Patriots

Table Of Contents

PatriotsPreface

Part One: Introductions

Commanders

Bernard Trainor: It turned out the major of Danang was a double agent

Dang Vu Hiep: With all those choppers they seemed terribly strong

War Heroes
Roger Donlon: We were babes in arms in every way

Tran Thi Gung: I was stuck in a tunnel for seven days

Paying the Price
Ta Quang Thinh: They carried me the whole way back to the North

George Watkins: That sand was probably the only thing that saved me

Phan Xuan Sinh: Ail my ancestors are buried here

Where is Vietnam?
Jo Collins: I just thought I was going to Europe

Deirdre English: How can my country be at war and I don’t know about it?

Part Two: Beginnings (1945-64)

History Is Not Made with IFS

Henry Prunier: These were not ragtag farmers

Yo Nguyen Giap: The most atrocious conflict in human history

Deliver Us From Evil
Daniel Redmond: The doctor who won the war in Indochina

Rufus Phillips: Tell ’em I’m not French before they lynch me

Ngo Vinh Long: If they’re making maps, they’re preparing for war

Kick the Tires and Light the Fires

Richard Olsen: It was like ‘Terry and the Pirates’

Malcolm Browne: You could smell the burning flech

Le Leiu Browne: There was one coup after another

Paul Hare: My cock lost the fight

The Emporor Has No Clothes
Paul Kattenburg: What’s good for Peru is good for Vietnam

Evelyn Colbert: Dissent which contradicted the public optimism was ignored

Chester Cooper: Boy, you speak just like an American

Sergei Khruchchev: The Vietnamese had their own ideas

Paradise Island
John Singlaub: We sent them all back with a generous gift package

Luyen Nguyen: She divorces her second husband and waited for me

Part Three: Escalations

Trails to War

Vu Thi Vinh: The Truong Son jungle gave us life

Nguyen Thi Kim Chuy: We came home hairless with ghostly white eyes

Helen Tennant

Hegelhimer: I was their wife, their sister, their girlfriend

You Want Me to Start World War III?
James Thompson: This was crazy and deceitful policy making

Seth Tillman: We could stop this war tommorrow

Charles Cooper (I): He used the f-word more freely than a marine in boot camp

Walt Whitman Rostow: Take the North Vietnamese of Vinh hostage

Central Highlands
Dennis Deal: Man, if we’re up against this, it’s gonna be a long-ass year

Ward Just: It approached the vicinity of the spiritual

Le Cao Dai: Sometimes I operated all night while the staff took turns pedaling the bicycle

From Civil Rights to Antiwar
Julian Bond: They said I was guilty of treason and sedition

General Baker Jr.: When the call is made to free the Mississippi Delta…I’ll be the first one in line

The Ultimate Protest
Anne Morrison Welsh: It was like an arrow was shot from Norman’s heart

Free-Fire Zone
Jim Soular: A goddamn chopper was worth three times more than David

Triage
James Lafferty: No draft board ever failed to meet its quotas

David M. Smith: The knife man

Sylvia Lutz Holland: We saved their lives, but what life?

Chi Nguyen: Being wounded was not considered the worst thing that could happen

Morale Boosters
Bobbie Keith: I got a butterfly right on the butt. So that’s my war story

James Brown: After they got the funk they went back and reloaded

Quach Van Phong: An artist ca be as important in war as a soldier

Nancy Smoyer: I can’t believe the Donut Dollies got us to do that

Vu Hy Thieu: Nothing was more essential than our sandals

Joe McDonald: I was president of my high school marching band

Air War
Jopnathan Schell: I had my notebook right there in the plane

Harlan S.

Pinkerton Jr.: Good luck and good hunting

Luu Huy Chao: Before I trained as a pilot I had never been in an airplane

Nguyen Quang Sang: That was the first time I ever saw an American

Fred Branfman: What would it be like to hide in a cave all for five years?

Prisoners of War (I)
Porter Halyburton: I don’t see how you’ve got a worse place than this

Troung My Hoa: They tried to make us say, ‘Down with President Ho!’

Randy Kehler: Friction against the wheel

Cameras, Books, and Guns
Philip Jones Griffiths (I): Go see what they did to those people with your money

Larry Heinemann: We had this idea that we were king of the fucking hill

Doung Thanh Phong: We didn’t need a darkroom

Joan Holden: The counterculture was visible everywhere

Oliver Stone: He lived to kill. He was like a real Arab

Nguyen Duy: Whoever won, the people always lost

Yusef Komunyakaa: Soul Brothers, what you dying for?

H.D.S. Greenway: We would write something ans the magazine would ignore it if it wasn’t upbeat

Antiwar Escalations
Todd Gitlin: A rather grandoise sense that we were the stars and spear-carriers of history

Tom Englehardt: It was like Vietnam had somehow come all the way into our living rooms

Vivian Rothstein: What? Meet separately with women?

