Teachers in Vietnam can expect to make at least $1,100 USD (25,049,500 VND) per month. But the average salary is $1,500 (35,000,000 VND) per month. Teachers with previous teaching abroad experience and patience can find English teaching jobs that pay over $2,000 (46,617,980 VND). Narrowly defined, the war was considerably shorter. The first American combat unit splashed ashore in South Vietnam on March 8, 1965. That was the U.S. Marines, dispatched to protect the airbase there. Just over eight years later, on March 29, 1973, the last American combat troops left the country. A US army veteran has allegedly been found living in a remote Vietnam village - 44 years after he was presumed dead when his helicopter was shot down. VNM is the Best (and Only) Vietnam ETF for Q4 2022. By. Nathan Reiff. Updated September 22, 2022. Vietnam has undergone dramatic shifts in recent decades as the country evolves from a command Mark the Setter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the following questions. Viet Nam is now willing to _____part in the 24th SEA Games hosted by Thailand by the end of 2007 with a total of 958 athletes. A. play B. lose C. take D. enjoy Bruce 'Caitlyn' Jenner is now in a 'lesbian' relationship with another transgender and they want to have a baby. Aug. 1, 2019 9:39 am Nov. 25, 2019 11:17 am by The Right Scoop. Two men, who now are living as women, are now living together as a lesbian couple, and want to have a baby through a surrogate and one of them is one of them Adopted: 1992; Communist Party of Vietnam holds the central role in politics and society. The constitution's focus on strict communist orthodoxy has become less important than economic development as a national priority as seen through recent amendments. Government Type: Communist State. Coat of Arms of Socialist Republic of Vietnam. WTWjS. Photograph Source Air Force – Public Domain As its forces mobilized on the borders of Ukraine, reports of substantial numbers of Russia’s draft-vulnerable men fleeing into exile flooded the US news media. Of particular relevance to the recent publication of my documentary memoir, Safe Return Inside the Amnesty Movement for Vietnam War Deserters, are the accounts of battlefield desertions by Russian soldiers following the invasion and now publicized as well with increasing frequency. Far from being despised in the US, these acts of resistance– not just the draft evasions, but the desertions as well – have been held in high esteem as expression of legitimate opposition to the Russian invasion . How, on the other hand, do we suppose the mass of Russian public opinion responds to accounts of Russian soldiers abandoning the battlefield? I suspect that the majority have viewed these acts much the way the US political and military establishments conflated resistance to an unjust war like Vietnam, over the course of which the incidents of desertion numbered in the hundreds of thousands, with how one would have expected those same deserting soldiers to act if their own land, their own homes were being attacked. Instead, in the conflated paradigm, the distinction between aggressive and defensive wars is collapsed, and American deserters were in the main denounced as misfits, shirkers, cowards or even traitors; Russians deserters are likely to be tarred with the same charges. In the meantime, we await how the outcome of the former Wagner commando’s – now a deserter – appeal for asylum in Norway will echo among his comrades in the trenches of Ukraine. The comparison here is imperfect, of course, since the Vietnam War ended five decades ago, and the war in Ukraine drags on, its outcome far from certain. It is likely to be some time before we learn the fates of those who deserted the Russian ranks or fled to foreign soil to evade conscription. We do know something about what befell those who evaded the draft or deserted active service during the long decade of the Vietnam/American War. A movement for amnesty was organized in the US demanding their reintegration and repatriation without penalty. I tell that story in part in my account of the activities of the Safe Return Amnesty Committee. I say in part, because Safe Return occupied one corner, albeit a prominent one, within the larger confines of the amnesty movement, and primarily concentrated its efforts on defending the deserters who had less support than the draft resisters among members of the public not militantly opposed to the war. Still, over the course of the roughly six years that the amnesty movement was active, late 1971 to early 1977, a good deal of public sympathy was eventually stirred for the American deserters. But when President Carter came to pardon draft resisters shortly after his inauguration in 1977, he left the resolution of those still in the active status of desertion to the whims of the military. The same solution was applied to all the dissident GIs already herded through the inquisitions of military justice and turned out with discharges that were less than honorable. Even congenitally centrist observers like the editors of the New Republic were wide eyed in acknowledging something fishy when reporting that those with “bad paper” numbered in the hundreds of thousands. To compound this stigma, a significant sector of legal and journalistic opinion, by no means entirely radical, held that the overwhelming majority of bad discharges involved offenses that would not be criminal in civilian society. Put it this way, that tainted label is not something you want on your resume when you go job hunting. The Vietnam antiwar movement was a