A Gift of Barbed Wire: America's Allies Abandoned in South Vietnam [Hardcover]

Robert S. McKelvey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 2002

"A Gift of Barbed Wire" is a searing look at the lives of South Vietnamese officials and their families left behind in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975. A former Marine who served in Vietnam, Robert McKelvey went on to practice psychiatry and, through his work in refugee camps and U.S. social service organizations, met South Vietnamese men from all walks of life who had been imprisoned in re-education camps immediately after the war. McKelvey's interviews with these former political prisoners, their wives, and their children reveal the devastating, long-term impact of their incarceration. From the early years in French colonial Vietnam through the Vietnam War, from postwar ordeals of re-education camps, social ostracism, and poverty, to escape or emigration to the United States, this collection of narratives provides broad and highly personal accounts of individuals and families evolving against the backdrop of war and vast social change. All the people interviewed for the book eventually reached the United States, some by the desperate route of the boat people fleeing Vietnam in unsafe vessels, others, after rigorous screening, through U.S. Government-sponsored programs. But even in the safety of the United States they had to begin anew, devoting all their remaining energies to survival. While crediting the courage and resilience of these families, McKelvey holds a critical mirror up to our culture, exploring the nature of our responsibility to our allies as well as the attitudes that obscured the reality of war as 'a grinding, brutal interplay of complex forces that often develops a sustaining energy and momentum of its own, driving us in directions that we neither anticipated nor desired'.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Despite the horrors portrayed, these are tales of courage and successful survival in the broader human tragedy of war and its aftermath. McKelvey's skills as an interviewer and his knowledge of the Vietnamese community, especially the survivors, and their willingness to trust him with stories which they usually hold closely, make A Gift of Barbed Wire both persuasive and cogent. They are also reasons why not many people in the world could undertake such a project."--Charles Holzer, University of Texas Medical Branch "A Gift of Barbed Wire is the only study of Vietnamese re-education camp experiences that includes in some detail the family members of those who were incarcerated and the effects--economic, social, and psychological--that imprisonment had on the whole family."--James Freeman, author of Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese American Lives

About the Author

Robert S. McKelvey is professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland and is the author of The Dust of Life: America's Children Abandoned in Vietnam.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 266 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Washington Pr; 1St Edition edition (August 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0295982241
• ISBN-13: 978-0295982243
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,410,751 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The best book about postwar Vietnam's reeducation, January 16, 2006

By 

Quang Pham "Quang Pham" (Orange County, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Gift of Barbed Wire: America's Allies Abandoned in South Vietnam (Hardcover)

McKelvey, a Marine veteran of Vietnam, penned a marvelous oral history of former reeducation camp survivors. The Introduction is personal and touching. The book contains four major sections dealing with interviews with former prisoners: a doctor, an engineer, a tailor, a pilot and a spy. Families of prisoners give their stories of carrying on while their loved ones were in captivity.

The author probes deeply into the postwar lives of these former public servants and officers of South Vietnam. From the initial reporting date in June 1975 until their release, the interviewees recall the brutal details of the camps, their captors and the communist indoctrination--basically hard labor and starvation. "Reeducation" is a misnomer.

Nixon and Kissinger's "Peace with Honor" never materialized. Ford took care of the refugees in the U.S. but didn't/couldn't intervene. Carter, well...he was busy with pardoning draft dodgers and Iran. The U.N. and Amnesty International finally took notice in 1979 when it was too late for the majority of those who had perished.

I give this book four stars only because it reeks of academia, its format of Q&A rather than an arcing narrative. It should be included in every Vietnam class, especially those professors and students who care to learn about America's defeated and abandoned allies.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rather late than never, October 13, 2002

By 

Andy (New York, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Gift of Barbed Wire: America's Allies Abandoned in South Vietnam (Hardcover)

I am a student from Vietnam and now studying in the U.S. I chanced to read this book in our university library. Thanks the AUTHOR for an insightful book.

In fact, my family background was 'clean' in the eyes of our government because my parents were not involved in any military service for the former government. But I have friends whose family situations were exactly the same as those portrayed in the book. I must say those are incredible human sufferings, and not only for one generation. I am glad some of those stories are now heard, perhaps a bit late but still, better than never.

Here's a life-time lesson for me (and perhaps some others): no matter how and what communists tell you, don't hastily believe them. Just look at what and how they do, and you'll see it for yourself. For many of them, human dignity and lives are trivial and cheap.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enlightening., January 5, 2003

By 

alainviet "alainviet" (Indianapolis, IN United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Gift of Barbed Wire: America's Allies Abandoned in South Vietnam (Hardcover)

In this book, Dr. McKelvey wrote a detailed and intimate account of the South Vietnamese military officers' fates after the end of the Vietnam War.

The message is troublesome but not surprising: the military personnel were rounded into re-education camps and suffered untold tragedies from humiliation, torture, mental degradation to physical impoverishment within a communist prison system. The majority of the officers were jailed from ten to fifteen years; one officer was detained for a total of 22 years.

While 70,000 former political inmates and their families were allowed to immigrate to the U.S. through the ODP (Orderly Departure Program), many more are still living on the fringes of the Vietnamese communist society. A former major drives a pedicab for a living. In this McKelvey's book, we heard the voices of a doctor, a tailor, a politician, an engineer, a spy, a pilot, and a teacher. They all endured "grueling and unforgiving ordeals that only the strongest would have survived." Family members were ostracized for being related to the political prisoners; their wives suffered uncounted financial, emotional, physical hardships, their children barred from a decent education.

The book is one of the few that deal with the long-term psychological effects of the incarceration on the inmates and the sufferings of their relatives.

The author concludes that: 1) War does not end when peace treaties are signed because the negative rippling effects of war and destruction affect many generations to come. 2) The U.S. should be very careful about intervening militarily in any part of the World. 3) The U.S., if it does go to war, cannot simply abandon friends and allies to the mercies of common enemies.