Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call the American War—a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both nations.

From a kaleidoscope of cultural forms—novels, memoirs, cemeteries, monuments, films, photography, museum exhibits, video games, souvenirs, and more—Nothing Ever Dies brings a comprehensive vision of the war into sharp focus. At stake are ethical questions about how the war should be remembered by participants that include not only Americans and Vietnamese but also Laotians, Cambodians, South Koreans, and Southeast Asian Americans. Too often, memorials valorize the experience of one’s own people above all else, honoring their sacrifices while demonizing the “enemy”—or, most often, ignoring combatants and civilians on the other side altogether. Visiting sites across the United States, Southeast Asia, and Korea, Viet Thanh Nguyen provides penetrating interpretations of the way memories of the war help to enable future wars or struggle to prevent them.

Drawing from this war, Nguyen offers a lesson for all wars by calling on us to recognize not only our shared humanity but our ever-present inhumanity. This is the only path to reconciliation with our foes, and with ourselves. Without reconciliation, war’s truth will be impossible to remember, and war’s trauma impossible to forget.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, War, Asia, Politics, Asian American, Memoir

384 pages, Hardcover

First published October 27, 2018

About the author

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of “The Sympathizer,” awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. His most recent book, “To Save and to Destroy,” explores the idea of being an outsider. He is also the author of the short story collection “The Refugees;” the nonfiction book “Nothing Ever Dies,” a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; the children's book “Simone” along with illustrator Minnie Phan; the sequel to “The Sympathizer,” “The Committed;” the nonfiction book “A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial,” longlisted for the National Book Award; and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, “The Displaced,” as well as a co-editor of “The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora.” He is a University Professor and the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

NOI SIAMO QUI PERCHÉ VOI ERAVATE LÀ


11 giugno 1963: l'immolazione del monaco buddhista Thích Quảng Đức nella foto di Malcolm Browne.

“Noi siamo qui perché voi eravate là” è il marchio che assumono le voci artistiche di una comunità, come quella vietnamita, profuga in terra d’America.
E loro, gli US, erano là per la loro ossessione di combattere il comunismo, che è il loro spauracchio, vedono rosso ovunque peggio di un toro – erano là perché a loro piace impicciarsi di fatti che non dovrebbero riguardarli.
E chissà se quel tizio dalla fantasmagorica pettinatura (neppure il Berlusca!) che di questi tempi dice d’aver risolto sei o sette guerre, se ne sta inventando una nuova in Venezuela, ovviamente per profitto, ma chissà se anche questa volta verrà scomodata la scusa della civilizzazione.


Visitatori al Museo della Guerra di Hanoi davanti a una celebre foto del massacro di My Lai scattata dal fotografo dell'esercito statunitense Ronald L. Haeberle.

È stata la loro prima sconfitta, dicono. Vero. Ma è stato molto di più: neppure oggi, mezzo secolo dopo, riescono a scenderci a patti.

Viet Thanh Nguyen sottolinea come la guerra in Vietnam, o la guerra del Vietnam, coinvolse anche i paesi limitrofi – Laos e Cambogia: il sentiero di Ho Chi Minh passava dal Nord al Sud del Vietnam e lo faceva attraversando Laos e Cambogia – gli americani bombardarono Laos e Cambogia come sanno fare (bombe intelligenti anche quelle?) e i morti furono centinaia di migliaia. Anche se è difficile contarli in Cambogia perché in quegli anni Pol Pot “curava” il suo popolo sterminandolo.


Ho Chi Minh

Mi sono mancati dati, date, eventi, fatti, Storia.
Avrei volentieri fatto a meno di così tanta teoria e filosofia ed etica e ragionamenti di estetica e astrazione e memoria come entità e non come ricordi.
Però, nel complesso, libro che ho apprezzato, di argomento per me oltremodo interessante.

Curiosamente le pagine più belle sono dedicate alla Cambogia e alla Corea del sud: fatto che colpisce perché l’autore è vietnamita e sin dall’inizio mi ha lasciato credere che avrebbe parlato di Vietnam. Cosa che in effetti fa: ma poi le parti più pregnanti sono invece quelle su altri paesi.
Parla di film e letteratura, opere sia occidentali che orientali. Parla di luoghi e monumenti e cimiteri e musei e memoriali di quella parte di mondo dilaniata da una ferocia particolare, alla quale una generosa mano è stata data dall’esercito a stelle-e-strisce, ma non dimentichiamoci dei giapponesi e dei francesi.


Nguyen Thi Hien, foto di Mai Nam, 1966.

Viet Thanh Nguyen è perfetto per firmare un libro di questo tipo: vietnamita, a quattro anni viene accolto con la famiglia in America.
L’accoglienza si concretizza in un campo profughi, dove chissà perché viene strappato alla famiglia e dato in affido a una coppia di estranei.
Ciò non gli impedisce di vedere a otto anni “Ba” e “Má”, papà e mamma, presi a rivoltellate nella drogheria di famiglia.
A scuola e per strada si sente dire “scherzo cinese, faccia di maionese”. Ha tempo e modo di sperimentare la brutale selezione di migranti e profughi operata sulla base del colore della pelle. Tutto ciò avviene durante presidenze repubblicane e presidenze democratiche: tra il rosso e il blu dei due partiti principali non cambia politica riguardo agli stranieri.
Diventa uno scrittore, vince un premio Pulitzer, insegna all’università, viene invitato a tenere corsi stage conferenze. Ma sa che nella vita dei rifugiati non c’è nulla di divertente, lamentarsi non serve perché essere rifugiati significa vivere nel presente sentendo sempre il passato, come un’ombra, come un’ossessione.

PS
Sorpreso che il film Jarhead sia qui attribuito a Sam Raimi, con tanto di dichiarazioni del regista, che però è Sam Mendes, non Raimi.


Il carcere sull’Isola di Con Son fu costruito dai francesi nel 1941 e poi perfezionato dagli americani che costruirono questa cosiddetta “gabbia della tigre”: si tratta di 384 celle. Tutte in cemento, senza piedistalli per dormire; i prigionieri dovevano giacere sotto i pavimenti di cemento umidi. Imprigionati in questo campo, i prigionieri politici impazzirono tutti e morirono.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant book about war and its never-ending consequences. Viet Thanh Nguyen dissects how society glamorizes veterans while dehumanizing victims, how certain industries profit from war and its bloodshed, and how we often only interpret wars from our own side (hence, why Americans call it the Vietnam War whereas the Vietnamese call it the American War). Nguyen gathers evidence from museums, monuments, novels, films, etc. to illustrate the devastating effects of war and how we often overlook the most awful parts of mass combat. While he focuses on the war between America and Vietnam and others, his ideas span all wars, and he provides a powerful argument about creating just memory instead of forgetting our past and allowing it to repeat itself.

