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wow

Revisado: 02-04-24

Incredibly powerful story, performed exquisitely. Way more complex than I expected from the premise, and not pretentious at all despite how easy it would have been to slip into preachy bs and tropes. Loved it.

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karen mom

Revisado: 12-17-23

This overall is very well written and performed, and it's engaging. But by God the mom character is so annoying. What on earth possessed the writer to make the mom a karen?? She's just annoying to listen to. If your intent was to annoy the listener, job well done I guess. But why would you want that lmao

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Good info but very biased

Revisado: 12-06-23

This audiobook is very informative about the events that constituted the vietnam war, as well as the cultural, political, and social context of the war and it's immediate causes and aftermath. The writer/narrator does a good job on both counts as well, i.e. the writing style was clear, concise, eloquent, and entertaining all in one, and he performed it more than adequately.

HOWEVER. This guy is very biased in his opinions. So while he DOES mention all the atrocities committed by the allied forces of the US and France, he pretty much glosses over most of it and deflects the blame or simply moves on. But he shines a very particular spotlight on the atrocities committed by the communists. i.e. the communists did bad things because they were bad, the US did bad things but don't assume they were bad please!! You know, the way children think.

So he'll be like, "the chemical weapons deployed by the US on rice crops to starve civilians did also cause hundreds of thousands of birth defects in the following decades, but aaaanyway." and then doesn't mention it again. Wtf. Then he'll do a paragraph about all the sex crimes and the rape of women and CHILDREN. And he'll be like "but that was a small percentage of the US forces who did that so anyway..." He even talks about indiscriminate fire and trigger happy nut jobs mowing down thousands, perhaps millions of civilians in the crossfire, and follows it up immediately by attributing the blame to the Viet Cong for using them as human shields. And he'll talk about an infamous massacre of civilians in a village committed by the US, and like so much popular media, he fills the sentences with codes meant to humanize the perpetrators like "combat stress" or the bad conditions they were living in leading them to commit these atrocities. Of course he never uses such phrases to explain away the war crimes committed by the other
side. The series of events he lays out clearly shows how French colonialism was cruel and unjust and inhumane and without question led directly to this whole clusterf**** in the first place, but never outright says that last bit or draws the connection in plain terms. Then just moves on to the US working with France during the war like it was nothing, working together to make sure the outcome of the conflict is not only the defeat of communism, but to eventually install a friendly government in charge. He also never outright focuses on how the allied forces were straight up working with tyrants who were in charge of the south and regularly abused human rights.

Again, all that information is present in the text but the presentation doesn't focus on it, or focuses the reader's attention away from drawing conclusions that are unfavorable to the allied presence in Vietnam to begin with. There is also the matter of available texts and information from which to draw material for a write-up of the history. This isn't directly the author's fault but it needs to be mentioned. While he can intimately explain the experience of western soldiers day-to-day during the war, their mentalities and mantras and jokes and inner-experience, he can't do that for the other side. The result is an unfair portrayal: western invaders come off as normal humans with faults and personality kinks, which is generally the right way to look at anything involving humans and human nature, whereas the communist soldiers are not portrayed as humans even though they had far more motivation to be involved in what is ostensibly a civil war to determine the fate of THEIR country and many of whom were forced to fight with threats to their families etc etc. Again, I get that that's just how the information that is available to an American scholar is, but it goes hand-in-hand with the author's bias to make this whole text feel way more one-sided than any real conflict is.

The real story is, like most military conflicts, that all the people in charge of all the sides of the war were terrible. The communists were monsters, the southern Vietnamese were largely authoritarian and oversaw a struggling citizenry with no economic equality. The Americans were monsters who committed innumerable heinous and revolting crimes in a war they had no right to participate in if they weren't afflicted by enormous egos and a BS self-assessment of themselves as "world leaders," and the French were imperialist scumbags who caused this whole mess in the first place by enslaving entire countries all around the world for decades.

And the other side is that many of the humans involved in the conflict were good people in a bad place, and many were terrible monsters. On. All. Sides. Nothing is black and white. I know a lot of Americans have trouble seeing the world that way what with the sheer amount of propaganda they are regularly exposed to, but you'd think a scholar would be more intelligent than that. To have some semblance of empathy. But nah.

Idk. I pushed my way through it but at many points I found the bias to be draining and upsetting and I just wanted to finish the book and move on to a more human portrayal of the conflict in some other book.

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