Pomona College
2013
Who was Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn?
"Who was Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn?" To the
current Communist government of Vietnam, whose historical narrative of national
unity against foreign invasion denies the legitimacy of South Vietnam, he is a
political traitor. To the American state, who conceptualizes the Vietnam War as
a struggle between the U.S. and the Communists, he is a forgotten subject. To
patriotic South Vietnamese veterans in the diaspora, who push back against
these state imposed narratives of “organized forgetting,” he is hero. To
Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn’s family members, most of whom live in Vietnam, he is a
loved a one they cannot mourn because of state suppression. To me, he is a
grand-uncle, though I did not know of his fame—of his story—until I was
twenty-one.
This
film embodies rather than effaces the tensions of these conflicting narratives,
reproducing the feelings of simultaneous absence and excess that I felt when I
stumbled upon the wealth of on-line information on Colonel Cẩn after twenty-one
years of silence. This is not a straight foward biographical documentary, but
rather an intertwining of the different histories and memories surrounding
Colonel Cẩn. At the center of this story is absence—a ghost. Colonel Cẩn no
longer exists, and there is little official written documentation about him. We
will never be able to excavate a single “truth.” Rather, we must embrace the
multiplicities, acknowledging that the slippages between these conflicting
narratives are legitimate, important, and enlightening. From the gaps we may
find an answer: "Who was Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn?
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