Time to cut the Germans some slack?

-->

UWE SIEMON-NETTO

These days I am proud to be a German. I am saying this not because of my country’s economic and therefore growing political prowess; that would be childish posturing. No, I am proud to be a German because of my compatriots’ admirably serene reaction to the relentless abuse leveled against them by those who mismanaged their own affairs and now expect to be rescued by the Germans who had managed their affairs well.

Night after night, Germans see on television their chancellor portrayed as a born-again Hitler by a moronic rabble in the streets of Greece, Spain, Italy and Cyprus, and in some of major newspapers we read this as well. It hasn’t escaped the Germans’ attention that they were daily targets of hateful slogans during the election campaign in Italy, probably the one European nation they have traditionally loved the most. They know that Silvio Berlusconi, while still prime minister of Italy, publicly questioned the suitability of one of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s body parts for sexual purposes, using a word unprintable even in the German media and most definitely in the prim American press.

Many German friends of mine admit in private that they find it hard to contain their annoyance when reading the inexorably hostile columns by New York Times contributor Paul Krugman, still, they manage to reign in their fury. Others, and here I include myself, are perplexed and saddened that even the conservative American media are curiously restrained in their support or, God forbid, admiration for Merkel’s solitary stamina in the face of a frightening international crisis her government has not caused.

Why is it, I wonder, that I have read nowhere the long overdue profile of this Eastern German pastor’s daughter and scientist who, while holding Europe together in truly Herculean fashion, still goes shopping and fixes her husband’s breakfast and sandwiches before sending him off to work at Humboldt University in Berlin like the good German Hausfrau she is? What happened to journalistic craftsmanship in America? Is there no writer left capable of tackling this fascinating topic tongue-in-cheek but with empathy and, by all means, critical mind? Personalities of much less human fascination receive more attention than she. Is this because she is, Heaven help us, a German?

Have journalistic values become so warped that the industrious, the fiscally prudent and therefore powerful and successful are no longer deemed worthy of some slack? How come that when Europe’s plight is being mentioned on American talk shows everyday life in Germany or, for that matter, Austria, the Netherlands or Finland – the few sane ones in a madhouse – never seems to merit in-depth reporting? How is it that no American reporter goes around asking the average Hans Müller or Liese Schmidt how they feel about their invariable vilification in the streets of Athens and Nikosia, Madrid and Rome?

Do Hans, Liese, Otto or Helga boycott Greek or Italian restaurants in Frankfurt or Munich or pour Italian or Greek wines into the gullies of Hamburg or Berlin the way American innkeepers did with French wines when they felt that the United States was unfairly maligned by the French? Do Germans stay away from their beloved Italy at vacation time? Do they accost visitors or residents from Europe’s troubled south in Stuttgart or Cologne?

The answer to all these last questions is a resounding “NO!”

And this is why, far from being a strident nationalist, I am very proud of this generation of Germans at this very moment.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, has been an international journalist for 57 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs the League of Faithful Masks and Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Capistrano Beach, California. 

DUC: A Reporter's Love For a Wounded People

My new book, DUC - A Reporter's Love for A Wounded People, has received some stunning endorsements:

-->

This brilliant book reminds me of Theodore White's In Search of History. Duc is a compelling and elegantly-written memoir.  But it is much more than that.  Uwe Siemon-Netto challenges facets of our flawed historical memory of  the Vietnam War.  He exposes the false virtue of Vietnamese Communist forces  that brutalized innocents in their quest to impose their totalitarian system on the South Vietnamese people.  And he sheds fresh light and understanding on the experiences of those who endured thatbrutality, wartime reporters, and South Vietnamese and American troops as well as the interactions between them.

                                - Maj. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Ph.D.
Author of Dereliction of Duty:
Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara,
the Joint Chiefs and the
Lies That Led to Vietnam 

-->

          Uwe Siemon-Netto, the distinguished German journalist, has written a masterful memoir of his many years covering the Vietnam War.  He captures, as very few others have, the pathos and absurdities, the combat, cruelties and human cost of a conflict which – as he unflinchingly and correctly argues -- the wrong side won. From the street cafés of Saigon to Special Forces outposts in the central highlands, from villages where terror comes at night to the carnage and war crimes visited on the city of Hue at Tet, 1968, Uwe brings a brilliant reportorial talent and touch.  Above all, Uwe writes about the Vietnamese people: street urchins and buffalo boys, courageous warriors and hapless war victims, and the full human panoply of a society at war.  As a German, Uwe had, as he puts it, "no dog in this fight", but he understood the rights and wrongs of this war better than almost anyone and his heart, throughout the powerful and moving volume, is always and ardently with the Vietnamese people.

