Constructing historical narratives

How is meaning constructed for past events? How are historical narratives filled with meaning over and over? As Heer, Manoschek, Pollak, & Wodak (Reference Heer, Manoschek, Pollak and Wodak2008) observe, history as a retrospectively composed and meaning-endowed narrative is always construction and fictionalization. Historical phenomena as the result of social processes are borne out of contradiction, conflict, and the struggle over meaning. In this struggle, some events ‘will become carriers of consensual values and ideals’ and will ‘therefore have value as objects in collective memory’ (Heer et al. Reference Heer, Manoschek, Pollak and Wodak2008:1). The process of retrospective attribution of meaning necessarily includes conflict, since decisions are being made on inclusions and exclusions in the production of specific discourses. Historical narratives are carried and reproduced through discourses in history books, films, photographs, documentaries, political speeches, and social media, among others. Discourses produced in diverse sites through a multiplicity of texts and modalities make up collective memory. History—written, oral, aural, or visual, official, or unofficial, distant or recent—is always a ‘text’ of some sort. But there is a lot more to its textual nature. Historical narratives are constantly made and remade, thought and rethought, discursively, in a process of ‘multidirectional memory’ (Rothberg Reference Rothberg2019; Milani & Richardson Reference Milani and Richardson2022) that highlights the interplay and cross-referencing between memories and histories, while insisting on an exploration of underlying power dynamics and a recognition of our own positional entanglements in these histories.

The decisions about attributing meaning to select historical narratives impact, in turn, the discursive construction of identities, national and other identities, drawing on a wide range of collective and individual memories (de Cillia, Reisigl, & Wodak Reference de Cillia, Rudolf and Wodak1999; Wodak & Richardson Reference Ruth and John2009; Milani & Richardson Reference Milani and Richardson2022). Pennebaker & Banasik note that ‘history defines us just as we define history. As our identities and cultures evolve over time, we tacitly reconstruct our histories. By the same token, these new collectively defined historical memories help to provide identities for succeeding generations’ (Pennebaker & Banasik Reference Pennebaker, Banasik, Pennebaker, Paez and Rimé1997, cited in Strath & Wodak Reference Strath, Wodak, Triandafyllidou, Wodak and Krzyżanowski2009:19).

For this project we draw on literature in critical discourse studies that investigates the construction of collective remembering discursively (Pennebaker & Banasik Reference Pennebaker, Banasik, Pennebaker, Paez and Rimé1997; Wertsch Reference Wertsch2002; Heer et al. Reference Heer, Manoschek, Pollak and Wodak2008; Strath & Wodak Reference Strath, Wodak, Triandafyllidou, Wodak and Krzyżanowski2009; Wodak & Richardson Reference Ruth and John2009; Flowerdew Reference Flowerdew2012; Abousnnouga & Machin Reference Abousnnouga and Machin2013; Achugar, Fernández, & Morales Reference Achugar, Fernández and Morales2013; Achugar Reference Achugar, Flowerdew and John2017; Gounari Reference Gounari2021; Milani & Richardson Reference Milani and Richardson2021, Reference Milani and Richardson2022). Our goal is to make a novel contribution to the burgeoning body of research on the use of the discourse of necropolitics in war remembrance that has focused so far, mainly on textual data. In order to explore the discourses of Vietnam War commemorations and collective remembering produced in the NYT commemorative digital section, we are employing multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA). We align our work with Milani & Richardson’s (Reference Milani and Richardson2022) core assumptions: first, that collective remembering is a process, not a static snapshot of the past; second, that collective remembering is political in that it ‘lies in the heart of intersectional social identities’ and ‘ensures that the political past is brought into the political present’; and third, that collective memory has an affective base, it is ‘saturated with affective elements—from grief to anger, from shame to pride’ [4].

The New York Times Archive

The photographs analyzed in this study are part of a social studies curricular unit titled ‘Teaching the Vietnam War with primary sources from The New York Times’, designed for use in US classrooms (Gonchar Reference Gonchar2017). This curricular unit is an archive of photographic slideshows alongside original reporting (articles published by The New York Times during the war), first-person accounts, and teaching activities, underscoring its pedagogical significance. The photographs included in the unit are drawn from an archive labeled ‘Vietnam ‘67ʹ, published by The New York Times to commemorate the forty-second anniversary of the Vietnam War. These photographs are categorized into three thematic collections, presented as slideshows: (i) ‘How young soldiers saw life in wartime Vietnam’ (Collection 1); (ii) ‘Images of the Vietnam War that defined an era’ (Collection 2); and (iii) ‘Vietnam War photos that made a difference’ (Collection 3). Collections 2 and 3 are introduced with brief prefaces by journalist Ralph Blumenthal and NYT staff writer Joseph Berger, respectively.

