The Devil's Trick: How Canada Fought the Vietnam War - Softcover

Boyko, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0735278024 ISBN 13: 9780735278028

Verlag: Knopf Canada, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

Forty-five years after the fall of Saigon, John Boyko brings to light the little-known story of Canada's involvement in the American War in Vietnam.

Through the lens of six remarkable people, some well-known, others obscure, bestselling historian John Boyko recounts Canada's often-overlooked involvement in that conflict as peacemaker, combatant, and provider of weapons and sanctuary.
 
When Brigadier General Sherwood Lett arrived in Vietnam over a decade before American troops, he and the Canadians under his command risked their lives trying to enforce an unstable peace while questioning whether they were merely handmaidens to a new war. As American battleships steamed across the Pacific, Canadian diplomat Blair Seaborn was meeting secretly in Hanoi with North Vietnam’s prime minister; if American leaders accepted his roadmap to peace, those ships could be turned around before war began. Claire Culhane worked in a Canadian hospital in Vietnam and then returned home to implore Canadians to stop supporting what she deemed an immoral war. Joe Erickson was among 30,000 young Americans who changed Canada by evading the draft and heading north; Doug Carey was one of the 20,000 Canadians who enlisted with the American forces to serve in Vietnam. Rebecca Trinh fled Saigon with her husband and young daughters, joining the waves of desperate Indochinese refugees, thousands of whom were to forge new lives in Canada.
 
Through these wide-ranging and fascinating accounts, Boyko exposes what he calls the Devil’s wiliest trick: convincing leaders that war is desirable, persuading the public that it is acceptable, and telling combatants that the deeds they carry out and the horrors they experience are normal, or at least necessary. In uncovering Canada’s side of the story, Boyko reveals the many secret and forgotten ways that Canada not only fought the war but was forever shaped by its lessons and lies.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JOHN BOYKO is the author of seven previous books, including Cold Fire: Kennedy's Northern Front, which was shortlisted for the Dafoe Literary Award for non-fiction, and Blood and Daring: How Canada Fought the American Civil War and Forged a Nation, which was shortlisted for a Governor General's Literary Award for its English-to-French translation, Voisins et ennemis. La guerre de Sécession et l'invention du Canada. Boyko is an op-ed contributor to the Globe and Mail, Calgary Herald, Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Maclean's, and more. He also writes entries for the Canadian Encyclopedia.

He has addressed audiences across Canada and appeared on radio and television discussing his books and various historical and current political issues. The Globe and Mail has called Boyko "a distinguished scholar of Canadian political history" and the Winnipeg Free Press has praised his "encyclopaedic knowledge of Canadian history."

Boyko has earned degrees from Trent, Queen's and McMaster universities, served on and chaired many boards, and been elected to municipal office. He lives in Lakefield, Ontario.

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INTRODUCTION


STORIES THAT MATTER

War is about sending our children to kill theirs. The devil’s trick is convincing leaders that war is desirable, the rest of us that it’s acceptable, and combatants that everything they are doing and seeing is normal or, at least, necessary.

Canada has always been a warrior state. It has fought or involved itself in war proudly, often reluctantly, and sometimes covertly. Some wars were noble pursuits and others just good business. Sometimes forgotten, and even at the time widely denied, is that among Canada’s wars was the Vietnam War, the slow-motion tragedy that revealed the devil’s trick at its wiliest.

There were Canadians in Vietnam fighting and dying in American uniforms; others were working in Canadian-run hospitals; and there were Canadian diplomats in Vietnam who tried to stop the war before it began, and then monitored its carnage. There were Canadian weapons in Vietnamese cities, villages, and jungles and falling from the sky. Back home, young Americans flooded north to escape the war, while Canadians were taking to the streets to urge lawmakers to stop it, or at least end Canada’s involvement. When the guns finally fell silent, if only for a while, more Canadian diplomats headed to Vietnam. Soon, thousands of desperate refugees fled postwar madness, many finding sanctuary in Canada. The war changed everything and everyone it touched. The war changed Canadians. It changed Canada.

One cannot fully comprehend the Vietnam War without understanding Canada’s role in it. One cannot fully understand Canada or the United States without considering the war’s lies and lessons. We deserve the truth, and we need the lessons, because the Vietnam War still echoes in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, who we are not, and who we aspire to be.



