Roger Rumpf (1944-2013)
From: Frank Proschan <frank.proschan@yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, May 15, 2013 at 11:26 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sad news about the loss of Roger Rumpf, a long-time friend of Vietnam and especially of Laos.
Some will remember when Roger and his wife Jacqui Chagnon came to Hanoi in the late 1980s to re-establish the American Friends Service Committee office; others will certainly know his longtime service with AFSC and other agencies in Laos. Or their earlier service with the Indochina Mobile Education Project, Indochina Resource Center (I believe) and others.
Roger will certainly be missed.
Frank Proschan
37 place Jeanne d'Arc
75013 Paris
FRANCE
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From: Shawn McHale <mchale@gwu.edu>
Date: Wed, May 15, 2013 at 12:00 PM
To: Frank Proschan <frank.proschan@yahoo.com>
Cc: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Thanks, Frank, for forwarding the obituary. Some of you may remember as well the work of Roger Rumpf and Jacqui Chagnon on the issue of unexploded bombs/ ordnance in Laos, bombs which often exploded after the war, maiming and killing many Lao.
Shawn McHale
--
Shawn McHale
Associate Professor of History
George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052 USA
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From: Bill Hayton <bill.hayton@bbc.co.uk>
Date: Wed, May 15, 2013 at 11:40 PM
To: "mchale@gwu.edu" <mchale@gwu.edu>, Frank Proschan <frank.proschan@yahoo.com>
Cc: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
The first line is unintentionally revealing about the conventional mode of writing about these topics in our western media, "Over a period of about 10 years during the war in Vietnam, more than 2 million tons of explosive ordnance fell from U.S. planes on the lush neighboring nation of Laos"
Fell? How careless. Did someone forget to lock the aeroplane's doors?
Even 40-odd years later it still seems rather difficult to begin an article like this with a sentence "Over a period of about 10 years during the war in Vietnam, [policy makers ordered the deliberate dropping of] more than 2 million tons of explosive ordnance [fell] from U.S. planes on the lush neighboring nation of Laos"
Bill
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From: Andrew Wells-Dang <andrewwd@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, May 16, 2013 at 12:32 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
As a friend and colleague of Roger's, I am sure he would be laughing at this too and noting that at least the article accepts that the bombs and planes came from the US! Being over 6 feet tall and gaunt, Roger used to joke with some seriousness that he was personally responsible for most of the supposed "MIA" sightings of Americans in rural Laos.
It's great that the Post gave him the full article his life and work deserve. They could have added that in his "retirement" (an activist like Roger never really retires), he was also a leading campaigner for normalizing US-Laos relations, and in the last months for investigating the still unresolved disappearance of his longtime friend, Sombath Somphone.
Andrew Wells-Dang
Hoi An, Vietnam