Batrioldman
Dear Sir,
I am not a dreamer
to send this letter
to you, The President of USA
the Top Representative
of Uncle Sam,
The old man with high nose
Always wears the stars & strips hat .
I am a Vietnamese Poet
Who only want to have a chat with you !
I always ask myself some question like this :
A lot of human lives of this misery-world
will be eliminated for the other’s survivals !
Is that the destiny of the Humanity ?
Have we, the humanity on this poor globe
already been putting our steps
into the third World War ?
and been being bathing under the ammunition-fires ?
And will we dance together
in the atomic fire-ball next time ?
Let’s look back
the common sad part
of our histories!
When Mr.Graham Martin
The last Ambassador of USA
in the Vietnam War
struck the colors
and stepped up to the helicopter
at 4:58 AM on Apr-30-1975
flew to the USS Blue Ridge war-ship
Six hours and thirty two minutes more
VC will put up their Liberation-Flag
On the top of the Independence Palace,
the last fortress of the South Vietnam Government.
If the Ambassador didn’t do like that
Surely He would be caught
by the VC Armed Force !
In this terrible case !
The Texas Cowboy,
The International Policeman
will suddenly become
a cleaned out gambler !
How can he save his face
before this large talkative world ? !
Very clearly, American had a time
to run away from Vietnam,
a poor Indochinese country
which is very far, far away
from your nation
It was not your fault
But that was from your predecessor’s
in the cold war !
That time
Capitalism hoped to set up its own bar
To cut Vietnam into 2 parts
at the 17 parallel of latitude.
Geneva agreement 1954
a sorrowful and rude
separation for all of us !
North and South Vietnam,
Both are the crazy inferior students
of the 2 big global groups :
Capitalism and Communism !
We entered a lot of fighting campaigns
your bombs were over our heads
And the rifles of both sides
were in our hands.
We stupidly shot each other
as the western game was planned
I hope to remind you
Your predecessors had brought
into this poor country
1,900,000 riffles
14,900 mortars
47,000 grenade launchers
1,532 canons
1.200 airplanes
600 helicopters
( Excluding the airplanes sent from Thailand
And the airplanes which belonged to USA )
2,074 Armor Tanks
56,000 Army trucks
You have atomic bombs ,
You have Napalm, CBU bombs,
You have TOW rockets
You also have B.52 flying fortresses
You have a lot of Claymore land mines,
Barbed wire fences, infrared telescopes
Electronic fences, magnetic bombs
You had spent USD 925 Billion
That was the Budget for 10 years Fighting
How many Vietnamese houses were burned ?
How many people,
Young guys, old men , women, children
were killed on this poor land ?
I will give you the impartial statistical numbers :
Yes , on this land
The American was truly very strong !!!
7,882,547 metric tons of bombs
were dropped on Indochina
including 3,770.000 metric tons for South Vietnam;
937,000 metric tons for the North
The remains were for Laos and Kampuchea.
45,260 metric tons of toxic chemical
Around 338,000 metric tons of Napalm,
were all dropped down on this land
for the sake of breaking our peasant’s iron-will
to build Freedom and keep Independence
for Vietnam , my mother land .
After bumping our heads
By chance of history
Uncle Ho and Uncle Sam
We shot each other
From wet grey swamps of the Mekong Delta
To the dry red earth of the highland
And so on to the blue sky.
We played our common funny crazy war-game
as the cowboys in the western films !
But here is not the Grand Canyon
here is Truong Son Range !.
Here is not Washington DC or New York
here is Hanoi and Saigon !.
Here is not “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year”,
Here is the “Tet Offensive” !
Surely here is not Florida or Kentucky,
here is Khe Sanh or Cu Chi !
Here is not Wall Street,
But Ho Chi Minh Trail !
We, both sides crazily bumped our heads
And had a sad time
to dance with the grim Reaper
Yes, truly we had a very bloody busy time
for embracing together
into death.
When the American came to Vietnam
Some of the politicians told us
That Uncle Sam
has continuously been playing
the role of an international policeman !