Additionally, all three collections include captions for the images, offering contextual framing for their social and historical interpretations. Together, the prefaces, labeling, and thematic categorization of these photographs serve as critical semiotic tools that guide their meaning-making (Berger Reference Berger1973; Barthes Reference Barthes and Howard1993; Sontag Reference Sontag1997) and pedagogical use. This archive and its three thematic collections form the primary data for our analysis, providing insights into how visual media and accompanying text shape public memory and educational narratives of the Vietnam War.

Semiotic filtering: Themes, captions, and introductory texts

The photographs that ultimately made it to the archive have undergone multiple layers of selection and curation as educational material, most likely meant to be ‘representative’ of the Vietnam War. Many of the images included had already achieved significant circulation, garnered international awards, and attained recognition as iconic representations of war, including Napalm Girl, Saigon Execution, and Burning Monk. Additional choices were made at the very moment the photographs were captured, whether by American soldiers (Collection 3) or Associated Press photographers (Collections 1 and 2). Each camera click encapsulated a series of deliberate and inadvertent decisions—choices about framing, inclusion, and exclusion that shaped the visual representation of the events and the narrative.

Photographic captions also bear significant importance as they provide historical and personal contexts for the viewer’s understanding and sense-making of the photographs. Barthes, in Camera Lucida (1993), explains how captions shape a viewer’s cultural or intellectual understanding of an image along the lines of what he calls ‘studium’, the cultural, historical, political, or social framework of a photograph. While captions may contribute to the studium, they cannot produce the punctum—the emotional or affective element of a photograph that ‘pierces’ or ‘wounds’ the viewer, as the latter arises unpredictably from the viewer’s intimate encounter with the photograph. Captions may enrich understanding, according to Barthes, but they do not evoke the raw, personal impact that defines the punctum.

Captioning as a semiotic tool serves to situate the photographs in a historical narrative that supports the ideology of those with the semiotic power over the discourse, such as the publisher, the editor, the lesson plan author, journalists, photographers, and ultimately, the American audience. As shown in our analysis below, the captions achieve three goals: (i) with the language of brevity, they remove layers of historical complexity from the specific historical moments presented in the photographs, thus dehistoricizing them; (ii) with the language of transitivity, the subjects in the photographs (mostly Vietnamese) become patients rather than actors in their social roles; and (iii) with the language of erasure, they strip Vietnamese subjects of their identities and stories while inscribing those of the American subjects into the historical narrative and remembrance of the war. Thus, our multimodal analysis focuses on three aspects: the photographs, their textual framing in the introductory short texts and the photograph’s captions, and the semiotic choices made in presenting the photographs as educational material to be used in classrooms.

Before the viewer/reader sees and experiences the photographs, their textual framing and the semiotic choices surrounding them, the archive begins with an introductory statement and three short captions that refer to photographs not displayed in this section of the curricular unit. Introductory short texts are a powerful tool for situating the photographs in a historical narrative. For example, Collection 2 ‘Images of the Vietnam War that defined an era’ is framed by a short introductory quote by Ralph Blumenthal followed by three brief texts describing iconic photographs (not present in this particular section of the archive):

The introductory statement, established rhetorically in the form of a question, preempts an essential inquiry into what should really be remembered. It reduces a deadly war into a ‘quagmire’ whereby the ‘nation’ is used metonymically for the US political and military leadership and the social actors responsible for going into war. The nation is called upon to assume responsibility for early ‘missteps’—an odd lexical choice for talking about deliberate and well-planned military decisions and operations with human casualties.

Language in sentences (1)-(3) above universalizes Vietnamese subjects as passive, agentless, and nationless, employing passive voice to linguistically remove them from the subject position. In fact, in all three sentences the social actors are erased: ‘a monk doused with gasoline’, a ‘bullet fired from a pistol at the end of an arm enters his brain’, ‘while her skin burns from napalm’. Further, the use of indefinite articles a and an for the Vietnamese subjects creates vagueness and generality. The initial framing of Collection 2 also obliterates the complexity of the historical dimension in each story the photograph depicts. Ultimately, these ‘award-winning’ photographs encourage an uncritical consumption of the events, representing them as self-evident truths.

