Be the first to submit a tribute honoring a vet from the Vietnam War! Vietnam War Stories from Vietcong Perspective. The cover of Life magazine from April 7, 1967, featured Hanoi residents taking shelter underground during an air raid. “You can’t take anything away from those men and women who fought over there. Three Vietnam War Veterans Share Their Stories W.D. Was it a war of racism and atrocity, or a war of noble, failed intentions? My grandmother was a war photographer in Quang Tri. To allow us to provide a better and more tailored experience please click "OK", North Vietnamese Soldiers | © manhhai/Flickr. The birth of his oldest daughter in 1983 added another perspective — one of empathy. “Democratic thinking teaches you to see things from multiple perspectives, to trust no single point of view.”. My 10-year-old mind had no way to make sense of drugs, psychedelic rock, murder, atrocity, massacre and Playboy bunnies. An American soldier guides U.S. Army helicopters in to land through a haze of purple smoke. It didn’t want to risk being accused of a lack of patriotism, so it avoided putting out films critical of the war until it was over,” Ross said. Referred to as Biêt-Dông-Quân or BDQ, a significant number of Ranger-qualified officers and NCOs served as advisors to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam Ranger units throughout the duration of the war…nearly in 2,000 total. Please explore selected contributions on this page. Yet we must not forget, Nguyen reminds us, that 6 million Jews and 20 million Russians died during World War II, and that 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered during the Rwandan genocide. “The World War II movies I’d watched weren’t horrific, and it was clear who was the good guy and who was the bad guy,” said Nguyen, Aerol Arnold Chair of English and associate professor of English and American studies and ethnicity. They were young, half a world away from home, and at war. In 1982 the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C., inscribed with the names of 57,939 members of U.S. armed forces who had died or were missing as a result of the war. No One Really “Survives” a War Intact. HANOI, VIETNAM—Forty years ago, on April 30, 1975, Nguyen Dang Phat experienced the happiest day of his life. The first episode premiered on PBS on September 17, 2017. It’s a shame, because although there are many excellent books written by American authors about the conflict, they don’t give you an idea of how a Vietnamese person saw the war. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died in the war. “What we learned from Vietnam is not to show pictures of war,” Gustafson said. “Watching that film made me feel like there was no place for me in American culture,” he said. Introduction to RE: Vietnam -- Stories Since the War. Here's another: They were a bunch of scared (mostly) young kids fighting in a massive conflict for very personal reasons. Carter described the Vietnam War as one “of mutual destruction.” While no one denies the tragedy of the 58,000 American dead, that figure pales next to the 6 million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians who died during the war and its aftermath. “When I saw parents visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., I imagined what it would be like to lose a child, and I broke down and cried. He fought as a Viet Cong from the late 1950s to the end of the war in the mid-'70s. I was confused because I wasn’t sure whether I should be rooting for the Americans who were doing the killing, who were committing all the horrors, or whether I should be identifying with the Vietnamese who had the horror being inflicted upon them and their voices taken away.”. Communist forces had already started shelling the airport when U.S. marines flew Luong, his father — an officer in the South Vietnamese marine corps — mother and seven sisters to a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, the USS Hancock . we run into the enemy concealed and dug in — death of Thompson — we return, enemy flees — the face of death — Thompson’s body lost at Đà Nẵng — our FO shells enemy night convoy — After Action Reports. For Nguyen, winning the Pulitzer was a personal victory, a validation of his long-term project to force Americans and Vietnamese to reconsider the history of the war and their involvement in it. The image of the napalm girl fleeing in terror, the way she is robbed of her innocence in that moment, captured the deplorable longstanding involvement of the U.S. military in the region.”