With the stick and carrot in his hand
With the ambitious peace-plan
He was the utopian dreamer
hoping to keep (or to control ? )
security for the whole world !
But after the date his army came to Vietnam,
North Vietnam had 1,100.000 martyrs
600,000 wounded soldiers ;
300,000 M.I.A;
South Vietnam
316,000 died in battles or missing
1,170,000 wounded soldiers
Both North and South
nearly 2,000,000 citizens were killed
2,000,000 were handicapped
2.000.000 were poisoned by Agent Orange
Around 50,000 children were deformities
And we couldn’t count
how many people were imprisoned or caught !
How can we exchange those deaths and heavy losses
for USA pilots in Hanoi Hilton
and 58,325 USA soldier’s deaths
on the Memorial Washington-Wall ?
and over 305,000 wounded soldiers
Including in 153,303
seriously wounded or handicapped,
2,251 airlplanes dropped down to the battlefields!
How can we exchange !?
How can we bargain
in such terrible suffering pain !?
Let’s look back to the common part of our history
When Ngo Dinh Diem was supported by the American,
became a Christian Dictator on this land
but also only a Puppet President
with strings pulled by John F.Kennedy
He himself had time to say :
“With regard to security,
the frontiers of the United States
do not stop at the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts,
but extend, in South East Asia, to the Ben Hai river,
which partitions Viet-Nam at the 17th parallel,
and forms the threatened border
of the Free World”
When Diem , a Christian Dictator organized and ruled
this nation with Nepotism,
Did you know this real situation ?
A lot of farmers, a lot of patriots of this nation
were executed by the guillotine .
That time,
The Christian Priests were subjected to palankeen-procession
So the Buddist-Monks
had to burn themselves
To show to the whole world
the meaning of dictatorship !
In the end,
Diem and Nhu, his young brother
were killed in a coup d état !
What can we say ?
“The horses were changed in the middle of the stream” !
A betrayal by dirty hands
of the USA Ally !
On Feb 21 , 1972
Nixon and Kissinger came to Peking
He warmly shook the bloody hand of Mao Tse Tung
The Chinese Communist Chairman Dictator,
Who killed his comrades by public denouncement !
By young red guards, false legend heroes
in Cultural Revolution !
And killed over 50 million
naïve farmers by starvation !
At that time
For opening the potential large Chinese Market
To build up the future profits
for the finance big bosses of Wallstreet ?
Was the Nixon hand also bloody contaminated ?
To the year 1974, on 19 January
When the Chinese Navy attacked the South Vietnam Navy
For the purpose of occupying the Paracel Islands.
The USA Navy had turned its face
to the other direction,
turning the blind eyes of a foxy gambler !
That was really
ignoring the fate of an ally !
Please make a requiem for
Captain Nguy Van Tha
and Vice Captain Nguyen Thanh Tri
and 51 Navy Sailors
of South Vietnam Navy
They died in honor
sunk with the battleship
in the historical Battle of Paracel Islands ,
When Nixon pressed Nguyen Van Thieu
President of the second Republic of Vietnam
To sign the Paris Peace Accord,
Nixon only hoped to bring back the USA pilots
Who were kept inside Ha Noi Hilton !
And when he put his step to the helicopter
Took off away from the garden of the White House
On a trip of resignation
As the big ancient tree was cut down
By the judiciary axe
of the Watergate Scandal
He forgot all of his “Vietnamization” policy
and his promises to poor President Thieu :
“I repeat my personal assurances to you,
“that the United States will react very strongly
and rapidly
to any violation of the agreement.”
In the Vietnam War
Uncle Sam played a game
With the value of USD 25 Billion
That was yearly Military-Expenses and Military Aid
From 1966 to 1970.
In 1970 and 1971
The gambling came down
to USD 12 Billion per year
And now, The year 1975
Uncle Sam was short of capital
He dared not bet again
President Gerald Ford’s April 23 speech
at Tulane University in New Orleans,
He said :
“the Vietnam War is finished
as far as America is concerned.
“Today, Americans can regain the sense of pride
that existed before Vietnam.
But it cannot be achieved by re-fighting a war.”
To him, Vietnam war was already
Game over !
On the other side,
The USA Congress
Cut down the budget of the Military Aid
For South Vietnam
It was only
USD 700 Million
Oh ! How pitiful for South Vietnam !
He was sitting there to gamble
With some very very tiny false coins
So in the end,
He himself dissolved and ran away
Game over followed pitifully at his heels !
But then we come to this act :
Before the end of war in Vietnam
From Mar 10 to Apr 30, 1975
Fifty one days and nights
South Vietnam Army lost Second Army Corps
On the 7th road of withdrawal
From Cheo Reo, Cung Son, to Tuy Hoa
The 2nd Army Corp was seriously attacked
disintegrated , collapsed .
Thousands and thousands of citizens followed that troop
killed by mortars , by canons, by grenades
By M16 , AK47 rifles
Even on the surface of that rough road
Uncountable children
who were learning
how to take their first step
in this suffering life ,
lost their family
violently sobbed by the roadsides
or in the middle of the dark tropical forest
The same situation with the 1st Army Corp
In Quang Trị, Hue, Da Nang,
Opened the bloody escape way,
to find a small place on the army ship
by shooting each other !
Those were the last deaths
Before we could embrace the bird of peace !
But that was not the end of the tearful tragedy
That was only the beginning
of the new terrible tragedy
for the Indochinese People
When the American Army,
who play the role of the Global Cop, left here ,
Nearly 1 million of South Vietnam Army Officers
And the administrative high officers
of the puppet government
would lose jobs
and be concentrated
into a lot of re-education camps
for hard labor !
A lot of people died in such prison-camps !
A lot of people
Became the boat men
To find freedom
on the top of Pacific Ocean’s waves
And so, a lot of people
Sank down into the dark deep sea !
In Kampuchea,
With the help of Chinese Advisors
Polpot’s army immediately attacked to Vietnam
They invaded Vietnam, along the common border,
killed a lot of Vietnamese-citizens inside our villages !
To uninstall their knifes
that were close by the belly of our nation-body
How many Vietnamese Martyr’s deaths in that war ?!
Polpot set up the new agrarian socialist utopia
For his country
Immediately after the fall of Phnom Penh,
Khmer Rouge began to implement
their concept of “Year Zero”
They ordered the complete evacuation of Phnom Penh
and all other recently captured major towns and cities.
They started the “Death March”
Hundreds of thousands of poor pitiful people,
were taken out in shackles
to dig their own mass graves.
Then the Khmer Rouge soldiers
buried them alive.
A lot of people were executed
Modern research has located 20,000 mass graves
on the “Killing Fields”
from the Khmer Rouge era
all over Cambodia.
A U.N. investigation reported 2–3 million dead,
while UNICEF estimated
3 million had been killed.
The combined effects of executions,
strenuous working conditions,
malnutrition, starvation,
over-work or disease
with poor medical care
caused the deaths
of approximately 25 percent
of the Cambodian population.
That came from the absence
Of the International Cop !
Oh You, The World – Cop
As same as the figures of the cops
Always hold tighly the blackjack in their hands
standing on the rear footboard
of the Police Patrol Autos
for their rush work
in Charlie Chaplin movies !
Did you, the cop have time
To take a look back ?
Yes, behind your back
when you start your step to leave the scene
that time will show the space empty of power
surely it will have a lot of dead bodies
and a lot of bloodshed-chaos !
on the rough road to real Peace !
On the road you just start your step to leave the scene
That time were full of dead bodies
and a lot of bloodshed-chaos !
After the Vietnam War
Uncle Sam recognized that most of his weapons
Would not suitable for the future wars
So he have already started to improve
and develop a lot of new modern army weapons
such as : UAV MQ-9 Reaper,
Boeing AH-64 Apache attack helicopter,
DARPA’s self-guided smart bullets
M109A6 Paladin Self Propelled Howitzer
M1A2 Abrams Battle Tank,
A BGM-109 Tomahawk , Long-range,
all-weather, Subsoniccruise missile.
Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit, Stealth Bomber,
an American heavy penetration strategic bomber,
Panavia Tornado GR4, multirole combat aircraft
with Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missile
40 mm Small Arms Grenade Munitions (SAGM)
M2HB machine gun
Ya , all the above very modern weapons
Have been used in Middle East !
as the special gifts to the Reaper
for his terrible dancing
with the noisy song of death !
So on , at the same time
China set up the political leadership goals
“ Four Modernizations”
Modernization of Agriculture, Industry,
National Defense, Science and Technology.
Step by step , they grew up under the sky
of North Asia.
And now, they declared to all of the world
Their “Chinese Dream”
They had already started to occupy
Paracel Islands and Spratly Islands
Which belonged to Vietnam
from a thousand years ago
They brutally violated the Vietnamese Sovereignty
with their Navy Gun-Ships !
And they drew the U-shaped nine-dash line.
Which In Vietnam we called “cow’s tongue line” ,
Aggressive declaration that they were their Islands !
Robbery ! Invasion ! Expansionism !
Let’s look back the other act
Middle East
From Oct 7, 2001 to now
Fifteen years for the war in Afghanistan
Taliban and the caves
on the high mountain Tora Bora
Bill Laden was killed
But how many lives of that land
And also from your country
were lost by weapons of both sides ?
Taliban have been still there
They still hide somewhere in Kandahar,
in Helmand , Oruzgan, and Patika
They already destroyed
the 2 huge ancient statues of Buddha
by high explosive in Bamiyan,
explosion mixed with their shouting “Allah Akbar”
And they still force the young ladies
to wear” Burga” at all times in public
and can not go to school
Until 8 year old
What did the Global Cop do and get there ?
From Oct 7, 2001 to October 1, 2015
in the Afghanistan war
there have been 3,486 coalition deaths
and there have been 2,356 U.S. military deaths
Afghan security forces: 21,950 killed
Northern Alliance: 200 killed
Coalition Wounded: 22,773
(United States: 19,950, United Kingdom: 2,188, Canada: 635)
Contractors: Dead: 1,582 Wounded: 15,000
Taliban and other forces : 25,000 -40,500 killed
Civilians killed: 26,270
Those are the glacial number on your reports
To describe your suffering
When George Bush condemned Saddam Hussein
For producing and storing chemical weapons .
Bush started his own war in Iraq on Mar 19, 2003
without the consensus of his allies and the United Nations!
USA Air Force dropped the “Shock and Awe”
bombing campaign on Baghdad .
We can read in “Iraq Body Count” dossier
released by Oxford Research Group:
approximately 6,616 civilian deaths
to the actions of U.S.-led forces
during the “invasion phase”,
including the shock-and-awe
bombing campaign on Baghdad. !
For nearly 9 years in that Middle East country
How many bombs and rockets
were dropped down on Baghdad ?
Alibaba and 1,001 dreamy legend nights were killed
By your ammunition !
And in the end
Following his capture on 13 December 2003,
the trial of Saddam took place
under the Iraqi Interim Government.
On 5 November 2006,
Saddam was convicted of charges
related to the 1982 killing of 148 Iraqi Shi’ites,
and was sentenced to death by hanging.
None chemical weapons of mass destruction
could be found there !
His execution was carried out
on 30 December 2006.
On the peak of war,
In Iraq, USA had 170,000 soldiers,
500 army bases .
And you had already spend USD 1 trillion
For fighting there
But Al Qaeda in Iraq still survived
and already has grown up,
sloughed its skin into ISIS
Violence still be on that red sand
Suicide bombs still continuously explode somewhere
Iraq blood still continuously bleeds
And one time more
The Global Cop
Who always hold tightly the blackjack in his hand
Can not or dare not to stay
He had to run away
Behind him was the empty power space
ready to welcome the bloody chaos
of the Arab Spring !
Arab Spring
or Middle East & North Africa Bloody Hot Summer ?
The spring without blossom of flowers
and pigeons !
but the hot running fires and chaos
Absolute Destruction !
