Station 2
Looking Behind the Names
You can work on your own or with a partner.
Greene probably chose the names Pyle and Fowler for his protagonists quite deliberately.
1. Think of English words that sound like or are written like these names. Which of them fit the characters of the novel?
If you need some inspiration, look up the words pile(s), foul and fowl in a dictionary. Think of different kinds of fowl and consider which connotations they have.
2. Have a look at p. 78 and pp. 125–133 and comment on your findings regarding the meaning of Pyle and Fowler.
Be prepared to present your findings to the other students.
Station 3
What a Country!
Work together in groups of three to five students.
Imagine you are a tourist guide in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Before showing your group of tourists the sights of the city, you give them some background information on Vietnam. Record a tape on which you talk to them about the following aspects:
1. Country and people
2. Religion and culture
3. Politics and economy.
Use the Internet to find information on these aspects. The following websites may be helpful:
www.vietnamembassy-usa.org
www.vietnamembassy-usa.org/learn_about_vietnam/
Prepare a text (5–8 minutes) and record it.
Later, you will be asked to present the tape to “tourists” (i.e. the rest of the class), who might ask additional questions. So be prepared!
Station 4
The Vietnam War – A Historical Overview
Work together with two other students.
1. Each student in your group reads one text and answers the corresponding question
(cf. tasks a, b, or c below). Take notes. Your teacher will provide you with a map.
2. Now tell each other what you have learned about the war in Vietnam. Listen carefully to the information given by the others and take notes.
Be prepared to present the information of all three texts to the rest of the class.
a. John F. Kennedy, “America’s Stake in Vietnam”
On 1 June 1956, John F. Kennedy, then a young senator, gave a speech on America’s political interests in Vietnam. The following excerpt demonstrates the political principles which later, as a president, led him to increase US economic and military support for the Republic of South Vietnam.
Let us briefly consider exactly what is “America’s Stake in Vietnam”:
(1) First, Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone to the arch, the finger in the dike. Burma, Thailand, Japan, the Philippines and obviously Laos and Cambodia are among those whose security would be threatened if the Red Tide of Communism overflowed into Vietnam. In the past, our policy-makers have sometimes issued contradictory statements on this point – but the long history of Southeast Asia being stopped by Vietnamese warriors should have removed all doubt on this subject.
Moreover, the independence of Free Vietnam is crucial to the free world in fields other than the military. Her economy is essential to the economy of all of Southeast Asia; and her political liberty in all parts of Asia – and indeed the world. The fundamental tenets of this nation’s foreign policy, in short, depend in considerable measure upon a strong and free Vietnamese nation.
(2) Secondly, Vietnam represents a proving ground of democracy in Asia. However we may choose to ignore it or deprecate it, the rising prestige and influence of Communist China in Asia are unchallengeable facts. Vietnam represents the alternative to Communist dictatorship. If this democratic experiment fails, if some one million refugees have fled the totalitarianism of the North only to find neither freedom nor security in the South, then weakness, not strength, will characterize the meaning of democracy in the minds of still more Asians. The United States is directly responsible for this experiment – it is playing an important role in the laboratory where it is being conducted. We cannot afford to permit that experiment to fail.
(3) Third and in somewhat similar fashion, Vietnam represents a test of American responsiblity and determination in Asia. If we are not the parents of little Vietnam, then surely we are the godparents. We presided the birth, we gave assistance to its life, we have helped to shape its future. As French influence in the political, economic and military spheres has declined in Vietnam, American influence has steadily grown. This is our offspring – we cannot abandon it, we cannot ignore its needs. And if it falls victims to any of the perils that threaten its existence – Communism, political anarchy, poverty and the rest – then the United States, with some justification, will be held responsible; and our prestige in Asia will sink to a new low.
(4) Fourth and finally, America’s stake in Vietnam, in her strength and in her security, is a very selfish one – for it can be measured, in the last analysis, in terms of American lives and American dollars. […] Military weakness, political instability or economic failure in the new state of Vietnam could change al-most overnight the apparent security which has increasingly characterized that area under the leadership of Premier Diem. And the key position of Vietnam in Southeast Asia, as already discussed, makes inevitable the involvement of this nation’s security in any new outbreak of trouble.
It is these four points, in my opinion, that represent America’s stake in Vietnamese security.
Annotations:
1 stake: (here) interest 3 arch: curved structure supporting the weight of what is above it, as in a bridge or gate • dike: long wall of earth, etc. (to keep back water and prevent flooding) 4 tide: Flut 5 issue sth. ['9Su.:], BE also ['9sju.:]: (here) send sth. out, publish sth. 8 crucial ['1kru.:Sl]: decisive, critical 10 tenet ['tenII9t]: principle, belief 12 proving ground: testing field 13 deprecate sb./sth. ['depr4keit] (fml): feel and express disapproval of sb./sth. 14 unchallengeable: undoubtable 21 determination: firmness of purpose • godparent: Pate; Patin 22 preside sth.: control or be responsible for sth. 24 offspring (sing and pl) (fml): child, children • abandon sb./sth.: give up, leave sb./sth. 25 peril: serious danger 32 Premier Diem = Ngo Dinh Diem (1901–1963): president and head of the government of South Vietnam until his violent overthrow and assassination in 1963
from: Gerhard Kirchner, Dieter Sang (Hrsg.). America’s Vietnam Experience.
Textsammlung für den Englischunterricht. Berlin: Cornelsen, 1999, S. 23–24
Task:
Briefly describe America’s interests in the Vietnam War. What image of America does Kennedy’s speech create?
b. Richard Butwell, “Democracy and Communist Aggression”
The following excerpt from an American encyclopedia deals with the causes of the Indochina conflict and the development of the war.
The Vietnam War – also called the Indochina War or Second Indochina War – may be said to have started in 1957 when Communist-led rebels began mounting terrorist attacks against the government of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). The rebel forces, commonly called the Vietcong, were later aided by troops of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). American combat personnel were formally committed to the defense of the South in 1965.
An agreement calling for a ceasefire was signed in January 1973, and by March the few remaining U.S. military personnel in Vietnam were withdrawn. However, the war between the two Vietnamese sides persisted inconclusively for two additional years before South Vietnamese resistance suddenly and unexpectedly collapsed. Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, fell to the Communists on April 30, 1975.
The causes of the conflict can be traced back to the Indochina War of 1946–1954. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, the French had returned to Indochina as colonial administrators but were challenged by the Vietminh, Communist-led Vietnamese nationalists who had proclaimed an independent government in 1945. France, in an attempt to seem to give Indochina independence while retaining control there, granted nominal sovereignty to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “associated states” of the French Union in 1949. The following year the United States recognized the three “associated states” and began supplying them with economic and military aid, although it was channeled through France. By 1954, the United States was furnishing 78% of the cost of the French war effort. In the spring of 1954, when the French were besieged at Dien Bien Phu, the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave serious consideration to providing them with air and even ground support.
Washington expected little of Ngo Dinh Diem, who assumed leadership in French-controlled Vietnam during the 1954 armistice negotiations that ended the war. After the Geneva Agreement of that year had temporarily divided Vietnam into northern and southern parts, Diem headed the government of South Vietnam in Saigon, while Ho Chi Minh presided over the Communist-dominated government of the North at Hanoi. The Geneva Agreement had provided for elections to be held in 1956 to reunify Vietnam, and the Communists had anticipated that they would win because of their elaborate political organization. For this reason Diem, a determined anti-Communist, blocked the elections – with the backing of the U.S. government. The Communists, unable to unify and dominate Vietnam through elections, then returned to military means of doing so.
First Years of the War. The terrorist incidents that began in 1957 intensified over the next two years. Initially the rebels were Communists left behind in the South after 1954, but they were soon reinforced by others who had moved to the North in accord with the Geneva Agreement. By 1964 the Vietcong rebels had been joined by regular North Vietnamese army units.
The objective of the Vietnamese Communists remained constant throughout the war: the overthrow of the non-Communist Saigon government and its replacement with a regime that would agree to ultimate unification with the Hanoi government. [...]
President Eisenhower had pledged in 1954 to assist the Diem government in “developing and maintaining a strong, viable state capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means.” He sent several hundred military advisers to South Vietnam. The mounting Communist assault against the Diem government and Saigon’s inability to deal satisfactorily with this threat prompted President John F. Kennedy to increase U.S. military advisory personnel to 16,000 by the time of his assassination in November 1963. Some of these men saw limited combat service.
Earlier in November 1963, Diem was overthrown and killed. The U.S. government had clearly despaired of him, and was aware of the plot to remove him. His overthrow increased the likelihood of direct U.S. intervention in the war, however, for a series of incompetent administrations rapidly followed one another in Saigon, and the military effort against the Communists suffered from the political preoccupation of South Vietnam’s leaders.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution, passed by the U.S. Congress in August 1964 after two naval incidents involving U.S. and North Vietnamese craft, authorized President Lyndon B. Johnson to “repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” The question was later raised in Congress and elsewhere as to whether the administration had misrepresented aspects of the Tonkin Gulf incidents, and subsequently it was established that the resolution had been drafted in advance of the crisis. After serving as the main legal basis for major U.S. escalation of the undeclared war, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was repealed in 1970.
Failure of Escalation. Even as late as 1965, when the United States began to step up its participation in the war, Vietnam itself was not the primary consideration in Washington’s Southeast Asian policy. What moved the Johnson administration to act was its desire to reinforce the credibility of the United States as an ally.
During the Johnson years the number of U.S. forces in Vietnam increased from 16,000 to more than half a million, although at the end of 1964 there were still only 23,000. The war was also escalated in other ways: sustained U.S. bombing of North Vietnam began in early 1965; the annual cost of the war increased from $5.8 billion to $28.8 billion between 1966 and 1969; and adjacent Laos, through which ran the system of Communist supply routes known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, was drawn into the Viet-nam War as an increasingly important theater of conflict.
From the Encyclopedia Americana, 1991 Edition. Copyright 1991 by Grolier Incorporate.
Reprinted by permission of Grolier an imprint of Scholastic Library Publishing Inc.
Annotations:
1 Indochina: the southeastern peninsula of Asia 2 mount sth.: set sth. up; organize sth. 5 be committed to sth.: take on the responsibility for sth. 6 ceasefire ['sI:i.sfa94r; BE -fai4]: stop to all fighting
15 grant sth.: give or allow sth. 18 furnish sth.: supply sth. 19 besiege sb./sth. [b91si.d7Z]: surround and attack sb./sth. 22 assume sth.: begin to act in or exercise sth. 23 armistice ['2A:rm9st9s, BE 2.-]: agreement during a war to stop fighting for a certain time • negotiation [n9!'g48USIi1e9S4n]: discussion aimed at reaching an agreement 26 provide for sth.: establish the legal basis for sth. to happen later • anticipate sth. [– '– – –]: foresee sth. 27 elaborate [91'läb4r4t] (adj): worked out with much care and in great detail 32 reinforce sb./sth.: make sb./sth. stronger 33 in accord with sb./sth.: in agreement with sb./sth. 38 pledge to do sth. (fml): solemnly promise to do sth. 39 viable ['va94bl]: able to exist without outside help 45 despair of sb.: give up hope in sb. • plot (n): secret plan, conspiracy
48 preoccupation: state of constantly thinking about sb./sth. 49 naval (adj): of or belonging to a navy or to warships 50 craft (n): boat, ship • repel sb./sth.: drive sb./sth. back or away 54 draft sth.: make a first, rough version of sth. (e.g. a document) 55 repeal sth.: withdraw sth. officially 56 failure ['fe9lj4r; BE -j4]: lack of success • step sth. up: increase sth. 59 ally ['äla9]: person or state giving help or support 62 sustain sth.: keep sth. going 63 adjacent [4'1dZ7e9snt] (adj): close; neighboring 65 theater (fml): scene of important events
Task:
Outline the development of the Indochina conflict and the Vietnam War following it. c. Military Strategies in the Vietnam War
In order to make up for US material superiority the Vietcong guerrillas resorted to hit-and-run tactics, surprise attacks and booby traps ranging from such simple devices as sharpened bamboo stakes in covered holes to grenades, mines and bombs which exploded when a hidden contact was stepped on. They found protection and hiding places among the population and in the vast Vietnamese jungles and were often indistinguishable from the civilian population.
