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On 31 August 2010, the National Public Radio (NPR) news show All Things Considered began airing “The USS Kirk: Valor at the Vietnam War’s End,” a three-part special series about “one of the most extraordinary humanitarian missions in the history of the US military” conducted in the South China Sea as Saigon fell. According to NPR, on 29 April 1975, the Kirk crew guided the landing of sixteen South Vietnamese helicopters on deck, saving two hundred fleeing refugees. Then, the following day, the Kirk entered enemy waters to “rescue” “the remnants of the South Vietnamese navy” (“USS”), a ragtag fleet packed with thousands more refugees whom the Kirk safely escorted to the Philippines. Although NPR recounts losses along the way, including the death of a refugee baby, the story has a happy ending: most of the rescued refugees safely and gratefully resettle in the United States. The riveting, highly sentimental series and accompanying online exhibit comprise one recent entry in the ongoing drama of national redemption that has swirled around the doubled figures of the American Vietnam War veteran and the South Vietnamese refugee. While both figures entered the American social imaginary as unpopular and tragically unmoored human remnants of a disastrous war, in recent decades they have—often together, as foils to each other—been gradually recuperated through a racialized, post-war archnarrative that emphasizes US rescue of a racial Other, followed by that Other’s gratitude (Espiritu, Body 82-83). Tales in this vein proliferate through a variety of popular narrative forms and have been central to what Ŷen Lê Espiritu incisively terms the “we-win-even-when-we-lose syndrome” (“We-Win” 329): the array of cultural processes by which American public memory of the Vietnam War has gradually transformed from a dominant narrative of failure and loss into one of humanitarian aid and ideological triumph.

Reframing the Archive: Vietnamese Refugee Narratives in the Post-9/11 Period