Body Counts by Espiritu Yen Le;

Author:Espiritu, Yen Le; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

AROUND THE WEB: “MOVING” MEMORIALS

In the mid-1980s, Vietnam veteran John Devitt of Stockton, California, created a transportable half-size replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, named it the Moving Wall, and toured it across the country so that people who were unable to travel to Washington, D. C., might be able to access the wall and honor the American fallen men and women of the Vietnam War. First displayed to the public in Tyler, Texas, in 1984, the Moving Wall has visited more than a thousand towns and cities and been viewed by millions of people. As it has moved across the country, the Moving Wall has reached a cross-section of Americans, creating a temporary site of memory for diverse groups of people—from grieving family members to proud veterans to sympathetic bystanders—to either hold silent vigil or come together with others to pay homage to the dead.59 In this section, I examine how Vietnamese online memorials also move, in this case around the web, as users and webmasters circulate and repost photos, images, and tributes and/or provide hyperlinks to re-direct traffic to various memorials. Like the Moving Wall, these Moving Memorials travel around the web, reaching a cross section of Vietnamese in the diaspora. However, unlike the Moving Wall, online encounters are not scheduled months in advance through an application process; rather, they are chance meetings with the disappeared of the Republic of Vietnam, which often lead to encounters with other ghostly aspects of Vietnam history.

An Internet search of my uncle’s story, using primarily Google but also other popular search engines,60 yielded thirty-two websites that feature articles and/or videos that commemorate his life and death. In many ways, my uncle’s life is significant precisely because of its end—his refusal to surrender and his public execution at the hands of his North Vietnamese captors. I discovered that these different sites reference and borrow from each other, circulating roughly—sometimes exactly—the same biographies of my uncle’s military accomplishments and public execution and the two photographs of him discussed above. According to Timothy Pham, webmaster of the vnafmamn website, the biographies of the ARVN officers had been retrieved from an English-language website hosted by a group of Việt Quốc members. Short for Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng (VNQDD),61 the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, Việt Quốc exists today only outside Vietnam and is recognized among some sections of the overseas Vietnamese community as Vietnam’s leading anticommunist organization.62 On the Việt Quốc homepage, one can click on the Vietnam War section and then on “The Suicides on April 30, 1975” tab to assess the biographies of these deceased officers.63 The page contains neither photographs of the men nor the yellow-with-red-stripes flag of the Republic of Vietnam; it presents just facts about their military lives and the known circumstances of their deaths. Thus unadorned, the page appears more as a somber history lesson than a hagiographic requiem, as presented on the vnafmamn website. In turn, the spruced-up content and photos of the latter site, replete with the South Vietnam

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