A place of war and peace that now feeds the masses

Country Living with Francis Farragher

As a child of the 1960s, the news and information outlets were extremely limited by today’s standards of instant access to all kinds of instant knowledge.

The old Philips radio, an occasional chance to see television at a house a couple of miles away, and my father’s loyalty to the Evening Herald newspaper, provided the main sources of news.

As the decade progressed, more and more news items centred on one conflict, namely the Vietnam War, and as young lads, we could rattle off the names of key zones and cities.

The analysis was simple enough stuff with the Americans being the good guys while the Viet Cong communists were the baddies, and of course it was only going to be a matter of time before the might of the US would have its way.

Words like B52 bombers, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh, Saigon, the Tet Offensive, the Mekong Delta, the My Lai massacre of civilians and Agent Orange (the deadly chemical used by the US to clear vegetation and cover for the Viet Cong), were familiar terms to us.

In the end of course like all wars, it ended up with the most horrific slaughtering of human beings imaginable. Possibly up to three million people lost their their lives in the conflict, most of them Vietnamese, but also including over 58,000 US soldiers, dragged into a war that they knew little or nothing about.

The story of Vietnam, a country with a population of around 90 million, is quite akin to our own struggles here in Ireland, only that they were colonised by the French, not the British, back in the 1860s, mainly because they had valuable natural products such as tobacco, tea, indigo and coffee.

Eventually the unfortunate Vietnamese, after eventually turfing the French out in 1954 following the first Indochina war, found themselves being engulfed in a far more apocalyptic scenario. In the aftermath of the French withdrawal, the country was divided into North and South Vietnam. The North was communist, led by Ho Chi Minh and the South ended up being supported by the West and primarily the United States.

The Vietnam War stretched from 1954 to 1975 but really escalated in the Lyndon Johnson presidency of the mid-1960, when at one point around a half million US soldiers had been posted for duty in a country divided by what was known as the 17th parallel.

Time though has been a healer of sorts and now the United States and Vietnam have returned to full diplomatic relations. Now, a people still led by a communist government, gets on with its job of growing its own food and exporting product to many different parts of the world.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.