War dead, trauma, and care: the differential reintegration of Vietnamese former combatants

Abstract

This paper explores how Vietnamese former combatants navigate and contest the infrastructure of care and recognition (or lack thereof) for veterans, their families, and the war dead in postwar Vietnam. It examines efforts by veterans to establish their socio-political standing through acts of claim-making, including spiritual care for the dead. We argue that through these acts of claim-making, veterans forge an alternative modality of veteranhood based not simply on state-recognised war contributions, but also on moral commitments to social justice and care for the fallen and their bereaved families in the postwar period.

Following the end of the Vietnam-American War in 1975, Vietnamese former combatants found themselves needing to navigate a volatile political and economic environment. In the immediate postwar period, the economy of the newly unified Vietnam was stagnant, as the communist government implemented broad domestic collectivisation policies, while relying on assistance from the Soviet Union and China.¹ Vietnam’s subsequent involvement in Cambodia in 1978 and the border war with China in 1979 created further strains on the country’s postwar economy and fragile international diplomatic relationships. In the late 1980s, facing pressures within the country for economic transformation and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Vietnamese state implemented a series of economic reforms, known as Đổi mới (Renovation), resulting in Vietnam’s opening up to the global market economy. While the reforms led to the gradual development of the private sector and increased access to globalised cultural and economic resources, they engendered new forms of social inequalities.²

For many Vietnamese former combatants, these dramatic socio-economic and political transformations translated not only to socio-economic hardship, but also to concerns and anxieties about how to establish themselves in the postwar context. Political distinctions between North and South Vietnam, both in the immediate postwar period and until now more than forty years after the war, have resulted in drastically different experiences and trajectories for former combatants. Vietnamese soldiers who fought for North Vietnam have been respected and given state benefits, while combatants of South Vietnam have experienced discrimination and marginalisation. Moreover, even among soldiers eligible for welfare support, these forms of state assistance were not distributed equally, and often they were not sufficient in addressing socio-economic problems that veterans had to confront.³

In this article we investigate the question of how Vietnamese veterans navigate postwar changes in the face of multiple difficulties. We do so by foregrounding one element often overlooked in research on veterans’ postwar integration, namely religion. We present two case studies of two former combatants – one for the northern People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and the other for the southern Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) – who in the postwar period performed spiritual and ritual work to commemorate the fallen and missing-in-action (MIA) soldiers and console bereaved families.⁴ By presenting these two cases, we highlight the differences between the postwar experiences of former combatants from two sides of the war. Wartime experiences, affiliations, and relationships, as revealed in these two case studies, continue to influence former combatants’ endeavours to establish themselves socially, economically, and spiritually in the postwar context. More importantly, our cases show the similar role of religion in the formation and course of veterans’ postwar trajectories. In these case studies, we examine how engagement in religious/spiritual activities and networks can facilitate a level of psychological healing, socio-economic success, as well as social justice. Through religious imaginaries and practices, we argue, former combatants can forge alternative forms of citizenship and veteranhood – including those that might not be recognised by the postwar Vietnamese state – while making claims about the cost and aftermath of warfare.

By paying attention to religion, we contribute to the recent anthropological critiques of the notion of ‘reintegration’ commonly used in the development and humanitarianism literature. As Nikkie Wiegnik astutely observes in her ethnography of former guerrillas in Mozambique, reintegration ‘assumes the return to a status quo in which “integration” is presupposed’, while implying that the social and military contexts, as well as the wartime and postwar periods, are separate.⁵ As such, the framing of reintegration can obscure ‘processes and relationships that unfolded during the war and continued into the postwar period as well’.⁶ By engaging in a spiritual economy around telepathy used in searching for the remains of MIA soldiers of the PAVN and ritual commemoration for the marginalised ARVN dead respectively, the two veterans discussed here position themselves as a connection between the past and the present, the wartime and the postwar, and the religious/spiritual and the secular.

Postwar veteran welfare: a contentious issue

Before we go into the specific case studies, it is instructive to examine briefly the different pathways for former combatants to establish themselves following the end of the Vietnam-American war. Vietnam’s stagnant postwar, collectivised economy from 1975 to the mid-1980s posed serious socio-economic challenges to demobilised soldiers and their families. Confronted with a lack of economic and employment opportunities, many former combatants and their families participated in different state economic mobility programs, including the ‘building new economic zones’ (xây dựng vùng kinh tế mới) and ‘clearing the wilderness’ (khai hoang) programs, as well as visiting worker programs, while others engaged in smuggling and other aspects of the informal economy.

For many PAVN soldiers, within the framework of the state economic programs, they and their families were relocated to remote areas up in the highlands, to coastal regions and islands, or to underpopulated areas in an effort to foster the economic potential of these areas, particularly in agriculture.⁷ These programs also served the goal of maintaining political stability, as local communist cadres continued to monitor and manage political dissidents. Besides these programs of domestic migration, young Vietnamese from families of PAVN veterans and martyrs were also given the opportunities to become contract workers in East Germany and the Soviet Union.⁸ These programs allowed revolutionary veterans and their families to draw on their war experiences as social and political capital to achieve new economic opportunities.

For those who fought for the southern Republic of Vietnam, the immediate postwar years were experienced very differently. Besides ARVN military personnel’s being stripped of the many benefits that they had received, including titles, salaries, and other welfare benefits under the Republic of Vietnam government, several hundred thousand ARVN officers, soldiers, and governmental officials were sent to re-education camps.⁹ While ARVN soldiers spent a few months in the camps, higher-ranking officers and governmental officials could stay more than a decade. Within these camps, members of the ‘puppet regime’ were forced to do hard manual labour under strenuous circumstances, take classes on communist ideology, while being underfed and not receiving proper medical care.¹⁰ Outside of these camps, many families of those affiliated with the ARVN and the South Vietnam government witnessed their properties being confiscated by the state. Many family members were sent to new economic zones in the countryside and instructed to do manual labour, while others had to engage in black-market trade.¹¹ The mass enforcement of the collectivisation policies in southern Vietnam beginning in 1982 meant that engagement in private black-market trade became criminalised, with many southern Vietnamese traders seeing their stalls destroyed, goods confiscated, and being forced to enter state-run cooperatives.

From 1975 to the mid-1990s, a large number of ARVN military personnel and South Vietnam governmental officers, together with their families, also took risks and joined the mass exodus of southern Vietnamese to the United States, Europe, with long and dangerous transits in refugee camps in East and Southeast Asia.¹² Fallen ARVN soldiers, as well as South Vietnamese civilian dead were (and continue to be) marginalised in the postwar state’s revolutionary narratives and commemorative practices. Important ARVN commemorative sites and cemeteries were destroyed or left to serious disrepair.

The economic reforms launched in 1986 brought about some positive changes to the life of veterans and their families. Whereas in the decade before, participating in private economic activities came with a certain degree of political shame and humiliation,¹³ veterans from both sides of the war participated in various economic activities to make ends meet and care for their families. The free market became a new battle field (mặt trận kinh tế) in which veterans had to fight again to survive. Sometimes their wartime skills, experiences, and connections helped. A number of successful companies, particularly in construction and transportations in Vietnam were founded by PAVN veterans.¹⁴ Similarly ARVN veterans put themselves forward as valuable tour guides and operators to provide foreign tourists interested in alternative narratives of war in Vietnam’s booming tourism industry.¹⁵ Many others also engaged in various forms of small trading endeavours.¹⁶

The market as a battlefield was new to not only the veterans, but almost everyone in post-socialist Vietnam. As a result, an increased sense of insecurity and a need for luck and divine blessing to navigate the free market economy contributed to the resurgence of religious activities. Throughout the 1990s and the 2000s, various religious rituals and practices have been revived, revitalised, and sometimes entirely invented to provide many Vietnamese with spiritual means to confront the new challenges of the market economy.¹⁷ Many of these rituals and practices involve caring for the millions of dead from the recent wars by ways of searching for their remains and communicating with their souls in hope for their blessing and protection.¹⁸ It is here that the religious resurgence in postwar Vietnam unexpectedly provides some veterans a unique opportunity not only to work out their own war trauma, but also to play an important role in shaping postwar commemorative politics while tapping into the booming necroeconomy. Let us now turn to the case study of Mrs. Nghĩa in southern Vietnam, whose story illustrates the entanglements between religion, market economy, and commemorative politics in veterans’ diverse trajectories of postwar psychological reintegration.

A traumatised soul: Mrs. Nghĩa

Born in 1952 in Thái Bình province in northern Vietnam, in 1970, Mrs. Nghĩa joined the war as a volunteer militia. After a few months of training at Unit 4090 of the 251st Division of the 3rd Corps (Military Region 3), she began her service as a combatant and assistant in battlefront clinics in the southeast region of the Mekong Delta. One of the common tasks she shouldered was to collect and bury fellow fighters. A rich and deeply moving description of such a task can be found in Dương Thu Hương’s A Novel without Name, one of the most important North Vietnamese novels on the war experience.¹⁹ It highlights the role of women in taking care of the wounded and burying the dead during military operations.