. The story of South Korea’s involvement in the Vietnam War is largely untold. Thompson’s Hill (April 9-10, 1968), by Richard Dieterle. “I don’t want there to be any softening of the horror,” he said. In 1974, with … As the first hypnotic notes of The Doors’ “The End” played over a lush, idyllic Vietnamese jungle, 10-year-old Viet Thanh Nguyen’s eyes widened as the peaceful green palm trees erupted into a fiery, orange inferno. Brig. However, like Gustafson, he says he has been deeply moved by some of the documentaries made about Vietnam. From there, Luong and his family, along with thousands of other Vietnamese refugees in danger of communist reprisals, made their way to the U.S. under Operation Frequent Wind, a political asylum program. The Golden dragons also fought in the Iraqi war, a war of similar consequences of Vietnam. Free shipping for many products! The traditional historiography of the Vietnam War often avoids reckoning with the postwar history of the Hanoi regime and its human consequences, and Nguyen’s stories are a useful corrective. The story of Hayslip, who grew up in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, is intense, intimate, and ultimately human. “Here that wasn’t clear to me, and what was worse, people like me were the ones being killed. “When that image of Kim Phuc came out it was 1972. My Worst Day in Vietnam. Today, despite our perception that we are more knowledgeable about current events thanks to 24/7 internet news access, Nguyen says censorship of war-zone images has increased, leaving us paradoxically sometimes less well informed than we were during the Vietnam era. Ross stresses that the film studios largely remained silent on Vietnam until after the war was over. It was 1981, and unbeknownst to his parents — refugees from Vietnam who fled to the U.S. six years earlier with their then 4-year-old son when Saigon fell to the communists — Nguyen had rented Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now to while away a solitary weekend while his mom and dad worked long hours at their neighborhood grocery store in San Jose. The tunnel rats encounter. “That hurts even more than the sense of abandonment,” he said. Well, that's one side of the story. An important outlet for these efforts is The Conversation, an independent source for informed commentary and analysis written by the…, To test her students’ knowledge of history in a more social, casual setting, USC Dornsife’s Lindsay O’Neill hosts an online pub trivia-style competition pitting Trojans against Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish. Haywood T. "The Kid" Kirkland from Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (1984) In an article in the New York Times Magazine on March 24, 1968, reporter Sol Stern observed, "In Vietnam between 1961 and 1964, Negroes accounted for more than 20 percent of Army fatalities, even though they represented only 12.6 percent of Army … “That was going to be my subject, not just the war itself, but how the war was regarded.”. This year will go down as one of the most troubled — and inspirational — in history. October 11, 2020 — 32 Comments. Escaping by boat, many found freedom in foreign land, many were captured and … Stories from Vietnam. We sent a writer out to Vietnam to speak with Nguyen Hoa Giai. He cites Last Days of Saigon and certain combat documentaries. “American self-confidence still hasn’t been restored to the quality it had in the 1950s. “That’s the ethos I was raised with — that as ugly as war is, it’s important to sign up to defend your country.”. “What that means is that we’re personally invested in it,” he said. See the Jet Age’s lasting influence. The Chinese dubbed the American unit, “Golden Dragons,” because of their fierce fighting spirit. The Vietnam War is a 10-part American television documentary series about the Vietnam War written by Geoffrey C. Ward and directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. While Nguyen says the U.S. is not unique in the way it remembers and forgets its wars and those involved in them, it has nevertheless focused on the Vietnam War almost exclusively as an American war in terms of its cost — to American lives and unity, and with respect to damage to the American psyche. I along with about 30 other 19-yr- old males had to gather at the armory in Kalamazoo, … Many of those persist to this day. But in some ways we don’t want to learn; we don’t want to confront it. Here are 10 of the most read USC Dornsife…, Explore USC’s unseen gems. Photo courtesy of Viet Thanh Nguyen. South Korea’s contingent was bigger than that of … At first, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, but looking closely, I saw stairs leading into the ground and realized he … As a literature professor, I teach critical thinking, but it must be supplemented by empathy, the ability to put ourselves in the shoes, the souls, hearts and minds of someone different from ourselves. It’s only a matter of time, Gualtieri notes, before the sympathy it evokes is overshadowed by more recurrent and powerful images of terrorists. Vietnam veterans from the northland share their personal stories, in their own words. Luong was 9 years old when he escaped the ravages of war-torn Vietnam with his family, just a day before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese on April 30, 1975. The long shadow of the Vietnam War continues to hang over every American foreign policy venture, even today.”