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Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees
Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) examines how the Vietnam War has continued to serve as a stage for the shoring up of American imperialist adventure and for the (re)production of American and Vietnamese American identities. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, this book retheorizes the connections among history, memory, and power and refashions the fields of American studies, Asian American studies, and refugee studies not around the narratives of American exceptionalism, immigration, and transnationalism but around the crucial issues of war, race, and violence—and the history and memories that are forged in the aftermath of war. At the same time, the book moves decisively away from the “damage-centered” approach that pathologizes loss and trauma by detailing how first- and second-generation Vietnamese have created alternative memories and epistemologies that challenge the established public narratives of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese people. Explicitly interdisciplinary, Body Counts moves between the humanities and social sciences, drawing on historical, ethnographic, cultural, and virtual evidence in order to illuminate the places where Vietnamese refugees have managed to conjure up social, public, and collective remembering.
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
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March 26, 2019yen le espiritu is smarter than i am and i can have more thoughts when im not on a road trip
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June 24, 2025chapter six on inheriting silences was the make or break for my paper. everyone say thank you yen le espiritu.
July 28, 2023
This book should be compulsory literature in US schools to question the idea of American infallibility and exceptionalism. Sadly, this is not likely to happen while the US is not willing to be faced with its past.
I had to read this book in an academic class. At the beginning of my engagement with this book, I was not sure what to expect from an author writing about a group that she herself is a part of and experiences that are personally affecting her own everyday experience. After all, how does one stay the course of academic inquiry when faced with their own trauma and loss?
However, Le Espiritu’s discourse becomes richer for the constant re-evaluation of her own place at the intersection of war, memory, remembering, and remembrance as a Vietnamese refugee who grew up in the United States. Her critical perspective as well as her understanding of the Vietnamese refugees as constantly living a militarised existence years after resettling are much-needed additions to the scholarship, and her findings could and should be employed in humanitarian settings to end the ‘everyday war’ for displaced people of various circumstances.
I had to read this book in an academic class. At the beginning of my engagement with this book, I was not sure what to expect from an author writing about a group that she herself is a part of and experiences that are personally affecting her own everyday experience. After all, how does one stay the course of academic inquiry when faced with their own trauma and loss?
However, Le Espiritu’s discourse becomes richer for the constant re-evaluation of her own place at the intersection of war, memory, remembering, and remembrance as a Vietnamese refugee who grew up in the United States. Her critical perspective as well as her understanding of the Vietnamese refugees as constantly living a militarised existence years after resettling are much-needed additions to the scholarship, and her findings could and should be employed in humanitarian settings to end the ‘everyday war’ for displaced people of various circumstances.
July 28, 2017
p. 156: These stories about "personal transgressions" and everyday-ness of wartime remind us that, even in the midst of war, people are always more than victims of their circumstances; they are also desiring subjects with both simple and complex needs and wants. Our task as scholars is to figure out how to "communicate the depth, density, and intricacies of the dialectic of subjection and subjectivity." We do this not only for the sake of accuracy but also out of respect for people's multifaceted and often-contradictory humanity and subjectivity.
June 13, 2022
A beautifully imaginative grappling with critical refugee studies.
February 18, 2025
SUCH a good book. Highly recommend. About the politics of remembering and forgetting the Vietnam War & the construction of refugee subjects. Felt very geog 31/geog 90
March 11, 2025
This is the only Vietnam War book you’ll ever need. Just… Perfect
June 13, 2018
So thorough. I want this to be THE book on the Vietnam War.
