Vietnam War

Articles

• Jang, Han Gil. “People’s Tribunal on War Crimes by South Korean Troops during the Vietnam War.” Asia-Pacific Journal 17, no. 12:1 (June 15, 2019): https://apjjf.org/2019/12/Jang.html.

  [From essay introduction] “A People’s Tribunal was held between April 21 and 22, 2018 at the Oil Tank Culture Park in Seoul, in conjunction with an academic conference a day earlier organized around the theme of what it means to be a perpetrator of atrocities. In light of the fact that no meaningful action had been taken by the South Korean government in the past twenty years, the People’s Tribunal aimed to re-publicize the issue of massacres committed by South Korean troops during the Vietnam War and to urge the South Korean government to take meaningful reparatory actions for the survivors in legal terms. The year 2018 marked not only the 50th anniversary of massacres committed in Phong Nhị, Phong Nhất and Hà My hamlets of Vietnam, but also the 70th anniversary of the Jeju uprising, bolstering the felt necessity of coming to terms with the nation’s unresolved past.”

• Kim, Hyun Sook. “Korea’s ‘Vietnam Question’: War Atrocities, National Identity, and Reconciliation in Asia.” positions: asia critique 9, no. 3 (2001): 621–35.

  Reflecting the inter-Asia reconciliatory mood at the turn of the millennium, this article delves into South Korea’s belated reckoning—prompted by South Korean progressive activist-led investigations into their country’s war crimes during the Vietnam War—with its role as a perpetrator of counterrevolutionary, anticommunist violence against the Vietnamese people. Addressing the place of Vietnam in South Korean national history, Kim describes the emergence of a “new language of apology” within the realm of culture—what she dubs “creative acts of contrition” performed by activists and politically engaged artists.

• Kim, Mi-ran. “The Vietnam War and Sexuality: An Analysis of the Images of Ao Dai and Vietcong as Represented in the Media.” Lines: Asian Perspectives 2 (2011): 83–106.

  Under the Park Chung Hee regime, South Korea dispatched some 326,000 Korean soldiers to participate in the Vietnam War (1964–1973). Recent scholarship has sought to highlight Korea’s semicolonial status under the U.S. military, arguing that South Korean economic development turned on its subimperial role in Vietnam. Kim adds crucial gender analyses to this trend, allowing us to consider how South Korea’s complicity in U.S.-led counterrevolution in Vietnam affirmed its subordinate position to American global ambitions while also imposing South Korean dominance over Vietnam by perpetrating violence on Vietnamese civilians—particularly Vietnamese women.

• Yoon Chung Ro. 윤충로, “베트남전쟁 시기 ‘월남재벌’의 형성과 파월(派越)기술자의 저항: 한진그룹의 사례를 중심으로” (The making of “Wol-nam Chaebol” and resistance of the Korean workers with Vietnam War experience: A case study of Han-jin Group). 사회와 역사 79 (2008): 93–128.

  In this journal article, Yoon Chung Ro explores the experiences of South Korean laborers who traveled alongside South Korean soldiers to fight in Vietnam. Yoon’s article focuses specifically on the experiences of workers for the chaebol, Hanjin Group. In addition to contextualizing the motivations and hopes of Hanjin workers, the article outlines how they were mistreated by Hanjin and ignored by U.S. military officials. Indeed, the history of Hanjin workers is part of a larger one involving the U.S. military’s exploitation of racialized labor (not only Koreans but also people from around the decolonizing world) to wage its wars of intervention around the globe. 

News Articles

• Gluck, Caroline. “N Korea Admits Vietnam War Role.” BBC News, July 7, 2001. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1427367.stm.

  This brief article spotlights North Korea’s official confirmation that it sent fighter pilots to support North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and it cites Kim Il Sung’s directive, “Fight as if the skies were your own.” On the cusp of the 9/11 era, it describes the warming of ties between North Korea and Vietnam, “with Vietnam’s voicing support for the inter-Korean peace process” that was unfolding between the two Koreas during the Sunshine Policy era.

• “A Korean in Vietnam, Seeing Orphans, Recalls Earlier War,” New York Times, November 21, 1967, 4.

  In this late 1967 New York Times article, Link White (a.k.a. “Chesi”), who served U.S. forces as a child mascot during the battle phase of the Korean War before being adopted by American parents, describes the uncanny experience of being deployed to Vietnam, now as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army. “I volunteered to come to Vietnam,” White explains, “because I wanted to see what kind of war this is in comparison to my experience during the Korean War,” before noting that it was the “same” in its mass production of orphans.

Documentary

• “Ghosts of the Vietnam War.” BBC News. May 10, 2020. YouTube video, 15:25. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zixaHx0yPH8. 

