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Showing posts from June, 2011

A Proper Welcome Home . . .

... After All These Years! My brother was born on May 28, 1945, the year World War II ended. In August of that same year, the Japanese had surrendered unconditionally. Unknown to my brother, who was less than three months old, the winds of war blew fiercely somewhere else on the far side of the earth as the Japanese occupied a spot north of the sixteenth parallel after the War had ended. In September of that year, Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Viet Minh, declared the Democratic Republic of Vietnam before a crowd of some 500,000 in Hanoi. But the major allied victors of World War II— the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union—all agreed the area belonged to the French. As the French had not the wherewithal to retake Vietnam at the time, the major powers agreed that British troops would occupy the South and the Nationalist Chinese, the North. On September 14, 1945, Chinese forces disarmed the Japanese troops north of the sixteenth parallel and the British landed i