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Chapter 1: A Buddhist Soldier Defends a Catholic Government
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Chapter 1 A Buddhist Soldier Defends a Catholic Government S.Sgt. Huynh Van No was very affable and gregarious, even though he had a tough time during the war and a fatigued life thereafter. Before each interview in Ho Chi Minh City, he usually started a conversation with me and my wife on an interesting topic like the difference between traditional Mahayana Buddhism in Vietnam and Westernized Buddhism in America. Sometimes they were so engaged that I had to step in by offering them a cup of “caphe sua” (Vietnamese ice coffee) before they got carried away with their enlightening and serious discussions. Staff Sergeant No was serious about the common Western assumption that the ARVN failed to defend its own country even with American direct intervention in the Vietnam War.1 He argued that this supposition is not fair to the ARVN, which he entered in 1962 at eighteen. His testimony suggests that the ARVN departed from traditional values and lost popular support only after the Americans transformed it into a modern army.2 Its modernization or Westernization detached the ARVN from Vietnamese society. In other words, while providing advanced technology, military training, democratic ideas, and even Christianity to the ARVN, the United States should also have promoted nationalistic pride as a reason for the South Vietnamese soldiers to fight for their own country’s independence and sovereignty. Ignoring and overlooking Vietnamese nationalism made the ARVN a hotbed of apathy. Staff Sergeant No felt like he was fighting for his Catholic commanders , President Diem, and American advisers, not for himself, his family, and the Vietnamese people. In retrospect, the U.S. Vietnam policy was originally aimed at supporting 16 A Country Divided the government and people of South Vietnam in their efforts against Communist aggression. From the beginning, Pres. John F. Kennedy emphasized that the South Vietnamese should fight this war “by themselves, for themselves , win or lose, it is their war, the people of Vietnam against the Communists .”3 He authorized $41 million to improve the ARVN and the civil guards in 1961. According to Staff Sergeant No, his unit and other ARVN troops had made some progress in carrying out some of President Diem’s policies, like the “Strategic Hamlet Program” in 1962–1963.4 The program was designed to protect the rural population and neutralize Viet Cong insurgents. However , the battlefield failure in 1963–1964 convinced American leaders that the ARVN could not protect its government and South Vietnam from further attacks by the PLAF and NVA. Their assumed failure and incompetence influenced the Johnson administration’s military escalation of the Vietnam War in order to help the hopeless South Vietnamese in an American way. Approximately 3.6 million South Vietnamese served in the ARVN from 1963 to 1975. During that time, most of the adult males between seventeen and forty-five years old were drafted into the war and stayed in the army until the end.5 Staff Sergeant No was wounded during the Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive campaign in 1968, but was lucky enough to live to see the end of the war. S.Sgt. Huynh Van No First Battalion, Third Regiment, An Giang Provincial Command, ARVN (South Vietnam) I was born in 1944 into a peasant’s family in Long Hung, a small village near Long Xuyen, An Giang Province, South Vietnam. As the youngest in the family, I had seven brothers and sisters. Their hard work in family farming helped me through elementary and secondary education in the town of Long Xuyen. I enjoyed riding my bicycle along the river to my school every morning, waving good-bye to my father and brothers who already worked in the rice field. Our teachers talked about the First Indochina War all the time, but it seemed far away from our classroom in the late 1950s. My favorite subject was drawing and painting, both in watercolor and oil colors. I had painted a lot of pictures of the rivers, rice paddies, and people in my hometown. The life was so quiet and peaceful at Long Xuyen that sometimes I was even bored to death. I dreamed of leaving our village and traveling all over the country. [34.204.177.148] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:57 GMT) A Buddhist Soldier Defends a Catholic Government 17 I liked visiting the Buddhist temples with my parents and grandparents either in our village or in the city. I met many people there, including my relatives, friends...