A "new" View on Viet Nam War?

From DNguyen@K003

Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 01:02:29 -0700

From: Nguyen Qui Duc <DNguyen@KQED.org>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: A "new" view on Viet Nam War?

Dear all,

I am interested in your reactions to the following article by Barbara Crossette. I'll appreciate any responses.

Regards,

Nguyen Qui Duc

Pacific Time, KQED - FM

San Francisco

Source: World Policy Journal, Spring 2003 v20 i1 p69(8).

Title: What the poets thought: antiwar sentiment in North Vietnam.

(Reconsiderations).

Author: Barbara Crossette

Hoang Cam is 82. His well-worn jacket and the black beret set jauntily over his wispy white hair afford little protection against the relentless, cold drizzle of a Hanoi winter. He walks slowly, with a cane. But Hoang Cam is not about to surrender to old age. Keenly aware that he is the last survivor of a band of poets and writers known as he "humanist literature movement," which challenged Hanoi's Communist orthodoxy in the 1950s and 1960s and were quickly suppressed, he is at work on his memoirs. It is a story all but unknown not only in the West but also among Vietnamese of younger generations, and it deserves a wider hearing if history is not to impose a one-dimensional, militaristic image over the remarkably cerebral, essentially humanistic society of North Vietnam.

In Hoang Cam's story, and those of countless intellectual contemporaries now dead, lie answers to some puzzling questions about why so many great writers and thinkers in a country where literary and scholarly attainment ranked higher than anywhere in Southeast Asia did not openly protest as Hanoi's Communist leaders squandered three generations of precious human capital on a succession of wars: against the French, the Americans, Cambodia, and, defensively, China.

Now able to talk more freely about those times, veterans of war and repression--or their surviving families--recall long years of official isolation intended to abort any potential antiwar movement or political opposition before it could form. It may seem hard to imagine now, but long before satellite television and the Internet, even basic reporting from the front during the American war, or honest accounts of life in the south, could be, and were, routinely and easily suppressed in the north. There was no way to make contact with the "third force" of antiwar intellectuals and students in South Vietnam, short of chancing a letter routed through Paris, and probably censors.

"Everybody had to write about the war with revolutionary optimism so that more people would send their sons," said Vu Bao, an acclaimed novelist and short-story writer who served in the American war as a communications specialist. "When we went south, we saw a lot but kept it in our hearts. Nobody could really discuss the war then--though now everybody does, and they wonder how we could have sacrificed so many people. In the war, when we talked about how many died, we were told to write that they were wounded. But the night my own son went to the battlefield, I said to myself: 'You have to write in a different way about this war.' When your son goes to the field of death, you learn how precious human life can be. That changed my way of writing."

Vu Bao, now 77, said in a conversation at a friend's country retreat that he had never been part of the humanist literature movement because its founders were highly educated stars and he learned most of what he knew in the trenches of the anti-French war. But he was hounded by officialdom nonetheless because he had decided early in life that he would "have to choose between being a writer and a hired pen" and was forced after writing his first novel in the late 1950s to flee to the countryside and hide in a friendly village. He wrote prodigiously, surviving on the fringes of trouble, but maintaining his Communist Party membership. Among Vu Bao's most engaging short stories to emerge recently is one translated into English as "The Man Who Stained His Soul," a tragicomic tale of an exhausted and traumatized battalion in the American war forced to reenact for the camera of a "foreign comrade" an assault on an enemy outpost, complete with a phony flag raising that became an iconic poster image worldwide. The "hero" the camera immortalized hoisting the flag was in fact a terrified soldier who had hung back from the real assault and wet his pants.

Those northerners who tried to reach out to their southern counterparts in a spirit of reconciliation were jailed. Hanoi's leaders also kept independent-minded intellectuals well away from American critics of the war, so that there could be no discovery of common ground. Seminars staged for Westerners and delegations sent to peace meetings in Western Europe and the Soviet bloc included only "safe" poets and writers. As late as 1987, Hoang Cam was refused permission to travel abroad after the Musee Guimet in Paris, one of the world's greatest centers of Asian art and culture, had invited him to talk about the poetry of Vietnam. "When the government finally allowed us to leave the country, we were too weak to go," he said over lunch at the home of friends. He and other writers I met over three weeks in Hanoi spoke in Vietnamese through a skilled former foreign ministry interpreter, Phan Thanh Hao, a multilingual journalist and translator of the 1991 novel The Sorrow of War, by Bao Ninh, published in English in the United States by Pantheon in 1993. Phan Thanh Hao's father, Phan Khac Khoan, was another poet accused of being a dissenter. He went to jail in 1965.

Officially, there was no antiwar movement in Hanoi in the 1960s because everyone was expected to be foursquare behind the Communist leadership's decision to impose its doomed socialist dream on the south at whatever cost. Hoang Cam argues now that he would have been an unlikely antiwar activist in any case, since as Vietnamese nationalists he and his friends felt they had no choice but to fight the French and the Americans. But he also suggested that the American war was a tragedy visited on Vietnam through the manipulative talents of Le Duan, the Communist leader at the time. Le Duan had "trapped" President Lyndon Johnson into a wider war in Indochina, Hoang Cam said. Among the provocations was the attack on the American destroyer Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, which (with a more controversial, apparently false, report of a second attack on another destroyer) persuaded Congress to grant President Johnson wide powers to wage war.

It is startling to an outsider to hear how widespread the conviction is among Vietnamese intellectuals, young and old, that for both sides the Gulf of Tonkin incident was part of a lethal game. Y Ban, a 41-year-old fiction writer who grew up near the gulf, picked up early in life the prevailing wisdom that Hanoi had lured the Americans into a firefight. She remembers this well because it became linked in her childhood mind with the bombs that soon fell on her town, where there was little stomach for war. Draft evasion was common. In a short story, "A Worthy Resume," she writes how a man who broke his kneecap in a construction accident (a thinly disguised portrait of her father) was refused treatment at the local hospital because it was assumed he had a self-inflicted injury.

However the Tonkin Gulf incident was sparked, it allowed Hanoi to portray the growing conflict as a foreign invasion, nor the coldly calculated, ideologically motivated grab for the south that it was. Many in the north would have opposed a war waged solely against fellow Vietnamese.

"We were killing blood brothers," Hoang Cam said, adding that he still suffers in retrospect. "That was the biggest tragedy of our revolution."

"If there hadn't been a war, it could have been much better, because in the north and the south, 4 million, maybe 5 million, died," he said. "If those 5 million were sacrificed for a more beautiful Vietnam, a happier Vietnam, then I would not be suffering so much. If we didn't have the war, if we didn't lose our 5 million people, then maybe now we would not be ranked among the poorest countries in the world. That is unacceptable."

