Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen uses the Vietnam War
as a model to critique the ways in which wars are remembered and offer an alternative ethical
model. The book rests on Nguyen’s assertion that wars are fought twice, once on the battlefield and
a second time in the memory of the individuals and societies involved. Accordingly, he calls for a
“just memory,” both to ethically remember past wars and prevent future ones.

The author begins by rejecting the simplistic ethical models that he believes are insufficient for
establishing a just memory. The first is the ethics of remembering one’s own, which portrays one’s
own nation as heroes while dehumanizing the other. He also rejects the common alternative to this
model, the ethics of remembering others. Though this ethics acknowledges the suffering of the
others, it views them solely as victims and dehumanizes one’s own. He argues that unjust memory
is further encouraged by national “industries of memory.” In addition to their war machines, he
states that all nations have a comparable industry of memory, which produces and disseminates the
preferred memory of the country’s elites. The American industry of memory is dominated by
Hollywood, whose films justify and glorify war. Like the U.S. military, the American memory
industry is extremely powerful and influences the collective memory of other nations. The
Vietnamese industry of memory, by contrast, relies on tourists visiting Vietnamese territory, where
its smaller museums and memorials maintain an advantage.

In contrast, Nguyen’s conception of a just memory incorporates two major ideas. The first is ethical
forgetting. The author states that forgetting is an essential part of memory and life in general.
Simultaneously, it can be used intentionally to foreground preferred memories. Ethical memory,
therefore, requires an ethical approach to forgetting to ensure that none of war’s participants are
marginalized or forgotten. Secondly, he argues that just memory requires us to acknowledge that
inhumanity and humanity are always present in all human beings. Often, we erroneously view war
as a contest between pure good and pure evil. In doing so, we assume that inhumanity and humanity
are separate and thus ignore our own capacity to harm others. Even if we humanize others, we risk
justifying war in order to protect them from perceived evils. To encourage just memory, he suggests
a cosmopolitan education that both humanizes others and makes us aware of our ability to cause
harm. In presenting his arguments, Nguyen draws extensively from other critics and literature about
the Vietnam War. To a lesser extent, he also cites examples from the Cambodian genocide and the
history of South Korea.

Nguyen begins by noting that he was “born in Vietnam but made in America,” thus his perspective
on these countries’ histories, most notably the Vietnam War, is often uncertain (1). While Americans
generally view the Vietnam War as a singular moral failing, Nguyen states that it is part of a
continuous chain of wars that came before it and after it. As a result, this particular war cannot be
separated from a long history of war, inconsistent with an idealized America. Vietnam has also
failed to fulfill the promise of its revolution. Both countries, he argues manufacture memories to
absolve themselves of moral failings. His goal in this book is to examine the processes of memory
and forgetting to help revitalize both countries.

opens up his 2016 treatise on memory and war with a powerful sentence: ‘All wars are fought
twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory’ (4). In Nothing Ever Dies,
Nguyen deals with the extensive ways of knowing and remembering wars in general, and delineates
the identity crisis that arises from grappling with what some name the Vietnam War and what others
would call the American War in Vietnam. The naming of the war itself arguably casts shadow upon
one aspect of the selective memory in remembering the violence in South Asia: encouraging
Vietnamese people to think of themselves as victims of foreign aggression and facilitating their
amnesia about what they did to one another or to other countries such as Cambodia and Laos. The
author regards such naming as the epitome of what he defines as the industrialisation of memory.
Throughout the book, Nguyen observes how both Vietnam and the US fashion war memories in
various memory projects which take the forms of art, literature, cinema, photography, memorials,
graveyards and museums. He suggests that the excessive violence of the war and the affective
impact on contemporary individuals exceed the national boundaries and defy the war’s official
dates, which have been identified by the naming of the war. Rather than limiting his vision to a
simplified reading of the nationalist representation of war memories, the author moves further to
complicate the process in which the war victims and witnesses relive and reinterpret the war’s
memory. By recalling the weak, subjected and forgotten people and experiences, and their
aspirations to form alternative memories and memorialisation, argues Nguyen, we can oppose the
dominant memory of the war, and create spaces for reimagining and remembering the war
differently. This gives birth to what Nguyen calls ‘a just memory.’ Thus the project forces the
readers to think anew about the Vietnam War and ponder questions of memory, representation and
reconciliation.
In the first part of the book, which discusses the ethics of war memory, Nguyen records his
experiences of visiting the war memory sites established in Vietnam and the US. More specifically,
he focuses the embodiments that are present and absent in these sites’ commemoration and their
functions in displaying the memory’s humanity (the salute of the fallen soldiers, the value of peace)
and inhumanity (the death of the innocent people, the violence and cruelty of the war). In his visit to
various graveyards commemorating the war heroes in Vietnam, Nguyen argues that these sites are
established to remember the humanity of the winning party’s own side. The geographical location
and the national affinity of the graveyards facilitate the remembering but cannot shadow the sites’
sanctioned ambitions of such memorialisation that exclude the remembrance of those deceased and
exiled people who fought for the losing side.

