MetaFilter posts tagged with vietnamwar

"It offers no explanations, no apologies and only a thin patina of regret."

liketitanic — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:39:02 -0800

Kathryn Bigelow's 2009 feature film The Hurt Locker, tells the story of a U.S. military bomb squad in Iraq. Hurt Locker has been critically praised as "the best American feature made yet about the war in Iraq." But historian Marilyn Young, who's written and spoken widely on the Vietnam War(s) and their similarities to the current conflict in Iraq, argues in a blistering review that the film is "a video game of a movie, or war as a video game." Bigelow wrote the film with freelance writer Mark Boal, whose 2004 article "Death and Dishonor" exposed the failures of military health care for veterans with PTSD and was adapted into a film, In the Valley of Elah,which Young sees as a much more persuasive and honest depiction of war. (Her critical essay is part of a series, Masters and the Movies, curated by the American Historical Association and published in its member magazine Perspectives on History.)

"The original Port Huron Statement . . . Not the compromised second draft."

IvoShandor — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:37:35 -0800

The Sixties Project - The Sixties Project began as a collective of humanities scholars working together on the Internet to use electronic resources to provide routes of collaboration and make available primary and secondary sources for researchers, students, teachers, writers and librarians interested in the Sixties. From The Sixties Project: *Special Exhibitions (incl. Sixties buttons and political posters) *Winter Soldier Investigation (wiki) *Articles (published in the Viet Nam Generation Journal, 1988-1996) *Fiction and personal narratives *Primary sources: incl - Port Huron Statement (wiki), and John Kerry's 1971 statement to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations *Other resources Other interesting Vietnam links: *Texas Tech University: The Vietnam Center and Archive (Oral History Project: Interviews, search (some material excluded because of copyright)) *University of South Florida: The Vietnam War: Oral Histories (videos) *Brown University: The Whole World Was Watching - An Oral History of 1968 *Rutgers University: Oral History interviews (site contains materials from other conflicts too) *Georgia Tech: Vietnam War Resources (this is a pretty astounding compilation) *Mount Holyoke College: Documents relating to American Foreign Policy in Vietnam *Los Angeles Times: Vietnam - The War Crime Files (wiki) *PBS: "Battlefield: Vietnam", American Experience: Vietnam Online (online companion to "Vietnam: A Television History") And a general 60s site called "The Psychedelic 60s" from the University of Virginia. There really are an abundance of great links on Vietnam and the 1960s, this is just a sampling of some that I enjoy.

Vietnam in Pennsylvania

billysumday — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:42:29 -0800

Civil War reenacting is so 2002. Vietnam reenacting is the new black. But really, if reenacting is your thing, you've got lots of wars to choose from.

The things they returned

LenaO — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:18:25 -0800

In 1970, while burning captured enemy documents with no military intelligence value, Fred Whitehurst came across a tiny diary. Advised not to burn it by his translator, he kept it and took it with him to America when his tour was over. Thirty five years later, the diary came back home. That diary belonged to Dang Thuy Tram (she went by her middle name Thuy), a young doctor from the North. Freshly out from medical school, she followed the NVA down South and set up a clinic in Quang Ngai province, one of the fiercest battle ground in Vietnam (this is where My Lai happened). Young, idealistic and passionate, she wrote about her patients, her desires to join the Communist party, her childhood love, and most of all about her longing for family and friends: More links: Scan of the diary: (In Vietnamese) Last night I dream of Peace Translated by Andrew X.Pham, author of Catfish and Mandala Audio interview with the Whitehurst brothers and excerpts from the diary Women in war: Radio interview with Fred Whitehurst How the two families bonded Previously on things returned by old enemies.