Humanist Literature

Half a century ago, the poetry of Hoang Cam inspired Viet Minh soldiers battling French colonialism. The Communist army had an Office of Art and Literature that sent writers and poets to the front with most military units in both the French and American wars, and Hoang Cam was a political officer who used his verse in pep talks on the eve of battles. But after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, victory was not sweet. Hoang Cam and other intellectuals became the targets of the Communist leaders they had trusted. On their return from the battlefield, many writers were deeply dismayed to see Hanoi sliding into Stalinism. Thousands of peasants were being dispossessed, arrested, tortured, or executed in a brutal land reform program, and individual opinion was no longer tolerated if it deviated from the party line.

In this atmosphere, Hoang Cam and a handful of others began to circulate collections of their writing and pooled their money to start a magazine they called Humanist Literature. Though the publi cation's life was short and troubled, it gave its name to a movement that Hanoi's newly entrenched Communist government found threatening.

"During the French war, we didn't talk about these things, because we just wanted to fight the French," Hoang Cam said. "But within only three months of returning to Hanoi, we recognized what was happening. We were astounded that our authorities were imposing land reform and killing people. We really loved communism, and we loved this country, but communism didn't teach people to kill like that. I visited many places and learned that many people were shot only because they were rich peasants. Because they had built a brick house, they were called landlords, and then they were killed. So many people were killed. They were only peasants, illiterate, but they were working hard and knew how to make a little money." He wrote a touching poem about a little girl starving to death because giving food to a landlord's child was prohibited.

"Our magazine came out saying: 'We want our right to be human beings. We want democracy. We want our freedom to write.' Other writers had the same idea." As many as several hundred intellectuals may have suffered for their opposition in the years that followed.' "After the fifth issue of our magazine, I thought we had succeeded, but I was wrong," Hoang Cam said. Circulation of the magazine was rising exponentially. However, before the sixth issue appeared, a quarrel broke out among the founders over how antigovernment the journal should be. The editor in chief, Nguyen Huu Dang, wanted to take a strongly critical political line and wrote an editorial demanding the right to public demonstrations. Hoang Cam thought that it would be wiser to "go more slowly, more smoothly." There were other problems. The magazine could no longer buy newsprint in Hanoi. The business manager took the publication's remaining money and went to Haiphong to find paper. While he was away, the regime struck. "There was a public order from the prime minister to close the magazine," Hoang Cam said. "Publication stopped in December 1956." By then the writers knew they had been incriminating themselves right from the start.

"In the first issue, there were two time bombs," Hoang Cam recalls. The group had published a poem by Tran Dan, a well-known writer outspoken in his resistance to the simpleminded literature of upbeat socialist realism that was being forced on his generation. Roaming Hanoi after hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholics and others had fled to the south to escape what was becoming a harsh police state, Tran Dan saw familiar streets disturbingly deserted. The long poem that resulted included these lines: I am wandering in the capital as if in no man's land. I see nothing but drizzle falling on the red flag.

"The two sentences were criticized," Hoang Cam said. "We were told that we were against the people, against the nation. Only a sentimental pair of sentences, and they interpreted it as a reaction against the regime! The second piece in that first issue, an article of mine, was in support of my colleague [Tran Dan] and in criticism of the leaders for their ill treatment of him," he said. "There was a drawing of him wearing leaves around his neck to cover his throat. He had been arrested, and tried to commit suicide, and there was a scar.

Ngo Thao, a former political officer with the rank of lieutenant colonel during the American war who had accompanied Hoang Cam to the lunch with friends, interrupted the older man's story to explain that the state's most famous "correct" poet and top cultural commissar, To Huu--a figure now openly ridiculed by younger writers--may have acted out of envy for Hoang Cam's greater reputation as well as opposition to the demands for democracy made by Humanist Literature when he led the political assault on the dissenters. In Hanoi, intellectual rivalries are intense. Whatever the prime factor, "To Huu wanted to teach them a lesson," said Ngo Thao, who now edits Theater magazine and is deputy director of the Theatrical Artists of Vietnam. Bizarrely, Hoang Cam was asked by a government publication to write an obituary of To Huu when he died late last year. Tongue in cheek, Hoang Cam wrote that the death of his nemesis was "a big loss to the Communist Party and his family." Editors added, "and the people." Hoang Cam was indignant. "I would never have written that," he said.

Numerous former military officers like Ngo Thao, many of them intellectuals who volunteered or were drafted into the army during the American war, have put some distance between themselves and the government. Tran Do, a former northern general who died in August 2002 at the age of 78, was expelled in 1998 from the Communist Party, where he had been head of the culture department, for circulating a proposal advocating that the party give up its monopoly on political power. Somehow, the proposal got on the Internet, drawing the special wrath of the Communist leadership reserved for those who advertise the country's problems abroad. In 2001, multiple copies of a manuscript thought to contain more trenchant criticism were confiscated from him as he left a photocopy shop in Ho Chi Minh City. Last summer, around the same time that Tran Do died, 21 influential Vietnamese issued a petition demanding a constitutional court to deal with violations of fundamental freedoms. Among the signers was a respected military hist orian, Col. Pham Que Dong, and the former dean of the Hanoi Marxist-Leninist Institute of Philosophy, Hoang Minh Chinh.

Imprisoned Poets

When Humanist Literature died in 1956, the lives of its founders were changed forever, and intellectuals ducked into the semi-underground or hid behind pseudonyms. "Officially, four of the writers were not allowed to write or publish anything for three years," Hoang Cam said. "And me, I was not allowed to write for one year. But in reality, the order lasted 30 years. No newspaper could publish me. But I didn't keep writing to put things in a drawer. For 24 years I was in and out of trouble because the poems I wrote were being circulated orally by young people. In 1982, they put me in prison because my poetry was so well known. I was in jail for 18 months with a young poet who had taken my collection of poems to Saigon. He was in prison for 31 months."

Hoang Cam said that the poem that caused him the most trouble was a bittersweet lyrical account of his rural boyhood and his obsession with a young woman eight years older, who promised to marry him if he brought her a rare du bong leaf. Each time he found the special leaf--which existed only in his poetic imagination, he confessed--she rejected it. The poem dwelt on the lovesick boy's fascination with her grace, with the way her ao dai floated behind her as she walked through the rice fields. After Vietnamese troops were sent to neighboring Cambodia in 1978 to oust Pol Pot, who had been attacking border areas of Vietnam, the soldiers, perhaps missing their Vietnamese village homes and fields, were heard reciting the poem by heart. "In prison, I had to write in my self-criticism why I wrote that poem," he recalled. "They said, how dare I compare the hem of her dress with the curve of roof on the communal house? And did I mean to imply that the party tricks people all the time, like the woman tricked the boy?"

