Ngo Vinh Long '68 originally sent the following article as a letter to a Harvard professor. The CRIMSON believes that it deserves wider circulation.

The author, the only Vietnamese undergraduate at Harvard, is a leader of the Vietnamese Students Association in the United States and a former secretary-general of the New England chapter. Before coming to Harvard, he was president of the Saigon Students Association.

Dear Professor,

I am a Vietnamese student enrolled in your course. Since I heard you mention your experience of having listened to some Vietnamese "epic poems," I venture to present you mine with the hope that again you will have the patience to read it through.

Being a Vietnamese, my basic education has been directed under these four most important laws: "hoc an, hoc noi, hoc goi, hoc mo," which means that I am supposed to learn to eat, to learn how to say things, to learn how to wrap up the things I have to say, and to learn to open up the things that others have wrapped up.

The first law is supposed to provide me with a guide-line in my relationship with people around me; in the family, when I sit down at the dining table I have to look around to see how much food is available there before eating; outside the famliy it teaches me how to be considerate of other people. The other three laws are supposed to teach me how to survive and to get along in the world. However, since I have been highly influenced by Western standards, I cannot but have some inner admiration for the concluding sentences of King

Lear:

The weight of these sad times we must obey

Speak what we feel and not what we ought to say.

The eldest hath borne most, we that are young

Shall never see so much nor live so long.

I was truly impressed the other day by your lectures on Vietnam. In a war in which the perfection of military arts and techniques outweighs all other considerations, the attention you paid to the Vietnamese traditions and culture as some of the factors upon which either the shortening or the lengthening of this conflict rests, demands my respect. If I am correct, in your lectures you mentioned that the Vietnamese, being mostly Confucians, usually behave according to the Confucian ethics. That is to say they seldom remain neutral in a conflict in which one side to the struggle turns out to be the decisive victor, since the victor is also the carrier of the "Mandate of Heaven."

But I think that Confucianism in Vietnam is as different from its Chinese counterpart as the Vietnamese themselves from the Chinese. In Vietnam, people operate less on Confucian doctrines as such than on Vietnamese principles. It is not the winning side in a struggle that usually carries the Mandate of Heaven, but rather the side which carries out the traditions or behaves according to the principles of the country. Vietnamese history is full or examples illustrating this point. And the present conflict is but only another of such examples.

In fact, I think that the secret of the Liberation Front's strength and the reason for its survival lie in its ability to act according to the Vietnamese principles although it may seem paradoxical that a revolutionary Communist-oriented movement should behave so.

In support of your thesis about the ambivalent behavior of the South Vietnamese people towards both the South Vietnamese regime and the Viet Cong, you also mentioned the Viet Cong's control of the population in the countryside "by night" and the regime's "by day." Many Americans would go a little further by saying that the Viet Cong's nighttime control is possible because it is coupled with an "evil and dark system of terrorism." President Johnson, in his Johns Hopkins University speech, talked of "innocent children and women being strangled in the heart of the night" and of "terror striking the hearts of the cities," etc.