Semiotic control: Slideshow view mode and the juxtaposition of photographs

The presentation of the photos in three slideshows, corresponding to the three collections mentioned above, sets up a fixed mode of viewing that represents a linear, sequential transition from one photo to the next rather than a random browsing of the photographs. This mode of viewing, however technical, functions semiotically to sharpen contradictions, while highlighting similarities between the photos, especially those juxtaposed in the slideshows. In fact, when reviewing the three collections, we noticed that photographs that either markedly align or strikingly contrast, are deliberately juxtaposed, highlighting the stark contrast in how deathworlds and lifeworlds are discursively created.

Both sequence and juxtaposition of the photographs are part of semiotic control. They have a profound impact on how the viewer perceives and responds to the photos, or rather the historical texts that those photos generate/represent. In what follows, we present photographs that are consecutively displayed in the same collection in a horizontal dimension, while a vertical presentation will be used for those either belonging in different collections or in the same collection but not juxtaposed. Due to space limitations, the most representative photos from the archive are presented with their original captions (given after the collection number in the figure captions).

Two black-and-white pictures presented above of a South Vietnamese ranger (Figure 1) and an American soldier (Figure 2) are an example of the juxtaposition between different social actors in similar roles (soldiers) engaged in different types of action. In Figure 1, the social actor’s identity is erased. Its caption discloses no personal identification beyond the generic ‘a wounded South Vietnamese ranger’. The person’s face is fully covered in white gauze, leaving only his eyes and part of his mouth exposed, rendering him faceless, unrecognizable, and unidentifiable. In Vietnamese culture, the head and face covered with white cloth symbolize death—only seen in funerals. The memory imprinted on this photo is of a Vietnamese man, a ghost, invoking death by pointing the gun away from the viewer and targeting someone or something that is not included in the frame. On the contrary, Figure 2, with a similar black-and-white aesthetic and naturalistic background (a forest) shows a tender moment of life. It captures Private First Class officer Richie who, according to the NYT caption, kisses and breathes into a letter from his loved one—a rare and affectionate moment of humanity in the most inhumane context. The photograph is saturated with love, tenderness, and life and evokes feelings of relatedness and affection. These two photographs, while sequenced, highlight and evoke radically opposite feelings. In the face of love and affection, the deathworlds appear even deadlier and more brutal, even though the South Vietnamese soldier pictured is a US ally.

Figure 1. Photograph 5, Collection 2: A wounded South Vietnamese ranger kept his weapon ready to answer a Vietcong attack during the battle of Dong Xoai, June, 1995 (NYT Archive).

Figure 2. Photograph 6, Collection 2: Pfc. Clark Richie took in the scent of a letter from a girl back home in Jay, Okla., April 1966. A short while later his battalion took part in an assault on a tunnel riddled Vietcong stronghold (NYT Archive).

We argue that the photographs in the collections are selected, grouped, and arranged in a way that establishes racializing, (hyper)sexualizing, and dehumanizing Vietnamese subjects, as central argumentative patterns in discursively creating deathworlds. By imposing inhumanity on the racialized Other in the banality of death, the photographs highlight white American soldiers’ humanity. In what follows, we discuss the creation of deathworlds and the status of Vietnamese people as ‘living dead’ under three major discursive themes: dehumanized death, gendered death, and paternalized death, all of which we argue are inscribed within the visual and textual semiosis.

Dehumanized death

With death, human beings cease their material existence—their life as living organisms ends but not their humanity. The locution ‘dehumanized death’ might sound odd at first, but it is based on the premise that with death, one’s humanity does not end, that is, the qualities that made one human throughout one’s life persist. What the photographs under analysis do is dehumanize the Other, even in the moment of their death, stripping them of their humanity—human beings’ fundamental power to confront their death, and their right to existence even during their last breath. Two very distinct examples are presented below.

Malcolm Browne, the Pulitzer Prize winner photographer behind this frame, offered a personal account of his experience taking the photograph of Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation in an interview with Time Magazine he did at the age of eighty. Asked about his reaction to the event unfolding before his camera, he said “I was thinking only about the fact it was a self-illuminated subject that required an exposure of about, oh say, f10 or whatever it was” (Witty Reference Witty2012), articulating a professional concern, emotionally detached from the suffering he was witnessing. Additionally, Browne lamented the initial unfortunate fate of the photograph, noting that “The New York Times did not run it. They felt it was too grisly a picture that wasn’t suitable for a breakfast newspaper”.

