Dagger vs B-52
On the Veterans Day of 1996, there was something new. Among others is the appearance of the Vietnamese woman, Ms Tran Thi Kim Phuc, who has been known to the world in the picture taken by Nick Ut. She was severely burned by a napalm bomb from a South Vietnam Air Force fighter bomber in Trang Bang, 25 miles west of Saigon in 1972 when Phuc was 9 years old.
She was then treated intensively in South Vietnam hospitals and living quietly in her village. In 1984 a Dutch reporter revealed her address and the Communist government brought her to Saigon to stage a propaganda campaign. Then Hanoi sent her to Cuba for schooling. She got married to a Vietnamese fellow there and both ran away from the plane which stopped at Newfoundland, Canada for refueling on its way from Moscow to Havana. The couple asked for and were granted asylum in Canada.
In fact, during he Vietnam War there were thousands of horrible scenes by both sides, much more shocking than the Phuc's photograph. However those scenes seldom caught the sight of reporters. If composite pictures could be drawn from memories of Vietnamese who witnessed the horrors of War, we could have a collection that will frighten the most heartless Mafiosi. Unfortunately, very few or none of such pictures have ever been published outside Vietnam. And rarely did people in the world know that many of the assassins, authors of those horrible pictures are now senior officials and army officers in the current Ha Noi regime.
In the first row of such collection, we could see a woman half naked, eviscerated, her breasts sliced off only because she was the wife of an unarmed village official who refused to support the Viet Cong.
Another picture produces no much shocking at the first look, but very creepy at further thinking . An army officer with both arms tied in his back and hung at the top of a tall bamboo. His eyes were blindfolded with a dirty piece of cloth. Inside the cloth and over his eyes were two slices of raw cowhide. After a day with flies swarms feasting on the cowhide, larvae began worming their way into his eyes balls and then farther inside his skull. No one dared to help him until an army unit arrived. But the young lieutenant had passed away, his eyes eaten up from two bloody sockets.
Any sight of war victims like the picture that brought Nick Ut a Pulitzer prize would certainly shocks people who look at, whether the victims were children of a family supporting the VC or faithful to the South Vietnamese government, whether the victims were injured by a South Vietnamese pilot or a VC guerrilla. Nevertheless, the perception of the individual who used the weapon makes the differences.
A pilot drops a bomb or launches a rocket or triggers his machine-guns on the given target which appear to him more a dot with coordinates on the map more than the humans. The same things happen to the artillery crew, who usually do not see people injured by their shells.
A VC terrorist, sapper, or death squad member however, killed his victims with his knife or his gun or grenade with full perception about their victims as the human, as the individuals. They beheaded, buried alive, dismembered, eviscerated the unarmed local government officials, blew up cross-country buses and theaters whose owners failed to pay money to the VC financial agency, the vital branch of the insurgence..
Any action that causes injuries to the civilian population should be accused. On the side of the South Vietnamese government and the US Armed Forces in Vietnam, unscrupulous use of air and artillery fire did cause unnecessary losses of human lives and properties.
But the losses are far less than death and destruction done by the Vietnamese Communist guerrillas. Though they were all documented by the South Vietnam government, the victims killed by the Communist side - about 1,200 in 1958 to 4,000 in 1961 - were mostly unreported, mainly because the Western media had no space and time to carry such news. But it has been the Communist terrorism that played a major part in the Vietnam War and defeated South Vietnam and its American ally. Although the terrorists' weapons were knives and hand grenades, they proved more effective than the B-52's.
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