While written as a reflection on Vietnam, these words also speak, I believe, to our present moment, mired as we are in amorphous wars and subject to a climate of weaponized forgetting.

This dominant logic of remembering one's own and forgetting others is so strong, that even those who have been forgotten will, when given the chance, forget others. The stories of those that lost in this war show that in the conflict over remembrance, no one is innocent of forgetting" (10-11).

They urge their citizens to remember their own and to forget others in order to forge the nationalist spirit crucial for war, a self-centered logic that also circulates through communities of race, ethnicity, and religion.

Wars cannot be fought without control over memory and its inherent opposite, forgetting (which, despite seeming to be an absence, is an actual resource). Nations cultivate and would monopolize, if they could, both memory and forgetting.

We forget despite our best efforts, and we also forget because powerful interests often actively suppress memory, creating what Milan Kundera calls "the desert of organized forgetting." In this desert, memory is as important as water, for memory is a strategic resource in the struggle for power.

This desire to include more of one's own or even others runs into problems both personal and political, for neither individual nor collective memory can be completely inclusive. Total memory is neither possible nor practical, for something is always forgotten.

Those who are against war call for a broader human identity that would include those we had previously forgotten, hoping that such expansiveness will reduce the chances of conflict.

Thus, the inclusiveness of the American Way is, by definition, exclusive of anything not American, which is why, even today, American memories of war usually forget or obscure the Vietnamese, not to mention the Cambodians and Laotians.

"So it is that a call for war is usually accompanied by a demand that the citizenry remember a limited sense of identity and a narrow sense of the collective that extends only to family, tribe, and nation.

To commemorate the passage of time, I offer these words from Viet Thanh Nguyen's "Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War:"

Though born several years later, my life was set in motion by their respective flights from a city and nation in free fall - falling into another form - transforming into something else - something that none of us would witness or experience until many decades later.

My father left the country on 29 April 1975. The week before, on 24 April, my mother fled on the last Pan Am flight out of Saigon.

“Its dreams extend to sustain a select few. Its imagination is exercised for its own exclusive ends. It believes in itself so deeply that it will even fight and die for itself. It is precisely in this proximity of our inhumanity to our humanity that we are most challenged and tested.”

“But our inhumanity holds each of these differently—more selectively and narrowly—in contortions and distortions of how they ought to be. Inhumanity loves its own dearly, but only its own. It draws its arms tightly around its beloved community in disregard of others.”

“They are deceptively alike. Inhumanity does not lack in love, conviction, or a sense of justice. Like our humanity, our inhumanity has its share of intimacy and empathy, relationality and community, creativity and artistry, even faith and righteousness.”

A few excerpts from the end: “The challenge lies in maintaining the fine line between our humanity and inhumanity. Indeed, we would be mistaken to conceive of humanity and inhumanity as diametric opposites or inversions of each other.“