- Peter R. Kann, Pulitzer laureate 1972

Former publisher of the Wall Street Journal

and CEO of Dow Jones

         Uwe Siemon-Netto’s memoir about his years as a war correspondent in Vietnam is one of the most touching and moving books I have read in a long time. It is also hilarious. This renowned journalist, a longtime war correspondent for various German newspapers, made me both sad and happy. I did cry at times, but I also laughed. He took me on a splendid journey from Saigon to Hue and back again, always captivating me with his memorable talent and his unique way with engaging words and phrases. I couldn't get enough of his anecdotes about his little friends, a group of street urchins. They slept in his ramshackle car at night, protesting they were doing him a favor by guarding it. His vivid writing brings alive all kinds of unusual cosmopolitan "characters" he met, as well as the innocent victims and brave survivors of this war, in particular the everyday people of Vietnam. His genuine sympathy for the Vietnamese and his understanding of the war that engulfed them help to make this a powerful read.

- Barbara Taylor

Bradford. Author of

A Woman Of Substance and

 Secrets From The Past

Uwe Siemon-Netto, a reporter experienced but still young, German and so not naive about communism, arrived in Saigon to report the Vietnam War at its height. He fell in love with Vietnam and the Vietnamese. But he found Saigon to be a clubroom of armchair reporters, praising each other's idealistic dissent on the war, and followed the fighting into the countryside. There he found different truths -- the horror of the North Vietnamese massacre of young mothers dressed for the festival of Tet, the self-sacrifice of GIs and South Vietnamese troops, the heroic comedy of two WWII veterans -- a German and an English reporter -- bringing order to the chaos of resistance to a Vietcong attack. Every page has an eccentric or brave or charming or cowardly or villainous individual -- Vietnamese, American or European -- brought to life on it. Duc is an angry account of a betrayal of a nation. But there is hope about people on every page too.

- John O’Sullivan, Executive Editor

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2008-2011

Editor-in-Chief, UPI, 2001-2004

Editor, National Review, 1988-2007

It seems appropriate that this meaningful and poetic book written from well ingrained memories going back 40 plus years comes to our attention just as we prepare to celebrate and honor the hundreds of thousands surviving Vietnam veterans who were sent away to defeat communism only to come home abandoned and mistreated by the country that sent them into this hellish war. I had the great pleasure of supervising Uwe during his tenure at the St Cloud, MN Veterans Affairs Medical Center early in my career as a Clinical Psychologist treating combat veterans with PTSD. His earlier book The Acquittal of God helped many of our veterans overcome longstanding painful spirituality issues and this current release will certainly help my generation to better fully understand the horrifying mindset and trauma enforced upon a culture and people by their fellow countrymen.

- James R. Tuorila, Ph.D., L.P.VFW Surgeon General, 2012-2013

Uwe Siemon-Netto’s account of the Vietnam War provides many new details and important insights. It is impossible to read the book without being reminded of Graham Greene's The Quiet American and Bernard B. Fall's Street Without Joy. It is beautifully written, relates very captivating stories and has been superbly translated into Vietnamese by Quy V. Ly and Hien Nguyen.

- Col. (ret.)  Duong Nguyen, MC,

Former Division Surgeon,

1^st Armored Division U.S. Army

Former captain, ARVN Medical Corps

            Every reader will gain much from this book’s empathetic portrait of the countless tragedies the freedom-loving South Vietnamese suffered during and after the Viet Nam war, a war that still haunts many Americans who do not know or remember that their leaders, with the compliance of the American public, opted to enter this war with the commitment of protecting and saving the South Vietnamese from the Communist Viet Cong.  Uwe Siemon-Netto, a German war correspondent for five years in Viet Nam, shows, how Americans at home, unwilling to support their soldiers in a protracted war, together with their throw-away disposition, jettisoned their commitment.  They withdrew their forces, enabling Communists to slaughter millions in pursuit of “liberation,” a duplicitous term the new journalists, as social-advocates, a byproduct of the Viet Nam war, did not question.

- Rev. Alvin J. Schmidt, Ph.D.

Professor of sociology emeritus, Illinois College,

and Lutheran pastor

In this captivating memoir of his time in South Vietnam, Uwe Siemon-Netto describes what that country was really like. Having served there as a U.S. diplomat at about the same time, I can thoroughly vouch for the accuracy of his observations. The book abounds in incidents and episodes amusing, heartwarming, heartbreaking, depressing, frightening and thought provoking. Uwe did not shun danger and witnessed some fierce combat, notably at the bloody1965 Ia Drang battle.

