Watching it changed the 10 year old’s destiny, setting him on the path to becoming a USC Dornsife professor and a Pulitzer Prize–winning author. Nov 4, 2020. True stories of the Vietnam War. A contentious election. War Stories on DVD as told at the 2006 VHPA Reunion. Vietnam War Story: How This Cellar Saved My Friend. A Vietnam War Story. I would like to say a special thanks to everyone who helped me turn this documentary into a reality, from the people who graciously shared their stories, pictures, and poetry; to the friends who helped me translate. ... like many other relics from the Vietnam War era. I would like to say a special thanks to everyone who helped me turn this documentary into a reality, from the people who graciously shared their stories, pictures, and poetry; to the friends who helped me translate. “Looking back, I realized that rage had rendered it impossible for me to be an American. It didn’t want to risk being accused of a lack of patriotism, so it avoided putting out films critical of the war until it was over,” Ross said. The first episode premiered on PBS on September 17, 2017. While such images fueled the anti-war movement in the U.S., they served to reinforce Luong’s determination to continue his family’s legacy of military service. The cover of Life magazine from April 7, 1967, featured Hanoi residents taking shelter underground during an air raid. Art Jacobs in Vietnam 1967-1970 video. The headline reads “First American Photograph in North Vietnam Under Siege.” Photo by Lee Lockwood/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images. “We want to cover up how we began and developed as an empire. Viet Thanh Nguyen as a small child in Vietnam with his mother, Linda Kim Nguyen, at a rubber plantation in Ban Me Thuot in 1973. His politics were different from mine, but I knew he had a nephew who’d been killed in Vietnam. “The aftermath of the Vietnam War meant that no longer could Americans be self-confident about either their military prowess or their good intentions,” said Nguyen, describing the conflict as “deeply divisive.”, “I think of it as a civil war in the American soul,” he said. Protests against racial injustice. Luong was 9 years old when he escaped the ravages of war-torn Vietnam with his family, just a day before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese on April 30, 1975. In 1982 the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C., inscribed with the names of 57,939 members of U.S. armed forces who had died or were missing as a result of the war. Referred to as Biêt-Dông-Quân or BDQ, a significant number of Ranger-qualified officers and NCOs served as advisors to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam Ranger units throughout the duration of the war…nearly in 2,000 total. “We’re such a militaristic country, but we shy away from that, preferring instead to see ourselves as a republic, not as an empire,” he said. “Here that wasn’t clear to me, and what was worse, people like me were the ones being killed. “I think it’s a vindication of the idea that the Vietnam War remains very much in the American consciousness.”. “We asked our father ‘Dad, where are we?’ He said ‘We’re on a U.S. carrier.’ We said ‘What does that mean?’ And he replied, ‘It means nothing in the world can harm you now.’”. There’s easy listening and uneasy listening, and we have the hardest time doing the uneasy listening to the voices that don’t flatter us, that don’t self-justify us. Vietnam War Story: How This Cellar Saved My Friend. “The bipartisan recasting of American memory is not simply to focus on American soldiers,” Nguyen argues, “but to turn the memory of what was at best an ambivalent war for Americans into one that is now a war of noble intentions and human failure, rather than one of atrocity and racism as it was portrayed by the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s.”. “When that image of Kim Phuc came out it was 1972. The rift Gustafson felt within himself that day was an echo, he realized, of the division he now knew existed within his country. “Vietnam was the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place.”. At first, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, but looking closely, I saw stairs leading into the ground and realized he … I was confused because I wasn’t sure whether I should be rooting for the Americans who were doing the killing, who were committing all the horrors, or whether I should be identifying with the Vietnamese who had the horror being inflicted upon them and their voices taken away.”. “That was going to be my subject, not just the war itself, but how the war was regarded.”