Fire in the Lake :: essays research papers

Fire in the LakeBy Gerard ChretienEnglishVietnam 2002 profMorgan ShulzTwenty-eight years after publication, and 25 after the wars end, Fire in the Lake remains one of the truly best controls on the Viet Nam war. Sadly, Americans are unhappily ignorant of the rest of the world. We have little real knowledge of our hold history but for the rest of the worlds history and culture, we have neither knowledge nor regard. We do non even do the Vietnamese people the dexterity of respecting the name of their country--Viet Nam, not Vietnam Sai Gon, not Saigon. Fitzgerald helps to correct some of this ignorance and arrogance. She begins examining the U.S. in Viet Nam from the purview of Vietnamese history and culture and in the process, demonstrating the tenacity and courage of the Vietnamese people, as well as their determination to rid themselves of any unlike invaders, even if, as with the qinese, it takes 1,000 years. Another great strength of Fitzgeralds book is, with her attentio n to Viet Nams history and culture and their 20th century struggle against the French, she demonstrates, in an almost matter of fact way, a fundamental tenant of U.S. unusual policy which has been repeated numerous times in the post military personnel War II era. That central tenant is to support thugs over nationalists, to fig up to power those who will sell out their people for 30 pieces of capital rather than work with those committed to the well being of their people. Ho Chi Minh was our ally during WWII his hero was Thomas Jefferson, not Karl Marx or Stalin. He was very pro-American yet he was a nationalist and a patriot first, which meant, from the perspective of the U.S., he was not only unreliable, but someone who had to be destroyed. And though Fitzgerald does not carry her analysis beyond Viet Nam, an informed or a curious reader quickly can draw the parallels betwixt U.S. policy in Viet Nam and U.S. policy in Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific flange (Indonesia sp ecifically), South America, the Caribbean, and most obvious of all, Central America. Thus Fitzgerald gives us not only the means of understanding the war in Viet Nam, and why we were ill-starred to lose, but also a point of departure for understanding the trick of U.