.
While the state favoured a triumphant celebration of revolutionary victors that emphasised the future over the past, the persistent presence of ghosts in My Lai suggests that moving away too swiftly from the experience of historic injustice and the horrors of violence, even when the enemy had been defeated, caused wounds to fester.ā]
hannah proctor, from burn out: the emotional experience of political defeat, 2024