Battles in a traditional sense were very rare. Only in the period from 1965 to 1968 did North Vietnamese strategy allow for occasional head-on confrontations. This phase of the war was terminated with the Tet Offensive (named after the Vietnamese New Year) of February 1968, which, although a military debacle for the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, proved successful politically in turning the American public, shocked by the numbers of American casualties, against the US war effort.
Initially, US ground combat forces were only protecting air bases and supply facilities, but when this did not prove sufficient, the American forces were committed to direct combat. Missions ranged in intensity from “security operations”, designed to help maintain control over roads and waterways as well as political control over villages and hamlets, to “clearing operations”, meant to drive large enemy forces out of populated areas, to “search-and-destroy operations”, designed to find, fight and defeat enemy forces.
Another objective of US military strategy was to eliminate enemy places of refuge or logistic bases. Bunkers and tunnel systems were destroyed with explosives and forest cover was eliminated either by chemical defoliation with Agent Orange or similar herbicides or by razing areas with heavy bulldozers. Civilians sometimes were evacuated to separate them from the Vietcong, and cleared areas would then be declared “free-fire zones”.
Without the usual standards for measuring progress, the US military turned to imprecise statistics: number of villages “pacified”, i.e. brought under US or South Vietnamese control, numbers of miles of highway opened and of enemy soldiers killed. The latter, the notorious “body count”, further eroded American public support for the war in the second half of the 1960s.
A major development in American tactics was the use of helicopters to move troops into battle positions without the risk of being ambushed on the ground by the enemy. In typical airmobile operations, artillery, jet fighters and helicopter gunships raked an area with gunfire while infantry units were flown into the battle area by transport helicopters. Moments before they landed, the supporting fire was lifted and the soldiers embarked from their helicopters with guns blazing. This tactic allowed US combat forces to avoid the ambushing of road-bound reinforcements and supply convoys.
From March 1965 to November 1968, the US conducted bombing operations over North Vietnam. At first the bombing was designed to cut transportation routes in the southern part of North Vietnam and thereby slow infiltration of personnel and supplies into South Vietnam. In 1966, this operation with the code name “Rolling Thunder” was expanded to include North Vietnamese ammunition dumps and oil storage facilities, and in the spring of 1967 it was further expanded to include powerplants, factories and airfields in the Hanoi-Haiphong area. In 1969, American planes bombed North Vietnamese and Vietcong base areas in Cambodia. The operation was kept secret, but reports in American newspapers further fuelled anti-war protests. In 1972, further bombing operations were flown against targets in North Vietnam, mainly to force the North Vietnamese to negotiate and sign a ceasefire agreement.
from: Gerhard Kirchner, Dieter Sang (Hrsg.). America’s Vietnam Experience.
Textsammlung für den Englischunterricht. Berlin: Cornelsen, 1999, S. 47–48
Annotations:
1 resort to sth.: use/do sth. bad in order to succeed or deal with a problem 2 booby trap: (here) hidden bomb that explodes when you touch sth. that is connected to it • stake: (here) pointed piece of wood pushed into the ground 12 initially: at the beginning • supply sth.: provide sth. • facilities: equipment or services that are provided for a particular purpose 13 sufficient: enough • commit sb. to sth.: (here) say that sb. must do sth. 15 hamlet: very small village 18 refuge: place that provides protection from danger 20 defoliation: process of using a chemical substance on plants to make their leaves drop
• herbicide: substance used to kill unwanted plants • raze sth.: destroy sth. completely so that no part is left standing 23 imprecise: not exact 25 erode sth.: make sth. smaller in numbers 28 ambush sb.: attack sb. from a place where you have been hiding 31 embark from sth.: (here) leave sth.
35 infiltration: secret introduction of sb. into (an organisation or place) 40 fuel sth.: (here) give strength to sth. 41 ceasefire: agreement to stop fighting for a period of time, especially so that a more permanent agreement can be made
Task:
What were the main military strategies America and the Vietcong used during the Vietnam War? In what ways did they contribute to America’s problems during the war?
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