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Joseph Darda, "Like a Refugee: Veterans, Vietnam, and the Making of a False Equivalence"

Abstract: In 2015, American news media marked the fortieth anniversary of the “fall” of Saigon with stories of loss and reconciliation.
These stories tended to focus on Southeast Asian refugees who had settled (and succeeded) in the United States and white male
American veterans who still carried their war wounds with them and, through return visits to Vietnam, sought to at last heal themselves.
This narrative structure suggests a sense of balance, that the liberal news reader was getting more than a one-sided, soldier-centered
remembrance of the war. But it also reflects the emergence of a wider cultural narrative in which the “dislocation” of the American
veteran––from his “innocence,” his youth, the nationalist fantasies on which he was raised––is treated as the mirror image of that of the
Southeast Asian refugee.
Building on the work of such scholars as Yen Espiritu, Mimi Nguyen, and Viet Nguyen, this
paper will investigate the making and meaning of this false equivalence. Whereas Espiritu,
in her much-cited account of American media’s coverage of the twenty-fifth anniversary
of the war’s end, scrutinizes the circulation of the interrelated “good warrior” and “good
refugee” narratives, the fortieth anniversary saw the white veteran become “like a refugee”
himself. Through a consideration of news media and “return to Vietnam” tour services for
American veterans, this paper will show how this flattening of difference has allowed the
white male veteran––in an era of an all-volunteer military and anxious discussions of a
growing soldier-civilian divide––to imagine himself as “refugeed” from American culture.
With then–presidential candidate Donald Trump claiming, in September 2016, that
veterans are “treated worse than illegal immigrants,” the memory of the Vietnam War has
once again, I argue, been deployed as a vehicle for white male grievance and, ironically, a
case for new draconian refugee policies.
Bio: Joseph Darda is an assistant professor of English at Texas Christian University, where
he specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature and media, critical
race and ethnic studies, and American cultural studies. His articles have appeared or are
forthcoming in such journals as American Quarterly, American Literature, Contemporary
Literature, African American Review, and Criticism. While serving as the managing editor
of LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, he edited and introduced the special issue “Literary
Counterhistories of US Exceptionalism” (2014). He is currently working on a book project, Empire of Defense: Race and the Cultural
Politics of Permanent War, that traces a cultural history of national defense and racialization––through state documents, novels, films,
memorials, and news media––from the formation of the national security state in the late 1940s to the counterterror wars of the twentyfirst
century. At TCU, Darda is a core member of the Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies Program and an affiliate member of the Women
and Gender Studies Program. He is on leave in 2016–17 as a Mellon Sawyer Seminar fellow at the University of California, Irvine.