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Dispatches from Pác Bó

@thomasbelfield54.bsky.social
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Thomas R. Belfield University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Department of Geography. MA. A Bibliographical Exposition of the Wars on Vietnam 1945 -1975. See: ALT (always more info there) “Americans ignore history.” ― Frances FitzGerald

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E hele me ka pu‘olo @pnwgeographies.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
life during wartime
This ain't no party, this ain't no disco
This ain't no fooling around
No time for dancing, or lovey-dovey
I ain't got time for that now
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
The PAVN Army Corp II in the Outskirts of Da Nang, 29th March 1975. Source: People’s Army Newspaper.
The PAVN Army Corp II in the Outskirts of Da Nang, 29th March 1975. Source: People’s Army Newspaper.

b/w photo tank in the street flying National Liberation Front flag.
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
understandingempire.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/s...
understandingempire.wordpress.com
Scorched Atmospheres: The Violent Geographies of the Vietnam War and the Rise of Drone Warfare
This article is published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Cite as: Shaw, I.G.R. (2016). Scorched Atmospheres: The Violent Geographies of the Vietnam War and the Rise of Dr…
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Ninh Hòa salt production
photo: segmentedleg

making salt reflected of clouds and mountains
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purepapua.bsky.social @purepapua.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Indonesia loves telling the world how proudly it threw off Dutch colonialism. Apparently the lesson was: colonialism is terrible when someone does it to you — but perfectly acceptable when you do it to West Papua.
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Major General Douglas Gracey who was in command of allied occupation in South Vietnam (Cochinchina) refused to let the OSS team fly the American flag on their jeep. Vietminh attacked the jeep and he was killed. Ho Chi Minh thought it a grievous mistake and offered his deep condolences.
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Anti-Colonial History @anticolonialhistry.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
On this day in 1945, intelligence operative A. Peter Dewey is killed by the Việt Minh, the first of nearly 59,000 Americans to be killed in Vietnam. anticolonialhistory.com/day/9/26/
On 2 September 1945, President Ho Chi Minh read the Declaration of Independence at Ba Dinh Square, giving birth to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
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Cha: An Asian Literary Journal @asiancha.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
𝐍𝐄𝐖 @asiancha.bsky.social 𝐄𝐒𝐒𝐀𝐘 | Vietnamese writer & astronomer Nguyễn Bình explores poet Xuân Quỳnh’s 1982 translations of Palestinian poetry, especially Mahmoud Darwish, situating them within socialist internationalism and Vietnam’s wartime experience. 𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗗: chajournal.com/2026/09/26/w... 。。。。。
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Forest, mountains, clouds. My own Việt Bắc.
I'll be here if things go sideways. Mountains, forest, clouds. My own Việt Bắc.
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Trump never had a friend in his entire miserable life.
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Resist 🕎🍉 @antizionistjew.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Interviewer: What does the area look like after? Soldier: Hiroshima. That's what I'm saying, Hiroshima.
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Resist 🕎🍉 @antizionistjew.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Soldier: Everything is everything. Everything that's built. Interviewer: Orchards? Soldier: Yes Interviewer: Cowsheds, chicken coops? Soldier: Yes, yes Interviewer: Every building and every structure? Soldier: Every building and every structure. Everything.
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Resist 🕎🍉 @antizionistjew.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
🪖 IDF Anonymous Soldier Testimony (Sent Thru "Breaking The Silence") 🎖️ Rank: Warrant Officer 🥷🏻 Unit: Disclosed 📍 Service Area: Gaza 🗓️ Time: 2024 Interviewer: During briefings, is there talk about civilians who might be in the area? Soldier: There is no civilian population. They're terrorists,
A soldier on white and black paint
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Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Well this seems to have taken off - if you're interested in how atrocities are covered up and forgotten, I wrote a book about the worst massacre in American history that you have never heard about: Bud Dajo 1906 (more people were killed than at Wounded Knee and My Lai combined).
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Working Class History @workingclasshistory.com · 23/09/2026
#OtD 23 Sep 1945 the Saigon Commune came into being when workers rose up, independently of the Vietminh, after French troops supported by Gurkhas under British command entered the city. More info, sources and map: stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/7885...
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Viet Thanh Nguyen @vietthanhnguyen.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
A powerful and confident empire wouldn’t to annihilate anyone. An insecure and decaying empire does.
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
It is Tuesday, and National Elephant Appreciation Day!
elephants on the Ho Chi Minh Trail
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Lee West @whodat35.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Inside the US ‘Kill Chain’ That Destroyed an Iranian School | Bloomberg News archive.today/wr8t9
Satellite imagery in black and white with a red box over a school site and a heading in a red tape banner with black text that reads:  

