Category: Vietnam
-
Thirty Years from Tienanmen Square
June 4, 2019 marks the thirty year anniversary of a dark day in Chinese history – what is known in the west as The Tienanmen Square Massacre. I remember this day very well. I had just graduated from college a month before. I had just gotten married a week after college graduation. We were in…
-
Great Hanoi (& Haiphong) Rat Massacre
I ran across this fascinating article a while back which I wanted to share. It’s about the great Hanoi rat massacre during the time of French colonialism. I don’t want to spoil the entire article because it’s a great read, but the crux of it gets to the amazing entrepreneurial spirit of the Vietnamese people.…
-
The Tribal Groups of Vietnam
If you haven’t seen this stunning collection of many of the tribal groups in Vietnam, please click HERE to see them. They are beautiful. French photographer, and Hoi An resident Rehanh, is making an effort to photograph all 54 tribal groups in Vietnam, many of them on the verge of extinction with only a few hundred people…
-
Did Truman Start the Vietnam War?
The headline is purposefully provocative. How could Truman, who came on the scene after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, have started the Vietnam War of two decades later? He didn’t, of course, but the case could be made, and was made in my thesis, that Truman instituted a policy shift towards Indochina which set the…
-
Reflections on Tet ’68: The Power of Media
Happy TET everyone! It’s almost become a tradition here to conjure up remembrances of Tet ’68 every year. This is a post I originally posted over two years ago and I thought I’d let it fly one more time. Have a great new year! (By the way, no self-respecting Vietnamese would ever call it Chinese New Year. Just…
-
Know Your History: Christmas Invasion of Cambodia, 1978
The beginning of the end of the dark periods of modern history began on December 25, 1978, when a sure-footed, well-oiled, Vietnamese fighting machine crossed the border, heading straight towards the nearly deserted Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. The ramifications and irony of such an invasion were lost on many people at that time, and…
-
Viet Minh and USA Relations in 1945
Part of my Master’s Thesis that I wrote a couple years back dealt with the Viet Minh, the Vietnamese nationalistic rebels who warred with the Japanese and French during and after WWII. The Americans had some very interesting interactions with them in the summer of 1945. Some have called these interactions nothing less than a…
-
Know Your History: Indochina 1945 from a Page in my Novel
I’m going to change up the “know your history” post this time around and use a direct quote from my new novel, The Reach of the Banyan Tree, to emphasize the strange WWII ties which existed in Indochina in 1945. Here’s a short paragraph from the chapter entitled “The Strange Ways of the Universe”: On a cosmic…
Author Mark W Sasse 