[ndlr] Avis de la parution prochaine d’un ouvrage sur la mémoire des soldats sud-vietnamiens (ARVN) réfugiés en Australie. Aboutissement d’un projet de recherche de longue haleine mené par Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen (Monash University) pour constituer une histoire orale de ces vétérans à la bibliothèque nationale d’Australie.

Nathalie Nguyen says the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War brings painful memories for former South Vietnamese soldiers. But in Australia, veterans are keeping their stories alive – and slowly changing perceptions of the war.

I wanted to explore the stories of Vietnamese veterans in Australia because they are the forgotten soldiers of the Vietnam War.

More than 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed in the 1955 -1975 war however their histories have been largely silenced in the wider story of the war, and erased in postwar Vietnam.

General mobilization was decreed in South Vietnam in 1968, and nearly every male over the age of twenty had some form of military experience. South Vietnam suffered terrible casualties during the war: In one year alone, in 1972, 39,587 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed in action while 109,960 were wounded. South Vietnam had a population of approximately 18 million. It was a country scarred by war.

Many veterans experienced years of internment after the war and many escaped their country as refugees.

Lire la suite / Read more : Australia Plus – ABC International

Voir aussi :

• Catherine Norwood, A home for exiled memories, Monash Magazine (June 2013).

• Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, War and Diaspora: The Memories of South Vietnamese Soldiers, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Vol. 34, issue 6, 2013, pp. 697-713.

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