Word: vietnames
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...perhaps there is room for books about the war that are completely personal, that concentrate on the individual's reactions. One of the most horrifying aspects of the Vietnam war was its denial of humanity: death came from the sky, unpredictably and indiscriminately, or in the forest, at night and without warning. The enemy never took human form. American soldiers generally were ignorant of the historical roots of both the war they were fighting and the society they were invading. And on this side of the ocean, it took almost a decade of American involvement in Vietnam for the public...
Early in the book, Emerson quotes Nguyen Ngoc Luong, her Vietnamese interpreter, who wrote to her after she left, "There is an acute lack of forgetfulness in you about Vietnam." Much later in the book, she responds: "Korea taught me nothing, for no one spoke of it when I was growing up, except as something about how wonderful the girls in Japan were. Vietnam taught some of us more than we perhaps ever wished to know...
...these lessons, painful and ineradicable, that Emerson tries to transmit in Winners and Losers. Her approach is typical of a reporter: she spent years interviewing dozens of Vietnam veterans and their families, dozens of antiwar workers, members of the foreign policy establishment that supported the war, and as many Vietnamese as she could. Her book has been criticized bacause the majority of the people she describes are American, but Emerson explains early on that she, like so many other foreign correspondents, found it difficult to contact North Vietnamese or South Vietnamese freedom fighters. And since the liberation of Saigon, very...
...last comment would not always have seemed snide. Fifteen years ago, the criticism in the following passage from The Quiet American, a novel many people feel prefigures the whole of the U.S.'s senseless devastation of Vietnam, would not have seemed painful. A Vietnamese woman named Phuong asks the British reporter, 'Are there skyscrapers in London...
Once again last December a delegation arrived for talks, as usual led by Mr. Ellsworth Bunker, the former ambassador to Vietnam: they stayed for the inside of a week on the pleasant tourist island of Contadura where it had become a habit to hold such parleys, then they went home...