"In the Babylift mission, the changeover from acts of violence to recovery occurred without even a pause. On April 4, 1975, initiating Operation Babylift, a U.S. Air Force aircraft C-5, "which was returning to the Philippines after delivering war material," immediately flew to Saigon to airlift Vietnamese orphans to Clark AFB. In other words, the C-5 was performing two seemingly opposing missions- warring and rescuing- back to back, and yet seemingly without contradictions." (41)
"Agamben's 'camp' is thus a more apt descriptor of detention centers and closed camps, in which protracted refugees become constituted as 'no longer human,' then of refugee processing centers and open camps, in which refugees are converted into modern human beings bound for the modern West." (76)
"As Marita Sturken observes, in most public depictions of the Vietnam War, the Vietnam veteran displaces the Vietnamese as "the central figure for whom the war is mourned." (82)
"Convinced that they were there to 'save' the Vietnamese, some veterans still flinched at what they perceived to be Vietnamese ingratitude toward Americans: 'The Vietnamese didn't see us as liberators...And I'd think, 'Excuse me. I've just come 10,000 miles to save you from communism. So what's with this attitude you've got?'" (91)
"Once again, the point is simple: only by 'mak[ing] it out' could Vietnamese partake in the good life." (100)
"Thus, to write from this haunted position is to look for the living effects of what seems to be over and done with. As such, the ghost is important not as a dead figure but as a sign of what is missing- or, more accurately, of what has been disappeared...the public erasure of Vietnamese American history necessitates a different methodology, one deploying personal affect in order to expose and reclaim 'the something else' that resides at the intersection between private loss and public commemoration." (107-108)
"However, it was the U.S. war in Iraq-the shock of recognition- that brought me directly back to Vietnam and back to the figure of the refugee: the spectacle of violence; the 'we need to destroy it in order to save it' mandate; the ways that peace could only come int he form of a 'war without end'; and the brutal displacement of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children from their homes and neighborhoods." (172)
After tracing her academic journey from sociology to Asian American Studies, from her work on Filipino Americans, coming to realize "it was not coincidental that one of the most-traveled refugee routes via military aircraft was from Vietnam to the Philippines to Guam to California- all nodes of U.S. colonial and military empire in the Asia Pacific Region," (172), she remarks "All of this is to say that, in order for me to tell the story of the Vietnamese refugees, I have had to borrow and learn from a number of places and groups. But these stories are more than personal experiences; they reflect the workings of empire as the United States crisscrosses the globe in an ever-expanding quest to increase its political, military, economic, and cultural influence across the world" (173)
She is expert at summary. She summarizes at the end of each chapter and then in the last chapter outlines her main contributions: critical refugee studies, militarized refuge(es), refuge(e) making, critical juxtaposing. It's incredible- she is contributing a field of study, interdisciplinary concepts, and a method all in one book and then summarizes it beautifully for people who are looking for a quick skim.
"As tellers of ghost stories, it is imperative that we...always see the living effects of what seems to be over and done with." (187-188)
"In the Babylift mission, the changeover from acts of violence to recovery occurred without even a pause. On April 4, 1975, initiating Operation Babylift, a U.S. Air Force aircraft C-5, "which was returning to the Philippines after delivering war material," immediately flew to Saigon to airlift Vietnamese orphans to Clark AFB. In other words, the C-5 was performing two seemingly opposing missions- warring and rescuing- back to back, and yet seemingly without contradictions." (41)
"Agamben's 'camp' is thus a more apt descriptor of detention centers and closed camps, in which protracted refugees become constituted as 'no longer human,' then of refugee processing centers and open camps, in which refugees are converted into modern human beings bound for the modern West." (76)
"As Marita Sturken observes, in most public depictions of the Vietnam War, the Vietnam veteran displaces the Vietnamese as "the central figure for whom the war is mourned." (82)
"Convinced that they were there to 'save' the Vietnamese, some veterans still flinched at what they perceived to be Vietnamese ingratitude toward Americans: 'The Vietnamese didn't see us as liberators...And I'd think, 'Excuse me. I've just come 10,000 miles to save you from communism. So what's with this attitude you've got?'" (91)
"Once again, the point is simple: only by 'mak[ing] it out' could Vietnamese partake in the good life." (100)
"Thus, to write from this haunted position is to look for the living effects of what seems to be over and done with. As such, the ghost is important not as a dead figure but as a sign of what is missing- or, more accurately, of what has been disappeared...the public erasure of Vietnamese American history necessitates a different methodology, one deploying personal affect in order to expose and reclaim 'the something else' that resides at the intersection between private loss and public commemoration." (107-108)
"However, it was the U.S. war in Iraq-the shock of recognition- that brought me directly back to Vietnam and back to the figure of the refugee: the spectacle of violence; the 'we need to destroy it in order to save it' mandate; the ways that peace could only come int he form of a 'war without end'; and the brutal displacement of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children from their homes and neighborhoods." (172)
After tracing her academic journey from sociology to Asian American Studies, from her work on Filipino Americans, coming to realize "it was not coincidental that one of the most-traveled refugee routes via military aircraft was from Vietnam to the Philippines to Guam to California- all nodes of U.S. colonial and military empire in the Asia Pacific Region," (172), she remarks "All of this is to say that, in order for me to tell the story of the Vietnamese refugees, I have had to borrow and learn from a number of places and groups. But these stories are more than personal experiences; they reflect the workings of empire as the United States crisscrosses the globe in an ever-expanding quest to increase its political, military, economic, and cultural influence across the world" (173)
She is expert at summary. She summarizes at the end of each chapter and then in the last chapter outlines her main contributions: critical refugee studies, militarized refuge(es), refuge(e) making, critical juxtaposing. It's incredible- she is contributing a field of study, interdisciplinary concepts, and a method all in one book and then summarizes it beautifully for people who are looking for a quick skim.
"As tellers of ghost stories, it is imperative that we...always see the living effects of what seems to be over and done with." (187-188)
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews