New soldiers and empty boys: imaging traumatic memory

Abstract

This essay reconstructs one important context for images published by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW): the testimonial practices of anti-war veterans. First in small rap sessions, and then in unofficial public hearings, anti-war veterans recollected their war experiences in an effort to inform civilians about the US war in Vietnam, and mobilise them to oppose it. Photographs of introspective veterans – lost in memory – provide a visual idiom for the experience of ‘flashing back’ that was the basis for veterans’ testimony. If these photographs signify the central role of self-reflection in veterans’ anti-war organising, they also imply a distrust of graphic war photography – both images disseminated by the mainstream media and atrocity photographs taken by soldiers themselves. Anti-war veterans worried that war photographs catered to a consumerist appetite for intense, vicarious experience and provoked only a fleeting sense of revulsion. Compounding this distrust of graphic imagery was the circulation of war souvenirs, atrocity photographs taken by soldiers of their dead and wounded victims. Exploring portraiture as an alternative to photojournalism, this essay situates images of introspective veterans in relation to the pioneering activism of the VVAW and allies them with images produced by other activists working in the visual field, focusing on Martha Rosler’s ‘Empty Boys’.

Notes

[1] I discuss Sontag’s early critique of photography at length in my essay, ‘Against Photography: Susan Sontag’s Vietnam’, arguing that Sontag’s writing on photography grew out of her opposition to the US war in Vietnam. My analysis of VVAW imagery expands on this argument, demonstrating that a critique of war photography informed veterans’ organising, and the anti-war movement at large (Nudelman 2014).

[2] I draw my description of rap sessions from a number of sources. For a comprehensive account of their evolution see Lifton 1972, 1973, 2011; Egendorf 1985; Hunt 1999; Nicosia [2001] 2004; Scott 1990, 2003; Shatan 1973.

[3] The finest histories of trauma misconstrue the role of Vietnam veterans in the development of PTSD. In Harmony of Illusions, Allan Young credits psychiatrists with formulating the diagnosis on ‘behalf of the large number of Vietnam veterans’, failing to account for the collaborative relationship between veterans and therapists in the context of rap sessions (1995, 5). In Empire of Trauma, Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman follow Young’s lead and, likewise, underestimate the agency of activist veterans and their contribution to the definition of the syndrome.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Franny Nudelman

Franny Nudelman is an Associate Professor in the English Department and the Institute for the Study of Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton University, and the author of John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War (University of North Carolina Press, 2004). She is currently writing a book about activist documentary of the Vietnam era.