The editor-in-chief of Humanist Literature, Nguyen Huu Dang--a once-loyal Communist to whom Ho Chi Minh himself had given important political tasks--was exiled from public life altogether during the American war. "He never knew anything about the war," said Ngo Thao. "He never heard the B-52s, or anything. When the war started, the government was afraid of him shaking hands with people like you--Americans-and he was sent to the distant border and put in jail in a forestry area. He had a special cell. All he could see was the deep jungle. When he was released he had no idea where he was. He didn't know what had happened to him. He was like Robinson Crusoe."

Just as Vietnam's party leadership was forced to apologize in the 1960s for the excesses of the merciless land reform program, which was followed by a "rectification of errors" campaign, so in the late 1980s and 1990s the government began to make amends to the generation of free-spirited intellectuals it had suppressed for decades. Now, though the founders of the humanist literature movement are nearly all gone, others still alive who shared their ideals and were also silenced can meet foreigners, travel, appear at seminars and be interviewed on television. In the mid-1990s, an unknown number of writers were each given payments of 4 million Vietnamese dong (about $500 at the time), ostensibly to help them publish their once-suppressed work. Nguyen Huu Dang, the disgraced editor of Humanist Literature, also got a new house. Apart from Hoang Cam, he is the only other survivor of the journal, but his mind and memory are gone and he can no longer write. "The government seems to want to send a message of apology," said Phan Thanh Hao, the translator. Her father, Phan Khac Khoan, never lived to see his poetry published. A book of his writing appeared after his death in 1998. For many, the gestures of forgiveness came too late.

Phan Thanh Hao, who had been my interpreter on several occasions when I reported from Vietnam between 1984 and 1988, is also a writer. She recently completed a book about the last half-century of intellectual life in Vietnam using the story of her own family as its vehicle. She was an impressionable

13 years old, one of five children, when her father went to prison "for 8 years, 9 months and 12 days," she says--all of her teenage years. The family believes that he was swept up in a paranoid government's roundup of intellectuals in 1965, the year the American Marines landed near Danang and the Vietnam War shifted into high gear. Phan Khac Khoan was a poet and teacher from a scholarly family in the imperial city of Hue who had taught Prince Bao Long, the son of the last Nguyen Dynasty emperor Bao Dai, in the 1940s before joining the Communist resistance against the French.

Phan Khac Khoan was not part of the humanist literature movement, his daughter said. He had, in fact, tried to warn its founders of the folly of stepping too far out of line. "He was arrested because he was a romantic and thought he could go to the south and persuade people not to go to war," she said. His case was complicated by student informers who had falsely accused him of acting against the regime in Hanoi. Phan Thanh Hao said her father was well-meaning but naive. "The writers didn't know in 1965 that the two sides had already decided to go to war, and that behind both the north and south were outside powers, she said. For the North Vietnamese, that power was initially China, and later Russia. Just as many southerners are still angry that the Americans deserted them in 1973, with Hanoi's army advancing on the south, many North Vietnamese are bitter because they sense they were being used by the Chinese. "We say now that China would help Vietnam fight the United States until the last Vietnamese," Phan T hanh Hao said.

"Renovation"

A public rethinking of the war years became possible only in the late 1980s, when doi moi, or "renovation" became the new motto of Vietnam's leadership and it was acknowledged in the face of a moribund economy that the entrepreneurial energy of the south should have been encouraged rather than repressed. "Your success in the marketplace is no less glorious than a victory on the battlefield," Prime Minister Phan Van Khai recently told a group of young business people in Hanoi. Writers soon seized new space for expression. If doi moi was intended to be largely an economic policy, intellectuals were prepared to push it beyond those bounds, and they got support at crucial moments from Nguyen Van Linh, the Communist Party leader at the time. Plays, short stories, documentary films, and poetry tested the limits of criticism with irony and satire, as well as stark reporting. In 1988, a privately made video documentary titled Kindness capped scenes of poverty and despair in Hanoi's streets with this concluding commen t: "Only animals turn their backs on human suffering to save their own skins. Do you know who said that? Fortunately, it was not one of my friends. It was Karl Marx." In a short story based on a real event in a rural village in the north, tax collectors forced an old woman to turn over a small store of rice she had hidden in her coffin, her insurance against indignity in death. Her cry of anguish ricocheted around the intellectual salons of Hanoi. "Oh, government! Oh, party!" she wailed. "Look at us!"

At about the same time, a spate of what looked like delayed-reaction antiwar books began to appear. In Bao Ninh's novel The Sorrow of War, still the best known of those novels outside Vietnam, the central character, Kien, moves through searing scenes of battlefield horror. Then, after the guns are silent, he is ordered to return to an eerie devastation to collect the remains of the dead. Everywhere he is haunted by ghosts and spirits, and wracked by nightmarish memories. The author wrote from experience. He was a member of the 500-member Glorious Twenty-seventh Youth Brigade sent to battle in 1969. Only ten of those young men survived.

Unlike American veterans, the North Vietnamese knew that families at home were also suffering, not only from American bombs or the deaths of soldiers but also from the hardships the political system had inflicted on them. Duong Thu Huong made civilian life the theme of her powerful novel, Paradise of the Blind, which the Women's Publishing House in Hanoi first printed in 1991. (2) Although Paradise of the Blind was set mainly in the 1980s, the author links the dysfunction of one northern family to the tumult that began in the 1950s, when the social structure of the countryside was shattered and development stymied by an anticapitalist campaign. By the time many young people were sent to war against the Americans, their families were living in hunger and terror. City teenagers were accosted by the police for wearing faddish clothes. "I hid behind a lamppost, shivering with fear, waiting for my turn," a young man in Duong Thu Huong's book tells an aging party hack. "Where does it come from, your need to humilia te us? In the name of what?"

"Everybody Loses Something"

Although once-beleaguered intellectuals say that the young, in their rush to consumerism and pop culture, will quickly forget about the lives and careers sacrificed for intellectual principles, a critical examination of the past goes on. In January, a haunting new film, Song of the Stork, opened in Hanoi. The film, due to be released in art houses in the United States this year, tells the story of a diverse group of young men from North Vietnam headed south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail for battle in the American war, each with his own dreams and fears. It treats all sides with a humanistic touch: northerners, southerners, and the Americans. One of the film's two co-directors is Nguyen Phan Quang Binh--Phan Thanh Hao's son and the grandson of Phan Khac Khoan, who went to jail believing in reconciliation. "In war, nobody wins," a soldier says in Song of the Stork. "Everybody loses something."

The line echoes a poem that Nguyen Duy, a North Vietnamese war correspondent in both the American and Cambodian wars and a screenwriter for Song of the Stork, wrote after visiting the Khmer temples at Angkor. He called the poem,

"Old Stones":

I stand in meditation before Angkor's ruins

If stone can be so shattered, what of human life?

Old stones, let me inscribe a plea for peace.

In the end, in every war, whoever won, the people always lost.

One of the most impressive landmarks in Hanoi is the eleventh-century Temple of Literature, originally a university. Its very existence testifies to Vietnam's--in particular, northern Vietnam's--traditional veneration of scholars and writers. To walk there among the monuments to ancient sages makes one think what a fleeting aberration in Vietnam's history the anti-intellectual campaign may one day seem to be. In the late 1980s, a dissident video in Hanoi warned in its narrative: "If you shoot the past with a bullet, the future will mow you down with artillery." But Hanoi's zealous Communist leaders, while abusing human rights to inflict their political orthodoxy on writers and artists, never went to the extremes other regimes did to obliterate--to shoot--the intellectual past. There was not,

for example, a Chinese-style cultural revolution or the return to the Year Zero of the Khmer Rouge. Vietnamese churches, pagodas, and museums were neglected and sometimes shuttered or reassigned to other uses, but they we re not sacked, and many are now restored. There are, to be sure, still political limits on expression in Vietnam. Dozens of dissidents, including monks, are in detention or under house arrest. Online commentary is policed. But at the Temple of Literature, in the recently recreated Thai Hoc Courtyard, a voice from the fifteenth century can still offer a lesson for those in power. On the wall of a small museum is this excerpt from a 1442 examination paper:

Virtuous and talented men are state-sustaining elements: the strength and prosperity of a state depend on its stable vitality, and it becomes weaker as such vitality fails. That is why all the saint-emperors and clear-sighted kings did not fail to promote men of talent and the employment of literature.

As the long lunch with Hoang Cam and his friends wound down, and the Cognac bottle was all but drained, I asked the writers if today's rulers would finally subscribe to that old conviction that writers were essential to a nation's vitality. Or are "men of talent" still feared? There was laughter all around. "Poets and writers have been fighting authority for centuries,"

Hoang Cam began. One of his friends cut in with the illustrative story of a nineteenth-century author who managed even posthumously to enrage an emperor. The writer's tomb got 36 lashes. "The politicians are not afraid of us," said Hoang Cam. "They just hate intellectuals, and would still like to put all of them in jail."

Notes

(1.) The extent and impact of this intellectual reaction to burgeoning totalitarianism are detailed by Kim N. B. Ninh, an American scholar of Vietnamese descent, in a new book, A World Transformed: The Politics of Culture in Revolutionary Vietnam, 1945-1965 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).

(2.) Paradise of the Blind appeared in English in the United States in 1993,

under the Perennial imprint of HarperCollins, translated by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson.

Barbara Crossette, the author of several hooks on Asia, was the chief New York Times correspondent in Southeast Asia from 1984 to 1988. She recently spent a month in Vietnam, beginning in mid-December 2002.

-- End --

From HPHSZB01@phd.ceu.hu Tue Oct 14 18:28:34 2003

Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 11:21:48 +0200

From: Balazs Szalontai <HPHSZB01@phd.ceu.hu>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: A "new" view on Viet Nam War?

This is certainly an interesting article, which throws light on a subject that has not been studied particularly extensively, to say the least. While studying the Hungarian archival documents, now and then I did find references to sentiments somewhat comparable to the views of the persons quoted in this article. For instance, around 1961 there were references to southerners (i.e., South Vietnamese Communists and otherwise "progressive" elements) who disagreed with the hawkish line pursued by Hanoi. They thought that both the DRV and the RVN should be admitted to the UN (a conception suggested by the Soviets in 1957 but disapproved by the VWP leaders), for it might restrain Diem a bit. Other southerners complained of that the northern leaders had no clear view about the enormous difficulties their movement had to cope with and that Hanoi underestimated American firepower. Nevertheless, the South Vietnamese regimes seem not to have been able to generate much sympathy in the North. Around 1957-1958 the Hungarian diplomats, who must have been informed by VWP cadres, noted that while a fairly high number of North Vietnamese intellectuals listened to BBC broadcasts (this is why they knew quite a lot about the Hungarian revolution of 1956), the crude radio propaganda of the Diem regime hardly aroused any interest. I also have comments on the issue of humanist literature, and I would be glad to discuss the subject with you.

Best regards,

Balazs Szalontai

Central European University

History Department

e-mail: hphszb01@phd.ceu.hu

From ProschanF@folklife.si.edu Thu Jul 31 06:59:57 2003

Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 10:26:14 -0400

From: Frank Proschan <ProschanF@folklife.si.edu>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: A "new" view on Viet Nam War?

Through what curious logic does Barbara Crossette define the Sino-Vietnamese war of 1979 as a "defensive" one when all the rest are

aggressive? Couldn't she blame that one on the Vietnamese as well? And eventhat one grudgingly-acknowledged-to-be-defensive war was a waste like theothers, by Crossette's account ("squander" is "to spend profusely, without securing adequate return; to use in a wasteful manner" according to OED).Sounds eerily like Westmoreland's shameful canard that Asians don't valuehuman life as much as "we" do.

The mind reels: one ponders Grenada's aggression against the U.S., or Kuwait's attack on Iraq, or the Polish invasion of Nazi Germany. What was in the tea that Crossette was sipping with her interviewees?

Frank Proschan

Save Our Sounds

temporary cellphone until 7/10: 202-391-5907

postal mail:

Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage

Smithsonian Institution

PO Box 37012

Victor Building Suite 4100, MRC 0953

Washington, DC 20013-7012

office location and express services:

Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage

750 9th Street N.W., Suite 4100

Washington DC 20560-0953

tel: 202-275-1607

fax: 202-275-1119

From hhtai@fas.harvard.edu Thu Jul 31 07:00:13 2003

Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 11:16:54 -0400

From: Hue Tam H. Tai <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: A "new" view on Viet Nam War?

