Kiersten on The Tragedy of Vietnam

Before reading the book, I knew very little about the Vietnam War and the past events that contributed to the conflict. Only having remembered some main facts about the war from high school U.S. History, I went into this Rhetoric class aware of our country's fear of communism at the time and the vague remembrance of learning about some guy named Ho Chi Minh... and thats about it. Yet as I was reading The Tragedy of Vietnam, I was able to successfully grasp the whole history behind the war through the facts given in the novel. Some of the information was totally new to me and other things I began to relate back to what I had learned from previous classes.
But both this new and old information were presented to me in a viewpoint I had never been exposed to before... an unbiased one. The book does a really good job of telling the story from all sides and viewpoints. It is so common in our society to see movies, novels, and even textbooks that depict the Vietnamese in such a negative light when it comes to the war. And after reading the book, I was truly able to sympathize with the Vietnamese's situation and understand their reasons behind the war as well. Its rather unfair that their independence was denied from them for so long, whether it was by the French, Chinese, or Americans. Also I was never aware of how harsh their leaders, such as Diem, treated the Vietnamese people. The whole idea of democracy was contaminated with with the corruption of the government. The Vietnamese were never really exposed to a stable democracy like the one we have in America, so it is no wonder why they preferred communism instead. With these facts in mind, its easy to understand the viewpoint and hostility that the Vietnamese took towards their situation.