Looking Back on the Vietnam War

"Looking Back on the Vietnam War reflects on the half-century since the 1965 U.S. escalation of conflict in Viet Nam, asking what, how, and why we know about the Vietnam War. While the war in all of its complexities is written about from a number of disciplinary perspectives, those dominant narratives often tell a limited story, one often told in isolation from other disciplinary perspectives. Looking Back suggests we take stock of the stories absent from dominant narratives of the War, and that we do that stock-taking through the lenses of multiple disciplines and perspectives. Based on the idea that Vietnamese stories, both those set in the postwar Viet Nam and also in the Vietnamese diaspora, are crucial to understanding the Vietnam War, this volume brings together essays examining Vietnamese and diasporic conditions with those examining U.S. traces of the War. Looking Back also attends to the significance of the present in the act of recollecting as it reflects on the war's echoes in the current era of endless U.S. warring. The volume engages in a dual looking back--both in the sense of remembering and of reconsidering--to offer a fuller picture of the Vietnam War by showing the perspectives of groups and issues that have largely escaped serious attention in popular narratives of the war"--