As a second generation Vietnamese American born and raised in the United States, I received a whitewashed, America-centered education all throughout my pre-university years. I feel thankful that Nguyen wrote this book, as it has helped me once again see beyond the narrative we feed children in the United States. Nothing Ever Dies reveals harsh truths: that war kills people and erases living people's pasts, that we laud soldiers' bravery while ignoring their rape, that pro-war propaganda perpetuates hate with the intent of eliminating human compassion. Though quite academic and sometimes long in its descriptions, I would still recommend Nothing Ever Dies to anyone who enjoys history, or wants to learn a way of analyzing history and war outside of the predominant, complacent perspective.

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a sluggish read for me. The language kept settling into bland assertions about the war and its aftermath, assertions that I found to be both self-evident, and overly verbose. The tone altered from intimate writing to academic writing, with little warning. Also I think you get away with writing sentences that begin with words like: "The Vietnamese in America understood that..." only if you're writing a sociological study, and only if you have actually interviewed enough individuals in the group known as "Vietnamese in America" that you can say for sure what it is that they understand, rather than just speculating and homogenizing their understandings. There are so many generalized notions in the book that it felt shallow.

Here is the rest of the passage that begins with: "The Vietnamese in America..":

"The Vietnamese in America understood that strength and profit came in the concentration of their numbers. Thus, like other new arrivals, they gathered themselves defensively into ethnic enclave, subaltern suburb, and strategic hamlet, those emergent landscapes of he American dream, distinct from the sidelined ghetto, barrio, and reservation of the American nightmare."

These sentences are a representative example of Nguyen's writing throughout, and frankly I have a lot of trouble with this kind of writing. Not just that "the Vietnamese in America" homogenizes this group, but also, just how much of this sentence makes actual sense, anyway? Just what difference is there between an ethnic enclave and a sidelined ghetto to make one "American Dream" and the other "American Nightmare"? Maybe Nguyen is asserting that Vietnamese immigrants chose to live in segregated neighborhoods, and other ethnic groups are victims of segregation forced upon them? Or? And although "ghetto" and "barrio" and "reservation" are ethnically coded in contemporary American English, and do call to mind a specific kind of community, just what defines "ethnic enclave," "subaltern suburb," "strategic hamlet," and "emergent landscape?" Are those real categories of community, or just something Nguyen made up to balance the sentence? What the heck makes some of these community types a definitive part of the "American Dream" and the others "American Nightmare?"

If Nguyen had been in my English class I would have handed this book back for a rewrite, marked "fuzzy thinking."

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the main points in this long academic treatment of topics surrounding war and memory are summed up in this Fresh Air interview.

The author spent eleven years on the research for this book, and along the way also wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Sympathizer. I gave the novel five stars but despite the longlisting of this book for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction, I won't be able to rate this one as highly.

It is clear that Nguyen is interested in war and memory. I was led to some very thoughtful moments, considering who has the power to control memory, and provided a comprehensive list of works of fiction and memoir written by Vietnamese people for Vietnamese audiences. But I found the exploration of film to be exhaustive/ing and duplicating much of what is between the lines of his novel. I suspected that this was his primary research interest, and found multiple scholarly articles dating back at least a decade on branches of this topic (his 1997 dissertation seems to be on a related topic - Asian American representation, and that topic resurfaces in Nothing Ever Dies as well.) For me, it was recycled too much within the confines of this book, and I grew weary of it.

I would have liked the entire novel to be an expansion of the last three chapters:
On True War Stories
On Powerful Memory
Just Forgetting

[Claire Reads Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

A little bit of academic overwriting at some points, but wow, there’s so much in this book to think about and wrestle with, and Nguyen’s prose and analysis are as elegant and haunting as you could hope for in a text from a university press. Amid the dense close-reading and ethical argumentation, there are sentences so beautifully and masterfully constructed as to stop you in your tracks, and the final paragraph of the epilogue gave me actual chills. Bravo for that. The many works cited and examined here also offer jumping off points for further reading and exploration of the many themes and ideas that Nguyen probes throughout. Highly recommend!

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has the characteristic of a long, multi-chaptered, essay about the interrelationship of war, memory, and identity. The book's narrative penetrates into memories of the Vietnamese War with particular focus on the differences between winners and losers—the powerful and weak.

The book's consideration of memory includes the subjects of trauma, literature, news media, movies, memorials, and museums. In particular I found the book's discussion of novels about Vietnam to be enlightening because it made me aware of many books of which I was previously unaware.

I'm too lazy to write a thorough review, so I've simply included a number of quotations from the book. If you want a more descriptive review of the book's contents I recommend THIS REVIEW originally published in Pacific Affairs.

The following is a collection of quotations from the book that caught my attention. My collection of quotes is more of an indicator of what gets my attention than quotes that provide a representative summary of the subjects covered.

This is a book on war, memory, and identity. It proceeds from the idea that all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battle field, the second time in memory. (p.4)

The dominant logic of remembering one’s own and forgetting others is so strong that even those who have been forgotten will, when given the chance, forget others. The stories of those that lost in this war show that in the conflict over remembrance, no one is innocent of forgetting. (p.11)

Haunted and haunting, human and inhuman, war remains with us and within us, impossible to forget but difficult to remember. (p.19)

Generosity comes easier when one has won, and the victorious find it in their best interests to be magnanimous to the defeated. (p.46)

This identity is the true “Vietnam Syndrome,” the selective memory of a country that imagines itself as a perpetual innocent. (p.51)

What makes the black wall powerful is its embodiment of remembering oneself as well as its evocation of otherness. (p.53)

Philip Jones Griffiths observes, “Everyone should know one simple statistic: the Washington, D.C., memorial to the American war dead is 150 yards long; if a similar monument were built with the same density of names of the Vietnamese who died in it, [it] would be nine miles long.” (p.66)

When we say aways remember and never forget, we usually mean to always remember and never forget what was done to us or to our friends and allies. Of the terrible things that we have done or condoned, the less said and the less remembered the better. (p.73)

As the writer W.G. Sebald points out regarding Germans, “it’s the ones who have a conscience who die early, it grinds you down. The fascist supporters live forever. Or the passive resisters. That’s what they all are now in their own minds … there is no difference between passive resistance and passive collaboration—it’s the same thing.” (p.92)

As novelist Gina Apostol puts it: "The military-industrial complex ... does it not suggest not only an economic order but also a psychiatric disorder?" (p.112)