Politics The Big Take: an inside the US ‘Kill Chain’ That Destroyed an Iranian School 

Pentagon investigators have discovered that flawed intelligence, outdated imagery and an overreliance on Al contributed to a missile strike that killed 123 children in Minab.
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purepapua.bsky.social @purepapua.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
West Papua: Empires came, drew their borders, took the land — and called it governance
freedomnews.org.uk
Papuan traditions and Empire’s mess - Freedom News
Models of indigenous governance challenge Western and Indonesian subjugation ~ Julian McKinlay King ~ On the periphery of globalisation, media inte…
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0pj... The entire premise for this war is never questioned by those that sat behind a desk and executed the orders from on high.
youtube.com
Vietnam Special : Con Thien Battle
YouTube video by PublicResourceOrg
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
That includes 5600 helicopters including the one that gets blown up in the movie.
en.wikipedia.org
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Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Jfc
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DMovies @dmovies.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Son of Argentinian revolutionary recalls fragments of his country's turbulent history, in this modest third-person documentary From the 74th San Sebastian International Film Festival: dmovies.org/2026/09/19/p...
dmovies.org
Pedro in the Land (Pedro en el Pais) - DMovies
Son of Argentinian revolutionary recalls fragments of his country's turbulent history, in this modest third-person documentary - from the 74th San Sebastian International Film Festival
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Resist 🕎🍉 @antizionistjew.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
‼️👇 Israeli President from the Labour Party pardons an IDF murderer who shot an helpless man in the head to death The problem is not the government, it’s the Israeli society as a whole
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Resist 🕎🍉 @antizionistjew.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
🎯
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High Country News @highcountrynews.org · 20/09/2026
Heirs to the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott explain their ancestors’ wisdom and how they defend it today. buff.ly/WW55v6S
buff.ly
‘Quite frustrating:’ what it’s like to have a treaty with the United States - High Country News
The Treaty of Point Elliott bears the signatures of over 80 Indigenous leaders representing more than 20 tribal nations from the Pacific Northwest. Contemporary leaders from some of those nations…
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indones...
en.wikipedia.org
Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 - Wikipedia
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6sP...
youtube.com
Behind The Viet Cong Lines (1965)
YouTube video by Nuclear Vault
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Lê Huy Toàn, 1958, Điện Biên Phủ. Oil on silk.
Lê Huy Toàn, 1958, Điện Biên Phủ. Oil on silk.
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
www.penguin.sg/book/no-man-... Last book. You can now scroll back through to where this begins. There are sixty or so titles from my library.
Undeniably one of Vietnam’s most beloved stories, Duong Huong’s No Man River is a novel about the homefront during the American War and its aftermath. Awarded the Vietnam Writers’ Association’s most prestigious prize in 1991—the same year Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War was published—it has been translated into many languages, and twice been adapted into film. It tells the story of a village in northern Vietnam that must send its men to fight, but at the same time continue the communist revolution’s transformation of their society. An injured but idealistic veteran of the war against the French named Van hopes to create a modern society in which everyone will live in harmony, but first he must overcome the superstition and prejudices still held by his community. He must also keep secret his love for the village beauty, Nhan—the widow of his dearest fallen comrade. Complications arise when his nephew marries Nhan’s daughter, Hanh, just before he leaves to fight in the South. Parents long for the return of their sons. Wives and children anxiously await the return of their husbands and fathers. Resisting the socialist revolutionary notion that war is glorious or heroic, No Man River presents an innovative portrait of wartime and postwar village life that tells the story of the countless Vietnamese who carried not only the burden of war, but also all the tribulations of forging of a new society during the most tumultuous time in modern Vietnamese history.
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E hele me ka pu‘olo @pnwgeographies.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Hey, I finally retrieved my account from the August outage. I will be posting here again.
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Viet Thanh Nguyen @vietthanhnguyen.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Did you know there is a French graphic novel adaptation of The Sympathizer? What a thrill for me to visit Angers and talk with Antoine Ozanam about his adaptation of my novel into Le Sympathisant! Monday, September 28, 2026 6:30 – 8:30 pm Musée des Beaux-Arts · Angers (1/4)
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Prof Antifa @postcarbonsteve.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
"What oppresses me, more still than the unclosed eyes of the dead who fill the sandy paddy fields, is the way the West applauded the Khmer Rouge, hailing their victory over their brothers in 1975. The ovation was so frenzied as to drown out the protracted wailing of the millions being massacred."
In 1971 a young French ethnologist named Francois Bizot was taken prisoner by forces of the Khmer Rouge who kept him chained in a jungle camp for months before releasing him. Four years later Bizot became the intermediary between the now victorious Khmer Rouge and the occupants of the besieged French embassy in Phnom Penh, eventually leading a desperate convoy of foreigners to safety across the Thai border.