In this medium shot, the viewer is a voyeur in a public spectacle, with no direct interaction with the people or the event depicted. Voyeurism denotes the unsettling relationship between the watcher and the watched and establishes a semiotic boundary between the subjects in a deadly (and dying) world and the viewers who may show empathy and/or pity toward the living dead, very much resonating with Browne’s positioning. In the photograph, the venerable Thích Quảng Đức appears as a passive agent of the action, being devoured by the raging fire. Other Buddhist monks and nuns in the background behind him look stunned in fear and terror—a memory freeze-frame, a fragment of memory (Sontag Reference Sontag1997, Reference Sontag2002)—while some are praying.

Life is present even in the deadliest context such as war or genocide. In this lifeworld, according to Mbembe, people exercise their existence—that is, ‘live their lives out and confront the very forms of their death’ (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2001:15). In Buddhist teaching, the act of self-immolation bears profoundly significant meanings distinct from a suicidal way of ending life. Self-immolation is a pure expression of a compassionate mind, fearlessness, transformation of one form of being into another, and of the sacred seal of spirit (Hanh & Berrigan Reference Hanh and Berrigan2001; Long Reference Long2015). However, those meanings are erased by the lack of cultural context and the use of sentimentalist language in the caption and lesson plan: ‘fiery suicides’, ‘burned himself to death’, ‘doused with gasoline’, ‘squatting stoically in the street’, ‘roaring flames consume his body’. Turning Thích Quảng Đức into a self-torturing subject and an extreme image of death creation, both the language and the photograph obscure the symbolism of life that is profound in Vietnamese Buddhist culture—the lotus pose that Thích Quảng Đức sat in purposefully, quietly, and steadily throughout his self-immolation (Hanh & Berrigan Reference Hanh and Berrigan2001). This highest and most noble exercise of existence from a Buddhist perspective is reframed into a radicalized extreme form of suicide.

Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation marks one of the profound moments in anti-war movements by Vietnamese monks in their attempt to call for the US-supported government of Ngô Đình Diệm to end religious suppression and the killing of Buddhist practitioners in South Vietnam. At the time, his activism was derogatorily referred to as a ‘barbecue’ by the Diệm government. Without the historical, political, and religious knowledge, the photograph is interpreted as a drastically radicalized form of torture, suicide, and sacrifice as the caption of Figure 3 coupled with the initial introductory short text presented earlier allude to.

Figure 3. Photograph 1, Collection 2: In the first of a series of fiery suicides by Buddhist monks, Thich Quang Duc burned himself to death in Saigon to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government, June 11, 1963. The photograph caused worldwide outrage and hastened the end of the Diem government (NYT Archive).

Susan Sontag forcefully argues that most of us (viewers) can be consumers and tourists of our own reality, including war and suffering; ‘But there is shame as well as shock in looking at the closeup of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it—say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken—or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether we like it or not’ (Sontag Reference Sontag2002:89). This very much resonates with Browne’s earlier remark that speaks directly to the Western voyeuristic approach to the Vietnam War visuals as a whole. There are different layers of voyeurism here: the audience at home watching the ‘living-room war’ (Arlen Reference Arlen1997) but also the photographer who was at the scene taking the picture that later became an icon and, among other iconic photographs, gained the dignified title of photos that stopped the war. Voyeurism connects with the theme of dehumanization, since a complete emotional distance and detachment results from watching obsessively from a distance the racialized other suffering, while this suffering presents nothing but a professional opportunity for the photographer. It is interesting to note that Browne mentioned that he took ‘about ten rolls of film’ because he was ‘shooting constantly’ (Witty Reference Witty2012).

By his account, Browne was the only American journalist at the scene that day. He shared that he had a good relationship with the monks in Saigon and had been informed of an organized movement by the monks. Despite this cultural immersion, in his recollection, Browne described the event as ‘something pretty violent’, and compared it to what ‘in another civilization, … might have taken the form of a bomb or something like that’ (Witty Reference Witty2012). This comparison aligns with the dominant dehumanizing interpretation of Thích Quảng Đức’s activism from the Western gaze, devoid of its cultural and religious meanings.

Part of our goal in this analysis is to examine our own voyeurism, so that we can move beyond being voyeurs and becoming ‘those who could learn from it’ (Sontag Reference Sontag2002:89). In this example, dehumanization operates beyond the identity level (Thích Quảng Đức is named in the caption) but on the level of consciousness. Necropolitics strips one of their control and engagement over the meaning of their death. In this case, it is Thích Quảng Đức’s deliberate choice of life transformation, a fundamental nature of all sentient beings according to Buddhist teaching, for anti-war purposes. This control over death is a defining characteristic of necropolitics in both its physical and discursive dimensions. It is The New York Times’ Western gaze that presents Thích Quảng Đức in a dehumanizing necropolitical discourse while stripping the visual of critical interpretations that would engage more deeply with the nuances of cultural, social, and religious meanings represented in the photo.