In a few memorials, however, the process of commemoration is blended into the ethical mode of
remembering one’s own as well as that of remembering others. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in
Washington is one such case. The visitors honour the American war dead, help heal the plagued
morality and reputation of American soldiers and recast the war as a heroic and patriotic endeavour.
The Memorial’s black wall, argues Nguyen, captures how the dead belong to the living as their own
but are also irrevocably other: the otherness — the mystery and terror of the dead embodied by the
dead — is inevitably shared with the living. Such remembering of oneself, and its evocation of
otherness, forms unique ways of recognising self and healing wounds of the war, yet encourages us
to overlook our collective ability to commit crimes of genocide and atrocity. Nguyen then warns
that the failure to recognise our capacity to victimise would not prevent the victimisation carried out
on our behalf, or which we do ourselves. That makes the S-21 Museum in Tuol Sleng a valuable
and necessary site to remember and never forget our humanity and other’s inhumanity, thus
affirming a just ethics of recognition that confronts the totality around us.

The difficulty of ethical recognition in an unequal conflict is compounded by the more powerful
culture’s ability to create designated memories and understandings about the war. Nguyen suggests
that the US industry of memory includes the material and ideological forces that determine how and
why memories are produced and circulated, and who has access to, and control of, the memories.
For instance, the helicopters in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) become a motif in
American movies on wars and connote sexual symbols to personify America as both terrifying and
seductive in Nguyen’s reading. The Vietnamese characters, by contrast, are often portrayed as
rebellious, savages and refugees, who serve as the collective object of masculine desire, hatred and
fear for the American war machines. In this light, Nothing Ever Diespoints out the pervasiveness of
industrialised memory in refusing collective memory in the inhumanities of the other from being
recognised.

in order to construct effective memories for the humanities and inhumanities of the war, Nguyen
further discusses the aesthetics and ethics of writers who write about wars. These war literatures,
especially those written by ethnic minorities, seem to be the perfect translator to show the public
about wars through their common use of victimised and minority voices. For the majority readers,
who can assume their own humanity and universality, these stories about others are highly needed
to recognise the humanities of others. Nguyen seeks to challenge this dominant positioning of
minority writers as native informant and asserts that a “true” war literature should insist on the
dreadful knowledge of the inhumanity that exists with the human.

