Annie Xiong - Week 3 Blog

The readings this week relate to major issues affecting the SEA American community. As the young journalist who found hidden and undiscovered documents of war trials in the basement of a library in, Kill Anything That Moves, it became apparent that the SEA American community, especially young Vietnamese, comes to a realization that they know little to nothing pertaining to their history, along with other events that had happened during the Vietnam War. In addition, the SEA American community that consist of Vietnamese parents and grandparents seem to not be able to find closures to what had happened during the Vietnam War, allowing them to suppressed their experiences and stories from others. While college students and professors see this as a problem of the re-narration of the Vietnam War, as discussed on the first day of lecture, as well as them being misrepresented in textbook, it is hard to find survivors from the Vietnam War to have them re-called and tell us their Vietnam War stories without experiencing PTSD. Similarly, it was difficult for Mr. Duc to find a survivor from Bolinao 52, who was brave enough to share her journey.

One current event outside of class that connects to this week’s readings and theme is the bombing of Syria, in which it had injured and killed many innocent kids. Even though the Syria war has been an ongoing war, recently, photos of injured kids struck many Americans, especially one particular CNN news anchor, who broke down while reporting on a boy named Omran.

Questions that I have about the readings are: I felt that the Vietnam War had carried itself for such a long period of time without American soldiers being caught and penalized for their actions and without America accepting the fact that the Vietnam War was actually harming innocent, South Vietnamese people than from benefitting from the war. What could have the journalists who had attempted to write stories on this and/or medias done differently to portray the idea that the American soldiers were not fulfilling their duties of preventing the spread of communism, rather than killing unarmed civilians? If we had stopped the Vietnam War earlier, how would that have affected Vietnam and its people along with the United States, considering that fact that we were one of the most powerful countries?

Sources:

Turse, Nick. Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. Henry Holt and Company. New York: 2013. 24 January 2017.
CNN.com