The War didn't just affect soldiers- innocent children's homes were bombed, their lives devastated
I remember attending a war memorial museum in one of the country's northern provinces with a guide who had been raised in the north. He had a very different perspective on the War than one of our other guides from the south had- he had strong communism ideals because it was all he had ever known and grown up with, and he held resentment toward American involvement during the War. While there, everyone was clearly able to tell that I was American, but with a Vietnamese ethnicity. Never really having crossed my mind before, the same question sometimes comes up today: "What would it be like to be a true Vietnamese?" And in that I mean a person that actually lives in the country, not an American that appears to be Vietnamese. I'm not entirely sure what it even means to be a Communist, but I know for sure that if I lived in Vietnam, it would be a very different life from the one I have now. Sources: http://history1900s.about.com/od/vietnamwar/a/vietnamwar_2.htm http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/history/ http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/628478/Vietnam-War Video: http://video.pbs.org/video/2166430461/ |