Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: America's Forgotten Vietnamese Victims

America's Forgotten Vietnamese Victims 
by Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt 
TomDispatch  
On January 30-31, 1968, the Tet holiday, the North Vietnamese and the
National Liberation Front (NLF, known to Americans as "the Vietcong")
struck at five of the country's six largest cities, 34 provincial
capitals, 64 district capitals, and numerous military bases. NLF sappers
even briefly captured part of the heavily fortified American embassy
compound in the center of the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon. 
Vietnamese government troops allied to the Americans were badly bloodied
and American casualties were high. Fighting continued in parts of Saigon
for three weeks and in Hue, the old imperial capital, for almost a month
until, as with Fallujah in Iraq in November 2004, most of its buildings
were destroyed. To retake major urban areas, air power was called in. In
perhaps the most infamous phrase of the Vietnam War, an anonymous U.S.
major said of the retaking of Ben Tre, "It became necessary to destroy the
town to save it." 
In a wave of TV images of unexpected carnage, all this broke over the
American people, who had been assured that "progress" was being made,
that, as American commander General William Westmoreland put it, "We have
reached an important point when the end begins to come into view." (Sound
familiar?) 
The Tet Offensive was a home-front televisual disaster and proved a
breaking point in terms of public support for the war effort (despite
massive losses on the other side). A shocked Walter Cronkite, the
avuncular anchorman of CBS News and an American icon, declared the war
"mired in stalemate." President Lyndon Johnson, who was watching that
broadcast, promptly turned to an aide and said, "It's all over." And yet
the war, already visibly hopeless, would continue through another seven
years of carnage as American ground troops were drawn down, while air
power was relentlessly ratcheted up. (Again, does any of this sound
familiar?) 
Now, 40 years later, we are nearing Tet 2008 (February 7th), embroiled in
another faraway war in another faraway land where Americans are dying and
another people, another society is suffering grievous wounds, once again
on an almost unimaginable scale. Once again, an administration is assuring
Americans that "progress" is being made, that a corner is being turned.
Once again, the planes are being brought in. And once again, the voices we
seldom hear are those of the civilians who are suffering. Barely noted in
our world while the war is ongoing, they will promptly be forgotten – if
the Vietnam experience is any measure – when it's over (as someday it must
be), while Americans focus on the "lessons" to be learned from an
"American tragedy." 
Nick Turse and photographer Tam Turse are now in Vietnam meeting with
Vietnamese who ended up on the other end of American weaponry (and, in
some cases, the Vietnamese versions of present-day Hadithas). Traveling
through the distant Mekong Delta, they offer these unforgettable voices
from the missing archives of a lost war. Tom
Two Men, Two Legs, and Too Much Suffering
America's Forgotten Vietnamese Victims
By Nick Turse 
Nguyen Van Tu asks if I'm serious. Am I really willing to tell his story –
to tell the story of the Vietnamese who live in this rural corner of the
Mekong Delta? Almost 40 years after guerrilla fighters in his country
threw the limits of U.S. military power into stark relief – during the
1968 Tet Offensive – we sit in his rustic home, built of wood and thatch
with an earthen floor, and speak of two hallmarks of that power: ignorance
and lack of accountability. As awkward chicks scurry past my feet, I have
the sickening feeling that, in decades to come, far too many Iraqis and
Afghans will have similar stories to tell. Similar memories of American
troops. Similar accounts of air strikes and artillery bombardments.
Nightmare knowledge of what "America" means to far too many outside the
United States. 
"Do you really want to publicize this thing," Nguyen asks. "Do you really
dare tell everyone about all the losses and sufferings of the Vietnamese
people here?" I assure this well-weathered 60-year old grandfather that
that's just why I've come to Vietnam for the third time in three years. I
tell him I have every intention of reporting what he's told me –
decades-old memories of daily artillery shelling, of near-constant air
attacks, of farming families forced to live in their fields because of the
constant bombardment of their homes, of women and children killed by
bombs, of going hungry because U.S. troops and allied South Vietnamese
forces confiscated their rice, lest it be used to feed guerrillas. 
After hearing of the many horrors he endured, I hesitantly ask him about
the greatest hardship he lived through during what's appropriately known
here as the American War. I expect him to mention his brother, a simple
farmer shot dead by America's South Vietnamese allies in the early years
of the war, when the United States was engaged primarily in an "advisory"
role. Or his father who was killed just after the war, while tending his
garden, when an M-79 round – a 40 mm shell fired from a single-shot
grenade launcher – buried in the soil, exploded. Or that afternoon in 1971
when he heard outgoing artillery being fired and warned his family to
scramble for their bunker by shouting, "Shelling, shelling!" They made it
to safety. He didn't. The 105 mm artillery shell that landed near him
ripped off most of his right leg. 
But he didn't name any of these tragedies. 
"During the war, the greatest difficulty was a lack of freedom," he tells
me. "We had no freedom." 
