The Sandoz Collection by Sandoz Diego Cerveza (best short books to read .TXT) 📖

is today Vietnam.

Once hostilities had ceased, Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Cong version of George Washington, creates the National Liberation Committee of Vietnam to form a provisional government. Japan, dow broken and beaten, transfers all power to Ho's Vietminh. Ho declares independence of Vietnam, and wouldn't you know it, like a bad stage play, here come those bloody Brit redcoats as British forces land in Saigon to help return authority to the French. (Never mind that Ghandi was kicking Brit butt in the bid for Indian independence!) Also in 1945, the first American blood is shed, in Vietnam, when Lt. Col. A. Peter Dewey, head of American OSS mission, was killed by Vietminh troops while driving a jeep to the airport. Reports later indicated that his death was due to a case of mistaken identity. He had been mistaken for a Frenchman. Now France got a colonial hard-on to re-exert it's power and influence over the tiny nation, and opted to go for colonial rule, only now, the rules had changed and there was no room anymore for fancy pants France!

One year after the world war had ended, the French and Vietminh reach an accord. France recognizes Vietnam as a "free state" within the French Union.Negotiations Between France and the Vietminh breakdown like an old car on the open road, and the Indochina War begins. Following months of steadily deteriorating relations, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam launches its first attack against the French. A force of 40,000 heavily armed Vietminh lay seige to the French garrison at Dienbienphu. Using Chinese artillery to shell the airstrip, the Vietminh make it impossible for French supplies to arrive by air. It soon becomes clear that the French have met their match.

It is also important to note that Ho Chi Minh had contacted Harry Truman in 1949 for recognition, as he also did to Dwight Eisenhower when he was president. Both declined to respond. Much as what happened in Cuba when Castro took over. Both countries looked to the "free world" for support and were refused. This country has a habit of creating it's own "enemies" so it has someone to fight to take the American people's minds off of real problems here at home such as poverty, unemployment, unafforadable health care, etc. The American government is the grand Illusionist when it comes to hiding it's own dirt in plain sight.(This is also the same country that backed Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden!)

Meanwhile, the French, well they got phucked at Dien Bien Phu in 1953, and once more outside forces prevail as the Geneva accords determined that the country be partitioned into two separate entities,the north and the south. During the cold war the north of course supported by China and the USSR (after non response from the west!) while the south was supported by the United States. This eventually burst into flames and not only gave birth to a new nation, but later some really great films like Platoon and Apocalypse Now.."God, I love the smell of napalm in the morning." In 1960's there was a cornucopia of campus teach ins, Veterans stage anti-war rallies, including those from WWII and the Korean war stage a protest rally in New York City. Discharge and separation papers are burned in protest of US involvement in Vietnam.

The Civil Rights movement joined in the refrain as CORE cites "Burden On Minorities and Poor" in Vietnam, where The Congress of Racial Equality issues a report claiming that the US military draft places "a heavy discriminatory burden on minority groups and the poor." The group also calls for a withdrawal of all US troops from Vietnam. Martin Luther King speaks out against the war, calling the US "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world," Martin Luther King also encourages draft evasion and suggests a merger between antiwar and civil rights groups.

Secret negotiations and peace talks finally start to take place in Paris and stagger on for many agonizing years as the body count grows faster than a New York Taxi meter can add up the miles.

Then turn the clock to 1973..the reality check is complete. It's over. The last remaining American troops withdraw from Vietnam as President Nixon declares "the day we have all worked and prayed for has finally come." America's longest war, and its first defeat, thus concludes. During 15 years of military involvement, over 2 million Americans served in Vietnam with 500,000 seeing actual combat. 47,244 were killed in action, including 8000 airmen. There were 10,446 non-combat deaths. 153,329 were seriously wounded, including 10,000 amputees. Over 2400 American POWs/MIAs were unaccounted for as of 1973.

In 1975 South Vietnamese President Duong Van Minh delivers an unconditional surrender to the Communists in the early hours of April 30. North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin accepts the surrender and assures Minh that, "...Only the Americans have been beaten. If you are patriots, consider this a moment of joy." As the few remaining Americans evacuate Saigon, the last two US servicemen to die in Vietnam are killed when their helicopter crashes.


Today, Vietnam has become a tourist destination. French, Brits and yes, even Americans make the trip and trek post Tet. It's a land today still of rice paddies, ocean beaches and palm trees. The smells of foods and spices permeate the landscape and the open air markets, as the memories and the stench of Napalm and burning monks recedes from memory and fades into a distant past.

The 8-Track Tape & The Assasins Bullet

The 8-track tape, just like the rotating disco ball in a gay bar, hit the pop culture scene with nuclear impact...then, thanks to changing times and an even more rapid fire semi-automatioc changing world of technology, faded away faster then an avalanche!.