Francis Ford Coppola about the legendary making of the movie: “My film's not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like. It was crazy. We made it very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.” (p.116)

Being only human, celebrities and actors die, but being inhuman, the military-industrial complex lives on. (p.122)

The relationship of absence to presence is the invisible dimension of the asymmetry of memory, existing beside the visible dimension of great powers dominating smaller ones. (p.185)

Each racially defined ethnic group in the United States gets its own notable history for which it is remembered by Americans. ---- This quote continues in this

Blacks get slavery and the plantation, and the legacies they leave in blackness and the ghetto. Latinos are of the Americas but are neither North American nor white (at least the Lationos that come first to the American mind), their lives supposedly marked by barrios and the border, Native Americans get genocide, dispossession, and the reservation. Vietnamese Americans get the war. Any ethically defined literature is bound up with the ethnic group’s history in America because so-called ethnic literatures are forms of memory, saturated by ethical problems around the remembering of selves and others. Again race is key. For ethnic groups that can shed racial difference, such as the Irish who were once depicted in American media as being unassimilable, or the Jews once seen as beyond the pale, ethnicity becomes, as the sociologist Mary Waters says, an option, a choice. Those ethnic groups that remain marked, or stained, by race, have choices, too, but they also have no control about how other thrust their ethnicity on them. The choices made by racially defined people always conflict with the hard expectations of other Americans, which is also a reality of the literary world. (p.201)

These Western writers lack the imagination to see how their drab stories of unhappiness, divorces cancer, etc.—the very stuff of award-winning realism and the bad outcomes of white privilege over here—might be connected to, and made possible by, their society's wars and capitalist exploitation over there. (p.240)

To imagine and dream beyond being the citizen of a nation, to articulate the yearning for a citizenship of the imagination—that is the artist’s calling. (p.264)

As I have argued throughout this book, just memory proceeds from three things. ---- This quote continues in this

First, an ethical awareness of our simultaneous humanity and inhumanity which leads to a more complex understanding of our identity of what it means to be human and to be complicit in the deeds that our side, our kin, and even we ourselves commit. Second, equal access to the industries of memory both within countries and among countries, which will not be possible without a radical transformation, even a revolution, in the distribution of wealth and power. And third, the ability to imagine a world where no one will be exiled from what we think of as the near and the dear to those distant realms of the far and the feared. (p.283)

In the book's Epilogue the author relates his personal story with regard to memories of Vietnam. It is a haunting and emotionally poignant account. One of the stories he relates is the fact that his father has told him that he must never visit the town in Vietnam where the author was born because the people there will remember his father and they will persecute him. The author speculates that someday he may visit the site but it will be after his father is no longer living—when it will be too late to ask his father any questions. Immediately after this story the author writes the following.

This is the paradox of the past, of trauma, of loss, of war, a true war story where there is no ending but the unknown, no conversation except that which cannot be finished. (p.304)

This discussion of dealing with the past raises the specter of how much time is required to pass before the past can be discussed. Perhaps the answer has something to do with the fact that this book was written and published over forty years after the end of the Vietnam War.

Nothing Ever Dies is a work of nonfiction by an author who is famous for his fiction—his debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I noticed he received his PhD in English from U.C. Berkeley in 1997. That made me curious about what his dissertation subject was, and whether this book may be related to it. I've examined his curriculum vitae and so far I've been unable to find his dissertation title. However, I did find the following quotation from the author's webpage:

In 1992, as a first-year PhD student at Berkeley, I told the English department chairman, a famous Americanist, that I wanted to write a dissertation on Vietnamese and Vietnamese American literature. “You can’t do that,” he said, fretting over my ambition to teach in a university English department. “You won’t get a job.” Since even my Marxist mentor agreed with the chair, I took the safer route and wrote a dissertation on Asian American literature, a subject in which some people had gotten tenure-track professorial positions.
https://vietnguyen.info/2018/canon-fo...

I see that he published a nonfiction book in 2002 titled Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America which I suspect may have been an edited enhancement of his dissertation five years earlier. If so I think it would be fair to describe Nothing Ever Dies as an additional enhancement of this previous nonfiction book by including the results of twenty additional years of reading, research, and thinking about the interrelationship of Asian and Western culture viewed through the lens of the Vietnam War and how it's remembered.

It would appear that the author has come full circle and has finally written a book on the subject that he first aspired to do back in 1997. However, as rendered in Nothing Ever Dies the scope has broadened beyond "Vietnamese and Vietnamese American literature." to include other means of memory beyond that of literature.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished Viet Nguyen's latest a few weeks back, but I haven't posted anything yet because I've been mulling over its message. He doesn't pull punches in his critique of American adventuring overseas, nor does he fall back on a too-convenient portrayal of Vietnamese as victims. If nothing else, Nguyen's book is a clarion call for a full and honest assessment of inhumanity, in all its forms. This does not, however, mean that both sides are equal in this particular conflict. As Nguyen is quick to point out, approximately 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam; Over 3,000,000 Vietnamese suffered the same fate. He also notes that while we have an exact number of American casualties, the same can not be said of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian soldiers and civilians.

I was thinking about this book over the recent Memorial Day weekend. Nguyen writes about ethics and how when it comes to war, a cultural's central response tends to be celebrating its own humanity while ignoring the enemy's inhumanity. Another way of looking at that would be that each side likes to ignore its own inhumanity. For Nguyen that tendency is on display with the aphorism oppose war, support soliders:

Perhaps one could support the troops if one only opposed the war on issues of foreign policy, or if one simply did not agree with the expenditure of American treasure on military adventurism. But if one opposed a war because it killed innocent people, then how could one support the troops who inflicted the damage?

At its core, this book is an examination of responsibility, an insistence that we acknowledge our culpability, not just as Americans or Vietnamese, but as subjects of a global system inseparable from the mechanism that create and justify war. "The question of responsibility [may be] particularly pressing for an all-volunteer army versus an army with many draftees, as was the case in Vietnam," but the citizenry at large is not immune. We, too, bear some responsibility for "support[ing] through [our] votes, [our] attitudes, and [our] actions" the killing.

