In the nearly forty years since the Vietnam War ended, historians, journalists, and participants have created a body of scholarship on the conflict that is as politically charged as was the war itself. The extent to which the US government deceived its citizens and the world about its foreign policies, the shocking images of carnage that television and magazines brought into the homes of millions of citizens, and the global uprisings of oppressed peoples converged in Vietnam to reveal what many observers considered to be examples of post-1945 neocolonial capitalist domination. To a generation disillusioned by the Cold War international milieu, the victory of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and the National Liberation Front over the US military, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), and their allies was a watershed moment that exposed both the brutality and the limits of American power. Writers from this perspective established what is now known as the “orthodox” school of Vietnam War historiography, which remains in tension with the smaller body of “revisionist” literature. Revisionist scholars have primarily argued that the US war in Vietnam was justified and that the US could have won had Congress and the American public not given up the fight.

Until recently, writers in both schools have tended to focus on the US and its war against North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front. Marilyn Young's highly respected, now-canonical monograph, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990, an exemplar of the orthodox perspective, examines the US military intervention in the context of a much longer Vietnamese struggle for independence. Mark Moyar's controversial Triumph Forsaken, one of the best-known revisionist texts, argues that the US squandered a series of opportunities to win in Vietnam, most specifically by turning its back on President Ngo Dinh Diem. Debates between scholars have, at times, devolved into polemical mudslinging, most famously between Robert Buzzanco and Keith Taylor in 2006. New scholarship on the conflict, especially works grounded in Vietnamese sources, has begun to move the conversation away from the ideologically charged dichotomy between the orthodox and revisionist approaches. Pierre Asselin, Mark Bradley, Philip Catton, Jessica Chapman, Edward Miller, Lien-Hang Nguyen, and Nu-Anh Tran are leading this shift, which promises to clarify our understanding of the Vietnam War by muddling the stark contrasts that characterize the conventional wisdom of the orthodox and revisionist schools. These scholars remind us that the Vietnam War was part of Vietnamese history as well as US history, a fact that ironically often has appeared to be lost on writers of the previous schools, most of whom have had little training in Vietnamese history, culture, or language. Viewing the Vietnam War as Vietnamese history includes incorporating voices from the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), which scholarly efforts to either criticize or justify US intervention have marginalized.

As historians increasingly turn their attention to the end of the war and its legacies, they have opportunities to continue dismantling the orthodox–revisionist polarity by incorporating multiple perspectives into the long Vietnam War narrative. To that end, Scott Laderman and Edwin Martini have edited an important collection of essays analyzing the ways in which Americans and Vietnamese have remembered the conflict. From Vietnamese war memorials to the naming of the conflict (Was it the “Vietnam War”? The “Viet Nam War”? The “Second Indochina War”? The “American War”? Something else?), ways of looking back at the war have served to define the conflict, the victims, and the consequences, the editors and contributors contend. This collection advances the conversation about the post-1975 era and takes a transnational approach to understanding the war's consequences. In doing so, the editors hope to counteract the “historical amnesia” that allows nations to construct fantasies about winners and losers, failure and success.

The volume consists of eleven essays covering topics such as the “Vietnam Syndrome,” postwar Vietnamese cinema, the legacies of Agent Orange, Vietnamese environmentalism, and the American POW/MIA controversy. Much of what is contained in the collection is new and interesting. Christina Schwenkel brings together the voices of American, Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) veterans, three groups who rarely have been studied side by side, in an innovative examination of their commemorative practices. She argues that the practices offer spaces for healing and reconciliation, and that, through acts of remembering war dead, some American and Vietnamese veterans have developed a sense of empathy with each other that can further larger processes of national and international reconciliation. Looking at reconciliation from a different angle, Diane Niblack Fox compares American, Korean, and Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange and reveals similarities in the psychological trauma the victims experienced. Her findings suggest that a transnational approach to suffering might open up a space for reconciliation and redemption.

Moving the chronology back to the final years of the war, Ngo Vinh Long examines political repression in the last two years of the Republic of Vietnam's existence, arguing that by stifling pluralism, the Saigon government set the stage for a more difficult reunification process. Mariam B. Lam analyzes contemporary Vietnamese films to understand how Vietnamese filmmakers have attempted to make sense of the war and to craft a “postsocialist” cultural identity. Faced with a global market that includes competition from American and Korean filmmakers, efforts to build a viable Vietnamese film industry have highlighted the possibilities and limits of Vietnam's entry into the international economy. Scott Laderman's chapter on efforts by US southern lawmakers to prevent Americans from buying imported Vietnamese catfish argues that the “catfish wars” illustrate a contradiction in America's global economic policies. The US endorsed free-market capitalism only insofar as it did not threaten US economic hegemony, Laderman argues, and some policymakers viewed Vietnamese catfish, like Vietnamese communism decades earlier, as something to be stopped. In a scathing indictment of America's “POW/MIA invention,” H. Bruce Franklin describes how multiple US presidential administrations and other politicians perpetuated the notion that American prisoners remained in Vietnam in order to justify continued fighting, overshadow US and ARVN uses of torture, rationalize a postwar embargo of Vietnam, and discredit political opponents. These essays and others in the collection have established a solid foundation upon which historians can build future scholarship on the legacies of the Vietnam War.

Authored by respected scholars in the fields of history, anthropology, literature, Asian studies, English, and American studies, the individual chapters offer a fascinating diversity of approaches, rigorous research, and compelling arguments. However, by not including essays on topics such as postwar reeducation camps, the devastating impact of the “new economic zones” land reallocation plan, the experiences of Vietnamese refugees, and the repressive nature of the post-1975 Vietnamese government, this collection misses an opportunity to offer a full account of the war's impact. It is as though acknowledging the faults of the postwar Vietnamese government might be misconstrued as an attempt to vindicate the American war and risk being labeled “revisionist.” Not all Vietnamese remember 30 April 1975 as “Victory Day,” but that does not mean that they were pro-US intervention. For the Vietnamese, one of the central struggles of the Vietnam War was over what Vietnam's postcolonial national identity and political structure would be. When the war ended, those on the losing side of that battle faced life-shattering consequences, such as the separation of families, political imprisonment, and exile. Ignoring the Vietnamese “losing side” (to play on the English translation of the title of Huy Duc's account of post-1975 Vietnam, The Winning Side) in postwar studies suggests an alignment with the orthodox camp, which typically has viewed the Vietnam War as a fight between the US and Vietnamese communist nationalists. Orthodox histories generally do not consider that there were multiple attitudes among Vietnamese about the future of an independent Vietnam that were neither pro-American nor pro-communist. Histories of the post-1975 period that do not consider these experiences illustrate a reluctance to move beyond the orthodox–revisionist polarity and will not remedy the historical amnesia that the editors of this collection hope to counteract. To be sure, this is a needed addition to the Vietnam War and postwar historiography, and hopefully scholars will use it as a starting point for deconstructing the conventional wisdom that has shaped the memory of the war and its aftermath for the past four decades.