Brett Skarbakka is a photographer currently based in Hanoi, Vietnam. His project, 11 Days, “is a quiet memorial to a past scarred by terrific violence, a present changing by acceptance, and a personal way for me to contemplate the conflicting messages of shrouded histories.” We settled in for lunch in a Hanoi pub and compared our memories of the Vietnam war as young boys growing up in the States. From his web site:

Born in 1963, my early childhood memories are filled with images from the Vietnam War. This war, and the media portrayal of the conflict in Southeast Asia has always colored my perception of the people and landscapes of the region. Currently, as an American living in Hanoi, I am constantly brought full circle from the impressions of my past to the realities of the present. In some attempt to reconcile these conflicting perceptions, I have mapped out and photographed the devastating bombing routes of operation Linebacker 2, also known as the 11 day war, fought ground to air over Hanoi during Christmas 1972. This series is a quiet memorial to a past scarred by terrific violence, a present changing by acceptance, and a personal way for me to contemplate the conflicting messages of shrouded histories. All images are taken in areas and districts surrounding Hanoi. The mapping of locations was a result of research into war archives and advice and stories from local residents.

 I asked how the idea for his photo essay took form.

So first of course was the inkling of the idea, which happened in New York. To come over here and, I thought, documenting a culture in transition, blah blah blah. And that just ended up being cliché because everybody and their mother walking around here thinks that that’s what they’re doing. And then I decided to do research, and then of course I met my wife, and that gave me access to and involvement in the family. And then the research went a lot deeper because I was able to talk to people personally and it got away from being an art project and turned into a pursuit. It started out as an academic exercise. And it ended up being something I was involved in psychologically.

And what was it that drew you emotionally to want to pursue it once you were here?

Our histories were so intertwined and I grew up, I was born in 1964, so my formative years, I was raised with the television beaming explosions up the Hàn River and into Haiphong and the bombings.

My brother was an anti-war activist. One of my earliest memories was, you know, there was the whole generation gap thing going on at that time. And my parents’ generation was the World War II, Holocaust generation. You know, you support your country right or wrong, even though they were liberal Jews in New York. Why I remember this, I don’t know, my mother opened her dresser drawer in the bedroom, screaming at my brother because he had a button. The button said “LBJ” and for ‘B’ it said “Bombs, bullets, bullshit.” And to her, that was just a direct affront to the family.

 I guess the problem came when I realized that all I was doing was regurgitating information that I’d been taught and trying to give back the same imagery that we’ve all seen. Because I got married here, I became involved and realized there was a change on a much more fundamental level where everybody was just moving on. The world here has nothing to do with forty years ago. It’s absolutely gone. It’s ghosts, is what it is. And I realized that I was carrying a different image than the people who had been directly affected.

It’s probably a generational thing. In Nicaragua, I’d talk to an 18 or 20 year old and what the United States means to him is, you know, how is Kobe Bryant doing this year with the Lakers? Am I going to get an Apple or a Dell? And I really love this new HBO series on DVD. That’s what America means to them. So part of it here is a generational thing. It seems like you have teenagers who are like, “Dude, why are you talking about that shit?” And, second, people in their forties are like, “Yeah, terrible period, let’s move on.” It’s been forty years. And, by the way, they won the war. And I don’t know if there’s some kind of Buddhist, Asian, Vietnamese cultural thing that’s like, “Live in the moment, forgive, and don’t dwell on the past.”

Yeah, there’s lot of moving on and forgiving. And if they do hold onto it, a majority of them are willing to try to look past and not dwell on it. There seems to be a level of understanding that a lot of these events, weren’t the responsibility of the individual. They don’t have a tendency to look at a person and say, “I identify that person with what happened.” I’ve been here a while. I don’t see any of that. Usually they are able to look past and look at it as a bigger picture situation. That it’s part of a situation that’s much bigger than an individual. And I’ve had no problem with anybody, even one time. The whole time I’ve been here. That’s significant.

What story did you try to tell with those eleven pictures?

Well, each one was chosen for a day. Because each day was an action in a campaign that hit this region particularly hard. And they nicknamed it the eleven day war. So my idea was to go out there and to basically find the locations, which I did. I researched and then I mapped out all these places and took the motorcycle out, traveled all over the area and found specific areas, particular places and locations. Then I used those for photographing the essence of something that doesn’t exist. I mean, it’s all gone. And that’s why the photographs don’t show anything. It’s like photographing a phastasm. As something that looks different from different people’s memories, but you go out there and it’s a field. It’s a field, it’s a house, it’s a tree.

It’s an interesting aesthetic disconnect between the pastoral scene and the horror of what was done.

Well I’m not interested in horror. That’s already been done.That’s what we get inundated with on a daily basis. That’s CNN. That’s propaganda. Yeah, it’s reality, but nothing is more boring than war horror, I think.

Just last night, I don’t know why it affected me so much, but there was a YouTube video. I don’t even know why… I think I was looking for Apocalypse Now videos. This YouTube video about a B-52 carpet bombing. And of course, you know what that looks like. And you see all the bombs going off. And the comments were mostly very jingoistic, country boys, saying, “Yeah, we should fuck up communists, Muslims, ISIS. Without the liberal media, we would’ve fucking won.” And they were just getting off on the scenes of destruction, and they just wanted more of it.

The absence of things is a thousand times more powerful than the presence of things. Yeah, certainly, we can look at, I can show you where there’s craters, I’m not even interested in the crater. I can show you where people are still digging land mines out in Laos. I can show you those places. But I’m not really interested in those land mines either. And I’m not interested in those craters. What I”m really interested in is the presence of absence. And I think that that’s most important. That’s what I struggle for with this particular project.

What was your desired effect on the viewer of those photos?

You know, the imagination is the most powerful thing. And if you don’t show anything, how powerful is the imagination? So we look at something, we look at a trace of something. We look at something that doesn’t have a real form anymore. What does the imagination do to that form. so your imagination is going to go much further than what my pictures can ever do. And if I give you nothing, how strong is that going to be? That was my biggest question, so I went to these places. I give you nothing, except for the event and the location. Then what does your mind do? What happened there? What was really the truth behind that? That’s more powerful than I give you as many explosions and craters and… Apocalypse Now scenes as you want. But that’s why I did it.

