POST 4/30/2024 American soldiers in Vietnam

 I was born in South Vietnam and lived there for 16 years. The South meant the territory south of the 17th parallel.  We chose the South to live.  The South was my country.  We weren't rich but we were safe and free.  I had free public education. I never once felt or saw anything to say that Vietnam was invaded by America (Mỹ xâm lược).  As a child, I had contact with American soldiers in downtown Saigon -- my father entrusted me to a group of  American soldiers who were on their leave, touring Saigon, so those soldiers took me home in a taxi.  My father spoke English to these soldiers and they let me ride with them in their taxi.  

As an elementary schoolgirl, I received American aid: paper boxes of cute toys. At our elementary school Đồ Chiểu, we were given immunization shots and free lunches (sandwich bread, etc.,  and delicious cold milk that tasted like cream and did not taste like the over-sweet Vietnamese condensed milk we were accustomed to.).  We were safe in Saigon away from war zones, but during the 1968 Tet Offensive, my neighbors died from rockets. It was said that the rockets were from the Viet Cong who invaded or started an arms uprising in the South during a New Year ceasefire. Fightings took place on the streets in Saigon but we were safe, although my neighbors' house was leveled out into debris. Bodies were carried out from underneath the debris.  I saw the whole thing and, since then, have never forgotten what I saw. Whoever rocketed my neighborhood and killed my neighbors were never tried.     

Later in America, my law class was the last generation who studied My Lai from our criminal law textbook.  Those crazy people who killed civilians were tried before an American military court of law.  It was American soldiers who discovered the killings, saved the remaining villagers, and brought the massacre to justice, in America. The case was put in my American law textbook, 1982.