The war created a refugee crisis (of which Nguyen is part) not dissimilar to what we're seeing today with Syrians. I only bring Syria up to illustrate Nguyen's point that the refugee identity is itself a kind of violence, one that robs the individual of their full identity while also defanging the refugee by recasting their experience for the American public as simply another flavor of immigration. The Vietnamese refugee, like any "ethnic or racial" other, must confront the "identity politics" pejorative. But this is a trap, for "[t]o do so is to be forced into accepting the impossible choice that a dominant society built on whiteness gives to its minorities: be a victim or have a voice, accept one's lesser identity or strive to have no identity." This part of the book spoke to me the most. The idea that "hav[ing] no identity at all is the privilege of whiteness" is not a new idea, but it's one that is gaining ground in larger cultural conversations. Again, this is an insistence on accepting our full humanity/inhumanity. Erasure of the other's fullness is not accidental, nor is occluding the equally idiosyncratic nature of the dominate culture. Both are mechanisms of ignoring one's inhumanity, which, in turn, creates a path to further violence. "Southeast Asians," Nguyen writes, "must insist that the war that defines them in America is not only their war, but a war made by white people, a war that is not an aberration but a manifestation of a war machine that would prefer refugees to think of their stories as immigrant stories."

Nguyen is a brilliant writer and a much needed one. He is also, as all writers are, as all people are, idiosyncratic. He insists on his own fullness. I haven't mentioned his novel yet, but that, too, is excellent and in many ways a companion to this more academic work. He is a novelist and a scholar. In that sense also, Nguyen defies categorization. I recommend this book to anybody interested in learning more about the complexities of the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese-American experience. If you're just looking for a war history, though, you won't find that here.

If you liked this, make sure to follow me on Goodreads for more reviews!

[Evan Leach · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoughtful, erudite examination of the Vietnam War specifically and international relations in general. Nguyen presents a lot of thought provoking ideas and supports his arguments with well-reasoned logic and thorough research. Nguyen is both a first-rate academic mind and an excellent writer of prose, and both skills are fully on display here.

I listened to it on audiobook, which was definitely a mistake for me. I expected this to be a softer, simpler book about the U.S. and Vietnam 50 years after the Vietnam War. I was wrong; this is a pretty academic, dense, and heavy text. I tend to do my audiobooking while driving/doing chores/tending to some other task that commands some of my attention; this book demands close reading and full attention. I definitely would have gotten more out of this if I had read the physical book instead of listened to it. Still, what I did get was thought provoking and interesting. 4.0 stars (and could be higher upon a subsequent, closer reading), recommended!

[Daniel Warriner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once or twice a year I read a book that dislodges my point of view and drops it someplace I hadn't known existed. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016) by Viet Thanh Nguyen is one of those books, bursting with ideas and brilliantly illuminating from stunning angles. Nguyen tells us that "All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory." He calls for an ethical, simultaneous awareness of our humanity and inhumanity, for equal access to the "industries of memory," both within countries and among them, and also for the ability to "imagine a world where no one will be exiled from what we think of as the near and the dear to those distant realms of the far and the feared."

What I liked most about it was Nguyen's take on and dissection of the complex, multilayered relationship between war and art, especially his thoughts on films, mainly by Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Americans. He borrows and builds on ideas from Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Toni Morrison, Le Ly Hayslip, various filmmakers and many more. It's an excellent read that's rich with imagery and occasionally poetic, from a profound mind and masterful writer.

This art also shows us, in the words of Toni Morrison, that “nothing ever dies,” an insight both terrifying and hopeful.
—Viet Thanh Nguyen


As an Aside

Viet Thanh Nguyen's appreciation for Le Ly Hayslip's work comes through in this book. As a scholar and intellectual, Nguyen surprised me for how high he regarded her memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989; Oliver Stone's 1993 film, Heaven & Earth is based on her life), the ideas, and hopes, and ultimate forgiveness of a once simple peasant girl caught between—and raped and tortured by—Viet Cong and American soldiers.

I had the pleasure of meeting Le Ly Hayslip in the summer of 2003 while working for a Japanese NGO on an around-the-world cruise. She wanted a dance partner, preferably an American (I was told), and so she sent one of the staff over to fetch me (I was in my 20s, and Canadian but close enough). I can't remember our dance together. I'd seen the Oliver Stone movie and read her memoir. I'm sure my palms were sweaty. We had drinks a few nights later and, of all things, talked about prostitution and sex slaves in SE Asia (and surely other things that I no longer can recall). She helped the ship's captain preside over a Vietnamese-style wedding of two Japanese passengers on the upper deck, after a stop in Da Nang, where she'd picked up all the requisites and accoutrements for the ceremony. A courageous, high-spirited and clever individual with sharp eyes and a beatific smile.

[Mai Nguyễn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Viet Thanh Nguyen's NOTHING EVER DIES is one of the best non-fiction books about the Vietnam War. I quoted this book many times in my PhD thesis and I can't recommend it high enough.

[Guy Austin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing Ever Dies is an academic essay about the Vietnam War or as the Vietnamese call it the American War. The memory you hold depends on, where you were physically and mentally during the war, from whom you receive the information from and who's version of memory you have received.

This was a hard read. It requires a good deal of focus to digest the thoughts written with great density. The author obviously spent a great deal of time researching and pulling the complicated thoughts together.

The book is broken into three parts. Ethics, Industries and Aesthetics.

There is overwhelming detail and in some of those details, I lost the point never really understanding the intentions the writing is meant to convey. However, there is also some great takeaways in the writing.

Two ideas I pulled early on are:

"Man, individual or collective, is just as interested in forgetting what he has done as he is in remembering what was done to him. Man is ever and always implicated in power, and no one is innocent except the infant and the most abject victim."

"Power must be used, and the only question is whether it will be used ethically."

With these I held hope, but as the telling continued I felt it was all a bit too many words to say the same thing over and again.

Parts of this book, I loved. Others I found tiresome. I am torn between 2-3 stars. I wanted to love it. I know many do love it. Perhaps, it is just not for me.

[Andrew]

At a time when the discussion of the relationship between politics and art is at an absolute nadir in America (on one side, people who tell you white authors aren't allowed to write minority characters, on the other side, people who tell you that modernist art is tantamount to the decline of Westahn Civilahzation, neither of whom would know class struggle if it began violating their flabby asses), Viet Thanh Nguyen speaks great truths about history, race relations, literature, memory, tokenism, nationalism, and, above all else, how minority artists are foolishly expected to act as proxies for their people, and how they're expected to perform as saintly-victim colonial subjects. Simply put, he pulls no punches.

My one complaint is that -- for someone who writes a lot about these perspectives -- he doesn’t really tell us what his political perspectives actually are, and frankly, the topics he's discussing demand something of a theoretical basis. I'm guessing this is something of a tightrope act on his part -- if he is too explicitly anti-capitalist, he'll probably get dragged by the Vietnamese-American community (observe the number of South Vietnamese flags I saw still flying in certain Seattle neighborhoods).

