News, 20-22/10/00
hyt...@my-deja.com
* Vietnam not to renew Austrian coach's contract
HANOI, Oct 21 (Reuters) - The Vietnam Football Federation (VFF) said on
Saturday it would not renew the contract of national soccer coach
Alfred Riedl just days after he castigated the sport's governing body
in a local press interview.
``The national team will not have a busy schedule next year, therefore
a foreign coach will not be necessary,'' Doan Thanh Lam, VFF's chief
administrator told Reuters.
He said Riedl's contract expired on December 31 and would not be
renewed.
In an interview with the state-run Thanh Nien (Young People) earlier
this week, Riedl said he was angry with a VVF plan to send the Olympic
not national team to World Cup qualifying matches.
``The VFF...did not consult me, they ignored me. There was no co-
operation between me and the VFF,'' he was quoted as saying.
``If they continue to work like this, any football expert would find it
very difficult to help develop Vietnam's football.''
Riedl is Vietnam's fourth foreign coach in the past five years.
State newspapers said the VVF's decision was prompted by the interview,
but Lam said that although the federation was not happy about it, it
was not the reason for the decision.
* Asian coordinating nation posts allotted to China and Vietnam
Korea Herald, 22/10/00 - China and Vietnam have been chosen as the
coordination countries representing Asia for the Asia-Europe Meeting,
organizers said yesterday.
South Korea and Thailand have worked as coordination countries for the
past two years.
Four coordination countries from Europe and Asia work as mediators in
setting up the Senior Officials' Meeting and preparations for the
biannual summit.
One nation from China, Japan and South Korea and another from the ASEAN
member nations are selected to represent Asia.
The European Union and the Europe Commission are the standing
coordinators in Europe.
France is the coordination nation for this ASEM summit and Sweden will
take on the role next year.
* Vet's Widow Searches For Closure Meets With Men Who Served With Her
Husband
Yahoo News, 21/10/00 - A widow of a Vietnam veteran who has been
searching for 35 years for answers about her husband's death thinks she
may find what she needs in Oklahoma.
She's in town for a reunion with two men who served with her husband.
Ed Beesley served with Jan Mitchell-Meyers' husband. He said that he
remembers the day he watched two of his friends die.
"It was a typical patrol. We came into a mine field and we were
discussing what to do about the mines," he said. "I stepped on one and
it exploded. Our platoon commander was killed, one of my men was
killed, and three of us lost both our legs."
Norm Kegerreis was 60 feet away, and not injured in the blast. But it
has still caused him pain.
"Over the years I have felt a lot of guilt," he said. "It's a matter of
closure."
And finding that sense of finality is why the two men met with Mitchell-
Meyers at Will Rogers World Airport. Her husband was the platoon
commander killed with Beesley triggered the mine.
After 35 years, they all finally met face-to-face.
"It's sad and happy," Mitchell-Meyers said. "I'm excited to see
everybody. It's very touching, bringing back a lot of memories."
She also said that she's hoping the meeting will help her answer
questions about the last few moments of her late husband's life, and
allow her daughter to know more about the man.
Beesley and Kegerreis said they would do whatever it takes to fill that
void in the women's lives.
* Main Street: Artist draws on combat time in Vietnam
The Atlanta Journal - Constitution, 22/10/00 - Instead of suffering
from his flashbacks, he paints them.
Thirty-year-old memories of the firefights, the landing zones, the
villagers, and the occasional horror that were his Vietnam experience
have become acrylic images through the brush strokes of Aurence, a
trucking consultant turned artist.
Aurence (his professional name) waited until about six years ago to
start painting the caldron of beauty and destruction and gentleness and
gore that was Vietnam. It wasn't hard to bring it back to life.
"You don't ever really leave Vietnam, especially if you got popped a
couple of times," he said. As a Marine serving most of his hitch as a
helicopter door gunner, he was twice awarded the Purple Heart. Now, he
paints in his home in rural Habersham County, not far from
Clarkesville, where he has hung military relics on trees along the
paths in the woods in his back yard; he calls it the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Some of what he saw during his extended tour in Vietnam in 1969 and
1970 still plagues his conscience --- things like liquored-up crewmen
going out on a night "strafing run" just to shoot things up, and two
suspected Viet Cong being taken up in a helicopter for an interrogation
in which one was shoved out of the chopper to make the other talk.
"It bothers me to this day that we as a people did those kinds of
things to other people," Aurence said.
But that is not to say that he regrets serving his country. His regrets
are that those who guided the U.S. mission in Vietnam made "no effort
to win" and that "we stayed 12 or 15 years, then turned tail and ran."
Aurence went to Vietnam as a 19-year-old enlistee, not long out of high
school in Rockdale County. After his discharge, he came back to
Georgia, got married and settled into a seemingly conventional life
working in different phases of the transportation industry.
His wife, a folk artist and photojournalist named Biegun, had to coax
him for years to try his hand at art. "I tried and tried to get him to
paint, but he always laughed at me," she said.
Then, about six years ago, Aurence picked up a small sheet of tin and
started painting; at first, he did mostly pastoral scenes in a more or
less traditional folk art style.
But soon Aurence was dipping into his mind's Vietnam well for
inspiration. He never took an art lesson, but he was quickly discovered
by the art world.
Linda Anderson, a widely known Habersham County folk artist, saw one of
his works, tracked him down and represented him for about a year. Since
then, the response to his war paintings has "gone ballistic," he said.
Biegun said a wide range of clients have found Aurence and his work.
Some are collectors of Vietnam War art, some were war protesters, some
fought there, some lost loved ones there, she said.
Some people have categorized his work as outsider folk art or visionary
folk art. But Biegun said it is art that strikes an emotional chord for
people who want to try to understand the Vietnam experience, or heal
from it.
"I still don't think he realizes how important and rare his work is,"
she said.
For Aurence, his paintings are more like storytelling with
paintbrushes.
"I'm telling the story of Vietnam one experience at a time," he said.
His Vietnam paintings feature vivid contrasts, of bright and dark hues
and of violence in peaceful settings.
Somewhere in nearly all his paintings are depictions of fireballs,
which Aurence calls "messages from Vietnam." And amid the combat, there
is often a small white dog. At first, Aurence didn't know why he kept
painting the dog into his pictures; then he remembered that his unit
had a white dog for a mascot.
Aurence said he doesn't have nightmares or troubling visions from what
he saw in Vietnam. Still, bringing his memories to life is often an
emotionally draining experience, he said.
"Sometimes it's difficult; I get too involved," he said.
After he finishes a war scene, Aurence said, he often switches to
painting a scene of a Caribbean or Mexican village to help ease him out
of the Vietnam mind-set.
But it's not an easy thing to do, not for the Marine-artist, nor for
many Americans whose lives were marked by that era.
"All these years later," he said, "and people are still trying to find
answers to the question: Why?"
* Three Vietnam veterans with aching emotions prepare to see traveling
memorial
Alabama Live, 22/10/00 - When Charlie Jones of Trinity visits the
Traveling Vietnam Veterans Memorial here this week, he'll look for a
name. Just one name.
Ray Rhodes. A high school friend who lived ''out in the country'' near
Moulton with Jones in the 1960s.
Like Jones, Rhodes went to Southeast Asia, but Rhodes didn't come home.
His name is one of 58,219 American war dead etched on the wall.
When Ken Shepard of Huntsville visits the wall, he'll look for more
than one name. He'll start with eight names, a squad of bomb-disposal
experts assigned to the same tough job he had during the war. All eight
were killed on one day at one time by one very bad command decision.
Sam Johnson of Reid, a small town near Athens, will be at the traveling
wall, too, but Johnson won't be looking for any names. It's a blessing,
he thinks, how his mind has erased the names of the men he saw die in a
tour as a light infantryman.
Johnson knows seeing the wall may bring those names back. It will bring
back the experience.
''It's going to be an emotional thing,'' Johnson said last week. ''If I
look long enough, it's going to bring back memories of people getting
killed.''
Three men, expecting three powerful reactions to a black wall with the
names of America's Vietnam War dead and missing etched in its polished
face.