Re: "The Vietnamese": Which "Vietnamese" are you talking about, Frank? It seems to me that this is the core of the re-thinking about war. When I was in Hanoi several years ago, someone said that a popular theme in the arts was of brothers meeting each other on the battlefield. He added:" that's a common theme in southern literature, but we've just begun talking about it now." When I asked about specific instances of battlefield meetings, of course, he could not come up with one, but he pointed out that the brother of General Cao van Vien, the last ARVN Chief of Staff, was a general in the VPA, and in charge of the zone north of the 17th parallel.

None of the northern veterans I have talked to (in a totally unsystematic way since I am not doing research on this topic), regretted his war service; but some were envious of others who had not spent the better part of their youth fighting, and had thus acquired skills that were useful in civilian life. Others were envious of their relatives who had gone south, and later abroad. The person who was proudest of his work during the war was a southern guerrilla who showed me where he had been based (in what is now part of HCMC).

Among the 80 million Vietnamese (not to mention the overseas Vietnamese) there are many different views about the war. Barbara Crossette offered some. I found her article very interesting.

Hue-Tam Ho Tai

From eemoise@clemson.edu Thu Jul 31 07:00:25 2003

Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 12:53:04 -0400

From: Edwin Moise <eemoise@clemson.edu>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: A "new" view on Viet Nam War?

At 01:02 AM 6/18/2003 -0700, you wrote:

>Hoang Cam argues now that he would have been an unlikely antiwar activist in

>any case, since as Vietnamese nationalists he and his friends felt they had

>no choice but to fight the French and the Americans. But he also suggested

>that the American war was a tragedy visited on Vietnam through the

>manipulative talents of Le Duan, the Communist leader at the time. Le Duan

>had "trapped" President Lyndon Johnson into a wider war in Indochina, Hoang

>Cam said. Among the provocations was the attack on the American destroyer

>Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, which (with a more controversial,

>apparently false, report of a second attack on another destroyer) persuaded

>Congress to grant President Johnson wide powers to wage war.

I have doubts about making such a close association between Le Duan and the attack on the Maddox that occurred on August 2, 1964.

There is a story that Le Duan personally ordered torpedo boats to go out and attack the Maddox in this incident. I seriously doubt that any such thing happened in this incident; there is too much conflict between this story and other evidence. My guess is that if this happened, it happened in the incident of July 1, 1966, when the same three torpedo boats that had gone out after the Maddox on August 2, 1964, went out and challenged the

U.S. Navy again, and were all sunk. I suspect that a story of something Le Duan did in connection with the 1966 incident has been detached from that very little-known incident, and has become attached to the much more famous incident of 1964. If anyone has more information about this, or has contact with people who have it, I would be most interested.

>Just as Vietnam's party leadership was forced to apologize in the 1960s for

>the excesses of the merciless land reform program, which was followed by a

>"rectification of errors" campaign, so in the late 1980s and 1990s the

>government began to make amends to the generation of free-spirited

>intellectuals it had suppressed for decades.

The apology for the land reform campaign came in 1956, within months after the end of the campaign. It did not wait until the 1960s. This timing needed to be made clear in this essay. The Lao Dong Party's public self-criticism, in the denunciations of land reform errors, began to reach truly extraordinary levels at the end of October. The journal Humanist Literature was closed in December, when the correction of land reform errors was in full swing.

Ed Moise

From mgilbert@ngcsu.edu Thu Jul 31 07:00:35 2003

Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 13:03:02 -0400

From: Gilbert <mgilbert@ngcsu.edu>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: A "new" view on Viet Nam War?

In 1995 in Viet Nam I had occasion to spend some time with the first anthropologist the CIA sent there in the 1960s, and who was then making his first return to Viet Nam since the American War.

His most fervent complaint was that unlike the Vietnamese and most other people of the world, Americans insist on everything being "either or," in other words, Americans search for their choices in bi-polar terms.

Certainly, Crosette, who has not been highly regared among scholars since her less than stellar work in India, is proof enough of this dictum: through most of the article she tries to twist the remarks and sentiments she has engaged (or invented--a lot of familiar stock phrases of dissident Vietnamese appear here) to suit her single-minded agenda and view of the war. She avoids, of course, comparing the oppression in Viet Nam to the oppression of anti-war dissidents in the US at any time in its history (the topic of one of my own works), nor does she acknowledge that the war against the French was, shall we say, worthwhile? Her condemnation of socialism in Vietnam is also simplistic and twisted: when opposing imperialism etc. you have to be perfect, eh?

Does she not remember the Whiskey Rebellion from her high school education? The New York draft riots during the American Civil War? I have no love of apologists of any stripe, but perspective is lacking here. However, the voices of the poets come through, adding another layer of meaning and knowledge that needs to be explored in research and in the classroom; even Crosette pulls the final punch by making the (left-handed) compliment that Viet Nam is not Kampuchea. So I agree with those that find it useful, and disagree with those who might think it fair or represents a "new" view."

To see this as anything new, in fact, just confirms just how "either or" oriented we are. The poets own voices reflect the complexity of war and revolution (an anti-war poet who remains a party member, etc.) and I found beauty, if nothing new, in their remarks. The interviews with some veterans I have encountered and subsumed in Vietnamese post-war literature are consistent with the views expressed by these writers.

All wars produce such relfections: Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum" givces voice to the same sentiments. But wars also produce Reganite "noble cause" poetry as well. Poets count the human cost of the folly of war and revolution, but, perhaps, also the folly of living without hope or identity. "There are no winners in war" also applies to Iraq. So, Barabara, we must be careful when we seek to judge in the guise of reportage.

marc

Professor Marc Jason Gilbert

Department of History

North Georgia College and State University

Dahlonega, Georgia 30597

Phone: (706) 864-1911

Fax: (706) 864-1873

E-mail: mgilbert@ngcsu.edu

From dduffy@email.unc.edu Thu Jul 31 07:01:07 2003

Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 13:40:07 -0400

From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: A "new" view on Viet Nam War?

Big fun. Wonderful to read the a New York Times reporter writing an article that is based on actually talking to Vietnamese people. I will never forget Seth Mydans demanding that I come to the telephone out of a seminar so he could tell me what Duong Thu Huong thinks about life.

Barbara Crossette's article is the best single narration of Vietnamese literature I have ever read from a reporter for the corporate press in the United States. Its glaring lack is an account of simultaneous currents in Saigon, and the sequellae among the people overseas.

PIcky little note: "Humanist Literature" would be a translation of Nhan Van and Giai Pham, two distinct publications, the first a newspaper and the second a journal-like anthology. They both were in turn just part of a wider movement. Kim Ninh is often at pains to make that point.

