SwiftVets.com

[army72]

My daughter is a senior at Ohio State U. She is currently in a class the is supposedly teaching the real Vietnam War. She brought me several books that she has to do reports on. All three books portray the Norths' heroic stuggle against the evil US. The instructor also wants her to watch a French movie about it.

I have tried to get her to ask veterans about their take to give a balanced view, but she said the instuctor just to view it from the angle the books give.

Why he wouldn't want all the facts she could gather is beyond me, but he makes it obvious when he mentions their heroic struggle.

This is what is being taught to our kids. Any wonder what they will come away believing? I have talked to her about that particular war as well as others trying to instill that we do not all wear horns and carry pitchforks as her professor thinks.

I really want her to learn the truth and admit some of our history is very ugly. I have told her to read this forum and others to see what kind of people that guy branded as evil and I asked her to check into what happened to the country after our people left.

I will list the books she was given... I have read part of the first one... they make the guy sound like great guy. I'll scan through and see if they have Kerry's picture as a hero to the people.

1) Novel Without a Name - Duong Thu Huong
2) A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain- Robert Olen Butler
3) Paradise of the Blind - Duong Thu Huong

After talking to her, she thinks that any opposing view she gives will be reflected in grades... (she is a 4.0 student but feels the need to speak out risking grades).. she could give him what he wants then express her views about really happened during and after the war. But that is up to her.

I can't believe the nerve of teaching like that for starters. I also wanted to show people what is still being taught in our own institutions. As if anyone forgot!

Are there any Viet veterans willing to talk to her about everyday life there and what was really expected? I don't know if she will confront the professor in front of the class with real details, but if she does, it'lll at least show there are people that won't roll over and accept the re-writing of our history.

As I have stated before, I joined the army in early '72 and due to an accident, did not go so I cannot give first hand info.

The reward might be small ( a smile and an e-mail handshake and my thanks for serving our country).

Any takers? Any good counter resouces.
_________________
Hillary and Kerry in '08? Something smells!!

[Deuce]

Army,

Our condolences, and thank you for your service...your daughter has a great dad. But, yes, it sounds like her comrade professor, like Jimmy Carter, has yet to find a communist he can't love. The reason for my condolences is the Lose-Lose situation she (like so many in this country) that she is forced into by our AmeriKan AKademia.

The South Vietnam's People's Committee for Solidarity* has found another spokesperson in her Professor. And to go against her comrades in class risks not only grades, but their well known and successful tactic, Demonization (McCarthy, Gingrich come to mind) .

[Me#1You#10]

This is yet another example of the remarkable information opportunities that the internet has afforded us all.

Fairly stated, we all have a built-in bias towards aKademia (and rightly so, I might add) but, in this case, after spending a bit of time googling the three cited books, I'm not so sure that branding this "perfesser" as a "leftist ideologue" is appropriate.

I'm unfamiliar with the works in question, but here's the results of a short bit of research... (highlights mine)

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; A Novel in the Tunnels Of the North Vietnamese
Date: May 30, 1995, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

NOVEL WITHOUT A NAME
By Duong Thu Huong Translated by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson. 292 pages. William Morrow & Company. $23.

One of the most striking things about this new novel by Duong Thu Huong -- one of Vietnam's most popular writers and better known dissidents -- is just how closely it resembles many American novels about the Vietnam War. Not only does "Novel Without a Name" turn the conventional Bildungsroman into a tale of disillusionment, like such American works as Rob Riggan's "Free Fire Zone" and Stephen Wright's "Meditations in Green," but it also uses a disjointed time sequence, reminiscent of works like Nicholas Proffitt's "Gardens of Stone," to try to convey the war's disorienting, surreal effect.

NY Times Book Review

Well, that sent me immediately to Merriam-Webster... (which, by the way, offers a must have browser utility)

Main Entry: bil·dungs·ro·man
Pronunciation: 'bil-du[ng](k)s-rO-"män, -du[ng]z-
Function: noun
Etymology: German, from Bildung education + Roman novel
: a novel about the moral and psychological growth of the main character

Like the other two books cited, this is a NOVEL that, at least at first glance, may express some elements of an anti-Vietnam establishment viewpoint.

Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories (Paperback)
by Robert Olen Butler
Terrible, January 16, 2005
Reviewer: Lan Tran (New Orleans, LA)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

The Vietnam War continues to play itself out in fiction, autobiography, and history books, but no American author has captured the experiences of the Vietnamese themselves--and caught their voices--more tellingly than Robert Olen Butler, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain. The 15 stories collected here, all written in the first person, blend Vietnamese folklore, the terrible, lingering memories of war, American pop culture and family drama. Butler's literary ventriloquism, as he mines the experiences of a people with a great literary tradition of their own, is uncanny; but his talents as a writer of universal truths is what makes this a collection for the ages.--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Butler's 15 stories, set in the Vietnamese enclaves of suburban New Orleans, capture the voices of people who have lost their homeland and are trying to adapt to an alien culture. Named by PW as one of the best books of 1992.

Amazon Reader Review

Terrible, January 16, 2005
Reviewer: Lan Tran (New Orleans, LA)

I am Vietnamese and I grew up in New Orleans during the 80's and 90's when the first waves were settling down there. I hate to tell this to everyone on this site but this book is the worst piece of fiction ever written. Like many books written by someone who does not belong to the culture that he writes about, the book takes great liberties with the imagination and presents the stories from the viewpoint of the writer and not the actual people. The Vietnamese characters in the book are portrayed as backwards, uneducated, and simple. Further, the stories are depressing and very few of the characters seem to have any success. If you actually grew up in New Orleans during the time that the Vietnamese Americans were setting root during the 80's and 90's, you would know that by and large, the community pulled itself from nothing to become quite successful. No real Vietnamese American thinks or acts like the characters portrayed in this book. I repeat - no Vietnamese American thinks or acts like the characters portrayed in this book. The book repeats many of the fallacies that I have noticed in other books written by predominantly caucasian male authors about East Asian Culture. There always seems to be 1) an asian prostitute 2) caucasian guy with asian bride 3) asian male in an emasculated role 4) asian people as backwards and simple. Quite sad. This book reminds me quite a bit of Memoirs of a Geisha, though that portrayed Japanese culture in a better light. By the way, the lady on which "Memoirs of a Geisha" is based and written about was quite upset at the author of Memoirs of a Geisha and did not feel that it portrayed her life or her thoughts in any way at all. Regardless, if you really want to find out about the Vietnamese American experience you should really read a book written by a Vietnamese American.

Amazon

This novel appears to deal with the subject of problems faced in the evolution and integration of the New Orleans Vietnamese community into American society and, I would assume, doesn't really touch historical revisionism.

Memories of a Pure Spring (Paperback)
by Thu Hng Dng, Duong Thu Houng, Nina McPherson (Translator), Huy Ng Phan, Phan Huy Duong (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Often considered the literary conscience of postwar Vietnam, Huong (Paradise of the Blind) tells the wrenching story of three people coping with the brutal realities, disillusion and dispossession suffered by Vietnamese artists and intellectuals after the "war against the Americans." Hung is a composer and director of an artistic troupe forced from his job after the revolution; his wife, Suong, is a renowned singer stifled by the responsibility of supporting the family; rounding out the triangle is Suong's jealous, scrappy younger brother, Vinh. Huong vividly captures the vertiginous period after the Communists' victory, when Hung is shocked to find that his wartime friends have suddenly become high-ranking, impassive bureaucrats in command of his fate. Once an idealistic revolutionary, Hung is crushed to realize that redistribution of wealth means only that a new class of apparatchiks has gleefully seized power and material comforts. Hung accidentally ends up on a boat fleeing Vietnam that is quickly intercepted by the authorities. He's sent to prison for re-education, then forced to live as a nonperson after his release, with no identity card, food rations or possibility of official employment. He anesthetizes the pain of his uselessness and the memories of brutality with alcohol, and his marriage nearly unravels, but a suicide attempt by Suong has the dubious effect of temporarily reconciling the family. While Huong has a fine ear for the smug thickheadedness of Communist bureaucrats, her observations about family life and the importance of art are overwrought. The author tends to overexplain what her characters are thinking, following up with redundant interior monologues. The translation is serviceable but unpolished; cliches slip into the descriptions (Suong indulges in "the pleasures of the flesh"; another character longs for "the open road"), and the dialogue is occasionally transposed into an unnatural, slangy American English. An uneven but powerful testament to the abuses of an oppressive regime, the novel's artistry doesn't always measure up to its moral urgency. (Feb.)