Broken, dissolved Societies !
Spark ignition came from
the self – burning tragedy
of the fruity street-vendor Mohamed Bouazizi
on Dec 18, 2010 !
From that day
to the day I am writing this poem
1981 days passed
The people’s uprising
From Tunisia spread to Algeria,
Egyp, Yemen,Jordan, Mauritania,
Saudi Arabia, Oman,
Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Libya
and Morocco .
How many lives have already passed away ?
How many naïve souls
of 1,001 nights legendary dreamy land
Suddenly, painfully went to the thin air
Without your care ?
Oh ! Uncle Sam !, the global cop
Please take the time
To play out your destiny
and your spirit
Please in your own imagination
play a role of a Vietnamese mother
daily lonely sobbing,
and in the dark calm nights
despairingly waiting for her 11 children
Every of them
went out of her thatched cottage
and never came back
because all of them
one after another
were killed in the war !
Please imagine
a North Vietnamese handicapped Veteran
who came back to his poor farming family
married and had two children
both of them contaminated with Agent Orange
Dioxin Toxicity
Victims of “Ranch Hand” Campaign
Please enter into his daily suffering
as it has been continuously born.
Please , Uncle Sam , the Global Cop
Don’t run away !
try on the role
of the South Vietnamese Handicapped Veteran
after the war , when you already left here,
he with one leg remaining
became a street lottery-ticket vendor
a dusty , sunny , windy, rainy life
with daily profit around USD 3
one year around USD 1,200
compare with average USA GDP per capita : USD 51,248.21
Oh , Uncle Sam, the Global Cop
Please take the role of a Kampuchea Citizen
He who one time lived in Pnongpenh,
then was evacuated
with cheap trifles
inside his small threadbare grey bag
He started his own trip
with his family-members
to an infinite horizon
and behind that horizon
may be the hard labor camp
or one of the “Killing Fields”
to wait for him and his family.
At that place,
his wife could meet serious starvation,
and pass away by overwork.
His son could die of disease
And he, himself
could be killed by a rusty hoe !
Oh , Uncle Sam, the Global Cop
Now we change to the role of the Middle East Refugee
Please imagine that you were a Syrian Kurdish man,
Your nation is Syria
which was deeply sunk down in smoke and fire
of a 5 year civil war,
Uprising and the Government Force
both sides were very balanced !
and none of the houses are intact!
Army Tanks shot directly to every window
Syria now is a heap
of broken bricks and concrete
Over 250,000 people were killed
Inside the above number,
Can you count
How many people were killed
by your UAV MQ-9 Reaper Predator ?
You, the Syrian Kurdish Male Refugee
Your wife died young
in the shipwreck
under the cold waves
of the Mediterranean Ocean
And your 3 year-old son’s body
washed up on the Turkish beach
Oh ! how terrible sadness for this scene !
Dear Sir,
In your society
“In God We Trust”
But to the Ammunition Producers
Surely they always like to live
on this poor Globe
With happiness easily lives
They always like to have
Billion USD in their own secret bank-account
and embrace some long legged film star on board
their (should be millions of dollars ) luxury cruiser
To them, the weapons producers and suppliers
“In Gun We Trust”
for their target-searching
“In Gold We Trust”
Dear Sir, the Top Representative Uncle Sam
We could not use our strong Army Force
To defeat the will of the other nation
We could not impose our thinking,
on the other people’s thought
We could not compel the other people
to follow our own ideas.
That ‘s the real value of Freedom
We respect our children, the youth, the next generation !
Don’t push them to follow anyone, any religions,
Any ideal or any ideology
Let them freely choose their own beliefs
Don’t throw them into the water for baptism
When they are too young to understand !
Every continent has its own culture and life-style
We couldn’t attack or change
the other’s tradition cultural-life
please understand that
their beliefs were built up
on the base of thousand year-legends
Yes , We can not convert their beliefs
into our own’s
even ours are more modern than theirs !
We can not choose our father and mother
And even the place
For ourselves existence on this world !