Less picky little note: when I met him in 1996 Nguyen Huu Dang had not lost his mind or his memory. That day he had bicycled in several kilometers from the countryside and spent the afternoon bright and engaged in conversation with friends of a lifetime. Crossette's source Hoang Cam was falling over a table. I will do that myself at a party, but he certainly was nowhere near as alert as Nguyen Huu Dang.

Overall, I'm with Frank. The only reason the New York Times, or the Nation for that matter, pays any attention to actual Vietnamese people is to make snarky comments about the Ha Noi government.

That is my opinion based on trying to get coverage in those publications for contemporary Vietnamese literature appearing in translation here, including many Nhan Van/Giai Pham and Doi Moi authors. It is a bit thick to get lectured by a Times reporter about how Americans need to hear more from these authors.

But if she has come to the field I hope she will stay and do some more good work. When Nguyen Huu Dang led his friends in criticism of the Party they did it four-square, with intimacy and love and anger. They were confronting their party, their people, and their nation, altogether their only best chance for independence and freedom. That's the beauty of the article, what those people told Crossette about the tragedy of their lives.

Good on her for actually reporting on Viet Nam. I think the war stuff is silly, but I think it all is. Thank god people like Ed Moise can take it seriously and deal with these assertions. Thanks to Duc for bringing it up.

Looking forward to the rest of your comments -

Dan Duffy

From mchale@gwu.edu Thu Jul 31 07:01:25 2003

Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 14:38:52 -0400

From: mchale <mchale@gwu.edu>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: RE: A "new" view on Viet Nam War?

Dear list,

Like Marc Gilbert, I think that Barbara Crossette has penned some awful stuff. But I think that her article is interesting, and that Gilbert's critique is unfair. First of all, what is the basis for this comment, which essentailly says that Crossette is guilty of complete fraud?

"through most of the article she tries to twist the remarks and

>sentiments she has engaged (or invented--a lot of familiar stock phrases

>of dissident Vietnamese appear here) to suit her single-minded agenda

>and view of the war."

I find this accusation a bit incredible.

Secondly, it is a basic point of fairness that we should not criticize authors for what *we* would have written. We should see what the author was trying to say, and then see if he or she succeeded. Frankly, I don't care that Crossette "avoids, of course, comparing the oppression in Viet Nam to the oppression of anti-war dissidents in the US at any time in its history (the topic of one of my own works). . . " So what? Frankly, what would such a comparison show anyhow? Does *every* article on the war have to have an American referent? The answer is obvious: no.

Similarly, why does Crossette have to "acknowledge that the war against the French was, shall we say, worthwhile?"

Is any of this new? Well, to academics and to Vietnamese, perhaps not. But sometimes it is worthwhile to hear the voices of *particular* individuals who experienced history, and Hoang Cam and his cohort are worthy of our attention.

Shawn McHale

Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs

The George Washington University

e-mail address: mchale@gwu.edu

From judithh@u.washington.edu Thu Jul 31 07:02:16 2003

Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 15:50:32 -0700 (PDT)

From: Judith Henchy <judithh@u.washington.edu>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Response to Crosette article from Wayne Karlin

Forwarded from Wayne, who is not on the list:

My main objection to the article, beyond Crosette's views on the war, concerns her totally irresponsible use of out of context quotes from her Vietnamese sources as direct support for her views on that war. This is not only dishonest, in a professional sense, but could possibly put those sources in some jeopardy by attibuting her views to them. I argue this not only because a close look at the article does not establish a direct link between the quotes and her hypothesis, but also because I know some of the figures involved--indeed some are close friends--and I know they not share those views. Crossette asserts that "the Communist leadership was determined to impose its doomed socialist dream on the south at whatever cost," and raises the "puzzling question about why so many great writers and thinkers in a country where literary and scholarly attainment ranked higher than anywhere in Southeast Asia did not openly protest as Hanoi's Communist leaders squandered three generations of precious human capital on a succession of wars: against the French, the Americans, Cambodia, and, defensively, China."

The assumption in both statements is that the people quoted in the article support the idea that the American war was the imposition of a cynical manipulation by a "leadership" rather than, as even Hoang Cam says, "as Vietnamese nationalists he and his friends felt they had no choice but to fight the French and the Americans." I have never met Hoang Cam, but I do know Phan Thanh Hao, Vu Bao, and the people who made the film "Song of the Stork" quite well (I was one of the script writers on that film), and I know Y Ban slightly While all are very outspoken and independent commentators on their society, while Hao certainly feels her father's imprisonment was wrong, and while all mourn the great loss of life in the war, none of them believe it was an unjustified--or, as Crosette implies--an unpopular war foisted on the country by evil commies. That's certainly not the sense one gets from the film either, and its certainly not the sense I get from the doi moi writers I've met. They are not afraid to be critical. They do not glorify the war and they may even criticize some of the tactics used. But they certainly feel the war was justified. I have no reason to believe that the quotes Crossette uses from Vu Bao and from Hao are not genuine. But, I repeat, while she does not establish a link between those quotes and her assertions about the war, the reader who does not know these folks will assume there is one simply by the placement of their statements in her article. It's a rotten thing to do to them.

Regards,

W

From sophie_qj@yahoo.com Fri Aug 1 15:43:37 2003

Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 04:02:01 -0700 (PDT)

From: sophie qj <sophie_qj@yahoo.com>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: A "new" view on Viet Nam War?

Dear Ed and List,

It seems to me that the remark about Le Duan 'trapping' Lyndon Johnson into a war has to be taken as an example of the way that the scapegoating of Le Duan has developed into a new mythology. The last thing the Vietnamese leadership needed in 1964 was the introduction of US ground forces, as in fact the war in the South was going fairly well for the NLF at that time. This idea is typical of the way that people who have lived in closed societies begin to believe that the truth must be the direct opposite of what their leaders have told them.

Sophie Quinn-Judge

From cjr11@cornell.edu Thu Jul 31 07:04:44 2003

Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 15:28:46 -0400 (EDT)

From: cjr11@cornell.edu

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: A "new" view on Viet Nam War?

As an anthropologist working on and in Saigon/TPHCM I've read these posts with great interest. As is the case for others who work on the "idea of the Vietnamese South" (to use Philip Taylor's phrase), the questions that this article/reactions raised are central to any research in HCMC.

"Which Vietnam(ese)?" as professor Hue Tam Ho Tai suggested is a recurrent question when one looks at VN from the perspective of the south and of people in HCMC.

The narratives one hears locally are very often extremely dark: narratives of victimization, suffering, loss, inability to properly mourn for the loss of "something" that people may not be able to fully articulate (ie, the "before" 30/4/1975--which may then become a screen on which people project their subsequent suffering).

