thedrifter
06-03-05, 06:33 AM
The Vietnam War Through Today's Eyes
One of the last battles took place on May 15, 1975, but 30 years later its legacy lives on
"The bombs fell constantly," says Le Hoang Khanh, a lean, leathery man of 62 who once fought Americans a few miles from his family home. "Day and night became the same. Everybody left or went underground."
It's a hot afternoon outside Ben Suc, about an hour's drive north east of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. The lush rice-growing countryside bathes the eyes in green as it rolls toward a cloudless blue horizon; the only sound the whisper of a breeze rustling through the grass and the occasional mournful lowing of a buffalo.
Impossible to imagine now that Mr. Le's home Ben Suc and the neighboring district of Cu Chi was once, in the words of British journalists Tom Mangold and John Penycate, "the most bombed, shelled, gassed, defoliated and generally devastated area in the history of warfare," an area that bore the brunt of a previous assault by the U.S., not on terror, but on communism, and which ended almost exactly thirty years ago.
During what is known here as "The American War," peasant resistance fighters like Mr. Le, many of whom lived for months in a vast complex of underground tunnels, dominated this forty-square mile area. The U.S. dubbed the fighters Vietcong, for Vietnamese Communists, and called the area the "Iron Triangle," a "dagger pointing at the heart of Saigon," then the capital of Vietnam. Like present day Iraq, this tiny chunk of land became the frontline in the global battle against an elusive enemy, and a vast military machine was mobilized to smash it.
Soldiers came to herd Mr. Le's family, friends and most people in this area into "secure hamlets," or compounds ringed with barbed wire, free from Vietcong contagion, before setting the deserted villages and hamlets alight in what became notorious as "Zippo Jobs." Ben Suc, wrote a U.S. general in 1968, "no longer existed," after his men trucked the inhabitants out, set fire to their homes, bulldozed houses, schools and graveyards and detonated five tons of explosives and napalm in the center of the village.
The soldiers came in bigger numbers, trying to kill an invisible enemy that melted underground or back into the civilian population. Finally came the planes; wave after wave of bombers that dropped 400,000 tons of napalm and more than 11 million gallons of defoliant chemicals on the south of the country in an attempt to clear the dense jungle and undergrowth that the resistance used for cover. Then millions of tons of bombs were dropped to destroy the tunnels, leaving this lush countryside looking like the face of the moon.
Locals in Ben Suc will show you craters from these bombs. There are two on Mr. Le's small rice field where, he says, rice never grows. Still, he insists he's not angry. "It's just war," he says. "The American boys who came here didn't want to fight. We didn't want to fight. The U.S. soldiers were ordered to come by their government. And when they came we had to resist. We were just trying to defend our country."
His neighbor, Nguyen Thi Kieu, whose husband fought like many South Vietnamese for the Americans (in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam or ARVN) says the same. "You had to pick a side and we chose the losers," she laughs. For his sins, her husband spent over ten years in a Vietnamese "reeducation camp" after the war ended, and died before he could emigrate with his family to the U.S. "It was too bad, but we managed. It could have been worse.
"
Three million dead Vietnamese, including two million civilians, more than 15 million Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians refugees, over 10,000 hamlets like Ben Suc and 25 million acres of forest in South Vietnam laid waste, 58,169 dead American soldiers and 304,000 wounded, thousands more casualties from U.S. allies Australia, South Korea and elsewhere, and a country laid waste. How could have been worse?
One possible answer emerged in 2002 with the release of another extract from the secret tapes recorded during the administration of Richard M. Nixon, which have been dribbling out of his archives for years. In May 1972, unable to defeat the Vietnamese peasants and hounded by protestors at home, an increasingly frustrated Nixon proposed to his national security advisor and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger dropping a nuclear bomb on the northern capital of North Vietnam, Hanoi. "I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes," said the president.
Thumping a map of the world in anger, Nixon is heard on the tapes saying, "I'll see that the United States does not lose. I'm putting it quite bluntly ... South Vietnam may lose. But the United States cannot lose...Whatever happens to South Vietnam, we are going to cream North Vietnam...For once, we've got to use the maximum power of this country... against this ****-ass little country: to win the war. We can't use the word, "win." But others can."
In a later exchange Nixon observed to Kissinger: "The only place where you and I disagree ... is with regard to the bombing. You're so *******ed concerned about the civilians and I don't give a damn. I don't care." Kissinger replied, "I'm concerned about the civilians because I don't want the world to be mobilized against you as a butcher...."
In the end of course, Nixon fell before the Republic of Vietnam when he was impeached in 1974, a year before communist tanks entered Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, On April 30, 1975. The last battle of the Vietnam War was fought on May 15, 1975, a bitter firefight on the small island of Koh Tang which ended, fittingly, with the extraction of 29 exhausted young marines.
contiued.........