qualified success in aiding to end the land war in Southeast Asia, an outcome the dysfunctional state of our own fighting forces – aka the GI Resistance – contributed to significantly. But the scope of antiwar movement’s influence was anything but socially transformative, and thus impotent to power a post-war amnesty movement, albeit partially vindicated in the case of the draft evaders, to transcend the taboos that virtually every society associates with desertion. Not even when the war the deserters fled from was almost universally held to have been at the very least a mistake, and in many minds a war of aggression, no less than the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. The explosive rates of discontent in the ranks during the Vietnam-fueled fiasco did effect at least one obvious consequence. Shortly after the Peace Accords with Vietnam were signed in January 1973, the conscript US Army was replaced with an All-Volunteer Force, an even less democratic, some would say mercenary, arrangement for sharing the burden of military service than the draft. I expand on many of these themes in Safe Return an excerpt of which follows below. The book may be purchased from McFarland Books. Safe Return An Excerpt By late December 1971 I was already calling myself a revolutionary. A whole generation of New Leftists consumed by their opposition to the Vietnam War had come to define themselves in similarly provocative terms. As a state of mind this pretense was not entirely delusional. Only those activists most unhinged from material reality believed the United States was living a genuinely revolutionary moment. But revolutionary zeal had become rampant throughout the politicized youth culture. The axiomatic beliefs shared by many – perhaps most – radicals within this loosely knit, endlessly factious collectivity called the Movement held that the American political system was a sham, and that capitalism as a viable engine to achieve social and economic justice had been totally discredited. Equally in disrepute was liberalism, the idea that the system could be reformed at a steady and gradual pace, an ideological wolf in sheep’s clothing presenting a more comforting appearance for maintaining the status quo. Aim the first blow at the liberals Chairman Mao had advised his own revolutionary cadres; our group wasn’t Maoist, but we certainly had our issues about liberals. In the Movement we were known as CCI, short for Citizens Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes in Vietnam. Founded in the wake of public dismay over the revelation of the My Lai massacre in November 1969, CCI’s goal was to elevate popular awareness to the much greater scope of American atrocities in the war zone. Over the ensuing two years we’d had an amazingly good run, terrific coverage in the press and electronic media, with our two major accomplishments, a National Veterans Inquiry, and the rump Dellums War Crimes hearings on Capitol Hill, both subjects of books from mainstream publishers. We never did convince most Americans beyond radical veteran and Movement circles that war crimes committed by our troops were both widespread and a de facto consequence of the manner in which the war was being conducted, primarily against South Vietnamese civilians. CCI had claimed that American war crimes were a matter of policy inherent in tactics saturation bombing, free fire zones, forced removal of non-combatant civilians and destruction of their villages, and the systematic use of torture in the interrogation of detainees and prisoners. Looking back, I suppose that the most important contribution CCI made to the collective antiwar effort was to provide a forum for disaffected GIs like me who’d had their heads turned around in Vietnam and were inclined to tell that story to anyone on the home front willing to listen. By late 1971 the war crimes issue was a dead letter. Nixon had temporarily succeeded in demobilizing the antiwar movement with his policy of Vietnamization, the gradual withdrawal of American ground forces which, because victory now depended on the backed Saigon regime to battle on without American infantry, the press gruesomely described as “changing the color of the corpses.” It was a savvy political move. Clearly what had come to bother most Americans about the Vietnam War was its utter endlessness, not least the interminable images on the nightly news of GIs being stuffed into body bags and brought home in flag draped coffins. And still the war raged on with a full complement of American air and naval firepower at an intensity that was virtually undiminished despite the overall reduction in troops. Moreover, the field of hostilities would actually expand when both Laos and Cambodia, where covert war had been carried out for years, were openly invaded by American forces or their Army of South Vietnam surrogates. Far from “winding down,” from the Movement perspective the war had merely shifted into a phase that was likely to confuse, if not palliate, the mounting opposition among many so-called Middle Americans whose exhaustion with Vietnam had become a political obstacle to the Nixon administration’s hallucinatory dreams of “keeping” Indochina and sustaining the puppet regime in Saigon. It was in this atmosphere that in late 1971, Tod Ensign and I created Safe Return and entered the lists of the emerging Amnesty Movement. What most disturbed Tod and me, and many others in the not yet depleted ranks of the antiwar movement, was that, behind President Richard Nixon’s smokescreen of troop withdrawals, the public was being lured