A Simple Request 
Elsewhere in the Mekong Delta, Pham Van Chap, a solidly-built 52 year-old
with jet black hair tells a similar story. His was a farming family, but
the lands they worked and lived on were regularly blasted by U.S.
ordnance. "During the ten years of the war, there was serious bombing and
shelling in this region – two to three times a day," he recalls while
sitting in front of his home, a one-story house surrounded by animal pens
in a bucolic setting deep in the Delta countryside. "So many houses and
trees were destroyed. There were so many bomb craters around here." 
In January 1973, the first month of the last year U.S. troops fought in
Vietnam, Pham heard the ubiquitous sound of artillery and started to run
to safety. It was too late. A 105 mm shell slammed into the earth four
meters in front of him, propelling razor-sharp shrapnel into both legs.
When he awoke in the hospital, one leg was gone from the thigh down. After
40 days in the hospital, he was sent home, but he didn't get his first
prosthetic leg until the 1990s. His new replacement is now eight years old
and a far cry from the advanced, computerized prosthetics and carbon fiber
and titanium artificial legs that wounded U.S. veterans of America's
latest wars get. His wooden prosthetic instead resembles a table leg with
a hoof at the bottom. "It has not been easy for me without my leg," he
confides. 
When I ask if there are any questions he'd like to ask me or anything he'd
like to say to Americans, he has a quick response. He doesn't ask for
money for his pain and suffering. Nor for compensation for living his
adult life without a leg. Nor vengeance, that all-American urge, in the
words of George W. Bush to "kick some ass." Not even an apology. His
request is entirely too reasonable. He simply asks for a new leg. Nothing
more. 
Ignorance Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry 
I ask Nguyen Van Tu the same thing. And it turns out he has a question of
his own: "Americans caused many losses and much suffering for the
Vietnamese during the war, do Americans now feel remorse?" I wish I could
answer "yes." Instead, I tell him that most Americans are totally ignorant
of the pain of the Vietnamese people, and then I think to myself, as I
glance at the ample pile of tiny, local potatoes on his floor, about
widespread American indifference to civilians killed, maimed, or suffering
in other ways in Iraq and Afghanistan. 
Even those Vietnamese who didn't lose a limb – or a loved one – carry
memories of years of anguish, grief, and terror from the American War. The
fall-out here is still palpable. The elderly woman who tells me how her
home was destroyed by an incendiary bomb. The people who speak of utter
devastation – of villages laid waste by shelling and bombing, of gardens
and orchards decimated by chemical defoliants. The older woman who, with
trepidation, peeks into a home where I'm interviewing – she hasn't seen a
Caucasian since the war – and is visibly unnerved by the memories I
conjure up. Another begins trembling upon hearing that the Americans have
arrived again, fearing she might be taken away, as her son was almost 40
years earlier. The people with memories of heavily armed American patrols
disrupting their lives, searching their homes, killing their livestock.
The people for whom English was only one phrase, the one they all seem to
remember: "VC, VC" – slang for the pejorative term "Viet Cong"; and those
who recall model names and official designations of U.S. weaponry of the
era – from bombs to rifles – as intimately as Americans today know their
sports and celebrities. 
I wish I could tell Nguyen Van Tu that most Americans know something of
his country's torture and torment during the war. I wish I could tell him
that most Americans care. I wish I could tell him that Americans feel true
remorse for the terror visited upon the Vietnamese in their name, or that
an apology is forthcoming and reparations on their way. But then I'd be
lying. Mercifully, he doesn't quiz me as I've quizzed him for the better
part of an hour. He doesn't ask how Americans can be so ignorant or
hard-hearted, how they could allow their country to repeatedly invade
other nations and leave them littered with corpses and filled with
shattered families, lives, and dreams. Instead he answers calmly and
methodically: 
"I have two things to say. First, there have been many consequences due to
the war and even now the Vietnamese people suffer greatly because of it,
so I think that the American government must do something in response –
they caused all of these losses here in Vietnam, so they must take
responsibility for that. Secondly, this interview should be an article in
the press." 
I sit there knowing that the chances of the former are nil. The U.S.
government won't do it and the American people don't know, let alone care,
enough to make it happen. But for the latter, I tell him I share his
sentiments and I'll do my best. 
Nguyen Van Tu grasps my hands in thanks as we end the interview. His story
is part of a hidden, if not forbidden, history that few in the U.S. know.
It's a story that was written in blood in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos
during the 1960s and 1970s and now is being rewritten in Afghanistan and
Iraq. It's a story to which new episodes are added each day that U.S.
forces roll armored vehicles down other people's streets, kick down other
people's doors, carry out attacks in other people's neighborhoods and
occupy other people's countries. 
It took nearly 40 years for word of Nguyen Van Tu's hardships at the hands
of the United States to filter back to America. Perhaps a few more
Americans will feel remorse as a result. But who will come forward to take
responsibility for all this suffering? And who will give Pham Van Chap a
new leg? 
Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of
Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San
Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for
Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex, an exploration of the new
military-corporate complex in America, is due out in the American Empire
Project series by Metropolitan Books in March 2008. 
Tam Turse is a freelance photojournalist working in New York City. Her
photographs have appeared most recently in The Progressive and at
TomDispatch.com for which she is the official photographer. More of her
photos from these interviews can by viewed by clicking here. 
Copyright 2008 Nick Turse 
 
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