So if you were born in the Middle East
And if you were the Jew,
From the habit of the ancient World,
May be you could have chosen to worship the gilded bull,
Which was named Elohim, Jehovah or God
If you were a Greece
You might have worshiped Gaea , Zeus , Appolo, Aphrodite
If you were a Roman
You might have believed in Jupiter and Juno
And respected to Aristocrate, Platon, Archimede
If you were a Viking
You might have ducked your head before God Óðinn
and Freyja, Goddess of love !
or bent your knees to Thor
son of Óðinn, God of thunder and battle.
If you were a Hindu Indian
You might have burnt the oil lamp in the temple
Of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva
Or put on the yellow monk’s frock
Been a follower of Buddha
If you was born in Asia
You might have learnt about Confucius , Laotzi or Mentzi
Or if you was born in Tay Ninh small city
A south-west province of Vietnam,
near the border of Vietnam-Cambodia
You might have been a believer of the Caodaism
which worships one eye of the God.
And if you was born in Hoa Hao village
You might have become
a long haired follower
Of that Hoa Hao local Religion
But the true terrible crazy story is
both of those small religions,
in Vietnam, my poor country, my mother land
They had a time
To have their own army !
That were really the past bloody days
of the Religion-Heads’s dreams
Who always want to occupy power
and build up their own religious kingdoms !
over the crazy stupid minds of their believers !
From the Feudalism – era till now
Many many missionary-troops
A lot of Religion-Priests
With their crazy concrete heads
still try to convert someone to their own religion.
They don’t know this very clear truth
The Muslims in the Middle East,
They worship only Allah
strictly follow monotheism
And they believe the Quran
was verbally revealed by God
to Muhammad Prophet through the angel Gabriel
Now the rising up of ISIS in the Middle East
That means Mujahideens stood up for Jihad
That was the revenge for the invasions
of the Christian Holy Wars
Which were a lot of knights and swords of the Inquisition
marched out from Europe
Ardently , Foolishly to go conquering
Jesusalem some centuries ago.
He who used the sword will be killed by sword !
It has a more clearly meaning :
He who used the straight sword of the Roman Christian Knight
Will be killed by the bench Arabian Muslim sword
That’s the evident truth forever
Dear Uncle Sam ,
Dear Mr. Barack Obama
President of USA
And Dear The Future USA President-Successors,
When The USA Ex-Presidents
implemented their self-isolation policy
That means they had the serious fails to put a restraint
on the increment and expansion
of the Chinese Dragon !
It will be seriously affected to your next generations
in searching for Peace !
So Uncle Sam !, if you think your enemies
are really the dirty sinful robbers
are guilty ambitious expansionists,
-We have to destroy the small cell of cancer
Instead of we will be suffered with its big malignant tumor-
Please slap their faces with your UAV Predator
Please destroy all of the artificial constructions
Such as runways, army bunkers, radar systems
on Paracel Islands and Spratly Islands.
Please strongly re-open the military campaigns
for Freedom of Navigation
on the Pacific Ocean .
For the sake of building Peace on this tearful world !
Please fiercely attack them by all of your forces !
This is the true ethic challenge from our conscience
If any President of USA doing like this
Either Barack Obama or Donald Trump
He will be the true Justice-Hero of this Free World !
Oh ! all of you , my friends
Don’t play the role of the Global Policeman
Who always hold tightly the blackjack in his hand
but at the halfway point, running away
That’s not effective ! funny nonsense !
With this case, In Vietnam we have a proverb :
“ Chọc cứt không nên lổ”
It means :
“Be careful when you use the stick
to poke the hole full of the washy shit” !
Please remember this
when you start your step to leave the scene,
behind you will have the space empty of power
and time surely will have a lot of dead bodies
and a lot of bloodshed-chaos !
on the rough road to real Peace !
Your new friend,
A Vietnamese Poet
Batrioldman
(From 7:00 AM May 19,2016
To 12:44 AM May 22, 2016)
To remember Mr.Obama’s visiting-trip to Vietnam
from May 23rd to May 25th – 2016 .
batrioldman 