The People We Wanted to Forget - Softcover

Harpold, Michael G.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 194527168X ISBN 13: 9781945271687

Publisher: Book Publishers Network, 2020

Synopsis

After the last American left Saigon and 155,000 Vietnamese were resettled in the United States, Americans just wanted the Vietnam War put behind them. Many Vietnamese who stayed behind could not, and they continued their struggle of staying alive, now under new terms. Starving, their crops and catches collectivized by the new Socialist Republic of Vietnam, over 1.5 million people fled with their families most in small fishing boats. But they sailed into an indifferent world. No country wanted them, most notably the United States. Faced with a growing, unwelcome population, the countries of first refuge along the periphery of the South China Sea forced the overcrowded refugee boats back onto the open ocean. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese perished. On a Sunday morning in Thailand, Mike Harpold was on assignment at refugee camps in Southeast Asia to prepare a report for a congressional hearing on the boat people. Alerted by a doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières, Harpold rushed to the aid of thirty-four Vietnamese men, women, and children whose disabled boat was about to be towed out to sea by the Thai Navy and cast adrift certain death for all aboard. He had ten minutes to come up with a way to save them. What Harpold did next forced a change in US policy, encouraged Americans to once again look into their soul, and demonstrated how one person with integrity and courage can make the difference in the lives of thousands.

About this title

About the Author

During the war, Michael G. Harpold served two years with USAID in South Vietnam as an advisor to the National Police. His forty-year career of service to country began at age seventeen in the US Army and includes the US Border Patrol, and its parent, the former US Immigration and Naturalization Service. The author and his wife, Elaine, live in Ketchikan, Alaska, where he continued to serve his community as a member of the city council and the school board. His first book, a novel, Jumping the Line, describes the lives of Mexican-American farmworkers and Mexican immigrants.

Review

The People We Wanted to Forget, ISBN 978-1-945271-68-7, has been awarded Third Place in Memoir in the 2019 Independent Publishers competition.

The People We Wanted to Forget,  ISBN 978-1-945271-68-7, has been named one of three finalists for memoir in the 2019 Nancy Pearl Book Awards. The winner of the $1,000 prize will be announced at the 2019 Pacific Northwest Writers Association convention on 9/13/19.

Sent to Saigon in 1968 as a U.S. adviser to the paramilitary National Police Field Force, Harpold had a front-row view of the evolving impact of the war on the everyday lives of the country's population--a group left vulnerable when American forces abandoned South Vietnam in 1975. In this book, the author recalls his experiences from the time he landed in Saigon to his mission to the refugee camps of Southeast Asia three years after the war to report to Congress on the Vietnamese people's fate. He tells not simply his own story, but also the tale of an entire generation of people caught up in a conflict much larger than themselves.
There are many Vietnam memoirs in the marketplace, but the author's perspective--sandwiched midway between the civilian and military worlds, with a deep empathy toward the locals with whom he worked--is refreshingly less American-centric than the average book on the conflict. Of even more interest is that it presses past the war and explores the succeeding years, a rarely discussed period that was, in some ways, even more dire than the conflict itself.
Harpold writes in a sharp, often lyric prose that deftly captures the emotions and moods of his settings. "The People We Wanted to Forget" is a remarkable account of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. --Kirkus Reviews

Through a chain of impossible-to-foresee circumstances, the author in 1978 found himself in Thailand compiling a report for Congress about Thai refugee camps that housed some of the many Vietnamese people who were escaping their homeland in droves but who were unwelcome in the surrounding countries of Southeast Asia - and the United States.

By chance, Harpold was present when the Thai Navy was about to tow a disabled boat with 34 Vietnamese aboard back out to sea. The snap decision he made saved the lives of those aboard, and ultimately resulted in a change in U.S. policy relative to Vietnamese refugees.

Throughout "The People We Wanted to Forget," Harpold writes carefully. The feel is of a desire to represent things as accurately as possible. It's a story well-told, but not a work of hyperbole, spin or self-aggrandizement. As such, it's a clear window onto a different place and time, and a good reflection of the author himself. -- Scott Bowlen, Ketchikan Daily News

I've read extensively about American conflict, from the Revolutionary war to the war in Afghanistan. "The People We Wanted To Forget" ranks right up there with some of the best books I have had the pleasure to indulge. This gripping and true story that takes place in the later years of the Vietnam conflict is difficult to set down. For a tale to restore your faith in humanity and America, this is a must-read.
-- Terry Pyles, Artist


Through a chain of impossible-to-foresee circumstances, the author in 1978 found himself in Thailand compiling a report for Congress about Thai refugee camps that housed some of the many Vietnamese people who were escaping their homeland in droves but who were unwelcome in the surrounding countries of Southeast Asia - and the United States.

By chance, Harpold was present when the Thai Navy was about to tow a disabled boat with 34 Vietnamese aboard back out to sea. The snap decision he made saved the lives of those aboard, and ultimately resulted in a change in U.S. policy relative to Vietnamese refugees.

Throughout "The People We Wanted to Forget," Harpold writes carefully. The feel is of a desire to represent things as accurately as possible. It's a story well-told, but not a work of hyperbole, spin or self-aggrandizement. As such, it's a clear window onto a different place and time, and a good reflection of the author himself. -- Scott Bowlen, Ketchikan Daily News

About this edition

• Publisher: Book Publishers Network
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 194527168X
• ISBN 13: 9781945271687
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248