Taken on a street in Saigon in 1968, Figure 4 depicts the disastrous conditions of warfare during the Tết Offensive under martial law. The photograph, initially described in the archive as ‘An enemy prisoner grimacing as a bullet fired from a pistol at the end of an outstretched arm enters his brain’ is a widely circulated image of the Vietnam War and supports a characterization of the war as a civil war where the Northern and Southern Vietnamese slaughtered one another and killed innocent civilians. As discussed in quote (2) above, the language of transitivity erases the shooter’s identity while the murdered is identified generically as ‘an enemy prisoner’, alluding to the United States’ communist archenemy. In the caption of Figure 4, however, both men are now identified. The ‘outstretched arm’ belongs to South Vietnamese General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan and his victim is ‘communist suspect’ Nguyễn Văn Lem. The caption includes an infamous quote by General Loan, ‘They kill many of my people, and yours too’, in an attempt to legitimize and justify this killing through reciprocity: Using the topos of threat (‘they’ are killers) and numbers (they killed ‘many’ of our people and yours), there is an attempt to normalize and mitigate the atrocity depicted (Wodak Reference Wodak, Anthonissen and Blommaert2007). Such argumentative strategies legitimize the war on the basis of the ‘us vs. them’ binary. On the one hand, this strategy defends the act of killing (to protect us) while amplifying the brutality of the Other (they kill many of us but only one of them is killed and depicted in this picture). Such a binary built on the dichotomy, the ‘north vs. south’ conflict in Vietnam, works instrumentally to obscure the US nation-building in Vietnam that involved the bombing of the country and the killing of Vietnamese civilians. In addition, there are two layers of othering in this dichotomous ‘us vs. them’ discourse that portrays the Vietnamese as the politicized (Communist) and racialized Other. Dehumanization is a central topos operating across themes and with other topoi in our analysis.

Figure 4. Photograph 12, Collection 2: Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnamese chief of the national police, shot a suspected Vietcong official, Nguyen Van Lem, in Saigon, Feb. 1, 1968. The photographer Eddie Adams said that after the shooting Gen. Loan approached him and said, ‘They killed many of my people, and yours too,’ then walked away (NYT Archive).

Figures 5 and 6 are displayed subsequently in Collection 1. This semiotic choice of grouping photographs together once again intensifies the dehumanization and racialization of Vietnamese subjects in the frame of necropolitics. Multimodally, both photographs were taken from a close to medium distance but the interaction and social relation between the social actors and the viewer are contrasting. Figure 5 features a captured skinny Việt Cộng who is ‘faceless’—a recurrent pattern in depicting Vietnamese subjects. The man’s face is put in a sack and is unidentifiable because the caption does not provide any personal information. He wears a typical Vietnamese male outfit—a black blouse and shorts—so he could be any Vietnamese civilian featured in the collection. He sits on dirty dusty ground while his skinny hand holds his dirty barefoot. His head seemingly turns toward the viewer but with his head in the sack, the viewer cannot see him or interact with him. Semiotic clues such as the dark color, dirt, the sack, and his posture, evoke an aura of darkness, evilness, and danger. Next to this animalistic depiction of a human being comes a lovely photograph of an American soldier, Marvin De Witt, who holds two cute puppies against a backdrop of rockets and other ammunition (Figure 6). Taken horizontally from the front, in the photo Marvin and the puppies are directly interacting with the viewer by looking straight at the camera. He looks happy. The photo elicits feelings of youthfulness, innocence, and liveliness. It conveys a message of life: even in a deadly situation like war, life exists. However, this message pertains only to the photographs of Americans.

Figure 5. Photograph 7, Collection 1: A Viet Cong prisoner held for interrogation at Landing Zone Stinson. Quang Ngai Province, Vietnam (NYT Archive).

Figure 6. Photograph 8, Collection 1: Marvin De Witt with two puppies. Special Forces camp, Tay Ninh, Vietnam (NYT Archive).

