Indian country revisited
When I was younger, I asked my teacher, all the time in fact, why do we have to learn this. Her response was always, "you'll need it when you grow up." Math, science, and English, I understood, but history was different. She said that we must learn our history so as not to repeat the errors of the past. I still don't believe this. In Vietnam, Americans, foreigners to their land, came in and sought to take what wasn't ours to take. Did we not also do this when we, the British, came to the Americas to take the land. Sure we said that we were seeking religious freedom, but was that why we were really there? We were in Vietnam to fight for economic freedom (against communism), but was that really why? Vietnam was nothing more than the entire cowboys and Indians situation all over again, but with a different outcome. I propose then, why need history? If this situation was the same as taking the Indians' land, then we didn't learn from our history, and therefore it is worthless. In Robin Moore's, The Green Berets, he even refers to the entire conflict as Indians and Cowboys, but how accurate is this? For references I will be referring to Tim O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone, and Phill
In Phillip Caputo's book, he presents a different view of the war. Caputo enlisted before the war began, and he was aspiring to be an officer. He went to the war before antiwar Semitism was the fad sweeping the homeland. He entered the war when it was the noble thing to do, so that we can save these poor people from communism. In the early parts of his book, Caputo portrays the South Vietnamese as a peaceful people. They had their land and they were happy there, until we came over seeking economic freedom for the North Vietnamese. We came over and we were the barbarians. We raped their women, killed their kids, and shot their elders. It was even mentioned that they would line their scopes up on Vietnamese farmers working in the fields. We would kill them when uncertain, and rationalize it by saying, "If he is dead and Vietnamese, then he must have been VC." This is very reminiscent of the saying, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." Doesn't this sound like the settlers invading the Indian's land? We came over seeking religious freedom, and ended up kicking them out of their land, raping their women, killing entire tribes, and just mistreating them. The behavior is presented much like people describe the Indians. The Vietnamese were the underdogs when it came to technology, other than the weapons we gave them, they didn't have any bombs or planes, so they resorted to the only thing they had... sheer numbers and dirty tactics, such as booby traps. The Indians didn't have any guns, except the ones that we gave them, so they resorted to sheer numbers and dirty tactics, such as night raids, or picking off settlers one by one or in smal
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1122
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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