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The Flower of the Dragon; The Breakdown of the U.S. Army in Vietnam
The Flower of the Dragon; The Breakdown of the U.S. Army in Vietnam
Richard Boyle
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The Rangers in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). had power and they knew it. That power came from their backing by the United States, whose military advisers and material kept the Thieu puppet regime in the South in power in the face of mass public discontent. Boyle went out with them in February 1965. In the Mekong Delta, these Rangers stormed a village in Bạc Liêu, taking all military aged men as prisoners.
An ARVN Ranger captain and an American adviser started interrogating the prisoners. They were all about 14 or 15 years old, and they wouldn’t talk. One of the Rangers kicked the boy in the head hard, bringing blood to his mouth. He wouldn’t talk. He was kicked again. He still wouldn’t talk. A sergeant had two rangers hold him while he stuck his bayonet into the boy’s belly. The boy whimpered but didn’t say anything. He wouldn’t talk. A sergeant hacked away with his blade as his intestines spilled on the ground until the boy died. But he didn’t give up a scrap of information.
He’d managed to snap a picture of the soldier standing over the dead boy, captioned “VIETCONG PRISONER KILLED BY RANGERS,” but nobody would buy it.
“Later, back in the States, I sold the photograph with a different caption: ‘RANGER KILLS VIETCONG IN FIREFIGHT.’ It was my first copout of the war.”
Foreign War Correspondent
Richard Boyle was an archetypical American war reporter. He’d watched Jimmy Cagney movies as a kid and wanted to be a journalist when he grew up. He’d learned on a series of small newspapers early in his career that the worst thing a reporter could do was get involved in his story. And he’d wanted to see what war was like. So he’d saved up his “meager reporter’s pay” and got a visa to go play war correspondent in Vietnam.
There, the US military was the source of almost all stories that American correspondents wrote. As long as you played along, didn’t take pictures of prisoners being tortured, and kept your mouth shut, you’d keep your press card. Without it you couldn’t get on Army bases or rides on helicopters, and you’d be stuck, and you couldn’t work. But instead of going to the officer’s cafeteria for copy, he got a soldier’s gear and went into the field with American troops for his stories instead of from the PR officials. This vivid book of his adventures is the result including first person visit to My Lai. [more]
Some Quotes:
The biggest and meanest rats in Saigon had become army
generals, police chiefs or key officeholders. Like President
Thieu, many of them had Swiss bank accounts and villas in
Europe. They had plush mansions at the old French seacoast
resort of Vung Tau and mountain villas in cool, lush Dalat.
For them the war was great; it made them rich. America was
a sugar-candy mountain, a soda fountain of money juice that
never ran dry.
“Right on,” Beagle added. “The people of this country
have been fucked over, cheated, and lied to by all of them.
Johnson’s the same as Nixon, and Nixon’s the same as
Muskie or Humphrey: they all want to screw you.”
“That’s what this whole war was,” Jim said, “a big ripoff.
Fifty-five thousand guys died to make some people rich.”
“Everybody’s always trying to sell somebody out,” said
Cheyenne. “Labor leaders sell out their membership, politicians
sell out the voters, and even our own guys sell us out.”
“That’s why this war is still going,” Jim said.
“There’s something in it for everybody.”
It was not unusual for bounties to be raised by troops
in a unit to pay the soldier who actually did the fragging.
Each soldier would chip in and bounties could come to
hundreds, even thousands, of dollars.
He said it in a very matter-of-fact way, not
as a boast or a threat but almost calmly:
“If they fuck with us, they are going to die.”
Doc Hampton was not alone. All over Vietnam, Gls were
fragging their officers and their lifer noncoms. On some
patrols, if a lifer was too “gung ho,” he was shot in the back
by his men, who would report he was killed in combat.
We were by what Long said. It seemed simple enough:
"War would end when the soldiers refused to fight it."
“He shows how the army collapsed under the weight of the
ugliness of its tasks, as American soldiers fought the harder war, to
keep and to regain their humanity. His moving portrait of a
Vietnam pacifist and the impact of his courage and dedication
actually succeeds in introducing a note of hope, no mean
achievement.”
Noam Chomsky
Categories:
Year:
1972
Language:
English
Pages:
270
ISBN 10:
0878670203
ISBN:
0878670203
Your tags:
American History, bounty, fragging, officer casualties, discipline, drugs, heroin, marijuana, conflict, enemy, soldier, Vietcong, Indochina, fighting, morale, racial strife, enlisted, draft, Nixon
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