A Campus and a War: Michigan State University and Vietnam Exhibit: Legacy

The Vietnam War had an enduring impact on American popular culture. During the conflict, this impact was most visible in music that became a soundtrack for anti-war politics: Pete Seeger’s “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Ohio.” Beginning in the late 1970s, novels, films and memoirs depicting experiences of the war became an important part of how Americans made sense of — and argued about — the conflict. Many of these works were produced by American soldiers, and they shed light both on the brutal violence of the war and the psychological trauma it produced. Tim O’Brien’s novel “Going After Cacciato” (1978) garnered the National Book Award for Fiction, while Oliver Stone’s film “Platoon” (1986) won the Academy Award for Best Picture; its promotional tagline, “The first casualty of war is innocence,” captured the spirit of much of these works. MSU alumnus Michael Cimino (class of 1959) used the war experience to explore other themes; he insisted that his controversial film “The Deer Hunter” (1978), among the earliest to portray the war and another Best Picture winner, was not about politics or even Vietnam, but about friendships shattered. Alongside these prominent works were others that reflected an ongoing effort to redeem America’s intervention in Vietnam. Films like Randall Wallace’s “We Were Soldiers” (2002) sought instead to cast the war along much the same heroic lines as the World War II films that had shaped the imaginations of many Americans who fought in Vietnam. While many of these works have since become classics of American literature and cinema, they remain almost singularly focused on American experiences of the war. Vietnamese in and outside of Vietnam have also produced powerful depictions of the war experience. The novelist Bao Ninh was 1 of 5 out of a company of 500 to survive the war; his work “The Sorrow of War” (1987), banned in Vietnam for years for its unflinching portrait of destruction and trauma, has become one of the most iconic war novels of the twentieth century. Most memoirs, novels and films about the war created in Vietnam explore only the communist side of the conflict, but Vietnamese Americans have produced powerful accounts of the non-communist experience. Ham Tram’s 2006 film “Journey from the Fall” was a watershed in beginning to bring Vietnamese-American experiences into broader cultural realms. But the most notable breakthrough work was Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel “The Sympathizer” (2015), which features as the protagonist a communist spy who comes to the US after 1975 and wrestles with his double identity. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 and has been adapted into a miniseries for HBO.