Strange Grounds Americans in Vietnam 1945-1975 An Oral History This book is a collection of 67 first hand people of the Vietnam war by Americans who were involved. The book begins with an Oss mission to help Ho Chi Minh against the Japanese near the end of World War 2 and ends with the all of a sudden evacuation of Saigon in 1975. The range of people included is immense from grunts in the infantry to gung-ho generals, from anti-war activists visiting North Vietnam to the wives of State Department officials in Saigon. The outcome is a big sweeping sight of the United States ' involvement with Vietnam over thirty years, but at the same time one with the feeling of immediacy that only such personal accounts can offer. The only thing I didn …show more content…
I really do wish there were some Vietnamese voices to, but this book is pretty big and comprehensive as it is, and probably a separate other book is needed to give enough space to a whole other country and culture. Still some awesome and enlightening point of views, and since it moves kind of quickly between all of these personal accounts, it 's super gripping. I thought this was a well thought out selection of interviews with people who brought perspectives on Vietnam from lots of different points of view. This book excels by covering the experiences of other participants particularly the agriculture/education/medical volunteers and the diplomatic/intelligence people. Ameroso 's story is inspiring in terms of how much grass roots good could be done with a practical approach to aid. Carter 's story is maddening in terms of how bad things actually were in the embassy. I notice that another reviewer of this book takes the author to task for including an interview by a reported fraud. If you 're only compiling interviews to construct a book, you owe it to the readers to at least do a little checking up on those you include. Still, there is enough excellent material in this book for me to give it highest marks. After you read a couple of books on the Vietnam War you begin to see the same information being stated over and over again. It gets kind of old after a while. This book
He feels Yanagi’s pain through the connection but he does not draw attention to it. To be in the heat of a powerplay game such as the one boiling over in Konoha right now is a moment of extreme delicacy and ruthlessness; attachments are withheld, persons numbed down. The rampant mentality is this: eliminate those who are likely to get in one’s way, even if they are friends, or valuable allies. Nobody who lived through the Warring States Era would be unfamiliar with this tenet: do what must be done. And if Tobirama was forced to choose among the Yamanaka twins, he would keep Yanagi alive, simply because she is now the more valuable of the two, even though Yanagi herself and most definitely, not Osamu, would admit it. For to dabble in politics is to know who has value, worth and utility, and who do not.
The Vietnam War that commenced on November 1, 1955, and ended on April 30, 1975, took the soldiers through a devastating experience. Many lost their lives while others maimed as the war unfolded into its full magnitude. The book Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam by Bernard Edelman presents a series of letters written by the soldiers to their loved ones and families narrating the ordeals and experiences in the Warfield. In the book, Edelman presents the narrations of over 200 letters reflecting the soldiers’ experiences on the battlefield. While the letters were written many decades ago, they hold great significance as they can mirror the periods and the contexts within which they were sent. This paper takes into account five letters from different timelines and analyzes them against the events that occurred in those periods vis a vis their significance. The conclusion will also have a personal opinion and observation regarding the book and its impacts.
The Vietnam War is probably the worst war that the men in America have ever had to fight. These men not only had many struggles and extreme stress brought on by the war, but when they came back home, the people of America treated them like dirt and they were not thanked for the service they did for their country. Dr. Andrew Wiest’s novel The Boys of ’67 Charlie Company’s War in Vietnam gives a first hand account on what it was actually like to be in the Vietnam War. Many men in the Charlie Company are mentioned throughout the book, which tells each of their stories that they experienced throughout the war. Each and every one of these men
In her book The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990, author Marilyn Young examines the series of political and military struggles between the United States and Vietnam, a nation that has been distinctively separated as the South and the North. Young chooses to express the daily, weekly, monthly progresses of the affairs collectively called the Vietnam Wars, focusing on the American interventions in the foreign soil. She seeks to provide an answer to a question that has haunted the world for years: What was the reason behind the United States interfering in the internal affairs of a foreign country in which it had no claims at all? Young discloses the overt as well as covert actions undertaken by the U.S. government officials regarding the foreign affairs with Vietnam and the true nature of the multifaceted objectives of each and every person that’s involved had.
The war in Vietnam was a war against communism that tore apart the US. The United States of America plunged together with its allies and played a tremendous role as far as fight against communism is concerned. A huge number of American soldiers were deployed in Vietnam a practice that coupled with much unpreparedness. The soldiers were not aware what exactly they were up to in Vietnam. Most Americans at the time were very much against the act. It was one of the most deliberating wars America plunged herself into and the only one to have been lost. Most intriguing is the amount of publicity and media buzz created by the film industry. Vietnam War was the topic of many television networks, music and Hollywood. Journalist and veterans and scholar were never left behind and went ahead to produce tones of literature on the legacies and lessons to be learnt from the war (Hochgesang, Lawyer, and Stevenson). The exploitation of the soldiers and rejection of the veterans created just as much interest as the war had created. One such commentary came from George Kennan, who depicted the war as one of the most disastrous mission The United States has ever undertaken (Westheider 155-159).. This essay will establish the effects the war had to the US soldiers.
