North Vietnam

Dec. 30 1922 Vladimir I. Lenin proclaimed the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 1972 The United States halted its heavy bombing of North Vietnam.

The following is taken from a statement delivered Wednesday before the House Armed Services Committee. The author holds the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. His e-mail is acordesman@aol.com. Nearly half a century ago, I entered the office of the secretary of defense at a time when it was neoliberals who thrust us into a war in Vietnam. Over the years that followed, I saw the same tendency in that war to downplay the risks and threats and internal divisions in the nation where we fought that I see in the way that this administration treats the Iraq war today.

WASHINGTON -- Ross Perot offered during the Vietnam War to "rebuild every destroyed school and hospital" in North Vietnam if Hanoi would free its U.S. prisoners, according to testimony he gave the Senate.In a previously confidential deposition to the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs, Mr. Perot said communist North Vietnam's representatives were taken aback by the offer and never pursued it."Obviously, this just totally disconcerted the Vietnamese because they couldn't imagine that an individual could rebuild their schools and hospitals," he said.

Dec. 30 1922 Vladimir I. Lenin proclaimed the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 1972 The United States halted its heavy bombing of North Vietnam.

MOSCOW -- A document described as a top-secret report written by a senior North Vietnamese general and delivered to the Communist Party Politburo in Hanoi in September 1972 says that North Vietnam was holding 1,205 U.S. prisoners of war at a time when North Vietnamese officials were saying that the number was only 368.A copy of the report was recently discovered in the archives of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow.The report, which has been authenticated by leading experts and has been circulated among U.S. government officials, is being called by some of those experts a "smoking gun" that proves Hanoi has been withholding information about the fate of U.S. prisoners of war in Vietnam.

To Sedgwick Tourison, his book about a secret army of commandos in the Vietnam War is an attempt "to correct a grievous wrong 32 years ago.""It's a story we've covered up for so long. It had to be told," said the 54-year-old Crofton author, who was an interrogator during the war and later an analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). It's not easy, but it's all documented."Mr. Tourison's book, "Secret Army, Secret War," hit regional book stores this month. The 389-page book, published by the Naval Institute Press, is an exhaustive account of the Central Intelligence Agency's attempt to train South Vietnamese commandos to infiltrate North Vietnam.

WASHINGTON -- Thirty years after they were written off as dead, Vietnamese commandos who once worked for the U.S. Army are being abandoned again by a Pentagon that has refused to pay compensation approved by President Clinton, a lawyer for the commandos says.Six months ago, Clinton signed a law providing $20 million in compensation to the commandos, who were hired by the CIA and Defense Department for secret missions in the early days of the Vietnam War.But the Defense Department is balking at making payments.

"Secret Army, Secret War: Washington's Tragic Spy Operation in North Vietnam," by Sedgwick Tourison. Illustrated. 320 pages. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press. $29.95Sedgwick Tourison, a former top analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), has written an exhaustively researched account of a Vietnam War intelligence failure that was ineffective, sustained and brutal in its consequences."Secret Army, Secret War," is the story behind Washington's unsuccessful effort to use small teams of covert Vietnamese commandos to wage guerrilla warfare in North Vietnam.

BY MOST ACCOUNTS, the actor Sean Penn comported himself diplomatically during his visit to Baghdad last weekend. Apparently mindful of the disasters of earlier forays into enemy territory by other thespians -- most notably Jane Fonda's infamous 1972 journey to North Vietnam -- Mr. Penn kept his mouth shut for the most part, saying he had come to learn, not teach. Thank heavens for that. We don't contest Mr. Penn's freedom to attempt to understand for himself the oppression wrought by Saddam Hussein.

Washington. SOME AMERICANS ARE upset when one of their countrymen goes to an enemy capital and speaks out against U.S. bombing, asserting that many civilians are being killed cruelly and unnecessarily. But it happens.It happened 19 years ago in Hanoi, and it happened last week in Baghdad.The outspoken American this time was not Jane Fonda, who won the sobriquet of "Hanoi Jane" when she went there during the Vietnam war and posed at an anti-aircraft gun pretending to fire at U.S. planes. She has sort of apologized since then, and her youthful indiscretions have not kept her from making millions the red-white-and-blue capitalist way.But another career controversialist has had the guts, or the monomania, or the political bitterness, to go to both Hanoi and Baghdad -- and say virtually the same thing both places.

WASHINGTON - Critical to the Bush administration's effort to convince Iraqi civilians that the Americans have invaded their country as liberators, not conquerors or occupiers, is its determination to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. This worthy undertaking, however, appears to be complicating the military effort without avoiding allegations, including self-serving charges by the Saddam Hussein regime, that nonmilitary targets are being hit at a high cost in civilian lives. On ABC News' This Week Sunday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld referred to the inhibitions on military strategy imposed by this consideration.