We must begin by placing the war in its time. First, the war’s American phase and Canada’s involvement, from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, occurred during a period of sweeping changes in Canada and the United States that challenged all that had been considered certain. A generation that had suffered the Depression and fought the Second World War and were finally enjoying peace and prosperity, were being confronted by attacks on unspoken rules. Those in defiance of all that was thought proper presented discomforting questions about who should be in charge and who should know their place; whether more people should share the benefits of good times; and even the relevance of material comfort. The Civil Rights and burgeoning Indigenous Rights movements were forcing re-evaluations of original sins. Quebec’s Quiet Revolution saw bombs killing innocents amid demands for Canada’s splintering or, at a minimum, a fundamental redefinition of nationhood. A youth quake, reflected in music, fashion, art, and attitude, and fuelled by the raw clout of baby-boom numbers was redefining social norms. The Women’s Movement’s Second Wave and the licence afforded by the newly invented birth control pill were slowly spurring changes from bedrooms to boardrooms.

As the war progressed through the sixties, its brutality was seen every night on the widely watched Canadian and American television evening news programs —along with police dogs ripping flesh, night sticks cracking heads, radicals throwing rocks at the prime minister, fires consuming buildings, the public murders of progressive leaders, protests in universities, and young men burning draft cards.

Within the broad context of so much challenge and change, the war united some families and divided others. It unified the movements and linked individuals in the streets with those privately hoping for change. In Canada and the United States, Vietnam became a symbol for all that was wrong and needed to be fixed or torn down. Until late in the war, Canadian and American political leaders and the business and media elites who supported it seemed wedded to the status quo. The power structures they represented became the ramparts to be breached by those wanting to replace the old with the new. Communities split as the elites drew support from those who felt that anti-war beliefs, the various movements, and all those long-haired kids were unpatriotic and dangerous.

Second, we must contextualize the war by recalling that it was part of the larger Cold War. In the Second World War the liberal West joined the communist Soviet Union to defeat the fascist Nazis. Even before Hitler shot out what was left of his brains, however, the alliance was crumbling. At the February 1945 Yalta Conference, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union planned a postwar world with Soviets and Americans struggling for global dominance. With the war’s end, guns and money were sent to the competing sides in every nationalist movement, civil war, and crooked election. In August 1949 the Soviet Union successfully tested its first nuclear weapon. The West appeared to be no longer safe. Just two months later, a decades-long revolution ended with the formation of a communist government in China. The West appeared to be no longer winning.

In 1945 Igor Gouzenko, a young clerk working in Ottawa’s Soviet embassy, had defected and revealed there were communist spies operating in Western countries. In February 1950, American senator Joseph McCarthy began insisting that communists had infiltrated unions, the government, the military, and Hollywood. People were encouraged to see “reds” under every bed and to choose to be dead rather than red. Four months later, communist North Korea invaded the non-communist South, and Canada joined the American-led coalition to push it back. Meanwhile, books, comics, and movies told of alien invasions as tremendously popular cowboy movies and television shows spoke of taming frontiers— but they were all really about battling communists. Three strings of radar lines across Canada’s north watched for incoming Soviet bombers. Communities practised air raid drills, families built fallout shelters, and teachers taught children to hide under their desks in the faint hope that the thin bit of plywood would protect them from a nuclear onslaught.

The “Red Scare” led most Americans and Canadians to support more of their tax money being diverted to defence and more of their personal freedoms being ignored to weed out subversives. For a while, it also led a majority of Canadians and Americans to support the fighting of communists in Vietnam as parents tucked their children into bed each night knowing that either by design or accident, nuclear annihilation could be visited upon them before breakfast.

Finally, we must also consider the war from the Vietnamese perspective. The war’s roots can be traced back to 111 BCE, when an ethnic group called the Viet was conquered by China, leading to a centuries-long struggle for independence. In the 1600s Portuguese and then French missionaries began converting the region’s people to Christianity. In 1857 French ships arrived to support priests who were being mistreated by locals. Attacks on those ships led to an invasion and by 1897 the creation of French Indochina, composed of what later became Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Vietnamese nationalists attacked the French colonizers as they had the Chinese.

Ho Chi Minh was among a group of outspoken nationalists deported by the French in 1911. Ho’s thirty-year exile took him around the world, even to the United States, where he lived for a while in Boston and New York City. Ho was in Paris when world leaders assembled at Versailles to settle the recently ended First World War. American president Woodrow Wilson was promoting self-determination as a guiding principle of the postwar world, and Ho wrote...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Canada
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0735278024
• ISBN 13: 9780735278028
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland