Shaped by plight of Vietnam

Jul 12 2009 by Michael Kelly, Sunday Sun

NORTH East miner, activist, author and historian Dave Douglass talks about his three-month trip to Vietnam, the country whose plight helped shape his political views. MIKE KELLY reports.

FOR a moment, Dave Douglass felt quite flattered when his Vietnamese guide paused briefly on their trek through dense jungle to tell him no tourists usually travelled that way.

The air was warm and humid, the terrain difficult.

“I worked down the pit all my life, I’m fit,” Dave assured him.

“It’s not that,” the guide replied. “It’s the killer bees. People can die if they get stung.”

Dave laughed: “He hadn’t told me that before we started out. Fortunately, I never saw them. I just heard them.”

It was another memorable moment in a three-month journey which Dave had dreamed of most of his life.

His politics were left-wing from birth, being from a family of miners. Over the years he has been a member of the Communist, Anarchist and Revolutionary Workers groups . . . a standpoint that meant it was obvious whose side he would be on after the US invaded Vietnam.

In 1968, when working at Wardley Colliery, Gateshead, he travelled to London for the Grosvenor Square anti-Vietnam war demonstration outside the US embassy.

Dave said: “Vietnam was the inspiration of my generation’s conversion to ideas of radical socialism and the anti-war movement.

“The struggle of the Vietnamese broke a whole movement from non-violence and pacifism.

“It kick-started us into thinking of the difference between the violence of the oppressor and the violence of the oppressed.”

According to Dave, the US used more weapons and bombs than in the whole of the First and Second World Wars, including the two atom bombs.

Remnants of the bloody conflict are everywhere, from the tank graveyards to the countless landmines that still litter the country. Then there are swathes of the countryside where nothing grows because of the use of Agent Orange, the grim museums that reveal the full horror of the war, and the amount of Vietnamese people with disabilities.

Apparently, 60 per cent of the population is aged 30 or under, an astonishing statistic linked to the war.