"Two Sides of the Vietnam War and its Personal Costs" Topic
2 Posts
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Tango01 | 20 May 2015 10:24 p.m. PST |
"Wars end, but for those who live through them, they are not over. That's the common thread in these two otherwise completely dissimilar books, one fictional and one not, both looking back at the Vietnam War and its aftermath. The Sympathizer, a brilliantly crafted novel by the Vietnamese-American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, opens a window on the Vietnamese experience of that long conflict — a window Americans rarely looked through, during the war or after. Michael Putzel's The Price They Paid gives a gripping account of the war as it was fought by the pilots and crewmen of one U.S. helicopter unit, and shows how those harrowing experiences continued to shape their lives for years after they came home. The Sympathizer begins in the final days before Saigon's fall or liberation –depending on which side's vocabulary you choose — at the end of April, 1975. As the novel opens, its narrator, a young captain and an aide to a South Vietnamese general, is assigned to approach an American contact and arrange for the evacuation of the general and his family and members of his staff (this, mind you, several days before South Vietnam officially surrendered, so the officers on the evacuation list were technically deserting their posts). But the young captain is not only a South Vietnamese officer; he is also, as he reveals in the first words of the novel, "a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces," — that is, a Communist agent, secretly working for the side that is just about to sweep into the South Vietnamese capital and end the 30-year war for a unified, Communist Vietnam…" Full review here link Amicalement Armand |
mashrewba | 27 May 2015 11:47 p.m. PST |
I thought this was of interest from a VC veteran. link "Because we were on the front lines of South Vietnam, we were pretty far down the food chain when it came to getting weapons. Some came in through the Ho Chi Minh trail, but most of those went to the VC outside of Saigon. With the NVA above us and more critical Viet Cong below us, the guerrillas in the middle got the "short bus" weapons. It worked like this: The Soviets would make a bunch of AK-47s and send them to China. The Chinese would keep the Russian AKs and replace them with inferior knockoffs that they'd produced. The North Vietnamese Army got the Chinese weapons, along with whatever WWII-era crap they had left over. Since all of the "good" weapons from this already-bad lot went to the NVA and VC near major cities, we mostly wound up with antiques -- and not even the nice, collectible antiques that old ladies build nests out of. Just old junk. Which may explain why some of the most feared weapons of the war look like they came from a scrapyard.
Ironically enough, most of them were originally American made. M1s (I remember the iconic "ping" sound) and Thompsons were the norm in the early years. After fights, there were always enemy M16s scattered about, but we didn't touch those -- they never worked right. In one of the few true close-in fights we had with the Americans, they were actually using AK-47s against us. The American rifles were that bad." |
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