  [From BBC introduction] “Hundreds of thousands of South Korean soldiers fought alongside the Americans in Vietnam, but the story of South Korea’s involvement in the conflict is largely untold. More than fifty years later, a victim of Korean atrocities travels to the capital Seoul in search of justice. As part of the BBC’s Crossing Divides season, Ly Truong reports.”

Novels

• Ahn, Junghyo 안정효. White Badge: A Novel of Korea 하얀전쟁 (New York: Soho Press, 2003).

  In Ahn Junghyo’s Vietnam War novel, the suppressed horror of the experiences—the killing, the fears, and the mental frustrations—of South Korean soldiers, such as Sergeant Han Kiju and Private Pyon Chinsu in the jungles of Vietnam, reveals the nature of the psychological and bodily toll of imperial warfare on subimperial allies. While White Badge lays bare the futility of war by debunking the Park Chung Hee regime’s master narrative that “our boys are winning,” it subtly reendorses military masculinity by sexualizing war killing as “breathless joy” and “ejaculation of male ecstasy.” How is such “war romance” both eye-opening and problematic?

• Bang, Hyun-seok 방현석. Time to Eat Lobster: Contemporary Korean Stories on Memories of the Vietnam War 랍스터를 먹는 시간. Translated by Seung-Hee Jeon (Honolulu: MerwinAsia, 2016).

  Set in a supposedly post–Cold War Vietnam whose economy is dominated by South Korean conglomerates, Bang describes an uncanny meal shared between a South Korean factory employee and a Vietnamese worker who has been susceptible to both past South Korean war atrocities and ongoing South Korean multinational corporate capitalism in Vietnam. With an eye to critiquing South Korean dominance over Vietnam, a unilateralism that exploits the latter’s economic vulnerability, Time to Eat Lobster interweaves the modern histories of Vietnam and South Korea in search of a mutual bond and understanding that cuts across the two countries’ shared traumatic past and present-day struggles with imperialism, capitalism, and neocolonialism.

• Hwang, Sok-yong 황석영. The Shadow of Arms 무기의 그늘 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014).

  Published in 1985, Shadow of Arms is the first Korean novel to critically reassess how South Korea’s participation in the Vietnam War benefited the South Korean economy. This work casts light on what shadows South Korea’s modernity: namely, war and imperial economic relations under U.S.-led global capitalism. Through the South Korean protagonist, sergeant Ahn Yong-gyu, who is asked to investigate and thus traverses the impossible-to-control black market of U.S. military in Vietnam, Hwang unveils the war economy’s facade of development and national profit and asks us to consider what is at stake when South Korea participates in wars waged by the United States in Asia.

Primary Source Documents

• “The ‘Other’ Vietnam Village,” “I Field Force Vietnam, Operation Report Lessons Learned, Tet Offensives Field Force VI, 1 May–31 July 68.” Box 7, Entry (A1)3 U.S. Army Pacific Command Reporting Files, 1963–72, Record Group 550, National Archives, College Park, Md.

  In the Vietnam War, U.S. propaganda leaflets (see Figure 5) exclusively ascribed violence to its enemy—namely, the People’s Army of Vietnam and the Viet Cong. Such propaganda constructed and forced an interpretation of the Vietnamese population as victims: the brutalized Vietnamese men, the wailing child, and the helpless woman. The U.S. imperial gaze constructed a Cold War orientalist image of the Vietnamese as disempowered. How does this propaganda leaflet distinguish between villagers and the so-called Viet Cong? How does this portrait compare to and contrast with iconic Vietnam War images, such as the “napalm girl” photo depicting Phan Thi Kim Phúc, a young girl running away from U.S. bombing of a Vietnam village, shot by photographer Nick Ut in 1972?

• Telegram from U.S. Embassy Seoul to U.S. Embassy Saigon. “Rampage by Hanjin Workers.” September 9, 1971. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park.

  Written by the deputy chief to the U.S. operations mission to South Korea, Francis Underhill (a member of a white American missionary family with long historical ties to Korea), this telegram describes protests by Hanjin workers that resulted in the burning of an office building occupied by the Hanjin Group. The event was the culmination of years-long efforts by Hanjin workers to receive back pay from the company and speaks more generally to the extreme repression and exploitation of labor during the Vietnam War era, an era generally understood to be a time of compressed economic development for South Korea. Workers and company security clashed, leading to the destruction of the company offices. While seemingly an objective accounting of events, the provocative language used to describe the actions of Hanjin workers—for instance, the terms rampage and rioters (similar to mainstream U.S. and South Korean media descriptions of Saigu)—belies the loyalties of U.S. officials. In their interactions with foreign corporations and foreign workers, they prioritized the needs of the former.