Stand Point and Vietnam

30 April 2006

Stand Point and Vietnam

Posted by Bob Keith at 4/30/2006 1:30 AM 

Categories: The study of Vietnam

   After thinking about the subject of Vietnam the War and Vietnam the country it is clear to me now that if one writes about the subjects one must be self aware.  Who am I and what perspective do I write from? This question must be understood by the writer and the receiver of the message.  It was even more evident of the importance of whose voice it is telling the story when I went to the University of California - Riverside in April of 2005 and attended a seminar on the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the American Vietnam War.  Most of the speakers were Vietnamese.  

   So who am I? A white guy in his fifties from the Midwest who just happened to be in the U.S. Army when South Vietnam came to its bitter end.  So that is the best I can do.  When I write of the events of Vietnam the war and of the observations I gleaned in visiting Vietnam thirty years after the war, it is from those eyes - the eyes of a fifty something, Midwestern, white guy, Army veteran.  The observations are only tempered by a university education attained as an older person, time spent visiting Vietnamese in American and Vietnam itself, and thirty years of blue-collar cautiousness.  Nothing more, nothing less.