NAM: Ideas and Problems

by Disphotic

Having completed my last, practice orientated project, I’m now moving on to a research piece about the Vietnam war. My interest in the Vietnam war, or any war is fairly limited. When I was younger I thought wars were the interesting part of history and the lulls in between were tedious build ups to the next big fight, now I find the quiet periods in history infinitely more interesting. Despite this the Vietnam project has triggered quite a few ideas, so many actually that I’ve found it difficult to focus in on just one.

I’ve started work on one idea I have but so far I’ve found it utterly grueling. I’m not sure if for the right reasons or not. The basic idea is to create a small book that attempts to connect several different types of weapon with the types of injuries they inflict on people. Partly this is about counter-acting the way weapons are normalised in popular culture and disconnected from their purpose. Partly it’s a response to the way the media and many armies are increasingly sanitizing and censoring what images we see of wars. Finally it’s also a comment on the long distance nature of modern war which means in some circumstances even the people doing the killing don’t see the consequences of what they’ve done in the same way they might have done in the past. UAV or Drone aircraft strikes being an example of this.

So far it’s involved identifying about ten types of weapon and then trawling through some truly horrendous images of related injuries. It’s difficult knowing where to go with this book. On the one hand it ought to be totally shocking, otherwise it misses the point, but I can’t decide whether I actually should be using this research project to make a political point, and even if this point is actually worth trying to make. I have a feeling that the end result will be a book so horrible that I won’t want to inflict it on anyone else. At the same time the ideas that are emerging are starting to form the basis for what might be quite an interesting essay, so perhaps the resulting writing from the exercise will be the artifact rather than the book, which I don’t think I have the stomach to see through to completion.

I have a few other ideas I can always fall back on, including an exploration of the portrayal of Vietnam veterans over a period of about forty years, and the way they transition through different stereotypes and degrees of acceptability, from the badly received home coming vets of early films to the hero type veterans of films like Rambo. Another idea is to look at the development of millitary euphemisms and slang. My final idea is a study of a branch of Vietnam reenactment that takes place in the UK. The problem with these is they don’t really feel worth doing for any reason but the sake of jumping through the hoops laid out by my course syllabus. However horrible the weapons book is at least it will represent something I feel strongly about.