This book's focus moves away from the conventional combat-centered war history and instead looks into the relatively neglected subject of men and women's lives beyond the battleground. By examining topics such as their religion, marriage, education, and occupation in their home countries, the work details veteran backgrounds before the war and their civilian life after. It puts each veteran in the context of the society, culture, and politics. By introducing these young soldiers and junior officers and telling their stories, this work employs a social history methodology and provides an impetus to larger issues. It shows from the bottom up that each society has its own way to transform its civilians into soldiers, and that the people viewed and responded to similar problems differently. Oral history, of course, has its own weaknesses. The book does not intend to present a comprehensive coverage of the war, but a “limited” presentation of the voices of the international soldiers from all sides. Their stories may not be the bloodiest, but they will broaden our perspective on the war. Some of them are the noncombat stories of people who served in logistics, intelligence, medicine, and engineering, soldiers whose roles and contributions are often overlooked by historians.
The selected chapters present a life story and show the feelings and perceptions of the war by the men and women who lived it. The chapters follow the participants’ lives before, during, and after their service, to put each individual soldier in a common, broader context. To connect each man and woman with his or her social and political environment, a vignette is included as a background introduction to each personal account. Besides the Communist stories, there are fourteen stories of American, South Vietnamese, and Korean veterans.
It was difficult to select only eight American veterans from my interviews of fifty-three in fifteen states. I regret that time and space has not allowed me to include the stories of other veterans, who performed their duties in Vietnam heroically. Their stories have certainly provided a solid historical background for comparisons with the others and an analytical framework for the discussions of important issues. They also provided a large amount of wartime memorabilia, such as diaries, letters, photographs, newspapers, recommendation letters, and official documents.
The selection of South Vietnamese stories was based on interviews with ARVN veterans both in the United States and in Vietnam. Among the seventy-two South Vietnamese soldiers interviewed, sixty-one veterans and their families were in the United States. These ARVN veterans either fled the country after the war in the late 1970s or came to the United States later through humanitarian organizations and other American programs in the 1980s and 1990s. Some interviews were conducted in English, but most were done in their own native language through an interpreter, since I did not trust my Vietnamese. Certain words were changed during the translation and editing process for clarity. Between 2002 and 2006, I made three research trips to Vietnam and interviewed eleven ARVN veterans in four southern provinces. My wife helped with translations since the veterans did not feel comfortable with any official translator or other people knowing about the interview and their anti-Communist past. Reluctant and hesitant, they often avoided details about the lost war that sent them to jail for up to seven years. They did not keep many photos, records, and letters from their ARVN service. Some of them only started talking after my third visit or a dinner at a local restaurant. Some believed that the Communist government and local authorities still watched them.
The chapters are organized in both geopolitical and thematic ways. Part One begins with the narratives of six Vietnamese veterans from both sides. The second part focuses on the Russian and Chinese Communist veterans, North Vietnam's allies. Part Three examines Saigon's allies through four Americans’ stories. Then, the next part organizes the stories to show the efforts of medical personnel, including a doctor, nurse, medic, and hospital security captain. The last segment examines several different logistical support persons, including a U.S. Army lieutenant, a U.S. Air Force sergeant, a South Vietnamese official, and a Chinese colonel. The conclusion summarizes the perspectives on the war and provides a unique way of understanding Vietnam. In their own words, these former warriors put the readers in the midst of wartime life.
Part One
A Country Divided
Chapter 1
A Buddhist Soldier Defends
a Catholic Government
S.Sgt. Huynh Van No was very affable and gregarious, even though he had a tough time during the war and a fatigued life thereafter. Before each interview in Ho Chi Minh City, he usually started a conversation with me and my wife on an interesting topic like the difference between traditional Mahayana Buddhism in Vietnam and Westernized Buddhism in America. Sometimes they were so engaged that I had to step in by offering them a cup of “caphe sua” (Vietnamese ice coffee) before they got carried away with their enlightening and serious discussions.
Staff Sergeant No was serious about the common Western assumption that the ARVN failed to defend its own country even with American direct intervention in the Vietnam War.1 He argued that this supposition is not fair to the ARVN, which he entered in 1962 at eighteen. His testimony suggests that the ARVN departed from traditional values and lost popular support only after the Americans transformed it into a modern army.2 Its modernization or Westernization detached the ARVN from Vietnamese society. In other words, while providing advanced technology, military training, democratic ideas, and even Christianity to the ARVN, the United States should also have promoted nationalistic pride as a reason for the South Vietnamese soldiers to fight for their own country's independence and sovereignty. Ignoring and overlooking Vietnamese nationalism made the ARVN a hotbed of apathy. Staff Sergeant No felt like he was fighting for his Catholic commanders, President Diem, and American advisers, not for himself, his family, and the Vietnamese people.
In retrospect, the U.S. Vietnam policy was originally aimed at supporting the government and people of South Vietnam in their efforts against Communist aggression. From the beginning, Pres. John F. Kennedy emphasized that the South Vietnamese should fight this war “by themselves, for themselves, win or lose, it is their war, the people of Vietnam against the Communists”3 He authorized $41 million to improve the ARVN and the civil guards in 1961. According to Staff Sergeant No, his unit and other ARVN troops had made some progress in carrying out some of President Diem's policies, like the “Strategic Hamlet Program” in 1962–1963.4 The program was designed to protect the rural population and neutralize Viet Cong insurgents. However, the battlefield failure in 1963–1964 convinced American leaders that the ARVN could not protect its government and South Vietnam from further attacks by the PLAF and NVA. Their assumed failure and incompetence influenced the Johnson administration's military escalation of the Vietnam War in order to help the hopeless South Vietnamese in an American way.
Approximately 3.6 million South Vietnamese served in the ARVN from 1963 to 1975. During that time, most of the adult males between seventeen and forty-five years old were drafted into the war and stayed in the army until the end.5 Staff Sergeant No was wounded during the Viet Cong's Tet Offensive campaign in 1968, but was lucky enough to live to see the end of the war.
S.Sgt. Huynh Van No
First Battalion, Third Regiment, An Giang Provincial Command, ARVN (South Vietnam)
I was born in 1944 into a peasant's family in Long Hung, a small village near Long Xuyen, An Giang Province, South Vietnam. As the youngest