After 1975, Mrs. Nghĩa continued to serve the army in different locations in Southeast Mekong Delta until 1979. As she was often sick, she was discharged from the army. After encountering serious marital problems, she left her husband and returned to her natal village in Thái Bình province. In the broken economy of postwar Vietnam, life as a farmer in a failing cooperative was extremely hard. Initial support to help her reintegrate failed. Her life with a new partner, a wounded veteran, got harder when she suffered many episodes of mental breakdown. The images of the smashed-up bodies of her comrades that she helped to bury during the war haunted her.

In early 1996, her life changed after a near-death experience. She was then often sick, but one day she fell asleep and went into a coma for nearly 48 h. As she put it in an interview with Ngô, while her family thought that she had died and were preparing her funeral, she was actually travelling in the other world under the guidance of a Grand Master (Đức Ông) who purified her body and mind and then bestowed on her a special ability. Later she called this a great bioenergy (cho tôi một luồng điện sinh học), through which she can detect and communicate with the souls of the fallen soldiers. After that, she started to hear soldiers calling her name and asking her to help bring them home.

She woke up just in time, as her family was about to nail the coffin closed. In the following months, she had endless conversations with spirits of fallen PAVN soldiers (vong hồn các liệt sỹ),²⁰ so much so that families and neighbours thought that she had gone mad. They gave her a name ‘Nghĩa Điên’ (Crazy Nghĩa). At the end of 1996, with hardly any money, she boarded the train to the south and headed to the jungle where she camped and lived on meagre rations of rice and forest edibles in order to dig for soldiers’ remains. Nearly two months later, she emerged with hundreds of remains, packed in plastics and clothes. Her extraordinary appearance, like someone returning from the underworld, scared many locals, but also impressed many others. Gradually, she received support from local governments and fallen soldiers’ families. A trader in Ho Chi Minh City let her use a small rubber hill in Bình Dương to bury the remains which had not been claimed by families. This is the only private martyrs cemetery in Vietnam. In early 2000, the Bà Rịa provincial office of the PAVN acknowledged her contribution by allocating 2000 square metres of land in Hòa Long commune to her. In 2005, General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the supreme North Vietnamese war hero, came to visit her. He asked her how many remains she had found. She said, ‘I took pains to lie to him because I feared if I told him the real number that would hurt him’. Besides General Võ Nguyên Giáp, her photo archive shows her connections to many other high up officers and dignitaries, such as the former Prime Minister, Nguyễn Tấn Dũng.

Her assistants and many families who sought her help praised her for her total devotion to finding martyrs’ remains. On the days she communicated with the dead, she hardly had time to eat and rest. On the trips to exhume remains, she often outlasted even the young relatives of the dead. Such energy from such a fragile body could in the views of many only be attributed to the sacred power given by the martyrs themselves.

Between 2014 and 2016, Mrs. Nghĩa bought 3000 square metres of land around her home to build a Temple for the Martyrs (Đền thờ Liệt sỹ). The compound is massive and walled. The space outside the wall was left to accommodate at least a dozen cars or minivans at one time. In 2019, a relative of Mrs. Nghĩa opened a cafeteria (quán cơm bình dân) there to cater lunch to martyrs’ families and visitors to the temple. Inside the wall, the compound consists of lotus ponds, a Guanyin (the Goddess of Mercy) Hall, a Maitreya Buddha Hall, and the Hall of Memories (Nhà tưởng niệm). The Hall of Memories is covered with photographs and rows of glass shelves exhibiting thousands of personal belongings and objects that she found in the ground next to the remains she exhumed. Every object comes with a story about the dead soldier that it belongs to or has kept company with until exhumed. It is like an alternative museum of the war and its afterlife, deeply melancholic and personal and thus totally different from the triumphant war museums of the state.