Hula-hoops a generation earlier and lava lamps of the Sixties along with polyester and tie dyed clothing peaked and ultimately fell on the pop culture battlefield looking for all the world as the dead and dying blue and grey laid out pretty as a black and white picture in an 8X10 negative Civil War photograph by the Matthew Brady Bunch. Icons come and icons go.

The Hula Hoop and Twister...ones a tease, the other a sexual act. C'mon...two people facing each other, groin to groin, gyrating with hula hoop hip action, thrusting to and fro, back and forth, with full throttle action kicked into gear...a few minutes of that and then it's off to a group session of twister, crawling all over each other in a Rubics cube of what could be construed as sexual positions on the floor, climbing, crawling, pawing, bumping, mounting, dismounting...this all on the heels of a devastating round of strip poker where half the room is in the buff and Twister accessible!

Take Hollywood and Memphis. Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. The king and queen of the teen dream pop prom. Didn't make it to social security but adorn t-shirts from Brooklyn to Tokyo along with Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison and John Lennon. Forever young, (forever Jung?) in sizes small to large. Elvis, almost didn't make the icon archives gracefully as he was beginning to wear at the seams and sat waivering on the border of cartoon or buffoon. The rest of the rest in peace crowd though...what would they look like today? Lining up for the Larry King show, himself a living corpse that in one interview confused Ringo with the dead George in front of Paul, and Georges widow..like all cadavers, King just moved on in his own little dream world where you run in slow motion and the slower mummy can actually catch up to you to cause great harm.

Janis, God bless her Texas soul, would be a Sophie Tucker fixture on the Oprah show. Dean would probably try for a "Rebel Without a Cause" part two reunion but casting Corey Feldman as Sal Mineo, and himself as the father played originally by Jim Backus. Dean would not have the following today had he lived and couldn't even get himself punked by Ashton Kutcher.

Let's face it...they die young, get t-shirted, and are frozen in Dorian Gray time like a TV dinner. Those that have kept alive in spite of things and failing careers are wheeled out on occassion to our great horror. Tina Louise, Ginger on "Gilligans Island", Tuesday Weld the blonde nuclear bombshell of Dobie Gillis, the girl who played Ellie Mae on "Beverly Hillbillies"...40 years have gone by and they re-emerge as though nothing has changed, except as in Shangri-la you don't age until you leave the mountain..well, they left the mountain and age caught up with them as though an avalanche has raced down the hill. It's not that THEY have aged that bothers us...it's that it is a reminder that we also have right alongside of them, but we see ourselves everyday..complain a bit about wrinkles, grey hair, etc but we still view them as young...their youth, our youth, our illusion that nothing has changed and they show up and shatter our own false reality like broken glass flying everywhere from the Twin Towers.

Small town America and Route 66, America's Mainstreet are dust in the wind of nostalgia. Wal-Mart and the interstate combined an inevitable sucker punch that was long over due anyway. The rolling assembly lines of Detroit, spelled the end of the horse and buggy era, and the interstate highway system and it's speed and convienience in a world that had less and less time available was a welcome beacon to the demise of the two lane. Nobody had the time anymore to meander mindlessly through small town after small town while trying to get to their "destination."

Great old dives, cafes and diners have stepped aside for the chain restaurants..no, don't blame McDonalds, blame places like Stuckeys, still revered as roadside nostalgia, they helped foster the chain concept to kill the mom and pops. They literally took pecan rolls and shoved them up our collective nostalgia ass. Thankfully Wall Drug is holding the fort, the last stand of the asphalt Alamo!

The front page challenge of the newspaper industry today is to merely remain afloat in an ocean of digital information. Bobbing up and down in a digital sea, the printed newspaper has been eroded as a viable source of news, to the status of an informational dingy good for classified ads for garage sales, obits and not much more. It is not the Titantic it once was. It's the 8-track tape of news and information. Out dated, out moded, like the public phone booth.

See those any more? No. They never worked anyway when they were plentiful sentinels on the streets but thanks to cell phones...they have disappeared as a dinosaur as is the hard line phone in the home...good bye to the Princess Phone, iconic as she was, she has lost her virginity and become passe...another icon-a-tech product bites the dust. Clark Kent is still in a state of super shock.

The typewriter is a boat anchor in comparison to the small, light weight lap tops of today. Atari games, Pac Man, River Raid and other cartridge games of the early 80's are now a curiosity along with 78 rpm records and Victrola machines and penny arcades. Radio with it's constant babble has been replaced by MP3's.

When it comes to polyester..where the fuck is PETA when you need them! Do you know, really know how many polyesters have to die to make one really shiny shirt..the kind worn at disco's in the era by swarthy, sweaty dago's and by trailer trash in parks across America? Usually by Mrs. White Trash who just completed a course of cosmetology and opened a hairsalon in the spare room of her trailer.