Trip to Hanoi

I found it very interesting that while reading the beginning of this article it appeared as if the writer had knowledge of rhetoric, this became more and more obvious as terms such as rhetoric, pathos, and decorum were continually used. This article definitely spoke to my emotions, exactly as it intended to do. Although it was not obvious, I believe that the author was using rhetoric for an argument against the war. We are aware from the beginning that he is an anti-war demonstrator but throughout the reading he is not straight forwardly telling us that we should oppose the war as well, instead he is using subtleties that spark our emotions. What really made me sympathize for the Vietnamese people was the description of the grave set up for the American pilot died after having his plane shot down. When the author wrote how the Vietnamese people "have had spouses and parents and children murdered by this pilot and his comrades" it reminded me of the scene from Platoon in which Joker was in a helicopter watching a fellow marine taking aim at all the citizens below. Many of the American soldiers, pilots, etc. have been portrayed as heartless "killing machines", yet as mentioned in this reading, the people in the city where the pilot was shot down at created a beautiful grave in his memory, regardless of the possible killings of their people that he was responsible for. It did not matter whether they forgave or even pitied him, they were simply doing what they felt was the right and "humane" thing to do. I am sure that this evoked the emotions of many readers, obviously what the author was trying to do and it clearly worked for me.

Another element of the reading that appealed to me was the differences described between Americans and the Vietnamese. At first the author states how it appears as if all the people of this foreign country seem almost identical in his opinion. They all talk the same, act the same, and hold the same values. He believed it was almost impossible to have a conversation with them, not only because of the language barrier but because they as a foreign people could simply not understand the points he made and where he was coming from. The author's understanding of Vietnam and the war before traveling to the country itself was a main reason for his ignorance, one that many Americans must have shared as well, but slowly the author realized that his assumptions were wrong. He states how everything became much clearer to him as he "became less occupied with the constrictions of their language and with the reduction of my own resources of expressions". Once he was able to look past the cultural barrier and open his eyes to the new people that he was dealing with, he could see that the Vietnamese were not all the same people and that their almost prude-like personalities were the result of a tame and understanding culture that a large majority of the Vietnamese people held. After watching the different war movies it was a breath of fresh air to read an article that was anti-war. It gave me a new outlook on the war and a new respect for the Vietnamese people.