After reading this week's passages, it became very clear to me that there truly wasn't a winner in the Vietnam War. The Americans see it as a blemish upon their history because they couldn't decisively get the victory that they wanted, but the Vietnamese people have not gotten the life that they thought independence would bring them either. This seems very sad to me that after both countries faced such resistance and lost so many lives that no one has become better for it. The readings extensively covered post-war Vietnam from 1975 until the present and painted a pretty bleak picture of everyday life there.
Gabriel Kolko said in Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace, .
"The entire historical experience has repeatedly confirmed that a nation ultimately cannot truly win a war unless it is able to utilize that period that follows it to attain the goals for which it struggled and sacrificed so much." (p. 160).
The communist party gained the control that it so desperately fought for, but once they got the power they did not know how to manage it. Kolko said, "The Vietnamese Communist party became counterproductive the moment [the war] ended." (p.149) The political structure of the party was set up to fight a war and not to rebuild a nation after it was over. A major problem that they faced right after the war was having the task of unifying the north and the south, after there was basically a civil war raged between the two. The south had to be taken over and "re-educated" in the ways of the Vietnamese party. Also, as Clark Neher said, " national unification had to overcome the cultural and political dichotomy between the rural areas and the cities." (p. 184) The majority of people in Vietnam work in agriculture and the southerners were very reluctant to give up their land to the collectivization and redistribution that the government was trying to implement. There was also a problem with the fact that U.
