This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What is history? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.
I was born in Saigon in 1960, and I experienced the war in Vietnam firsthand. When the war ended and Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975, the U.S. government evacuated me and my family in a C-130 cargo plane. We ended up in California. Now, 50 years later, I work as a landscape photographer, viewing my medium not only as a tool for witnessing past and present conflicts, but also as a space suited for contending with the paradoxes that define history itself.
One particularly pivotal experience shaped my approach.
It began in 1999, when I contacted a group of war re-enactors based in North Carolina and Virginia. I worked with and photographed them over several summers, and the images eventually became a series titled “Small Wars.” This small group of young, conservative men was dedicated to recreating key U.S. military operations and battles from the war in Vietnam on one member’s 100-acre wooded property. Among them were a product manager at Thomson Financial, a former National Guard driver, a mortician and a carpenter. Too young to have served in the conflict, none of these men had ever experienced real combat. Yet they were obsessively committed to the authenticity of their “impressions” — meticulous in their attention to equipment, clothing, food and supplies, whether portraying the Vietcong, the North Vietnamese Army or American soldiers. Participation was by invitation only.
To engage with multiple perspectives, I alternated between the role of a Vietcong fighter and that of a Kit Carson Scout — an N.V.A. soldier who defected to assist the Americans. Armed with an AK-47 loaded with Hollywood blanks, and clad in either Vietnamese-made black pajamas or an N.V.A. khaki uniform, I walked the trails and immersed myself in the dense bamboo thickets the re-enactors had planted. This vegetation — an obvious signifier for Vietnam and other Asian landscapes — was incongruously situated in an area that once witnessed the U.S. Civil War, on a site densely populated by pines, spruce, horsetails and kudzu. The result was a striking conflation of histories: theirs, shaped by vicarious experiences filtered through news footage, literature and myth; and mine, formed by personal memory, family lore and ambivalent feelings about a devastating war — one perpetrated by a government that ultimately saved my family and me from Communism and granted us a new life.
The re-enactors and I spontaneously connected through a shared fluency brought on by the popularization and retelling of the Vietnam War in popular culture. We bantered back and forth, testing one another’s knowledge of classic war films, as well as fiction and nonfiction books. One-time participants from other states occasionally joined us, and the organizers would disclose my participation only at the last minute as a “reveal” for the unsuspecting visitors.
Once, a man sidled up to me after a “skirmish” and muttered, “You are so hot.” Another time, during a staged ambush of an American firebase by Vietcong and N.V.A. forces, I was egged on by my platoon leader to hurl Vietnamese invectives at the Americans. I complied — only to be met with a thundering reply: “Kill that bitch.”
In these destabilizing moments, the line between performance and reality frayed and the act of role-playing began to pick at old wounds.
I experienced the re-enactments with an uneasy mix of fascination and dread, much like it felt watching Hollywood films about the war from the 1970s and ’80s, which, at the time, were among the only cinematic representations of Vietnam I could access. In those films, I would delight in the glimpses of daily life in Saigon or brief pastoral interludes in the countryside — until a helicopter swooped in or an ordnance exploded. Inevitably, violence and humiliation were inflicted on Vietnamese civilians and combatants, regardless of their political affiliations. These classic films were excruciating to watch, but they were also essential records for me. As a refugee living in America, they provided a tenuous but vital connection to a reality I could no longer reach.
Yet the subversive nature of my role-playing left me disoriented. I felt a sort of existential turmoil as my interactions with the re-enactors collided with historical fact, lived experience and cultural mythology.
The art historian Joseph Koerner describes this as “the non-contemporaneity of the contemporary” — the idea that the present is a dynamic, layered space in which diverse historical and cultural forces coexist. The re-enactors and I were taking part in a dizzying recreation of a history that we had absorbed through images, narratives and the slow passage of time.
In response, I turned to my craft, which has always prioritized the natural world as the locus of human consciousness. I have come to embrace landscape photography’s paradoxical nature: its capacity to render the present in searing detail, while also evoking both the past and future through subjective suggestion.
Beneath the Southern sky, a dappled interplay of sun and shadow filtered through the canopy of weathered white oaks conjures an Arcadian vision of war. Yet this idyllic illusion is staged in a terrain tangled in conflicting pasts. It is perhaps in this tension — between artifice and authenticity, personal memory and collective myth — that we begin to understand how history is internalized and processed, and that we begin to fathom the disproportionate space that the war in Vietnam, and other wars, continue to occupy in the American cultural imagination.
An-My Lê is an artist and the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College. Aperture recently released a 20th anniversary reprint of her monograph “Small Wars,” featuring an afterword by Ocean Vuong.
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