Viet Cong Quotes

I Ain't Got No Quarrel With The VietCong...No VietCong Ever Called Me Nigger.

You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, but in the end, you will tire of it first.

If wars create vast sums of money for the global elite, is it possible the Soviets, the Viet Cong and Muslim extremists were, or are, also fabricated enemies of the West along with North Korea? Or at least exaggerated threats?

The Viet Cong were not the idealistic warriors of American antiwar propaganda; they were vicious. They relied on terror.

attacks.” George Romney, the governor of Michigan and a Republican candidate for president, told newspaper editors, “If what we have seen in the past week is a Viet Cong failure, then I hope they never have a victory.”25 On

Post-Traumatic Stress Injury isn't a disease. It's a wound to the soul that never heals.

The Government finally decided To wage the war all-out. Defeat is Un-American. And they took to the air, Their women beside them in bouffant hairdos putting nail-polish on the gunship cannon-buttons. And they never came down for they found, the ground is Pro-Communist. And dirty. And the insects side with the Viet Cong.

I got into heated arguments with brothers and sisters who claimed that the oppression of black people was only a question of race. I argued that there were Black oppressors as well as white ones. Black folks with money have always tended to support candidates who they believed would protect their financial interests. As far as i was concerned, it didn't take too much to figure that black people are oppressed because of class as well as race, because we are poor and because we are Black. It would burn me every time some body talked about Black people climbing the ladder of success. Anytime you're talking about a ladder, you're talking about a top and a bottom, an upper class and a lower class, a rich class and a poor class. As long as you got a system with a top and bottom, Black people are always going to end up at the bottom because we're easiest to discriminate against. That's why i couldn't see fighting within the system. Both the Democratic and Republican party are controlled by millionaires. They are interested in holding on to their power while i was interested in taking it away. They were interested in supporting fascist dictatorships in South and Central America, while i was interested in seeing them overthrown. They were interested in seeing racist, fascist regimes in Africa while i was interested in seeing them overthrown. They were interested in defeating the Viet Cong and i was interested in seeing their liberation.

A member of one group told me that if i was really concerned about the liberation of Black people, i should quit school and get a job n a factory, that if i wanted to get rid of the system i would have to work at the factory and organize the workers. When i asked him why he wasn't working in a factory and organizing the workers, he told me that he was staying in school in order to organize the students. I told him i was working to organize the students too and that i felt perfectly certain that the workers could organize themselves without any college student doing it for them. Some of these groups would come up with abstract intellectual theories, totally devoid of practical application, and swear they had the answers to the problems of the world. They attacked the Vietnamese for participating in the Paris peace talks, claiming that by negotiating the Viet Cong were selling out to the U.S. I think they got insulted when i asked them how a group of flabby white boys who couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag had the nerve to think they could tell the Viet Cong how to run their show.

Washington in 1965. We instinctively measure advantage in terms of the three M’s because men, money, and matériel are the easiest and most obvious ways to make sense of a battle. The only way to appreciate the threat that the Viet Cong posed was to actually listen to what they had to say—to look past the armor and see the man. The book you have just read has tried to persuade you to think that way. Men, money, and matériel aren’t always the deciding factors in a battle. In fact, what the inverted U-shaped curve tells us is that having too much money and matériel is as debilitating as having too little. Being an underdog—having nothing to lose—opens up possibilities. The Impressionists were better for shunning the Salon. History and experience ought to teach us to be suspicious of Goliaths, because the very thing that makes the giant so terrifying is also the source of his weakness. David understood that, as he sized up his opponent long ago in the Valley of Elah.

Army intelligence said the French owners paid the Viet Cong a million piasters a year in protection money and paid the Saigon government three million piasters a year in taxes. The plantation billed the U.S. government $50 for each tea bush and $250 for each rubber tree damaged by combat operations. Just one more incongruity.

Prevost was an imaginative gladiator of the air. He persuaded Vann to give him a pair of the new lightweight Armalite rifles, officially designated the AR-15 and later to be designated the M-16 when the Armalite was adopted as the standard U.S. infantry rifle. The Army was experimenting with the weapon and had issued Armalites to a company of 7th Division troops to see how the soldiers liked it and how well it worked on guerrillas. (The Armalite had a selector button for full or semiautomatic fire and shot a much smaller bullet at a much higher velocity than the older .30 caliber M-1 rifle. The high velocity caused the small bullet to inflict ugly wounds when it did not kill.) Prevost strapped the pair of Armalites to the support struts under the wings of the L-19 and invented a contrivance of wire that enabled him to pull the triggers from the cockpit to strafe guerrillas he sighted. He bombed the Viet Cong by tossing hand grenades out the windows.

Dr. van der Kolk asked the man directly: “What happened to you on July 5 at 6:30 in the morning?” He responded immediately. While he was in Vietnam, the man’s platoon had been ambushed by the Viet Cong. Everyone had been killed except for himself and his friend, Jim. The date was July 4. Darkness fell and the helicopters were unable to evacuate them. They spent a terrifying night together huddled in a rice paddy surrounded by the Viet Cong. At about 3:30 in the morning, Jim was hit in the chest by a Viet Cong bullet. He died in his friend’s arms at 6:30 on the morning of July 5. After returning to the States, every July 5 (that he did not spend in jail), the man had re-enacted the anniversary of his friend’s death. In the therapy session with Dr. van der Kolk, the vet experienced grief over the loss ...

I could smell the Viet Cong, really, I could smell Charlie. It wasn’t just his body sweat or the urine. There were times when I could hear the breathing, real quiet; you could hear a person breathe, and I’d know he was in there, and I didn’t go any farther. I just said to myself: In this dark corner of a tunnel is where the animal belongs, a rodent belongs. I’m becoming like a rodent, but still I don’t belong. Yes, I could smell Charlie. And he knew me. The type of cologne I used, the aftershave—that’s when we stopped using it altogether. But there was more than that. There was the scent that told you there was somebody in the tunnels. We became so tuned up after a while that when the other person would flick an eyelid up or down, you really knew he was there, in the corner, not even hiding anymore. Just sitting and waiting. They were the ones you never killed. You just backed out and told them up above the tunnel was cold.

I laid out the charges against him of subversion, conspiracy, and murder, but emphasized that he was innocent until proven guilty, which made him laugh. Your American puppet masters like to say that, but it's stupid, he said. History, humanity, religion, this war tells us exactly the reverse. We are all guilty until proven innocent, as even the Americans have shown. Why else do they believe everyone is really Viet Cong? Why else do they shoot first and ask questions later? Because to them all yellow people are guilty until proven innocent. Americans are a confused people because they can't admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent. You can't have both. You know how Americans deal with it? They pretend they are eternally innocent no matter how many times they lose their innocence.

In the nineteen sixties and early seventies students wore buttons and headbands demanding equal rights for women, blacks, Native Americans and all oppressed minorities, an end to the war in Vietnam, the salvation of the rain forests and the planet in general. [...] College students boycotted class, taught in, rioted everywhere, dodged the draft, fled to Canada or Scandinavia. High school students came to school fresh from images of war on television news, men blown to bits in rice paddies, helicopters hovering, tentative soldiers of the Viet Cong blasted out of their tunnels, their hands behind their heads, lucky for the moment they weren’t blasted back in again, images of anger back home, marches, demonstrations, hell no we won’t go, sit-ins, teachins, students falling before the guns of the National Guard, blacks recoiling from Bull Connor’s dogs, burn baby burn, black is beautiful, trust no one over thirty, I have a dream and, at the end of it all, your President is not a crook. [...]Mechanics and plumbers had to fight while college students shook indignant fists, fornicated in the fields of Woodstock and sat in.

At its height, the rebellion can best be described as an insurrection. Large crowds of looters in the early part of July 23 gave way to roving bands of looters and fire bombers, who were much harder to control. Some coordinated their tactics by shortwave radio. Apparently, the rebels saw all government officials as the enemy, and they attacked firemen as well as policemen. By 4:40 P.M. on July 24, rebels had stolen hundreds of guns from gun shops. As police began to shoot at the looters, black snipers started shooting back. Hubert Locke, executive secretary of the establishment Committee for Equal Opportunity, called it a “total state of war.” Police officers and firemen reported being attacked by snipers on both the east and west sides of the city. Snipers made sporadic attacks on the Detroit Street Railways buses and on crews of the Public Lighting Commission and the Detroit Edison Company. Police records indicate that as many as ten people were shot by snipers on July 25 alone. A span of 140 blocks on the west side became a “bloody battlefield,” according to the Detroit News. Government tanks and armored personnel carriers “thundered through the streets and heavy machine guns chattered. . . . It was as though the Viet Cong had infiltrated the riot blackened streets.” The mayor said, “It looks like Berlin in 1945.”55 The black uprisings in Detroit and Newark were the largest of 1967 but by no means the only ones. Urban rebellions rocked cities large and small all across America. According to the Kerner Commission, 164 such rebellions erupted in the first nine months of the year.56

Uncle Alfred was very respectful of Owen’s desire to go to Vietnam, but Aunt Martha—over our elegant dinner—questioned the war’s “morality.” “YES, I QUESTION THAT, TOO,” said Owen Meany. “BUT I FEEL ONE HAS TO SEE SOMETHING FIRSTHAND TO BE SURE. I’M CERTAINLY INCLINED TO AGREE WITH KENNEDY’S ASSESSMENT OF THE VIETNAMESE PROBLEM—WAY BACK IN NINETEEN SIXTY-THREE. YOU MAY RECALL THAT THE PRESIDENT SAID: ‘WE CAN HELP THEM, WE CAN GIVE THEM EQUIPMENT, WE CAN SEND OUR MEN OUT THERE AS ADVISERS, BUT THEY HAVE TO WIN IT, THE PEOPLE OF VIETNAM.’ I THINK THAT POINT IS STILL VALID—AND IT’S CLEAR TO ALL OF US THAT THE ‘PEOPLE OF VIETNAM’ ARE NOT WINNING THE WAR. WE APPEAR TO BE TRYING TO WIN IT FOR THEM. “BUT LET’S SUPPOSE, FOR A MOMENT, THAT WE BELIEVE IN THE STATED OBJECTIVES OF THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION’S VIETNAM POLICY—AND THAT WE SUPPORT THIS POLICY. WE AGREE TO RESIST COMMUNIST AGGRESSION IN SOUTH VIETNAM—WHETHER IT COMES FROM THE NORTH VIETNAMESE OR THE VIET CONG. WE SUPPORT THE IDEA OF SELF-DETERMINATION FOR SOUTH VIETNAM—AND WE WANT PEACE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA. IF THESE ARE OUR OBJECTIVES—IF WE AGREE THAT THIS IS WHAT WE WANT—WHY ARE WE ESCALATING THE WAR? “THERE DOESN’T APPEAR TO BE A GOVERNMENT IN SAIGON THAT CAN DO VERY WELL WITHOUT US. DO THE SOUTH VIETNAMESE PEOPLE EVEN LIKE THE MILITARY JUNTA OF MARSHAL KY? NATURALLY, HANOI AND THE VIET CONG WILL NOT NEGOTIATE FOR A PEACEFUL SETTLEMENT IF THEY THINK THEY CAN WIN THE WAR! THERE’S EVERY REASON FOR THE UNITED STATES TO KEEP ENOUGH OF OUR GROUND FORCES IN SOUTH VIETNAM TO PERSUADE HANOI AND THE VIET CONG THAT THEY COULD NEVER ACHIEVE A MILITARY VICTORY. BUT WHAT DOES IT ACCOMPLISH FOR US TO BOMB THE NORTH? “SUPPOSING THAT WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY—THAT WE WANT SOUTH VIETNAM TO BE FREE TO GOVERN ITSELF—WE SHOULD BE PROTECTING SOUTH VIETNAM FROM ATTACK. BUT IT APPEARS THAT WE ARE ATTACKING THE WHOLE COUNTRY—FROM THE AIR! IF WE BOMB THE WHOLE COUNTRY TO BITS—TO PROTECT IT FROM COMMUNISM—WHAT KIND OF PROTECTION IS THAT? “I THINK THAT’S THE PROBLEM,” said Owen Meany, “BUT I’D LIKE TO SEE THE SITUATION FOR MYSELF.

He then made the connection between Jim’s death and the compulsion he felt to commit the robberies. Once he became aware of his feelings and the role the original event had played in driving his compulsion, the man was able to stop re-enacting this tragic incident. What was the connection between the robberies and the Vietnam experience? By staging the robberies, the man was re-creating the fire-fight that had resulted in the death of his friend (as well as the rest of his platoon). By provoking the police to join in the re-enactment, the vet had orchestrated the cast of characters needed to play the role of the Viet Cong. He did not want to hurt anyone, so he used his fingers instead of a gun. He then brought the situation to a climax and was able to elicit the help he needed to heal his psychic wounds. That act enabled him to resolve his anguish, grief, and guilt about his buddy’s violent death and the horrors of war.

ALI He was butterfly and bee. In the ring, he floated and stung. In 1967, Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Clay, refused to put on a uniform. “Got nothing against no Viet Cong,” he said. “Ain’t no Vietnamese ever called me nigger.” They called him a traitor. They sentenced him to a five-year jail term, and barred him from boxing. They stripped him of his title as champion of the world. The punishment became his trophy. By taking away his crown, they anointed him king. Years later, a few college students asked him to recite something. And for them he improvised the shortest poem in world literature: “Me, we.

ain’t draft dodging. I ain’t burning no flag. I ain’t running to Canada. I’m staying right here. You want to send me to jail? Fine, you go right ahead. I’ve been in jail for four hundred years. I could be there for four or five more, but I ain’t going no ten thousand miles to help murder and kill other poor people. If I want to die, I’ll die right here, right now, fightin’ you, if I want to die. You my enemy, not no Chinese, no Viet Cong, no Japanese. You my opposer when I want freedom. You my opposer when I want justice. You my opposer when I want equality. Want me to go somewhere and fight for you? You won’t even stand up for me right here in America, for my rights and my religious beliefs. You won’t even stand up for me right here at home.

Viet Cong, young men carelessly eating their breakfast, never suspecting the Americans would be out so early. They paid with their lives. Most of us were pretty excited whenever we actually, but rarely, saw the enemy, much less killed them. But Barnes was cool, so cool, no big displays ever. Having reported the incident, and stripping the dead men, he soon had us under way, no credit taken, looking for further action ahead; considering there had already been contact, the likelihood of more that day was in the air. Whereas some of us were not looking forward to such an encounter, the thought excited Barnes. He was a great soldier, probably on his second or third tour — but why? Why would he come back after a facial wound like he had? I never asked, and he never told. You hear things in the army, as in all society, and some kind of narrative emerges; in this case, the story was that he’d been literally shot or sustained shrapnel in the face, skull, head, requiring a major reconstruction job as the scar branched deeply around his eye, nose, and cheek; even his lips were affected. And as he had clearly once been a handsome man, the scars perversely heightened his visage into a Phantom of the Opera echo — a man distorted, perhaps, by anger or revenge, or really a question mark. What was he about? He never hinted in all the time I was around him. I watched him with both curiosity and trepidation; he’d get back to the rear after we’d been out in the field a week or more and relax with booze, poker, cigarettes, sometimes a cigar. It was said he’d been in Japan in the hospital about eight months, rehabbing from the wound. And there he’d “married a Japanese gal.” And now he was back. Sort of an Ahab looking for his White Whale. And here I was, like Ishmael, walking five or ten steps behind him, always expecting that something was going to break because, like a fly, he smelled the blood of war. As good a soldier as he was, I was relieved when he got rid of me as his radio operator.

Recall Bernard Fall’s estimate that by April 1965, before the first North Vietnamese battalion was detected in the South, more than 160,000 “Viet Cong” had fallen “under the crushing weight of American armor, napalm, jet bombers and, finally, vomiting gases.

CV-17 Chinese Point name: Shan Zhong;20 English translation: “Chest Center;” Special Attributes: Intersection Point of the Spleen, Small Intestine, Triple Warmer and the Conception Vessel. Additionally, it is the alarm point for the Pericardium Meridian; Location: On the centerline of the body on the same level as the nipples; Western Anatomy: Branches of the internal mammary artery and vein are found with the anterior cutaneous branch of the fourth intercostal nerve; Comments: This is a major point of interest to combative martial artists. A blow to CV-17 can affect the electrical pattern of the heart resulting in arrhythmia. Western science refers to this as Commotio cordis and it is documented with strikes to the chest as in a baseball striking the chest of a child. While interviewing a former infantry point man who served in Vietnam confirmation was added to the lethality of a strike to CV-17. According to this individual, a life-long karate practitioner, while he was walking point one night he actually bumped into an enemy soldier who was traveling down the same trail from the opposite direction. The American struck the Viet Cong with a strong punch to CV-17 killing him instantly. His small frame combined with the larger stature of the American allowed for a perfect 45-degree strike (strikes to CV-17 should be downward at a 45-degree angle). These strikes will generally be open palm or hammer fist type strikes given the height of an average sized opponent and the location of the point. Additional energetic disruption can be added by rotating your striking hand outward on contact.

if the GVN did not soon show a capacity to beat back the Vietcong challenge-and on its own, without increased American participation. "If the conclusion is reached that the Viet Cong are not being beaten," one analyst at the Foreign Office wrote in late summer, "the only alternative is negotiation." The West's bargaining position would be poor, this and other British analysts agreed, but the likely end result, a reunified, Titoist Vietnam, would be acceptable. ("The

One of the first things you had to know was the difference between “In Coming” and “Out Going”.  The first loud noises or explosions we heard had everyone jumping and getting ready to run for the bunkers.  A loud voice in the darkness shouted for us to relax, it was “Out Going”.  The voice was referring to artillery fire being shot away from our location and hopefully onto a Viet Cong location.  It was normally referred to as an H&I fire (Harassing and Interdiction).  Another voice in the darkness asked, “What does in coming sound like?” The loud voice in the darkness answered, “There will be no doubt in your mind when you hear it.  If you don’t hear it, you will most likely be dead.

In 1965, the CIA reported that 31% of the weapons captured from the Viet Cong were of American manufacture.

Down here it seemed to be a mixed bag of NVA, the local Viet Cong, and any little old lady with an AK-47 in her shopping bag who felt like emptying a 20 round Magazine into a passing helicopter.

One of the most frustrating aspects of the Vietnam war from the Army's point of view is that as far as logistics and tactics were concerned we succeeded in everything we set out to do. At the height of the war the Army was able to move almost a million soldiers a year in and out of Vietnam, feed them, clothe them, house them, supply them with arms and ammunition, and generally sustain them better than any Army had ever been sustained in the field. To project an Army of that size halfway around the world was a logistics and management task of enormous magnitude, and we had been more that equal to the task. On the battlefield itself, the Army was unbeatable. In engagement after engagement the forces of the Viet Cong and that of the North Vietnamese Army were thrown back with terrible losses. Yet, in the end, it was North Vietnam, not the United States, that emerged victoriously. How could we have succeeded so well, yet failed so miserably? At least part of the answer appears to be that we saw Vietnam as unique rather than in strategic context. This misperception grew out of neglect of military strategy in the post-World War II nuclear era. Almost all professional literature on military strategy was written by civilian analysts - political scientists from the academic world and systems analysts from the Defense community. In his book War and Politics, political scientist Bernard Brodie devoted an entire chapter to the lack of professional military strategic thought. The same criticism was made by systems analysts Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith who commented: "Military professionals are among the most infrequent contributors to the basic literature on military strategy and defense policy. Most such contributors are civilians..." Even the Army's so-called "new" strategy of flexible response grew out of civilian, not military, thinking. This is not to say that the civilian strategies were wrong. The political scientists provided a valuable service in tying war to its political ends. They provided a valuable service in tying war to its political ends. The provided answers to "why" the United States ought to wage war. In the manner the systems analyst provided answer on "what" means we would use. What was missing was the link that should have been provided by military strategists -"how" to take the systems analyst's means and use them to achieve the political scientist's ends. But instead of providing professional military advice on how to fight the war, the military more and more joined with the systems analysts in determining material means we were to use. Indeed, the conventional wisdom among many Army officers was that "the Army doesn't make strategy, " and "there is no such thing as Army strategy." There was a general feeling that strategy was budget-driven and was primarily a function of resource allocation. The task of the Army, in their view, was to design and procure material, arms and equipment and to organize, train, and equip soldiers for the Defense Establishment.

First our comrades. They come from many places. Some were good Jews fighting the baddy Arabs, some were baddy Jews fighting the goody Arabs, some were good protestants fighting the baddy catholics, some were baddy protestants fighting the goody catholics, some were goody or baddy, Viet Cong, black or white, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.

She had joined the Viet Cong herself four years earlier, its Young Pioneer Organization.

When the Republicans caught us around a dead Viet Cong fighter, we had to act like we didn’t know what was going on. We would tell the soldiers that nobody knew who the dead person was, even though his family might be standing right there, holding back their tears. We would claim the dead man was a vagabond or someone from another village. “Would you soldiers like to haul him away for us?” No, they would not. So we’d bury him ourselves and the relatives would mourn in secret.

Cao reveled in the acclaim and the prospect of a general’s stars. “I kill fifty Viet Cong today,” he would announce to reporters coming to the command post. He began to learn the public relations game perhaps too well.

Under the influence of activists like Jim Fouratt these alliances extended (though were not limited) to domestic movements like the Black Panthers and foreign ones such as the Viet Cong, Mao’s regime in China, Castro’s Cuba and more. The fact that these movements were explicit in their varied opposition to homosexuals (Mao’s China, for instance, being willing to publicly castrate ‘sexual degenerates’) was merely one of those contradictions that needed to be got over.

Gingrich’s goal was to tar the Democrats as the party of corruption. In 1984, one of his advisers wrote a strategy memo saying that Gingrich and his allies should view themselves as the Viet Cong fighting the South Vietnamese government (the Democrats) while accepting support from the North Vietnamese (the Republican establishment). Both, he stated, were the “enemies.” The Democrats, he noted, “we must destroy” and the Republicans “we must take advantage of, lie to, sidetrack, confound, and possess by recruitment and propaganda.” The goal was to cast Democrats as “the oppressor,” a tyrannical enemy warranting the utmost despisal. This memo, as Gingrich’s biographer Julian Zelizer later said, was his “road map.” When

