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At this moment of reinvigorated U.S. imperialism, it is important to interrogate anew public recollections of the U.S. war in Vietnam"the war with the difficult memory."1 As a "controversial, morally questionable and unsuccessful" war,2 the Vietnam War has the potential to unsettle the master narratives of World War II-in which the United States rescues desperate people from tyrannical governments and reforms them "into free and advanced citizens of the postwar democratic world."3 It is this "good war" narrative, in which the United States is produced as triumphant and moral, that legitimizes and valorizes U.S. militaristic intervention around the world then and now. This article thus asks: How has U.S. popular culture dealt with the "difficult memory" of the Vietnam War-a war that left the United States as neither victor nor liberator? Having lost the Vietnam War, the United States had no "liberated" country or people to showcase; the Vietnam War thus appears to offer an antidote to the "rescue and liberation" myths and memories. Yet, in the absence of a "liberated" Vietnam and people, the U.S. media appear to have produced a substitute: the freed and reformed Vietnamese refugees. Calling attention to the link between the trope of the "good refugee" and the myth of "rescue and liberation," I argue that the media have deployed the refugee figure, the purported grateful beneficiary of U.S.-style freedom, to remake the Vietnam War into a just and successful war. In other words, Vietnamese refugees, whose war sufferings remain unmentionable and unmourned in most U.S. public discussions of Vietnam, have ironically become constituted as the featured evidence of the appropriateness of U.S. actions in Vietnam: that the war, no matter the cost, was ultimately necessary, just, and successful.4
Through analyses of U.S. press coverage of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the "Fall of Saigon" (hereafter, twenty-fifth anniversary), I identify two overarching narratives: one that centers on innocent and heroic Vietnam warriors, and the other on liberated and successful Vietnamese refugees.5 In themselves, the narratives of noble U.S. veterans and Vietnamese American model minorities are not new. What is new is my insistence that we juxtapose these two narratives and that we analyze them in relationship to the cultural legitimation of the Vietnam War. Many American studies scholars have detailed how...