What was the reaction of older members of your Vietnamese family to your work or the things that you’re exploring?

Oh, they just look at me with amusement. (Laughter.) They just kind of wonder… At first, it was problematic because I was hiding behind the camera because I was unable to…I couldn’t relax. I was crossing between the two, making the bridge between the two cultures. And I could not relax. They just thought I was weird, you know. I just always had the camera with me and eventually they kind of realized that I was just going to be doing stuff and I just might happen to have a camera. And at that point, it no longer mattered. Nobody was really thinking I was weird, they just thought, “Oh, there he is again with his camera.” And then it became normal. Then as I became part of the communities… Now I just walk around freely and they just expect me to do whatever I do because that’s who I am.

So in the years that you’ve been married, have there ever been pointed conversations from any of your older male Vietnamese relatives who served in the war, on the North Vietnamese side, who have a bone to pick with you for being an American?

Oh yeah, yeah, it’s really interesting. I mean, they’ve been curious. They’ve wondered about things and they’ve asked if my parents were involved, things like that. But there haven’t been any bones to pick, no. There’s been curiosity. There’s been curiosity and maybe like what I think, and how do I feel. There’s been curiosity, what am I doing here? (Laughter.) They probably don’t get the whole art for art’s sake thing, just like some of the projects I’ve done. They say, “Oh, you’re taking pictures, how are you making money from this?” (Laughter.) You know?

Yeah. It doesn’t.

“If you’re not making money, why are you doing this?” It’s nothing I ever have to explain because nobody’s ever really… They figure I’m doing it for whatever reason. A lot of them know that I’ve got work, that I do shows, that a lot of this stuff has been out. They kind of think that’s interesting. In the beginning, they kind of just thought I was weird. Now they just expect it. No, no bones to pick. Not at all. In fact, mostly everybody just would like to hang out with me and get drunk and talk. We all get drunk and we’re all best friends all of a sudden.

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Check out Brett’s website at www.brettskarbakka.com. Brett received his MFA in combined media from Hunter College before embarking on what he thought would be a one year documentary project in Vietnam. 5 years later he is still exploring the mountains, jungles, and coral reefs of Southeast Asia. He has given talks at Prescott College in Arizona, and the Hanoi Academy of Fine Arts. He has shown work in Redbird editions, f-stop Magazine, Forward Thinking Museum, Fotofilmic, Emergency Arts in NYC, and Hunter Time Square Gallery, as well as various other venues and publications. The interview was transcribed by Afterparty project intern Kayley Ingalls.

Jay Palevsky and I hunted down Jordan Plitteris on Facebook four decades after our last encounter. We were students at George Gershwin Junior High School 166 in the East New York section of Brooklyn. Jordan and I did our best to disrupt our classes in the most charming or clever manner possible. We finally connected in 2010 and then had lunch on a sunny Sunday afternoon at Gladstone’s on the beach in Los Angeles. When Jordan learned that I was to be in Vietnam, he connected me with Steven Herman.

This, from Steve’s bio: “A veteran journalist in Asia, Steven L Herman is the Voice of America bureau chief and correspondent based in Bangkok. His articles, columns, opinion pieces and reviews have been published in numerous newspapers and magazines including the Far Eastern Economic Review, Japan Times, South China Morning Post and the Wall Street Journal. Steve was elected for five consecutive years (1998-2002) to serve as Chairman of The Foreign Press in Japan (FPIJ).” His full bio can be found here.

We talked about Vietnam over dinner at the Essence Hotel Hotel in Hanoi.

Brian: The impression that I get is, of course, part of it is generational. A lot of those people died and so if you’re 18 years old, you’re more interested in how Kobe Bryant is doing with the Lakers, the latest American movies, and whether you got the newest smartphone. And perhaps there’s a cultural attitude of forgiveness, and an economic reality that you just have to move on, there’s a lot of American money coming into the country. But to me, after the horror of what was experienced, it is fascinating to me there is that attitude of forgetting.

Steve: Think when the Vietnam War ended, okay? Forty years ago. So unless you’re in your late fifties, you don’t have any direct experience of the Cong. And the only people that would remember who are younger would be that neighborhood got bombed, or Daddy didn’t come home. But that was the norm at the time, right? That was the experience that everybody around you was having, too. But the big picture is this: the Americans (and you can argue before that the French) were a mere blip on the radar screen of Vietnamese history. The Americans were adversaries for fifteen years. The animosity here is toward the Chinese. (Laughter.)

I know, I’ve heard that.

Because the Chinese are the giant neighbor to the north that’s been trying to eat Vietnam for 1,000 years. So whether or not people remember the war, they’re aware of the long-term of Vietnamese history. And they realize that China has posed, does pose, and will pose a perceived existential threat.

In Afghanistan you have the Pashtun looking down on Uzbeks, who are looking down on Hazaras. Is there any cultural feeling that Chinese consider Vietnamese inferior. Is there any kind of ethnic sensitivity like that?

Number one, I don’t think probably that the average Chinese gives Vietnam much thought. But if you’re a Chinese historian, an academic, a military strategist, or whatever, you look at the traditional orders of China, what the Chinese empire was, what happened to the Chinese empire, and how the tribute states of China need to be allied with China for China’s long-term stability. That’s the way the Chinese would look at it. There are books that have been written about this. I’ll tell you a story that was told to me by a young woman in her 30s whose father was shot in the leg by an American in the secret war in Cambodia in the 1970s. He was recruited into the NVA, the North Vietnamese Army, didn’t have much of a choice, and when he was able to access, for the first time, American technology (and I’m talking about stuff like wristwatches, okay?) and realized that the domestic and the Russian technology was utter garbage compared to the technology of his adversary, he then no longer believed in all the propaganda that he had been fed by the Communist Party. And to this day, he is a huge admirer of America and what it stands for. And is critical of the party that he fought for. Although he is a very proud Vietnamese. And I’m sure that is the attitude of very many people of that generation because it’s one thing to support the cause of a revolution, but after the revolution ends, then you have certain expectations of your leaders in peacetime. And I guess a lot of people here might ask whether the revolution, the victors of the war have been able to deliver on the promises they made to the people. And it’s been 40 years. Even in democracies, we have disillusionment with our leadership after a short period of time when the euphoria ends. So you can imagine looking around the world at one-party systems after many decades, and the same leadership still in place, what are the attitudes. In some of these places, they change rather quickly, in other places they change less quickly.

Me and Steve after a delightful dinner at the Essence Hanoi Hotel.

The irony is at the time, from McCarthy through the late 1960s and Nixon, we were warned of the the red menace, you know, “The Communist Chinese are in league with the Vietnamese and therefore we have to stop the march of communist aggression.” And in fact the Vietnamese hated the Chinese.

Right. Well, then there’s North Korea, where I’ve also spent some time.

Really? That would be fascinating.

Yeah. I was there for ten days in 2013 as a guest of the KPA, the Korean People’s Army, an elite unit.

Now there’s a place to settle down with a nice girl (we had been talking over dinner about the experience of dating in Asia for longtime western expats). (Laughter.)

Oh yeah. But I have no doubt that there are many in the government who desire normalized relations with the United States. And the reason is from the formation of the DPRK, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, they were able to play their two benefactors off one another, Beijing and Moscow. Like the Vietnamese, the North Koreans do not want to be a tributary state of China. And the sort of historical animosity and suspicion that exists here in Vietnam toward the Chinese has been… My observation is that it also exists in not only North Korea, but also South Korea. So it’s a Korean nationalistic perspective. And so, having normalized relations with the west would allow them not to be so dependant on China for so many things. So we have to realize that whatever people may think, of what designs China has on its neighbors over the long term, because of its insecurities, China never wants to be in the position that it was in during the 19th and early 20th centuries when it was colonized and divided up and was weakened, and there was a fear that 4,000 years of Chinese history was coming to an end. So I think it’s very easy to understand that Chinese mindset.

So we agree that if you are not in your late fifties, it’s irrelevant, it’s just family stories. Relevant, but, you know… And particularly if you have only been born in the last 25 years, a whole different thing. So generational things. For those who were of fighting age or older during the war, what’s their attitude?

I think mostly these people are at retirement age, practically. If you were in your 20s or 30s, in the 1960s and 70s, you’re probably now interested in what life is going to be like for your grandchildren, right? People marry young here. And I don’t think that there’s necessarily a lot of looking to the past. Obviously you’ll find this in any military around the world if you were a veteran, especially if you were on the winning side, that you’re quite proud of your service. And we see the same thing in the United States. People are very proud of their service regardlass of the outcome of the conflict. They may not necessarily agree on everything with the contemporary government, but they still remain very proud of their service. So I think, from what I can tell, most of these veterans are… The fact that you lived.

And won.

Yeah.

Actually, that’s an interesting point. Unlike many people the United States has fought against, they won. They can almost be magnanimous about it.

Yeah. There’s a tremendous resiliency here. And it’s been, like I said, dealing with the Chinese over 1,000 years and briefly having to grapple with the French and the Americans. I find Vietnam to be very vibrant, dynamic, quite bullish on this country in the long term. Because of the character of what I see in the people here. And I can’t necessarily say that about every country I visit. I won’t name names, but, yeah, there is something here that is special.

This is a naive touristy thing to say, the only evidence I’ve seen of communism is two or three shops selling propaganda posters.

No, there’s a lot more.

Tell me about communism in Vietnam.

I am not an expert. This is only my second visit here. There are giant propaganda billboards all over the country when I’ve been out in the countryside. There are offices of the communist party in every neighborhood. It’s a one-party state. What percentage of the economy is still in the hands of the party? I’d have to doublecheck my facts, but I think 40% of the businesses are party-owned. You’re talking about infrastructure, and then from what I can tell, looking at signs by the factories I was passing by in these industrial areas, they were joint ventures with the party itself. So yeah there’s no doubt that the party has quite a dominant presence throughout the country.

And how do they handle elections here?

This is a traditional communist state and–

You’re voting for your party candidate or your local council party member?

I don’t even know if…even China has experimented with some local elections. I’m not sure that there’s anything like that here. Certainly there’s no contested elections.

So, for example, our waitress, very pleasant young woman and she’s got a good job, seems well presented. At what point does she get in trouble with the communist government of Vietnam for saying what?

If she wrote a blog criticizing the government, she’d go to jail.

Really?

Yeah.

That’s heavy stuff.

Yeah. You can look it up, I dont know what the number of bloggers that are presently in jail for blogging…

Cam Ranh Bay, an important base for the American military during the Vietnam War http://www.stripes.com/news/changing-times-door-may-open-to-us-military-at-former-vietnam-war-hub-1.289509

So can Americans look back through some political filter and say, “See, we told you, we were trying to save these people from this kind of totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and yeah they’ve grown the economy a bit but they’ve had to suffer through this for forty years and goddamn, we gave it our best effort to try to save them from it.”

I think, I don’t think it’s possible to take a one end of the filter look at Vietnam right now in terms of US geopolitical interests. It’s very interesting, fascinating to me, that there have been overtures by the government of Vietnam to the United States looking for closer ties, including possibly the use of Cam Rahn Bay, and there’s no doubt, as I mentioned before, that the Vietnamese see China as much more of a threat than the United States. And from the US perspective, I guess there’s an open question about how we should engage with Vietnam. We have a new ambassador here, who I believe is the first openly gay ambassador.

Really? What’s his name?

I follow him on Twitter. Ted Osius III. So the question is, some people might say, “What right does the United States, after meddling in Vietnam to the point of a long and tragic war, which did not cause the communists to collapse, what right do we have to intervene in any way into this country?” And others would say, “Well, we have American principles that need to be upheld and we need to apply these principles fairly to all countries we deal with, including the issues of freedom of expression and human rights.” And there’s no doubt that there are serious problems in that area here. And the United States government does criticize, okay? But to what degree should it affect this relationship with Vietnam? And then the other thing to look at is maybe we should be more pragmatic and if we’re looking at American geopolitical interests and for those who believe that interest is trying to keep a rising China as a maritime power in check, and to reassure allies and friends and others in the region, including neutral states, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, that we don’t have treaties with, as we do with countries such as Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, Australia, that if push comes to shove, that we’re going to be there to stand up for our treaty partners and for others who would be the victims of aggression from a Chinese navy in the future. So, yeah, it’s a complicated, multi-faceted puzzle. And Vietnam is at the absolute core of that in this part of the world.

Ted Osius III, US ambassador to Vietnam. http://www.ibtimes.com/ted-osius-iii-becomes-asias-first-openly-gay-us-ambassador-1748399

In the beginning of Nick Turse’s book, Kill Anything That Moves, he shares the story about Ho Chi Minh helping the American war effort during World War II, office of special services (OSS), and he gives a speech to a half million in Hanoi, opening with the words to our declaration of independence…

And we ignored it.

And we ignored it and we said, “Let’s help the French” and then the rest is history.

Right.

At that moment, because it’s very easy to fantasize, “This man was a great democratic patriot and if only we didn’t ignore…” at what point do you think that Ho Chi Minh really wanted to pursue American-style democracy such that if the United States said, we’re going to help these people, they helped us, the French should stay the hell out, the colonialism thing is over and we’re going to–

Which is the pressure we did put on the British at the end of World War II.

We did.

Yeah. You know, hindsight is 20/20 and looking at alternative history is pure speculation. With those caveats, I think what we can say is that I don’t think that there were a lot of things, from my study of history of the late 1940s, early 50s, about US policy toward Asia, it was just benign neglect. We were, I think, at the end of World War II when there was this big cutback in military forces, military preparedness, and…

That’s the way it used to be done right? You build a standing army when you’ve got a war and then when the war’s over, the standing army gets cut down.

Yeah. Right. Like we have nuclear bombs now. Okay. And then the threat was the Soviet Union from 1949, was that when the Soviets tested? So I think we were rebuilding Europe, we had hemispheric issues to deal with at that time, stuff that was happening in South America was much more important that what was happening in Asia. Now you look at that and it’s like, that would be considered a joke right now. We, like when the Korean war broke out, the United States was totally caught unprepared. Militarily and strategically. So when we’re looking around late 1940s, early 1950s, Vietnam, it was French Indo-China, right? How many specialists did we have in the US military or in the State Department about Indo-China at that time? And one thing you learn in dealing with the government bureaucracy, is that the problems that get the attention are the immediate crises and sort of things that may be bubbling in the long term don’t really move up the food chain very quickly or very easily. So I highly doubt that there was any… And again, you’d have consult with a specialist about this history, who has gone through all the archives, but I just don’t see that Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, at that time, that we gave him much thought.

I think that’s true. And, well said. But the moment he made that speech, do you think there were democratic instincts which became…

I would be, I don’t know. The answer is, I don’t know. But I would be… I would have my doubts. Because the way that the party and Ho rose to power was not through any sort of (laughter)–

Making friends.

…democratic parlays, it was by being a ruthless power, Machiavellian in the extreme. And there’s a lot out there about Ho’s, all of these, the formation of these communist parties from their time in Europe and under the French. And I…

Ho got his ideas from hanging out in cafes in Paris, right? (Laughter.)

Well, right, right. So you know, socialism was quite in vogue–

It was.

–among many intellectuals in all parts of the world in the 20s, 30s, and 40s…

Sometimes someone phrases it in a certain way and it becomes clear. Lenin was actively agitating against colonial forces, which is an obvious thing for communists to do, but if you then were under colonial rule and you see this Dutch East India Company, and the French rubber companies, and you see all these French…

The democratic nations were not where you turn to for allies for, as a revolutionary fighting colonialism.

King Leopold II of Belgium, whose humanitarian organizations served as a front for the enslavement of millions in the Belgian Congo.

Democratic nations either in a beneficient way or in a brutal, vicious way, as with the Belgian Congo, etcetera, were saying, “We basically want your poor people to be our indentured servants.”

Yes. And with the Belgians they were basically slaves. Period. Full stop. They were slaves. Property owned by the king, if I recall.

That’s right. King Leopold. Your national sovereignty ain’t happening. No respect for your culture, onward Christian soldiers, you’re an inferior race. So suddenly you have this revoluationary socialist ideology coming along that says, regardless of whether you believe Das Kapital, that basically the bottom line is, what did you tell me? The bottom line is I’m going to throw off the Western colonial powers? Hmm…

Yeah. And the communist internationale was in the franchise business and was looking to expand into new markets. Yeah, there was definitely a meeting of the minds there. But yeah, if you look back on history you can see that there were all sorts of opportunities that were lost and I’m not a big fan of traditional political science because I don’t consider it to be science, and I tend more to believe in the chaos theory of politics, where, you know, there’s the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings over China that can change the weather eventually in North America. And I think it’s been the same thing in history where one small event, an accident or an archduke getting assassinated or a bullet missing a president of the United States or a dictator getting up on the wrong side of bed in the morning and deciding he’s going to invade a neighbor because he had a fight with mistress number seven the night before… A lot of things happen for not rational reasons that end up having a tremendous effect on world history. And so, you know, we can speculate all day about if this had happened or this didn’t happen, yes, the outcome of the world may have been very different and millions of people might not have died, but in another case maybe something else would have happened that could have been even more catastrophic.

——–

This interview was transcribed and fact checked by Afterparty intern Kayley Ingalls. Thanks, Kayley!

In my travels through Vietnam, I’ve talked to young people for whom the “American War” is ancient history, and to elders who lived through Japanese atrocities, French colonial capitalism and the civil war with the US-supported South. The first part of my interview with the 77-year old professor Dao Quang Hung can be found here. In Part Two of our discussion over daughter Mizen’s dining room table (she also acs as translator), we discuss US foreign policy and his perspectives on what drove the communist North to take catastrophic casualties. My questions are in italics. Some of the conversation can be uncomfortable as he describes military tactics used to kill Americans. We start with Hung’s exposition on how the North viewed America’s vastly superior military.

——–

Dao currently lives with his family in the south, in Vung Tau.

America is the largest country in the world. The best science, the best army, the best economy, a lot of land and natural resources. Vietnam is a small country, 1/20th of America.  Why drop millions of tons of bombs, more than you dropped in all of World War II?

In a war, whichever side has power is the winner But power here is not about weapons or number of troops. It is also the method and strategy and the passion for battle that brings victory. Vietnam has this historical legacy of nonstop fighting for the rights of its people. America has a lot of bombs, guns, weapons, tanks, ships, Marines. North Vietnam ’s army is not that big. Weapons are very simple but Vietnam has fought spiritual battles for 4,000 years against the north (China) and those experiences were passed from ancestors through the generations.

(Mizen adds, “When the enemy attacks the house, the woman will still fight, even with a broom.”).

Yes, there is a certain moral code that runs to every farmer or village woman, to fight, to protect the land, to fight and win, because you love your country and you love your people.

Vietnamese political activists jailed at the infamous Hoa Lo Prison, which was then used to jail American pilots who dubbed it “Hanoi Hilton.”

Under the French war, we lost everything, we were a colony and they had their own (brutal) style. When the Americans came, we considered America as a new form of colonist, the worst devils, worse than the French. Uncle Ho has a famous saying, that nothing is more precious than freedom.

Before we enter into the American war, Ho and Giap went to Russia for help against America. Russia worried that America has an extraordinary army and navy and weapons, how can Vietnam win? General Giap said if both sides spread out on the battlefield face to face, Vietnam will be wiped out. But we have a strategy and we know how to win, and in reality we did. Mentally, spiritually, Uncle Ho has to raise the call and say he doesn’t care how much we sacrifice and how long it takes, despite all this sacrifice we have no fear for this war. We are united together to fight this battle, no discrimination about religion, man or woman, it created a force that we called ‘people’s war.’

You are an intelligent, educated man. What went through your mind when you heard Ho speak?

My own thought after this call to nationalism was, something stirred up in me as motivation, pride in my country, and I thought, he has no fear of this war and he knows that we will win.

Which part of it was national pride and the salvation of your people, and which part motivation by Marxism-Leninism to create a socialist state?

It was all about freedom, love of country, patriotism, 99% was that. Marxism is not clear, just a purpose to look forward to in the future.

In 1954, then, with people who were equally patriotic, why did they flee to the south?

After the French failed, in 1954 northern people fled because some of them were in the Vietnam army set up by the French, some worked with the French and were afraid of vengeance, some were Catholic who listened to priests who said God is not in the north anymore, so move to the south, some loved the country but were cheated or misled.

Khe Sanh was near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). I walked through the tunnels dug and occupied by the North Vietnamese Army. According to Wikipedia, during the battle for Khe Sanh, “B-52s alone dropped more than 75,000 tons of bombs on the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) 304th and 325th Divisions encroaching the combat base in trenches.”

When we started to fight Americans, a US Air Force general (Curtis LeMay) said he will bomb Vietnam back to the stone age. McNamara said he will talk to VCs with a billion bullets, and then the Americans tried to stop provisions of weapons from the north to the south. At Khe Sanh, they put troops there and a military base and said that nobody can attack this base. But Vietnamese overwhelmed it with thousands of troops, overran the base, unafraid. Americans used airplanes to provide cover but the planes were shot down. We attacked them and shot them day and night. If they continued it would be another Dien Bien Phu.

If Americans stay, people thought Americans would win. But look at the numbers. First there are 60,000, then 100,000, then 200,000, then 400,000 then 530,000 American soldiers plus one million South Vietnam troops. American has to change three generals. Westmoreland, Abrams, if you are winning, you don’t have to change your generals.

Even if you bomb Hanoi and win, it will cause a third world war because Russia and China will not just sit by. Americans used to claim that they would stay in South Vietnam forever, but in reality they couldn’t, and they had to withdraw. How can you win, when your people don’t support the war.

A lot of generals came to Vietnam after the war and had the same question: How did you win, and they asked General Giap. It’s very simple, he said, it was because Americans had not known much about the Vietnamese people,. A thousand years ago, a skillful Chinese military general Sun Tsu said know yourself, know the enemy, and in one hundred battles, you have a hundred victories. Americans sent troops, with a thousand ways to attack Vietnam. Americans want to kill us like they killed the Indians, want to destroy us. In the same way, we questioned ourselves whether we can win or not. Our first challenge was Nuih Tan mountain in Danang. One night, we took it as a first challenge or a first trial. We took it so we can see if we can win or not. One hundred American soldiers, and in one night we killed all of them in that base. After that, we determined that we had the confidence to win this battle with Americans.

We lost five million dead and injured, millions have Agent Orange infections. A lot of suffering. In Vietnam, we have unexploded ordnance under the ground and they try to get at them, and it will take another 300 years to get rid of them. If we talk about crimes committed by Americans here, it is incalculable. Vietnam still accepts those sacrifices. We still fight to the last breath because we want to follow Ho’s words that nothing is more precious than freedom. If we paid the cost 2-3x more than what we sustained, we will continue to fight.

One of the many war monuments throughout the country.

I was teaching. Uncle Ho predicted that before America leaves Vietnam, it will destroy Hanoi, like it destroyed North Korea. If Hanoi can survive and resist the bombing, then America will surrender.

Uncle Ho predicted they will use B-52s to bomb Hanoi so we wrote a book for all air force soldiers how to resist the bombing. By the first Haiphong and Hanoi bombings, we had been preparing for a year and had 100 anti-aircraft batteries, but were defeated by  evasive methods affecting our radar targeting. On the second night, they shot down a B-52 in Hanoi. To win the battles, we had to fight 12 days and nights. Hanoi residents spread out from the city to the villages. I had two kids by that time.  We watched it like fireworks. I saw the plane explode as it was shot down.

There is a book by an former Sandinista guerrilla in Nicaragua where she laments the fact that their original ideals were largely unrealized. Where has communism succeeded in Vietnam?

Just one thing: from hell to heaven. During war times, there was no education, no medicine.

But was that the horror of war or was that the difference between colonial capitalism and communism?

If anyone in a village had a half chicken to eat, the whole village knows. We were provided 2.5 grams of meat for food. We no longer have to run away from fighting, bombs, and we can focus on living. We are still struggling with life, to become noble. we are still struggling to build up what we want.

What do you like and what don’t you like about Vietnamese communism? 

Whether communist or capitalist, the first thing I like are the leaders who sacrificed for the liberation of the country. The communist leaders who sacrificed for us, who brought us from hell to heaven. I respect them and love them. Certain people have taken advantage, like a worm in the soup bowl. Nothing is perfect in any country, among one hundred communist or capitalist leaders, who is perfect?

In 1945, when Uncle Ho proclaimed freedom for his country, we had to go through another thirty years to fight and shed blood to have true independence and freedom. And so the same for a perfect communist, socialist country, we have to struggle and build. No party or person is perfect. Compare it to a human body, a healthy and unhealthy side.

What would you want to say to the American people?

Americans have to respect the charter of the United Nations, international law.

You can help another country, but you have to be sure of how you help them, by bringing happiness, not criminal misery, bombs and killing. That’s not help. Make them bloom like a flower, don’t bring destruction and chaos.

Americans should be responsible for its crimes: millions killed, Agent Orange, bombs, 300 years of unexploded ordnance. We need help.

You say In God We Trust on your money, and presidents still lay hands on the bible. Then obey one of the ten commandments from the Lord: Do Not Covet. You shall not covet. The final commandment.

As much of his family have become Christian, I asked about Marxist restrictions on freedom of religion.

It’s not about Marxism; if the religion is about pure faith in God, there is no judgment. We have a history of Christians, Catholics from France and America send spies that carry politics along with their bibles. That’s why they have to watch out. During the French war, Le Hew Tu, father of the French church, had his own army and wiped out a village and all its people. He allowed the French army to put cannon on top of the church.

As a Christian, ask if you love your enemy. If you claim yourself as Christian, you have to love your enemy and not covet. Don’t cause war, and make yourself rich by causing war. It’s OK to get rich, just not by causing war. Now Americans are always attacking: is that how you love your enemy?

Grandfather Dao, daughter Mizen, son-in-law William, and Jimmy.

I met William through Kickstarter backer Adam Edwards. William motorbiked me around Vung Tau, to the locations of old French cannon, and historic religious sites. His delightful wife Mizen introduced me to her father, Dao Quang Hung, and we had four hours of sit downs in their living room. He lived through it all, from the Japanese occupation,  French colonial oppression, the American War and even a bit of a conversion from Marxist scientist to Jehovah’s Witness. Here is the first part of our interview. Watch this blog for additional segments.

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Tell me first about yourself. Where were you born, what did you study, what did you do professionally?

I was born in 1938, in Hanoi, during the second world war. I remember when I was 5 or 6 years old, we had to run back to the countryside to stay away from the bombs. In 1946, I turned 7 and there was already a big war in Hanoi against the French.

What are your first memories about being under French colonial rule?

At seven. of course, I did not understand politics. Only the memory of what I saw every morning when I opened the door and saw carts carrying dead people passing my house, their skin charred from the bombs.

When, as a young boy, did you develop a political sense or consciousness as to what was happening, a personal point of view?

What I felt was pity and love for the people that died in front of my house. One of my neighbors had three children, and I saw their starving mother lying and dying right on the street. I watched her husband take off her shirt and roll her body into a mat.

What were the reasons for the starvation?

The Japanese and the French both prevented the farmers from planting to have food. The Japanese came during WWII and instead of sewing the crops to make rice, they destroyed the crops and they wanted the farmers to plant to produce war materials. Two million died. You would go out of your house in Hanoi and see dead people everywhere. A lot of provinces around Hanoi, poor people died and had to move to Hanoi to live as beggars. My mother raised rice and cooked porridge to help these people and Hanoi provided them a place to stay.

Unexploded ordinance or UXO. Sixty thousand Vietnamese have died from UXO since the end of the American war.

Did the French carry out policies to continue the starving crisis?

The French negotiated with the Japanese to open the streets to allow Japanese troops to come in. Before the Japanese, the French already were here, invading, conquering, killing revolutionaries in Vietnam. The French should kick the Japanese out, but instead they negotiated, making Vietnam like a hard pressure rock from two sides, one neck with two shackles.

President Roosevelt insisted that the French would not be allowed to return to colonize Vietnam after the war. But he passed away before it’s conclusion.

FDR was a good man. He meant to free the colonies. But he passed away. Truman was different, he was an evil man, against independence.

Why?

First, communism is a choice for each country. Wrong or right? That’s a different story. Whatever the citizens desire. On the other hand, Ho Chi Minh wasn’t yet a communist.

But Ho Chi Minh joined the Comintern in the twenties while studying in Paris, went to Moscow and identified as a Marxist in much of his writings and statements.

In 1920, there was a monarchy, there was capitalism. We are an agricultural country. Monarchy, capitalism, each causes suffering and sorrow. Ho Chi Minh wants to relieve the suffering. Capitalism was good for rich people but not for the poor and farmers, who were treated like slaves, tortured. He wants to free everyone, no different levels, farmers and teachers, engineers all equal.

If the US supported Ho in 1945, would he be communist?

By the time Ho Chi Minh made that speech (famous Declaration of Independence to a half million people in Hanoi after the end of WWII), he was not communist yet. The top of the speech (which quotes the American declaration of independence) says democratic republic, freedom from the French, no more king, no more slaves.

Ho Chi Minh’s Comintern membership card from the 1920’s.

Wouldn’t his membership in the Comintern, his travels to Moscow, his Marxist interpretations of history cause Americans to think he was a communist?

True communist theory is a beautiful picture about how people might live. How can they consider communists as enemies?

Americans saw millions dying under Stalin, Eastern Europe being invaded and controlled by the Soviet Union, Ho speaking the same rhetoric, and Americans now considered the Soviet Union a potential threat. Isn’t it logical that they see Ho in the same way?

The Third Communist International (Comintern) had the purpose of releasing colonist countries, so people seeking independence would go to Russia to find ways that they can be released from colonialism.

What do you recall of the French?

First, the deepest impression is of August 19 (1945) revolution, after the years of starvation, ninety percent of Vietnamese were illiterate, ninety-five percent were farmers, poor suffering farmers. They were treated like slaves, and worked like slaves. Their lives were worse than animals. Uncle Ho stood up and called for the people to fight the French and kick the Japanese out. I remembered I stood along the pavement and saws thousands of people, they are holding anything they had, a knife, a stick, a hammer to run to the provinces to the factories, to attack them. While they were marching, they were calling out “Defeat the French,” political chants. The French factories and offices were wiped out and Ho set up a new government.

What was your experience under French occupation from 1945-1954 as a boy, then a young man?

The French attacked Vietnam in 1885 with only 500 troops. They won because the Vietnamese had only simple weapons like knives and no guns. The monarchy negotiated with the French making it easier to be defeated. During that time Viet people tried to rise up and constantly pushed back against the French for a hundred years. They hated the French. They lacked a clear political way against the French. Uncle ho offered a clear direction.