Figures 7 and 8 present two photographs similar to each other in terms of the spatial dimension. They were both taken in a war field trench. What makes them strikingly different is the central action of the social actors in each. Figure 7 features Captain Roland Ball beginning his day—a symbol of life and its quotidian happening. His mundane shaving is (dis)placed next to an image of a dumpster-like grave full of dead bodies of ‘insurgents’ and a group of soldiers, standing on one border, looking down at the bodies (Figure 8). The dead ‘insurgents’ are identified as Vietnamese people and are by and large unrecognizable, dumped in mass, with many of their faces turned upside down. The caption identifies them as Việt Cộng, that is, communist. Synecdochically, the death of communists here could also index the death of communism. Due to the shot from afar, Vietnamese soldiers are a hardly recognizable mass and there is no interaction between the soldiers and the viewer. Meanwhile, the photo of Captain Roland Ball shaving and beginning the day taken from a short distance establishes semiotically a close social relationship between the target viewers students, teachers, and educators in the United States, and the social actor in the photo—a white American soldier.

Figure 7. Photo 10, Collection: Marine Lance Cpl. Roland Ball of Tacoma, Wash. began the day with a shave, wearing his flak jacket and using a military vehicle’s rear view mirror and his helmet as a sink, in a trench at Khe Sanh. March 2, 1968 (NYT Archive).

Figure 8. Photo 11, Collection 2: American soldiers at a mass grave of insurgents after a daylong battle against the Vietcong. The United States military reported 423 Vietcong killed and American losses at 30 dead, 109 wounded and three missing. Often, these official ‘body counts’ overstated the numbers of insurgents killed. March 1967 (NYT Archive).

Figures 9 and 10 strike the viewer with both the mirroring and the contrast that they present. They feature two soldiers in a similar pose and in what seems to be excruciating pain. They are both positioned in a halfway lying and sitting pose, with frowning foreheads and gritted teeth from pain. At the same time, they feature two markedly opposite pictures of pain. The Vietnamese person in Figure 9, identified as a Việt Cộng suspect, is being tortured by a South Vietnamese soldier who kicks him in the face (resonating with the civil war discourse identified earlier) while his hands are being tied by another soldier. The suspect, almost naked, and skinny as a skeleton, gazes to his left on the ground where there is a body lying. The American soldier in Figure 10 turns up to the sky, awaiting a medical evacuation. The caption of Figure 10 is written in the language of transitivity—‘A United States paratrooper wounded’—where the source of the wounding is not identified. The photograph shows the paratrooper leaning against a pile of boxes, while far in the background frame, soldiers mind their own business, smoking a cigarette, and talking. In both photographs, even though the social actors are in pain and shown as victims, the Việt Cộng soldier appears hopeless, vulnerable, and stripped of power over his racialized body, pain, death, and/or salvation. Meanwhile, the American paratrooper is typecast as a wounded hero in an elevated romantic mode of confronting death—a common trait in depicting American soldiers (Wade Reference Wade2015).

Figure 9. Photograph 3, Collection 3: A South Vietnamese soldier kicked a suspected member of the Vietcong while another soldier tried to tie his hands. October 1965 (NYT Archive).

Figure 10. Photograph 4, Collection 3: A United States paratrooper wounded in the battle for Hamburger Hill waited for medical evacuation at a base camp near the Laotian border. May 1969 (NYT Archive).

Gendered death

Warfare and gender structurally have an intimate relation to one another (Jeffords Reference Jeffords1989). In the necropolitical work, gender and sexuality decisively impact the positioning of an individual, a group, and even an entire population in relation to death (Islekel Reference Islekel2022). Mbembe’s (Reference Mbembe2003) conceptualization of necropolitics also draws on the hypersexualization of Black women as justification for colonization and racialization. It is on this conceptual foundation that we argue that the selected photographs render Vietnamese women as hypersexualized objects. Figure 11 below is a telling example.

Figure 11. Photograph 1, Collection 1: A U.S.O. performance at Fire Base Rawlings. Tay Ninh Province, Vietnam. November 1969 (NYT Archive).

Figures 11 and 12 are presented consecutively in Collection 1. Both photographs invoke a degree of sensuality and sexualization, conveying a message about gender. Figure 11 shows a group of young Vietnamese women wearing minimalist tops and very short tight skirts on stage—a stylistic choice very foreign for Vietnamese women at the time. The women are dancing in front of a male band, inviting, and entertaining a group of male soldiers. Their focal entertainees are two white American soldiers. The women look at the soldiers, their gaze away from the viewer. This image of sexualized Vietnamese women precedes Figure 12 depicting a shirtless young American soldier sitting on a war truck. The photo highlights Larry’s masculinity as he poses with his arm resting over the wheel, relaxed, smoking a cigarette, confidently gazing straight at the camera, and interacting with the viewer.

Figure 12. Photograph 2, Collection 1: Larry Diesburg taking a smoking break after filling sandbags near Binh Long, Vietnam (NYT Archive).

The perpetual image of Vietnamese women in an intimate relationship with American soldiers speaks to what Collins (Reference Collins2000) calls the controlling image of women of color through sexualization and (hyper)sexualization. Writing about gender-based violence, Collins discusses the (hyper)sexualization of Black women as the paradoxical controlling image that places them into the framing of sexually desirable animus but simultaneously threatening to social order and, thus, necessarily expendable. Lorde (Reference Lorde1980:10) powerfully argues that Black women (and, really, all women of color) were ‘born to die and no note taken’. In this sense, gendered control and domination fit into the necropolitical discourse. The semiotic choice in Figures 11 and 12 above recontextualizes these photographs in the (re)making of the Vietnam War collective memory by legitimizing the way that gender positioning is inflicted on Vietnamese women. Consequently, it justifies gendered and racialized violence perpetrated against them in the historical narrative of the war.

On the other end of the polarized discourse, Vietnamese women appear as perpetual victims—powerless, vulnerable, pathetic, and buried in dirt and mud.

In the NYT’s visual sequencing game, Figures 13 and 14 above are displayed consecutively. The two photos contrast in all aspects. The main social actors in Figure 13 are identified as Carroll Baker and Bob Hope, as are their actions—‘snapped her finger’, ‘led her across the stage’,—time and space—‘flight deck, Ticonderoga, December 1965ʹ. In relation to the viewer, the shot is taken from a vertical angle, symbolically indicating the power relationship between the viewer and the depicted. Positioned on the sideline, the viewer looks up at Carroll Baker and Bob Hope, the primary depicted social actors, who symbolically hold power over the viewer. Both photographs are in black and white, but the actress’s sequin silver dress, hair, powerful feminine posture, and movement denote power, independence, and control, despite the fact that she is also objectified by the male gaze of onlooking soldiers. In the background, a large crowd of sailors look on from the upper decks of the ship, some of them taking pictures, cheering and smiling. There is also a music band on the flight deck behind the two actors—the viewer can see a guitarist, a bass player, and a saxophone player. The atmosphere is celebratory, and nothing indicates that this is happening in the middle of a deadly war, presenting a sanitized, feel-good image that veils death and destruction. This photograph could be a still from a 1960s Hollywood movie. The practice of Hollywood actors visiting warzones dates back to World War II, and the presence of women as morale-boosting actors in a hyper-masculine space raises important questions about their representations as caregivers, supporters, and emotional laborers and as objects of desire—a form of soft power for military industrial complex propaganda. Juxtaposed to this jubilant energy, the Vietnamese women and children in Figure 14 are overshadowed by muddy grey damp. In horror, they look up, watching out for bombing as they are escorted by paratroopers during a US offense. Apparently, they are standing, but the lower half of their body is buried in the muddy water as they are crouching and hiding. The woman at the front looks frail and terrified. Terror in the actors’ eyes is the only motion in place. All women are muted and motionless. Time is still. The viewer could imagine the sobbing drowned out by the roaring sound of bombs and war planes. On the contrary, Figure 13 is clean, sanitary, and full of motion. In the sky, there is music, roaring applause, and a cheerful buzz. The euphoria depicted in Figure 13 clashes with the necropolitical dysphoria and despondent vibe in Figure 14.

Figure 13. Photograph 7, Collection 2: The actress Carroll Baker snapped her fingers at sailors cheering from the bridge as Bob Hope led her across the stage on the flight deck of the U.S.S. Ticonderoga, December 1965 (NYT Archive).

Figure 14. Photograph 8, Collection 2: Women and children crouched in a canal to take cover from intense Vietcong fire, Jan. 1, 1966. Paratroopers, in the background, escorted civilians through a series of firefights during the American assault on a Vietcong stronghold (NYT Archive).

Vietnamese women in these collections are mostly captured in the passive role of prey to the voyeur, unknowingly being watched, and representatively appearing as either mistresses or victims. In most of the photographs, they represent a homogeneous group—either sexually provoking (e.g. Figure 11) or pathetically vulnerable (e.g. Figure 14). Furthermore, most Vietnamese female subjects are captured in the horizontal dimension, resonating with van Leeuwen’s (Reference van Leeuwen and Theo2008) emphasis on the symbolic meanings of that dimension in terms of involvement or detachment between the subject in the picture and the viewer. Additionally, close shots signify a symbolically close relationship between the social actor and the viewer. However, taken in close shots and horizontally, the Vietnamese women in Figures 11 and 14 above are depicted one-dimensionally from an Orientalist angle: an object of desire or a savage.

