Jacob Hutchins

4/13/2013

Part 1

The story from chapter 1 that was the most catching would have to be “All My Ancestors Are Buried Here” by Phan Xuan Sinh.

First and foremost, the story teller seems very legitimate in that he never had to make any

mention of slaughtering fisherman and yet chose to do so. Hearing this from an agent of

South Vietnam reinforces his credibility because he does not attempt to water down what he

did. Living in America and far removed from the war, Sinh could have easily made up a tale

of Northern brutality but instead chose to speak of his own real experiences despite their

grisly nature. With that in mind it makes his description of why he felt the North won even

more powerful. Quoting a letter seized from a dead Northern mail carrier, Sinh says: “ Don't

worry about us. We'll survive. Just do your best to destroy the enemy”. Coming from someone

you could logically expect to have Southern sympathy, this statement is powerful. Sinh

conceded that the North was more strongly motivated and credits it as the reason they won

the war. He also states: “People like me didn't hate the other side. We were forced to bear

arms and saw no compelling reason to fight. We just hoped to find a way to live together

with our brothers”. This also emphasizes why Sinh felt the South lost the war: they didn't

really want to be fighting. The North was much more motivated and the South, or at least

Southerners like him, didn't really want to be fighting at all. These admissions from a

Vietnamese person that fought for the South is were very compelling.

Part 2

The story “You Could Smell the Burning Flesh” by Malcolm Browne was extremely

disappointing. Highlighting  atrocities/mistakes of the war committed by both sides, Browne strikes

at the heart of why the Vietnam War was so horrible. That is to say, although the North won,

all sides were guilty of doing terrible things and making poor decisions. He opened his story

by described a region of Southern Vietnam that was routinely terrorized by an elite group of

Viet Cong guerillas. The town, Dam Doi, would experience raids from unit of guerillas called

the U Munh battalion. Browne described a scene in which “the slaughter had happened about

three days earlier so the whole village was one great mass of bluebotttle flies and the stench

was unbearable” As for the South Vietnamese, Browne says “Although Americans were not

slaughtering prisoners that I was aware of, Americans certainly knew the their Vietnamese

counterparts sometimes resorted to torture. The “Ding-a-ling” torture was common. As for the

Americans, Browne spoke of some of the dismal failures that occurred when trying to think up

new technologies to combat the war, such as a device the used bedbugs to try and determine

if there were any VC in a hole or such place. Browne noted “A huge amount of money was

spent on this and as far as I know it only produced a few laughs”. In the end this was a

very disappointing story because it lacked a real good guy or bad guy, unlike other stories

that sympathize with one side or the other; Browne describes the war in Vietnam as roundly

bad, and it leaves a feeling of genuine disappointment to think about the staggering cost we

expended fighting there. Browne said it best: “Early on I realized it was a rough war and there

were no nice guys in Vietnam”.

A positive lesson taken from this story is of how important freedom of the press was in this

war. Although disheartening by and large, the section in which Browne described a monk

immolating himself really struck at the core of why journalism and press coverage during war

time is so important; if Browne had not been there to take pictures, or had failed to keep his

film, a very important image of the war would not have been captured. It is an important

image because it highlighted how very much dissent there was against the South Vietnamese

government, and I believe that if we can take any positive away from such a terrible even

then it is that the world is at least aware of what happened and history was not overlooked.

There is hope in knowing that people did not, perhaps, die in vain only to be swept aside

and not into the proper place in history that they deserve.

*note: Try as I might I, I cannot get this to transfer well from Apache Open Office. I will do my next assignment in Word, as I should have done this time.