He demonstrated both physical courage and the courage of his convictions, not hesitating to expose and condemn the Communist enemy regime as cruel and intrinsically evil. This was most dramatically illustrated by the notorious 1968 Hue massacre, which he depicts in detail. When Communist forces captured the old imperial capital of Hue during the Tet Offensive they came with prepared lists of leading citizens and foreigners whom they systematically executed. After the enemy was driven out, a mass grave with nearly 3,000 bodies was found, some buried alive.

Uwe has rendered a useful service in bringing attention to this greatest atrocity of the war, which many in our media minimized. Throughout, Uwe demonstrates an abiding affection for and understanding of the Vietnamese people. He fittingly begins the book by noting it ”has been written in the memory of the countless victims of the Communist conquest in South Vietnam,” and then lists them. A word of note: when one begins to read this book, it is hard to put down.

- William Lloyd Stearman, PhD., Director

White House National Security Council

Indochina Staff, 1973-1976  

Forty years ago at the time of this writing, Henry Kissinger - then America's secretary of state - shook hands with his North Vietnamese counterpart in Paris and signed the agreement that seemed to guarantee the long-awaited peace in Indochina ending the bitter war between North and South Vietnam. Prior to signing, Washington told Saigon not to worry. Should the Communists strike again, the United States would respond, immediately and rigorously.

But, of course, this promise was not kept. Two years later, Hanoi attacked with massive conventional armed force, just as it had in the spring of l972. Then the South's valiant soldiers threw back the Communist assault. But in April 1975, South Vietnam fell to Communism, spawning hundreds of thousands of "boat-people" a large part of who found refuge in the United States while many others drowned.

Throughout much of the Vietnam War, Germany's Axel Springer Verlag in Berlin, Europe's largest publishing house with dozens of magazines and papers, had relied on Uwe Siemon-Netto's splendid reporting for general and specialized coverage of the armed and political conflict in Vietnam.

The Vietnamese called him Đức, meaning the German. Now he has chosen this nickname as title of his memoir. This fine book is the proclamation of "A Reporter's Love for a Wounded People," as its subtitle states. It wraps up a rare distinguished career in the trenches.

-  H. Joachim Maitre, former editor of

Die Welt/Welt am Sonntag

Brookline, Mass., March 2013

I was a so-called "'68er," part of the rebellious youth movement of the sixties. In those days my knowledge derived largely from the media of the time. By reading Duc, I now realize this was insufficient to give me a real picture of the conflict. What has not changed, and was underpinned by Uwe Siemon-Netto’s  book, are my feelings about the cruelties and absurdities of war in general."

- Wolfgang Drautz,

Former Consul General of Germany, Los Angeles

 


                                                       

***

IN MEMORIAM

This book has been written in the memory of the countless innocent victims of the Communist conquest in South Vietnam, notably: 

•             The hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children massacred in villages and cities, especially Hué;  
•            The hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamesesoldiers and officials who were executed, tortured or imprisoned after the end of the war;
•         The millions who were driven from their country and the hundreds of thousands who drowned in the process;
•            The brave ARVN soldiers who fought on when all was lost, and their valiant generals who took their own lives in the end;
•              The young South and North Vietnamese conscriptswho died in this so-called war of liberation, which brought no liberty;
•              The 58,272 American, 4,407 South Korean, 487 Australian,
• 351 Thai and 37 New Zealand soldiers who made
• the ultimate sacrifice in Vietnam;
•              My German compatriots who were murdered by the VietnameseCommunists, notably Dr. Horst-Günther and Elisabetha Krainick, Dr. Alois Alteköster, Dr. Raimund Discher, Prof. Otto Söllner, Baron Hasso Rüdt von Collenberg and many others, who came as friends and paid for it with their lives.

UWE SIEMON-NETTO

 

Epilogue

The fruit of terror and the virtue of hope

                        More than forty years have passsed by since I paid Vietnam my farewell visit.  In 2015, the world will observe the 40th anniversary of the Communist victory, and many will call it “liberation.” The Hué railway station, where a locomotive and a baggage car left on a symbolic 500-yard journey every morning at eight, no longer qualifies as Theater of the Absurd. It has been attractively restored and painted pink. Once again, as in the days of French dominance, it is the most beautiful station in Indochina, and taxi drivers do not have to wait outside in vain. Ten comfortable trains come through every day, five heading north, five going south. Collectively they are unofficially called Reunification Express. Should I not rejoice? Is this not just as in Germany, where the Berlin Wall and the minefields have gone, and now high speed trains zoom back and forth between the formerly Communist East and the democratic West at speeds up to 200 miles an hour?

