Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The Vietnam debacle
BY STANLEY KARNOW
(04/27/00)
Thank you so much for publishing Stanley Karnow's critique of the new Vietnam War revisionists. Rarely do we see or hear in the media these days the truth about those dark days. It was bloody hell; we shouldn't have been there in the first place and have no business asserting our bravado at this late date.
-- Donald Lewis
Stanley Karnow neglected to point out South Vietnam fell to the North in 1975 when it was invaded in violation of the 1973 treaty. At that time, a conventional invasion by the North Vietnamese Army (the one we knew was there all along) came out of hiding and headed south. Had the U.S. fulfilled its commitment under the 1973 peace treaty to support the South Vietnamese Army with ammunition, logistics and air cover, those North Vietnamese columns could have been destroyed. The legacy of that 1975 betrayal by the U.S., the killing fields of Cambodia, the "reeducation camps" and boat people of Vietnam, might have been averted. South Vietnam might today be a nation analogous to South Korea, and Ho Chi Minh's army might still be hiding in the mountains and jungles for 10, 50 or 100 years, waiting for its moment to attack.
As a former U.S. Army medical officer who was stationed in Vietnam in 1968-69, I agree with Karnow that the bloody quagmire should never have been engaged in the first place, and I certainly agree that our political leadership failed us in those years. But in 1975, after the sacrifice had already been made, defeat was not inevitable. The "revisionists" are right.
-- Harry I. Brown
Although it is a common enough mistake, the truth of the matter is that America's first lost war was the War of 1812. Only victory at the Battle of New Orleans, which took place after the peace treaty was signed due to slow communications, kept it from being seen as such. By any reasonable measure, we were whipped.
-- Jim Roberts-Miller
Returning to a place we've never seen
BY FIONA MORGAN
(04/28/00)
Frances FitzGerald remains sadly ignorant about the realities of Vietnamese life and history. As in her book, "Fire in the Lake," she is still trotting out the essentially American notion that landscape determines culture. The supposedly closed, tightly organized northern Vietnamese villages she mentions do not necessarily have a closed history or closed minds. Many of these villages have long histories of conquest, exploration and trade that she ignores in her reductive stereotypes.
She is also wrong to assume that the communist apparatus has died in Vietnamese villages. Ask the residents of Thai Binh province who rioted in 1997 to protest the predatory corruption and taxation by Communist Party officials in their villages. There are taxes on slaughtering animals, windows, salt and numerous other things all of which are an exploitative burden placed on the poorest people in Vietnam by communist cadres.
Far from dying, this apparatus remains fairly resilient and its power to limit freedoms of speech, religion and assembly are considerable. Indeed in recent years village officials have been granted additional powers to detain people without trial.
FitzGerald is correct in saying that Americans could understand more about the war if they understood more about Vietnam. Her orientalist reduction of the Vietnamese to a few narrow Confucian stereotypes will not help in this process.
-- Robert Templer
Author, "Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam"
I'm saddened by the inability of many Americans, particularly fellow Vietnam vets, to objectively discuss the country, the Vietnamese people or the war. I knew nothing of the country when I went in 1965. The Vietnamese people I met were nice people who simply wanted to live their lives in peace and cared little for a particular ideology. Too bad our past political leaders, those as far back as the end of World War II, didn't take the time to learn more about the country or the people. We could have avoided the whole fiasco. Fiona Morgan's article is excellent.
-- Robert Tallarovic
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