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Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

• offtop5 5y ago
  I absolutely love seeing history from different perspectives. The White Silk Dress is an amazing Vietnamese War movie.
• 1cvmask 5y ago
  Some great visuals and imagery of the bombing of the Vietnamese can be found in the Ken Burns documentary series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vietnam_War_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vietnam_War_(TV_series) Note: the imagery can be graphic and those afraid of seeing genocidal scenes and babies bombed should be warned.
  • neilpanchal 5y ago
    Ken Burns’ documentaries are profoundly life changing and shocking. Every person should learn about the history of war, especially during this time.
• VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
  These are some great photos! But I really do wonder if "the winning side" was _actually_ the winning side. It seems to me that nobody won, and it's very likely that the Vietnamese people ultimately lost bigtime. USA fought a similar war a decade earlier in Korea and now South Korea is one of the preeminent countries in the entire world. Imagine what could have been for South Vietnam? Instead the entire country has been basically poverty-class Nike factory workers for the last 50 years.
  • tjpnz 5y ago
    Have you seen Vietnam in the last 10 years? Sure, it's not what I would call a wealthy country but I didn't see much poverty either over my 6 months there - some of it spent in the countryside.
    • alephnan 5y ago
      Yet the largest city frequently floods with a foot of water during monsoon season. There is growing wealth disparity with the people at the top enjoying modern luxuries, yes.
      • tjpnz 5y ago
        >Yet the largest city frequently floods with a foot of water during monsoon season. Same thing can be said about parts of Tokyo during the typhoon season.
        • alephnan 5y ago
          That's funny because I actually live in Tokyo. My family also owned a property next to a guy in Vietnam who owned a collection of 30 Ferraris. To suggest Tokyo's flooding problem is anywhere close to Saigon is disingenuous.
          • tjpnz 5y ago
            I'm guessing you don't live near the Tamagawa River then. Granted this was 18 months ago but I remember there were evacuations and road closures in Setagaya. Things were a bit more dire on the Kanagawa side. I recall something similar happening the year before too.
            • alephnan 5y ago
              As seen in the movie Parasite depicting the stark contrast between rich and poor South Koreans, there is a scene where the entire neighborhood is flooded My point being, you can cherry pick and see every city gets flooded. The difference with Saigon is flooding occurs throughout the city in critical areas. Government funds and projects exists to address these issues but the whole amount never gets allocated to properly developing the sewage infrastructure. Instead, hotfixes such as building the roads higher. This is a never ending back and forth with civilians building barriers or building their house higher so the water floods back into the streets. That's just one example of lack of infrastructure
  • idlewords 5y ago
    Leaving aside the question of whether anyone won that war, have you been to Vietnam? The country is developing extremely rapidly.
    • JCharante 5y ago
      My jaw dropped the first time I went to Royal City in Hanoi. I hadn't seen anything like that in the US.
  • trhway 5y ago
    >But I really do wonder if "the winning side" was _actually_ the winning side. It is well beyond winning and losing sides in such wars. There is a foreign invader and the local population fighting against the invader tooth and nail with the invader losing it despite better/bigger weapons, economy, army. In many such wars one could make an argument that giving in to the foreign invader may have been a better option, at least in the long run, yet the deep guttural tribal drive to defend the Motherland takes over any of the rationality. I mean for example the Russian peasants, being by all the parameters slaves of Russian nobility, were fighting French in 1812 only to return to the same slavery like position after the war.
  • pirate787 5y ago
    China, which intervened in the Korean War at the moment of North Korea's complete military collapse, has not been held to account for the horrific North Korean regime it saved and still protects. China doesn't want a unified Korea and the North Korean people pay the price.
    • temp8964 5y ago
      China fought in the Vietnam war too, just not as directly as the U.S. Without the U.S. supporting the south, the north will easily win with the full resource support from China. People who don't understand the historical context like to say the U.S. did not need to involve in the Vietnam civil war. This is simply wrong. If the U.S. did no get involved, the Chinese Communist government will support communists throw over government one after another, millions and millions more people will die in civil wars and communist cleansing. The world will look totally different today. Got downvoted on this. LOL.
      • pmoriarty 5y ago
        "If the U.S. did no get involved, the Chinese Communist government will support communists throw over government one after another, millions and millions more people will die in civil wars and communist cleansing." This sounds like the Domino Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_theory
        • temp8964 5y ago
          Chinese Communist government got involved in the communist evolutions in all the neighbor countries. And international communists did help each other in different countries to over throw legitimate government. Takeover the whole world was the goal of the international communists. Those are all facts, not a theory.
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  • kureikain 5y ago
    You are confused two thing though. First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US. I don't see anything wrong with it. Their people, born in that country, fight that war, and they win. Second, after the war, the winning party didn't do a great job to improve the country and condition. That's another discussion.
    • throw0101a 5y ago
      > First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US. And some people did not want to live under socialism/communism, and asked the US in defending themselves. The two countries, North and South Vietnam, and their allies, agreed to end hostilities: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords North Vietnam then broke that agreement: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_spring_offensive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_spring_offensive * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-education_camp_(Vietnam) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-education_camp_(Vietnam)
      • nguyenkien 5y ago
        Without USA & France we wouldn't suffer from that war
        • throw0101a 5y ago
          No doubt. And without the US and the UN the people in South Korea would be living in the same conditions as North Korea IMHO. I'm honestly curious how a non-socialist/communist South Vietnam would look like. (I speak as someone whose family is from Central/Eastern Europe: so while I was not born in a totalitarian system, I visited family a few times while it was still around.)
          • platinumrad 5y ago
            You are aware that Vietnam was eventually reunified under the North right? And that it's nothing like North Korea today?