The question becomes, how do we write about this? One is aware that people who were victimized may indiscriminately demonize "northerners" or the "can bo"--in an unfair way. But then again, when the life history narratives one hears start assuming a certain uniformity in emplotment, these representations themselves become social facts--which I would argue form the basis of identifications for many people in HCMC... and the basis of an us/them boundary-making mechanism which is very prominent locally and which deserves scholarly attention.

This raises very uncomfortable questions for the ethnographer, who can be accused of identifying hysterically with the victim (i think part of this was at play for the writer of the article we're commenting on).

Narratives of suffering in the aftermath of 1975 in HCMC are a public secret in the city -- and I would argue in the whole country. Strange things happen when the public secret is uttered publicly: denial, harsh punishment, stigma. I feel that academics writing about VN often also function within this public secret about the war and its continuation by other means (through politics) in HCMC after 1975.

I think the contradictions involved in trying to make sense of this situation border on the overwhelming. I am from a generation which did not experience the war directly. I am interested however in the ways in which the events of (post)1975 very much haunts many people in HCMC--and therefore writing about the city also involves writing what Koselleck calls a history of the vanquished as opposed to a history of the victors-- while remaining alert to the contradictions, amnesias and "shortcuts" in people's own narratives of their victimization. The project then becomes to analyze the processes by which such narrative constructions emerge and the way they are shared and propagate to form a sense of identity.

Several list members have commented on the fact that the writers interviewed would never have said what was printed in the article. Other people remarked that these writers voiced fairly widespread opinions. I remember very well many moments during my research in HCMC when I thought "how can I possibly write about this?" after hearing people recount their experiences. And yet, if we do not struggle to engage with these narratives, are we silencing (again) voices of those who shared their stories?

I'm afraid I have no "solution" to these dilemmas--and this at times can become paralyzing. If one writes and tries to deal with these HCMC narratives of suffering, one can become accused of being anti-communist, or in denial about the brutality of the war, or unfair to those officials who tried to improve the dire situation in HCMC in the late 70s and early 80s (as Philip Taylor showed so well in his book).

I want to re-emphasize that a "new" view on the war, and on VN itself is to be found in HCMC -- as all of us are well aware. The question of representing these views, however, especially if one is concerned with the textures of daily experiences of "common people", is problematic. This is especially the case when writing as a foreigner--and guest in VN. To me, however, the questions of silence and voice are central, and deserve more critical attention when writing about the recent history of Vietnamese people--particularly in the south.

I maintain standards of scholarly practice: I don't consider myself an "advocate" for any cause (a question that looms large in anthropological writing). I do not accept all I heard in HCMC at face value: again, what is interesting to me is how people came to develop the narratives of their history they shared among themselves, and with me (not the same process). Simply, I struggle with (the very political) questions of representation of suffering--and it seemed this article raised some of the same issues.

Christophe Robert

From hhtai@fas.harvard.edu Thu Jul 31 07:04:55 2003

Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 16:47:19 -0400

From: Hue Tam H. Tai <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: A "new" view on Viet Nam War?

Being from Saigon, I have experienced many of the situations described so well by Christophe. Not only in Saigon, but overseas. Sometimes, people's recollections of the pre-75 South are so at odds with what has been written (or what I remember) about it as to suggest a different place altogether. But, as I wrote in my introduction to The Country of Memory, the present shapes the past as much as the past shapes the present.

I should note, though, that in asking "which Vietnamese?", I was not intending merely to draw a North/South, victors/vanquished dichotomy. It is not impossible to be proud of one's war service yet at the same time to feel that one's youth was wasted, that friends' lives were squandered. It is not impossible to stress some aspects of one's experience to one interlocutor, and others to another interlocutor without self-contradiction. Much depends on the context in which the past is being recalled.

Some of the stories I have heard are more in the nature of alternatives to the state's narrative than counternarratives. I have been surprised by the number of northern veterans who have relatives who went first south then abroad. While the state and many Americans continue to portray the war as the War of National Salvation against the American- a war that involves "the" Vietnamese on one side and "the Americans" or "the American government on the other-- these folks see it also as a war against their own relatives. One person I met took part in the attack on Tan Son Nhut airport in 1968, knowing that his first cousins lived only a few miles away. These cousins are now in California and regularly send him some money home. It would not occur to him to think that his war service was in vain, but it does not prevent him from wondering what his life would have turned out like if he had not been the son of the older son who felt his duty to remain north to take care of his parents.

Related to all this is the fact that a significant proportion of Hanoi intellectuals are of landlord or rich peasant background. Their recollection of wartime is colored by what happened to them and their families during the Land Reform. It is significant that Barbara Crossette talked to people who were implicated in events of the 1950s.

Like Sophie Quinn-Judge, I have heard some interesting attributions of causality, though I had not heard the one about the Tonkin Gulf. But I am constantly amazed at how fast rumors circulate in Hanoi and how consistent these rumors are. Soon, they can assume the solidity of truth through repetition.

Finally about confidentiality of sources. Some people feel that their advanced age entitles them to be as frank as they wish to be--that was true when I was growing up, and it did not necessarily carry political connotations. I would expect that the people whom Crossette quotes to be aware that she is a journalist and to know what they are willing to say and have published.Whether one shares Crossette's views of the war or not, I found the direct quotes from her sources very intesting and useful to have in print.

Hue-Tam

Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 05:30:06 +0700

From: Vern Weitzel <weitzel@undp.org.vn>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: A "new" view on Viet Nam War?

Like some of you I am concerned about how people may be unfairly involved with statements they did not make themselves, given the nature of the comments.

Nonetheless, these attitudes are not uncommon here, and similar expressions have been reported elsewhere. Though the detail makes me wish we had more information. Even then, absolute truth is not the real issue, but rather the sense that people made of things had in those times which led to certain criticisms. If you were never unlucky enough to participate in a war, it may be hard to explain how one person can hold several extreme or contradictory opinions at the same time.

Perhaps the most important point is not the criticism but word of the rehabilitation, if you will, of these moderate voices. I would find it hard to believe in any civilised country if there were not a range of opinion on the proper course of action in those terrible times. While it may be hard to get through a consensus-based decision to understand the interactional dynamics in government and society, still, this is an important issue to study *objectively*.

On the whole I am impressed by the article and the humainistic movement which, some of you have commented, was broader than single issues. It is quite important, for example, to understand such influences in relation to the Party's public admission of gross error in land reform - even if these individualists were bundled off to prison.