. by Duong Thuy Nguyen. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, thousands of so-called "boat people" fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, often in small overcrowded ships that were barely seaworthy. Former Vietnamese Soldier Shares His War Stories for Friendship. It was a war movie that was horrific, and that placed me at the center of that horror. A Vietnam War Story. It was 1973 and I was very aware about the casualties of the Vietnam war. “They made me feel absolutely torn and very committed to the cause in South Vietnam,” he said. We try to get students to listen to those voices, even when it’s challenging.”. These stories from the Vietnam War will break your heart. But the Kurdi photograph, although equally heartbreaking, is more complicated. (MORE: Iconic war images shown for first time in Vietnam) The rampage now known as the My Lai massacre … Not a single punch is … Refugees often encountered pirates while sailing the dangerous South China Sea. Please explore selected contributions on this page. It’s the story of Vietnam’s destruction and self-destruction, as seen through the eyes of a woman who was once a girl growing up in a community and family corrupted by war, who, as a teenager, became a refugee in Saigon living among both American and South Vietnamese soldiers. “My sisters and I were scared to death. Read stories from diverse points-of-view about how the Vietnam War era has affected our sense of self and our place in the world. Vietnam war: 'In a weird way, it’s with me every day' Ngoc Minh Ngo says her father was a colonel in the South Vietnamese army, ‘caught up in a complicated war’:. This is the first in a six-part series about the stories and sacrifices of local men and women during the Vietnam War. If you are a veteran, know a veteran, or are related to a veteran, and would like to place a personal story on the Online Veterans Tribute, please mail it to: American Veterans Center 1100 N. Glebe Rd. My Worst Day in Vietnam. Photo by Bettmann/Getty Images. Calley Jr., March 16, 1968, in My Lai, South Vietnam. Wm. Nguyen and Gustafson think that while these images of children caught in war can still have an impact, the possibility of them moving us to take action has been reduced. Vietnam, Past Is Prologue, probes the legacies of the Vietnam War and its aftermath through maps, videos, and paintings that highlight the voices and stories of former Vietnamese refugees. I still remember the formation of marine helicopters coming in to rescue us. Nguyen, however, believes that the scars left by Vietnam, both in America’s psyche and on its soul, have yet to heal. The Vietnam War was the prolonged struggle between nationalist forces attempting to unify the country of Vietnam under a communist government and the United States (with the aid of the South Vietnamese) attempting to prevent the spread of communism. Escaping by boat, many found freedom in foreign land, many were captured and … faculty research, alumni, usc dornsife magazine, general interest, topics: Even when such images do emerge, their impact is diminished, Nguyen said. Around 300,000 troops joined American forces in 1964. Ehrhart, left, in October 1967 near Quang Tri, Vietnam, and today. “The bipartisan recasting of American memory is not simply to focus on American soldiers,” Nguyen argues, “but to turn the memory of what was at best an ambivalent war for Americans into one that is now a war of noble intentions and human failure, rather than one of atrocity and racism as it was portrayed by the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s.”. In 1960, counter-guerrilla forces of South Vietnamese Army light infantry Ranger companies were created. Just as Nguyen’s world was turned upside down by watching Apocalypse Now, Gustafson experienced a cataclysmic awakening when, as a junior at Yale University in 1974, he saw the anti-war documentary Hearts and Minds, which affected him so much emotionally he couldn’t sleep at night. While such images fueled the anti-war movement in the U.S., they served to reinforce Luong’s determination to continue his family’s legacy of military service. Photo by Nick Ut, courtesy of AP Photo. Between 1975 to 1992, almost two million Vietnamese risked their lives to flee oppression and hardship after the Vietnam War, in one of the largest mass exoduses in modern history. That morning, as communist troops swept into the South Vietnamese … Vietnam War Books: Nonfiction An Intimate History of Killing by Joanna Bourke. At university, his first politics course had him reading the Pentagon Papers. 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