Over
Dear Bella US troops left South Vietnam in 1973 The war ended in 1975 The war was over But this is what I’ve learned from students The stories they’ve told me After class usually In…
Tag: Vietnam War
Bella Levenshteyn You Summon My Stream of Consciousness
Dear Bella How did you learn to respond when big burly vets spit on you, as if you’re Jane Fonda, only 40-something years younger? Have you ever been like Carla, failing at metta? Maybe after…
How Do You Tell Uncle Johnny Where You’re Going?
She bought her ticket She connected with her travel mates They’d be two weeks there Meeting people In the south In central In the north She was the youngest going Many were old-timers A couple…
The Way It Looked in 1986
The United States was deeply committed to the French effort to reconquer their former colony, recognizing throughout that the enemy was the nationalist movement of Vietnam. The death toll was about half a million. When…
“It’s Not All about Us?”
Why is so much omitted from our most familiar Vietnam war stories? The very size, length, and complexity of the war’s history is a partial explanation, but the harder truth is that we have simply…
Insertion
Wherever you have refugees, you have vultures who feed off them. –Kuan Ying, quoted in Lady Borton, Sensing the Enemy: An American Woman among the Boat People of Vietnam [101] Three worlds collide in this…
Saigon, U.S.A (Plus C’est la Même Chose)
…what Americans need to face is that these horrors are in fact being perpetrated with American assent, by a government kept in power solely by American military might, by men paid for by American dollars,…
After Reading Levertov’s Poem on the 1972 Christmas Bombing
For Suzanne Renard & Andrew Wimmer Haven’t you had such a fantasy Sure, a different decade A different civilization being destroyed Different men The same crimes Getting away with mass murder Mind movies of…
After Last Night’s Bhagavad Gita Discussion
Daniel Berrigan once said to us About trying to lead a nonviolent life: “We do it because it’s the right thing to do Not because it’s going to get us anywhere” How deeply this cuts…
What the President Says/What the First Calvary Sang
1. And one of the most painful chapters in our history was Vietnam – Most particularly, how we treated our troops who served there You were often blamed for a war you didn’t start When…