into a comfortable fiction that the role in the war was – or would soon be – over. Those informed feared worse. Tens of thousands of American troops still engaged in Vietnam combat in the early seventies, but the violence had now expanded openly throughout all of Indochina, with the relentless use of American air power as lethal to local populations as it had ever been. Looking for a new issue to prolong our own antiwar activism, Tod and I quickly shifted our attention to amnesty. We reasoned that a campaign positioned to anticipate a post-war political climate might become an adaptable vehicle for addressing a war vanishing from the headlines, but still far from over. If we had not yet come to see that advocating on behalf of veterans and GIs would define our political work in the years ahead, that trajectory was already evident when we created Safe Return. Thus, our orientation in this emerging movement would not be on behalf of those who’d refused to serve, but those who’d come to resist the war as a result of entering the armed forces. Once in uniform, many would run afoul of a draconian system of command dominated military justice and institutionalized racism, and in epidemic numbers deserted, some to foreign exile. On a wider political canvas, we demanded a universal amnesty without conditions for all those who resisted and were victimized by what we understood as an illegal war. We were certainly unambiguous in our public backing of resistance to the draft in any form, religious, philosophical, political or plain old self-interest. And while we acknowledged the sincerity of those who became conscientious objectors, we were arguing a unique position that would extend the blanket of amnesty over those who didn’t learn what was wrong with the Vietnam War until it was too late to avoid it. This was a class of men not schooled in religious argumentation or moral abstraction; a class of men who found no ready path to evade service through deferments, doctor’s letters, or informed political understanding; a class of men who would do the fighting and dying for 90% of their draft aged peers. There seems little doubt that, among the 10% of the draft age population who served, and the even smaller cohort who did the actual fighting in Vietnam, a majority of them, by any fair measure, came from the lower and marginalized strata of the working class. To the degree the politics we espoused at Safe Return had a consistent ideological edge, it was our espousal of class over moral politics. Over Safe Return’s lifetime, whatever the unique character and content of each campaign or action, our pitch for amnesty possessed a singular and consistent message to portray these many individual acts of defiance to military authority as a collective form of resistance. And such it was, we believed, in the temper of the times. Exactly how we fashioned that story line evolved with each successive episode of our trademark action, the voluntary surrender of a representative deserter under attention-getting circumstances tailored to each returnee an escapade in Paris, a surrender on the floor of a presidential convention, a caper on Capitol Hill, a Welcome Home Christmas Party under the nose of the FBI at a Greenwich Village jazz club. ASEAN Beat Security Southeast Asia The South China Sea matters to Vietnam’s economic development, but its land borders are the key to its long-term security. The border gate between Vietnam and Laos at Lao Bao, Vietnam. Credit DepositphotosWhere should the focus of Vietnam’s national security strategy lie in an age of rising Chinese power? In 2019, Vietnam’s Ministry of National Defense released a defense white paper that put much emphasis on the South China Sea SCS. Vietnam made clear that it was unhappy with China’s destabilizing behaviors in the SCS, referencing its “actions to unilaterally impose based on force disregarding international laws and militarization activities that change the status quo, violate Vietnam’s sovereignty.” The white paper also cautioned that “great-power competition is getting increasingly tense, making the East Sea [SCS] become flashpoint’ at one point, which increases the risks of conflict.”Since the 1990s, the SCS has been the focus of Vietnam’s national security strategy, with the goal of constraining Chinese expansion. Indeed, the bulk of Vietnam’s military modernization efforts since the early 2000s has focused on the navy and air force in order to boost their ability to protect the country’s maritime interests in a context of high-tech warfare and growing uncertainty in the SCS. Scholars have also noted the importance of the SCS in the overall China-Vietnam relationship and the ways in which China’s rise has shifted the regional maritime balance of power with great implications for settling the SCS disputes in a peaceful such an emphasis on the SCS as the potential flashpoint of Vietnam’s future conflicts with China is misplaced for two reasons. First, China’s rise has shifted the power balance not only at sea but also on the land. Beijing’s attempts to woo Vietnam’s neighbors, Cambodia and Laos, with economic rewards are as dangerous to Hanoi as its destabilizing actions in the SCS. Second, such an emphasis cannot explain Hanoi’s shift to maritime security in the 1990s and overstates the importance of the SCS in its long-term strategic outlook at the expense of other more important priorities, such as the alignment of Cambodia and Laos. Vietnam’s post-Cold War reorientation toward the SCS is based on the premise that its land borders are already secured. But China’s moves