Families of martyrs come with a photograph or ảnh truyền thần (painted portrait of a person after death). Having a photographed portrait was a luxury that most soldiers in Vietnam before the 1980s could not afford. Many fallen soldiers therefore were remembered by their surviving mother as a young man, so young that the posthumously painted portraits of them often appear childlike. Mrs. Nghĩa uses these photographs to locate the souls of the person or to show them to other dead so that they can spread the word in the underworld until they can locate a particular dead person, who would then communicate his/her whereabouts directly to her. After the family has found the body, they would send her a red silk scroll on which their thanks to her service are embroidered in golden threads, and the portrait would be kept and exhibited in her house. There are 26,000 martyrs venerated in her home temple, Mrs. Nghĩa told Ngô on her visit in December 2019.

Duty to care for the neglected dead: the case of Mr. Tình

On the other side of the war, veterans of the now-defunct Republic of Vietnam have also engaged in commemorative and care practices for their fallen comrades. The dead of South Vietnam have long been marginalised from the postwar state’s regime of memory and nation-building project. In the years following the end of the war in 1975, while South Vietnam’s important memorial sites were subjected to destruction and disrepair, ARVN dead received little to no public remembrance. It was not until the mid-2000s that one of the iconic South Vietnam commemorative sites, the Bien Hoa Military Cemetery (now Bình An People’s Cemetery) in contemporary Bình Dương province, where a large number of ARVN dead was interned, were turned over from military to local government management. This has facilitated many ARVN veterans, both living abroad and inside Vietnam, to perform commemorative and care practices for the military dead.

One such veteran was Mr. Tình (a pseudonym) who was recruited to be an ARVN soldier in 1968. Mr. Tình did not join the mass exodus of South Vietnamese to North America and Europe when Saigon fell but decided to remain in the country. Similar to many of his compatriots who used to fight for South Vietnam, Mr. Tình experienced much hardship following the war. After a short stint with re-education classes thanks to his lower rank within the ARVN, Mr. Tình and his wife tried to make ends meet with ‘small business’ ventures in the changing politico-economic landscape. While he did not discuss in-depth his economic endeavours in his interviews with Nguyen, it appeared that Mr. Tình was able to find his footing in the private sector after the economic reforms.

Around 2013, Mr. Tình stumbled upon news reports and social media posts where he learned that the cemetery has become more open to visitors. Since then, he has frequently led an informal group of volunteers to care for the former ARVN cemetery. The group started out mainly with Mr. Tình and close family members, including his daughters and niece, but then other ARVN veterans, family members of fallen soldiers, and young Vietnamese sympathetic towards South Vietnam, began to join the group. These other members either met Mr. Tình at the cemetery, or they saw Mr. Tình’s posting of his activities on social media and contacted him. Mr. Tình revealed that besides him and his family, the group membership fluctuated, with people joining for a short time and then deciding not to continue for different reasons (e.g., busy family schedule, health-related problems, or losing interest). During these visits, Mr. Tình and other volunteers cut down the overgrown weeds, raked the leaves around the graves, lit incense and offered various offerings to the dead. On important religio-cultural days, such as the Lunar New Year, the group would organise large commemorative rituals for the dead. Through the regular voluntary upkeeping work at the cemetery and ritual care for the dead, Mr. Tình and the volunteers endeavoured to preserve one of the most symbolic South Vietnamese heritage sites and the memory of the ARVN dead.

The former ARVN cemetery, even after being given to the management of the local government, has continued to experience a serious lack of regular care. While many graves do not have any identification and appear abandoned by families, trees and grasses regularly overgrow on top of and next to the graves, covering and destroying the resting place of the fallen. For Mr. Tình, this was no way to treat the dead. He explained in an interview that he performed the upkeeping work out of the deep feelings he felt for his comrades (tình chiến hữu) and his conscience (lương tâm).

Mr. Tình came from a family with some Chinese heritage. Under the Republic of Vietnam, Vietnamese of Chinese descent, as well as Cambodian Vietnamese, were recruited to be part of the army, although there was much reluctance among the Chinese community.²¹ In the interview, Mr. Tình revealed that he became a soldier in the ARVN partly because he came from a poorer family. On the one hand, becoming an ARVN soldier entitled one to receive a monthly salary (contrary to the northern revolutionary army, where young men did not receive any financial benefit during the war). On the other hand, unlike many wealthy Chinese families, Mr. Tình’s family did not have enough money to ‘bribe’ the recruitment offices to get a spot in the reserved army or to avoid being in the army completely. From Mr. Tình’s account, there were many cases of ‘office/house-plant soldiers’ (lính văn phòng/lính kiểng), whose names were in the military record, but who did not participate in warfare. Many people reportedly would come to the military offices once a month to sign the salary slips, but they would not take the salary themselves and sometimes even pay the officers extra. Among the Chinese, these practices seemed common enough to warrant the following assessment from a Vietnamese lieutenant, ‘Chinese-Vietnamese benefitted from the war but contributed little to it. Fearing combat duties, they usually evaded military services by devious means’.²² Because of this distinction in social class, Mr. Tình expressed great care and love towards soldiers resting at the former ARVN cemetery; many of them were people from working-class or poor backgrounds who went to the frontline partly because of financial difficulty. He shared:

The life of soldiers back then, especially low-ranking ones, was full of disadvantages. You know we would sometimes drink water from bomb craters, paddy fields, or creeks…I think of the feelings that I have for my comrades. We would go for a coffee or lunch one minute, and then the next, they would unfortunately die in battle. Some died in my arms, while others died on the way to the hospital. And then I saw the cold, abandoned graves [at the cemetery]. Most of them here were non-commissioned officers (hạ sĩ quan) or regular soldiers (hàng binh) …The fallen soldiers in the cemetery, when alive, they had such a hard life. When they died, they couldn’t have a comfortable, proper resting place (mồ êm, mả đẹp) either. They have suffered so much. So I work because I’m moved by the comradeship, by my conscience. I have a passion for this work.

Mr. Tình’s dedication to the ritual care for the dead stemmed partly also from his involvement in religious practices. Mr. Tình himself is the ‘manager’ of a family miếu, a small temple often associated with a Chinese family lineage, in Ho Chi Minh City. The temple used to belong to his great-grandfather. It was passed down to him, and he had since renovated it. The small temple worships various deities and buddhas, including Quan Cong, Mazu, Buddha Gautama, and the five ladies (bà ngũ hành). Besides being knowledgeable about rituals, Mr. Tình attributed the continuation of his work at the cemetery to the spirits of the fallen soldiers. Although he did not specify a particular moment when the spirits first compelled him to do the work, in an interview with Nguyen, Mr. Tình remarked, ‘I have to say, it seems that the god, buddhas, and the spirits of 16,000 fallen soldiers have arranged me to do this work at the cemetery’.

Most recently, since February 2022, Mr. Tình has managed to raise a sizeable amount of money to construct close to 1000 new grave tablets and fix up approximately 900 graves by adding a layer of ceramic to them. The majority of the graves and their tablets have degraded over the years from natural elements, including those that had been renovated by overseas Vietnamese veteran organisations since the mid-2000s.²³ The funding that Mr. Tình has managed to raise thus far comes from patrons inside Vietnam and abroad, though he estimated that 90 per cent of this funding comes from abroad, mostly from overseas Vietnamese (especially people in their 80s and 90s) in the United States who have learned about his voluntary work at the cemetery via his social media posts. While Mr. Tình is not the only one who has received financial support from the diaspora for the upkeeping work at the cemetery – relatives of fallen ARVN soldiers who still remain in Vietnam and other small local groups have also been involved in the upkeeping of individual graves – it appears that at the time of writing, Mr. Tình is unique in his ability to carry out renovation work for a large number of graves. He explained that all of this recent renovation work has received approval from the cemetery’s governing board, and that the contractors are well-connected to the board. The familiarity with the cemetery’s governing board that Mr. Tình has cultivated over years of voluntary work – not to mention, the ‘support’ of the fallen spirits as he alluded to – seems to have facilitated the renovation work.

Trauma, necroeconomy, and social justice

The case studies of Mrs. Nghĩa and Mr. Tình above point to the centrality of religion and spiritual practices in the mediation and constitution of veterans’ postwar trajectories, as well as their efforts at making claims about social (in)justice. In the following sections, we analyse the role of religion/spirituality in veterans’ coping with personal and social trauma and their participation in the booming postwar necroeconomy. While there are some similarities between them, the two cases of Mrs. Nghĩa and Mr. Tình highlight important differences in postwar experiences of North and South Vietnam former combatants.

