| ID | 142770 |
| Title Proper | Geography of Vietnam |
| Language | ENG |
| Author | Glassman, Jim |
| Summary / Abstract (Note) | “Vietnam” connotes far more than it could ever denote, and yet it often connotes very little about Vietnam or the Vietnam War. Growing up in the United States during the era of what Vietnamese call the “American War,” I came to associate “Vietnam” with many things, almost none of them contributing to my enlightenment about Vietnam, its peoples, their histories, or the reasons for the military violence wracking the country from the time of my birth. To me, “Vietnam” implied deep social contention in the United States between the “hippy” antiwar protestors and the conservative Americans who felt the former to be unpatriotic; it implied an incomprehensible conflict between Asian forces, some of whose motivations were debated (often impugned as reflecting a strange fanaticism), and American forces whose motivations were similarly contestable; and it ultimately implied both political meltdown and military embarrassment for US forces and their allies. These perceptions, of course, were almost entirely US-centric, and while much of that US-centrism reflects my own upbringing, I believe it also accurately represents the ways “Vietnam” became part of the consciousness of most Americans, right up to the present. |
| `In' analytical Note | Geopolitics Vol. 20, No.4; 2015: p.732-735 |
| Journal Source | Geopolitics Vol: 20 No 4 |
| Key Words | Geography ; Vietnam |