The famous writer and revolutionary Nhất Linh (Nguyễn Tường Tam) committed suicide on July 7, 1963, in protest against Ngô Đình Diệm, the first president of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam). Although largely ignored by Western scholars, the suicide was a major catalyst for the growing resistance to Ngô Đình Diệm and contributed to a deeper transformation of Vietnamese political culture. Even decades after the collapse of the RVN, the event remains central to the historical memory of the Vietnamese diaspora.

The famous writer and revolutionary Nhất Linh (Nguyễn Tường Tam) committed suicide on July 7, 1963, in protest against Ngô Đình Diệm, the first president of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam). Although largely ignored by Western scholars, the suicide was a major catalyst for the growing resistance to Ngô Đình Diệm and contributed to a deeper transformation of Vietnamese political culture. Even decades after the collapse of the RVN, the event remains central to the historical memory of the Vietnamese diaspora.

This article considers state-funded films in contemporary Vietnam and the legacy of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), which fell to communist forces in 1975. From a close reading of films produced on the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the war, the article deciphers complicated meanings about national identity, history, and gender. In this new political economic context, the possibilities for remembering the southern regime—including its people and veterans—remains open and closed. Through the framework of heteroglossia of history, the co-presence of competing viewpoints within cinematic texts points to the complexity of an ever-changing Vietnam.

Although recent English-language Vietnam War scholarship has devoted considerable attention to reassessing the Ngô Đình Diệm era, contemporaneous South Vietnamese interpretations of the president’s tenure have been largely overlooked. Contrary to prevailing assumptions that his influence ended abruptly with his 1963 murder, Ngô Đình Diệm was a hotly debated figure long after his death. Moreover, his contested legacy came to symbolize South Vietnam’s enduring political, regional and religious schisms, contributing to and reinforcing his country’s profound social fragmentation. The fluid and ambiguous memory that Vietnamese had of his time in office had a substantial impact on subsequent political developments, establishing patterned dynamics of political conflict that endured throughout the Second Republic and providing conceptual yardsticks against which subsequent politicians and political developments were measured. Ngô Đình Diệm’s fraught symbolic resonance and significant posthumous political impact are therefore crucial dimensions to consider in evaluating his legacy.

This article examines attempts by the Second Republic of Vietnam (RVN) to call attention to perceived and real quantitative and qualitative disparities of weapons between their forces and those of their enemies. It also looks at the way Chinese, Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and US propaganda efforts complicated these attempts. Sài Gòn’s leaders tried and failed to gain additional military aid, to use weapons to improve their relations with the Southern Vietnamese public, and to redress what they saw as inaccurate information about their own military strength and that of their enemies.