Trauma

One can say that until the early 1990s Vietnamese former combatants from both sides of the war focused mainly on healing the physical wounds of war and scraping for a marginal livelihood. There was little space for attention to their psychological wounds. This is very different from their American counterparts. While war trauma or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has become a common and recognised condition among American veterans, these psychological wounds of war remain unmentionable to their Vietnamese counterparts. On the side of the PAVN, the dominant narrative, instructed by the state and the military itself, holds that revolutionary soldiers fought and died a glorious death, a death that should fill one’s heart with bliss, bravery, righteousness, and pride, not with grief, guilt, and pain. Similarly, for surviving combatants, the types of wounds that they suffered should only be physical, not psychological. Current welfare policies for PAVN veterans continue to put more emphasis on healing physical injuries and disabilities, particularly those from war injuries that affect veterans’ abilities to work and those from Agent Orange.²⁴ Until today, two most important academic hospitals of the PAVN, the 103 and 108, for example, only admit veterans to their mental illness wards when the symptoms are directly connected to physical injuries such as head traumas. The terms ‘trauma’ (sang chấn) and ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD) (rối loạn căng thẳng sau chấn thương) are new to the Vietnamese vocabulary as the translation of applied psychology literature was only made available in Vietnam in the last decade.²⁵ After the war, veterans of the ARVN were, and still are, not eligible for any of the state welfare and medical support available to PAVN veterans.²⁶ They and their families are left to their own devices to handle both physical and psychological wounds.

Treatments for trauma and PTSD in Vietnam today, however, are mostly reserved for victims of sexual abuse and work-related burnout, and most readily available in private medical establishments, like the Vinmec hospitals and research centres. To date these diagnoses and subsequent treatments are not available in the army’s medical facilities for veterans. Such denial of the psychological effects of war on PAVN soldiers has dire consequences for many. In 2016, a lieutenant general in Hanoi explained to Ngô a dilemma that he had to face when one of his soldiers, someone who had fought along with him bravely and had become close to him, revealed his uncontrollable fear and neurological breakdowns. The cause of these breakdowns was the soldier’s frequent memory of a moment in 1975 when he was ordered to drive his tank over civilians to enter Saigon. The liberation of Saigon was a moment hailed as glorious for the nation, but for this soldier, it was the moment that the sound of cracking human skulls under his army tank was edged into his own skull. Seeing the soldier’s suffering, the general wanted to do something for him, but without a relatable physical wound and with such a ‘troublesome’ psychological cause, there was very little that he could do for his soldier. The best he could do was to let the soldier go to a civilian sanatorium with a meagre severance payout. This abandonment of his soldier left the general ridden with guilt. He has lobbied without success for the Vietnamese state recognition of, and therefore financial compensation for, victims of trauma and PTSD. To him, the state has done the worst abandonment to its traumatised soldiers.

In the cases of Mrs. Nghĩa and Mr. Tình, their traumatic experiences during and after the war were not articulated in terms of psychological trauma or PTSD. Nor was there any psychiatric treatment involved. Instead, religious and spiritual practices become areas in which both Mrs. Nghĩa and Mr. Tình narrate and work through their wartime sufferings, and potentially achieve a certain degree of psychological reintegration. As Narquis Barak observes in her study of military psychiatry and war trauma in northern Vietnam in the late 1990s and early 2000s, North Vietnamese theories and practices towards war trauma ‘emphasised the somatic and social over the intrapsychic and individual’.²⁷ They interpreted French and Soviet psychological theories – those that paid attention to the multiple aetiologies of psychiatric disorder, including organic, social, and psychological, rather than a predominantly psychoanalytic approach – through the lens of traditional Vietnamese medicine, Buddhism, Taoism, and other cultural frameworks.²⁸ Within these theories and practices, as contended by the clinicians Barak interviewed, spiritual beliefs and ritual care for the dead become one of the few ways ‘to make grief bearable’.²⁹

For both Mrs. Nghĩa and Mr. Tình, the images of their comrades dying in their arms or of their smashed-up bodies have left a deep imprint in their psyches. One can read Mrs. Nghĩa’s engagement in telepathy to search for bodies of the missing soldiers and Mr. Tình’s efforts to care for the neglected ARVN properly as ways to address their own grief, to work through some of the intense sufferings that they have witnessed and experienced first-hand. But the traumas that they were working through, via religious and spiritual means, are not just of the individuals; rather, they are social and cultural.

This is not to say, however, that the traumas experienced by Mrs. Nghĩa and Mr. Tình, or more broadly by northern and southern Vietnamese, are the same. As mentioned above, while both North and South Vietnam suffered intense violence and casualty during the war, South Vietnam in the postwar period was marginalised from national history and memory, resulting in many ARVN veterans having to go through communist re-education and being barred from any form of veteran welfare support. On the side of North Vietnam, the state gave recognition and assistance to certain categories of revolutionary soldiers and martyrs’ families, but it failed to recognise civilians and volunteers who also contributed to its revolutionary cause. In the cases of Mrs. Nghĩa and Mr. Tình, their engagements in religious and spiritual practices to care for the dead – what we in the next section refer to as ‘necroeconomy’ – become an important venue through which they address multiple layers of postwar social injustices and carve out alternative pathways towards recognition and veteranhood.