From Library Journal

From the author of two critically acclaimed previous novels, Novel Without a Name (LJ 1/95) and Paradise of the Blind (LJ 2/15/93), comes a third on the subject of life in postwar Vietnam, her native country. Duong, the leader of an artistic troupe and later an exile, brings a unique sense of realism and credibility to the story of composer Hung Pham and his wife, Mai Suong. On the exterior, readers find a successful composer who is happily married to his child-bride and is the father of two young daughters. Delving deeper into this novel, which is steeped in a heavy political climate, readers discover a complex telling of love and betrayal on various levels: between a husband and wife, a man and his art, and a man and his country. Duong takes readers on a journey into the human psyche by looking at the frailty of the human condition and asks readers to confront issues like depression, attempted suicide, infidelity, and drug and alcohol abuse. The threads of love that bind her characters together are the same threads that break them. An intense and sometimes dark novel; Asian literature collections and libraries with Duong's other works will want to have this one.
-Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA

Amazon
--------------------------------------------------

Memories of a Pure Spring
By Duong Thu Huong
Translated by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong
2000, 337 pages, hardback.

Book Description from the Front Cover Flap

From Vietnam's most acclaimed writer and famous dissident, Duong Thu Huong, comes a mesmerizing novel set during and after the Vietnam War. Through the story of Suong, a celebrated singer, and Hung, her composer husband, Memories of a Pure Spring depicts the strengthening of a marriage amidst the chaos of war and its dissolution following the war's end.

During the war, Hung meets Suong, a young peasant girl, and is struck by her voice and her beauty. He invites her to join his performing troupe and makes her his wife, opening a world of opportunities for Suong. The two become a team, entertaining the troops with Suong singing Hung's compositions. After the war, however, Hung is forced from his job, setting off a wrenching series of events. Anger and pity drive Suong and Hung apart, and their downward spiral of destruction finally leads to a moving and unexpected climax.

In breathtakingly lyrical prose, Duong Thu Huong paints an intimate portrait of modern Vietnam as she uncovers the lies people tell others and themselves. While many of her characters ultimately compromise their ideals, they are above all profoundly human in their struggle to survive under the complexities of the post-war regime. Memories of a Pure Spring draws heavily on the experiences of its author, vividly describing life at the battlefront, the inhuman conditions in a "re-education" camp, and the texture and rhythm, scents and sounds, of a provincial Vietnamese city. At the same time, it tells a simple, universal story of failed love that is as haunting as it is riveting.

Asian American Books

-------------------------------

New York Times

BOOK REVIEW DESK | January 30, 2000
Books in Brief: Fiction & Poetry
By PHILIP GAMBONE
Memories of a Pure Spring By Duong Thu Huong. Hyperion East, $23.95. ...
About: MEMORIES OF A PURE SPRING (BOOK)

Memories of a Pure Spring
By Duong Thu Huong.
Hyperion East, $23.95.

''Each life unfolds and creates a graveyard for its own hopes and aspirations, whether modest or grandiose.'' This gloomy, astringent sentiment lies at the heart of Duong Thu Huong's darkly poetic new novel, a story of two artists, husband and wife, and the abyss that opens between them. Suong is a celebrated singer in central Vietnam -- she is called the ''Edith Piaf of Indochina'' -- who, during the war with America, is discovered by Hung, a talented composer from Hanoi who is 10 years her senior. They soon marry, and he enlists her in the itinerant troupe that he directs, taking Suong into the jungle to entertain the soldiers. When, after the war, Hung is mistaken for a boat person trying to flee Vietnam, the authorities send him to a squalid re-education camp from which he is eventually released -- but not before both his career and his spirit are broken. While his wife's glorious voice provides the wherewithal to keep the family alive, Hung languishes in despair, fearful that all he has endured has killed the music inside him. Riddled with venereal disease, addicted to opium, tormented by memories of his former creativity and party loyalty, he is left with nothing but ''the role of the dead man.'' Duong, whose novels have been banned in her native Vietnam, deftly employs flashbacks, multiple points of view and a haunting interplay of narrative and interior voices to construct her sadly beautiful tale. The third of her novels to be translated into English (all by the able team of Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong), ''Memories of a Pure Spring'' is an exploration of the multifaceted nature of duty -- to self, to art, to truth. Philip Gambone

New York Times

THE ARTS/CULTURAL DESK | February 9, 2000
BOOKS OF THE TIMES; After the War Is Won, Another Struggle Begins
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
MEMORIES OF A PURE SPRING By Duong Thu Huong Translated by Nina McPherson and Phan ...
About: MEMORIES OF A PURE SPRING (BOOK)

MEMORIES OF A PURE SPRING
By Duong Thu Huong
Translated by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong. 340 pages. Hyperion. $23.95.