If this argument is familiar from earlier scholarship on the war’s legacy, Nguyen usefully expands it
in two ways. First, he points out that the disproportionate cultural capital of US memories of the
war has allowed them to become global, often obscuring and marginalizing other remembrances in
Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. And yet, at the same time, he locates the sites of both complicity and
resistance to that narrative in Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian American cultural production.
Moreover, he notes that the Vietnamese government is equally invested in constructing and
propagating remembrances of the war that vilify Americans and justify the Vietnamese states’
postwar policies. In writing about American tourists’ tendency to reject the narratives that they
encounter in spaces like the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, however, he explains that
“these Americans are wrong in denying the truths found in propaganda, specifically that American
soldiers committed atrocities in Vietnam and that the rest of America never fully grappled with
complicity in them”

that Vietnamese refugees “tend to forget, particularly in public commemoration, the venality of the
southern Vietnamese regime, the violence committed by their own soldiers--who happen to be their
fathers, brothers, and sons--and how their sentiments may be viewed from elsewhere,” I remain
unconvinced that “forgetting” is a the proper term (p. 280)
Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War is a work of historical criticism and ethical
theory by Vietnamese-American ethnic studies scholar and author Viet Thanh Nguyen. The book is
primarily a treatise on the ethics of creating and preserving public memories, particularly those of
mass atrocities such as war. Nguyen analyzes the Vietnam War and its long wake of memories to
explain different ways in which people remember war. In place of the many common methods of
creating memories, which he believes invite bias and erasure, he proposes his own ethical model.
Nguyen’s thesis is that wars are not merely enacted physically; on a battlefield or in the air: they are
reenacted in memory, driving the beliefs, decisions, and attitudes of those who remember them. He
believes that developing an improved ethical model of memory will help prevent future wars.

Nguyen begins Nothing Ever Dies by listing a few common ethical models for understanding war,
models that he rejects because he believes that they perpetuate injustice. First, he introduces the
ethical stance of “remembering one’s own”; that is, the practice of representing one’s own side of
the battle as the heroic and just one, while representing one’s opposition as evil. This practice
engenders a tendency to promote violent nationalism by dehumanizing outside groups.

Nguyen contends that “industries of memory” formed by social, political, and economic institutions
that seek to capitalize on the memories people create – are responsible for these injustices. He
argues that every nation has an industry of memory, one that generally promotes the interests of the
elite class. He takes the example of the United States, claiming that its industry of memory is
championed by Hollywood, which glorifies war and applies a biased American morality to war
stories. He compares this memory industry to the American army; while the army uses force and
threat to dominate others, Hollywood uses the power of images and words. The Vietnamese
memory industry, in contrast, tries to exploit the minds of visiting tourists, utilizing small-scale
memorials and museums to subtly spread propaganda.

Next, Nguyen departs from his explanation of traditional usages of memory and traditional ethical
attitudes towards war. He introduces his own idea of ethical memory based on what he calls “ethical
forgetting.” Ethical forgetting is a principle that proactively affirms the gradual failure and
disappearance of memory and its central position in human life. Once one accepts memory’s
ambiguities and failures, Nguyen believes, he is better equipped to notice where memory is being
abused to motivate people. He asserts that the process of forgetting should be managed in order to
prevent the further marginalization of people who suffer through war.

Nguyen also argues that ethical memory demands that we affirm that all humans contain a
propensity for both good and evil. Traditional narratives of war always set up a false dichotomy of
good versus evil. As a result, our conceptions of humanity and inhumanity become decoupled from
each other, and we forget that we, too, have hurt people or otherwise demonstrated our evil.