to win Laos and Cambodia to its side should shift its focus back generally prioritize land security over maritime security, and only after they have secured their land borders do they look to the ocean. This is simply because it is costly to build and maintain an army and a navy at the same time, especially when the rival is a peer or a more powerful state. China only began to expand its maritime capabilities in the 1980s after its land borders were secured and it became the sole great power in mainland Northeast Asia, reducing its need for a large army. Even now, China has little fear for its land security, given that most of its neighbors are much weaker. In the case of India, the Himalayas serve as a natural buffer to prevent both sides from fighting a large war that can threaten China’s survival. Thanks to the favorable power balance on the land, Beijing has shifted its focus to the maritime domain to contest the United States’ maritime same thing can be said about Vietnam. Hanoi only looked to the sea in the 1990s after it had defeated South Vietnam, resolved its border conflicts and normalized relations with China, and addressed the security threats in Laos and Cambodia in the aftermath of the Third Indochina War. Hanoi’s protests against China’s occupations of the Paracel islands in 1974 and the Johnson South Reef in 1988 were weak for a good reason it was distracted by other more pressing security threats on land and it did not have the capability to field a strong army and navy at the same prioritization of land over the sea was understandable. Compared to mainland Indochina, the SCS lacks the strategic importance that matters to Vietnam’s survival. Both the Paracel and Spratly island groups are far from Vietnam’s shore, meaning that losing them, while harmful to Vietnam’s economic interests, does not hurt Vietnam’s survival in any way. Remarkably, South Vietnam’s loss of the Paracel islands in 1974 to China did not spell its doom – the North Vietnamese army was responsible for that – while Vietnam’s loss of Johnson South Reef to China in 1988 did not threaten Hanoi’s survival as much as China’s 1979 ground both China’s and Vietnam’s land features are too small to defend in the event of war. And apart from using them as a way to assert sovereignty, those features have limited military use without external maritime surveillance capability and have little impact on freedom of navigation. On the other hand, Hanoi is fully aware of the significance of Laos and Cambodia to its survival, which has been demonstrated by its use of the Ho Chi Minh Trail to launch attacks on South Vietnam and its ambition to keep the two countries under an Indochinese Federation and out of the orbit of other rivals after key point is that China now poses a comprehensive threat to Vietnam, on both land and sea, as it presses forward with its Belt and Road Initiative and militarization of islands in the South China Sea, as well as the modernization of its navy. As a weaker power, Vietnam has little choice but to adjust its calculations accordingly and prioritize wisely. China’s occupation of SCS features claimed by Vietnam does not offer it more leverage on land. However, China’s ability to attack Vietnam on land does offer it more leverage on the sea because the stakes are much higher for Vietnam’s security. And this suggests that Vietnam should look west for its has little hope in the east; it cannot fight and win a naval war against China because the maritime balance of power is heavily skewed against it no matter how much it spends on modernizing its navy and air force in the aftermath of major purchases from Russia. It also cannot expect the to come to its defense, given that Washington has maintained its neutrality with regard to the territorial disputes in the SCS and is not bound by a treaty to defend Vietnam, as in the case of the the balance of power on land works more in Vietnam’s favor and it is this that will determine its survival. Vietnam has experience fighting major ground wars against superior enemies and has a better chance of neutralizing China’s qualitative and quantitative military advantages than at sea. The war in Ukraine has shown that a small power can forestall a large power’s attacks by employing a porcupine strategy. Instead of deploying modern military equipment, Vietnam can simply procure cheap and mass-produced weapon systems that are easy to hide and use to significantly increase the costs of Chinese ground mountainous topography of northern Vietnam and Laos should also complement Hanoi’s “porcupine” strategy. During China’s invasion in 1979, Vietnam successfully relied on militia and special operatives, who used tunnels and jungle warfare to stop Chinese assaults along the border while the regular army waited behind the front line to confront the exhausted Chinese Vietnam to successfully deter China, it needs to ensure that China does not establish any military outposts in Laos and Cambodia that allow Beijing to launch a multi-front invasion in addition to the China-Vietnam border. This explains why Hanoi is wary of China’s involvement in the refurbishment of a naval base in Cambodia and Chinese investments in debt-crippled Laos. Sri Lanka accepting to host a Chinese research vessel despite India’s objections should caution Vietnam that Beijing can similarly leverage its economic power to security ends in Laos. Vietnam thus should put more effort into courting these two countries with economic rewards and political partners in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – the Australia, Japan, and