A young Viet Cong soldier Nguyen Van Be became the focus, for debates on youth, heroism, and state policy throughout the course of the Vietnam War. The moment the story reached the media – ballets, poems, songs passionately flooded the country encouraging young men to enlist into the army. The extend of its publicity could be well imagined by the whopping thirty million leaflets, seven million cartoon leaflets, 465,000 posters, 175,000 copies of a special newspaper, 167,000 photographs, 10,000 song sheets that were published during the time. You name it, movie, television, radio, everything had Be’s face plastered on it.
Van Be wasn’t dead, he declared he had never fired a single shot. In fact he’d tried to run away but was captured and send away to a Vietnamese prison camp. After this sordid trick the Viet Cong told their audiences that American plastic surgeons had created a Van Be look-alike in order to deceive the population. Continue reading “In 1966 he had died heroically screaming “down with American Imperialists” and killing scores of Americans using a mine”