Viet Nam at Peace (Hardcover)

John Pilger, who also first arrived in Vietnam in 1966, writes of the, "Goya-like faces and the subversive quality of each image." Griffiths, he remarks, portrays "Viet Nam as a country, not a war."

The photos in this lavishly produced volume are presented in fifteen sections with brief introductions and captions. The legacies of war loom large, but Griffiths helps us get inside society and its ongoing problems and transformations. Certainly, the war's devastating toll, claiming the lives of 5 million Vietnamese, and the US refusal to honor its promise of reconstruction aid, compounded by spiteful sanctions, has indelibly scarred the people and hampered development.

We encounter the deformed babies affected by Agent Orange, faces scarred by napalm, wheelchair bound vets and amputees.
And there are children, so many children from the postwar baby boom going to ramshackle schools that feature grim classrooms and playgrounds scarred with trenches. From the 1980s we see some Amerasians, generally well accepted except for offspring of Afro-Americans who face racial prejudice. Only a tiny fraction of all these children have been contacted by their fathers, another debit in the balance sheet of the forgotten war.

Among the images of the boat people there is a haunting photo of a woman surrounded by her children in a refugee camp in Hong Kong, staring off with a sad dignity amidst cramped squalor. Life was miserable in these detention centers as the world turned its back on the exodus of those who had aligned themselves with the losing cause of the US.

Griffiths also challenges war memories, castigating the MIA/POW (Missing in Action/Prisoner of War) myth that hijacked US policy toward Vietnam. He speaks of the "flim-flam absurdity" of claims that Vietnam held POWs long after the war ended, arguing that this deliberate deception permitted ongoing callous indifference to the suffering the US had inflicted on Vietnam.

Truth is the first casualty of war and is now being perpetuated, Griffiths tells us, in Vietnam's war museums that cater to tourists by sanitizing the horrors endured. He asserts that younger Vietnamese are now challenging this reconciliation-first history propagated by their elders, the beginning of a revision process that is shedding a harsher light on US involvement and negligence.

There is a rich montage of everyday Vietnamese at weddings, funerals, attending religious ceremonies, working their fields and resting from their labors. Some of the most beautiful images portray life along the waterways, people fishing, rowing, poling, swimming and raising families on houseboats. We are taken beyond the tourist snaps of the majestic Ha Long Bay, seeing the gritty faced miners who work nearby, loading barges with coal laden straw baskets they carry on their heads.

Worlds away, the impact of globalization is evident in urban centers where slick billboards loom above ramshackle waterfront huts and deface office blocks. In a culture that prizes austerity and silence, designer goods and mobile phones have become ubiquitous accoutrements. Griffiths laments a spreading mass consumerism he satirizes in its sheer tastelessness and excess. As elsewhere, the poor gain naught from this "good life", their abject conditions a telling rebuke. Here we see them gazing upon what they are excluded from and there is no averting our gaze from the stark contrast that prevails and the misery of those who have been left behind.

In depicting the children of the "victors" working in multinational sneaker factories, modeling swimsuits, selling brand name goods and embracing capitalism, Griffiths puts us in the shoes of the veterans whose minds must boggle at the resounding ironies. The book closes, appropriately, where the trilogy began, with US Marines landing in Danang, but now coming without hostile intentions, making a beeline for the nearest bar.