En 1967, Ali fue juzgado y condenado a cinco años de prisión por «evadir el reclutamiento». Le confiscaron el pasaporte. Le impusieron multas elevadísimas. Le prohibieron boxear durante tres años. No estoy evadiendo el reclutamiento. No voy a huir a Canadá. Pienso quedarme aquí. ¿Me queréis enviar a la cárcel? Estupendo, hacedlo. Hace cuatrocientos años que estoy en la cárcel. No me importa quedarme en ella cuatro o cinco años más, pero lo que no pienso hacer es viajar a dieciséis mil kilómetros de distancia para ayudar a matar y a asesinar a otros. Si quiero morir, moriré aquí, ahora, enfrentándome a vosotros. Eso si es que quiero morir. Vosotros sois mi enemigo, no los chinos, no el Viet Cong, no los japoneses. Os oponéis a mí cuando pido libertad. Os oponéis a mí cuando pido justicia. Os oponéis a mí cuando pido igualdad. ¿Queréis que vaya a no sé dónde a luchar por vosotros contra no sé quién? Vosotros no me defendéis ni siquiera aquí, en Estados Unidos, no defendéis mis derechos ni mis creencias religiosas. No me defendéis ni siquiera aquí, en casa.

He sighed. All good intentions aside, sometimes he wondered, who am I kidding? Because sometimes he wondered if what was really driving him was guilt; guilt for walking away that November morning, through the acrid smell of burning fuel and the burning rubber smell from the bombed-out Jeeps; for looking at his hands and counting his fingers while the smell of the moist earth ejected by exploding Viet Cong shells mingled with the stench of burning flesh; and most of all, for being able to walk at all and for being able to see, smell and experience the nightmares that still haunted him nightly and the visions that still came during the day. He was guilty for feeling relief— relief that it was not his mangled body lying half-in and half-out of the blackened shell of a burned-out military vehicle; it wasn’t his headless torso next to a crater; and, it wasn’t his body zipped into one of the dark plastic body bags that lined the edge of the tarmac, waiting for pickup and removal by the C-130 transports the day he went home.

The rules of warfare seem to go in cycles alternating from neat rows—the Roman square, the French knights at Agincourt, the fixed battles of the early eighteenth century, the trenches of 1915–18, and the Maginot/Siegfried lines—to rules that stress mobility, irregularity, adaptability—Attila the Hun, the English longbowmen at Agincourt, the colonial guerrillas in 1776, both sides in our Civil War, the German panzers, the Viet Cong, and the Afghan guerrillas.

But the Viet Cong did horrible things,” she said. “The people who shot you down could have been the ones who massacred children, raped women, disemboweled village elders, couldn’t they? Such things happened in Vietnam.” “How do you know that? From more Republican books?” “Don’t condescend to me, Julian. You know it’s true. ” Julian said, “I’m not sure I do know that. But if such things were done by the V.C., there was always a political rationale. Always.” His features were once again in repose. “There was a ‘political rationale’?” Emily said. “That explains everything?” Julian had no chance to answer before the radio emitted some incomprehensible message from air traffic control that required him to respond. But for Julian, Emily realized, it did explain everything.

I knew as a 10-year-old Black girl that I was not precious to these adults. I believed they would kill me as readily as they would kill the Viet Cong the US was at war with. It didn't matter that I was a United States citizen. It didn't matter that I was very smart, would probably grow up to be pretty like my mother, or that I was fun to talk to and had unlimited potential. It didn't matter that I was a good girl and hadn't been suspended from school. It didn't matter because I didn't matter to them.

Meanwhile, with each day that passes, there is an increasing danger that the GVN's deteriorating relations with the South Vietnamese people will begin to produce a general sag of enthusiasm for continuing the war against the Viet Cong, both among the populace and the armed forces. Should this occur, the likelihood of achieving ultimate U.S. objectives in South Vietnam will have virtually disappeared.

Imagine such a historian citing a book by Frederick Douglass or another abolitionist, twisting the words around so that they became arguments for slavery. But that is exactly what Zinn did with the words of Douglas Pike: Pike accused the Viet Cong of genocide, but Zinn used selective quotations of Pike’s work to make them the heroes of the Vietnamese people. Zinn, as we have seen, violated over and over the rules on which the American Historical Association prides itself and by which Richard Evans and his team showed Irving to be a historian of disrepute. Zinn did everything—misrepresented sources, omitted critical information, falsified evidence, and plagiarized. His rhetorical strategies included leading questions, logical fallacies, and ad hominem attacks.

