(Please don’t repost or edit my work. Reblogs are always appreciated. Support my work here: https://www.patreon.com/joshualuna)
CW: Anti-Asian racism, war
When I was a teen, I worked as a summer hire filing Vietnam War records. I couldn't articulate it then, but as a Filipino America, working there deeply affected me.
Imagery of the Vietnam War is so one-sided that many have been desensitized to the trauma and suffering of Vietnamese people—even Asian Americans ourselves. By that age I had already long been taught to identify as an un-hypenated American, and to root for Rambo and other violent white saviors. So that's why, when an older white co-worker—who was a Vietnam War vet—suggested my Asian presence was triggering to him, I internalized it by learning to walk on egg shells around him and make myself smaller. It didn't matter that I was Filipino. To him, I was just another g**k.
The US now recognizes the suffering of the 58k soldiers who died and vets who returned with ailments and PTSD—so common that the term “Nam flashback” is ubiquitous—but that empathy hasn't extended towards the innocent Southeast Asian lives that were also affected, both during the war and after.
The US dropped more bombs on Vietnam than it did in all of WW2, but didn't stop there—it also dropped 2 million+ tons of ordnance on Laos for 9 straight years (making Laos the most bombed country per capita in history) and 2.7 million in Cambodia as part of its "Secret War." Two-thirds of Vietnam's 3 million+ deaths were civilians. If that wasn't enough, they're still dying today. Since the war ended, nearly 40k have died from unexploded bombs and landmines left behind, and 67K more have been blinded or maimed—together that's double the number of US war deaths.
While PTSD is a serious issue, "Nam flashback" suggests that the pain of war for American vets lives in the mind and that the physical threat is buried in the past. But for Vietnamese, Lao, and Khmer victims of America's relentless bombing, the threat remains buried in the ground they live on. International law requires the US to clean up unexploded ordnance in Southeast Asia, but the US is skirting responsibility. As a result, cleanup is estimated to take hundreds of years at the current rate. (It's worth noting the US war in Afghanistan is creating similar conditions as we speak.) Similarly, the US largely ignores the 20-30k Amerasians fathered and abandoned by US soldiers in Vietnam—legacies of US sexual plunder—and the enduring impact of Agent Orange, which is so destructive it altered the DNA of Vietnamese survivors and gave their children debilitating deformities.
It's not hard to understand why Filipinx have an affinity for our SEA neighbors—we also experienced war and genocide at the hands of the US in 1899, which is sometimes called "The First Vietnam" because it set a precedent for US intervention/exploitation in the Southeast Asian region. But on a personal level, I saw the inherited legacies of war in Southeast Asian refugees—whose Asian American kids were my high school classmates. Their existence was all but criminalized, pushing them towards teen pregnancies and gangs, and putting them on the school to prison to deportation pipeline.
So in discussing the Vietnam War, it's not enough to talk about US vets. We must also recognize the PTSD and continued terror that Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians victims experience, and acknowledge America's racist institutional animosity towards Southeast Asians (abroad and in the US) that persists today.
Note: All of the information and stats talked about here are from publicly available sources. Also, please be respectful to Vietnamese people and remember to call the war by its full name ("Vietnam War") and not shorthand it as "Vietnam."
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