Just ordered mine: Duc: A reporter's love for the wounded people of Vietnam

Via Dan

Almost half a century ago, a young reporter from Germany arrived in still-glamorous Saigon to cover the Vietnam War over a period of five years. In this memoir he now tells the story of how he fell in love with the Vietnamese people. He praises the beauty, elegance and feistiness of their women. He describes blood-curdling Communist atrocities and fierce combat scenes he had witnessed. 

He introduces a striking array of characters: heroes, villains, statesmen and spooks, hilarious eccentrics, street urchins and orphans herding water buffalos. He shows how professional malpractice by U.S. media stars such as Walter Cronkite turned the military victory of American and South Vietnamese forces during the 1968 Tet Offensive into a political defeat. He mourns the countless innocent victims of the Communist conquest of South Vietnam, which was the grim consequence of its abandonment by the United States.

Read the  13 customer reviews and then you will order, I am sure.

  

Dr. Khoi Nguyen’s speech at the May 4, 2013 book signing of Đức

Growing up in a war-torn country, one is anxious to discover the root causes of a protracted war in this nation: Why did we have to fight the Communists? Why couldn’t we overcome them in spite of the material aid from western superpowers such as France and the United States? These questions became a constant obsession to me.

Very early in my youth, I pored over literature about the French Indochina war. I got acquainted with names like Jean Lartéguy and Jules Roy describing the tragic destruction of the French Expeditionary forces on Route Coloniale 4 in 1950 when they tried to withdraw from frontier towns of Cao Bang, Lang Son, or the bloody siege of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. 

At that age, I could not grasp the fact that the highly technological warfare of the West is no match to the strategy of Mao Tse Tung wasting human lives, waging a long war that will eventually wear out the enemy. 

Uwe has brilliantly quoted Mao’s statement in his book: “ He who cannot win the insurrectional war, loses. He who does not lose a protracted insurrectional war, wins”. This seems to be a lesson the West — and we — never learn. 

You notice that I mention Mao, not Ho Chi Minh or Vo Nguyen Giap, because right in the beginning, the enemy’s strategy is Mao’s. At the RC4 battles, Chinese military and political advisors such as Cheng Geng and Luo Gui Bo were already present alongside Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap.

Later on, after Dien Bien Phu, our country was divided along the 17^th parallel into North and South Viet Nam. Then came the Americans. This time I had all the reasons to rejoice. 

“John Wayne is coming to our rescue. How can we lose?” I thought.

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