Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com SAIGON — It’s become fashionable among intellectuals from left and right to talk about the Vietnam War in terms of “lessons learned.” Better yet, critics of U.S. policy write and talk about “lessons not learned.” One of the latter emailed asking me to tell him “in a nutshell” […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com SAIGON ― Memories of a brutal past mingle with images of new beginnings in a region of thick mangrove swamps interlaced with canals from which Viet Cong guerillas more than 40 years ago fired rockets into the heart of the capital of “South” Vietnam. Returning for the 40th […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com SEOUL — Anniversaries have their special appeal. The first anniversary on April 16 of the sinking of the Sewol off South Korea’s southwestern coast evoked emotions of outrage and sadness over the loss of 304 lives, 250 of them teenagers from the same school near Seoul. Anniversaries of […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, EastAsiaIntel.com The Xi Jinping administration’s aggressive power projection in the South China Sea could deal a frontal blow to Beijing’s “peripheral diplomacy,” which is supposed to improve the country’s relations with neighbors in the Asia-Pacific Region. The Xi leadership has redoubled reclamation efforts in several islets and rocks in […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — It’s been forty years since the wars in Indochina ended and the curtain dropped ushering in a new period of darkness for the people of Vietnam and Cambodia. Four long decades since the stunning imagery of North Vietnamese tanks smashing through the gates of Saigon’s […]
By Sol W. Sanders “Authorities investigating the death of Andrew Getty, an heir to the Getty oil fortune, are trying to determine whether foul play was involved.” (Los Angeles Times, March 31, 2015). Jean-Paul Getty’s Tokyo representative and Andrew Getty’ cousin, Jean Paul Getty III (infamous for a celebrated kidnapping a generation earlier) are featured […]
Special to WorldTribune.com by Harlan Ullman For those of us old enough to recall the Vietnam War, fact and reality were obscured and mangled by successive White Houses anxious to reach the delusional “light at the end of the tunnel.” Tragically, at the end of the tunnel lay a quagmire that consumed 58,000 American and […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com Comparisons between the Korean and Vietnam wars have always been misleading if not ridiculous, never more so than when Henry Kissinger, in a new documentary, “Last Days in Vietnam,” says that he and his boss, President Richard Nixon, believed the Vietnam War would end as had the Korean […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com The murder of journalists at the hands of ISIS forces shows how far a few daring correspondents will go to find out what’s going on. Covering wars has always been hazardous, never more so than when highly resourceful, motivated reporters go beyond the protective cover of military units […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com In sunny Florida, while storms and blizzards rage in the American Northeast, old war correspondents from our days in Vietnam and Cambodia talk about those days of fighting in the jungles, of going down remote roads, of running into the bad guys and coming back alive. One of […]