No Front Line

This is the title of a book by Claire Hall about the Vietnam War.

 

It is made from interviews with veterans of that war taken in the last few years by a group of researchers as part of the settlement between the veterans and the Crown, to compensate for the neglect of the veterans' welfare by government since the war ended.

 

You may have heard an interview last Saturday morning between Claire and Kim Hill on National Radio. http://www.radionz.co.nz/audio/player/20144069

 

Monday of this week, when celebrations were being held all over the country to remember the start of World War I, Vietnam veterans in North Taranaki shared a local launch of the book at their monthly get-together.

 

For a couple of years, Margaret has helped Claire look after her three children, and in that process we have become friends with Claire and her husband and the children. So we attended the launch on Monday.

 

1000 copies have already been sold, and the official launch (in Wellington) does not take place till later this month.

 

If you heard the Kim Hill interview you will have gathered that this book is not just about wartime experiences. It has a wash-up chapter at the end which recounts what happened to these service-people when they returned to new Zealand after the war. It also touches on the protests against the war. In that section Claire interviewed me about my part in the protests during the late sixties in Auckland.

 

So we have all sorts of reasons for our interest in this book. It is too soon to have read it all; perhaps we will revisit it when we have finished. But from what we know of it, we can certainly recommend it.

 

The book raises issues of history, of attitudes to war, of treatment of returned servicemen, of the difference between political decisions and the service-people who carry those decisions out. Above all, it raises again the issue of whether the New Zealand Government was on the right track in sending forces to help the US.

 

At the time, most NZers agreed with the Holyoake decision; like him, reluctantly. But there was a big shift here later on. My position arose from my living in India and being open to the informed opinions of people from that part of the world.

 

From there it looked like a colonialist attempt to reimpose foreign control. Just as the Indians had managed to persuade the British to leave them to rule themselves, so the Vietnamese had convinced the French there was no future there as a colony, but the Americans seemed to be trying to recolonize the region under the guise of a campaign against Communism.

 

All these questions are worth another look.