[Dick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a good read. It's an academic essay on a difficult subject. I highlighted more in this book than I have in any other book. Very thought provoking. I was not surprised by atrocities and cruelties committed by Americans. I was surprised by the interpretations of war and it's aftermath by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Kudos to Nguyen for an excellent piece of work.

I agree with 99% of all in the book except sometimes I disagree with the degree to which his assertions or descriptions are true. For example: his assertion that America is driven by the greed of capitalism and this causes America to be the aggressor in many wars. There's truth in that. There's also truth in that America's values (e.g. democracy, individual freedom, and yes capitalism) felt threatened.

Although Nguyen is reasonable balanced in criticizing both sides, I felt he did not use the various communist atrocities in China, the Soviet Union, Chile, and elsewhere as examples. He focused on capitalism.

I also disagree with his assessment of minorities (others) getting there art published. I think the American publishing world craves and encourages authors of all types, even those with unflattering views of the establishment. It's hard to get published and get good grades, even if you are an American white male.

I also sense that his assertion that American media and the American military comprise a war machine -- working together -- is a little off. My sense is that the media is often against the military. That's why the CIA tended to try to squelch authors like Hemingway. Nguyen's points, however, are worthy of contemplation.

Nguyen also doesn't address whether there ever is a reason to go to war. Can there be a good reason? Was it just to fight Hitler?

This book left me thinking (in a good way). A good example is in the final pages the books says "Even American tendencies against intellectuals, the elites, and the French ..." Hmmm. I've never felt America was against intellectuals. It has only been against intellectuals on some issues. And the French, well we love and we hate 'em.

The book has also lead me to more good writings about the Vietnam war.

One more point: this book is a slow read because Nguyen is writing about a tough subject and he uses some subtle descriptions (memory and unremembering, own versus other, flat versus round characters).

Note: Nguyen seems to be anti-capitalistic. He seems to believe communistic or socialistic systems are less prone to aggression. He feels the profit motive is a driver in war. I believe the motives for war are complex and although profit (or the preservation of them) has been a factor in some wars, it's not the only and not the major factor in most wars. He makes statements like "...onward march of global capitalism, military-industrial complexes, the dominance of self-interested political parties, the survival of nation-states, and the perpetuation of power for the sake of power." Perhaps I should substitute the word capitalism with trade???

This book will cause to to reflect on history and wonder whether Nguyen's statements are true or false to to what degree they are true or false. The problem with history is that (1) its complex and (2) every statement that seems to hold most of the time has a counter-example.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

National Book Award Longlist for Nonfiction 2016. Vietnamese-American author Nguyen makes a convincing case that the memory of war belongs to the victors; or if no victor exists, to the nation that best defines the conflict through print, photographs, and big-screen films. Americans lost roughly 58,000 lives during the Viet Nam War. However, Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia lost nearly 4 million. The United States has the Viet Nam Memorial, numerous books, and films like Apocalypse Now that pay tribute to the American soldier. Southeast Asia has little to counterbalance this; and yet, the impact of the war on their populations was so much greater.
I was unaware that the United States paid South Korean soldiers to fight in the War. Apparently, South Korea was so devastated after the Korean War that they welcomed the opportunity to receive American dollars in return for their support in the war effort. Nor was I aware that the South Koreans that remained in their country rather than traveling to the United States as refugees fared much, much better than those who came to the ‘land of opportunity’ to begin new lives.
Nguyen’s essays are largely of a philosophical nature, but they do make one reflect on the human/inhuman aspects of war. Recommend.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first watched Full Metal Jacket when I was in high school. I must have been 15 or 16 years old. Most of my friends had already seen it, and they would quote lines from the opening scene all the time. Sergeant Hartman, the senior drill instructor, eviscerates a group of Marine recruits on their first day at boot camp. He curses them in extraordinary turns of phrase, insults their racial backgrounds and physical appearances.

The way my high school buddies related this scene led me to believe the movie was comedic. It was funny stuff for teenagers, the kind of insults we'd lob at each other.

I always wanted to watch war movies, and in the mid-1980s a string of movies about the Vietnam war were released. Having seen the ridiculous Rambo-genre films, where war seems cool, heroic, and easy -- where one man can wipe out the bad guys with a single clip of ammunition -- my father made me watch Platoon to straighten me out. In my teenage ignorance, I loved Reagan, hated Commies, and believed that the U.S. could never be wrong, so we must have really won in Vietnam but somehow came out of it a "loser."

Platoon was the first "real" war film I watched, and even though I was just a teenager I was aware of the film's impact outside my small world in suburban New Jersey. The scenes of soldiers dying, killed the moment they stuck their heads up, shattered my imagination about combat: war ain't fun, and Rambo was bullshit.

But these new films were also supposed to help us reckon with our past, and they were my first "education" about Vietnam.

Full Metal Jacket: I remember the night I put the VHS tape in our VCR after the rest of the family was asleep, ready for the hilarious scene my friends had been quoting. Instead of laughing, I was dumbstruck. I had never heard such language delivered is so sustained a manner before. I couldn't believe that Marine boot camp might actually have been this way. I didn't know what to think -- was the drill sergeant's routine merely an act for our entertainment?

Then the second half of the movie left me exhilarated. Here was a film that was supposed to convey the insanity and immorality of war - and it did - yet it left me salivating for more war. Sure, the war may have been a mistake, but look at these heroes. Animal Mother, played by Adam Baldwin, may have been a psychopath, but he was right about those little enemy bastards.

And then there was the last scene. Watch: Shoot Me

The Marine squad, filled with rage and lusting for revenge, locates the sniper who has killed several of its members. The sniper is a 12-year-old girl. The Marines riddle her with bullets, and then stand over her dying body debating what to do: put her out of her misery or leave her to rot in a pool of her own blood, a kind of moral purgatory.

I did not understand it at the time, but the role of the sniper symbolized the American folly of that war, a war in which our enemy was willing to sacrifice its youth to repel the invaders.

The sniper knew she would die. First, she was supposed to decimate the squad of Marines trying to make its way through a leveled city, but this 12-year-old girl had to know her life would end in the rubble of Hue. And when the Marines finally get to her, their ambiguous reaction -- their unsatisfying result -- leaves the viewer feeling the same way. All this, for a girl? How unheroic.

But even a film as controversial as Full Metal Jacket can only go so far in undermining our love affair with war and violence. And as the Vietnamese-American scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen explains in Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, this kind of war story only appears to tell the whole truth.

Scenes of soldiers and shooting and dying "pump us up, get the blood going, that tell the 'truth' about war through spectacular battles and sacrificial soldiers, also affirm the necessity of war. This limited way of thinking about war stories is one of the reasons why antiwar movies are often not actually against war. They continually place at their center the soldier, and her or his validation, as hero or as antihero, persuades even some reluctant viewers to be resigned to war," Nguyen writes.

"They submit to the passive-aggressive demand to 'support our troops' if they oppose the war, for what ingrate would not affirm these patriots?" Nguyen adds.

Among his most potent analyses of memory and war is Nguyen's dismantling of the 'Support the Troops' mantra.

Nguyen: "The slogan's refusal to judge the soldiers also implies a refusal to judge the civilians. What lies behind the slogan is not only support for the troops but the absolution of the same civilians who utter the phrase. If the hands of the troops are clean, so are the hands of these civilians. As for the American dead, they have not died for nothing after all. This slogan has arisen in their memory, proving once again that the memories the living create of the dead -- and the dead themselves -- are strategic resources in the campaigns of future wars. Once the dead seemed to cry out against war, but now, just as plausibly, the dead seem to cry out in support of our troops who wage new wars. At least this is what the living say, and it is what the living say that really counts... The story of supporting the troops affirms an American identity invested in the justice of American wars and the innocence of American intentions. This identity is... the selective memory of a country that imagines itself as a perpetual innocent."

This is a book about memory, but not just the images and recollections that bounce around in each of our minds. It is also about the uses of language and the industry of memory: the publishing industry, Hollywood, museum- and memorial-builders, and the powerful institutions that disseminate the memories they produce across the world. In the case of the U.S., its industry of memory is more powerful than any other nation's, including Vietnam. Thus, Vietnamese memories of the conflict and Vietnamese interpretations of its meaning are largely lost on American audiences who read U.S. authors and watch Hollywood films, or visit U.S. war memorials where the other is absent.

Nguyen wants us to level things by obtaining "a just memory" -- a memory that recognizes our own inhumanity as well as the humanity and inhumanity of the other, the other's ability to inflict cruelty on their own, as Vietnamese did to fellow Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon. He asks whether a "pure forgiveness" is possible, forgiving without requiring anything in return so as to finally extinguish old resentments and vendettas.

And he believes it is absolutely necessary that we reverse our attitude about the "necessity" of war. We live in an age of Forever War, where battlefield victories are no longer needed to keep the U.S. war machine in business. This makes us believe that perpetual war is the norm and is sustainable, and that efforts for peace are noble but misguided, and fruitless anyway. In fact, perpetual war is neither necessary nor sustainable, and our only hope in fashioning a "just memory" relies on understanding that peace must be the default position, not war.

We must also recognize our own complicity in supporting the industry of memory that perpetuates war. We not only elect the politicians and support war-making industries, we buy the books, watch the movies, and obtain the products that make our own lives more comfortable -- the products of companies that also manufacture the tools of the war machine that kill others in faraway places. Recognizing one's own complicity should not be paralyzing, but cause for action.

Nguyen's insights and questions are important, but also depressing. Yet he seems to be a guarded optimist: while nothing may ever die, history also does not operate along a straight line of inevitability.

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Identifying with the human and denying one's inhumanity, and the inhumanity of one's own, is the ultimate kind of identity politics. It circulates through nationalism, capitalism, and racism, as well as through the humanities."

"...Kundera ... in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The laughter of angels, he says, is the sound of those in power. But should one always be aligned with the angels? Rather than just believe that devils are fallen angels, might it not be the case that angels are triumphant devils?"

"Is there anything more asymmetrical than air war waged against those without an air force, or a people forced to make a living by selling the fragments of the bombs to those who bombed them?"

"Culture, as Edward Said explains, is inseparable from imperialism, which can be read as humanity being inseparable from inhumanity."

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not long ago I read Viet Thanh Nguyen's prize winning debut novel The Sympathizers and enjoyed it. So I decided to read his non-fiction Vietnam book, Nothing Ever Dies (2016), while in Vietnam recently. It is a long and detailed mediation on the Vietnam War and how it is situated in people's memory. The book is organized in several sections: Ethics, Industries, and Aesthetics. There is a remarkable list of references throughout the book-some which would have thought to be tangentially related to Vietnam, but that coupled with memory broadens the scope of the book to make it very inclusive. Some references used by Nguyen include the obvious-references to famous movies like Apocalypse Now! and Causalities of War and famous books on the war such as Bao Ninh's The Sorrows of War and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Some of the more less relevant references included James Baldwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Milan Kundera, Toni Morrison, Elaine Scarry, Flannery O'Connor, Art Spiegelman and many, many more. It is very much a thought-provoking look at the Vietnam War and how it is remembered.

[Victor N · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings with this book and it’s mostly my fault. I did what I usually regret doing, reading some other reviews before finishing the book.

I loved the first chapter, and of course that meant I needed to look up all the 1 star reviews. Sure enough there was THAT review accusing the author of Marxist sympathies. I hadn’t gotten to the communist manifesto portion of the book yet so I was shocked (spoiler, there is no communist manifesto portion of this book, though there is some powerful criticism of capitalism). This is a book that believes democracy can exist without capitalism. As irrelevant as that review was, it made me think that the author mislead many readers. Nguyen believed there was a lack of popular writing in this area and aimed to remedy it. In my mind, a pop-accessible work needs to speak to the average person that doesn’t necessarily believe you; this work clearly speaks past most readers. It is far from easy reading.

The writing however is wonderful and even if you struggle to follow the jump from Solzhenitsyn to Dérida to Levinas to Butler to Fanon to Arendt to Zizek and many more in between, you’ll probably still appreciate the overarching message and writing style.

It wasn’t mentioned in this book but it reminded me that I need to go back to Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak. Maybe I have learned enough by now to comprehend that piece.

