Mythologizing the Vietnam War

Book excerpt: The Vietnam War is evolving from contemporary memory into history. Fifty years on, it still serves as a benchmark in the history of war reporting and in the representation of conflict in popular culture and historical memory. However, as contemporary culture tries to come to terms with the events and their political, psychological and cultural implications, the ‘real’ Vietnam War has been appropriated and changed into a set of mythologies which implicate American and Vietnamese national identities specifically, and ideas of modern conflict more broadly, particularly in shaping the mediation of the twenty-first century ‘War on Terror’. This collection of interdisciplinary critical essays explores the cultural legacies of the US involvement in South East Asia, considering this process of ‘mythologising’ through the lenses of visual media and tracing the war’s evolution from contemporary reportage to subsequent interpretation and consumption. It reassesses the role of visual media in covering and remembering the war, its memorialisation, mediation and memory. The origin of this collection of essays was an international conference, titled “Considering Vietnam”, held at the Imperial War Museum, London, in February 2012, co-organised by the museum and the University of the Arts London Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC).