The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam - Hardcover

Black, George

 
9780593534106: The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593534107 ISBN 13: 9780593534106
Verlag: Knopf, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

The moving story of how a small group of people—including two Vietnam veterans—forced the U.S. government to take responsibility for the ongoing horrors—agent orange and unexploded munitions—inflicted on the Vietnamese.

"Fifty years after the last U.S. service member left Vietnam, the scars of that war remain...This [is the] remarkable story of a group of individuals determined to heal those enduring wounds.”—Elliot Ackerman, author of The Fifth Act and 2034

The American war in Vietnam has left many long-lasting scars that have not yet been sufficiently examined. The worst of them were inflicted in a tiny area bounded by the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail in neighboring Laos. That small region saw the most intense aerial bombing campaign in history, the massive use of toxic chemicals, and the heaviest casualties on both sides.

In The Long Reckoning, George Black recounts the inspirational story of the small cast of characters—veterans, scientists, and Quaker-inspired pacifists, and their Vietnamese partners—who used their moral authority, scientific and political ingenuity, and sheer persistence to attempt to heal the horrors that were left in the wake of the military engagement in Southeast Asia. Their intersecting story is one of reconciliation and personal redemption, embedded in a vivid portrait of Vietnam today, with all its startling collisions between past and present, in which one-time mortal enemies, in the endless shape-shifting of geopolitics, have been transformed into close allies and partners.

The Long Reckoning is being published on the fiftieth anniversary of the day the last American combat soldier left Vietnam.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

GEORGE BLACK is the author of seven previous books on subjects including India, China, and foreign policy. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. He lives in New York City.

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Chapter 1

Going to B

Hanoi remembers the war, but mainly Hanoi forgets. There seems to be no end to the construction boom. In the city’s upscale neighborhoods, Vietnam’s nouveaux riches build themselves gaudy mansions with Roman balconies, Doric and Corinthian pillars, and classical fountains and statuary. Luxury high-rise apartment buildings spring up overnight. Many of these monuments to the new prosperity have English names—the Lancaster, the Gardenia, Goldmark City, the Skylake. Towering over a cloverleaf intersection by the rust-brown crawl of the Red River is the Sunshine Riverside, the name revolving in rainbow colors on a giant LED display at penthouse level. Other complexes, like the D’Le Roi Soleil, pay oblique homage to Vietnam’s French colonial heritage.

By the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the politburo of the Vietnamese Communist Party had designated tourism a “spearhead industry,” and Vietnam was welcoming close to 18 million foreign visitors a year. About half come from East Asia. Among the Westerners, two groups predominate: twentysomething backpackers and retirees, most of them old enough to remember the war. They come to see Vietnam, the country, and to look for echoes of Vietnam, the war.

Sometimes it can seem that on any given day most of them are strolling around Hanoi’s Hoan Kiem Lake, the Lake of the Restored Sword, the beautiful though polluted heart of the city’s tourist district, stopping in at the Temple of the Jade Mountain and taking photos of the elderly ladies doing their morning tai chi exercises. Dodging the motorbikes in the labyrinthine “36 Streets” of the Old Quarter, they book package tours to the beautiful karst archipelago of Ha Long Bay and homestays in the stilt-house villages of the ethnic minorities whom the French and the Americans called the Montagnards, the mountain people. They squat on blue plastic stools beneath the caged songbirds to slurp up pho, Vietnam’s classic noodle soup, and shop for silks and silver and revolutionary kitsch—Ho Chi Minh T-shirts and refrigerator magnets, faux Zippo lighters and dog tags, reproductions of wartime propaganda posters.

Some of the tourists take a cyclo ride for a couple of miles to join the early morning throngs of uniformed soldiers and schoolchildren and young pioneers in red neckerchiefs lined up to visit the monolithic granite mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh on Ba Dinh Square, which is ringed by the elegant colonial-era buildings, painted mustard yellow and salmon pink, that house the offices of party and government. Inside, they shuffle around the icy crypt for a brief glimpse of the waxy corpse of the iconic leader of the Vietnamese revolution, preserved thanks to the skills of Russian embalmers, who had perfected their art on Lenin. The spectacle would have appalled Uncle Ho, a frugal man who left written instructions that his body should be cremated, his ashes divided into three parts and scattered in the north, south, and center of the country, but with neither monument nor grave marker.

Some visitors take a short walk to the Museum of Military History, with its totemic display of crashed American airplanes and the antiaircraft guns that brought them down. Nearby, running parallel to a stretch of the main north-south railroad where the modest houses and shops crowd in close enough to the tracks for residents to reach out and shake hands with the passengers, is a long street called Ly Nam De, named for a sixth-century emperor who is regarded as one of the earliest champions of Vietnam’s independence.

For the most part, Ly Nam De looks much like countless other streets in modern Hanoi. The tree-shaded sidewalks are an obstacle course of parked motorbikes. The Ficus Suites offer luxury rental apartments for expats. Farther down the block are Annie’s Lingerie and the Laura Beauty Spa. But Ly Nam De is also a military enclave, resonant with history. There are two barracks of the People’s Army of Viet Nam, the PAVN, and the offices of the Army Publishing House. Gen. Nguyen Chi Thanh, who commanded military operations in the South from September 1964 until his death in July 1967, lived at number 34, which is now home to the Viet Nam War Veterans Association. Number 83 houses the Military Library, and while there is no public monument or memorial plaque, the building was the setting for one of the most consequential events in Vietnam’s history, a secretive meeting in May 1959, convened on orders from the politburo, that prefigured the entire logic of what Vietnamese call the American War.

For many years after the fall of Saigon, the conventional wisdom was that the success of the Vietnamese revolution could be attributed primarily to two men, each with his own distinctive charisma and legend. Ho Chi Minh, “He Who Enlightens,” founder of the Indochinese Communist Party, with his wispy chin-beard, benign smile, and avuncular manner, was its inspiration. Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap was the military genius who had engineered the decisive victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and who, for decades until his death in 2013, at the age of 102, charmed foreign visitors with his urbane manners and impeccable French. But the story is more complicated and in many ways much darker. By 1959, other powerful voices had risen to prominence in the Vietnamese Workers Party—known after reunification as the Vietnamese Communist Party—contesting and eventually eclipsing the paramount authority of Ho and Giap.

Two men were central to this less visible power structure. The senior of the two was Le Duan, a member of the politburo, a gaunt and dogmatic figure distinctly lacking in charisma. On the military side, there was his close political ally and fellow politburo member Nguyen Chi Thanh, the head of the PAVN’s general political department and the only general promoted to share Giap’s five-star rank.

Following the Leninist precepts of democratic centralism, the party took great pains to present a unified public face that masked its internal debates and the often brutal silencing of dissent. American policy makers, and the first generation of postwar historians, were generally aware of two camps that could be classified, at the risk of oversimplification, as moderates and hard-liners. The faction headed by Ho and Giap favored a protracted armed struggle combined with patient diplomacy and negotiations; the other, headed by Le Duan, advocated bold acts of revolutionary violence that would trigger mass uprisings as the key to national liberation. Sometimes these factions were respectively categorized as pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese, though those allegiances shifted at different times, and in general the party as a whole succeeded in holding on to the support of both Communist powers while never allowing them to dictate Vietnam’s war strategy.

The two factions were defined by differences of temperament and ideology, each camp reading in its own way the shifting currents of global politics in the Cold War. But the clashes were also deeply rooted in geography and above all in the personal experiences and local loyalties of Le Duan and Thanh during the war against the French.

The first signs of friction had been apparent as early as 1951, and they grew bitter with the 1954 Geneva Accords, which split Vietnam in two after the collapse of French colonial rule in Indochina. There was fierce argument in Geneva about where the country should be divided. Negotiators for the North—the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam—initially demanded the thirteenth parallel, which would have given them control over two-thirds of the country. Ho Chi Minh was prepared to settle for the sixteenth. But both the Soviet Union, emerging at the time from the...

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593534107
ISBN 13 
9780593534106
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
496
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Knopf
https://knopfdoubleday.com

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