[TĐH; Very funny. All those simple hand-made booby traps and tunnels and even killing village leaders who cooperated with the South VN government or the US (which I don’t approve at all, and I call that Terrorism, to terrorize the Southern population) is no where near the US’ and South Vietnam government’s bombings, including B-52 “carpet bombing” to clean any path they flied by (if you heard the sound of B52, your were going to die; no way to run); Napalm bombings – burning you and everyone and the forests and everything ínsight; Agent Orange killing all the trees and left hundreds of thousands of people sick until today – third and fourth generations after the war. Saying the Vietnamese were brutal is like telling a six-year-old kid who punches the belly of a thirty-year-old man that the kid is brutal. Come on, you guys and gals, have some common sense. For God’s sake.]
The VC butchered their own people, making examples of village leaders who cooperated with the South Vietnamese government or the United States. Those are facts.
The VC constructed illegal booby traps, such as punji stick pits, bouncing bettys, cartridge tripwire traps, grenade tripwire traps, snake pits, the mace (photo), tiger traps, bamboo whips, and pressure release traps.
These traps were just as likely to kill or maim civilians as they were members of the ARVN or US military, as they were normally put on trails and near riverbanks.
[TDH : Trump the Idiot. Try to attack Vietnam or any coutry defending their home against foregn aggression war line Iran or Cuba – and you shall learn, be it military or economic or 1000% tariffs. You idiotic Joker are the shame for the US, where I am practicing law as a US citizen in Washingont DC. You shame me and millions of US citizens]
Defending Democracy Shawna Topanga SF State & ID State Univs, AS & BBS, Life & work experience Apr 22
George Wallace’s 1968 Presidential campaign featured Air Force General Curtis Lemay as the Vice Presidential nominee. Well Bombs Away Lemay also had an idea of how to end the Vietnam War quickly too: nukes. And, had he gotten any more traction than he did, there would have been lots of mushroom clouds over Vietnam … instead of having mushrooms in your dimsun soup in Hanoi.
There is a chapter about Cu Chi Tunnel in this book : Bare Feet, Iron Will Stories from the Other Side of Vietnam’s Battlefield. by James G. Zumwalt.
He came to Vietnam after the war, against Vietnamese but latterly changed his view a little bit. It is worth reading, easy to read from US perspective if you want to research about life in tunnels.
Below are introduction about background and the author via publisher in Amazon.
In short answer, during the Sino-Vietnamese War, after suffering a large number of casualties and before the coming of the Vietnamese crack troops, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (P.L.A) had to withdraw their forces. The “road to Hanoi lay open and the city could have fallen to China” was also a war myth. In fact, all the roads from the border regions to Hanoi were heavily fortified and garrisoned by several main force divisions of the People’s Army of Vietnam (P.A.V.N).
The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces commonly wore rubber sandals (often called “Ho Chi Minh sandals” or dép lốp) for practical, tactical, economic, and cultural reasons. Key factors:
Cost and availability
Made from recycled car or truck tire soles, these sandals were extremely cheap to produce and easy to repair or replace in the field.
Local cobblers could cut and strap soles quickly using scrap materials, enabling mass distribution without industrial supply lines.
Durability and suitability for terrain
Thick tire rubber resisted sharp stones, thorns, and rough trails better than many civilian shoes.
Michael Rohde · Former Criminal Defense Investigator (1980–2003)6y
The North Vietnamese Army was a very capable force. The South Koreans in Vietnam, the Marines called them ROKs for Republic of Korea, were known as fierce fighters who also gave no quarter. Many considered their actions war crimes because they could be indiscriminate with their fire power and kill noncombatants.
Original Question Near the end of the Vietnam war, the US had practically won. Viet Cong were surrendering in record numbers, their main forces annihilated and their leaders begging for peace. Why would the US pull out when they had utterly crushed the Vietnamese?
Well, first lets edit this for based on the history as the rest of the world knows it.
Question should be: Near the end of the Vietnam war, the US had practically won. Why would the US pull out when they had utterly crushed the Vietnamese?
Ah, that’s better.
Btw, we hadn’t utterly crushed them, but had made life much more intolerable than it had been the previous 7 years of open conflict. Enough so that the North Vietnamese were willing to negotiate an actual end.
From violent westward expansion to interwar isolationism to ruinous military interventions, discover which U.S. foreign policy decisions left the most tarnished legacies.
From securing America’s sovereignty to expanding its continental reach to creating the post-World War II institutions that ushered in unprecedented peace and prosperity, discover which U.S. foreign policy decisions left the most positive legacies.
Sang is one of hundreds of thousands of unwanted and discriminated children left behind by the US soldiers after the Vietnam War. When his lifelong dream of finding his father comes true, Sang’s only mission is to race against time to meet his ailing dad and break the cycle of war trauma that has plagued generations. Tiếp tục đọc “A man’s 50-year search for his father after the Vietnam War”→
As well as sending remittances, many are returning to their homeland
Photograph: Hannah Reyes Morales/New York Times/Redux /Eyevine
May 22nd 2025|HO CHI MINH CITYShareListen to this story
Fifty years ago Thinh Nguyen left his homeland aboard an American navy ship. Some of his compatriots escaped in helicopters. Tens of thousands fled in makeshift boats. Many more, including Mr Nguyen’s father and brother, were left behind as troops from North Vietnam stormed into Saigon, then the capital of American-backed South Vietnam. The chaotic evacuation marked the end of the Vietnam war, badly damaged American credibility and left Vietnam in Communist hands. It also helped create one of the world’s biggest diasporas.
Agent Orange was a chemical herbicide used during the Vietnam War that had a devastating impact long after the conflict ended.
Vietnam says 400,000 killed by Agent Orange; cleanup halted after US aid cuts
The US military sprayed millions of hectares of Vietnamese land with Agent Orange, a defoliant containing dioxin — a chemical linked to cancer, birth defects, and long-term environmental damage. Vietnam estimates 400,000 people were killed by the toxin. Although the US had been helping with the cleanup, efforts stopped following aid cuts by the Trump administration.
Al Jazeera’s Tony Cheng reports from Bien Hoa in Vietnam. A warning: this report contains disturbing images.
Trong cuộc Chiến tranh Việt Nam, Mỹ đã rải hàng triệu lít thuốc diệt cỏ độc hại, còn gọi là chất độc da cam (Agent Orange), xuống những cánh rừng rậm để phá hủy những tán lá dày mà các chiến binh Việt Cộng dùng làm nơi ẩn nấp.
Từ những năm 1960, bác sĩ Nguyễn Thị Ngọc Phượng bắt đầu nhận thấy các trường hợp dị tật bẩm sinh, ung thư và các căn bệnh liên quan đến việc tiếp xúc với chất độc da cam. Hơn nửa thế kỷ sau, nhiều người ở Việt Nam vẫn tiếp tục bị ảnh hưởng.
BBC News Tiếng Việt phỏng vấn giáo sư, bác sĩ Ngọc Phượng về hành trình hơn 40 năm đi tìm công lý cho các nạn nhân chất độc ca cam.
Năm 2024, bác sĩ Ngọc Phượng đã được trao giải thưởng Ramon Magsaysay (được mệnh danh là Giải Nobel châu Á) vì những đóng góp cho những nạn nhân chất độc da cam tại Việt Nam.
Mahmoud Ajjour, nine (left), who was injured during an Israeli attack on Gaza City in March 2024, finds refuge and medical help in Doha, Qatar, on June 28, 2024 [Samar Abu Elouf, for The New York Times] Kim Phuc, nine (right) is seen running down Route 1 near Trang Bang after a South Vietnamese plane accidentally dropped its flaming napalm on its own troops and civilians, on June 8, 1972. The terrified girl ripped off her burning clothes while fleeing [Nick Ut/AP]
Ajjour had both of his arms blown off by an Israeli strike on the Gaza Strip, where Israel’s ongoing genocide has now killed at least 52,365 Palestinians since October 2023. In the award-winning photograph, the boy’s head and armless torso are cast in partial shadow, his gaze nevertheless intense in its emptiness.
We mark 50 years since the end of the U.S. war on Vietnam with the acclaimed Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese troops took control of the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon as video of U.S. personnel being airlifted out of the city were broadcast around the world. Some 3 million Vietnamese people were killed in the U.S. war, along with about 58,000 U.S. soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of Lao, Hmong and Cambodians also died, and the impact of the war is still being felt in Vietnam and the region.
Nguyen says while the Vietnam War was deeply divisive in the United States during the 1960s and ’70s, American interference in Southeast Asia goes back to President Woodrow Wilson in 1919, when he rejected Vietnamese demands for independence from France. “And from that mistake, we’ve had a series of mistakes over the past century, mostly revolving around the fact that the United States did not recognize Vietnamese self-determination,” says Nguyen.
We Are Here Because You Are There”: Viet Thanh Nguyen on How U.S. Foreign Policy Creates Refugees
Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses why he chooses to use the term “refugee” in his books, and speaks about his own experience as a refugee. His new novel tells the story of a man who arrives in France as a refugee from Vietnam, and explores the main character’s questioning of ideology and different visions of liberation. Titled “The Committed,” the book is a sequel to “The Sympathizer,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016. Nguyen says his protagonist is “a man of two faces and two minds” whose ability to see beyond Cold War divisions makes him the perfect figure to satirize the facile stories people tell themselves about the world. “He’s always going beyond the surface binaries to look underneath.” Nguyen is the chair of English and professor of English and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His other books include “The Refugees” and the edited collection “The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen Interview: The Vietnam War Refugee Experience Behind The Sympathizer
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen reflects on his childhood as a refugee in America, his writing career, and family: from the trauma of displacement to the healing found in fatherhood and literature. Nguyen shares how these experiences have shaped his life and work, from his novel The Sympathizer to his commentary on war, cultural identity, and American life.
00:00 Introduction to Viet Thanh Nguyen and The Sympathizer
00:49 Refugee journey, family separation, and overcoming trauma
03:43 Humor, cultural expectations, and Vietnamese Catholic roots 05:29 Cultural identity, rebellion, and hidden writing career
07:14 Family relationships, cultural silence, and lessons in parenting 09:35 Impact of fatherhood, learning from children, and rediscovering play
12:13 Art, personal identity, and American cultural values 14:49 Vietnamese American identity, racism, and vision for the future
17:27 Teaching about war, challenges of digital information overload
20:31 Apocalypse Now, self identity struggles, and power of storytelling
24:41 Vietnam War legacy, draft-era resistance vs. modern volunteer military
26:47 Family history, generational trauma, and refugee story from Vietnam
CVD 