India – should not only support its efforts to balance against China in the SCS but also in Laos and Cambodia. And the support does not have to be military. The Quad can provide economic and infrastructure support to weaken the appeal of China’s economic rewards, a task that Vietnam alone cannot achieve. Importantly, Vietnam needs to maintain good relations with China by committing to a diplomatic solution of the SCS disputes in line with international law. History has shown that if the overall Vietnam-China relationship is good, both sides will be willing to settle their disputes South China Sea surely matters to Vietnam’s economic development, but it will be Laos and Cambodia that determine its survival over the long term. And importantly, protecting Vietnam’s land security first and foremost is the best way for it to protect its sovereignty in the SCS. Continuing to balance against China at sea via naval and air force modernization is a step in the wrong direction if China increasingly poses a threat on land. Vietnam therefore needs to strengthen its army and put Laos and Cambodia back at the center of its national security strategy. A grand strategy for Vietnam should start with a simple question is Vietnam secure enough on land to expand to the sea? If China ever decides to test Vietnam on land, Hanoi should be able to pass the test, as it has successfully done so many times over the past 2,000 years. Four prominent Vietnamese dissidents have been given harsh prison terms for speaking out against the government. Activists say it's part of an escalating crackdown on dissent. SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST Vietnam has sentenced four dissidents to lengthy jail terms for what officials are calling spreading anti-state propaganda. Activists say it's part of an escalating crackdown on dissent. This is in a country that the is keen to keep on its side in a bid to try to contain China, as Michael Sullivan SULLIVAN, BYLINE Like its neighbor to the north, Vietnam is a one-party communist state. And like China, it tolerates little dissent. But four convictions in one week?PHIL ROBERTSON Well, the Vietnam government is telling the Vietnam people to sit down and shut up, that they are not going to accept any challenges to their rule. They're not going to accept demands for better governance or an end to corruption or to end the human rights That's Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch. Human rights lawyer and activist Vi Tran has another explanation for the timing of last week's TRAN I think it is a message, and the message is just, like, raising two middle fingers to the rest of the Western Especially the European Union, she says. She thinks the EU has been a bit naive in its approach to Vietnam, especially in the runup to the free trade agreement the two signed not long ago. Here's an argument she says she heard frequently while in If we, you know, help them raise the economy to a better place, human rights would come with it, right? They also say that, you know, Vietnam is needed in the geopolitical world because this is the place that we can counter China. So we should be nice to Vietnam a little bit, and they will be nicer to human rights In fact, activists say the government's crackdown on dissent is just getting HUU LONG 2021 is and has been a very difficult year for dissidents and journalists because within one year, they prosecuted and tried and convicted three groups of More than 20 people in total, says activist and journalist Trinh Huu Long, among them his friend and colleague, the prominent journalist Pham Doan Trang.SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDINGUNIDENTIFIED PERSON Non-English language spoken.SULLIVAN Her conviction and sentencing last week was covered prominently on state-run media. Here's her friend, the human rights lawyer and journalist Vi Tran, reading Pham Doan Trang's defiant final statement to the court.SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDINGTRAN You may imprison me and bask in celebration for eliminating a long-standing thorn in your eye, but you will never be rid of your ugly, authoritarian, undemocratic, anti-democratic reputation because an animal is forever an animal. It can never become The judge sentenced Phan Doan Trang to nine years in prison, more than the prosecutors had asked for. There was an outpouring of support for her on social media, which Vietnam hasn't been able to keep a lid on the way neighboring China has. And the recent surge of the COVID pandemic in Vietnam has dinged the ruling party's reputation even more. Again, activist and journalist Trinh Huu I see major changes in political attitudes among ordinary Vietnamese people. They are now much more critical, and they are more willing to stand up for what is right. And I think this is very bad news for the But rights activists aren't likely to get much help from a West more concerned with China's growing assertiveness in the South China HAYTON I don't think the outside powers have any desire to rock the boat in Vietnam at the Bill Hayton is a Vietnam watcher at Chatham House think tank in I think as long as Vietnam keeps its repression within certain limits, it'll be privately admonished, but it's not going to be publicly criticized by the big powers, and they're not going to take any practical measures like Another activist is scheduled to be sentenced next week. For NPR News, I'm Michael Sullivan in Chiang Rai. Copyright © 2021 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. 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