Vietnam -- Still at War Thirty-Five Years Later
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-a-bass/vietnam----still-at-war-t_b_558766.html
Thomas A. Bass
May 3, 2010
As we commemorate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the fall--or is it
the liberation?--of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the Vietnam war is
again a hotly-contested issue. Today the skirmishes are being fought
on the battlefield of our collective memory, and, surprisingly, the
issue is just as contentious in Vietnam as it is in the United States.
I realized this when a Vietnamese translation of my book The Spy Who
Loved Us arrived recently on my desk. The book tells the story of
Pham Xuan An, a correspondent for Time during the war and the
magazine's last bureau chief in Saigon. An was a great reporter, but,
as we later learned, he was an even greater spy. For twenty years he
was the Communists' best source of intelligence out of South Vietnam.
"We are now in the United States' war room!" exclaimed Ho Chi Minh
and General Vo Nguyen Giap on receiving An's lethal reports.
After the war, the Communists named Pham Xuan An a Hero of the
People's Armed Forces and elevated him to the rank of General. He
lived in a Saigon villa filled with books and regaled guests--until
his death in 2006--with the illuminating and funny stories for which
he was famous. An's revolutionary hopes were disappointed in the
post-war years, and he became an outspoken critic of Communist
corruption and bureaucracy.
I expected my Vietnamese publisher to cut some of An's remarks, but I
was unprepared for the mauling the manuscript suffered. The text was
turned into a triumphal paean to the Fatherland. Even the prose gave
off the metallic odor of socialist sanctity. Gone was any criticism
of Communists or Communism, any criticism, or even mention, of China,
any praise for the United States. The list of proscribed words, which
had been swapped out for euphemisms, included "graft," "corruption,"
"concentration camp," and "retreat" (when applied to Heroes of the
People's Armed Forces).
The most extensive cuts involved the removal from the text of General
Giap. Why eliminate modern Vietnam's greatest military commander,
architect of their victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu and the
United States in the "American" war? Vietnam's rulers are divided
into two camps, one pro-Chinese and one open to the West. The
Sinologues control the government, while the internationalists,
headed by ex-history professor Vo Nguyen Giap, are accused of being
CIA agents. They are considered so dangerous that mention of General
Giap's current activities will be deleted from a contemporary history
of Vietnam written by an American.
The battle over the war's legacy is equally intense in the United
States. At a recent conference in Washington, D.C. on "Lessons
Learned, Lessons Lost: Counterinsurgency from Vietnam to Iraq and
Afghanistan," sponsored by The Vietnam Center at Texas Tech
University and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International
Studies, top billing was given to the military hawks and
counterinsurgency specialists who are back in the ascendancy. As they
describe it, the Vietnam war was not actually lost. The United States
simply packed up its army and took its successful strategies
elsewhere. Instead of winning hearts and minds in Vietnam, the U.S.
will now win hearts and minds in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So what went wrong in Vietnam? The United States was betrayed by
disloyal journalists--an old canard from the war years. As a Marine
Corps University expert recently wrote, the "viciousness" of their
"attacks on public servants" amounted to "gross misdeeds" that
"harmed the United States." In other words, by doing their jobs these
journalists were traitors.
What proof supports these allegations? None has been offered so far.
But many journalists talked to Pham Xuan An--who is now known to have
been a Communist--which retroactively makes them guilty by
association. "Most of the information they passed on was false or
misleading," says our Marine Corps' expert, because of their "heavy
reliance... on Pham Xuan An."
An's former colleagues cannot produce a single example when he gave
the news an anti-war slant. To the contrary, they cite many instances
when he spared Time from printing errors, even when these errors--by
exaggerating Communist troop strength, for example--might have
benefited the other side. It was not his job to plant stories in the
Western press. In fact, to protect his cover, he did everything
possible to steer clear of Communist ideology and rhetoric. Far from
being an agent of disinformation, Pham Xuan An was more lethal as an
agent of information. General Giap benefited from his timely and
accurate news--the same news that was delivered to Henry Luce. The
trick, of course, was knowing what to do with this news.
Honest reporting and human intelligence can shape our destinies,
either at war or in peace. This is one of the lessons of the Vietnam
war. But thirty-five years after the war's end, many people, both in
Vietnam and the United States, are still afraid to hear honest voices
speak. The continuing Vietnam war is a battle over memory, history,
and truth, and the stakes are still high.
--
Thomas Bass, author of Vietnamerica, The Spy Who Loved Us, and other
books, is a professor of English and journalism at the State
University of New York at Albany.
.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
