LewWaters
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Joined: 18 May 2004
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Location: Washington State
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 Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2008 4:04 am Post subject: Some Vietnam War Issues Revisited: The Role Played By ARVN |
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From 2006 in Vietnam Review, an honest look back at not only the ARVN, but Soviet Bloc involvement in the conflict.
| Quote: | Nguyen Ngoc Bich
March 2006
The Vietnam War is almost 31 years behind us now. Claims have been made that we have put that conflict to rest, that we have “beaten” the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” and the two peoples, Vietnamese and Americans, have made heroic efforts to put that war behind us. How true is that? And have we really succeeded?
It seems that to this day, we are still struggling with words to describe that conflict—the longest conflict in the history of the United States. The Vietnam War lasted longer than the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, World War II and the Korean War combined, so how could we forget it so easily? The wounds are too deep and in the last two presidential elections the Vietnam-era experience still formed the basis on which the electorate judged the character of such candidates as Bill Clinton or, even more recently, President George W. Bush and his rival, John Kerry.
Words can play tricks sometimes
The war in Vietnam sometimes is a word trap. Much too often it is described as a war between the United States and Vietnam, as if there were cleanly only two sides, the Americans on the one hand and the Vietnamese on the other. Such a reduction clearly will not do since by virtue of this conference alone, we are recognizing that there were at least two Vietnamese sides to the war, usually known in Vietnamese as “Quốc-Cộng,” Nationalists vs. Communists—a basic definition that was accepted by both sides in the Vietnamese conflict and only got blurred in recent years by the co-optation by Hanoi of the term “Quốc gia” in some of their institutions. This is a mistake that is made not only by the common people, it is all too often made even by intellectuals and academics, and most recently, it was even made by President Bush and Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, when both of them answered in interviews that the South Vietnamese did not do enough to fight for themselves. This, I think, is the very raison d’ętre of the present conference. Was South Vietnam a legitimate government and state, and did ARVN fight? |
Rest of article
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