. Introduction to RE: Vietnam -- Stories Since the War. While President Lyndon Johnson’s government maintained the official line, telling Americans that Vietnam was about saving democracy — that if Vietnam fell to communism, everything else would fall — it knew this to be untrue, Ross said. “It’s very difficult for me to view the Vietnam War as anything other than an ugly conflict that should never have occurred,” Luong said. Between 1975 to 1992, almost two million Vietnamese risked their lives to flee oppression and hardship after the Vietnam War, in one of the largest mass exoduses in modern history. A well-meaning American soldier from the 7th Marine Regiment tries to comfort a distraught Vietnamese child by giving her a doll, near Cape Batangan, Vietnam, 1965. August 23, 2020 | Featured, Reflections, Vietnamese Voices. Here's another: They were a bunch of scared (mostly) young kids fighting in a massive conflict for very personal reasons. The Vietnamese refugee success stories are plentiful, but let’s never forget about those who were not so fortunate. Communist forces had already started shelling the airport when U.S. marines flew Luong, his father — an officer in the South Vietnamese marine corps — mother and seven sisters to a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, the USS Hancock . The script is by Geoffrey Ward, and the series is narrated by Peter Coyote.This series is one of the few PBS series to carry a TV-MA rating. Refugees often encountered pirates while sailing the dangerous South China Sea. For many, the horrors of the Vietnam War were — and still are — unforgettably distilled in one unbearable image: that of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the 9-year-old Vietnamese girl running naked in the collective eternity of our imaginations down a road, wailing in agony. “Censorship is much more pervasive now so the media simply doesn’t have access to U.S. military operations in the same way American and foreign media did in Vietnam,” Nguyen said. Former Vietnamese Soldier Shares His War Stories for Friendship. “Although a huge amount of work had already been done about the Vietnam War, I felt that no one had yet tried to write a novel that dealt with all sides, and with the problem of looking at a war from all sides,” Nguyen said. That is the most horrific thing about it.”, Read more stories from USC Dornsife Magazine’s Fall 2016-Spring 2017 issue >>, categories: This is the first in a six-part series about the stories and sacrifices of local men and women during the Vietnam War. For me, the seed of that came from Vietnam.”. My father... Jack V Sturiano describes his ‘Forrest Gump moment’:. No. Trip to Vietnam I heard during my tour the difference between a fairy tale and a war story is that one starts with “Once upon a time” and the other with “This is no shit!” I’m not sure these were the exact words, but it hits a central truth, which will be central to you while you read my book. It was 1967 and Gustafson was 13 years old. We try to get students to listen to those voices, even when it’s challenging.”. It was a war movie that was horrific, and that placed me at the center of that horror. In 1960, counter-guerrilla forces of South Vietnamese Army light infantry Ranger companies were created. The alumnus, who earned a degree in biological sciences in 1987, is the first Vietnamese-born general officer in the U.S. military. When such memos were revealed, the result, Ross said, was that Vietnam killed Americans’ confidence in the ability of American military power to fight the right wars. “The fact that 6 million people died during a war was actually not unique during the 20th century. Though it was a relatively short battle, it was by far the most intense fighting I saw during my tour. Vietnam Dustoff. It was 1973 and I was very aware about the casualties of the Vietnam war. As the first hypnotic notes of The Doors’ “The End” played over a lush, idyllic Vietnamese jungle, 10-year-old Viet Thanh Nguyen’s eyes widened as the peaceful green palm trees erupted into a fiery, orange inferno. Wm. One day, I saw my neighbor Jerry slowly climbing out from somewhere below his backyard. The Incredible Story Behind a Haunting Picture of a POW in Vietnam Captured U.S. pilot major Dewey Waddell is guarded by a militiawoman with a gun and a bayonet on a rice field. From there, Luong and his family, along with thousands of other Vietnamese refugees in danger of communist reprisals, made their way to the U.S. under Operation Frequent Wind, a political asylum program. Haywood T. "The Kid" Kirkland from Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (1984) In an article in the New York Times Magazine on March 24, 1968, reporter Sol Stern observed, "In Vietnam between 1961 and 1964, Negroes accounted for more than 20 percent of Army fatalities, even though they represented only 12.6 percent of Army … There Was No Rules At All. This photograph of terrified children fleeing from a South Vietnamese napalm bomb attack on their village on June 8, 1972, became an iconic image of the anti-war movement. The 1980s was a time to tell the stories of the Vietnam War. A Vietnam War Story. The … Yet we must not forget, Nguyen reminds us, that 6 million Jews and 20 million Russians