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A Disturbing but Welcome Change of Perspective: From The Vietnam War to The American War

By Mike Budd

I was drafted out of grad school in July 1968, just a few weeks after Bobby Kennedy was killed and a few months after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed in April of that year. After basic training and along with other draftees who had at least some college, the Army offered me the opportunity to reduce my chances of dying or being maimed in Vietnam by enlisting for three years and attending a months-long class to train us to repair IBM key punch machines. Of course, virtually all of us college boys chose to save our asses, even though very few of us used the skills the IBM technicians had taught us when we got to Vietnam or wherever we ended up. Instead we drove trucks, filled sandbags, or worse. However, we could utilize those skills working for IBM after we left the Army. With their big fat Army contract, IBM was training hundreds of keypunch machine repairmen on the taxpayers' dime so they didn't have to pay for all that training themselves, socializing their expenses and fattening their profits. My introduction to the military industrial complex.

When I finally got to Vietnam in November 1969, I was a clerk typist in a Signal Corps message center for 365 days in the vast US base in Long Binh, working twelve-hour shifts, writing daily letters home, listening to rock and roll at night, and getting an even wider view of the American military industrial complex. I had few interactions with the thousands of Vietnamese who came onto the base each day from Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City)—educated, middle-class women who worked in our air-conditioned office, maids who cleaned our rooms and sold us pot and other stuff, or men who did the shit work in kitchens, motor pools, and everywhere else. Even when we were on guard duty, a line of ARVN bunkers lay in front of our bunkers, making the war seem more distant, even to us. "Vietnamization" of the war, designed among other reasons to reduce US casualties, also meant that more Americans could live in a relatively insulated American bubble of distraction and escapism, with American consumer culture and increasingly powerful drugs. We were in Vietnam but not really in Vietnam, and couldn't wait to get back to "the world." Our half-joking wish fulfillment fantasy, already a commonplace about the GI experience of the war, was that we were really in the jungle in Louisiana or somewhere else in the southern US

As Americans, we were invited to imagine that we could dominate the war and the Vietnamese people while still half-living in our own portable consumerist world. These were the privileges of empire, even one that was coming up against its own limits. It was their country, but they were living in our world, which we imagined we could impose almost anywhere we chose. We brought the American empire into our heads along with all our stuff. Even the critical and enlightening literature I read in Vietnam, including The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, seemed to bring America's viewpoints and problems with them to Vietnam.

Like many American vets, I gradually developed some critical distance on the Vietnam War. In my case, I was teaching film and media studies at a university (Florida Atlantic). I could learn and teach about the war, partly through the films and other media about the war that I assigned. I began in the seventies, when the war was still fresh in Americans' minds, with an analysis of news coverage of "the living room war," including Walter Cronkite's famous post-Tet Offensive verdict on the war in 1968 that seems to have influenced LBJ to decide not to run for President again that year. Anti-war documentaries like Peter Davis's 1974 Hearts and Minds and Emile de Antonio's 1968 In the Year of the Pig, the latter of which was startled by incorporating some Vietnamese Communist viewpoints. Over the years, among the best documentaries on that war that I've taught are, in addition to the two above, Sir! No Sir! (2005), about the anti-war movement in the US military during the war, and Barbara Sonneborn's Regret to Inform (1998), about American and Vietnamese women as widows and combatants in that war. While the latter stood out by including the experiences of Vietnamese women, virtually all the films I've seen and taught have limited themselves to an American (or Western) perspective.

Fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War, more Americans may be ready to see that war from Vietnamese perspectives, understanding it as the American War, a war against Vietnam and most of its people. And this change of perspectives, allowing us to experience Vietnamese viewpoints in multiple ways, clearly has special resonance for us, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, who have struggled our whole lives against the forces that sent us into that war. For most of our lives, the political and cultural battles among Americans over the American War in Vietnam have been fought without the voices and viewpoints of Vietnamese or others. Now that is changing.

The seven-part television series The Sympathizer premiered on HBO in April 2024, bringing a disturbing new perspective to US and Western audiences on what is usually referred to in the US as The Vietnam War. Here, US and Western viewers see, for many, for the first time, that war from the viewpoint of the Vietnamese. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Viet Thanh Nguyen and created by the South Korean director Park Chan-Wook (Oldboy, No Other Choice) and the Canadian actor and writer Don McKellar (Last Night), the series, like its source novel, centers on a Captain in South Vietnamese military intelligence who is also a spy for the Communist North Vietnamese. Framed by the Captain's repeatedly revised voice-over narration written in a postwar North Vietnamese reeducation camp, the story follows mostly Vietnamese characters through the fall of Saigon in 1975 to their resettlement as refugees in Los Angeles in the late seventies, the making of a Hollywood film about the war, and the Captain's return to Southeast Asia and the narrative's conclusion.

A fuller consideration of the series itself is beyond the scope of this essay. I have written more about the series and its historical context in a longer essay in Jump Cut, an online journal of contemporary media. I strongly recommend the whole series, and also Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel. His other fiction and nonfiction works are great reads, too.

Mike Budd, a longtime VVAW member and retired professor of film and media studies at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, is active in union and other progressive groups and has led The Truth Project, a counter-military recruiting group in Palm Beach County, Florida.