So, you had no weapons. You had no unifying ideology and Ho came along and offered one. Something that explained colonial capitalism, its behavior, its exploitation of labor, virtually enslaving your people, often controlling via starvation and brutality.

Yes, that’s what I’m saying.

One of the visible reminders that Vietnam is one of the few remaining formally Marxist countries in the world is the presence of posters and billboards such as these. Limits on freedom of the press, speech, religion and the existence of only one political party are less visible to outsiders but a daily reality for nationals.

The French were attacked by Japan, and had no power over Indochina; they ran away. During that time, the Japanese had the power. The Viet Minh (Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh, or Vietnam Independence League), stood together, with the (US) Allies to oppose the Japanese. The Vietnamese took power from the Japanese, not the French. In 1945, Ho proclaimed independence, then the French tried to attack a second time. During that time, the allies allowed the Chinese to come to Vietnam to get the weapons from the Japanese. That ended up destroying the newborn government from Uncle Ho because they want to set up their own government system. I saw the 200,000 Chinese soldiers as they came to every corner of the North, saw them in Hanoi.

In the south, the English troops came over to get the weapons from the Japanese. and Vietnam’s army was weak, still young, as was the government system. Ho does not want war, after the war with the Japanese, so Ho had to be very skillful in handling them. Ho had to be patient and swallow his anger, even though Chinese killed people in Hanoi, raping women and killing children. President de Gaulle, during these transitional moments, was supported by America and England.

(Grandfather Dao’s daughter Mizen, our translator, exclaims, “It sounds like an 18-year old getting repeatedly raped.”).

Stalin’s forces brutally controlled and repressed eastern European countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, so there was a sense among American and western European democracies that the Soviets and their expansion had to be resisted.

Russia had 20 million people killed and 2,000 cities destroyed. When Russia invaded, it was to attack Hitler. And the fascists were not only in Germany. So to oppose fascism, those countries have communist groups as well. Russia came over to help and kick ass on Hitler but also expand the battle where Hitler invaded. There were then no governments, so of course the communist cells wanted to run the government, and of course they were supported by Stalin.

In 1945, Americans supported the French to come back to Vietnam. Vietnam tried to have a policy communication with the US, but the US put it aside. In 1950, the French kept losing battles and the US provided more money to pay for the French to create a south Vietnamese army. The more the French fought, the more they fell. The US kept providing funds, eighty percent by the end, and then it was finished at Dien Bien Phu. US General Taylor said no one can take that base and the French military brass said no one can defeat them. But General Giap defeated the French there.

The French were brutal overlords in Vietnam. Political prisoners, i.e. anyone speaking against the colonists, were tortured, starved and held in filthy prisons. These are cages for uppity prisoners, unbearable in blazing heat.

When Dien Bien Phu was going to fall, the French asked help from America. The military war-mongers intended to drop hundreds of bombs to kill Vietnamese, but they couldn’t do it (dropping an atomic bomb to save the besieged French troops was proposed at one point by a senior American military official). If they did, it would expand the war to Russia and China and it would be another Korean War. America would have loved to join the battle, as it was a way of opposing communists, and Uncle Ho was now a communist.

Was there an economic purpose as well as political purpose for Americans to join the fight?

Sure, we have an oil industry here, it was all basically about economics. I have a question for you. What does the word politics mean to you?

I paused and said, “It is the way individuals, organizations and governments maneuver for there own self-interest or position.”

In Vietnam, we have a saying, nothing comes for free. Yes, the Russians got access but they helped the revolution against the French, while the Americans opposed it. The US spends a hundred billion dollars here, sends half a million army troops to defeat VC, not just simply to help the South Vietnamese government. As well, when the Chinese helped the northern government before, they had their own agenda.

If the US conquered Vietnam, all of Southeast Asia would be in US hands for sure. And they would threaten China. US military bases in Vietnam, nuclear weapon bases. According to Marx, politics, for both Marxists and capitalists, politics is using different methods, even devious ways, to protect your own rights. On the theory, causing war ends up protecting your own rights or self-interest.

What do you think the US was thinking, why did they not support that 1954 Geneva peace agreement, why did they support the war between 1954 and 1964, when President Johnson began to increase troops?

We have a saying here. Buffalos and cows hit each other and the mosquitos and flies die. The domino theory was true based on the theory of communism that once you are free you want to help free countries from capitalism.

A similar situation happened in Nicaragua. As soon as the Sandinistas won, they wanted to support the guerrillas in El Salvador, even though it ultimately destroyed their relationship with the United States.

(Our translator Mizen jumps in, “Why do you have to put your nose in your neighbors’ business, you don’t really know what is happening in that house.”).

China invaded Vietnam many times. It became like a national enemy, a traditional enemy. Vietnam can still separate who is the enemy. The Chinese people are not the enemy to us, it is the political war-monger who likes to conquer, to invade Vietnam (in 1979). Chinese people are nice, gentle people. Our enemy is not them, but the government. And the same for America. American citizens love peace, they don’t want to invade another country. But those in power are the enemy.

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Part Two of the interview will be posted shortly.

A lot of the old leftie conspiracy theories that used to impress our girlfriends in high school turned out to be true, with a little help from the Freedom of Information Act. I visited the Gulf of Tonkin this week as I worked my way down the Vietnam Coast from Hanoi.

The incident that got LBJ to go on national TV to ask Congress and the American people to support the acceleration of the Vietnam War never happened.

On August 4th, 1964, the USS Maddox reported that it was under attack from North Vietnamese patrol boats. James Stockdale, the American pilot who would become a Vice Admiral, serve time in the famous Hanoi Hilton (Hoa Lo) prison and run for vice president on Ross Perot’s ticket, was flying over the Gulf that day. Years later, Stockdale admitted that he “had the best seat in the house to watch that event, and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets—there were no PT boats there…. There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.” His superiors told him to keep that information to himself. Secretary of Defense at the time Robert McNamara admitted in the masterful Errol Morris doc ‘Fog of War‘, “It was just confusion, and events afterwards showed that our judgment that we’d been attacked that day was wrong. It didn’t happen.” President Johnson later said, “”For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”

Not that it mattered. The Johnson administration was looking for a pretext to justify escalation, and was repeatedly sending warships and aircraft into the Gulf as both provocation and in active support of South Vietnamese military operations. After the phantom attack, coastal cities were bombed.