Out of those ordeals comes this transfixing book. At its center lies the relationship between Bizot and his principal captor, a man named Douch, who is today known as the most notorious of the Khmer Rouge’s torturers but who, for a while, was Bizot’s protector and friend. Written with the immediacy of a great novel, unsparing in its understanding of evil, The Gate manages to be at once wrenching and redemptive.
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300... There was always more than just the war.
A milestone book that provides the first guide to Vietnam’s spectacular flora and fauna and the diverse natural areas in which they live

A country uncommonly rich in plants, animals, and natural habitats, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam shelters a significant portion of the world’s biological diversity, including rare and unique organisms and an unusual mixture of tropical and temperate species. This book is the first comprehensive account of Vietnam’s natural history in English. Illustrated with maps, photographs, and thirty-five original watercolor illustrations, the book offers a complete tour of the country’s plants and animals along with a full discussion of the factors shaping their evolution and distribution.

Separate chapters focus on northern, central, and southern Vietnam, regions that encompass tropics, subtropics, mountains, lowlands, wetland and river regions, delta and coastal areas, and offshore islands. The authors provide detailed descriptions of key natural areas to visit, where a traveler might explore limestone caves or glimpse some of the country’s twenty-seven monkey and ape species and more than 850 bird species. The book also explores the long history of humans in the country, including the impact of the Vietnam-American War on plants and animals, and describes current efforts to conserve Vietnam’s complex, fragile, and widely threatened biodiversity.
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
www.ttupress.org/978168283162... This is one of my favorite books.
Breaking a thirty-year silence, Bảo Ninh has permitted at last the publication of a new work in English. Ninh is perhaps Vietnam’s foremost chronicler of the war, which he joined at age 17. Bringing to life the full range of his inventive and poetic language, Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran are granting to English readers Bảo Ninh’s first book-length work since The Sorrow of War, which catapulted him to fame and which was banned in Vietnam until 2006. In Hà Nội at Midnight, ten stories are appearing in the West for the first time.

Juxtaposed with tranquility and geniality are abandoned landscapes and defoliated forests. Polluted rivers and streams, the war-torn sky, pungent air filled with the stench of decomposing human corpses, and the deafening roar of helicopters and bombers hovering in the gloom dominate the settings of Bảo Ninh’s stories.

Intertwined with these horrific images are human tears shed during farewell ceremonies, when recruits are separated from their loved ones, when parents live in anxiety and hope while their children are fighting in remote regions, and when soldiers bury their comrades and burden themselves with the fallen’s unfulfilled wishes. Hà Nội at Midnight delineates the complex outpourings of war and the way it remakes human relationships.
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
In this anthology, Vietnamese writers describe their experience of what they call the American War and its lasting legacy through the lens of their own vital artistic visions. A North Vietnamese soldier forms a bond with an abandoned puppy. Cousins find their lives upended by the revelation that their fathers fought on opposite sides of the war. Two lonely veterans in Hanoi meet years after the war has ended through a newspaper dating service. A psychic assists the search for the body of a long-vanished soldier. The father of a girl suffering from dioxin poisoning struggles with corrupt local officials.

The twenty short stories collected in Other Moons range from the intensely personal to narratives that deal with larger questions of remembrance, trauma, and healing. By a diverse set of authors, including many veterans, they span styles from social realism to tales of the fantastic. Yet whether describing the effects of Agent Orange exposure or telling ghost stories, all speak to the unresolved legacy of a conflict that still haunts Vietnam. Among the most widely anthologized and popular pieces of short fiction about the war in Vietnam, these works appear here for the first time in English. Other Moons offers Anglophone audiences an unparalleled opportunity to experience how the Vietnamese think and write about the conflict that consumed their country from 1954 to 1975―a perspective still largely missing from American narratives.
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
asterismbooks.com/product/the-... In Vietnam, author Nguyễn Bình Phương is considered a military writer. After four years of serving as a soldier, rising to the rank of Colonel, with a stint at the Nguyễn Du writing academy.
Mysterious, unsettling, but darkly poetic, this magical realist novel echoes the timelessness of García Marquez and Faulkner.

