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  • The Impact of War
  • Jacqueline Alnes (bio)
The Broken Country: On Trauma, A Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam
Paisley Rekdal
University of Georgia Press
www.ugapress.org/index.php/books
160 Pages; Print, $24.95

In the numerous representations of the Vietnam War that have emerged since its end, many have fallen short of addressing the long-term ramifications. Paisley Rekdal's The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam is an exception. By weaving personal experience, history, analysis of cultural ephemera, and conducting extensive interviews throughout her book-length essay, Rekdal raises difficult questions. Who does war effect? And for how many generations? What challenges to immigrants to the United States face in terms of mental illness? How does trauma impact individuals and communities, and how might we—as citizens and as consumers of popular culture—be complicit?

The book hinges on a startling scene. In the opening pages of the book, Rekdal describes Keltin Barney, an undergraduate at the University of Utah, being stabbed in broad daylight by Kiet Thanh Ly, a homeless man originally from Vietnam, who yells "You killed my people!" and "Why did you kill my people?" In the measured, precise, nearly-lyrical prose that is used throughout the book, Rekdal describes the "thick blanket of clouds that traps the sun but blocks the breeze," and shows us Keltin, who has "lashes so pale they look white against his blue eyes." The moment, a public act of violence, is unnerving and familiar all at once. Rekdal does not allow readers to become complacent in their reading of the event. As she does fluidly throughout her prose, she immediately turns the moment into a point of inquiry, asking readers to consider not the surface of the story, but the complex psychological, cultural, and historic underpinnings that swirl beneath the surface.

Rekdal, early in the book, admits that "to write about Ly and violence is to write into a place of cultural speculation and possible fantasy . . . that blurry area in which fact and imagination collide, and perhaps collude, with each other in creating a portrait of a war's long term effects on us." Many of the scenes in this book occupy liminal space, trauma, memory, current reality, and commemoration all muddling what at first seems like tangible fact. There is a sculpture that Rekdal visits while in Hanoi, for example, "a hulking mass of incongruous metals, scorched and dented and scarred, the planes' spoilers soldered into ailerons," and propped on top is a "giant black-and-white photo of a Viet Cong fighter." As she stands by the structure, she emphasizes that the planes are real while also being a part of a monument that "appeared to morph into strange new images" the more she tries to decipher its meaning. The sculpture is "triumphant," "material," "mechanical," sensational, an elegy, personal and political all at once.

The Broken Country provokes similar feelings. The closer Rekdal tries to get to the idea of trauma, the more twisted the idea becomes. In her examination of the Vietnam War, integration of her own personal experiences visiting a war memorial in Hanoi, interviews with immigrants and their children, reflection on her viewing of popular films, and her careful effort to circle back to the tragedy that holds this book together, Rekdal deftly swoops between the tangible world and ideas such as cultural trauma. Vietnam is an "actual place" as well as a "symbol for masculine frustration," "a rhetorical device employed by senators running for office" and "a single word that we use as political currency." When linking narrative to trauma, Rekdal writes, "this is the paradox of writing about or even recounting trauma: the conventions you use to express experience may make these same experiences less actually palpable." Recalling a memory of a man compulsively repeating his personal experience of 9/11 at the Ground Zero memorial, she raises questions: "Did the repetition of that day ever heal his pain, I wonder, or did it just train him to be a better storyteller?" By writing toward these complex ideas and myriad portrayals, Rekdal successfully veers...

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