Another Vietnam – Unseen images of the war from the winning side

I&#x27;m reminded of an article I read in one of Jerry Pournelle&#x27;s anthologies. It was written by a Vietnamese man who had agitated against the Americans during the Vietnam war.<p>At one point, he was in jail for resisting the Americans. His father visited him, and asked &quot;What the heck are you doing?&quot; He answered &quot;Fighting against the oppressor Americans!&quot; His father responded &quot;It&#x27;s true that they&#x27;re oppressors, but the communists are worse.&quot;<p>He didn&#x27;t believe his father. When the Americans left, there was a victory parade through Hanoi. Which was composed <i>only</i> of communist regiments. He asked the other people involved in the resistance &quot;Where are all the non-communist regiments, which were the majority of the fighters?&quot; The answer was &quot;On exercises in the country.&quot;<p>It turned out that the communists had infiltrated all of the non-communist resistance groups (of which there were many), and taken them over from the inside.<p>A few years later, with his life in danger from the communists, he fled Vietnam, became one of the boat people, and immigrated to America.

I think it is crucial to understand the motivations and principles of the people involved, in order to shed more insight unto the matter.<p>Regardless of the political overhead, from my personal experience the vast majority of the Vietnamese people at the time, already being Spartan like in certain manners and living in times of turmoil, saw the &#x27;war of Resistance against America&#x27; (as the Vietnam War is called in VN)as the continuation of resistance against foreign superpowers, dating back thousands of years.<p>The US, after, Japan, France, the Mongols, China was seen as yet another invader in a long line, albeit arguably the one with the most overwhelming strength.<p>The average North Vietnamese person did not care about Communism, Capitalism, Political theories or world politics. They only cared about them in so far how they could help them achieve their goal: To be free! Sovereign in their own land.<p>This mindset coupled with the history of Vietnam is important to understand where the dermination of these units came from. Yes, the US military would &#x27;win&#x27;, as in being the last party to remain with living soldiers in an all out war until the very end no discussions, hands down. That is because, similar to the Japanese the morals of these Vietnamese guerilla peasants fighting would fight till the end.<p>In that regard, especially when seeing discussions here and mostly on reddit going back and forth about who &#x27;won&#x27; the war, people forget that they might talk with completely different defnitions of winning in mind. (Or they are just American kiddos that cannot accept their great US ever loosing ever.)<p>It is a great tragedy in the end, because in the end, absurdly in a certain way, both sides fought for the same thing: Freedom.<p>The US won the battle, but lost the war.

This is sure to be confusing to many, as a majority of Americans believe the US won the war on Vietnam, or won it but were forced to declare defeat by Congress.<p>The VC won fair and square against the occupying and invading forces, and despite all the doom predictions of the time, they appear to still be a functioning state.

Yeah, Vietnamese had no Hollywood to force their point of view onto the global society.<p>I lived in Hanoi for two years, and been attending a local climbing club. A friend of mine, an American climber, once shared his thoughts on the war, and the way Vietnamese don&#x27;t hate modern Americans despite having a war veteran in every family - it was a bit of surprise to him.<p>I think what he did not realize is that the US lost the war, and retrieved the forces, and Vietnamese are really proud of that, and it&#x27;s very different to, for example, modern situation in the Arabic world, where the US just can&#x27;t get enough of it.

Some of these photos are probably staged: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;CombatFootage&#x2F;comments&#x2F;44dwib&#x2F;astonishing_photo_of_vietnam_war_from_the_other&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;CombatFootage&#x2F;comments&#x2F;44dwib&#x2F;aston...</a>

There are two larger points about Vietnam that I think are often overlooked.<p>1) Vietnam was, as others wars are, a most profitable venture for the military industrial congressional complex. Even with the draft, the upper elite usually wiggled their way out it in some form or another.<p>2) The war was started, as were other wars, on false pretenses and lies. Now this is where you may expect a rambling about the gulf of tonkin, but the more sinister angle is that of the created enemy: communism. Through the Yale in China group, a front for an intelligence group, the Maoists were trained and put into power against Sun Yat-Sen who wanted to actually modernize the country.<p>The supranational elite use the hegellian dialectic in order to control the outcome. It&#x27;s nowhere as direct as maany theorists would say, buts thats how its done, for whatever the enemy is, be it facism, communism, terrorism, and soon cyberterrorism.<p>No ones learns any of this in their heavily controlled history textbooks though.

It&#x27;s striking that we&#x27;re only seeing these 40 years after the war. If people saw both sides earlier on we might have less conflict. (Typed from Saigon which is booming at the moment).

Jose Rocha Ferreira Bastos Neto - That wouldn&#x27;t surprise me at all

So, this article not only retranslates Vietcong propanagda, but the only commentary it seems to offer is by Vietcong themselves, with phrases like &quot;resistance to foreign invasion&quot;. How isn&#x27;t this article isn&#x27;t considered a propaganda piece by itself? It&#x27;s one thing to present interesting historic material; it&#x27;s another thing entirely to glorify a marxist dictatorship.

We&#x27;re still glorifying war? Even on HN?

The Vietnamese people didn&#x27;t win the war. The people lost when the communists won. They realized that a couple decades later..after the communists had inflicted their brutal tyranny on the people.<p>Neighboring Cambodia lost a seventh of their population because of Communist evils.<p>By the way, despite leftist gleefulness of &quot;American loss &quot;. The US militarily won almost every battle and had a kill ratio of 134:1.

First off, these pictures are amazing, and the stories of the photographers are hard to describe with words.<p>Reading through the comments, I see a lot of purportedly european folk who believe that many, if not most, people in the US are unfamiliar with the Vietnam conflict. If we discard children (15 and younger) I would be very surprised to find that half of the country is unaware of the war.<p>I think the confusion here is coming from the Idea that the US lost the war. They did not. There were two groups of winners and losers. On the winning side, you have Vietnam, Thailand, the US, and Japan. On the losing side you have France, Laos, Cambodia, and China. The last one was the true &quot;enemy&quot; the US was confronting. Given the recent developments in the Spratly&#x27;s and Cam Ranh Bay, i think it is even more clear that the US, losses notwithstanding, gained much from the Vietnam Conflict.<p>Another point brought up by another comment was that the US does not fight at &quot;home&quot;. This is intentional and the US has been very successful in this regard. Even if the US is forced to abandon policy aims as well as territory, it is hard to see it as a loss when it continues to economically prosper.<p>Wars are not like sporting events; there is no official scorecard. Body counts and capital losses play a role, but so do evolving narratives and cultural identity.<p>Only time tells us who wins and loses. The French definitely lost. The Vietnamese definitely won. All other participants, direct and indirect, occupy a gray area.