Nguyen ends his book with the claim that we might start to improve our ethics of memory by
installing more cosmopolitan systems of education. The education systems of the United States and
abroad promote regressive nationalist impulses that teach students to be blind to their own
propensity for evil. Nothing Ever Dies is an argument about the future of liberal arts education as
much as it is an ethical treatise.
Decades ago, at the end of a devastating conflict, a flow of humanity, braving all dangers while
paying a deadly price, fled Indochina to asylum countries where they resettled into new lives, their
homelands branded into their memories. Their experiences—seldom directly recounted by
themselves but more so by their children, a generation further removed from the conflict—became a
barely discernible genre within a voluminous stream of works known in the English language as the
Vietnam War literature. This genere involves not only the written word but also a filmography
churned out by Hollywood, which has been viewed globally and implicitly accepted as expressing
the wartime realities, whether rendered coarsely as in the Rambo series or artistically as
in Apocalypse Now.
These works tend to be Manichean in their interpretations, predominantly concerned with
explaining how the United States, the most powerful nation in the world, lost to an underdeveloped,
formerly colonized country, Vietnam. None went beyond this dualistic approach which opposed the
(American) Self/perpetrator and the (non-American) Other/victim, ignoring the fact that the victim
could also be the perpetrator. None, that is, until Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies.
Nguyen’s work is a multidimensional reflection on conflicts in general and on the Second Indochina
War in particular, from the further removed location of memories; it is about how the Vietnam or
American War—the names are “false choices” (7)—is remembered, reflected, produced, and
disseminated, and by whom. The author explores memories grouped under three headings
—“Ethics,” “Industries,” and “Aesthetics”— canvassing a vast literary, artistic, and
cinematographic array produced in the English language. Employing Marxist dialectics and
influenced by the school of memory and forgetting, from Halbwachs to Ricoeur, Nguyen argues that
remembrances, themselves part of a thriving industry of memory, are reflections of a dualistic
imbalance of power, the powerful versus the weak, the rich versus the poor, the developed versus
the underdeveloped, as “memories are signs and products of power, and in turn, they service power”
(15).
Nguyen strives to be as inclusive as possible, including not only the voices of Americans and
Vietnamese but also of Cambodians, Laotians, Hmong, and others. He advocates “just memory” to
be approached “by recalling the weak, the subjugated, the different” (17). Nothing and no one
escapes his scrutiny, from the hallowed Vietnam War Wall in Washington, DC, to the revered Ho
Chi Minh Mausoleum in Hanoi, as he examines the underpinnings of consecrated symbols, and
shines light on the victims to show that they can be equally perpetrators, “human and inhuman.”
The author extends such metaphorical analysis to present-day “others” such as the Muslim, the
Arab, or the terrorist, who are supposedly treated in some circles “in the same idealized fashion as
the antiwar movement treated the Vietnamese” (74).
Nguyen’s work is a reflection not just on the Vietnam War but also on other conflicts fought by the
United States (e.g., Korea, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Iraq), explaining that “historically
intractable conflicts continue” because both sides see themselves as victims but refuse to
acknowledge that they are also perpetrators (73). It ponders racial relations in America between the
predominant English-speaking white majority and the varied ethnicities that have also settled the
land, and the problematics of writing from an ethnic point of view—be the perspective that of the
Vietnamese American or another ethnicity. Nguyen confronts the paradox of Vietnamese American
and, by extension, all ethnically based literature bound to a defining trauma as “minority writers
know they are most easily heard in America when they speak about the historical events that
defined their populations” (201).
Nothing Ever Dies’ strength lies in the voice its author gives to the disenfranchised via a lyrical,
impassioned style, fuelled by a considerable scholarship and coloured by numerous trips to Asia. He