The most memorable takeaway for me is the concept of a just memory, which is necessary for progress towards a just world. He defines this as:

1. Understanding humanity and inhumanity as intertwined and perhaps inextricable.

2. Providing equal access to the industry of memory: wealth equity, representation, education and power.

3. The ability to imagine and want a world that values human well being for everyone.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

"This invocation of Vietnam as quagmire, syndrome, and war speaks neither to Vietnamese reality nor to current difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan. It speaks to American fear. Americans think defeat in these wars is the worst thing, when winning in Iraq and Afghanistan today only means more of the same tomorrow: Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, and so on. This is the most important reason for Americans to remember what they call the Vietnam War, the fact that it was one conflict in a long line of horrific wars that came before it and after it. This war’s identity—and, indeed, any war’s identity—cannot be extricated from the identity of war itself."
Nguyen is a thoughtful and compelling writer - one of my favourite writers - so this is always an engaging and provoking read. He is a novelist capable of visceral, emotional, hilarious and delicate fiction, but here he displays his academic credentials with analytical and precise language. Nevertheless, or simply because of, this I have a lot of complicated thoughts and feelings about this book, which may take 'some time to sort out. Possibly starting with the central contention that the Vietnam-US war can more be analysed as an entity of war than as a specific conflict about particular power and ideological ideas. While I get that, I also feel as if something is lost in the process.
It feels as if Nguyen is writing for an audience who have grown up with Vietnam as code for war, and it made me examine my own context a bit more. I grew up alongside kids born in Vietnam, who had lived most of their lives as refugees in one place or another. I knew Vietnam as a place and as a civil war long before I understood it as a war dragged out by the US and Australia. I also grew up alongside kids born in Cambodia, most related to Vietnamese, who had lost parents to Pol Pot's killing fields and took a different view on the North Vietnamese government. Of specifics as a kid, I understood little, but I knew that what was happening and had happened in those countries was big, and complicated, and hard. And that the hold it had on my friends was different to the hold it had on their parents, but different was not lesser. As I got older, I met North Vietnamese youth, with another different range of beliefs and perspectives.
By the time I saw Apocolypse Now I was a young adult, and hated the way it used Vietnam as the background to a US story, just like the military used the country as a pawn for its own interests. (the machismo probably didn't help). So I struggle with the idea that this war is somehow reducible to something less complex or less lived. And those ideas, which mattered a great deal to my friends' parents just as they did to the huge numbers who fought, feel like an essential part of the story.
Nguyen here delves into various pop culture and cultural forms of memory keeping to interrogate how the war is enshrined and reinterpreted. This includes, of course, Coppola's epic but also fiction and non-fiction by US writers and Vietnamese diaspora writers. There is less coverage by authors from post-war Vietnam, but there is an extensive section on the war tourism and museum memory industry inside Vietnam. I did feel, possibly unfairly, that the perspectives of Vietnamese who supported the revolution were given less space than other perspectives, but that may be unfair. Certainly, Nguyen argues strongly and persuasively for the importance of allowing space for all memories, for not fossilising 'flattening' memory into neat stories. It is this quality which draws me so strongly to Nguyen's writing, I think, his capacity to hold multiple perspectives and honour them. He also notes the problems of denied voice to those without English:
"While those who live in what the scholar Werner Sollors calls a “multilingual America” speak and write many languages, America as a whole, the America that rules, prides itself on trenchant monolingualism. As a result, the immigrant, the refugee, the exile, and the stranger can be heard in high volume only in their own homes and in the enclaves they carve out for themselves. Outside those ethnic walls, facing an indifferent America, the other struggles to speak. She clears her throat, hesitates and, most often, waits for the next generation raised or born on American soil to speak for them. Vietnamese American literature written in English follows this ethnic cycle of silence to speech. In that way, Vietnamese American literature fulfils ethnic writing’s most basic function: to serve as proof that regardless of what brought these others to America, they or their children have become accepted, even if grudgingly, by other Americans. "
The book, which shoots off in many directions, Nguyen less troubled by trying to push a forceful argument than by following the threads of what he knows to be real and then examining where that takes us. Some parts are just so pithily put, that feeling that you have always known this just as it probably never seemed so clear.
And in the end, the book matters a great deal as a reminder that, just as the 'truth' is not one thing about this war, it is also never one thing about our present - a warning that feels particularly important in an era where being in a camp can feel like a substitute for self-examination of the impact of our actions. For this alone, the book is worth being widely read.
"We must continue to look at the horrors done by humans like him if we are to learn anything, if we are to imagine not just a hopeful utopian future but also an alternate dystopian one where, if the Khmer Rouge had succeeded, Duch would not be a devil but an angel. This would force us to ask whether those we imagine as angels today are not simply triumphant devils who have written their own stories, in the manner of so many bomb-launching bureaucrats and elected officials with ghostwritten memoirs."

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

This non-fiction book by the author of The Sympathizer is a challenging philosophical analysis of war - particularly but not exclusively, the American War in Vietnam and its contemporaneous killings in Laos and Cambodia - and of the artificial and real juxtapositions that war requires and creates, such as humanity/inhumanity, warriors and civilians, actors and victims, memory and reality, "us" and "others", etc. Filled with profound ethical and historical concepts (I had to read many passages twice to understand them) and with the insights of many other writers and filmmakers (e.g., W.G. Sebald: "there is no difference between passive resistance and passive collaboration - it's the same thing"; or, Jacques Derida: "Pure forgiveness arises from the paradox of forgiving the unforgivable. All other forms of forgiveness are conditional - I will forgive, if you give me something"). In its essence, the book seeks to have us recognize the endless war in which America has engaged since the end of WWII (and, arguably, going back to the end of the 19th Century), how it is affected by our memories of war (note that if the 150 foot long Vietnam memorial in Washington had the names of Vietnamese killed on it, the wall would be 3 miles long), and how we need to reflect upon the realities of war and its lingering social and moral consequences in order to create pathways to reconciliation with "the others" and an end to endless war.

[Coenraad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Viet Thanh Nguyen delivers an encompassing work, moving between the deeply philosophical and the deeply personal. He investigates how wars in general, and particularly the war we usually call the Vietnam War, are remembered, memorialised and forgotten. What is ethical, acceptable, honest and proper? He looks at monuments, literature, movies and the pronouncements of a variety of philosophers and mines his topic thoroughly, convincingly and movingly.

Nguyen se uitgebreide ondersoek na die onthou, die herdenking en die vergeet van oorloê, spesifiek die een wat ons die Viëtnam-oorlog noem, voer mee, omdat hy nie alleen na verskeie filosowe se idees verwys nie, maar ook na sy eie ervaring en sy familiegeskiedenis. Lank en kompleks, maar beslis oortuigend en pakkend.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

So many important lessons in this book, about how to consider our perceived enemies, how to re-consider ourselves and our capacity for good and bad, how our identities can be actively shaped, how to really forgive and how to make peace present instead of just make war absent.

[Elaine Nguyen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I sometimes feel like I've spent my whole life trying to find out what it means to be Vietnamese. I don't know if this book brought me any closer, but it certainly gave me some tools for the journey.

[Nick Klagge · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book turned out to be a lot different than I was expecting. I had read Nguyen's short story collection _The Refugees_ about a year ago and liked his writing. I was expecting this book, based on the title, to be a set of personal reflections. It is that to some extent, but it is written in a far more "traditionally academic" style than I had anticipated.