Duong Thu Huong, who lives in Hanoi and whose most recent books have been banned in her own country, came to the attention of readers in the West with her book ''Novel Without a Name.'' It was a striking and affecting work, but it was most notable in the United States for its political message. It powerfully evoked a deep disillusionment in North Vietnam, which it depicted as a militarily victorious but spiritually wounded civilization ruled over by a self-satisfied, cliche-spouting Marxist bureaucracy.

Ms. Huong's accomplished new novel, ''Memories of a Pure Spring,'' takes place in the years immediately after the great victory and is a continuing evocation of a kind of postwar despair among those morally conscious enough to experience it. But it would be a mistake to see Ms. Huong's most recent book, translated by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong, as aiming mainly to make a political statement. One reads it certainly for its politics, but even more for the depth and complexity of its characters who strive to define themselves in a world that still puts everything and everybody in one or another category of ideology and national aspiration.

The two main characters are Suong, a famous singer in an unnamed provincial city in central Vietnam, and Hung, her husband and one of the country's best-known composers. They have known each other since Hung discovered Suong in a humble village. They became lovers and were married even as they led a Vietnamese cultural troupe that performed in the midst of some of the heaviest bombing of the war. As this novel opens, however, we meet Suong, not experiencing the pleasures of revolutionary heroism but recovering in a provincial hospital after a failed suicide attempt.

As Ms. Huong tells her story, using shifting time periods and shifting points of view, the relationship of Suong and Hung emerges with richness and depth, and so does the reason for Suong's drastic action. Suong and Hung are bound together by hoops of steel, but the end of the war has also brought a reversal in what might be seen as a shift in the personal balance of power.

Like Theodore Dreiser's ''Sister Carrie,'' ''Memories of a Pure Spring'' is a story of crisscrossing fortunes. During the war years the older and more worldly Hung served as Suong's lover and guide. But when the war is over, he is set adrift with devastating consequences for both of them.

Part of Hung's disorientation is political. A cultural functionary who has had it in for Hung for years succeeds in having him removed as head of the cultural troupe. This demonstrates the pettiness of arbitrary political power and the absence of redress in Vietnam, but Ms. Huong is more interested in its spiritual effects.

Hung is a complex and memorable figure, one who is already troubled by the pettiness and meanness of postwar revolutionary life. Early on we see his reaction when a Communist cultural commissar drives by in an American-made jeep, a kind of war trophy in Vietnam and a prestigious one. For Hung, though, the jeep and the commissar's proud possession of it symbolize what is going wrong.

''The patriotic feeling that had filled his heart all those years, all the sacrifice -- none of this had prepared him to imagine that the glory of their sacred resistance would take such a shameless form,'' she writes of Hung. ''What did he want? He didn't know. Something was missing. The jeep was already far down the road. In the billowing cloud of dust and light, the dreams that he had cherished all those years fell apart, like so many planks of wood, adrift, bobbing on the waves.''

Ms. Huong takes us on an emotionally intense and exceedingly intelligent journey through the thicket of Hung and Suong's lives, both political and personal. She brings us to the heart of a political re-education camp as well as into a den of artistic alienation. Hung falls in with a group of artists who, like himself, have no place in victorious Vietnam. They moan to each other of the brittleness of Vietnamese culture, its backwardness.

''Our country is a stagnant pond lagging behind other civilizations,'' Hung is told by a younger man whose goal is to flee Vietnam by boat. ''The works you wrote during the war are like fragments of epics, but watered down -- a little local color, a bit of bamboo, a backdrop of tropical forests.''

As Hung collapses morally and physically, Suong strives valiantly to hold together her disintegrating world, and she has some help. Here and there in this bleak landscape is a bit of light, most important an official who works behind the scenes to reverse the wrong done to Hung. But the power of disintegration is impressively strong in Ms. Huong's world, which is, as we learn from a biographical sketch appended to the novel, a fictional transfiguration of her own experience.