demands that we, the readers, always remember “ethically.” While having “Vietnam” in its title and
a Vietnamese author’s name may limit its readership to those eternally seeking an answer to the
conflict, this work is very much of the moment—and beyond—in its examination of current issues
that are at the forefront of American society such as racial relations, identity politics, war, and
memories. While the work by itself may read as a philosophical discourse on “just forgetting,” on
Asian Americans and their fates in “the land of the free,” it conveys a touch of tenderness and
relatable fragile humanity via a filigree of a voice, that of the refugee child that the author used to
be before his metamorphosis into a full-fledged, Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer. His
trajectory of exodus, resettlement, and return to his roots make him palpably one of “them,” in
search of his “self” in his ancestral as well as adopted land.
Throughout the work, the author strives to be inclusive by refusing to accept the dominant
memories of the “patronizing, guilt-ridden” majority (196). This drive, while necessary and
commendable, is weakened by his attempt to step into cultures and lands with which by ethnic
membership and scholarly training, the author is unfamiliar. Thus his examination of the
Cambodian Genocide through visits to the killing fields reads as simplistic and reductive in its
interpretation of such a complex phenomenon, just like his desire to include the Lao experience is
limited by the scarcity of English-language works about such a little-known nation. Equally it is
sometimes plagued by facile, jargonistic phrases such as “the American industry of memory is on a
par with the American arms industry just as Hollywood is the equal of the American armed forces”
(108).
Overall, Nothing Ever Dies affects us all, whether we are students of the Vietnam/American War or
simply concerned by questions of “identity politics,” whether we are part of the first or second
generation of exiles adapting to a new homeland or whether we are curious about the “other.” It will
affect all readers who are musing about present-day conflicts, and above all, those of us who try to
remember justly.
Nguyen argues that the American War in Vietnam of the 1960s and 1970s can only be understood in
the context of over a century of imperialism stretching from the 1898 invasion of the Philippines to
the occupation of Iraq. In just over 300 pages that blend the history of memory, literary and film
criticism, public history, cultural studies, postmodern theory, and philosophic meditation, Nguyen
demonstrates the multiple ways in which the war lives on in a variety of contexts. This is a
brilliantly written and deeply moving interdisciplinary study of the unresolved memories of the war.
Yet the book’s greatest strength, its ability to draw from diverse fields, may frustrate readers who
would appreciate greater methodological consistency. Other readers may be surprised by the book’s
emotionally powerful conclusion, which urges an almost transcendental shift to a higher
consciousness. Specifically, Nothing Ever Dies argues the case for a “complex ethics of memory”
that will recognize the victims on all sides and fully examine the construction, reproduction, and
circulation of memory. While the book is focused on the legacy of the American War in Vietnam, its
philosophical implications are universal. Another great strength of the book is how it examines the
memory of the war from multiple perspectives. In addition to a generalized Anglo-American
position, Nguyen delves into the war’s meaning for Vietnamese-Americans, Southern Vietnamese,
Northern Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and South Koreans (though the Australian story is not
addressed). While uneven and constrained by language issues surrounding source material, Nothing
Ever Dies breaks important ground with its truly international perspective. After opening with a
very personal prologue and a brief chapter that establishes the author’s argument, the book is
organized into three sections of three chapters each, followed by a summary chapter and an
epilogue. An unashamed and enthusiastic logophile, the author peppers the text with witty
postmodern word play. Nguyen starts with “Just Memory,” an essay in which he calls for an ethical
understanding of war, specifically the American one in Vietnam, to establish a framework for an
inclusive reconciliation and forgiveness.

The first section, “Ethics,” contains the chapters “On Remembering One’s Own,” “On
Remembering Others,” and “On the Inhumanities.” In the first chapter, Nguyen discusses the
various cemeteries, memorials, and ceremonies honoring fallen Vietnamese. He contrasts the
impressive official Communist Party memorials with a defaced and neglected Republic of Vietnam
era cemetery in Southern Vietnam. He also considers the sites and practices of memory in
Vietnamese diaspora communities in Westminster and San José, California, where anticommunist
refugees struggle to be included in the dominant narratives of the war on both sides of the Pacific.
The second chapter begins with an analysis American memorials in Washington D.C., both the
famous wall and statues dedicated to field soldiers and nurses. Nguyen contrasts American
memorialization of its dead with American silences about the Asian dead. In a powerful indictment
of the way Americans view the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the author condemns the
“discourse of the Gook,” which presents the 58,000 dead Americans as victims while ignoring
3,000,000 dead Asians. In this chapter, Nguyen utilizes film and literature to prove his point. The
final chapter of the first section calls for a remembrance of inhumane acts. In an elegant discursive
move, he calls for all sides to recognize the other side’s humanity as they come to terms with their
own inhumanity. Nguyen critiques American films that place white American male soldiers at the
center of the story and use Vietnamese bodies, often female bodies, as plot devices to work out their
own demons. The chapter concludes in Cambodia with a consideration Phnom Penh’s infamous
Tuol Sleng genocide museum and a laudatory assessment of Rithy Panh’s films on the horrors of
the Khmer Rouge years, films that capture both the humanity and inhumanity of the Khmer people.
This is an example of an ethical memory. The second section, “Industries,” contains the chapters
“On War Machines,” “On Becoming Human,” and “On Asymmetry.” The first chapter argues that
as an economic and military super-power, the United States of America is also a cultural super-
power that uses its muscles to dominate global memories of the war. Nguyen considers a number of
American films in his argument about the weaponization of memory. Nguyen holds that many
Americans dismiss Vietnamese narratives of the war, such as Ho Chi Minh City’s War Remnants
Museum, as blatant propaganda while failing to acknowledge Hollywood’s promotion of
ideological messages. The chapter ends with a simple call for a recognition of American cinema’s
complicity in a larger war machine. The section’s second chapter explores memories of the war in
South Korea. Analyzing Korean cinema and public history sites such as Seoul’s military museum,
Nguyen internationalizes our understanding of the war and war memories. He calls attention to the
oft-neglected brutal history of South Korean troops sent to South Vietnam in a mercenary like
capacity. His insightful observations note South Korea’s actions as a sub-imperial power and the
ongoing complications of Cold War legacies. Nguyen starts the final chapter with the asymmetrical
nature of guerilla forces taking on an industrial super-power but then argues for an asymmetry in
memory production. Against the global appeal of blockbusters like Transformers 2, he presents the
various ways in which Vietnamese produce memories that challenge the dominant American
narrative. Vietnam’s museums filled with “weapons with biographies” and life size mannequins
being tortured, films with modest budgets but previously unheard perspectives, and tourist traps
offering kitschy souvenirs are an asymmetric attack on Hollywood’s hegemony. The third section,
“Aesthetics,” contains the chapters “On Victims and Voices,” “On True War Stories,” and “On
Powerful Memory.” In the first chapter, Nguyen uses a number of authors to critique Vietnamese
American literature and its struggle to form identity and memory for a minority group in the United
States of America. The chapter ends with a larger call to arms against the cultural dominance of
whiteness. The second chapter starts with the issue of authenticity and accuracy in writing about
war—arguing that true war stories need to capture horror, banality, and beauty—and then makes an
argument about the difficulty of refugees as ethnic minorities to establish their own identities on
their own terms. Here Nguyen writes in the genre of literary criticism. Importantly, he factors the
Hmong experience into his analysis. The final chapter calls for a “powerful memory to fight war
and find peace.” In this piece, Nguyen offers his notes on Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek (the so-called
“Killing Fields”) in Cambodia. He contrasts the poverty of Southeast Asian sites with the well-
funded Dachau memorial in Germany. Elsewhere, he considers provocative works of art such as the
photography of An-My Lê and Dinh Q. Lê. To fight for peace, he calls for art that celebrates
humanity on all sides yet acknowledges inhumanity on all sides. Above all, such art must speak
truth to power. The final full chapter, “Just Forgetting,” serves as a conclusion. Nguyen summarizes
the book’s argument as a call for an ethics of memory that recognizes the humanity and inhumanity
of all sides, equal access to the industries of memory, and a world in which no one will feel exiled.
In the epilogue (as throughout the book as a whole) the author inserts his and his family’s history
into the analysis, underlining the very personal nature of the project. While Nothing Ever Dies is a
brilliant work, some readers may have trouble with the repeated shifts in analytical style and
methodology. At several points, this reviewer noted a lack of historical specificity. Other readers
may be surprised by Nguyen’s larger mission of calling for a framework for global peace and social
justice. That said, the book is a stunning achievement.
In Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War Viet Thanh Nguyen, a professor of
American Studies at USC and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, reflects deeply on the mechanisms
of memory which have shaped and controlled the images and understandings of the Vietnam War.
He does not confine himself to Vietnam, drawing broad strokes across the Pacific from Korea to
Cambodia, across the Philippines and to the United States. In the same way, the book ranges across
sources from war memorials to movies, from novelizations to videogames.

