![]() ![]() Suffering was the main characteristic of the war in Southeast Asia. That deserves a whole lot more focus.įrom American histories, you would think the primary feature of the Vietnam War was combat. But it killed several million Vietnamese and severely affected - and I mean severely - the lives of many millions more. That’s a lot of people and a lot of heartache. The Vietnam War killed more than 58,000 Americans. The main problem with most of those books is the complete lack of Vietnamese voices. Or you can read several hundred of the middling-to-poor books and, if you pay special attention to the few real truths buried in all the run-of-the-mill war stories, you’ll still get some feeling for war American-style. ![]() Maybe not perfect knowledge, but a reasonable picture anyway. I can tell you from experience that if you read a few dozen of the best of them, you can get a fairly good idea about what that war was really like. There are volumes on the decision-making of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, grand biographies of Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, rafts of memoirs by American soldiers - some staggeringly well-written, many not - and plenty of disposable paperbacks about snipers, medics, and field Marines. There are more than 30,000 books on the Vietnam War in print. It just isn’t the sort of knowledge that’s easy to come by. The truth is, you actually can know a lot about war without fighting in one. These are often the same guys who won’t tell you the truths that they know about war and who never think to blame themselves in any way for our collective ignorance. Some veterans will tell you that you can’t know war if you haven’t served in one, if you haven’t seen combat. Maybe numerous rapes were committed there that day, but this was a rare one involving American GIs that actually made its way into the military justice system.Īnd that wasn’t the only thing that set it apart. On August 31, 1969, a rape was committed in Vietnam. This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |