General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: What happened after the US ran from Vietnam? n/t [View all]phasma ex machina
(2,328 posts)A young visiting Vietnamese priest celebrated mass at my parish yesterday. He said the mass in Vietnamese. He wore the same style of glasses that Vietnamese priests wore back in the day, but he was way too young to have experienced the war first hand.
Almost all of the Vietnamese in attendance were also way too young. Only one guy looked old enough to have possibly lived through the war as a child.
They sang in Vietnamese accompanied by one violinist. It was very soothing and reminded me that the church has a worldwide presence.
Allow me to embellish other comments in this thread. Some say that Britain prodded America to restore French Indochina. If France got her empire restored after WWII then surely the British empire ought to also get restored.
Some say that the Allies made a mistake by leaving Japanese administrators in place in Vietnam after WWII. Vietnam mistakenly thought that its Japanese overlords would go away after Japan lost the war.
The books that help me to understand the Vietnam War are: Ron Kovic's "Born on the Fourth of July," Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," and James C. Scott's "The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia," which explores the Montagnard mindset, among other things.