Political Ephemera from the Vietnam War Era

Rumple — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 15:55:31 -0800

The University of Washington has put a collection of Vietnam War era printed ephemera (posters, flyers, pamphlets, magazines, mostly cheap mimeographs or photocopies) online. The browsable collection ranges from Defend the Black Panthers to How to Make a Revolution in the U.S. to the Planetary Citizen Human Manifesto to plain old Do Something. The collection offers a fascinating insight into the passion, energy and graphic sensibilities of grassroots, home-front politics in late 1960s and early 1970s Seattle. There are over 200 items, many with multiple pages (scroll bar in upper left frame). Some which caught my eye were: Gay Love is Here to Stay International Women's Day Teach-In Striking Covers of the Helix Magazine ("Seattle's Hip Rag"), e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4. Black American IQ Test for Honkies Our Fight is Here: Essays on Draft Resistance. NW Call - Democratic Socialis m: see the dove text-art on page 2. Job Ad for War Criminals Stop the War (Nixon as Bomb Payload) Housewives for Peace No More ROTC MANIFESTO - MAN (Making a Nation) January 1st, 1974: All Automobiles Will Be Destroyed Birthday Benefit for Huey SDS - Bring the War Home (see page 2, eery echoes of Iraq) The John Birch Society (a know thine enemy event) The Palestine Revolution and Its Problems People Can Stop IT&T Rehearse for the Apocalypse Seattle Gay Liberation Front Newsletter, Dec. 1970. Taste the Sweetness of Destiny, Racist Pig We Are All the Conspiracy Who's for the White Working Man? (American Nazi Party Recruitment) Plant Grass Everywhere Attention Campus Women: What did you learn in school today?

John McCain, Prisoner of War

kirkaracha — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 10:58:12 -0800

John McCain, Prisoner of War: A First-Person Account. Originally appeared in the May 14, 1973, issue of U.S.News & World Report. "My six years of hell" is a February 2008 extract from McCain's book Faith of My Fathers.

Vang Pao

homunculus — Sun, 11 May 2008 13:05:22 -0800

Gen. Vang Pao’s Last War. "The U.S. government relied on Vang Pao and his Hmong soldiers to battle Communism in the jungles of Laos. Why is the Justice Department now calling him a terrorist?" The Hmong in America and Vang Pao were previously discussed here and here.

1960's

MLIS — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:13:47 -0800

The Psychedelic 60's: Literary Tradition and Social Change

No one here gets out alive

adamvasco — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 02:37:11 -0800

Underfire; images from the Vietnam war. Some photographers never made it out: Dana Stone, Henri Huet, Sean Flynn. Tim Page is still alive and his photos tell the story of 'Fire in the Jungle". Several of these almost forgotten legends hung out at Franki's House at one time or another. Page, Stone and Flyn were all friends of Michael Herr who wrote about them and the war in Dispatches which was widely acclaimed and acknowledged by Hunter S. Thompson as puts the rest of us in the shade.

RIP David Halberstam

psmealey — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 17:02:48 -0800

David Halbertstam dead in tragic car accident. Experienced, eloquent, and always observant (his dim view of Patrick Ewing being a notable exception), David Halberstam was a journalistic jack-of-all-trades who was probably best known for his stinging indictment of Vietnam warrior Robert McNamara, JFK and LBJ's secretary of defense, in the classic The Best and the Brightest. A superior war correspondent before the era of CNN-televised revolutions , Halberstam was also an excellent historian and sports writer. Halberstam's dense but illuminating The Fifties is an informative and tightly written study on the Eisenhower era. And The Children offers a compelling look at eight young leaders of the Civil Rights Revolution. Moreover, Halberstam's many writings on basketball (The Breaks of the Game, Playing for Keeps) and baseball (Summer of '49, October 1964) rank among the upper echelon of sports books.

Daryl Press on credibility

russilwvong — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 13:14:45 -0800

The Credibility of Power. Daryl Press, author of Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats, argues that in a crisis, the credibility of threats is primarily determined by the balance of power and the interests of stake; past history is relatively unimportant. As case studies, he examines the decision-making of Hitler and his generals during the crises over Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. "To this day, U.S. leaders ... are loath to reevaluate existing commitments for fear that doing so would signal irresolution. These fears, however, are greatly overblown." An example of US rigidity: Gideon Rose on the end of the Vietnam War.

Kissinger told China communist takeover in Vietnam was acceptable

ericb — Fri, 26 May 2006 16:10:28 -0800

Today, George Washington University's National Security Archive has published online the most comprehensive collection of memoranda of conversations (memcons) involving Henry Kissinger.

Revealed in the collection is the fact that "Kissinger quietly acknowledged to China in 1972 that Washington could accept a communist takeover of South Vietnam if that evolved after a withdrawal of U.S. troops - even as the war to drive back the Communists dragged on with mounting deaths....[He] told Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai: 'If we can live with a communist government in China, we ought to be able to accept it in Indochina.' ...[His] comments appear to lend credence to the 'decent interval' theory posed by some historians who said the United States was prepared to see Communists take over Saigon, as long as that happened long enough after a U.S. troop departure to save face."