Veterans like them are the main reason the half-sized model of the
original Vietnam monument was built and sent touring the country.
Vietnam veteran John Devitt wanted a way for veterans who couldn't make
it to Washington to see the memorial. His original version now goes by
many names, including "The Wall That Heals," or, simply, "the Moving
Wall."
The veterans interviewed for this story fit Devitt's target market.
None has been to Washington, but all will come to Huntsville's Big
Spring International Park this weekend to see the traveling version.
The traveling wall also tours so others - families and friends of
veterans, students born since the war ended - can see the human cost
and the incredible sacrifice of a conflict that still affects America
today.
Like the full-scale monument in Washington, the traveling wall raises
powerful emotions, sponsors say. It has the power to take veterans back
to the war. It has the power to affect anyone with enough imagination
to wonder at the stories behind the names.
People come to the monument in Washington and to the traveling wall at
all hours of the day and night. Sponsors expect it will rarely be
deserted during its four-day stay here.
What they see is a design that was highly controversial at first, that
lists the names of the dead and missing in chronological order from
1959 until the last American killed in 1975.
Each name has its own story and, to veterans, many of those stories
still have a bitter taste.
Shepard tells of the bomb squad ordered onto the tarmac at Ben Hoa
airport where American planes were being loaded for bombing runs. An
accident had set off a string of bombs on planes still on the ground,
and eight men died because a commander couldn't - or wouldn't - wait
for the explosions to stop.
Johnson remembers South Vietnamese troops who brought their wives and
children to the base they shared with American troops. The Americans
patrolled every day, but these South Vietnamese fought only one week of
every month. If they were in the field at the end of that week, they'd
turn around and begin walking back to base.
''We were fighting a war and dying, and they were home with their wives
and kids,'' Johnson said. ''It left a bitter taste in my mouth.''
The wall can bring that taste of gall back again, and it can make
observers wonder again why America was in Vietnam. The veterans
themselves are getting older now, and some are tired of looking for
lessons in the experience. For many, it's enough to know that, when
their country called, they answered. They met good people. They did
their duty in a bad situation.
But the approach of the wall and the experience of seeing it always
bring out the human tendency to look for meaning.
''I wouldn't call it a mistake,'' Jones said of the war. ''We were
trying to insert some of our own standards into their conflict. I just
don't think we understood our mission.''
After coming home, Johnson made a promise to himself.
''If I had a son and there was a war like that, fought the same way, I
would try to keep my son out of the military,'' he said.
He doesn't feel that way now. Desert Storm, he thinks, was fought the
right way by men who learned the lesson of Vietnam, what one veteran
summed up as "get in, get it done, get out." Johnson hopes we never
forget that.
Vietnam was good for one thing, Johnson said. It changed his
perspective on life back home.
''I got to see a different lifestyle,'' Johnson added. ''I thought I
was poor growing up. I was poor. But these people slept on a bamboo mat
and were lucky to have a bowl of rice a day to eat. The war taught me
to thank God for the blessings we have.''
The war taught Shepard something, too. Something about brotherhood.
''It doesn't matter'' your partner's race or religion, he said. ''He's
a soldier, a trooper, your comrade in arms. You do what you can to take
care of him.''
For Shepard, the worst day of the war was a day he had to do just that.
A line of body bags had been ferried by helicopter from a firefight at
a base camp in the bush. The bags had been sealed for days while the
battle raged and, before they could be taken to the morgue for
processing home, each bag had to be opened, each American boy's body
searched for grenades or other ordnance.
Shepard is 63 years old and a war hero. Twice, he won the Bronze Star
with ''V'' device for combat heroics. He owns a Purple Heart. But even
in a restaurant on the edge of Research Park in the year 2000, tears
still come at the memory of that long line of body bags on the ground.
''Did they die in vain?'' he asked. ''From the perspective that we
didn't win, it's almost like they did. But from the perspective that we
did honor our word, it was something we had to do.''
Seeing the wall in Huntsville is something Shepard, Jones and Johnson
have to do, too. It will be painful, but the wall is coming here, and
they will bear witness.
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.