Vietnam War Apocrypha

It's been half a century since the Vietnam War ended. South Vietnamese call it the Vietnam War not the American War like the Northerners do. The South Vietnamese perspective is often neglected for reasons that should be obvious. It doesn't fit neatly within the historical narrative that's been built. Do not speak of David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, or Ken Burns to me. If you think it is sometimes difficult to hold a different opinion in the West, consider that voices of dissent are even less acceptable in the Asian sphere.

Many veterans, American and South Vietnamese, would not talk about the war to their children. My father, who was South Vietnamese, on the other hand would talk about just about anything.

This series of mini-vignettes are meant to be typical of what one might have heard back then. Some are first-hand accounts, others rumors that would have been passed around. They are not really about my father even though he is how I came to know of most of them. I did not write them down while he was alive and my memory isn't the greatest so expect representations but not fiction invented wholesale.

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I once read about the Vietnam war from a novel called "The Things They Carried", which is an overall tone of the burdens our soldiers went through. Not only that, but how the war affected them in ways that our own government neglected to ever bring to light.

Tim O'Brien, the author once said, "A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil."

No one in our home received a hero's welcome. The very thought of losing to the American Military was considered hogwash. They paid a price our rulers weren't willing to pay.