From “America’s Vanishing Kingdom,”
By Thuy Linh Tu
Ms. Tu, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, moved from South Vietnam to Connecticut as a child, not long after the fall of Saigon.

My dad’s American dream was made of aluminum. Not that he would have put it that way. He did not talk much, and never about his dreams, but most days for nearly 25 years he headed off to a factory and turned aluminum and other metals into parts and a paycheck. He started at the Torrington Company, once one of the largest producers of metal bearings in North America and the biggest employer in Torrington, Conn., where we somehow found ourselves in 1980. Half a decade had passed since the fall of Saigon. My dad had been in and out of a re-education camp; we had been in and out of refugee camps. After we did stints in Thailand and Hong Kong, someone, somewhere sent us to Torrington. My father died there three decades later, having spent the rest of his life making industrial and military supplies in America’s gun belt.

Aluminum is a “magic metal.” It’s so light and strong that without it, “no fighting is possible, and no war can be carried to a successful conclusion,” proclaimed a 1951 pamphlet. . . . During the First and Second World Wars, about 90 percent of U.S. aluminum production went into military uses.

My father spent years working this famously malleable metal. He knew it well — its remarkable versatility, its shine, its feel. I wonder if he also knew that it was a main ingredient in “daisy cutter” bombs — once described as the world’s largest non-nuclear weapon — which were dropped near my mother’s home in central Vietnam to clear out the trees surrounding her commune. . . .

America spent the second half of the 20th century more or less continuously ramping up its production of war technologies, expanding its military-industrial ecosystem. The Korean War was a major leap forward, bringing along with it advances in nuclear weapons, but it was the Vietnam War that changed everything.

As the economic historian Adam Tooze tells it, we inherited from that conflict not just new weapons, but also more sophisticated doctrines of warfare, and better coordination of air and land forces. We also got a professionalized army and an abiding faith in the necessity of military spending. Since the defeat in Vietnam and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it has become nearly impossible to reduce military budgets without stoking outrage over factory closures and international threats.

The United States’ recent withdrawal from Afghanistan has prompted many to ask about our responsibilities to Afghans now that fighting has ceased. Before we’ve even had a chance to answer, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has displaced millions more. As yet another war-induced refugee crisis mounts, military spending continues to grow. . . .

Inside factories across the United States, war never really ends. Will the newly dislocated also be invited in — to build more weapons, abet more wars? To accept this work as an opportunity, even a kind of refuge? To continue the cycle of destroy and rebuild?

. . . An industrial town, Torrington prides itself on being a place that made stuff: bikes, guitars, needles, bearings. Despite its reputation as the home of sleepy suburbs and commuter towns, Connecticut makes lots of stuff, including guns. . . .

It’s hard to imagine the Stepford Wives state as a ground zero of military-industrial capitalism. But for decades Connecticut has received billions of dollars in Department of Defense contracts annually. . . . These companies made the parts, in other words, that turned men and machines into fighters. Or as an advertisement from Torrington’s manufacturers during World War II put it: “We are ‘Behind the Men Behind the Guns.’”

My father became one of those men. Not that he would have put it that way. Connecticut’s industries gave my dad a rare opportunity for steady, unionized work, open to him thanks to decades of organizing by activists to integrate factories . . . .

As I watched the coverage of the withdrawal from Afghanistan on the news, I couldn’t help thinking of my father. Some scenes would have struck him as very familiar: There is the helicopter, here is the rescue, those are the ones left behind. Many have said that Kabul is a replay of Saigon. For years, while Vietnam was under a U.S. embargo, people hungered in the way that many Afghans now hunger. Left with a decimated landscape and devastated economy, families like mine set off on a raft of hope, following our own arrow forward. I imagine some in Afghanistan are contemplating the same.

But Kabul is not really a replay of Saigon — it’s a continuation. And now the United States has become a shrinking kingdom, with far less generous immigration policies, fewer opportunities and little sense of responsibility for the damage it has caused. Freedom, for the more recently displaced, is all that much farther ahead.

Shortly after retiring, my father died of leukemia, a condition affecting many U.S. veterans, some of whom believe it’s caused by their exposure to the chemical mixture Agent Orange, millions of gallons of which rained down on Vietnam. Who knows what caused it in my dad — the war, the work or the recursive loop that feeds one into the other and from which no one emerges unscathed?

— New York Times