Edited by Bernard Edelman, “Dear America” is a collection of letters written by soldiers during the Vietnam War. Their letters are written to love ones back home such as parents, siblings, and spouses but they are a great depiction of the Vietnam War. The soldiers would write these letters to help keep hope alive and to keep sane. Throughout the book the letters are categorize into those who are barely arriving into the war to those who have been there a long time. The stress and anxiety grows more and more as the letters continue and the soldiers begin to contemplate their situation. I’ve learned a lot of factual things about the Vietnam War throughout my life such as how it began and what the outcome was but reading this book was the
The Viet Nam War has been the most reviled conflict in United States history for many reasons, but it has produced some great literature. For some reason the emotion and depredation of war kindle in some people the ability to express themselves in a way that they may not have been able to do otherwise. Movies of the time period are great, but they are not able to elicit, seeing the extremely limited time crunch, the same images and charge that a well-written book can. In writing of this war, Tim O'Brien put himself and his memories in the forefront of the experiences his characters go through, and his writing is better for it. He produced a great work of art not only because he experienced the war first hand, but because he is able to convey the lives around him in such vivid detail. He writes a group of fictional works that have a great deal of truth mixed in with them. This style of writing and certain aspects of the book are the topics of this reflective paper.
If Philip Caputo’s memoir is meant to be the story of an American soldier, Trâm’s diary becomes the story of the Vietnamese people and their struggle. On May 7th 1970 Trâm recounts her feelings on the history of war in Vietnam, and how the people still remain undeterred. “Twenty-five years immersed in fire and bullets, we are still strong.” Not only after all this fighting and after all that Trâm herself has witnessed and endured she is still confident in her country. “We will persevere and be courageous and hold our heads high and take the offensive.” Trâm’s diary makes it clear that there was never any doubt in
The Vietnam war was an absolutely brutal time in American history. The war lasted for the majority of the 1960s and left many young men dead. The short story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien and the film Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam give us just a glance into the war by giving using the three themes of fear, pressures, and blame/guilt to embody the concept of war and how it absolutely changes a person. War not only destroys countries, but it destroys people.
Moss, G.D. (2010), Vietnam an American ordeal (6th ed.), Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall
Before I opened this book, I thought to myself that this was going to be a difficult and boring book to read. After the first twenty pages of reading, I was hooked on the book and started to find out more information page by page. It was interesting to me mostly because it was based upon facts that actually occurred during the Vietnam War. The one part of the book that I enjoyed most was towards the end of the book where they said how
The soldiers that were in Vietnam were subject to horrors that they should not have because it was useless and their time in Vietnam turned to communism anyway. In the book Fallen Angels the soldiers in it had to
Arrowood, Janet. Vietnam . Edison, NJ: Hunter Publishing, 2009. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 1 Oct. 2015.
It can be hard to fully comprehend the effects the Vietnam War had on not just the veterans, but the nation as a whole. The violent battles and acts of war became all too common during the long years of the conflict. The war warped the soldiers and civilians characters and desensitized their mentalities to the cruelty seen on the battlefield. Bao Ninh and Tim O’Brien, both veterans of the war, narrate their experiences of the war and use the loss of love as a metaphor for the detrimental effects of the years of fighting.
The subject of my interview is a 68 year elderly Vietnamese man named Minh “Bi” Ngo. Mr. Ngo has white long hair, a medium long white beard and a distinctive mole on the bottom of his left eye and a thick Vietnamese accent. He was born and raised in Vietnam on April 3rd, 1947. He is also a widow who is currently living with his daughter in Westminster, Orange County. Originally, Mr. Ngo was from the city of Buon Ma Thuot in the province of Dak Lak, Vietnam. He then immigrated to Falls Church, Virginia where he began his new life in the United States. At the time of the interview, Mr. Ngo looked very exhausted yet grateful at the same time. I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Ngo through his daughter, who is a friend of my cousin. I conducted the interview on the afternoon of September 24th, which lasted for two hours. During the interview Mr. Ngo shared with me his experiences during the Vietnam war, his times in the Vietnamese Reeducation camps, his immigration to the United States, and his involvement in the Vietnamese community today. As the interview continues on, I began to comprehend a little bit more on the way it was back then and how the common folks