VLVL 4: War, politics and love

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "pynchonoid" <pynchonoid at yahoo.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2003 2:22 AM
Subject: Re: VLVL 4: War, politics and love


> --- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> > US troops
> > were finally withdrawn from
> > Vietnam in January '73.
>
> That's not true.  They didn't all pull out until 1975,
> in April, I think; that was when we saw those glorious
> TV pictures of the remaining US troops, diplomats, and
> spooks hightailing it out, stranding an unknown but
> large number of people who were later persecuted for
> having collaborated with the US invaders, more than a
> few of them were left to dangle and then to fall after
> trying to climb into the last few helicopters to leave
> US facilities in Saigon.

Most of the US-troops indeed had left the country in 1973 after the Paris
agreement reached by Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. Without the help from
the US and the massive bombings of North Vietnamese cities & troops the
South wasn't able to resist against the North very long. Vietnam was
reunited in 1975 under communist rule which still lasts. The NFL then
quickly took Cambodia too, what followed there was the deadly Khmer
Rouge-regime, we all know the "Killing Fields"-history.

The victory over the most powerful nation of the world is one of the reasons
that there's no democratic opposition in this country, so the wrong
US-policy, the attempt of bombing a country back into stone-age still keeps
the Vietnamese people from real freedom. Nobody dares to oppose the ruling
communist party that has won the war.

>
> >That "since the war"
> > referent for their life
> > together is pretty precise, however.
>
> Yes, but it doesn't necessarily mean he's a Vietnam
> vet.  Lots of people have been where they are "since
> the war" who never had anything to do with the war.
>

I think from the information given it's undecidable if RC was a Vietnam-vet
but this illegal (according to US-law) war itself was the major reason of
the 60s youth to oppose the "establishment" -- and not only in the US but in
Europe too. RC and Moonpie surely had their reasons to change their names.
Maybe they had done things that were considered as illegal, maybe they have
their own "Hector" still looking for them.

Without the war the opposition had lost its focalising point, people dropped
into privacy, the movement fell apart.

Otto

"I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam
because they were my babies."
--Benjamin Spock, 1988
http://www.vietnamwar.net/antiwar/antiwar.htm

History of the U.S. War in Vietnam
By Barry Romo, Pete Zastrow & Joe Miller
http://www.vvaw.org/main.html/warhist.html

The News Media and the War in Vietnam
Myths and Realities
By Peter Braestrup
http://www.vwam.com/vets/media.htm

Differing Perspectives of the Vietnam War
http://www.isd77.k12.mn.us/schools/dakota/vietnam/oralhistories.htm