                        Obviously I am glad that the war is over and Vietnam is reunified and prosperous, that the trains are running, and most of the minefields cleared. But this is where the analogy with Germany ends. Germany achieved its unity, in part because the Germans in the Communist East toppled their totalitarian government with peaceful protest and resistance, and in part thanks to the wisdom of international leaders such as Presidents Ronald Reagan and George G.W. Bush, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and partly because of the predictable economic collapse of the flawed socialist system in the Soviet Bloc. Nobody died in the process, nobody was tortured, nobody ended up in camps, nobody was forced to flee.

                        There is an incomprehensible tendency, even among respectable pundits in the West, to refer to the Communist takeover of the South as “liberation.” This begs the question: liberation from what and to what? Was South Vietnam “freed” for the imposition of a totalitarian one-party state that ranks among the world’s worst offenders against the principles of religious liberty, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press? What kind of liberation was this that cost 3.8 million Vietnamese lives between 1955 and 1975 and has forced more than one million Vietnamese to flee their country, not only from the vanquished South, but even from ports in the North, causing between 200,000 and 400,000 of the so-called boat people to drown?

                        Was it an act of liberation to execute 100,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and officials after the fall of Saigon? Was it meant to be a display of generosity by the victors to herd between one million and 2.5 million South Vietnamese to reeducation camps, where an estimated 165,000 perished and thousands more have sustained lasting brain injuries and mental health problems resulting from torture, according to a study by an international team of scholars led by Harvard psychiatrist Richard F. Molina?

                        Since the mid-1960s, political and historical mythographers in the West have either naively or dishonestly accepted Hanoi’s line that this conflict was a “People’s War.” Well it was, if one accepts Mao Zedong’s and Vo Nguyen Giap’s interpretation of the term. But the Saxon Genitive implies that a “People’s War” is supposed to be a war of the people. In truth, it wasn’t. Some 3.8 million Vietnamese were killed between 1955 and 1975. Approximately 164,000 South Vietnamese civilians were annihilated in a Communist democide during that same period, according to political scientist Rudolf Joseph Rummel of the University of Hawaii. The Pentagon estimated that 950,000 North Vietnamese and more than 200,000 South Vietnamese soldiers fell in combat, in addition to 58,000 U.S. troops. This was no war of the people; it was a war against the people.

                        In the all too often hypocritical rhetoric about the Vietnam War over the last 40 years, the key question has gone AWOL, to use a military acronym meaning absent without leave, and the question is: Did the Vietnamese people desire a Communist regime? If so, how was it that nearly one million northerners moved south following the division of their country in 1954, while only about 130,000 Vietminh sympathizers went in the opposite direction?

 Who started this war? Were there any South Vietnamese units operating in North Vietnam? No. Did South Vietnamese guerillas cross the 17th parallel to disembowel and hang pro-Communist village chiefs, their wives and children in the northern countryside? No. Did the South Vietnamese regime massacre an entire class of people by the tens of thousands in is territory after 1954 the way the North Vietnamese had liquidated landowners and other potential opponents of their Soviet-style rule? No. Did the South Vietnamese establish a monolithic one-party system? No.

                        As a German citizen, I had no dog in this fight, as Americans would say. But to paraphrase the Journalists’ Prayer Book, such as hardened reporters have hearts, mine was, and still is, with the wounded Vietnamese people. It belongs to these sublime women who can often be so blunt and amusing; it belongs to the cerebral and immensely complicated Vietnamese men trying to dream the perfect dream in a Confucian way; to the childlike soldiers going to battle carrying their only possessions – a canary in a cage; to young war widows who had their bodies grotesquely modified just to catch a GI husband and create a new home for their children and perhaps for themselves, rather than face a Communist tyranny; to those urban and rural urchins minding each other and water buffalos. What a hardened heart I had, it belonged to those I saw running away from the butchery and the fighting – always in a southerly direction, but never ever north, until at the very end there was no VC-free square inch to escape to.   I saw them slaughtered or buried alive in mass graves, and still have the stench of putrefying corpses in my nostrils.

                        I wasn’t there when Saigon fell after entire ARVN units, often so maligned in the U.S. media and now abandoned by their American allies, fought on nobly, knowing that they would neither win nor survive this final battle. I was in Paris, mourning, when all this happened, and I wish I could have paid my respects to five South Vietnamese generals before they committed suicide when the game was over that they should have won: Le Van Hung (born 1933), Le Nguyen Vy (born 1933), Nguyen Khoa Nam (born 1927), Tran Van Hai (born 1927) and Pham Van Phu (born 1927).

