My family returns to Vietnam, Part 1
I’m a big fan of agrarian Marxism. Not for any ideological reasons (though I have nothing against the workers’ collective). I’m also a huge fan of colonialism. I have to be. My admiration is, at root, selfishness defined. Without the contradiction and hostility between those two movements of history, I would not exist. No. Really.
In 1962 my father (photographed above at a orphanage in Nha Trang), along with my mother, brother and sister, was sent by the U.S. military to South Vietnam. As a Green Beret and part of the MAAG (Military Assistance Advisory Group) batallion, it was my father’s assignment to advise both the U.S. government and the South Vietnamese military on how to handle a growing insurgency against the French-supported colonial establishment in the south. BTW. His advice can be summed up as follows: Escalating to war is probably a very bad idea. My father observed that it didn’t appear that the Vietnamese were interested in any aggressive expansion or militaristic utopias. They just wanted to farm a rice paddy, own a buffalo, maybe do some fishing, and be left in peace to determine their own destiny. And he noted, while these people were small in stature, they were tough. Very, very tough indeed. With a long bloody history of thousands of years of fighting wars. Read on
UP TO TOP