died during World War II, and that 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered during the Rwandan genocide. “I don’t want there to be any softening of the horror,” he said. These books do. I along with about 30 other 19-yr- old males had to gather at the armory in Kalamazoo, … When they landed on the USS Hancock the ship was so big, Luong remembers, that he and his siblings were disoriented. Gustafson, who is writing a memoir about the events of that parade, said growing up during the Vietnam War gave him his first lesson in what he calls “democratic thinking.”, “Tyranny tells people to learn from or respect one voice,” he said. Unlike Nguyen, it had little effect on him. October 18, 2020 — 24 Comments. Art Jacobs in Vietnam 1967-1970 video. As his protagonist puts it: “This was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors.” For not only America’s understanding of the Vietnam War but the world’s perception of the conflict has been shaped almost exclusively by the viewpoints of Americans — by American soldiers, politicians and journalists, and by the makers of American culture — while Vietnamese perception of the most deadly combat in its history has largely been ignored. “I was completely shaped by responding to Vietnam and it still affects how I teach today,” he said. “Watching that film made me feel like there was no place for me in American culture,” he said. It’s the story of Vietnam’s destruction and self-destruction, as seen through the eyes of a woman who was once a girl growing up in a community and family corrupted by war, who, as a teenager, became a refugee in Saigon living among both American and South Vietnamese soldiers. “That hurts even more than the sense of abandonment,” he said. I felt sympathetic to the high school protestors, but I could also see the war from the point of view of this wonderful man who had lost his nephew.”. War Stories on DVD as told at the 2006 VHPA Reunion. One gets the impression that Nguyen wrote this book primarily to commemorate and memorialise her interviewees, and the RVNAF more broadly. “To me it was just another movie, it didn’t have an impact on me either way,” he said. While Luong condemns the war, he pays tribute to the bravery and sacrifice of the American soldiers who fought in Vietnam. But there are many, many more ghost stories throughout Vietnam, relevant to the war fought there. Three Vietnam War Veterans Share Their Stories W.D. However, like Gustafson, he says he has been deeply moved by some of the documentaries made about Vietnam. Of … Newsweek national security correspondent Jeff Stein is the author of A Murder in Wartime: The Untold Spy Story That Changed the Course of the Vietnam War (St. Martin's Press, 1992). It was only later, after he developed a political conscience at college, that fury also entered the picture. When the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ played they sat down,” Gustafson recalled. While Nguyen says the U.S. is not unique in the way it remembers and forgets its wars and those involved in them, it has nevertheless focused on the Vietnam War almost exclusively as an American war in terms of its cost — to American lives and unity, and with respect to damage to the American psyche. If we maintain that the photograph of Kim Phuc resonated so deeply on so many levels that it had an impact on policy and indeed hastened the end of the war, what can we say about a more recent shocking photograph of another child tragically caught up in the consequences of war — that of Alan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian refugee boy washed up on a Turkish beach in September 2015? The question of perspective lies at the heart of Nguyen’s novel and is a vital one for anyone seeking to establish a more balanced, less-biased truth about the 20-year conflict. Ehrhart, left, in October 1967 near Quang Tri, Vietnam, and today. One day, I saw my neighbor Jerry slowly climbing out from somewhere below his backyard. Here's what he told us. “My sisters and I were scared to death. “My baseball coach, who was also chief of the fire department, made them stand and respect the flag. Well, that's one side of the story. The Golden dragons also fought in the Iraqi war, a war of similar consequences of Vietnam. Vietnam War Stories from Vietcong Perspective. My grandmother was a war photographer in Quang Tri. The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now — these films changed our post-war view of Vietnam, recasting it as our very own personal horror story. “Bill” Ehrhart joined the U.S. Marines when he was 17. Follow Us We asked viewers how they experienced the events of the Vietnam era. In one single battle in Quang Tri – the border between North and South Vietnam and the most attacked city during the war – the bombs used had the destructive power of 7 nuclear bombs in Hiroshima. A Vietnam War Story. The building at 727 Tran Hung Dao in Ho Chi Minh City – also known as Saigon – was a building that housed American service members for much of the Vietnam War. He cites Last Days of Saigon and certain combat documentaries. Introduction to RE: Vietnam -- Stories Since the War. October 4, 2020 — 11 Comments. The traditional historiography of the Vietnam War often avoids reckoning with the postwar history of the Hanoi regime and its human consequences, and Nguyen’s stories are a useful corrective. It also went a step further, explicitly describing the war as one of “noble sacrifice” — a perspective on the war that has also found favor among Republicans. Escaping by boat, many found freedom in foreign land, many were captured and … Iraq like Vietnam was a war of so many contradictions… “a war with no boundaries or indications of friend or foe. The series complements a Maryland Public Television initiative Calley Jr., March 16, 1968, in My Lai, South Vietnam. It took a little time, but I think we’ve recovered from Vietnam and that, demonstrably, our men and women across the armed forces have done a great job in the last decade or more of war.”. The Vietnam War was the prolonged struggle between nationalist forces attempting to unify the country of Vietnam under a communist government and the United States (with the aid of the South Vietnamese) attempting to prevent the spread of communism. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died in the war. Before Vietnam, he argues, the U.S. saw itself as a world benefactor, a strong country that had never lost a war. Iraq like Vietnam was a war of so many contradictions… “a war with no boundaries or indications of friend or foe. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, thousands of so-called "boat people" fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, often in small overcrowded ships that were barely seaworthy. At first, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, but looking closely, I saw stairs leading into the ground and realized he … An American soldier guides U.S. Army helicopters in to land through a haze of purple smoke. Between 1975 to 1992, almost two million Vietnamese risked their lives to flee oppression and hardship after the Vietnam War, in one of the largest mass exoduses in modern history. “Our war, our horror, is more unique than other peoples’ and that’s actually not true.”. The image of the napalm girl fleeing in terror, the way she is robbed of her innocence in that moment, captured the deplorable longstanding involvement of the U.S. military in the region.”. October 11, 2020 — 32 Comments. We and our partners use cookies to better understand your needs, improve performance and provide you with personalised content and advertisements. My 10-year-old mind had no way to make sense of drugs, psychedelic rock, murder, atrocity, massacre and Playboy bunnies. The Vietnam War is a 10-part American television documentary series about the Vietnam War written by Geoffrey C. Ward and directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Thompson’s Hill (April 9-10, 1968), by Richard Dieterle. “Hollywood is in the money-making business not the consciousness-raising business. However, Nguyen warns there’s a real danger in arguing that any kind of atrocity or war is unique, or more horrific, than any other. My Worst Day in Vietnam. Photo by Paul Schutzer/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images. Nguyen argues that the impact of such images is now reduced due to the desensitization caused by the rise in terrorism and our exposure to widespread graphic imagery in movies, video games and terrorist videos. Just as Nguyen’s world was turned upside down by watching Apocalypse Now, Gustafson experienced a cataclysmic awakening when, as a junior at Yale University in 1974, he saw the anti-war documentary Hearts and Minds, which affected him so much emotionally he couldn’t sleep at night. 085: Footloose and Lucky. Here's what he told us. His words are juxtaposed with a funeral in South Vietnam showing a mother, ravaged with grief, throwing herself on a grave,” Gustafson said. But the Kurdi photograph, although equally heartbreaking, is more complicated. That morning, as communist troops swept into the South Vietnamese … “Covering up” is not a new concept where Vietnam is concerned, argues Steven Ross, professor of history and director of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life at USC Dornsife. Here are 10 of the most read USC Dornsife…, Explore USC’s unseen gems. As we recognize the 50th anniversary of this tragic conflict, USC Dornsife scholars challenge this one-sided perspective, re-examining the legacy of what even the Vietnamese refer to as “The American War.”. I still remember the formation of marine helicopters coming in to rescue us. This, he argues, is illustrated in presidential speeches, from President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s to President Barack Obama today. 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