She, too, was the head of an artistic troupe during the war, but afterward, she fell afoul of the authorities, spending seven months in prison in 1991. Her new book, a kind of Vietnamese ''Farewell to Arms,'' is a powerful testament to a continued spirit of moral resistance in Vietnam, lonelier than the resistance to the United States that forms the country's great epic and therefore all the braver.

Published: 02 - 09 - 2000 , Late Edition - Final , Section E , Column 3 , Page 7
NY Times

Whew. After reading that last one, and if it's an indicator of the perfesser's "ideology", perhaps your daughter has nothing to fear?

[LewWaters]

Along these same lines, just today, I was chatting with my Hairstylist (barber, before PC took hold)who also happens to be a Vietnamese-Amercian. Without going into detail, she stated that the fall of Saigon in 1975 and about 10 years after that were "very bad times."

Somehow, she managed to escape and come to America back then and became an American citizen. She currently has 2 sons, both serving in the US Army, one in Iraq.

She loves her native country and would like to visit it again, to see family left behind, but is apprehensive since even today, the officials there are wary of visiting Vietnamese Americans and like to find reason to arrest them and jail them.

I encouraged her to write down her memories, if able and ask other refugees to do the same and make them available to all. Hopefully, more will speak out and let the world know what the anti-war left wrought on the People of South Viet Nam by setting a timetable for withdrawal and abandoning the People of South Viet Nam, when they needed help the most.

She is hopeful that the fall of Saigon in April of 1975 teaches the world a valuable lesson, but agreed, that apparently, very few learned anything and we are in danger of repeating that same mistake in Iraq today.
_________________
Clark County Conservative

[fortdixlover]

[army72]

After reading the post from Me#1You#10, I have decided that I will read the books and see just what the messages are. I have also had an offer from another vet on this forum to give his view to my daughter. This will, at the very least, give her an insight that will help her to understand that our guys weren't the evil maniacs that Mr. Kerry described.

The books may not be as bad as they sound, but instructors slant was obvious from his description of the course.

I thank you guys for your efforts on this.
_________________
Hillary and Kerry in '08? Something smells!!

[Me#1You#10]

Looking at the OSU website, I found the following....

[DavidS]

I recently received a small book that I would recommend your daughter ( and everyone interested in the topic) read. It is titled: Whitewash/Blackwash, Myths of the Viet Nam War by Bill Laurie and R. J. Del Vecchio and available at TechConsultServ@Juno.com.
_________________
Keep A Zero Bubble!

[JN173]

[R J Del Vecchio]

I have researched this carefully, and had contact with the professor. There has been some misunderstanding/miscommunication, the course has several books listed as ones from which to choose for reading, with a requirement that one by a North Vietnamese be among them. Those books are NOT defenses of the "heroic struggle", they show how terribly wrongly the communist system treated even those who supported it. The professor is a decorated Vietnam vet and excellent professional historian. From his syllabus and my conversations with him, I would say this may be one of the best courses I've seen about the war. And I am engaged heavily in trying to correct the myths about the war, am also a vet, and not remotely into the BS psuedohistory that has served this country so badly.

R J Del Vecchio

[Me#1You#10]

[army72]

After receiving e-mails from Mr. Del Vecchio, I am having second thoughts about this. It seems that I took too much of what was said out of context. This instructor is a decorated veteran. My daughter said that one of the movies he was actually against is ' Apocalypse Now' (SP?) saying it showed very little of the war as he saw it and portrayed the US soldiers as deviates and dope heads.

I should have checked my facts better but was worried that my daughter would be getting a very slanted view of that war. My daughter seems to think he is an ok guy... good enough for me. My thanks to everyone for helping me with this.
_________________
Hillary and Kerry in '08? Something smells!!

[Navy_Navy_Navy]

Army72, I can see how you could have easily been misled from the information you first had. After all, the revisionist version of Vietnam is the one that most students are going to hear, in this country. Very sad situation.

I'm so glad that it worked out that your daughter has this professor who is more interested teaching real history than than in preaching pro-communist ideology.

Kudos to this professor and thank heavens he's still fighting!
_________________
~ Echo Juliet ~
Altering course to starboard - On Fire, Keep Clear
Navy woman, Navy wife, Navy mother

[Deuce]

NNN,
I'll second your observation....tho' I still enjoy jumping to conclusions every now and then for the educational/entertainment value if nothing else! My holdover from the 60's.
Deuce