Rebekah Rundstrom #L00504809

Part 1

            The story that caught my attention and had an impact on me was the story of Ta Quang Thinh, a Vietnamese jungle nurse who had survived a bomb explosion, paralyzing him from the mid-back down.  The reason why this story caught my attention was through his journey of returning home – to Northern Vietnam after being away for 6 years.  He had to be carried by two porters when they reached a station, they would stop and a new set of porters would then carry him to the next station.  It took him seven months to reach home.  By the time he made it home, he was completely tired of the war and wanted it to end.  He was annoyed that foreigners had to come in and forced them to fight in a war.  They all knew that they had to keep their country, but the war brought with it immense casualties, lost savings, ruined lands, lost homes and the killing of livestock all of their possessions were ruined by the war.  He personally lost so much, he lost his ability to walk, his wife after finding out that he had been paralyzed left him because she couldn’t stand to look at him. 

I feel like Ta Quang Thinh is a very reliable source.  I think he is reliable because he doesn’t sugarcoat anything he says it like it is.  He does seem a bit bitter though.  He has probably seen some of the most horrific scenes of the war being apart of the medical profession.  His words are trustworthy because he says that they were all sick of the war, they as a large people group lost everything.  I cannot even begin to imagine the hardships that he has had to over come from being injured in the war.  He wasn’t even fighting and he was injured.  He was there in the field treating the injured and surviving the war.  A lot of what he says is objective.  After all the injuries he had treated, and then he himself being injured brought more of his emotions into the war.  Along with the injuries he saw how peoples lives suffered during the war with their homes being burned down, or the poverty that started from people losing money.

Part 2

            The most disappointing story for me to read was the story of Ngo Vinh Long. He was a well-educated Vietnamese man who was hired as a public relations man.  He was in charge of the mapping teams – teams that were sent out to survey the land and make detailed maps for the military’s use.  Through all the traveling he did, he saw the different “strategic hamlets” that the US placed people in to decrease the number of people who could easily turn on them.  In one particular hamlet that these people were in, there were obvious signs of starvation and malnutrition.  After telling officials in Saigon of this starvation that he saw, they sent doctors to treat them.  The doctor’s diagnosis was that these people had some disease.  Long and his crew didn’t move on to map-making; instead they started a fire and prepared food for these people.  They stayed and cooked for these people until these people became healthy again.  After this he wrote a letter to the US embassy telling them that these people were starving and that this “program” should be ended because it was killing people.  The response he got from the US was that it was how they were getting rid of the Communists.  I found this statement by the US outrageous; that the US was knowingly starving people and that was their idea of defeating the enemy.  It wasn’t disappointing from what he did to feed the people, but it was rather disappointing seeing how the Americans treated innocent village people.

            What I found to be amazing was that through all of Long’s map-making work business, he saw a need to feed people who were in need.  A lesson I learned from this is that even though I might be busy, taking a moment to really see the needs around me can be an over looked need, like Long saw the need to feed those people.  He showed compassion when no one was backing him up.  I took this as even though I see a need I don’t need a group behind me, supporting me to help, I can act on my own to help.  What I found to be most valuable about this story was that he had compassion for village people who weren’t the enemy, yet they were being treated like the enemy and he helped them.  Even though the US treated these people poorly he didn’t stoop to their level to continue treating them like that, he set aside his job and helped take care of some one else’s problem.