They Slept At Our House
Paul Warnke: We fought for a separate South Vietnam, but there wasn’t any South

Part Four: The Turning Point (1968-70)

Tet

Tran Van Tan: He asked me for directions to the police sensations

Barry Zorthian: Then-boom!-Tet comes along

Philip Jones Griffiths (II): You’re not safe in those cities

Nguyen Qui Duc: I was living a double life

Bob Gabriel: We buried our own men right there

Tuan Van Ban: Attack! Attack! Attack!

Memorial Day 1968
Clark Dougan: He Was Only 19-Did You Know Him?

From Johnson to Nixon
John Gilligan: Our only shot was to help Humphrey break away from Johnson

Peter Kuznick: Political conversion was the greatest ahprodisiac

J. Shaeffer: The Palace Guard

Samuel Huntington: You had to be pretty stupid to stay out in the countryside

Douglas Kinnard: While we had the power, it turned out they had the will

A Three-Square-Mile Piece of the United States
Tom O’Hara: It was like being in a minimum-security prison

Familes At War
John Douglas Marshal: You will not be welcome here again

Huynh Phuong Dong: Recieving a letter was a mixed blessing

Richard Houser: They told me I needed to choose between my country and my brother

Nathan Houser: A sign this country has grown up will be when there is a memorial erected to the war resisters

Suzie Scott: This nice young man from the FBI was here

Lam Van Lich: I was away from home for twenty-nine years

My Lai
Larry Colburn: They were butchering people

Michael Bernhardt: The portable fire-free zone

You Look Like a Gook
Vincent Okamoto: Damn, I’m a Gook

Wayne Smith: I was thinking God they didn’t have air support

Charley Trujillo: It sure as hell wasn’t ‘English only’ in Vietnam

An Acute Lack of Forgetfulness
Gloria Emerson: Before the war, I was Miss Mary Poppins

Nguyen Ngoc Luong: To get their ID cards, the girls had to go to bed with the police

From Cambodia to Kent State
Anthony Lake: Quitting wasn’t heroic

A.J. Langguth: I think they pictured it as a kind of huge bamboo Pentagon

Tom Grace: As much as we hated the war on April 29, we hated it more on April 30

Part Five: Endings (1970-75)

The End of the Tunnel

Alexander M. Haig Jr.: Even the tough guys…caved in

Morton Halerin: Kissenger did not trust anybody fully

Judith Coburn: Vietnamization wasn’t working any better than Americanization

We Really Believes…
Beverly Gologorsky: God forbid my boss finds out I’m here

Nguyen Ngoc Bich: Why should my son die for your country?

Chalmers Johnson: The campus was turning into a celebration of Maoism

Steve Sherlock: Steve Sherlock, bronze star with a V.

Watergate
Daniel Ellsberg: We’re eating our young

Egil “Bud” Krogh: Let’s circle the wagons

The World Was Coming to An End
Frank Maguire: The whole attitude was, stand back little brother, I’ll take care of it

Charles Cooper (II): All this area was Indian country

Everybody Thought We’d Won the War
Charles Hill: Reporters just kept writing as if it were Tet

Paris
Daniel Davidson: I wouldn’t buy a used car from that man

Nguyen Thi Binh: The longest peace talks in history

Nguyen Khac Huynh: It wasn’t a mistake, it was an inexplicable crime

Prisoners of War (II)
Jay Scarborough: I read Anthony Adverse about four times

Tran Ngoc Chau: The curriculum was designed to detoxicate us

John McCain: Americans like conspiracies

Patty and Earl Hopper Sr.: What mushroom do they think we were hatched under last week?

Gloria Coppin: The government wanted to control the POW/MIA movement

Copllapse
Frank Snepp: There was classified confetti all over the trees

Troung Tran: We could either lose or tie, but not win

The Merriment was Short-Lived
Le Minh Khue: The letters remain, but the senders are gone forever

Part Six: Legacies (1975- )

Missing In Action

Tran Van Ban: We saw so many parents crying for their lost children

Tom Corey: Why do you hate the Vietnamese?

War-Zone Childhoods
Tran Luong: I never got there in time to capture an American pilot

Bong Macdoran: It’s not worth my energy to lay blame on anybody

Luong Ung: People just disappeared and you didn’t say anything

Silences
Toshio Whelchel: i didn’t her to worry, so I lied

R. Huynh: Your real self was only for you

Jayne Stancavage: I just want to know what happened

Souvenirs
Hoang Van Thiet: They bought Zippos as a kind of birth certificate

Taps
Leroy V. Quintana: Old geezers…playing taps on a tape recorder

William Westmoreland: I was leading an unpopular war

Thai Dao: The first time I ever encountered the Vietnam War was in Hollywood movies

Tim O’Brien: You can’t talk with people you demonize

Huu Ngoc: We no longer hate the Americans

Wayne Karlin: The roof that hasn’t been built

Duong Tuong: Because love is stronger than enmity

Acknowledgments
Index