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emma_in_dreamHaving just rewatched some *A Team*, I attempted to read about the war in Vietnam. As you do. Watching *Captain America* naturally lead to a lot of reading about WWII and life in the depression.
However, it was a lot harder to find anything useful about the war in Vietnam in my little local library. Virtually all the books concentrated only on the period in the 1960s and 70s when the Vietnamese were fighting Americans and Australians, when I am sure my high school education told us about a continuous wave of opposition to colonialism from at least the 1930s onwards – to the French, the Japanese, the French again and then the American-led coalition. Pretty sure there would have been some earlier anti-Chinese opposition too.
And every book I can find seems to fall into one of two camps. Either they are histories of specific campaigns which congratulate the western soldiers on how well they did in that one small valley while ignoring the big picture, or else they are so overwrought that the text could basically be replaced with Red Gum lyrics.
So, historians out there, get it together. Now would be the perfect time to write a very good history of the war in Vietnam because:
1, a whole heap of confidential papers must be about to come out of the 50 year period so there will be a lot of background decision making made available that was previously unknown. What was Johnson thinking? What was Harold Holt thinking? Did anyone, anywhere think it was a good idea to get bogged down in a land war in Asia?
2, it is not too late to attempt to compensate for the disproportionate reliance on western experiences. OK, the west left documents that can be read (am assuming Vietnamese documents were mostly destroyed as nothing produced by the Vietnamese government is referenced in any of the books??? Or possibly none of the historians read Vietnamese???). But what an oral history project it would make if you interviewed the former Viet Cong! They were a youngish population so quite a viable project and it would give way more context to the histories.
Also, it would make it a loss less racist. ATM, Charlie just pops out of the jungle to engage in unmotivated and context-free fights with the western soldiers who have no idea why they are there. Perhaps the motivations of both sides could be fleshed out a little.
However, it was a lot harder to find anything useful about the war in Vietnam in my little local library. Virtually all the books concentrated only on the period in the 1960s and 70s when the Vietnamese were fighting Americans and Australians, when I am sure my high school education told us about a continuous wave of opposition to colonialism from at least the 1930s onwards – to the French, the Japanese, the French again and then the American-led coalition. Pretty sure there would have been some earlier anti-Chinese opposition too.
And every book I can find seems to fall into one of two camps. Either they are histories of specific campaigns which congratulate the western soldiers on how well they did in that one small valley while ignoring the big picture, or else they are so overwrought that the text could basically be replaced with Red Gum lyrics.
So, historians out there, get it together. Now would be the perfect time to write a very good history of the war in Vietnam because:
1, a whole heap of confidential papers must be about to come out of the 50 year period so there will be a lot of background decision making made available that was previously unknown. What was Johnson thinking? What was Harold Holt thinking? Did anyone, anywhere think it was a good idea to get bogged down in a land war in Asia?
2, it is not too late to attempt to compensate for the disproportionate reliance on western experiences. OK, the west left documents that can be read (am assuming Vietnamese documents were mostly destroyed as nothing produced by the Vietnamese government is referenced in any of the books??? Or possibly none of the historians read Vietnamese???). But what an oral history project it would make if you interviewed the former Viet Cong! They were a youngish population so quite a viable project and it would give way more context to the histories.
Also, it would make it a loss less racist. ATM, Charlie just pops out of the jungle to engage in unmotivated and context-free fights with the western soldiers who have no idea why they are there. Perhaps the motivations of both sides could be fleshed out a little.
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