Necroeconomy

As Tâm Ngô has argued recently, the modern Vietnamese state predicates much of its sovereignty on ‘warfare and the management of dead bodies’.³⁰ Within this regime of ‘necropolitics’,³¹ the Vietnamese state’s governing of the dead promotes the sacralisation of fallen revolutionary Vietnamese soldiers, the criminalisation of the enemy dead, and the marginalisation of the dead outside of these two categories.³² The deliberate endeavours of the state to commemorate certain categories of the war dead, but also to criminalise and marginalise others, have contributed to the proliferation of different actors, networks, and organisations committed to fostering and maintaining various forms of ‘necrosociality’,³³ that is the enduring relationship between the living and the dead, particularly the war dead in this case.

Since the 1990s, as many Vietnamese families increasingly grew unsatisfied with the government’s inadequate response to their requests to find the remains of their loved ones, they have participated in private bone-finding missions.³⁴ With the revival of religious activities and the rise of private economic activities ushered in by the economic reforms of the late 1980s, Vietnamese families have consulted spirit mediums to locate the remains of their loved ones, and more and more money has been spent on religious rituals, temples, grave sites, and memorials to commemorate the dead. The ebb and flow of monetary resources dedicated to the commemoration of the war dead – what we call ‘necroeconomy’ –facilitate the forging of various forms of necrosociality between the living and the war dead, relationships that can contest, but also reinforce, the Vietnamese state’s necropolitical agendas. This necroeconomy presents opportunities for former combatants not only to engage with the market economy and establish themselves economically, but also make claims about their veteran status.

In the cases of Mrs. Nghĩa and Mr. Tình, the postwar necroeconomy figures centrally in their spiritual and commemorative work for the war dead. For Mrs. Nghĩa, her successful engagements in spirit mediumship to search for the remains of fallen soldiers have translated to a form of stable livelihood, both for herself and her relative, who opened a cafeteria on the ground of her Temple for the Martyrs. Her dedication to locating the remains of the war dead and comforting the bereaved families has allowed her to gain material support from martyrs’ families, business owners, and the military alike. Since the early 1990s, the state has sanctioned spirit mediums to assist families with the search for the remains of the missing dead and recognised the traditional methods of contacting souls to search for bones as a form of spiritual forensics.³⁵ Within this framework, Mrs. Nghĩa’s work as a spirit medium and her engagement with the necroeconomy become a legitimate means towards a stable livelihood.

For Mr. Tình, the necroeconomy does not translate to livelihood per se, but rather, the ability to tap into the flow of remittances from overseas Vietnamese to do the work of maintaining and protecting an important ARVN heritage site. ARVN dead belong to the category of enemy dead within the postwar state’s necropolitical agenda. As such, fallen soldiers at the former ARVN cemetery do not receive any form of recognition or commemoration from the state. The responsibility and burden to remember South Vietnamese war dead are completely placed on the shoulders of individual families and ARVN former combatants. Through his continual dedication to the voluntary work at the cemetery and the strategic use of social media to document his work, Mr. Tình was able to gain financial support from the overseas Vietnamese community to carry out important care work at the cemetery. This necroeconomy, based on remittances by overseas Vietnamese, reflects the important shift in the attitude of the government towards momentary flows from abroad following the 1980s economic reforms.³⁶ As the government continues to encourage monetary remittances back to Vietnam, living relatives of ARVN fallen soldiers, ARVN veteran organisations, as well as the broader overseas Vietnamese communities, have sent money back to their relatives in Vietnam or to individuals like Mr. Tình to care for the ARVN dead. The influx of monetary remittances to maintain and care for ARVN heritage sites can be seen as a result of the state’s necropolitics: the state’s criminalisation of ARVN dead and purposeful neglect of ARVN sites have prompted collective actions from southern Vietnamese inside Vietnam and abroad. In this context, Mr. Tình has found himself in the position where he has to negotiate between the overseas Vietnamese communities and the cemetery governing board, who has given him the permission to carry out the renovation work and put him in contact with the contractors.

