Kissing in Vietnamese

Vuong’s poem “Kissing in Vietnamese” makes specific, direct references to America’s military intervention in Vietnam that took place during the 1960s and 70s. The Vietnam war was both a civil war, in which Americans took sides with the anti-communist South against the pro-communist North, and a proxy war between Russia and the US in their ongoing “cold war.” Thus, two global superpowers’ geo-political interests in Southeast Asia became the catalyst for catastrophic destruction visited on a population half a world away in an effort to dictate their political and economic system. 3.8 million Vietnamese were killed in the protracted carnage—roughly 12-13% of their population at the time—along with 58,000 American soldiers and as many as 2.5 million deaths in neighboring Cambodia where the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime took control as a direct result of American bombing there.

The conflict has come to represent the emergence of modern warfare in areas technological, strategic, and in terms of its sheer brutality. Since the goal of the United States was not to conquer North Vietnam but rather to ensure the survival of the South Vietnamese government, they could not measure progress in the amount of territory seized and held. It was decided that victory in battle would be determined by the number of enemy combatants killed.

However, since the North Vietnamese military were waging guerilla warfare where any person of any age, gender or dress could be enlisted to resist the incursion, it was difficult to know just which of the dead were the enemy. Civilians were often listed as enemy dead, and US soldiers began to perceive the whole population of Vietnam as their enemy to be destroyed. Leadership encouraged this idea. The day before the My Lai massacre where about 500 villagers—mostly women, children, and the elderly—were tortured, raped, and killed by US troops, Capt. Ernest Medina told his soldiers, “There are no innocent civilians in this area,” and that the enemy was, “Anybody that is running away from us, hiding from us, or appears to be the enemy.” Atrocities became commonplace under these conditions.

Specific weapons and war tactics provided concrete ways that the history of the Vietnam War “never ended” (Line 19). The US dropped more than 350,000 tons of napalm weapons on the country in fire bombings that caused widespread disfigurement among the survivors. All told, the United States dropped 8 million tons of bombs in Indochina between 1962 and 1973, about double the amount dropped by all warring nations involved in World War II. Vietnam spent many years rebuilding their country after this barrage of destruction.

Also of note, Agent Orange was a program to spread more than twenty million gallons of defoliant chemicals across Vietnam to clear the forest that hid Viet Cong encampments. It is estimated that three out of four million people who were sprayed with Agent Orange chemicals became ill from the exposure and one-quarter of them suffered consequences such as permanent disability, fatal illness or passing on birth defects to their children.

In his poem, “Kissing in Vietnamese” the speaker describes or speculates on his grandmother’s experience, in which the bombs fall outside her kitchen window. For civilians, no place was safe. Any Vietnamese could be cut down at any second. The daily routines of life could turn tragic without warning.