  • yongjik 5y ago
    Well, during and after the Korean War, South Korea was under a corrupt dictator who killed several hundred thousand civilians for being communist. Its economy didn't improve until 60s, and it couldn't be really called a democratic country until mid-90s. So it's a bit of a stretch to claim that South Korea became today's South Korea because it survived the war in 1953. One could equally say that Vietnam's economic development in 2000s validates North Vietnam's victory.
    • tasogare 5y ago
      True, and North Korea current poverty is totally made by the international sanctions lead by the US. Vietnam is a great example that a communist country can open slowly if not bullied into a antagonistic position by the US.
      • germandiago 5y ago
        Do not defend communism, man... you have too many history records to know it is a failure in all senses: poverty and lack of freedom. For the record, China and Vietnam is not what I would call communist. That is more North Korea or Cuba. In Vietnam even foreigners can buy property already nowadays. I do not recall the exact conditions but I know people who did it. It is a capitalist system, actually. With a lot of control sometimes, but with market rules. It is not about the sanctions. It is the system chosen. Everyone that has intellectual honesty knows that. There is a lot of literature about the problem of economic calculation in socialism systems proved by how russians did theirs, for example (black markets and copying countries budgets, the U.S. army compared to the russian one is an example of such a thing). And do not make me started on the repression, that is the worst part. But all go hand in hand at the end. Vietnam is developing, and I am glad it is. But what they are doing is not communism at all, do not sell us that. I have been living there for almost 10 years and I hope I can come back. It is a lovely country.
        • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
          "Everyone that has intellectual honesty knows that" If we are into intellectual honesty, then North Korea does not match any features of Socialism or Communism I've ever read or heard of. Tt is a totalitarian absolute monarchy bordering on "worship god emperror"
  • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    They won, but the cost was enormous. We grieve 58,000 deaths, but they lost more than a million (the figures are very fuzzy). Their soldiers lived rough as hell, and weren't particularly well-equipped. We bombed the living hell out of them. We used napalm. Being an NVC was a tough gig. From what I can see, Vietnam is actually starting to thrive, and I sincerely wish them the best.
    • jimmies 5y ago
      To put that into perspective, the US has lost more than half a million people due to the Coronavirus. Vietnam lost 50 people. And there was no war.
      • VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
        How do you know that Vietnam has only lost 50 people?
        • jimmies 5y ago
          Let's just say the government is super evil and they covered up 99 deaths every 100 deaths for some reason, although we have no evidence that they did. They lost 50,000 people. The US lost half a million. Are you happy now?
          • VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
            Let me ask you something. Do you think a south-east asian country with ~100,000,000 people only had 50 people die from the COVID-19 virus? Answer honestly
            • ufo 5y ago
              The CDC currently rates Vietnam's covid levels as "Low" https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/covid-1/coronavirus-vietnam https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/covid-1/coronavirus-vie... It's generally seen as having as effective response against the pandemic. They closed borders early and have employed an effective testing and tracing strategy. Their data appears to be transparent and is corroborated by neighboring countries.
  • random314 5y ago
    Attributing south Korea's success after 1980 to US intervention in 1950 is disingenuous. South Korea had an economy that was similar to or slightly worse than North Korea until the 80s. This is a classic example of "white man's burden" where south Korean success in 1980 is being attributed to white intervention in 1950, which was followed by decades of poverty. Apparently Koreans can't build a country without American help. Perhaps north Korea would also have been in much better shape without US sponsored world wide sanctions. If you want to know the consequences of American intervention, latin America is impossible to ignore. Especially Haiti.
  • kumarvvr 5y ago
    Winning a war and living with the consequences are two very different things. Vietnam won the war. At great cost. Things might have been different if they lost. But the US did lose the war, come out of the region and its primary objective of preventing a socialist govt. in Vietnam could not be achieved. Was it worth it for Vietnam to win the war, that is a totally different question. Was it worth it for US to lose the war? Definitely not. The mightiest nation on earth could not overcome a peasant nation with guerrilla fighters and outdated equipment. That is a slap in the face.
• tibbydudeza 5y ago
  I wonder how the misadventures of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan would have played out had we had this sort of media coverage - CNN and others was just an extension of the Pentagon.
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  • not2b 5y ago
    CNN was founded in 1980. The US withdrew from Vietnam in 1973 and Saigon fell in 1975. US media coverage of Vietnam near the end of the war was much fairer than cable news coverage of the Iraq wars, though it was still US-centric it did start to show the atrocities. During the Vietnam war US media were much freer to go out on their own (at great personal risk); the Gulf War model was for the Pentagon to manage coverage by having the press "embed" with military units so they would think like the US soldiers they were with.
  • redis_mlc 5y ago
    Iraq wasn't a misadventure. The ultimate goal of removing Saddam and destroying the Iraqi army (4th largest) were important strategic goals because oil, although the reasons given to the American people were at best superficial. Saudi Arabia and other countries paid for part of the US military effort, around $40 billion. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/saudi-arabia-pays-us-500m-offset-costs-us-troops-region-pentagon https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/saudi-arabia-pays-us-500m... Afghanistan is a strange story and isn't well-understood by Americans. Its location is important, as well as its natural resources. Ideally Russia, Pakistan and the US would have come up with a plan to occupy it since the Taliban is certainly a threat to Pakistan, as well as the Russian border. (Pakistan is reluctant to fight the Taliban because of Islamic ideology swaying lower ranks in the Pakistani army. But Russia and the US worked at cross-purposes. In some ways Afghanistan and Palestine are similar - nobody wants them or to be responsible for them.)
• rudolfwinestock 5y ago
  As you look at those photos and read the captions, keep in mind that the people who migrated from North Vietnam to South Vietnam outnumbered those in the opposite direction by at least a factor of two while that war lasted. Also keep in mind that, after North Vietnam successfully INVADED South Vietnam, one to two million million people crossed open ocean, through shark-infested waters, in hand-made boats in order to get away from the regime which those photos extol. The pictures on that website are communist propaganda and should be taken as seriously as those made under the Soviet Union or East Germany.
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  • ku-man 5y ago
    "... after North Vietnam successfully INVADED South Vietnam..." You cannot invade your own country. If anything the invaders were the US.
  • mc32 5y ago
    That war was multi-faceted in many ways. There was the internal struggle between a corrupt government which was loath to reform (land reform as the US suggested) and on the other hand, the Communists who had become ideological and who killed and re-educated their own countryfolk from the losing side. Then there were external forces at play, France, then the US, the USSR and China. Finally the old guard was replaced by the new guard and VN and the US reconciled at long last.
  • pessimizer 5y ago
    > As you look at those photos and read the captions, keep in mind that the people who migrated from North Vietnam to South Vietnam outnumbered those in the opposite direction by at least a factor of two while that war lasted. You might also keep in mind the millions killed in the bombing of the north. Might make me want to go south, too.
    • refurb 5y ago
      This was in 1954 when the country was divided. What bombing are you talking about?
• jimmies 5y ago
  I am a software developer in the US with a Vietnamese origin, so I am no historian and my views are probably skewed. I am among the minority Northern Vietnamese people in the US, most Vietnamese people in the Bay Area are (refugees) from the South. People can tell where one comes from with one's accent. It was undeniable that much suffering and injustice was done for Southern people, especially after the war ended. So many still have a lot of resentments against the Hanoi government in particular and people from the North in general. Some still secretly view Northen international students in the US as red princes and princesses. The truth is far from that, they are just ordinary people looking for a better life. Many of the Northern people also have resentments with the current government as much as anyone else. However, I have to say much of the suffering and conflict is fading. I am so glad that in the last three years I was in the Bay Area, I have made many new Vietnamese friends, and have gone to many Vietnamese-owned shops buying groceries. I have not once had bad experiences with anyone in here. We spoke to each other and caring about each other despite of the differences. When I was a student in the US, I borrowed as many books and DVDs about the Vietnam war I could from the library and began watching to understand where I came from, and what to make of the war. I am still searching for the answer. One thing I began to understand is the reason that the North won the war. The people from the North did have a charismatic leader and more importantly, they had a sense of righteousness and revenge when they participated in the war. I still remember vividly, one day I watched an (American) documentary about a farmer after the 1972 bombing operation. The bomb killed all of his family members and all the pigs he raised and left him with nothing. He cried and vowed to fight till he dies. The guy had lost everything, he had nothing left to lose. That was the moment I realized it was inevitable that the North would inevitably win. I see that pattern a lot in places that talked about the war, for example in the article: >She was only 24 years old but had been widowed twice. Both her husbands were soldiers. I saw her as the embodiment of the ideal guerrilla woman, who’d made great sacrifices for her country. I do not have as much exposure (or at least as much as I wished) to the literature, arts, and music of the South, but I can say that the sense of righteousness while fighting wasn't as strong in places that I have looked into. My (personal and flawed) conclusion is that it wasn't the policy, the brainwashing, or the political power of communism, or the help of Russia that made the North win. They won despite despite being poor as hell, they won despite being communist, and they won despite having lost more troops. They won because they took part in the war with a sense of righteousness. By chance, I just revisited the Vietnam war and the scar it left a couple of days ago, how much it matters in my everyday life, and wrote an essay about it on my blog. Here is the blog I wrote a couple of days ago about the war, btw, if you're so interested: http://www.tnhh.net/posts/lullaby-of-the-artillery.html http://www.tnhh.net/posts/lullaby-of-the-artillery.html
• amatecha 5y ago
  What is the "winning" side? War comes at a massive cost for all participants. Interestingly the URL for the article implies the original name was "Vietnam war images from Vietnamese photographers" and was later changed to what it says now... I don't mean this as a slight to Vietnam whatsoever of course, I just don't understand using words "winning" and "losing" when anywhere from 1.5-4 million people died.
  • knowaveragejoe 5y ago
    It's interesting, the "winning side" in this case overwhelmingly supports free market capitalism when surveyed today: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/10/09/emerging-and-developing-economies-much-more-optimistic-than-rich-countries-about-the-future/inequality-01/ https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/10/09/emerging-and-d... So who really won?
  • henvic 5y ago
    Completely agree. The "winning" side might be politicians or high-ranking army officers. The population? In almost all cases, they are the real losers, regardless of which sides they sympathize with, if any.
    • sharkjacobs 5y ago
      Indeed! And you could say that the real "winners" of this year's Super Bowl were the fans and spectators! Or, more cynically, perhaps the advertisers and other corporate interests who profited from it. That's a reasonable thing to say and not at all willfully ignoring what is meant when someone talks about the winner of a competition between two opposed parties.
  • DoctorNick 5y ago
    Really; More bombs in tonnage were dropped in three months than the entirety of WW2. The devastation wrought by the US on Vietnam is still being felt today, particularly the use of Agent Orange. The birth defects stemming from exposure are horrifying.
• fallingfrog 5y ago
  Looking at those pictures, I would not have predicted them as the winning side. The picture of the field operating theater in the middle of a swamp is particularly moving. They must have felt they were fighting against unbelievable odds: the most powerful military in the world, with all the bombers, the agent orange, the napalm, the best equipment.. it must have taken a lot of courage to keep up the fight against that. Especially as they watched all their compatriots dying like flies.
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• nsonha 5y ago
  "...by the mid-’70s, a force the U.S. military conceded was one of the finest in the world" I wonder how much of this is truth, or it's just the US trying to save face by claiming that they've lost to a world-class military.
  • rudolfwinestock 5y ago
    It's saving face. Robert McNamara was several different kinds of fool. JFK & LBJ were even bigger fools for keeping him as SecDef. Later, when Nixon became president, the situation changed for the better, but it was a slog. Nixon had promised the South Vietnamese premier better terms than what LBJ was offering, but, by the time he came into office, the situation had gotten so bad that it was all that he could do just to guarantee South Vietnam's existence. Nevertheless, the situation stabilized. The North Vietnamese army was pushed out of South Vietnam. Nixon got the North to sign a cease-fire agreement, which the North (being perfidious communists) violated. And the South Vietnamese army got good enough that, after Nixon had pulled American ground troops out of the area, South Vietnam was able to defend itself from North Vietnamese aggression, for a while. In 1972, North Vietnam sent 150,000 troops—along with columns of tanks from the Soviet Union—to invade South Vietnam. The latter had American air support, but only its own troops on the ground. Result: Less than a third of North Vietnam's invasion force made it back north. Roughly 650 Americans were KIA in a campaign as big as the Battle of Kharkov. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam had won, big time. Then, Watergate happened. In 1975, North Vietnam—violating the cease-fire agreement AGAIN—launched another invasion of South Vietnam. The Soviet Union continued to support North Vietnam. The Congress of the United States of America pulled all support from South Vietnam. Result: Yet another workers' paradise blighting the history of the twentieth century. And the kind of gloating you can see in this discussion thread.
• aantix 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hiNanqC5aQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hiNanqC5aQ My dad was a hospital corpsman on the USS Repose (hospital ship) during Vietnam. Having seen some of his operating room photos, I can't imagine that we were on the "winning" side. The video above is his amateur footage he took while aboard the ship. Probably 1968/1969. I had the film digitized after he passed in 2016.
  • xtracto 5y ago
    Dont imagine and look at the article . They refer to photos taken by vietnamese photographers. It is actually pretty good.
  • dopeboy 5y ago
    This is really cool, what an honor to see. Thank you for digitizing the footage and sharing it to the world. Couple q's if you're up for it: * What camera did he have? Was it common in that era for cameras to not have a mic? (not complaining, just curious) * Did he ever watch the footage, after the war? I know some veterans, depending on how they processed their experience, just block it all out. * Can you share more on what he thought of his service there?
    • aantix 5y ago
      * I'm not sure of the specifics of the camera. But the reels of film say "KodaChrome Movie Film Super 8" on their boxes. * I don't think he ever saw the footage. I would assume that at some point he had a projector, but as far as I can remember, he just always kept them in his top drawer. He always talked about getting them transferred to VHS. Never did it. * He's in the video at 38 seconds in. I assume his buddy from the previous frames filmed him. https://youtu.be/1hiNanqC5aQ?t=38 https://youtu.be/1hiNanqC5aQ?t=38 He didn't like the military. He had a lot of explosive outbursts I remember growing up. Later in his life, when he was finally convinced to see a VA doctor, he was diagnosed with PTSD with - 100% related to the war. He received full disability but very late in life. He was fired from so many jobs during his lifetime.
    • relaxing 5y ago
• codeproject 5y ago
  People in the pictures are all pretty skinny. It looks like they must have a healthy diet.
  • BigHackerBalls2 5y ago
    U mad tankie
• marcodiego 5y ago
  The photo https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-StC-dVAdOns/YK081DEgPdI/AAAAAAAAdzo/MsqfJwfGeC4cpLRoMMLPK6zcpSvOgJjBACLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/vietnam-war-images-from-vietnamese-photographers%2B%25283%2529.jpg https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-StC-dVAdOns/YK081DEgPdI/AAAAAAAAd... is probably a captured M16 since, AFAIK, Vietnam used AK-47. What impressed me the most: "Using home-brewed chemicals, they developed their pictures in the open air or in underground tunnels" if by chemicals to develop photos in open air means no need for a dark room, that is really not something easy to do with then available technology. It is basically Polaroid chemicals quality. Also "The Americans denuded the landscape with chemicals to deny cover to the Viet Cong." means chemical weapons. How the US avoided international courts is something that should be better explained. Specially considering Iraqi invasion decades later alleging chemical weapons suspicions. Some pictures look extremely noise and grain free for such old photos. Makes me think they are probably digitally enhanced or Vietnam chemicals were really first class quality.
  • lanna 5y ago
    Maybe they developed the photos in open air at night?
  • pavlov 5y ago
    "...if by chemicals to develop photos in open air means no need for a dark room" I don't think that's what it means. They presumably developed the photos in near darkness, either during the night (open air) or in those tunnels.
  • azernik 5y ago
    Legally, whether something is a "chemical weapon" depends on whether it's used to attack people, or is used in population centers where many people will be directly injured regardless of intent. See also the legal wrangling around US use of white phosphorous, which is 100% legal if used as an "illuminant" [https://treaties.unoda.org/t/ccwc_p3 https://treaties.unoda.org/t/ccwc_p3] (i.e. for flares), but not as a weapon against people.
    • wumpus 5y ago
      Also for smoke, apparently: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/world/middleeast/22phosphorus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/world/middleeast/22phosph...
• stolen_biscuit 5y ago
  There's a lot of people in the comments saying that Vietnam didn't really "win" the war. Their political and military objectives were ultimately successful, those of the US/South Vietnam were not. That's what a victory is. The cost of victory was very high, but it was a pretty unambiguous success for the Vietnamese.
  • ska 5y ago
    It's impressive how deep some of these psychological things run nearly 50 years on. It was such a blow to self-image that, let alone all the related domestic political fallout, people still have a hard time accepting what happened. The sheer amount of ink and celluloid spent trying to come to terms with this is awesome, and a little depressing.
    • enraged_camel 5y ago
      I'm not a native-born American and don't feel like I have skin in that game. I just feel like in war, there may be victors, but there are no winners. Especially in the modern age, if you get in a war, all sides lose. Victory is just a matter of who manages to lose less.
      • xenophonf 5y ago
        In war there are no winners, only widows.
      • stjohnswarts 5y ago
        This is a cliche understanding. Wars can and have been won since warfare started. However, the actual people doing the fighting aren't winning, they're just dying and mostly (unless defending their own country) giving up their most valuable asset (life) so that rich men can play Axis and Allies.
      • stolen_biscuit 5y ago
        I think WW2 had pretty decisive winners and losers
• vmception 5y ago
  I saw a French movie about a French soldier in Vietnam set in 1945 I was also in France at the time when viewing the movie, it was very surreal in so many ways to be empathizing for a protagonist on one of the enemy sides - from an American perspective as I am an American. But I had never seen anything depicted about that war decades before the US got involved. I had never seen a war movie produced outside of Hollywood. Or a director with primarily french influences producing a war movie. It was sensual, horrific, erotic, fascinating. I dont think it would get greenlit by American studios. Maybe some streaming services have it though.
  • xsmasher 5y ago
    What is the name of the film?
    • vmception 5y ago
      I need to look it up from the time and place I was there, I'll edit if I find it in two hours or make a separate comment edit: Les Confins du Monde (English: To the Ends of the World), 2018, directed by Guillaume Nicloux I'm not immediately seeing where to stream it, I would really like to view it again! With English subtitles!
      • xsmasher 5y ago
        Thank you. You're right, doesn't seem to be streaming yet. https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/to-the-ends-of-the-world https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/to-the-ends-of-the-world
        • vmception 5y ago
          A DVD is available on Amazon without subtitles. The first step
  • hvs 5y ago
    There are some depictions of the French occupation of Vietnam in the beginning of "We Were Soldiers".
• nickthemagicman 5y ago
  The American news media propaganda reported these people as savages and this to be a noble war for 'DEMOCRACY'. The Vietnamese and the hippie generation knew this was bullshit. The American news media may be the biggest propaganda machine in the history of the world.
• skzv 5y ago
  I wrote a quick script the other day to colorize directories of family photos. I realized it would be cool to colorize these photos, too. Here's the album: https://imgur.com/a/aJbpMjf https://imgur.com/a/aJbpMjf The script uses the Image Colorization API from DeepAi. Here's the repo for the colorizing model itself: https://github.com/jantic/DeOldify https://github.com/jantic/DeOldify I don't think the DeepAi API allows you to adjust the model parameters, but you definitely can if you run it yourself from the repo above or a colab instance (e.g. https://colab.research.google.com/github/jantic/DeOldify/blob/master/ImageColorizerColabStable.ipynb https://colab.research.google.com/github/jantic/DeOldify/blo...). MyHeritage also offers this API as a service with tunable parameters. If you want some quick results on your own BW images, just set your own DeepAi API key as an env var and run this script: https://github.com/skzv/colorize-photos https://github.com/skzv/colorize-photos
  • ghostly_s 5y ago
    Please don't do this.
    • Firerouge 5y ago
      Why not? I've also colorized pictures and video frames using these same sorts of processes. It's reasonably quick and works pretty well
      • xwdv 5y ago
        It’s fake, and pretty soon people will not even want to entertain the idea of looking at photos or videos that are not in color.
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        • lethologica 5y ago
          That’s discounting the scores of people who prefer to watch cinema in black and white. Many movies are now coming out with black and white variants (Snyder cut of Justice League, Mad Max: Fury Road etc) black and white isn’t going anywhere. Saying this is like saying people won’t want to read books any more because digital text exists.
• ethagnawl 5y ago
  I recently read Garth Ennis' _Punisher: The Platoon_ and it does a great job of humanizing "the winning side". The art in that book (Goran Parlov) is excellent and reminds me a lot of the photos in this series.
• refurb 5y ago
  The sourcing of these photos is terrible. Several are from before the US involvement, namely the Plain of Reeds photo which is from the French War in Indochina. Plus, many of these photos are staged propaganda photos, in particular the battle scenes. After an enemy surrendered, POWs would often be told to “recreate” the battle. Actually battle photographs from the north are blurry and a bit more chaotic.
  • dundarious 5y ago
    I only see one other battle scene (NVA soldiers dash) aside from the Plain of Reeds photo.
    • refurb 5y ago
      The other photos are posed as well. The downed wreckage, the Ca Mau operating room in the swamp, the Lam Son 719 photo are well known photos that were staged. You can find similar photos from the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. The French POWs were asked/made to recreate the final battle for photographers. An Eastern Bloc country, I believe the USSR or East Germany, sent photo equipment and photographers to North Vietnam. They understood the propaganda value of these photos. And don't get me wrong, these photos are very valuable in reinforcing morale and swaying international opinion. The West does it too. There was less staging of photos by the West back then as they tended to have more people taking photos of the action at the time.
      • selimthegrim 5y ago
        I’m pretty sure USSR published a photo book “Vietnamskiy Reportazh”
• mort1merp0 5y ago
  I have a friend who served as a tank gunner in Vietnam. Has was wounded and sent home. He ended up with 4 teeth left after his jaw has been shot. He refused to accept that the US lost. No amount of reasoning would make him budge on that opinion. I dropped the subject as it was a risk to our friendship. I understand where he is coming from though. To have lost so many friends in addition to his personal injury, it would mean to him that it was all for nothing if he were to acknowledge it as a loss. [edit - a word]
  • badmadrad 5y ago
    it wasn't all for nothing. there was time when Americans cared about advancing a free world. Free from soviet style communism. And this was an ideal worth sacrificing for. Unfortunately, Americans have been demoralized by propaganda to the point of seeing freedom as something not worth dying for.
    • objektif 5y ago
      It is not your business or anybody's business to dictate what type of world people should live in. DropPing napalm on children is definitely not the right way to convince people on your vision of free world.
    • Cipater 5y ago
      When I think of the word "propaganda", the first two things that come to mind are the Nazis and the "fight against communism".
      • fighterpilot 5y ago
        Because South Korea would be so much better off today had it fallen to Kim Il Sung rule...
        • diragon 5y ago
          Impossible to say definitely. North Korea military spending has been around 25% of its GDP, which is said to be one of the top reasons why its economy plateaud in the 70s. Would it have needed to be so high if they had annexed the whole peninsula, and would they had closed up like they did if they had decisively won the war? Perhaps not: Vietnam certainly did better.
• dmitryminkovsky 5y ago
  These are really neat. One photo has this caption: > Even using antiquated WWII rifles such as these, the Vietnamese were able to cripple or down many U.S. aircraft. Seems impossible? Allied aircraft were flying at least 5-10,000 ft, at least 300mph?
  • anikan_vader 5y ago
    Small arms have a ceiling of around 10,000 ft, so aircraft flying at 5,000 ft would definitely be vulnerable. And 300mph is fairly slow compared to a small arms projectile traveling maybe 1700mph. Even today, fighter jets will often try to stay above 10,000 ft, roughly where small arms and flak peter out. I could easily imagine WWII rifles having some success damaging helicopters, which were (and compared to modern fighters still are) low and slow.
  • meheleventyone 5y ago
    There were a bunch of Forward Air Controllers who flew smaller, slower planes much lower to direct air strikes. In particular those flying in support of SF missions flew low routinely. Although the predominant danger is still going to be flak and large machine guns rather than rifles. Then you also have attack helicopters and troop transport helicopters are particularly vulnerable whilst loading and unloading who all fly lower and slower.
  • samus 5y ago
    Dive-bombing (no clue whether that tactic was/is still in use) and strafing aircraft fly a lot lower when attacking ground targets. The danger is so great that ground-attack planes like the A-10 Thunderbolt are designed with survivability in mind and carry a lot of armor.
• Daub 5y ago
  European now living in Vietnam. One thing I learned pretty quickly about the Vietnam war... it was two wars:the French War and the American war.
  • edgyquant 5y ago
    Technically it was three, the third Indochina war took place between Vietnam and China
    • nemo44x 5y ago
      Don’t forget the 5 years of Japanese occupation sandwiched in there.
      • Carioca 5y ago
        Japanese occupation was before the two wars cited though. It went French colony -> Japanese occupation -> War against the French -> War between North and South (with US siding with te South)
  • Haga 5y ago
    According to the north it was one war of independence against France, the US and then China.
• michelpp 5y ago
  "From 1964 to 1972, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world made a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic bombs, to defeat a nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny, peasant country—and failed. When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won." A Peoples History of the United States - Howard Zinn
  • cloverich 5y ago
    > a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic bombs That book is extremely pro communist (hence the title). This is a pretty poor take on the war for several reasons, not least of which "maximum military effort" and didn't use most powerful weapons are somehow in the same sentence. They literally did not use their maximum military effort (not just on the atomic bomb front). It was a political war full of mishaps that were capitalized on by North Vietnam. I also thought PRC and Russia backed North Vietnam which seems relevant. The general point that military might isn't the sole determinant of a wars outcome is true and important -- and also pretty obvious.
    • kiliantics 5y ago
      they dropped more bombs in Vietnam than in WWII, I'd say that sounds pretty maximal
      • cloverich 5y ago
        If they didn't use their full force it is by definition not maximal. But that's skirting the point a bit. The quoted passage (and the book) are a very biased take on history in general. Zinn wants the narrative to be that powerful technocrats couldn't overcome the people backed by some mythical cause (communism) whose good is the ultimate destiny of mankind. The reality is Vietnam was in civil war, and super powers were backing differnt sides. The US literally could not use its maximal force because it risked escalating into a larger conflict (China, Russia, etc). The real story is nuanced, complex. The US did lose -- nobody is contesting that here. But the quoted passage (and much of the book) is as much an attempt to spin the narrative as is "The US could have won if it wanted to".
• badmadrad 5y ago
  The US was fighting a proxy war with the soviet union. We had no interest in defeating the vietcong as much as stopping the spread of communism. Ho Chi Minh was a KGB agent and the communist revolution was largely born of soviet agitprop. So there is another layer to this conflict. Even though vietnam "won" they really were just puppets in a shadow war and it came at a huge cost for them. Much less than US.
  • objektif 5y ago
    Are you saying millions of Vietnamese who really wanted to kick out what they believed to be invaders puppets???? It is very CNN of you to say such a thing.
  • dundarious 5y ago
    My understanding is that Ho Chi Minh was agitating for French socialists to join Lenin's 3rd International in the 1910s. I don't think he was a Soviet "agent" in any way, and had his own beliefs, aligning with Bolsheviks, certainly. However, you can definitely argue Vietnam was a client state of USSR.
    • badmadrad 5y ago
      Ho Chi Minh was trained at Lenin's "Comintern" with the expressive goal of training foreign assets to spread Soviet communist interests. These assets would be funded and supplied by the soviets to agitate revolution in their countries. This essentially is an agent.
      • dundarious 5y ago
        OK, I see what you mean by agent now. I had assumed you meant "receiving and following orders", but receiving training (including ideological) seems more in line with your meaning. I do think almost every leader in South and Central America in the latter 20th Century could be called a "CIA agent" by that definition though. Not something I'd say.
• kyle_morris_ 5y ago
  Anyone looking for context of what it was like as a soldier fighting for the north in the Vietnam war, I highly recommend The Sorrow of War[0]. I read it in college in a Vietnam and the US History class and it was blown away. This book, along with The Things They Carried[1] are worthwhile reads. [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrow_of_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrow_of_War [1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Things_They_Carried https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Things_They_Carried
  • Loughla 5y ago
    I was introduced to The Things They Carried in my freshman high school English class. That was a tough row to hoe as a 13-14 year old. I never understood why it was in there. Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong and Style were especially weird in the in-class discussions. That was 25+ years ago, and those classroom talks still stick with me. That teacher was either an unbelievable genius, or an insane person. Not sure.
• chewz 5y ago
  My ex-wife Grandmother had spent over 10 years (1964-1975) in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as a reporter on the Vietnamese side during the Vietnam War and consecutive conflicts (Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia 1978). She was the first European to walk all length of Ho Chi Minh trail, lived in Saigon undercover during American occupation and wrote couple of books about the Vietnam Wars. She was telling a lot of stories and I remember some people from US visiting her in 90s hoping to use her contacts in order to find some lost American POWs. Unfortunately her books had been not translated into English. https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monika_Warne%C5%84ska https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monika_Warne%C5%84ska https://www.amazon.com/PFADE-DURCH-DEN-DSCHUNGEL-Vietnam-Report/dp/B002HMFQ4O https://www.amazon.com/PFADE-DURCH-DEN-DSCHUNGEL-Vietnam-Rep... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh_trail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh_trail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese_W...
  • michelpp 5y ago
    > Unfortunately her books had been not translated into English. Sounds like an excellent opportunity. Has anyone considered crowd sourcing a translation? I'd chuck in 10 bucks to read it and there's certainly a lot of history buffs out there looking for a fresh perspective.
    • chewz 5y ago
      Mind that Monika was reporting for largest communist daily in Poland - her books are good reporting, lots of focus on people involved in the war but there is also a propaganda narrative. On the other hand her reporting angle is much better then some Western "useful idots"[1] like Tiziano Terzani [0] (der Spiegel), who had been calling Pol-pot 'great man with a vision for a nation' even on his deathbed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiziano_Terzani https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiziano_Terzani [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot https://ruj.uj.edu.pl/xmlui/handle/item/231066 https://ruj.uj.edu.pl/xmlui/handle/item/231066
      • michelpp 5y ago
• cies 5y ago
  The US is repeatedly on the wrong side of history. And they cannot even face that. Red scare. Supporting neo-liberal-to-fascist govts. Yelling democracy but then killing democratically chosen representatives when they do not "suit de US likings". Bitching about some "meddling" in their election when the history is full of US meddling in democratic process of other nations. Giving "foreign aid" to apartheid regimes. US looked like a force of good after WW2, but that deteriorated quickly. Not that other western nation states are holy, but the US seems to be the ringleader.
  • cies 5y ago
    Now I know HN is not all about jokes. But this came to mind in context of this most horrible war the Viet had to fight to gain independence from their colonial overlords: https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/6zefas/the_flag_of_the_united_states/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/6zefas/the_flag_...
    • noduerme 5y ago
      Never mind the horrors inflicted by the North on their newly liberated Southern brethren, 800,000 of whom fled by boat (many to take up successful lives as immigrants in the evil, racist USA).
  • hansor 5y ago
    You should investigate CIA/NATO funded clandestine operations such us GLADIO involving terror attacks in Europe against civilians. AKA "strategy of tension". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_Due https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_Due https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:JOC_1990_324_R_0186_01&from=EN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:J... >The August 2, 1980 bombing of the Bologna train station which killed 85 people, is widely recognized as a Gladio operation. While it was initially blamed on the communist “Red Brigades,” eventually, right-wing and fascists elements were discoverd to be the culprits. Two Italian secret service agents and Licio Gelli, the head of the infamous P2 Masonic lodge, were convicted in connection to the bombing. >1969: “In Italy, the Piazza Fontana massacre in Milan kills 16 and injures and maims 80 [….] during a trial of rightwing extremists General Giandelio Maletti, former head of Italian counterintelligence, alleges that the massacre had been carried out by the Italian stay-behind army and rightwing terrorists on the orders of the US secret service CIA in order to discredit Italian Communists.”
• christkv 5y ago
  The political impossibility of invading North Vietnam meant the war became an insurrection in the south, at that point I think the conflict became a competition of will to win and the north and Vietcong were more motivated. If it had been a full on traditional war like in Korea the conflict might have ended differently but the risk of a full blown world war would have been high.
• Nimitz14 5y ago
  > Viet Cong meet the enemy face-to-face, most likely in the Mekong Delta or Plain of Reeds. This rare image shows both sides in combat, ARVN soldiers at the top and Viet Cong in the foreground. The VC have flanked the enemy at left and right, which likely meant the ARVN unit was wiped out. This photo is a well known to be staged. Makes me doubt the authenticity of everything else.
  • opium_tea 5y ago
    I thought that looked pretty dubious. Do you know of anywhere to read up on it? edit: some reddit discussion here https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/44gfpz/astonishing_rare_images_of_the_vietnam_war_from/czq5vvh/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/44gfpz/astonishing...
    • DeliriumTrigger 5y ago
      You mean there weren't photo ops on the american side? Come on it's war there is propaganda everywhere take it all with a grain of doubt.
  • treis 5y ago
    The operating picture looks staged too despite the caption claiming otherwise. Battlefield hospitals tend to be chaotic and bloody things. Not peaceful and calm operating rooms without a drop of blood in sight.
• tha0xb3 5y ago
  The Vietnam War: a series of huge tactical wins for the US that lead to an overall strategic failure. Very few wars in history end that way.
  • nemo44x 5y ago
    More or less. The Tet Offensive was crushed and had Saigon supporting troops pushed into the North quickly, there’s a chance the war would have ended differently. The North was massively depleted at this point. But the political and propaganda goals of the Tet Offensive worked and made the USA timid when it should have been aggressive. It was at this point that citizen support for the war began to fade quickly as the media incorrectly reported that VC were making progress and couldn’t be stopped, in essence unwittingly passing along the propaganda that VC hoped would spread. Not sure the outcome would have been different in the end though. The people were colonized by the French and then the Japanese and then the French again - the USA wasn’t looking like the great liberator.
    • nsonha 5y ago
      Not saying I want that to have happened but the USA don't have colonies, in the traditional way that the French and the Japanese do
• jcaldas 5y ago
  If anyone here is interested in Vietnam war photography, I highly recommend the book Vietnam Inc., by Philip Jones Griffith (1971).
• gifnamething 5y ago
  >A guerrilla in the Mekong Delta paddles through a mangrove forest defoliated by Agent Orange. The Americans denuded the landscape with chemicals to deny cover to the Viet Cong The official line, maybe, but untrue. Agent Orange was used to destroy crops. Its side effects and lasting effects are well known, but the focus on these are to the detriment of awareness about why the US used it. The indiscriminate destruction of food for combatants and innocents alike is genocide.
• valprop1 5y ago
  It's interesting how history differs in perspectives. Great read!
• graycat 5y ago
  some thoughts on the Viet Nam war.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    A whole lot of excess words here, because the key point was here: “The US […] supported the French return to Viet Nam.” It was a US continuation of the reassertion of French imperialism, and as long as that imperialism continued, Hanoi wasn’t looking to roll over and avoid conflict, but to win it. Which, you know, they did. The opportunity to avoid the war was for the US not to try to take over the failed French imperialist mission.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • fsckboy 5y ago
      what you are saying is just not true. France gave up any claim to Vietnam in 1954. The US involvement was to attempt to stem the spread of communism, not to help the French.
• numpad0 5y ago
  Is the trend of "publish with sensational title, switch to benign version to continue growth" creeping into HN or is it the fate
  • nabla9 5y ago
    I don't think it's sensational to say that North Vietnam won and South Vietnam lost.
    • numpad0 5y ago
      Original title for this post was “Rare Vietnam War images from the winning side”
  • koheripbal 5y ago
    HN is not the same place it was a few years ago. It's a victim of its own success.
• hermitcrab 5y ago
  I went to Vietnam a few years ago. The locals I spoke to had a very dim of view of their government, saying that it was deeply corrupt. It is a shame that the extraordinary sacrifices made fighting the French and then the US resulted in such poor outcome for the Vietnamese people.
  • Carioca 5y ago
    As a counterpoint, it does not seem to a foreigner that their government is worse than average
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    > I went to Vietnam a few years ago. The locals I spoke to had a very dim of view of their government, saying that it was deeply corrupt. I feel like if you asked random Americans on the street how they felt about their government the sentiment would be at least as bad.
• camillomiller 5y ago
  These pictures are stunning. Each one of them is so powerful. We've really only been shown our side of history. Le Minh Truong is an astounding photographer, and one that should be as celebrate as Robert Capa, or many other Western photoreporters. Impressive. The picture with the two women and the fishnet is one of the most beautifully composed pictures I've ever seen, period. And I've seen a lot. Insane that I never got to see these pictures before today.
  • sandworm101 5y ago
    >> We've really only been shown our side of history. Really? Maybe if one confines one's self to US TV news channels. There have been plenty of books, films, and documentary series that address the Vietnamese side of the war. If I were to recommend one, I suggest "Vietnam Minefield" (2005), covering the Australian's improper use of a minefield that resulted in countless bombings as Viet Cong forces repurposed captured mines as IEDs. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0488904 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0488904 https://donaldwilliamtate.medium.com/the-minefield-australias-greatest-military-blunder-of-the-vietnam-war-9abb817142a1 https://donaldwilliamtate.medium.com/the-minefield-australia...
    • camillomiller 5y ago
      I've always known that, yes. Yet, as an Italian kid of the 80s I've been raised by American and American-influenced media way more that I would like to admit. I knew the US were wrong, but there was still a disconnect between that and the depiction of the American War (as they call it in Vietnam) I took as "standard" for so long. My wake up call was 2017, during the first of a few trips to Vietnam. The War museum in Saigon is impressive. Despite having known qiute a bit about the conflict, for example, I had never heard of My Lai. Boy, that was hard to watch. I also was not aware of Cu Chi. I'm surprised I didn't get to see pictures from Le Minh Truong in Vietnam, or maybe I did, and I didn't recognize their power back then? There's also an easy language barrier, as this part of history is mostly told in languages different from the ones I speak.
      • sandworm101 5y ago
• pknerd 5y ago
  After a few decades or years someone will come up about afghan war, the next Vietnam for US.