We often talk about the way change happens in Viet Nam and how democracy does work here. This is one important cultural difference between Viet Nam and most other countries. It is therefore important to understand.

Thanks, Vern

--

Vern Weitzel (Mr.), Webmanager

<weitzel@undp.org.vn> or <webmanager@undp.org.vn>

United Nations Development Programme

address: 25-29 Phan Boi Chau; Ha Noi, Viet Nam

postal address:

UNDP Viet Nam One UN Plaza New York, NY 10017 USA

UNDP Viet Nam Palais des Nations 1211 Geneva Switzerland

UNDP Viet Nam GPO Box 618 Bangkok, 10501 Thailand

tel: +84-4 942-1495 (ext 135) fax: +84-4 942-2267

http://www.undp.org.vn and http://www.un.org.vn

home address: Apartment 504-505, Block A4 Giang Vo

[opposite UN Int. School] tel: +84-4 846-1751

-------------------------------------------------

From smg7@cornell.edu Thu Jul 31 07:05:26 2003

Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 10:42:34 -0400 (EDT)

From: smg7@cornell.edu

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: RE: A "new" view on Viet Nam War?

Dear List readers:

Judging from recent posts on this list, Nguyen Qui Duc's invitation for responses to the Barbara Crossette Hanoi poets article has proven timely. Duc's inquiry has led to a very lucid thread, I suggest, because readers' responses are clearly bifurcated along lines critical of Ms. Crossette's reportage and appreciation of her narrative of two personalities talk-stories, Hoang Cam and Pham Thanh Hao.

In my view, no one has trashed the piece it seems that almost everyone agrees it has merit in terms of its content and despite some perceived egregious flaws. Such a clear dichotomy of responses likely stems from the way Ms. Crossette frames her article: she stridently interprets Vietnamese political history and culture her own way in terms of Cam's, Hao's, and other Hanoians' largely personal, subjective narratives. Her style, and hence the credibility of her arguments (in addition to ample factual misinformation, as a number of posts here have shown) suffer from her juxtaposing rather than synthesizing interpretation with narrative. This outcome is inevitable, given her own bias rooted in Cold War ideology.

To the dedicated specialists of this list, Ms. Crossette's frequent ignorance or excesses are certainly nettlesome. With the plethora of historians on this list, I'm astonished that no one has jumped upon the second paragraph's claim of Vietnamese literary superiority among all the peoples of Southeast Asia uncritical acceptance of what is clearly Hanoi chauvinism if there ever was! While reading the article, I often felt like a TA grading a junior's composition largely culled from a run-of-the-mill encyclopedia.

But Ms. Crossette has been writing like that for years, protected by the highbrow conceits (recently shattered) of the New York Times. Of course Ms. Crossette has been absent from the Times for some years now, long enough a period that back then she could not have taken the toast, "The Vagina Monologue of West 43rd St" (Times headquarters, ed.), as anything but pejorative.

What I'm concerned with, however, is not accreditation, but the forum within which the text appears. List contributors have yet to pick up on the publication that proffers Ms. Crossette's piece: "World Policy Journal" (WPJ), an unrefereed periodical, albeit one with a prestigious pedigree and intellectual-journalist editor, Dr. Karl E. Meyer. WPJ is the two-decades-old house organ of the World Policy Institute, itself an adjunct of Manhattan's New School University ("for Social Research" in the title seems to have succumbed in this new millenium, one hopes not as a policy statement!). Now in choosing to run this piece, or perhaps even assigning and advancing for it to Ms. Crossette, it is likely not coincidental that Editor Meyer is a longstanding, senior member of the NYT editorial board. Or that one finds no Vietnam-versed scholar (correct my misperception if it is wrong, please) among those on the WPJ's board of advisors. Has WPJ embarked on an East River version of co+?i mo+?, a liberal penetration of the oriental other that is "our" Vietnam? Ms. Crossette seems woefully unaware of that cultural intiative's coupling to ddo^?i mo+'i.

That last question is not the least facetious for examining the higher echelons in the New School University (NS) hierarchy begin to explain what is going on here. The NS got a new president not too long ago, Robert Kerrey, politician and guilt-stricken VN war veteran. Some people, especially the militant (sounding) Left, were unhappy with the choice (see http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/aug2001/kerr-a29.pdf) for a socialist polemic that does accurately represent some of the viewpoints involved, no doubt onerous to a few fellow listaneers, but not way off as a reverse mirror to Ms. Crossette's opinions). Unspoken in that political debate, but relevant to our purposes, is the old bugaboo so well laid out in Richard Hofstedter's "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life."

What NS thinks it needs is a politician-warrior to lead its intellectual Our Gang, and not vice-versa. Sweet dreams Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, and of course Manhattan's finest, D. P. Moynihan! And enter that cerebral tower of power, Ms. Crossette. WPJ gives us an "experienced" Hanoi guide, leading us to see that both sides were human, prone to naivete, failure and demagogy more readily than prescience, heroism and generosity. Ms. Crossette's cognac glass sits across the bar from Robert Kerrey's Jack Daniels. Not mixed drinks, but rather "separate but equal." To each his own guilt, envy, and ultimately in this discourse, triumph. History, like the market, sets things straight. Yep.

Shawn McHale posted on this thread, castigating Marc Gilbert for introducing a historical comparison between VN and the US war resistance. Shawn wrote, " So what? Frankly, what would such a comparison show anyhow? Does every article on the war have to have an American referent? The answer is obvious: no." I contend that if one looks not just at what Ms.Crossette wrote, but how and why, a very different conclusion, closer to Marc's leap, emerges. Ms. Crossette as well as Robert Kerrey, are inextricably caught in a dualist trope that demands constant reconstruction in "us and them" fashion, Crossette for reasons of an outmoded ideological belief and the demands of her audience (and likely, her editor too), and Kerrey, with his haunted military and subsequently duplicitous political past, combine seeking the classically comic, or better, intoxicated, trope of reconciliation. But such a reconciliation does not come easily, especially without dedication to first seeking accurate data, and second, jettisoning habits from the past.

To conclude, Ms. Crossette's article is indeed a piece of its immediate time. As Hillary Clinton's new book is more about the life of a celebrity than leader, statesperson, or intellectual, Crossette's style testifies how far mediocrity and connections can take one. And a reminder that the subjects we study with and study in Vietnam, both people and intellectual constructs, are also always aware of the gulf between "others," but not so aware of the creatures who swim in those waters.

Stephen Graw

**********

"To the losers go the hangups,

To the winners go the hangers-on"

Phil Ochs

****************