One of the last battles took place on May 15, 1975, but 30 years later its legacy lives on
"The bombs fell constantly," says Le Hoang Khanh, a lean, leathery man of 62 who once fought Americans a few miles from his family home. "Day and night became the same. Everybody left or went underground."
It's a hot afternoon outside Ben Suc, about an hour's drive north east of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. The lush rice-growing countryside bathes the eyes in green as it rolls toward a cloudless blue horizon; the only sound the whisper of a breeze rustling through the grass and the occasional mournful lowing of a buffalo.
Impossible to imagine now that Mr. Le's home Ben Suc and the neighboring district of Cu Chi was once, in the words of British journalists Tom Mangold and John Penycate, "the most bombed, shelled, gassed, defoliated and generally devastated area in the history of warfare," an area that bore the brunt of a previous assault by the U.S., not on terror, but on communism, and which ended almost exactly thirty years ago.
During what is known here as "The American War," peasant resistance fighters like Mr. Le, many of whom lived for months in a vast complex of underground tunnels, dominated this forty-square mile area. The U.S. dubbed the fighters Vietcong, for Vietnamese Communists, and called the area the "Iron Triangle," a "dagger pointing at the heart of Saigon," then the capital of Vietnam. Like present day Iraq, this tiny chunk of land became the frontline in the global battle against an elusive enemy, and a vast military machine was mobilized to smash it.
Soldiers came to herd Mr. Le's family, friends and most people in this area into "secure hamlets," or compounds ringed with barbed wire, free from Vietcong contagion, before setting the deserted villages and hamlets alight in what became notorious as "Zippo Jobs." Ben Suc, wrote a U.S. general in 1968, "no longer existed," after his men trucked the inhabitants out, set fire to their homes, bulldozed houses, schools and graveyards and detonated five tons of explosives and napalm in the center of the village.
The soldiers came in bigger numbers, trying to kill an invisible enemy that melted underground or back into the civilian population. Finally came the planes; wave after wave of bombers that dropped 400,000 tons of napalm and more than 11 million gallons of defoliant chemicals on the south of the country in an attempt to clear the dense jungle and undergrowth that the resistance used for cover. Then millions of tons of bombs were dropped to destroy the tunnels, leaving this lush countryside looking like the face of the moon.
Locals in Ben Suc will show you craters from these bombs. There are two on Mr. Le's small rice field where, he says, rice never grows. Still, he insists he's not angry. "It's just war," he says. "The American boys who came here didn't want to fight. We didn't want to fight. The U.S. soldiers were ordered to come by their government. And when they came we had to resist. We were just trying to defend our country."
His neighbor, Nguyen Thi Kieu, whose husband fought like many South Vietnamese for the Americans (in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam or ARVN) says the same. "You had to pick a side and we chose the losers," she laughs. For his sins, her husband spent over ten years in a Vietnamese "reeducation camp" after the war ended, and died before he could emigrate with his family to the U.S. "It was too bad, but we managed. It could have been worse.
"
Three million dead Vietnamese, including two million civilians, more than 15 million Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians refugees, over 10,000 hamlets like Ben Suc and 25 million acres of forest in South Vietnam laid waste, 58,169 dead American soldiers and 304,000 wounded, thousands more casualties from U.S. allies Australia, South Korea and elsewhere, and a country laid waste. How could have been worse?
One possible answer emerged in 2002 with the release of another extract from the secret tapes recorded during the administration of Richard M. Nixon, which have been dribbling out of his archives for years. In May 1972, unable to defeat the Vietnamese peasants and hounded by protestors at home, an increasingly frustrated Nixon proposed to his national security advisor and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger dropping a nuclear bomb on the northern capital of North Vietnam, Hanoi. "I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes," said the president.
Thumping a map of the world in anger, Nixon is heard on the tapes saying, "I'll see that the United States does not lose. I'm putting it quite bluntly ... South Vietnam may lose. But the United States cannot lose...Whatever happens to South Vietnam, we are going to cream North Vietnam...For once, we've got to use the maximum power of this country... against this ****-ass little country: to win the war. We can't use the word, "win." But others can."
In a later exchange Nixon observed to Kissinger: "The only place where you and I disagree ... is with regard to the bombing. You're so *******ed concerned about the civilians and I don't give a damn. I don't care." Kissinger replied, "I'm concerned about the civilians because I don't want the world to be mobilized against you as a butcher...."
In the end of course, Nixon fell before the Republic of Vietnam when he was impeached in 1974, a year before communist tanks entered Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, On April 30, 1975. The last battle of the Vietnam War was fought on May 15, 1975, a bitter firefight on the small island of Koh Tang which ended, fittingly, with the extraction of 29 exhausted young marines.
contiued.........