Regarding the April 5 Counterpoint column titled "America's memory wars and the Vietnam debacle," in two respects professor Jeff Kingston offers readers an incomplete and dated impression of the current state of American understanding of the Vietnam War.
First, a growing body of formidable scholarship undertaken in the United States does indeed take the Republic of Vietnam, its society and its politics seriously. To suggest that that county is today understood in the U.S. as a state led and served by "puppets" of Washington or "imperialist lackeys" is simply not accurate.
Second, this emerging historiography has also come to see the conflict that brought tragedy to Vietnam between 1945 and 1975 as a civil war in which the American intervention, for all its blunders and for all the attention that it drew in the international media, actually played a rather minor part.
The opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect the policies of The Japan Times.
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