Set in the mythic village of Phan, the novel follows a tangled web of characters haunted by buried secrets, ancestral curses, and an unnamed historical trauma. Two feuding families vie for control of a mysterious treasure said to lie beneath the land, while a former soldier wanders the village, driven by fractured memories, and unfulfilled desires.

Like a fragmented but lyrical nightmare, Nguyễn Bình Phương evokes the disorientation of a society grappling with the aftershocks of war, repression, and silence. The title speaks to a generation whose youth was lost before it began—children who age prematurely under the weight of unspoken histories.
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
The blurring of lines between the dead and the living, past and present core to studying hauntings can offer insight into memory as the everyday experience of living with and among the past.
  Drawing from Jacques Derrida, Martha and Bruce Lincoln describe hauntology as the “sensuous and the non-sensuous, visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, reality and not-yet-reality, being and non-being.” (192) How does an ontological study of haunting offer a deeper understanding of memory? To study memory is to study the dialectical relationship between the past and the present and the lived understanding of the past. The blurring of lines between the dead and the living, past and present core to studying hauntings can offer insight into memory as the everyday experience of living with and among the past.
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
www.ucpress.edu/books/after-... How shall I think about this? How shall I remember this?
Though a generation has passed since the massacre of civilians at My Lai, the legacy of this tragedy continues to reverberate throughout Vietnam and the rest of the world. This engrossing study considers how Vietnamese villagers in My Lai and Ha My—a village where South Korean troops committed an equally appalling, though less well-known, massacre of unarmed civilians—assimilate the catastrophe of these mass deaths into their everyday ritual life.

Based on a detailed study of local history and moral practices, After the Massacre focuses on the particular context of domestic life in which the Vietnamese villagers interact with their ancestors on one hand and the ghosts of tragic death on the other. Heonik Kwon explains what intimate ritual actions can tell us about the history of mass violence and the global bipolar politics that caused it. He highlights the aesthetics of Vietnamese commemorative rituals and the morality of their practical actions to liberate the spirits from their grievous history of death. The author brings these important practices into a critical dialogue with dominant sociological theories of death and symbolic transformation.
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Sammy Feldblum @sammyfeldblum.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
RIP to Patricio Guzmán, a titan of documentary. La Batalla de Chile is one of the great works of political art. I got to write for the @thebaffler.com a couple years back on memory, nostalgia, and political urgency in his work 50 years on from Chile's coup. Rest easy. thebaffler.com/latest/the-a...
thebaffler.com
The Afterlife of a Coup | Sammy Feldblum
The films of Patricio Guzmán chronicle fifty years of tumult and memory in Chile.
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
A depiction of soldiers on a postwar mission to collect the bones of fallen comrades for reburial. The Sorrow of War, Bao Ninh "On the banks of the Ya Crong Poco river, ..."


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



The Sorrow of War (Vietnamese: Nỗi buồn chiến tranh), formerly titled The Destiny of Love (Thân phận của tình yêu), is a novel by Vietnamese writer Bảo Ninh. Written in 1987, the work was first published in Vietnam in 1990.[1] The story follows Kiên, a romantic and idealistic young man whose life is upended by the Vietnam War. After witnessing immense loss and death, Kiên is left haunted and isolated, and struggles to reintegrate into civilian life during peacetime.

The Sorrow of War has received acclaim from writers and scholars both domestically and internationally.[2][3][4][5] Departing from the traditional epic heroism of previous Vietnamese literature, the novel sparked intense controversy among critics and the public upon its release.[6][7] By 2016, it had become the most translated and published Vietnamese novel in the international book market.[8] Excerpts from the book were also included in the 12th-grade literature textbook for high schools in Vietnam.[9] Alongside Nguyễn Du's The Tale of Kiều, Bảo Ninh's The Sorrow of War is one of the two most widely recognized works of Vietnamese literature globally.[10][11]

