Click to larger image of Saigon 1974 photo at the website Finding Jim Smith.

Jim Smith put Kim Phuong and brother Lam with three cousins on a flight out of Saigon as the Republic of Viet Nam fell.   Their mother Phan Thi Nuoi didn’t make the plane.

Jim visited twice as they grew in Florida.   The children would like to learn more about him.

1972 photo supplied by Krista Page of Texas, grand-daughter of James Thomas Smith, Jr.

Was he James Thomas Smith,  Jr.? That Jim Smith retired as lieutenant colonel from the Army then served from 1965 as United States Agency for International Development province representative around Nha Trang.

An adoption form lists James Lee Smith of Odessa, Florida who worked for “PAE, Inc.”, perhaps Pacific Architects and Engineers.  Kim’s adoptive father says Jim spoke of rebuilding ships for the Saigon navy.

Was he the Jim Smith of Southeast Asia Computer Associates from Honolulu with offices in Hong Kong and Saigon?

Phan Thi Nuoi remains sent from Malaysia to the United States.

Kim manages Community Affairs & Grassroots for Southwest Airlines. She married Peter Delevett, now a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News.

Early on they found her mother’s family in Viet Nam. They visit as often as they can.

With the family at Soc Trang, 2003. Pete stands in blue at back and Kim sits at right.

Kim and Pete and everyone else would like to be in touch with Jim’s people. If you have further information on Jim Smith or an adviser or contractor like him please let Kim and Pete know.

Viet Nam Literature Project blogs about our encyclopedia, our comics and translations as we develop our university program. Donors receive our print newsletter and annual comic book.

Click to read "Beautiful Wreckage" by W.D. Ehrhart.

Jane Irish’s new show War Is Not What You Think will be up until March 29 at La Salle University Art Museum and at the Connelly Library.   Jane collaborated with John Baky’s collection Imaginative Representations of the Vietnam War.

She painted watercolors and fired vases illustrating poets from the collection such as David Connolly and Philadelphia’s own John Balaban and W.D. Ehrhart.   Her collaborations with Bill and David evoke the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War, subjects of her 2005 show Operation Rapid American Withdrawal.

Click to enlarge "Some Things Can't be Handled" vase with David Connolly poem.

John’s translations from Vietnamese hang with artifacts from that country.   Jane lays out riches which scholars travel across the world to dig from Connelly.

Director John Baky started the collection thirty years ago as a librarian.  He had served as a military policeman in Viet Nam.

Library director John Baky with artist Jane Irish at center. Poet W.D. Ehrhart at far left with curator Carmen Vendalin. Poet John Balaban at far right with museum director Klare Scarborough. Installation watercolor in background.

He has steadily collected the range of the American imagination of that other country.   Jane’s show includes a display of Connelly holdings with research products.

War is not what you think.  It is what many other people think, the reality of whose fantasies Jane and John display.

Viet Nam Literature Project blogs about our encyclopedia, our comics and translations as we develop our university program. Donors receive our print newsletter and annual comic book

The Allies found murdered civilians as we took Hue back after Tet 1968.  Next year we will review the history.

At the time Pham Duy composed a direct response. Khanh Ly still sings it.

I am not a plant or a tree!

I am not a post or a stone!

So I weep for our Viet Nam, for three long generations

Robbed of joy.

I’m not a random passerby,

I’m not a fellow from some other clan,

So I weep for one, not far away, fallen on the battlefield

While still a youth.

Don’t disguise it with the sound of singing,

Don’t think you need a pair of tinted glasses,

Look unblinking at our ruined countryside;

Count one by one the bodies of our guiltless dead;

Rage against these fratricidal battles;

Weep in spirit even if your well of tears is dry.

Know enough to grieve; know enough to be ashamed!

For our hills and streams are covered in a pall of black.

I cannot stand by indifferently!

I cannot stand here in silence!

So I scream into the void words more terrible

Than guns or bombs.

I cannot stand by with muted mouth!

I cannot have ears that hear no sound!

Therefore I weep, and shall lose my senses till the day

That peace returns.

[Translation by Eric Henry of Toi khong phai la go da by Pham Duy.]

Viet Nam Literature Project blogs about our encyclopedia, our comics and translations as we develop our university program. Donors receive our print newsletter and annual comic book.

Click to read the novel.

After the new year Joker and Rafter Man fight through Hue.  Their author Gustav Hasford did it over Tet 1968 as a United States Marine Corps combat correspondent.

Joker survives to patrol out from Khe Sanh Combat Base.   He shoots his squad leader dead when a sniper wounds Cowboy as bait.

I laugh and laugh.  The squad freezes with fear because the sniper is laughing with me.  The sniper and I are laughing together and we know that sooner or later the squad will be laughing too.