The Gate, by Francois Bizot. Knopf. 304 pages, $24. Cambodia -- the country, the war -- once seemed a moral, sanctified cause. A lot of wars begin that way, as endeavors identified with absolutes, but in the end the rectitude only added to the horrific misfortunes of the Cambodians. Francois Bizot, a French scholar of Buddhism and Khmer culture, was living in the Cambodian countryside when, at the end of the 1960s, the United States, North Vietnam and the Cambodian revolutionaries known as the Khmer Rouge each assigned themselves the goal of remaking the country.

BY MOST ACCOUNTS, the actor Sean Penn comported himself diplomatically during his visit to Baghdad last weekend. Apparently mindful of the disasters of earlier forays into enemy territory by other thespians -- most notably Jane Fonda's infamous 1972 journey to North Vietnam -- Mr. Penn kept his mouth shut for the most part, saying he had come to learn, not teach. Thank heavens for that. We don't contest Mr. Penn's freedom to attempt to understand for himself the oppression wrought by Saddam Hussein.

JACK FELLOWES spent six years, seven months and 22 days in places nicknamed the Zoo, Camp Hope, Skid Row and, ultimately, the Hanoi Hilton. He and his fellow pilots were left to the tender mercies of Weasel, Pig Eye, Rabbit, Rat and Spanky. Fellowes, a 1956 graduate of the Naval Academy and resident of Annapolis, had much to think about this past Veterans Day weekend, thoughts of quick violence and years of numbing imprisonment in North Vietnam. And comradeship. On his 55th mission, on Aug. 27, 1966, he set off in an A-6 Intruder from the USS Constellation to attack some river barges in North Vietnam "My wingman, Bob Williams, told me we were being tracked [by radar]

WASHINGTON - Late in 1961, President John F. Kennedy dispatched a handful of U.S. military advisers to assist a pro-Western regime fighting Communist insurgents in a small, hot country most Americans had never heard of. That country was South Vietnam, and Kennedy's move set the United States on a track that would convulse society and lead to the deaths of 58,152 Americans. President Clinton's planned visit to Vietnam, the first by a U.S. president since the war, is seen as a landmark in a healing process that many believe began with the release of American prisoners by North Vietnam in 1973 or dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington in 1982.

Pham Van Dong,94, who served as Vietnam's prime minister through three decades of war and reunification, died Saturday, a day before the 25th anniversary of the communists' biggest victory, government officials said yesterday in Hanoi. Mr. Dong, an architect of the communist revolution who combined personal charm with political toughness, had been hospitalized on life support for months before his death, the officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity. Mr. Dong was among a few revolutionaries who wrested Vietnam from the French, then defeated U.S.-backed South Vietnam to bring the entire country under Hanoi's rule on April 30, 1975.

PARIS -- The two million or so murders for which Pol Pot and his movement were responsible in Cambodia all were inspired by a desire to outstrip in revolutionary zeal the Chinese cultural revolution, so as to cleanse Cambodia of "all sorts of depraved cultures and social blemishes."A naive ideological vision of agrarian utopia, stripped of urban and bourgeois influences, was responsible for this genocidal program. It had been worked up in student leftist circles in Paris after World War II, and adopted by the man who later renamed himself Pol Pot. The principal author of the ideology, which he developed in the thesis he presented at the Sorbonne in the 1950s, is still alive, in the Cambodian forest.

IF PRESIDENT BUSH goes to war against Iraq, he should count on being shadowed by a large, angry anti-war movement. Students will not necessarily lead, but commentators who see nothing but Republicans and hear nothing but silence on campuses may be surprised by the level of student activism.The skeptics commonly invoke "the 1960s" as proof that today's students are largely apathetic. But they wrongly compare the uncertain pre-war present to the high tide of campus protest in 1967-1970, when U.S. casualties in the Vietnam war numbered in the tens of thousands.

AS WE approach the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War on April 30 and the reunification of Vietnam under socialist rule, memories of that conflict are still alive and a vital part of American political discourse. During a recent visit to Vietnam, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen pointedly refused to apologize for the U.S. military action there, explaining, as he put it, "Both nations were scarred by this. They (the Vietnamese)have their own scars from the war. We certainly have ours."

WASHINGTON -- There are many memorials in the nation's capital to those who died in past wars, but none to those who survived but returned home disabled, shattered and often neglected.A philanthropist from southern Florida with a large budget, some vivid memories and a simple idea wants to change that.Yesterday, the eve of Veterans Day, Lois Pope and veterans' advocates announced a fund-raising drive for a national memorial for disabled veterans to be built on or near the Mall, home to memorials honoring veterans of the Korean and Vietnam wars.