Paternalized death: The emblematic victim and the father

The paternalistic discourse around the Vietnam War has been understood as a discursive framing that forges a child-father relationship, depicting the United States as the father figure, the humanitarian who protected ‘little Vietnam’ (Vesma Reference Vesma2022). Paternalism is understood here as a racial lens that sees non-European cultures as ‘primitive’ or ‘exotic’ (Borstelmann Reference Borstelmann2001; Frey Reference Frey2003). This discourse became instrumentally integrated into the pro-war discourse of necropower, justifying the US intervention and bombing of Vietnam.

Figure 15 is the Pulitzer Prize winner The Terror of War, also known as Napalm Girl by Nick Ut. It depicts a scene where Vietnamese children, with Phan Thị Kim Phúc in the middle, run and scream in horror against a backdrop of swirling smoke caused by bombs, with South Vietnamese soldiers holding guns walking calmly behind. In the photograph, Phúc, the girl who was torn completely naked by bombs, is singled out to become the ‘image’ of Vietnam and its people. This presentation, as Viet Thanh Nguyen notes, racializes Vietnamese bodies, turning them into emblematic victims—‘the way in which the victimized body politic manifests itself in American discourse, which makes no difference between representative and represented’ (V. T. Nguyen Reference Nguyen2002:112). The image of the now emblematic victim is further hegemonized through the language in both the Figure 15 caption and its description in the lesson plan. The caption removes Phúc’s identity, including her name and her story.

Figure 15. Photograph 14, Collection 2: Burned in an aerial napalm attack, children ran screaming, followed by South Vietnamese soldiers, June 8, 1972. A South Vietnamese plane seeking Vietcong hiding places accidentally dropped its flaming napalm on civilians and government troops instead (NYT Archive).

While the text in the caption of Figure 15 decontextualizes the featured social actors from complicated historical political contexts, semiotic control is powerful enough to recontextualize and reframe those social actors into a new historical narrative. This narrative reinforces the power of the US empire while depriving the racialized Other of their power over their life and death. The sequencing and juxtaposition of photographs as a semiotic technique showcases the deathworlds of Vietnam and its living-dead people in comparison to the lifeworlds of the US and its social actors.

The photo of Kim Phuc is followed by Figure 16, a photograph depicting a moment of joy when Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm returns home to a loving welcome from his family. The caption discloses his identity and personal story ‘He was five and a half years in Vietnam as a war prisoner’ and a ‘bitter’ divorce followed his return. There is a marked disparity in the verbal descriptions of the two photos.

In their multimodal framing, the two photographs are similar in multiple ways. In terms of the relationship between the viewer and the subject, both photographs present the depicted as active agents of their action—running—placed in a close social relation with the viewer as voyeur. Taken on the horizontal dimension, the shots imply a symbolic attachment or closeness between the subjects in the photographs and the viewer.

Despite these semiotic similarities, the two photographs tell two contrasting stories—one of life and another of death. All subjects in Figure 16 are agents of their action, running toward each other in delight with warm smiles, and wide-spread arms in anticipation of long-awaited hugs while in Figure 15, the kids are patients of the action—they are running away from bombing. The symbolic attachment between the subjects and the viewer displays very different meanings, with Figure 16 provoking a quotidian and endearing image of life—a father coming home as a war hero welcomed by his beloved family. Due to this semiotic control, Phúc’s pain and nakedness are highlighted and intensified, invoking an even greater emotional response to the horror depicted. Years later, Phan Thị Kim Phúc lamented the publicity of the photo that made her into a victim all over again (Chong Reference Chong2001)—a practice reproduced in the NYT.

Figure 16. Photograph 15, Collection 2: Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm. Returned home from Vietnam after five and a half years as a prisoner of war. Though the nation was euphoric at the release of P.O.W.’s, the feeling did not prevent Colonel Stirm’s marriage from ending bitterly the following year. March 17, 1973 (NYT Archive).

Sontag (Reference Sontag2002) reminds us that photographs do not help us understand but narratives do. Photographs haunt us. Phúc’s personal narrative of victimizing, healing, and becoming a loving mom and an anti-war advocate (Chong Reference Chong2001) is erased in this recontextualization that invokes a paternalized discourse. The ownership of her unique personal story is stripped away; and so, in this particular historical narrative, she is treated as an anonymous victim, torn by napalm.

In contrast, the symbolic closeness embodied in Figure 15 invokes urgent pity for the bombed children in the deathworlds whereas the father in Figure 16, by implication, has just come back from his mission to rescue the pathetic horrified kids. Within this framing, the narrative of the US father figure is activated, discursively and multimodally.