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Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory

By Jerry Lembcke (reviewer)

Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory
Scott Laderman
(Duke University Press, 2009)

"Vietnam is more than a war" has become a popular expression with American historians and anthropologists eager to authenticate their sensitivity to the integrity and complexity of Vietnamese culture. As it turns out, however, the phrase is a marketing slogan ginned-up by the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT) for the consumption of American travelers who might otherwise be squeamish about dropping dollars where they or their fathers had dropped bombs.

Such are the nuggets turned up by author Scott Laderman in his search for the ways that institutions mediate the making of peoples' memories of the past. Treating travel guides as an institution that does that, arbitrating the truth of travel experience even before it has begun. He goes on to tell us that English language guide books produced by VNAT exclude the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City from mention while the Vietnamese editions include it. It's a difference, he suggests, that occludes American memory about the war for Vietnamese national unity that continues to be validated for them as the most important theme in their history.

Laderman's primary interest is in American social memory. His use of guide books such as Lonely Planet and Fodor's Exploring Vietnam as primary documents is a clever approach to that topic, one yielding a first-rate example of what good public history looks like. Laderman's background in American Studies gives him a solid grasp of cultural studies and his writing an interdisciplinary flare and stylistic shading that will invite readers from many academic fields and levels, the book-buying public, and thoughtful travelers.

The social construction of memory is Laderman's object of study and his narrative is woven with threads from the history of the American war in Vietnam and the history of tour books about Vietnam. For the first, he creates a case study of Hue, the city where the National Liberation Front and army of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (aka, the Viet Cong and North Vietnam) waged a fight against the client US government in Saigon and US troops in 1968. Known as the Tet Offensive, the fight for Hue destroyed much of the city and cost all sides many dead and wounded. But the controversies over who did what to whom, argues Laderman, are elided by the English-language tour books that rewrite the story as a massacre perpetrated by communists on Vietnamese civilians. There is "no credible evidentiary basis for this version of events" (p. 89), he says. Meanwhile, the same books leave out the devastating effect of US bombing on the city and the fact that assassination teams mounted by the Saigon government roamed the city killing members of the opposition in the closing days of the fight.

Laderman's reviews of the ways the war and the period of doi moi are represented are well developed but I learned the most from his history of Vietnam tour books. Laderman begins that study with the French colonial period when guidebooks portrayed colonialism as an intervention by benevolent foreigners that brought modernity and peace to a region torn by conflict. Moving to the post-World War II years when the United States began to express its own interests in Vietnam, he cites Olson's Orient Guide (1962) as an example that treated unfavorably both the French attempt to reoccupy Indochina, and the struggle of the Vietnamese for independence, while touting Ngo Dinh Diem as the President of the Saigon government as having been "elected by an overwhelming majority" (p. 31). Laderman's debunking of that version of the Diem regime is detailed and well documented.

The double entendre in Tours of Vietnam won't be missed by American veterans of the war who did their military tours of duty there. They and other readers will be fascinated with Laderman's finding that travel books not only valorized the Diem government but even promoted (South) Vietnam as a tourist destination for the first US military personnel dispatched there in the early 1960s. Eugene Fodor, namesake of the travel-book series, was a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner to the CIA, and a hardcore cold warrior who allowed CIA operatives to work as travel writers for the series. Drawing sexualized imagery, Fodor's marketing of Vietnamese women as assets to lure travelers anticipated the formation of sex tourism that followed the American war. Laderman tells us about the Pentagon's own travel literature (1963) promoting the beaches at Danang and Nha Trang as places where deployed servicemen could enjoy fishing and water skiing. Ironically, the phrase "Fun, Travel, Adventure" spun by GIs to mock their recruitment, and later appropriated for the title of an anti-war variety show, was not so far-fetched.

Laderman's use of newly published tour guides and his interviews done in Vietnam with travelers using the guides takes the relevance of his work right into 21st Century America. "Vietnam is more than a war" may or may not be a slogan ahead of its time, we can't tell that from Tours of Vietnam. What we can tell from the author's excavation of travel guides is that the Vietnam war is embedded in America. From his study, considered with the unending references by press and policy makers to the relevance of that war for the unfolding military ventures abroad, we could well ask if America is yet more than the war it fought in Vietnam nearly a half-century ago.

Jerry Lembcke is an Assoc. Prof. in the Department of Sociology/Anthropology at Holy Cross College in Worcester, MA.