Vietnam

With a title like this one, you can get a feel for what is coming. I wasn’t really surprised that a definitive history would be so large, but as would fit oral histories, it is packed with detail.

I like history. I like reading about the past and spending time absorbing the contents of events. This book was really satisfied my desire to understand more about what happened and why.

It was easy to get into because it told the stories of so many different people. But at the same time, the process of reading stories of this nature wore me down.

War stories are never easy to take because war is never easy. The differing views on the war are as cemented now as they were then. The coarsened stories of the battle-hardened show they have maintained their beliefs about the events from when they happened through to now. Like all of us, when taking the time to reconsider their actions, people from all sides of can overlook the negative impact their actions produced.

The stories in Vietnam are very graphic. This made it hard to get even to half-way through. The book challenges people to consider broader perspectives, and is a useful account of how people look back on an event that helped define a generation.

On reflection after some time away from reading the book, I have begun to wonder about human liberation. The result of a communist liberation of Vietnam was some very large movements of fleeing refugee populations into places like Australia and North America. Meanwhile the American war of liberation was bogged down by poorly chosen leaders for the South, and the growing unpopularity of fighting against Communism at such a cost to young lives in a country that no-one really knew anything about.

Vietnam was all about freedom. For many Vietnamese it was about freedom from foreign control. For others, it was freedom from communism and freedom of religious expression.

The Cold War setting also gave Vietnam the broader geopolitics of freedom. In the end though, the war was a disappointment. Human intervention will never bring us enough freedom to satisfy us. Sin will get in the way; people will outstay their welcome and the freedom once craved again becomes slavery.

If you want true freedom, look to Christ. From a human perspective many things are worth fighting for. But in the end, the removal of sin trumps all the other victories many times over.

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