Like the rest of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse saw no hope for revolution from the working class. Instead, he looked to the marginalized groups who are excluded from consumer society and hence immune to its blandishments, a “substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and unemployable.”64 Marx himself had scornfully called this moblike group the Lumpenproletariat , a tool of demogogic reaction; now they became Marcuse’s last hope. In his Essay on Liberation (1969), Marcuse summoned forth an alliance of “the young, the intelligentsia,” blacks, welfare recipients, Third World revolutionaries, and New Left students, who would “break the historical continuum of injustice, cruelty, and silence.” “The armed class struggle is waged outside” the mainstream of Western society, in the streets and ghettos, the rice paddies of Asia, and the mountains of Latin America.65 “The Cuban revolution and the Viet Cong have demonstrated it can be done,” Marcuse wrote in 1968. “There is a morality, a humanity, a will, and a faith which can resist and deter the gigantic technical and economic force of capitalist expansion” and what he called “the affluent monster.

When Timothy Leary’s consciousness-seeking cohort, Ram Dass, went to India seeking higher knowledge, he did meditation and numerous esoteric practices for a long period of time, and one day his guru told him it was time to show his power. Ram Dass was giddy. He wondered what the guru would have him do to demonstrate the prowess he had gained during his training. When he reported to the guru to find out his task, the guru told him to go feed somebody. He was crestfallen. He thought maybe he would be asked to bend spoons with his mind or something similar.

THAT SUMMER, before shipping out to Vietnam, Mogie Crocker came home for a visit. “We were at dinner one evening,” his mother recalled, “and just talking in generalities about the war. And he said, ‘Of course if I were Vietnamese I probably would be on the side of the Viet Cong.’ I puzzled over that. And my husband did, too. I suppose Mogie was relating it to our American Revolution, that he saw their need for their own freedom. But as an American citizen, he also saw the larger picture of trying to prevent communism.

What had happened at My Lai may have shocked the American public. But it was not news to the Army. Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who had tried to stop the massacre, reported what he had seen. So did at least five other pilots. The word went steadily up the chain of command—all the way to the division commander, Major General Samuel W. Koster. No one took any action. Instead, the brigade log was falsified to say that 128 Viet Cong had been killed by U.S. artillery. The slaughter was covered up. The Army Public Information Office released a widely disseminated story that described an operation that “went like clockwork” in which the “jungle warriors” of the Eleventh Brigade had killed 128 Viet Cong in a running “day-long battle,” chalking up the largest body count in the brigade’s history. On the strength of reports like these, General Westmoreland had sent his official congratulations.

And in the end we lost our butt. We lost because the guerilla theory of the Viet Cong rested on a stronger base than our massive injections of men and material. The Viet Cong out-suffered and out-fought us. Their dead left little debris on the trails and battlefields and beyond their bodies and occasionally some poerty; ours strewed cigarettes and condoms. The only solace is that we were wrong and lost. It could have been worse — we could have been right and lost. But, mind you, if we'd been right, we wouldn't have lost.

Moving into our small American housing enclave above the city were the families of American officers stationed in Saigon, and the free-ranging game of Cowboys and Indians that we boys in the neighborhood had previously played was renamed Green Berets and Viet Cong. It didn’t actually change the game that much, except that in the past the Indians sometimes won, and in the new version the Viet Cong never did.

when we marched into the rice paddies on that damp March afternoon, we carried, along with our packs and rifles, the implicit convictions that the Viet Cong would be quickly beaten and that we were doing something altogether noble and good. We kept the packs and rifles; the convictions, we lost.

The enemy was considered to be all communist forces in SEA whether NVA (North Vietnamese Army), VC (The Viet Cong in South Vietnam supported from the North), or the PL (Pathet Lao communists) in Laos.