This is a complex work. Equal parts philosophical treatise, historical analysis, manifesto of
memory, and memoire, it is hard to put Nothing Ever Dies into any conventional boxes. The book
is divided into three broad sections, each subdivided into three chapters. The sections are titled
“Ethics,” “Industries,” and “Aesthetics.” These are prefaced with a fantastic introduction titled “Just
Memory,” which seeks to outline the author’s ideas about what constitutes cultural memory, about
how societies divide that memory between a memory of self and a memory of other, and about how
he envisions the possibility of an understanding which crosses the barrier of self and other. “War”
Nguyen states, “grows on intimate soil, nurtured by friends and neighbors, fought by sons,
daughters, wives, and fathers.” (p. 18) If we are to have an ethical memory of war, Nguyen believes,
we must bring the self and the other, our humanity and our inhumanity together.
“Ethics” explores the ways in which groups build and justify policies of remembering and
forgetting. By delving into the distinctive qualities which are found in forms of memory through
the three chapters Nguyen examines cultural memory as products of a vested interest. This vested
interest, which Nguyen names an “industry of memory” works to create narratives of the self which
refute blame, cover misconduct, and glorify the dead. At the same time, the memories of others
become simplified and dehumanized, only victim or enemy. The result, according to Nguyen, is
that the industry of memory seeks to create a history of humanity that ignores the inhumanities
which are committed during war. He ties this need for recognition of inhumanities to his core
principle of an ethical “just memory”.
The second section, “Industries,” examines the ways in which these narratives of memory are
created and distributed. The author identifies the camera, the screen, and written word as vital parts
of the war machine. Nguyen looks deeply into the examples provided by American films of the
Vietnam War, Nguyen seeks an explanation of how the acts of killing, raping, and pillaging are
glorified on the screen, largely separated from the identities of the individuals upon whom these
acts are committed. He also takes an original, if somewhat controversial among some circles, tack
of including videogames in the sphere of war machines. First Person Shooters, in particular, he
explains, are, “built on the aesthetics of sweat and viscera and is about identifying one’s self with
the shooter and feeling the joy and excitement of participating in slaughter.” (pg. 111)
The final section, “Aesthetics,” examines how all of this is delivered to the public. The chapters
“On Victims and Voices”, “On True War Stories”, and “On Powerful Memory” spend much time
looking at the forms of art which Vietnamese, Americans, and Vietnamese Americans use to capture
their concepts of self, other, and war. Wars, Nguyen posits, creates deep reverberations in the spirits
of those who are affected by them for generations afterwards. Looking at the writing of his
contemporaries he says, “the odor and the flickering shadow of war’s burning corpse still haunts
Vietnamese American literature.” (pg. 213) The results, for Nguyen, are war stories used to capture
elements of warfare, both vital to the furtherance of violence and deeply rooted in the memories of
the wars which have passed. He examines the critics of war stories, soldier-writer, and the refugee-
writer, showing the relationships each has to the self in war, and the self after war. The crux of the
true war story according to Nguyen lies in insisting, “on this dreadful knowledge of the inhumanity
which exists in the human.” (pg. 236)
In all, this book is compelling and difficult. It challenges many conventions of memory and
understandings of conflicts, nationhood, and collective memory by insisting that these are ideas that
have been built, bought, and sold by each side. In this sense, memories are inherently political for
Nguyen, and he infuses this broadly philosophical outline with his own travels and photographs
across Southeast Asia. Nothing Ever Dies is most certainly a scholarly work, drawing from a wide
swath of philosophical schools and delivering tangled and sometimes challenging problems in
confronting warfare and its aftermath. By drawing heavily on a range of cultural examples and
biographical excerpts he builds a work that is not only readable, but deeply engaging.