It is also one of the few Vietnamese literary works held in the Nobel Library.[12] The novel has earned Bảo Ninh numerous prestigious awards both in Vietnam and abroad.
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
“Look far ahead and ponder deeply.” ― Hồ Chí Minh
In this new edition of his widely acclaimed study, William Duiker has revised and updated his analysis of the Communist movement in Vietnam from its formation in 1930 to the dilemmas facing its leadership in the post?Cold War era. Making use of newly available documentary sources and recent Western scholarship, the author reevaluates Communist revolutionary strategy during the Vietnam War. Based on primary materials in several languages, this respected work is essential for an understanding of Vietnam in the twentieth century.
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
www.ucpress.edu/books/body-c... This book retheorizes the connections among history, memory, power and around the crucial issues of war, race, and violence—and the history and memories that are forged in the aftermath of war.
Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) examines how the Vietnam War has continued to serve as a stage for the shoring up of American imperialist adventure and for the (re)production of American and Vietnamese American identities. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, this book retheorizes the connections among history, memory, and power and refashions the fields of American studies, Asian American studies, and refugee studies not around the narratives of American exceptionalism, immigration, and transnationalism but around the crucial issues of war, race, and violence—and the history and memories that are forged in the aftermath of war. At the same time, the book moves decisively away from the “damage-centered” approach that pathologizes loss and trauma by detailing how first- and second-generation Vietnamese have created alternative memories and epistemologies that challenge the established public narratives of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese people. Explicitly interdisciplinary, Body Counts moves between the humanities and social sciences, drawing on historical, ethnographic, cultural, and virtual evidence in order to illuminate the places where Vietnamese refugees have managed to conjure up social, public, and collective remembering.
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Done in a day. The war is over.
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
monthlyreview.org/9780853454090/ With this decision, the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt... ...30 April 1975 as the time of death, but the shot that killed the Republic of Vietnam was fired at Dien Bien Phu on 13 March 1954 by General Vo Nguyen Giap.
With this decision, the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt. The coroner's certificate lists 30 April 1975 as the
time of death, but the shot that killed the Republic of South Vietnam was fired on 18 March by General Vo Nguyen
Giap. Contrary to his well-earned reputation for ruthlessness, Giap's last victory was also his most bloodless.
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Saigon on April 27th, 1975, eye witness to the end of Vietnam’s tragic war and his experiences over the next 90 days - a first-hand account of the revolutionary process in Vietnam during and after the collapse of American power.
Tiziano Terzani slipped back into Saigon on April 27th, 1975, determined to witness the end of Vietnam’s most tragic war. What he experienced over the next ninety days - last ditch attempts at negotiation, the panicked American evacuation, the precipitous conquest of Saigon, the anxious waiting for a bloodbath that never came, the first signs of transformation and reconstruction - is the subject of this book, a first-hand account of the revolutionary process in Vietnam during and after the collapse of American power. Terzani, whose reports on the takeover at Doc Lap palace ion April 30th, 1975, were the first news bulletins out of the new Vietnam, brings an informed passion to this exclusive and timely story, he gives dramatic revelations about the last days of American presence - how the American blocked negotiations to gain time for their own evacuation, the story behind the abortive baby lift, the unmasking of agents on both sides. He offers an incisive picture of Saigon waiting, Americans escaping, of Communist troops marching triumphantly into the city’s center shouting Giai Phong! Giai Phong! - Liberation! Liberation! He shows Saigon caught in the grip of its own fantasies, and the dream of revolution suddenly become daily reality; he describes the invisible new government and its mysterious new leaders, men like Tran Van Tra, Nguyen Huu Tho, Le Duc Tho; he analyzes the frightening saintliness of many revolutionaries. Terzani takes us to Con Son Island, site of Thieu’s famous tiger cages to witness the liberation of thousands of political prisoners; to a solidarity cell meeting in one of the districts of Saigon where old residents express resentment at the new regime; to Givral, gossip spot of the old Saigon, where the last of the obstinate conjure up schemes of resistance; to the Delta for an inside look at revolution in the North Vietnamese capital on the road to reconstruction and reunification. Terzani, a veteran Vietnam reporter and international scholar …
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
A Brief History of the Republic of Vietnam Ngô Đình Diệm 1953-54 After Dien Bien Phu the State of Vietnam was a figment of the imagination of the French. Bảo Đại, the last emperor of Vietnam, offered Diệm the government to run all military and civilian affairs. Diệm was the last mandarin.
photo: Life Magazine
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Richard Kadrey @richardkadrey.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager. —Susan Sontag
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Dispatches from Pác Bó @thomasbelfield54.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
"Our country is at war. We always root for our country under any circumstance. So let's get this done, Mr. President." -Nancy Pelosi
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