Conclusion: Veteran status and social justice

Eva van Roekel and Valentina Salvi, in writing about veterans in Argentina, observe that ‘the category of the veteran is an inherently contested social and moral identity around which different political actors in society forward different claims not only regarding rights, entitlements, and privileges of care and compensation but also regarding accountability and blame’.³⁷ In postwar Vietnam, the state valorises certain categories of veterans – those who fought and sacrificed their lives for its revolutionary cause – while it criminalises veterans of the other side and marginalises volunteer militia from its scheme of recognition. Within the state’s political agenda, veteranhood then relies solely on state-recognised wartime contributions, and these contributions dictate former combatants’ access to welfare and social benefits. Nevertheless, veteranhood is a contested social and moral identity, as van Roekel and Salvi argue, and Vietnamese former combatants existing at the margins of state’s policies continue to lay claims on their veteran status and address social injustices they have faced.

For both Mrs. Nghĩa and Mr. Tình, their engagements with the necroeconomy and religious/spiritual practices to care for the dead are central to their claim-making endeavours. Similar to many other Vietnamese women, Mrs. Nghĩa volunteered to participate in the war effort. While women’s contributions – via participating in combat, providing support and medical services, carrying ammunition, etc. – were deemed essential to the success of North Vietnam in the war, female combatants did not receive the same level of recognition as their male counterparts. Helle Rydström traces this distinction to Vietnamese gender ideology, in which men are considered to be more aggressive and suited for combat.³⁸ Women also suffered during the war, both at the front line and at the rear caring for the families, but their narratives of suffering ‘tend to be muted in public discourse’ and ‘do not invite immediate recognition for those individuals (mainly men) who went to the front’.³⁹ In the aftermath of war, Mrs. Nghĩa suffered both economically and psychologically, but there was little state support or recognition given to her. Her work as a spirit medium thus has allowed her to make public claims not only about her valiant contributions to the war, especially the very difficult work of collecting and burying the bodies of fallen soldiers during the war, but also her assistance to the bereaved families.

For Mr. Tình, as an ARVN veteran, he has witnessed the state for which he fought collapse. He and many of his ARVN comrades were socially, politically, and economically marginalised by the postwar state. Against the state’s attempts at ‘official invisibilisation’,⁴⁰ Mr. Tình’s continual care work for the ARVN fallen soldiers at the former cemetery not only preserves the legacies of ARVN, but also allows him to make claims about his veteranhood. On his social media platform and in interviews with him, Mr. Tình portrays himself as a veteran who has dedicated himself to the duty to care for his fallen comrades, to ensure that the dead is well-respected and remembered.

Both Mrs. Nghĩa and Mr. Tình, through their religious and spiritual care for the war dead, have forged an alternative approach to veteranhood. For them, veteranhood is not based so much on the communist state-valorised war contributions and sacrifices, but rather predicated on suffering and spiritual care for the marginalised, forgotten dead and their bereaved families. Drawing on their past war experiences and ritual work, Mrs. Nghĩa and Mr. Tình form a bridge between the present and the past not only for themselves, but also for many others who feel abandoned by the state.

Biographies

Dr Tâm T. T. Ngô is a senior researcher at the NIOD, studying processes of social healing, environmental reparation, and reconciliation politics through the interactive lens of religion and science. Her research examines a wide range of ethnographic settings from postwar Vietnam, Vietnamese diasporas in Europe, Hmong refugees in the US and Vietnamese Chinese refugees in China, to different circles of DNA forensic experts working on human identification and the genetic and ecological destruction of the Vietnam War. She is the author of The New Way: Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam (University of Washington Press 2016). She co-edited the double special issue ‘Actions for the Missing: Scientific and Vernacular Forms of War Dead Accounting’, which includes her own single-author article, ‘The tombs of wind (Những ngôi mộ giό): The enigmas of empty graves, encrypted archives and porous bones’, published in 2023 and 2024 in Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

Dr Đạt Nguyễn is a researcher at the NIOD, specialising in the study of religion, care, and war legacies in Vietnam. He has published on Vietnamese Buddhism, youth culture, and mental health in the Journal of Vietnamese Studies and the Journal of Global Buddhism, and on the commemoration of the war dead in Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal. He is currently co-developing NIOD’s research programme on the environment and violence, particularly through his research on war pollution, ecology, and social welfare in Vietnam.

Funding Statement

Research and writing of this article were supported by the Vidi project, Bones of Contention: Technologies of Identification and Politics of reconciliation in Vietnam (VI. Vidi 195.051), financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).