Over the course of the book, Nguyen develops related concepts of "just remembering" and "just forgetting," considering how we as individuals and a society can try to relate to traumatic historical events in a way that does justice to those involved. A key aspect of this process is the recognition of both the humanity and inhumanity within ourselves and within others. Nguyen draws out a progression, wherein we first recognize the humanity within ourselves, then recognize the humanity within others and the inhumanity within ourselves, and finally also recognize the inhumanity in others (moving beyond patronizing them as eternal perfect victims). This was an interesting framework and one that I've continued to think about. Having recently watched the Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War, I definitely had some personal sense of this--in the early parts of the movie it was easy to idealize the North Vietnamese communists, but as events unfolded this became less and less tenable, and in the end we are really left with "no heroes." I also appreciated Nguyen's discussion of capitalist power over memory and forgetting, and the idea of "memory industries."

All that said, the writing style did get in my way as a reader. Nguyen is constantly referring to so-and-so's concept of X; while I realize that he is just trying to give proper credit, it's not very meaningful to me as a reader not already familiar with most of the other writers he mentions. (Perhaps I'm not really the target audience.) Pushing more of that stuff to the endnotes would have helped me. I also felt that he often quoted "catchy phrases" from other authors that didn't really add anything to the discussion for me. My favorite parts of the book were his discussions of his personal experiences visiting war-related sites in Vietnam and Cambodia. He has a strong authorial voice, as you would expect from a talented fiction writer, and I wish he would have used it more rather than (often) obscuring it behind a dry academic style.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Here goes take 2 at writing this review...)

This was definitely a slow read, but it played an important part in the path toward reclaiming my identity this past year. As the child of Vietnamese refugees, I’ve never known how to reconcile my parents’ (rarely expressed) narrative of the Vietnam War, the American account, and the official Vietnamese record. Over the last two years, I’ve grown steadily disillusioned by the Southern Vietnamese community, what with the blatant racism, over-the-top white worshipping, and Trump supporting in the name of unilateral hatred toward anything associated with communism. At the same time, I wasn’t rushing to believe the American narrative of saving SE Asia from communism, nor the current Vietnamese government’s propaganda either. This book organized these dialectics in a thoughtful analysis tinged with Nguyen’s personal experiences, in a way that deeply resonated with me.

Some takeaways:

-War isn’t glorious, and officials, the public, and the media should stop treating it as only a nationalistic duty in the name of some grand ideal. It’s an industry that churns on the blood of innocent civilians in the country of location and the complicity of the attacking army. We need to turn more attention toward film, media, and literature that show the other much less glamorous sides of war: the dilapidated war memorials in the poorer countries versus the mausoleums of virtue in richer countries, the refugees who will find no rest, and the everlasting nature of war.

-We only follow through with war by depriving the other side of their humanity and hyper focusing on our own humanity.

-Some pretty interesting descriptions of war museums and memorials in Vietnam and Cambodia to contrast with the highly polished pristine temples of memory in the US and other economic victors.

-Memory and ghosts, the dead who still hold power over the living through their demands to be remembered.

I also appreciated the very extensive and comprehensive bibliography of Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American writers and filmmakers. Lots to add to my shelf!

I did have to take off a star because the writing style was overly convoluted at some point.

[Trevor Seigler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Viet Thanh Nguyen has written two powerful novels about the Vietnam War, from the perspective of a nameless spy whose divided loyalties keep him from being authentic in his responses to those around him. Now, with this non-fiction work, Nguyen plumbs the depths of his own memory and the memories of those around him, as well as works of art, to reconstruct the war and look at its legacy.

"Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War" is an engaging, illuminating look at the ways in which the Vietnam War, and the country it was named for, has been looked at in modern memory. Nguyen, whose family fled from the conflict in the aftermath of South Vietnam's collapse, looks at various artistic representations of the conflict, as well as the memories enshrined in works of art from a variety of voices. He makes some great points about how the memory of the war is usually filtered through an "us and them" lens, with Vietnam and the United States as the obvious adversaries, while ignoring the stories of those caught up in the conflict (South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). Nguyen also addresses the influence of Korean troops on the war (South Korea sent troops to serve alongside the American soldiers), and the ways in which such acts as atrocities or bombings are remembered (and why some memories are faulty, or weighted towards only one side's point of view).

The war in Vietnam has been refought in books and art since the last chopper took off from Saigon in 1975. How we look back at this conflict (those of us in the West and the East, on either side of the conflict) says a lot about how we view the world. A gifted novelist, Vietnam Thanh Nguyen is also a great critic and cultivator of the historic record. "Nothing Ever Dies" goes to show that the past is never really past, not when we still wrestle with its meaning for the present day.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another in preparation for my upcoming trip to Southeast Asia. Although, everyone should read this. Over and over. This is a slow read; it is dense and there is a lot that you need to step away and mull over. This is a difficult read; there is pain and evil and wrong here in vast quantity. This is ultimately a book about the potential for a better future; we must imagine a different world and then seek to create it. That journey will be challenging and the multitudes will sneer at you, ignore your efforts at best and attempt to negate your efforts at worst. But it's a journey that I agree with Nguyen must be taken by as many people brave enough to set out on it.

I question whether I can be that brave. But this book will stick with me for a long time to come. I would like to revisit it, as I know there is more and more to pull out of it. And maybe one day, I will be that brave.

I also feel like this was great preparation to visit the places talked about in the book. My lens is different than it was before I started and I think better prepared for the encounter and more open to an alternative story than the one I've been inundated with in preparation for this trip.

Good stuff all around. Just do it, fellow readers. Just do it.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Viet Thanh Nguyen always has something interesting to bring to the table. I think this book brought up some really good, harsh truths about the humanity and inhumanity of both sides during all wars, as well as the asymmetric power of the industry of memory between countries. I definitely learned a lot and really enjoyed reading this book which draws from personal observations as well as academic and literary references. Nguyen also has a way with words, which I noticed in both The Sympathizer and The Committed, which was nice to see again, though certain sections were a bit repetitive and verbose.

[David Eisler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This incredible book was haunting in so many ways. It challenged my thinking on concepts of war, memory, and representation. Nguyen's writing clearly stands out as among the best of anyone, but especially in a complex academic subject that underlies this book. I will be thinking about this one for a long time.

[Bekah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took me too long to read, but very good—incredibly well-researched, thoughtful, & scholarly. Contains lots of good resources for further exploration, as well as many insightful reflections on the role of art/artists in working against war & for peace. My main critique is that it got a bit repetitious.