With the introduction of the reform project doi moi in 1986, Vietnam turned
to tourism as a major new economic resource. Demands from international visitors
have entailed a commodification of the Vietnam War. This article approaches tourism
as an ideologically saturated nexus where identities and worldviews are continuously
being represented, consumed, reconfirmed, negotiated and modified. Practices and
narrations of Western backpackers, who travel to Vietnam spurred by phantasms of
Vietnam as a war, are related to discourses of Vietnam in tourism literature,
popular media, academia, journalism and politics, and traced to a `popcolonial'
fantasy of Western superiority. At the core are the hegemonic implications the `been
there, done that' cliché carries when war and tourism go hand in hand. It
is argued that the dichotomies of here/there and war/peace need to be dislodged in
order to understand the ideologies of both tourism and war.
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