McNamara: We introduced what was called “Rolling Thunder,” which over the years became a very, very heavy bombing program. Two to three times as many bombs as were dropped on Western Europe during all of World War II.

I visited Vinh, which was destroyed by the bombing. You see a stark difference between the beautiful old imperial and colonial towns like Hue and Hoi An, and cities like Vinh rebuilt with East German and Soviet aid. The French destroyed Vinh in their battle against the Viet Minh in the late forties, early fifties, the US in the sixties.

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An Afterparty project backer took offense at one of the reasons I gave for Vietnamese forgiveness and their uniformly kind treatment of American visitors. That is, that they won the war. In Joseph Galloway’s 1999 New York Times book review of the Naval Institute Press’ “The Wrong War: Why We Lost In Vietnam,” he writes:

(Jeffrey) Record, who served a tour as a civilian State Department adviser in the Mekong Delta and was later a legislative assistant to Senators Sam Nunn and Lloyd Bentsen, declares at the outset that in his view the main causes of the American defeat in Vietnam were a misinterpretation of both the significance and nature of the struggle; an underestimation of the enemy’s tenacity and fighting power; an overestimation of United States political stamina and military effectiveness; and the absence of a politically competitive South Vietnam.

Record goes on to quote Gen. Colin Powell, a two-tour Vietnam veteran: ”Our political leaders led us into a war for the one-size-fits-all rationale of anti-Communism, which was only a partial fit in Vietnam, where the war had its own historical roots in nationalism, anticolonialism and civil strife.”

I am visiting numerous museums as I roll south. The inspiring and horrifying Land Mine Action Center (over 40,000 killed and 60,000 maimed from mostly US unexploded ordinance, since the end of the war, or 10x our 9/11 casualties), the Ho Chi Minh Museum, Hoa Lo prison, the DMZ facilities, the Citadel in Hue, the military museums. Exhibits documenting a thousand years of struggles for independence from the Chinese, then the French, then the Japanese and the puppet Vichy regime, then the French again, then the United States.

McNamara, again from ‘The Fog of War:’ Kennedy announced we were going to pull out all of our military advisors by the end of ’65 and we were going to take 1000 out by the end of ’63 and we did. But, there was a coup in South Vietnam. Diem was overthrown and he and his brother were killed. I was present with the President when together we received information of that coup. I’ve never seen him more upset. He totally blanched. President Kenndy and I had tremendous problems with Diem, but my God, he was the authority, he was the head of state. And he was overthrown by a military coup. And Kennedy knew and I knew, that to some degree, the U.S. government was responsible for that.

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The farmer, the mother, the teacher fighting American forces in the rice paddies knew and cared little about Das Kapital or The Communist Manifesto. They had been fighting foreign invaders for decades, for centuries, for millennia, and they were ready to fight to the last man or woman.

McNamara, quite a reviled figure during the Vietnam War, but a man capable of extraordinary introspection, went to Vietnam in the nineties. He tells this story:

The former Foreign Minister of Vietnam, a wonderful man named Thach said, “You’re totally wrong. We were fighting for our independence. You were fighting to enslave us.” We almost came to blows. That was noon on the first day.

“Do you mean to say it was not a tragedy for you, when you lost 3 million 4 hundred thousand Vietnamese killed, which on our population base is the equivalent of 27 million Americans? What did you accomplish? ….”

“Mr. McNamara, You must never have read a history book. If you’d had, you’d know we weren’t pawns of the Chinese or the Russians. McNamara, didn’t you know that? Don’t you understand that we have been fighting the Chinese for 1000 years? We were fighting for our independence. And we would fight to the last man. And we were determined to do so. And no amount of bombing, no amount of U.S. pressure would ever have stopped us.”

French colonialists and companies undermined Vietnam’s subsistence economy by forcibly expropriating vast amounts of land and reorganizing farmers into large plantations. By the 1930’s, French Indochina was producing sixty thousand tons of rubber annually, five per cent of world production. Vietnamese worked  long hours in debilitating conditions for slave wages. Malnutrition and malaria were common on the plantations. In the years between the two world wars, one Michelin-owned plantation recorded seventeen thousand worker deaths. Meanwhile, Ho Chi Minh was in Paris studying revolutionary philosophies in vogue in French cafes and universities. He wasn’t there because he got off on Engels. He was there to adopt a framework for leading his people out of the humiliating repression of French colonial capitalism. He was a nationalist, returning to drive out the French and Japanese. Working alongside the American OSS, moving American leaders like FDR to furiously insist the U.S. support Vietnamese independence and oppose French colonialism, much as the U.S. opposed British colonialism post-WWII. Ho began his independence address to a half million newly liberated Vietnamese in Hanoi with the words of the American Declaration of Independence.

As with radical Islamists who know fuck-all about the Koran, but have had brothers, neighbors and uncles killed by western bullets, missiles, bombs, drones, there was a history of grievance that American leaders ignored. Walking Vietnamese streets in Hanoi, Vinh, Dong Ha, Hue and Hoi An, I see rare signs of Marxist-Leninist triumphalism. The occasional billboard, a tribute to military heroes, the iconic flag, a rare photo of Marx on a shop wall, a statue of Lenin in a park. Young people have accepted that they can talk whatever shit they want with their friends, but will be visited by the state police if they get too public with their discontent. There is too much state control of industry, but a growing, mostly market-driven economy. It is a young country that is eager to move on, feeds on American culture and technology and, considers the Chinese (manufacturer of cheap American consumer goods, produced by underpaid, exploited laborers) their biggest threat.

Finally, this, from Galloway.

In the end it all boils down to one question: Could we have won a military victory in Vietnam? Record’s answer is: Yes, but not at any price even remotely acceptable to the American people. One thoughtful former infantry battalion commander told me he had reflected long and hard about what would have resulted from unlimited war, including an invasion of North Vietnam: ”We could have won a military victory without question. But today my sons and yours would still be garrisoning Vietnam and fighting and dying in an unending guerrilla war.” The war was ours to lose, and we did; it was for the South Vietnamese to win, and they could not.