It's the government's way of dehumanizing people they want us to kill." Calling them a name like 'Cong' is just an attempt to denigrate Asian people, part of the old Hong Kong, ching chong, ricky-ticky stereotype. "They are really the National Liberation Front. "There's no such thing as the Viet Cong," journalist Robert Scheer told us from the steps of the old Merritt College in Oakland. The message from newspapers and the evening news was incessant: the South Vietnamese were a peace-loving, gentle, farming people being assailed by vicious hordes of Communist cadre known as the Viet Cong. The drumbeats of war were fiercely booming across the nation. It was the fall of 1965, the year of the introduction of U.S. I CAN REMEMBER the first time someone tried to convince me that Vietnamese were real, human people and not just subjects in a newspaper article or the objects of somebody's Great Cause. His new book reveals the secrets of his family's past, the heart of humanity and the deepest wounds of war. Life Cycle: Andrew Pham toured his homeland on a bicycle with a general itinerary to travel the countryside, often camping out in parks and open space areas such as this one above.Īndrew Pham left Vietnam as a child in a leaking boat and returned 20 years later as a grown man on a bicycle.
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