Michael Pollak:
> Unless there are two Tim O'Briens around, I'm pretty sure you're wrong
> about this, Gordon. O'Brien fought in the war as an infantryman and has
> been writing novels and memoirs about it ever since. He experienced what
> it was like to be in a free fire zone and probably remembers it as vividly
> as anyone, since his memoir, written in 1969, just after he got back, was
> first published in 1992, and reissued last year. So he's gotten to relive
> it in more detail than most, and recently. And that memoir is almost
> obsessively from the grunt's eye point of view. His animus must come from
> elsewhere. Very likely from the fact that he was against the war before
> he entered it, and still is, and yet he took part. He seems to suffer
> from too much knowledge of war's first hand effects, not too little.
It was my understanding that he had been in the war. I don't think that necessarily contradicts the point of view I ascribe to him. For all I know, he might also blame the American public for starting the war, as well as having an unsportsmanlike attitude about its outcome. In my wayward youth I sojourned briefly among the elite, and in those days it was common among them to attribute all sorts of evil to the public and see the elite, especially as manifested in the government and academia, as holding back a vast tide of ignorance, barbarity, racism, and violence. Perhaps they've gotten around to blaming the war on the vast tide. In any case, it _is_ the American _public_ O'Brien attacks, explicitly, in the passage I quoted yesterday, not its ruling class, and I think we have to go by the text.
Yoshie Furuhashi:
> ...
> Have you ever thought about what the Vietnamese people might feel
> about the American POW myth & demand based upon it? The Vietnamese
> had to cooperate with Americans, due to the Vietnamese government's
> desire to have the American economic sanctions lifted.
> ...
I was thinking about that. Suppose somebody had invaded America and gotten kicked out, and there were now, oh, Tasmanians tramping around New Jersey looking for remains of missing warriors. I would consider it salutary, I think, a coming-to-consciousness about war and what it produces. And some of my fellow Americans would no doubt see in the Tasmanians sources of entertainment or commercial opportunity as well. Of course, Vietnam has a different history and culture from the United States, so I can trust my imagination only to a very limited extent on this question. What _do_ the Vietnamese think of it all -- let bygones be bygones?