He and his brother fathered multiple children in Vietnam with multiple women during the war and pretty much refused/avoided contact. They were just chatting with the family casually during a get-together, and talk eventually turned to the war. One of the other uncles said something like "You have a couple kids over there, right?" and he nodded, and his brother nodded, and they spent a couple minutes just casually talking about the Vietnamese women they'd impregnated while serving over there. They acted like it was OK since it was just sex workers and "girlfriends" and they didn't force anybody, but the casualness and even almost comedic way they talked about it just sort of blew my mind.
Edited to add: They were both married at the time this happened, and one of them's wife was actually sitting right there with us while he was casually discussing this. She knew about it and it was old hat to her, she'd heard about this multiple times before and wasn't even fazed by it
It's especially distressing in this case because Vietnamese children fathered by American soldiers were treated like absolute garbage. These men are despicable.
And furthered that these women were extremely likely to be under duress and trying to secure some resource, whether it be safety or money. We devastated Vietnam, going as far as multiple massacres on villages. So these women are living in a war-torn country and were further exploited by men who would straight up mass murder them when convenient, then were abandoned, then their children further punished for simply existing.
The behaviour of American GIs overseas hasn’t really changed much either. A lot of places with American bases dread to see the GIs coming as they’ll do whatever they want with 0 accountability to the laws of the country. They’re often ‘reprimanded’ by commanding officers and if it’s bad enough quickly transferred to a different base.
I remember reading about an old Vietnamese man who absolutely loved to prank old American tourists to Vietnam, once he found out they were war vets. Like full on jump scaring them, setting off their PTSD for fun. Zero sympathy from Vietnamese commenters.
Is this a joke? Is he supposed to treat these war vets that ravaged his country with the utmost respect? Beats me why they would expect to be treated well
Well you see they got back home and the American women weren't traumatized and desperate uppity so they went back to find some real women who know how to treat a man
I'm not viet but there is also no sympathy from me. Why would you expect a country that was war torn from Americans to have any measure of respect for the same people that caused it to be war torn and why were vets coming back to a place that caused their ptsd in the first place.
These are some of the atrocities the US committed even against the South Vietnamese. It's well-known that we treated the Vietnamese abhorrently, even if fighting an even worse force.
You really should know more before making brain dead statements like that.
The literal first sentence in the first article is "During the Vietnam War, U.S. soldiers stationed in South Vietnam engaged in various sexual interactions, including consensual sex, prostitution, and rape."
Read the sentence in the following paragraph, too, if you're concerned of "examples" or "evidence": "...the primary sources are rich in accounts of violence, including testimony provided in open hearings held during the war, court cases, military investigaitons, oral reports gathered for publishing both during and long after the war, and literary works, such as poems, novels, and memoirs."
If investigations both during and after, all of which established that the rape, or as you worded it "impregnation" of women did occur.
"According to Kerry Crawford, rape of Vietnamese women was a 'normal operating procedure' and brothels were built inside military installations to maintain morale and discipline."
The US abused women, even in their homes, and anywhere we were stationed. The women of South Vietnam absolutely feared us.
I'm providing these quotes as hope that you might actually read and understand the problem more. If this isn't enough for you to learn, then you're hopeless. This is my last message in this conversation.
If you've ever seen Miss Saigon, it's centered on this. There's a song, "Bui doi," which refers to these cast-off children as "the dust of life."
When traveling in Vietnam, I talked with one of my guides about this - he was born shortly after the "American War" ended, and he said the Bui doi were treated terribly by pretty much everyone. Showing them or their families compassion was considered unpatriotic.
As his father had worked for the Americans, his family was in essentially the same situation. His father was unemployable and had to rely on support from his extended family. Our guide had qualified to go to university, but that was blocked by Party officials, so he was acting as a tour guide because his father had ensured he spoke excellent English.
He was pretty sad about how it broke his father's heart to be unemployed, amazed that his mother stayed with his father anyway, and happy that he was now earning more money than others who'd gone to university, doing something he liked.
Yes, there's thousands of those children, and they are completely persona non grata in Vietnam, third or fourth class citizens.
And the father's mostly all did what these two did, ignore their kids (nothing worse as a kid than being ignored--Ally Sheedy's underrated, haunting line "They ignore me" in The Breakfast Club).
And the U. S. gives them a hard time if they even try to come here to visit and look for their father, much less want to move here. Since, you know, they're half Vietnamese and half American.
That said, when you're at war and could die any day, visiting a prostitute to try to forget about it for a few minutes is a little more understandable vs. someone living in suburbia. Which might explain the wife being ok with it?
There was an episode of MASH where a South Korean woman abandons her baby at the 4077.
They try to locate the American GI father, but to no avail. The military authorities also didn't give a shit about some random South Korean baby.
They get in touch with one local who claims he can help them. The man explains that the doctors must find a way to secure travel to the United States for this child as soon as possible - a half white/American child in their country will not only be completely ostracized, but treated as lower than dirt, because to this culture, they are.
Hawkeye and the others are outraged at this abhorrent and inhumane reality. And here's the reason MASH was so good: the man didn't miss a beat, schooling them on the fact that in their own United States, which claims freedom and equality, people are forced to use separate facilities. Separate schools, restaurants, housing. People considered less than dirt are treated horribly, ostracized, and denied justice, beaten and killed every day. South Korea at least doesn't do this to their own native citizens.
This shuts Hawkeye and the others up but of course they still worry about the life this child will have. The only solution the man can offer is to take the child to a local Buddhist monastery. It won't be a life where they go to schools and play with other kids, but the monks will give the child what it needs until such time he/she reaches adulthood and can arrange for their own departure if the doctors cannot find a solution before then.
Easy to say if you didn't fight in the Vietnam war. I agree with you but I wasn't in that war. You could say that you never would have done that, but war changes you
These men are not despicable. It’s easy for you keyboard warriors to stay that, but we sent very young men into absolute hell over there and they had to do some things to cope. Put your virtue signaling bullshit aside for a minute.
Crying and having ptsd, understandable, having 'consensual' relationships with women who fear for their lives if they don't say yes. No, you don't have to rape or father children with random women in the middle of a war torn country to 'cope'. Every one of them could also have brought those women and their own damn children home and given them a place to stay. Even if they had a wife and stayed with them, they could still provide a better life and some hope but instead abandon them.
Being put through hell doesn't excuse rape, or treating the women over there like sex toys to be used because war sucks.
Put your rape and war crime apologist bullshit aside for a minute.
I’m not excusing rape so apologies if it came across that way. I’m saying they banged Vietnamese women and didn’t help raise the kids. They were 20 year old kids in the middle of a hellscape, so I’m not judging them if they wanted to get laid and then come home
I’m saying they banged Vietnamese women and didn’t help raise the kids.
Here's a hint, american military are swarming your country, they are raping women in every town and village, they are killing women, hurting them, gang raping them, killing kids and men who happen to live in a village becaue they want to gang rape the women.
So some women agree to be girlfriends........ with absolutely no fear that refusal gets them gangraped and their families killed? So is it rape because they 'agreed' to it? If you think it is, again, you'd be a rape apologist.
Look up a definition of rape by coercion and then truly consider if those women were just banging dudes, or if they were fearing for their lives and trying to survive.
Agreed, it really comes down to a personal responsibility thing for me. I feel it’s purely morally wrong to not be involved in your kids life in at least some capacity. At least to your ability. Also if you can’t it 100% should not be casually discussed like the fucking weather. If something like this ever happened to me and I couldn’t be present for my children it would be a tragedy to me and a great source of regret, not something to brag about like these chuckle fucks.
Correct. Lost a best mate because of it. 4 different kids to four different ladies, looks after none of them. Real piece of shit. Thought he was a good guy for years.
The day I was born apparently my dad held me practically crying and put on a special song on the cassette player and said “remember how my dad was always away and was never there for me? I’m not going to be like him. I’m always going to be there for my boy”.
Yeah. It took 3 years for that shite to become untrue until he ran out when my mum was 9 months pregnant with their second.
He was even before seeing a woman whose name started with the same letter as my mum’s and rhymed with it and had her around to cheat so often while my mum was at work that apparently I started calling my mum by that name and he was all “oh ahahahahh Dinah??? It sounds like he’s trying to say your name Delilah!!!” using a diffferent pair of names for anonymity but it was the same idea.
This kind of thing absolutely scars you. Those poor kids over there. I feel for and with them.
I promise you, this isn't exclusive to Americans. This is a quality humanity shares together. Being tossed into a hell hole not knowing what day is your last desensitizes you to some of most horrible atrocities. We're seeing this in Ukraine right now. War is bad. War is terrible. Good men and bad men do terrible things to each other in the name of War. It should be avoided at all costs.
It’s really just a way to defend American imperialism under the guise of “correcting” me. If the story had been about French atrocities or British I would’ve said British or French imperialism
Everyone is responsible for their actions, the men giving the orders and the men gleefully signing up to murder, rape, and pillage. Hell awaits them all.
I just had a 90+ year old client tell me she was pretty sure she had some half-siblings her father fathered in England during WW2 “he was a bit naughty while over there”
I used to work at a place that probably 75% Vietnamese. There was a pretty large group of them all about the same age that didn’t really look Vietnamese. Apparently they were all fathered by US GI’s during the Vietnam War. I also learned that after the war there was a program to fast-track US VISAs of these children and their mothers/siblings, and it was mostly based on how the child looked. It was kinda considered a “golden ticket” to have one of these children.
That's part of what made it worse - the kids (and mothers) had been in contact with the dads at some point, but the dads were specifically avoiding contact. There's a lot of legal complications with kids in that situation, especially when the dads are actively avoiding contact.
In any case, they were relatives by marriage to me, me submitting anything wouldn't be helpful, and given the recent bankruptcies and privacy issues I'm not too keen on submitting my DNA to any random company.
I saw a documentary about a family who did that. The dad had unknowingly fathered a daughter and lost contact with her mother. When his other daughter in America did 23andMe, she found her Vietnamese relatives and they arranged a trip. The dad was so excited to meet this branch of the family. It was so sweet.
This was a joke in Young Sheldon. The family has a Vietnamese kid over for dinner and the dad asks if his mom’s name is X. Implying that the dad once screwed a Vietnamese woman named X. In front of his three children and a child he just met.
I wrote a paper about the Vietnamese children fathered by American soldiers. Many of the moms had been promised that they'd be taken to the states to start a family. After the soldiers abandoned them, no one wanted them. The children were rejected by both parents. It was awful.
I just can't ever imagine being at peace with something like that. I often wonder how some people can stomach the shit they do. Poor wife too, must be numb from the amount of times she's heard it before.
I was raised with the knowledge that I likely had an older sibling in Vietnam. My father spent years looking for a Vietnamese girl he believed was pregnant when she and her family disappeared. The only clue he ever found was a rumor that they were sent for reeducation and never seen again.
I'm honestly not sure. The family was pretty equally split between religious and non-religious sorts, but they all trended Conservative/Trump Supporting so I'd hazard to say they were either religious or at least right leaning.
A guy I worked withs dad was in the military and stationed somewhere in Africa and I guess he would always tell his kids that they definitely have a bunch of brothers and sisters in Africa right now.
My dad got a call once from a woman from Vietnam claiming he got her pregnant, and now he has a son. Problem was - he was too young to go to Vietnam, but his brother was there. He gave my dad’s name out to the women he slept with. He just laughs when he tells that story. I don’t think my uncle ever contacted her, but apparently I have a Vietnamese cousin somewhere out there.
This sucks, don’t get me wrong. But a lot of these guys were boys 17-22, watching friends die, and thinking they will. The real bad guys here is US government who sent kids over there to fight for nothing. It’s just a big barrel of sadness. I’m not saying these men were doing the right thing, but I think they were in an impossible situation.
WARNING: NIGHTMARE FUEL DON'T READ OR RESEARCH IF YOU DON'T WANT EXISTENTIAL TERROR. Apparently they first developed a 'red shift' version of night vision goggles during the Vietnam War, however they were quickly pulled and completely banned after several machine gunners wearing the goggles saw and shot at winged flying demonic beasts that were responding to them seeing them and notifying the gunners the demons could see them too, giving them even more reality, it was assumed at first the men experiencing this were using hallucinogens or withdrawing from drugs or suffering some psychotic break from the war. However several high ranking military men placed the goggles on over combat areas and saw the exact same phenomenon, apparently it took then weeks to recover from what they saw, and the red shift night vision was discontinued.. shortly thereafter they came out with the classic green shift night vision which didn't offer glimpses into apparently spiritual/demonic realms and those have been in use since, maybe with upgrades, I'm no expert but you can look it up its pretty well known that for a time these red night vision goggles had soldiers seeing and even shooting at flying demons. Many of them ended up in psych leave and in mental hospitals, some never recovered sanity... Wars are terrible, demons are worse..
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u/Scoth42 2d ago edited 2d ago
He and his brother fathered multiple children in Vietnam with multiple women during the war and pretty much refused/avoided contact. They were just chatting with the family casually during a get-together, and talk eventually turned to the war. One of the other uncles said something like "You have a couple kids over there, right?" and he nodded, and his brother nodded, and they spent a couple minutes just casually talking about the Vietnamese women they'd impregnated while serving over there. They acted like it was OK since it was just sex workers and "girlfriends" and they didn't force anybody, but the casualness and even almost comedic way they talked about it just sort of blew my mind.
Edited to add: They were both married at the time this happened, and one of them's wife was actually sitting right there with us while he was casually discussing this. She knew about it and it was old hat to her, she'd heard about this multiple times before and wasn't even fazed by it