Disability, Vietnam, and the Discourse of American Exceptionalism

Abstract

When Michael Herr wrote in his famous 1977 memoir, Dispatches, that “Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along,” he signaled something of the representational crisis produced by the United States’ first military defeat (49). For perhaps the first time, the United States’ preeminent place in world history was called into question domestically. While the decision to enter Vietnam was underwritten by the discourse of American exceptionalism, the sheer violence of the war effort bore witness to the dark underside of American history¹ For people like Herr, the United States’ military destruction of Vietnam was not a historical anomaly. The tactics deployed by the US military, including the often-indiscriminate killings of Vietnamese civilians, the use of Agent Orange to destroy vast swaths of farmland and deprive peasants of food and livelihood, and the bombing and napalming raids that destroyed villages and left the landscape largely unlivable, resonated with a long history of American atrocities that the discourse of exceptionalism would seek to disavow. This history included the removal and near extermination of the native American population in the name of Manifest Destiny, the US slave trade, the imperial occupation of the Philippines, Hawaii, and Haiti, among other locations, Japanese internment, the firebombing of Dresden, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and so on.