1. Introduction

I have decided not long ago to write about the Vietnam conflict. For that I gathered quite an amount of books written by people with direct experience and good knowledge about my country and its history. I went through them and learned considerably. I wanted to find out the truth and how my view and opinion fared against what was written about the subject. Either way I hope to have something new and interesting to say while recalling for the reader the historical events from my own perspective.

The Vietnamese were the big losers of the war. My writing is merely a testimony to that, i.e about their courage and untold sacrifice. Those indelible wounds permeate their psyche. My people should have deserved a better outcome. Their unfulfilled aspirations and current plight is the mother lesson that fratricidal armed conflict is no answer to our internal grievances. And inserting ideology or religion as a subterfuge to further one's cause in the conflict didn't help but exacerbate the tensions and hatred between the two opposite camps. The Vietnamese have a long memory and hopefully will   remember from this tragic experience.

I realize now the extent of the work I pursued and always asked myself whether I would be up to the challenge. I was constantly faced with balancing judgment acts. With an issue as contentious as the war, the first casualty is the neutrality and fair mindedness to all sides in the conflict. When passion takes over sound judgment especially in such a divisive issue, the message put forward is biased, forfeiting credibility and thus becoming worthless. We've all experienced misfortune, big or small that leave marks in our psyche. And bearing a loss of someone or something dear, you take a beating and becoming emotionally afflicted. It's hard to stay above the fray and pretend that you'll remain objective.

The Vietnamese had to endure that collective nightmare transcending many generations. They have a pathological reaction to align for or against something. There were the pro and anti-French colonialist. The anti-French were subdivided between the pro and anti-communist. Then there were the pro and anti-Diem and later the pro and anti-American... This Balkanization into an infinite number of political factions in Vietnam gives students of VN history a sense of  bewilderment. And this political fragmentation and social divide have had lasting and untold repercussion.

The second difficulty is to differentiate fact from fiction. And it doesn't sound that simple. I have experienced some of the past events, for the rest I relied on witness accounts and material from the books I read, especially for the period prior to 1950 on the simple fact that I wasn't born then. That's one of the reason I will start with the Diem era. Vietnam recent history is well written, especially with the beginning of US involvement for Ngo Dinh Diem and his regime. And I have some vivid anecdotes to tell.

Many historical facts seemed to be at borderline with fiction and the reason is symptomatic of the way the Vietnamese coexist with information. They have a knack for rumors combined with a high propensity for gossip. The political leaders are very adept at capitalizing on that popular weakness and wouldn't miss any opportunity to mislead their people. Propaganda or the manufacturing and marketing of information, is an effective WMD. During the conflict, truth and falsehood thus have become hardly distinguishable, like the two similar sides of the same coin.

Fictitious news that have not been discarded will get a life of their own . They became accepted factual events and even outlasted other historical news throughout the conflict. To give an example, the Diem regime spread the rumor that the US were behind the 1963 Buddhist crisis in order to discredit the South Vietnamese regime, thus undermining its popularity and preparing for its downfall. On that Diem and his subordinates did succeed to sow confusion and nowadays the sense is still prevailing that it was an actual fact. We know something about 'conspiracy theories' these days.

Normal decency would require that we adhere to honesty and truth. I make no exception to that. My goal is to answer to the What, How and Why of all the fateful events that have occurred. But even in the best of circumstances, truth can wear many faces, like a mirror from which one sees reality through different angles. Truth is in the eyes of the beholder, it can be twisted and deformed. If objectivity is a standard, the search for [an illusory] truth should be foremost in our mind and it's a huge challenge indeed.

The last difficulty has to do with the scope of my writing project. The more I focus on a specific matter, the more I need to go further and consequently have to expand the subject studied. Vietnam history, even if it has occurred over 2000 years, is a succession of interrelated calamities especially in the last 2 centuries. Like an unending movie sequel, one cannot understand the American War period without looking into the first Indochina War. And one cannot comprehend the Diem period without looking at the French colonial period and the subsequent Communist take over with Ho Chi Minh.

I am no historian but I stick to the old adage that'' history just repeats itself''. It sounds so true when I look back at all the tragedies that just kept repeating throughout our unfortunate collective existence. To fully evaluate the situation in its context, the reader must be ready to digest centuries of upheaval, which should have been illuminating for the decision makers in Paris, Washington or elsewhere had they have known better about our intricate history.

How will I tackle the problem? I have decided to use a Vietnamese expediency to solve it. The Vietnamese love the number 9. By the way I got into a discussion with a former South Vietnamese official who was a refugee in California back in 1975. He lamented about his bad fate and the South's debacle. I reminded him that VN had many chances to be saved from both colonialism and communism and the opportunity came up every 9 years, starting in 1945.

With the end of World War 2 in 19[45] and the emergence of Ho Chi Minh a charismatic national leader, Vietnam saw a formidable grass root political force fighting against the weary French. Then 19[54], with the Diem phenomenon who erected the new bastion against uncle Ho and Communism financed by the Americans, a line was being drawn at the 17th parallel dividing the 2 Vietnam. In 19[63], the tragic death of Diem and the rule of the military junta still opened a new window to keep up the fight against the North with massive US intervention. And finally 19[72], the Communist general offensive against the South and the Paris Accord to be signed gave South Vietnam a further 'decent interval' and an ultimate chance for survival.

How many missed chances and unfulfilled opportunities do we have! Each time I gave a date, he just stared at me and said: 'Right, it's true! '' as if 9 could could have been his salvation number. Getting back to reality, he resigned himself to the idea that no amount of faith would make a dent into Vietnam's distress for the last half of the 20th century. The Good Spirits have let his country down, believe it or not, to his big sorrow. Unfortunately superstition doesn't seem to help in time of desperation.

Truth is taboo, untouchable and almost a dirty word in the Vietnamese culture. [Religious] faith although widely practiced in VN is a question mark and for me an unreliable asset for a nation. Then ideology became a fertile ground for some new desperate experiments in Vietnam no doubt during that period. The Diem period is a good starting point to tell and we can go backward or forward from there. Many questions ought to be answered during that chaotic period. An autopsy of that missed opportunity should be performed and it could be seen as an indictment of a corrosive regime, inept and incapable to changes under the most critical time of VN history.