                        As I write this epilogue, a fellow journalist and scholar of sorts, a man born in 1975 when Saigon fell, is making a name for himself, pillorying American war crimes in Vietnam. Yes, they deserve to be pilloried. Yes, they were a reality. My Lai was reality; I know, I was at the court martial where Lt. William Calley was found guilty. I know that the body count fetish dreamed up by the warped minds of political and military leaders of the McNamara era in Washington and U.S. headquarters in Saigon cost thousands of innocent civilians their lives.

                       But no atrocity committed by dysfunctional American or South Vietnamese units ever measured up to the state-ordered carnage inflicted upon the South Vietnamese in the name of Ho Chi Minh. These crimes his successors will not even acknowledge to this very day because nobody has the guts to ask them: why did your people slaughter all these innocents whom you claimed to have fought to liberate? As a German, I take the liberty of adding a footnote here: why did you murder my friend Hasso Rüdt von Collenberg, the German doctors in Hué, and poor Otto Söllner, whose only “crime” was to have taught young Vietnamese how to conduct an orchestra? Why did you kidnap those young Knights of Malta volunteers, subjecting some to death in the jungle and others to imprisonment in Hanoi? Why does it not even occur to you to search your conscience regarding these actions, the way thoughtful Americans, while correctly laying claim to have been on the right side in World War II, wrestle with the terrible legacy left by the carpet bombing of residential areas in Germany and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

                        Reminiscing on her ordeal on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the news magazine Der Spiegel, the West German nurse Monika Schwinn recalled her encounter with North Vietnamese combat units on their way south as one of her most horrifying experiences. She described the intensity of hatred in the facial expressions of these soldiers and wrote that her Vietcong minders had great difficulty preventing them from killing the Germans on the spot. Nobody is born hating. Hate must be taught. Fostering murder in the hearts of young people involved a teaching discipline at which only the school of totalitarianism excels. In his brilliant biography of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, historian Peter Longrich relates that even this founder of this evil force of black-uniformed thugs did not find it easy to make his men overcome natural inhibitions to execute the holocaust (Longerich. Heinrich Himmler. Oxford: 2012). It was the hatred in the eyes of the North Vietnamese killers in Hué that many of the survivors I interviewed considered most haunting. But of course one did have to spend time with them, suffer with them, gain their confidence and speak with them to discover this central element of a human, political and military catastrophe that is still with us four decades later. Opining about it from the ivory towers of a New York television studio or an Ivy League school does not suffice.

                        In a stirring book about the French Foreign Legion, Paul Bonnecarrère relates the historic meeting between the legendary Col. Pierre Charton and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap after France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu (Bonnecarrère. Par le Sang Versé. Paris: 1968).  Charton was a prisoner of war in the hands of the Communist Vietminh. Giap came to pay his respects to him but also to gloat. The encounter took place in a classroom in front some 20 students attending a political indoctrination session. The dialogue between the two antagonists went thus:

                        Giap: “I have defeated you, mon colonel!

                        Charton: “No you haven’t, mon general. The jungle has defeated us… and the support you received from the civilian population -- by means of terror.”

                        Vo Nguyen Giap didn’t like this answer, and forbade his students to write it down. But it was the truth, or more precisely: it was half of the truth. The other half was that democracies like the United States seemed indeed politically and psychologically ill equipped to fight a protracted war. This realization, alongside the use of terror tactics, became a pillar of Giap’s strategy. He was right and he won. Even more dangerous totalitarians are taking note today.

                        To this very day I am haunted by the conclusion I was forced to draw from my Vietnam experience: when a self-indulgent throwaway culture grows tired of sacrifice it becomes capable of discarding everything. It is prepared to dump a people whom it set out to protect. It is even willing to trash the lives, the physical and mental health, the dignity, memory and good name of the young men who were sent to war. This happened in the case of the Vietnam Veterans. The implications of this deficiency endemic in liberal democracies are terrifying because in the end it will demolish their legitimacy and destroy a free society. 

However, I must not end my narrative on this dark note. As an observer of history, I know that history, while closed to the past, is always open to the future. As a Christian I know who is the Lord of history. The Communist victory in Vietnam was based on evil foundations: terror, murder and betrayal. Obviously, I do not advocate a resumption of bloodshed to rectify this outcome, even if this were possible. But as an admirer of the resilient Vietnamese people, I know that they will ultimately find the right peaceful means and the leaders to rid themselves of their despots. It might take generations, but it will happen.

             In this sense, I will now join the queue of the pedicab drivers outside the Hué railway station where no passenger arrived back in 1972. Where else would my place be? What else do I possess but hope?