May 1, 2025: Ending the Vietnam War: “Galveston Bay”

[On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks entered the Presidential Palace in Saigon, a symbolic but significant moment to reflect the end of the war. That conclusion has been represented frequently & complicatedly in American media, so this week for its 50^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations!]

On two important ways that one of The Boss’s most underrated songs adds to his body of work.

The novelist Tim O’Brien is certainly in contention, but I don’t believe any American artist has created more cultural works depicting the Vietnam War overall, and definitely not its aftermaths in the United States specifically, than Bruce Springsteen. “Born in the U.S.A.” is without question the most famous (and the most famously misunderstood), but I could dedicate an entire week’s series to other Bruce songs about Vietnam vets, from “Shut Out the Light” to “The Wall” to “Brothers Under the Bridge (95)” and more. Springsteen has been working with vets for almost half a century now, and I think it shows; despite his own lack of experience with the war (compared to O’Brien for example, himself a Vietnam vet), Bruce has consistently depicted this community and its experiences with nuance, sensitivity, and impressive attention to detail. Taken together these songs constitute an important body of late 20^th century cultural and historical texts.

We have to be willing to be analytical and critical about such texts, though—yes, even if they’re by Bruce Springsteen—and it’s fair to say that they’re pretty thoroughly white, or at least that they elide any questions of race and culture for and around the community of Vietnam vets. That’s one reason why I think Springsteen’s moving and beautiful song “Galveston Bay” (1995) is one of his most frustratingly underrated songs: it depicts two Vietnam vets from two distinct races and cultures, white U.S. soldier Billy Sutter and South Vietnamese soldier Lee Bin Son; and, more complicatedly and importantly still, it portrays Billy as joining the Ku Klux Klan’s efforts to attack South Vietnamese immigrants as, after “the South fell/And the communist rolled into Saigon,” “the refugees came/Settled on the same streets/And worked the coast they’d grew up on.” By this point in the song Billy has been well developed as a multi-dimensional human character, so he’s not a caricatured racist, and that’s precisely the point—any white Americans, even those who’ve served their country honorably as Billy and the vast majority of Vietnam vets (white and otherwise) did, are susceptible to these white supremacist narratives and the violence that they can produce.

That’s one important way that “Galveston Bay” complicates, challenges, and ultimately adds to Springsteen’s body of Vietnam War songs. But the second is more significant still: it reminds us that even in the United States (that is, not just in Vietnam), the war connects to the Vietnamese community, a seemingly obvious point but one that is missing from many, many depictions of the war, Vietnam vets, and related histories. Of course Vietnamese American artists can tell that story in particularly meaningful ways, a long list that includes such recent masterpieces as Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015) and Eric Nguyen’s Things We Lost to the Water (2021), among many others as I highlighted in this post. But as I hope this blog has always illustrated, American culture (like our identity, community, history) is additive, and Springsteen’s song likewise engages in thoughtful and compelling ways with the Vietnamese American experience in the aftermath of the war, including Lee’s impressive resistance to the KKK’s racial terrorism—and how those actions and Lee himself, in the song’s surprising and amazing climactic moment, change Billy Sutter for the better.

Last portrayal tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Representations of the war you’d highlight?