Click to read the novel.

Joker is still laughing when his next novel begins.  Across the wire at Khe Sanh he is calling out the Phantom Blooper, the legendary white Viet Cong.

Captured, Joker himself makes friends with the Vietnamese communists.  Rescued and discharged he flees Alabama toward the liberated zone.

The only time I ever felt like I was being what an American should be and doing what an American should be doing was when I was a prisoner of the Viet Cong.  I could be real there.  I could be myself.

Click to read the novel.

We never see Joker again.   Gus Hasford died nineteen years ago this Sunday from diabetes then organ failure achieved with hamburgers, milk, cola and beer.

He lived in his car in Los Angeles while writing porn and developing The Short Timers in science fiction circles.   He worked on its movie, published The Phantom Blooper, then started a hard-boiled series about a Marine who deals in books from the Old West.

It is a typical California twilight, clear, perfect, and balmy.  You can smell sea air and pizza.  White-clad window washers on scaffolds are lowering themselves down the face of the monstrous Tomb of the Unknown Veteran they call the Federal Building, a bald concrete monolith overlooking a veterans’ cemetery which extends to the horizon.

David A. Willson at the Hasford symposium. Click to read the transcript.

David A. Willson thinks that The Short-Timers is the great Viet Nam war novel.  David doesn’t read them in French or Vietnamese but no one else will read more in English.

Jason Aaron has erected a website to his cousin with texts of all the novels and much more.  For the next death anniversary Viet Nam Literature Project will review the criticism.

Viet Nam Literature Project blogs about our encyclopedia, our comics and translations as we develop our university program. Donors receive our print newsletter and annual comic book.

Click for the Nguyen Chi Thien page at VNLP.

Our first writer for the year that starts on Monday is the poet Nguyen Chi Thien.  Thien was the first writer we ever published.

The first guest at Tet reflects the aspirations of a household.  Read about Thien in Jonathan Hill’s strip for Viet Nam Literature Comics.

Read our selection from Nguyen Ngoc Bich’s translations of Thien’s prison poems.   See Thien’s own account of his life for Viet Nam Literature Project.

Click for Jonathan Hill's Viet Nam Literature Comic of Nguyen Chi Thien in prison.

Thien’s life and work embody the theme of all the literatures of Viet Nam.  We read and write to live beyond illusion.

‘Real life is like a hospital.
They ply you with such bitter drugs
yet cannot cure you of two ills:
forever you have caught desire and hope.’

Viet Nam Literature Project blogs about our encyclopedia, our comics and translations as we develop our university program. Donors receive our print newsletter and annual comic book.

Moving out of Asian Studies

Eric Henry started playing piano at seven. By high school all he did was make music and read Charles Dickens.

The United States Army ordered him into the classroom to learn Vietnamese.  After interviewing deserters and prisoners of war at Cu Chi, Xuan Loc and Dong Ha he graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College with a thesis on the Tale of Kieu.

Speaking on Kieu

He earned his doctorate in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University while playing organ for a church. In New Haven he made friends with a music librarian who had been left for dead when an army of Chinese with wooden spears over-ran the United Nations.

He made friends also with Huynh Sanh Thong who had married a piano teacher then devoted himself to Kieu, talent bobbing on the sea of fate. Thong published Eric’s “On the Nature of the Kieu Story” in his Viet Nam Forum.

Joan Garnett photo with Pham Duy

At the University of North Carolina for thirty years Eric developed both Chinese and Vietnamese language instruction. His own courses on Chinese historical legend and East Asian popular music grew to enrollments of over one hundred.

Crossroads later published his “Chinese and Indigenous Influences in Vietnamese Verse Romances of the 19th Century.” For our Viet Nam Literature Seminar he twice explained the plot and prosody and compared different translations of the Tale of Kieu.

Moving into the new study at home

Pham Duy, musician of the People’s Army then Saigon then the flight overseas, asked Eric to translate his memoirs which Eric annotated as well. The English versions are not yet in print but see Eric’s articles “Tan Nhac: Notes Toward a Social History of Vietnamese Music in the 20th Century” in Michigan Quarterly Review and “Pham Duy and Modern Vietnamese History” in Southeastern Review of Asian Studies and in Vietnamese at Talawas.

Thong made Vietnamese Studies dance from his Hamden studio as Pham Duy has scored the modern history of Viet Nam.  In his library Eric arranges for English speakers to sing along.

Viet Nam Literature Project blogs about our encyclopedia, our comics and translations as we develop our university program. Donors receive our print newsletter and annual comic book.

Click to read "Theological Reflections on the Vietnam War" by permission of the Anglican Theological Review.

John Parsons Wheeler III graduated near the top of his United States Military Academy class in 1966.  He chose to serve in fire control at a missile base, the front line of our war with the Soviet Union.

After the Army sent him through Harvard Business School he served at the United States Army Vietnam headquarters.  On separation he studied for a year at Virginia Theological Seminary before Yale Law School.

Proceedings of a symposium at the start of Wheeler's movement

West Point, Harvard Business School and Yale Law School produce general officers, managers and counsel.  At Virginia Theological Seminary Jack mastered the specifics of reconciliation.

He published a journal article about separation of brother from brother, men from women and man from self by the American adventure in Viet Nam during our civil rights revolutions.  He already was organizing a movement to redress these differences.

Wheeler expanded his article.

Jack got land on the Mall from Congress, raised money and called forth Maya Lin’s design with a juried competition.  The compromise he forced through the Reagan administration has been the biggest draw in Washington, DC since opening.

The nation had reconciled once before, on the backs of black men and women and those conquered overseas.  Jack’s ancestor Joseph Wheeler, a rebel general, served again in the Philippines after the states of the Confederacy took Congress back.

Wheeler's family and work to middle age are a thread in this group biography.

At Yale there is a monument to that reconciliation, Memorial Rotunda in Woolsey Hall.  Jack and Maya each walked as students through the names of the men on its walls on their way to make something better.

Through his life Jack liked to stand with the church to recite the Nicene creed.  When we wrote that we also decided to remember at this time of year the birth of a man who was murdered.

Viet Nam Literature Project blogs about our encyclopedia, our comics and translations as we develop our university program. Donors receive our print newsletter and annual comic book.

Elizabeth Evenson as PFC in WWII

Peter Brush arrived at Khe Sanh Combat Base on December 17, 1967.   When he got back home he earned a bachelor and master of arts in history.

“Yep, my mother was a Marine. Still is – you know how that goes.

Peter Brush in dress blues

During his service as a librarian he has earned another degree in information science. As a teenager at Khe Sanh he had kept records for Marine artillery.

My father Frederick Brush was a lifer. I grew up on Marine bases. If I told someone I volunteered to go to Khe Sanh and they said I was an idiot for that, I’d understand.

Camp Carroll

He was at the base for the whole time the People’s Army attacked with rockets and shells. The engagement was a focus of American strategy, then journalism, then history.

I was bored out of my skull at Camp Carroll… I asked my boss, the battalion adjutant, if I could get transferred somewhere else…  He said the only place he could send me was Khe Sanh.

Click.

Peter is the witness who writes history from records he helped create, with an ear for what a citizen will ask a librarian. What were the rats like?

So I volunteered to go to Khe Sanh and told my parents what a good place I was in. Next thing you know Khe Sanh is on the cover of Life and Newsweek magazine and on 50% of the CBS evening newscasts for the next 11 weeks.

Firing up a Camel with the Zippo after starting coffee with C-4

If it was a siege how did supplies get in? Where did all those helicopters come from?

I sent this [Polaroid] to my mother in maybe February 1968. I think she carried it in her wallet for a long time, wore it out. It’s the sort of ‘happy camper’ picture we’d send home so parents wouldn’t worry.

Khe Sanh Combat Base

You mean the Marines cooperated with the Army and the Air Force? Did they fly water in?

Note the two tubes sticking out of the ground on the left, just above the road. Those were piss tubes, 175mm artillery powder charge cannisters stuck in the ground with screen covering the top.

4.2" mortar

Why didn’t we just kill all those Vietnamese? How many of us did they kill?

I was in a mortar battery. Our mortars were manufactured by Whirlpool, which struck me as an odd thing for them to make. But that’s what it said on the plate riveted to the mortar.

Shower

How did you all finally get out of there? What is it like to be a Khe Sanh veteran?

We were all amateur carpenters. Everything was made from ammo boxes and pallets, mostly ammo boxes… Ammo boxes came with hinges and latches.

Another shower

His “The Battle of Khe Sanh, 1968″ is not the only professional account by a participant but it is the one that leads to all the others. Articles and books have piled up but the artilleryman who volunteered there thirty-four years ago tomorrow is still the man to ask.

I’m leaning against a trailer that has shrapnel scars in it. The tall structure in the background is a homemade shower. The chimney is from a device that could heat the water using kerosene.

Going home

Peter’s focus on Khe Sanh and the Marines sharpens debate on how the United States sought to defend the Republic of Viet Nam.  Other articles apply his lens to related topics such as civic action, the McNamara Line and the Vietnamese Marines.

I’m a VERY happy camper because I’m just about to get on the plane to come home. That was maybe the best day of my life.”

Click for Peter Brush's page at Vanderbilt University.

When several Marines pointed out that I had neglected to mention Karl Marlantes in our Marine Corps Birthday post Peter volunteered to redress my oversight.  He is preparing a discussion of Karl’s novel and book of essays in light of Marine tactics in Viet Nam to publish here in 2012.

Viet Nam Literature Project blogs about our encyclopedia, our comics and translations as we develop our university program. Donors receive our print newsletter and annual comic book.

Click.

Next Monday is the birthday of novelist Le Luu.   He was born in 1942.

Ho Chi Minh declared independence in August 1945.  After the victory over France in 1954 Le Luu was about the same age as Sai, the small boy already married to a young girl when A Time Far Past (Thoi xa vang) begins.

Click.

Sai flees his marriage into reading then into the Army.  A Time Far Past is a soldier’s book rather than a war novel.

It resembles From Here to Eternity which is about Schofield Barracks at Pearl Harbor rather than the Japanese attack.  Sai leads us through the People’s Army of Viet Nam, the family and village of Ha Noi at war with Saigon.

Click.

He is looking for love.   Fannie notes at Amazon that Sai reads Jane Eyre in barracks.

Jane finds her love eventually but when we leave Sai he has abandoned the Army and all his women and children to serve his home village in a swamp north of Ha Noi.  Le Luu holed up outside of Hai Phong to write his novel.

Ca. 2011 by Hong Thanh Quang

He published A Time Far Past just as the Secretary of the Party called on writers in 1986 to contribute to doi moi, the renovation of Vietnamese society.  To speak of idealism in the hustling present Le Luu looked back through the Army a small boy had joined to get away from his wife.

The novel found a national audience.  When renovation within Viet Nam turned to reconciliation with the United States a team from the William Joiner Center at the University of Massachusetts translated it for the English-speaking world.

Ca. 2010 with poet Bruce Weigl's arm around his shoulder, in front of poets Fred Marchant and Martha Collins, next to his translators Kevin Bowen and Nguyen Ba Chung. Ngo Vinh Hai and David Hunt not present.

James Banerian dismissed A Time Far Past as low-brow and insufficiently anti-communist.  Another student of Nguyen Dinh Hoa, John C. Schafer, later compared the novel to Tran Manh Hao’s Ly than (Separation) that was suppressed at the same time as A Time Far Past won a prize.

More criticism in English will further help readers grasp this romance of the People’s Army.  For today, best wishes and many happy returns to the author.

Viet Nam Literature Project blogs about our encyclopedia, our comics and translations as we develop our university program. Donors receive our print newsletter and annual comic book.

Dr. Nguyen-Hong-Nhiem

Next Thursday will mark Lucy Nguyen-Hong-Nhiem’s seventy-second birthday. Soon after that Viet Nam Literature Project will print Jason Rainey’s comic book about her as a gift to our supporters.

Tales of a Dragon Child tells stories adapted from Lucy’s memoir Dragon Child: Reflections of a Daughter of Annam in America.  It also covers her scholarship on author Pham Van Ky and Lucy’s return trip to Viet Nam after living in America for 35 years.

Dragon Child

The first strip introduces Lucy’s childhood in Viet Nam, emigration, and teaching in Massachusetts.  Lucy began teaching at 14 to pay tuition after Communists destroyed her father’s farm.

After emigration in 1975 she educated young immigrants to high standards for their own ambitions.  Her collection with anthropologist Joel Martin Halpern, The Far East Comes Near: Autobiographical Accounts of Southeast Asian Students in America captures the first generation of young people making their way in the United States after escaping the fall of Phnom Penh, Saigon and Vientiane.

Lessons from the Garden

The second strip, “Lessons from the Garden” is about Lucy’s parents. It retells an old story Lucy heard from her mother and an example her father set.

The old story is about twin brothers in love with one woman. Her father’s example was to bang his head on a wall.

An Unexpected Clash

“An Unexpected Clash” shows Lucy’s work with novelist Pham Van Ky. His themes make an eloquent commentary on Lucy’s life.

Pham Van Ky wrote of the individual and the collective, contrasting France and Viet Nam. Lucy’s own life is a parable about gaining individual power to serve others.

Dragon Child Returns

“Dragon Child Returns” tells of her first visit back to Viet Nam. Lucy provided Jason with photos and spoke to us about her trip.

He shows Lucy’s visit to her brother, a priest who has returned to work with a national minority.  For the print collection Jason has added an original cover, title page and endpapers to the four strips.

Jason Rainey at his drawing table

Jason came to Viet Nam Literature Project through his studio-mate Jonathan Hill.  We are proud to have commissioned his book on Lucy like last year’s on Nhat Linh.

For the booklet of all four Lucy stories make a donation now in any amount.  Support for VNLP promotes talent.

Viet Nam Literature Project publishes a free on-line encyclopedia including our comics and translations. Donors receive our print newsletter and annual comic book.