Operation Igloo White

rolypolyman — Mon, 22 May 2006 22:37:17 -0800

"We wired the Ho Chi Minh Trail like a drugstore pinball machine and plugged into it every night." From 1965 to 1975, telemetry from thousands of microphones hidden in remote Vietnam jungles were fed to a massive data processing center in Thailand, where an IBM System/360 [wiki] mapped real-time Vietcong movements to display terminals. The details of Project Igloo White remained compartmentalized and highly classified until only several years ago.

Kiss the Boys Goodbye

drakepool — Mon, 30 May 2005 07:35:22 -0800

"I am Colonel Tom C. McKenney, You must know how to reach Bobby Garwood. I directed an official mission to assassinate him behind enemy lines, because I believed what they told me. Would you tell him that I will crawl on my hands and knees to beg his forgiveness?"

Silencing protest

tizzie — Wed, 04 May 2005 18:34:02 -0800

I can't find any major news outlets mentioning that today is the 35th anniversary of the Kent State killings, when national guardsmen troops fired a fusillade of live bullets at unarmed students protesting the invasion of Cambodia. Not everyone has forgotten. A new documentary, "Fire in the Heartland: A History of Dissent at Kent State University 1960-1980" was screened on campus today.

Insert obvious George Santayana quote here

orthogonality — Sat, 30 Apr 2005 16:41:25 -0800

"We are here to hand over to you the power in order to avoid bloodshed." Today is the thirtieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon.

A secret plan to end the war. After the rewarding the Vietnam war's technocratic architect with the Presidency of the World Bank, after the twin failures of President Nixon's "madman plan", to scare the Soviet Union into concessions over Vietnam out of fear of Nixon's insanity, and of "Vietnamization", turning over responsibility for the war to the South Vietnamese, the North nevertheless won the war.

Disposable helicopters. Operation Frequent Wind, the chaotic evacuation of the American Embassy, brought to a close fifteen years of American hubris. Karl Marx, who got little else right, observed "History repeats itself, the first as tragedy, then as farce."

Our whole history is treason; our blood was attained before we were born -- Theodore Parker

orthogonality — Sun, 03 Apr 2005 19:23:42 -0800

"Hanoi Jane" Fonda: the traitor stands in worse case of woe . "… sitting on an enemy aircraft gun was a betrayal," she said.
Treason or higher loyalty : her country right or wrong ? Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. --Mark Twain

Really Angry Veterans

kablam — Wed, 16 Jun 2004 18:32:02 -0800

The Swift Boat Veterans video you didn't hear about. Shown on CSPAN-2, now available on their website (downloadable video in WMV format), but not widely reported by any major news service. The angriest group of Vietnam vets you might ever see--men who served with and around John Kerry, united in their opposition to his becoming President. Part 1 Part 2

How Kerry Earned His Decorations

Postroad — Tue, 04 May 2004 13:01:58 -0800

How Kerry Earned His Decorations For all the loud mouths who shout out that Kerry is a traitor, a guy who did not earn his medals, read this and then compare your medals with his! Did he turn against the war? Sure. Many soldiers did too. The nation also turned against the war and, finally, some responsible for getting us into the war admitted their mistake. "Kerry is one of the Senate's most decorated veterans — though he has far fewer medals than friend John McCain — and his record is impressive for an officer who spent just 10 months in Vietnam. Each of the medals below came with a matching ribbon. Kerry wore his ribbons when he testified before a Senate committee in 1971; the next day, joining hundreds of other vets, he lobbed them at the Capitol. "

cell divide — Wed, 28 Nov 2001 10:49:16 -0800

Dead Men Walking Thomas Lipscome urges us to think about 4th generation warfare, the nature of the battle, and the potential dangers well beyond the idea of nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq. From the article: "Terrorists become extraordinarily resourceful playing weak hands against the strong and rich. So do revolutionaries. And it is time to realize bin Laden is both" This article is short yet wide-ranging, neatly bringing together the Balkans, Clinton, the Media, and 4G warfare.
via follow me here

rschram — Wed, 25 Apr 2001 16:15:35 -0800

Sen. Bob Kerrey tells a personal Vietnam horror story
And the NYT has posted an advance copy of its Sunday Magazine story to avoid being scooped, which is a first, I believe.
[via <http://www.nytimes.com>] Kerrey, as a lieutenant in Vietnam helped kill a village of Vietnamese women and children in 1969. How many more skeletons in the closets of the current leaders of America? And will this spur the actual beginning of American critical reflection on Vietnam, or will it blow over in a few weeks like when MacNamara's autobiographical confession came out a few years ago?