Civilization fails to lure Vietnam man, son from 40-year jungle home

Less than a week after being "rescued" from a jungle home they built and fled to 40 years ago during the Vietnam War, a former soldier and his son have both asked to go back.

They were taken from their dwelling, where they had been ever since their house was bombed in 1972, by a group of family members and local officials last week.

Ho Van Thanh, the 82-year-old father, has recovered with some medical care after being carried from his home 40 kilometers deep in the jungle in the central province of Quang Ngai on a hammock last Wednesday. Doctors said he has no medical problems except that he was malnourished.

Thanh does not speak the mainstream Vietnamese (Kinh) language, but the man from the local Cor minority group said in his local language that he wants to go back to the jungle and take care of his field there. The father and son have a nearly one hectare (2.47 acre) field where they grow cassava, corn, sugarcane, and tobacco.

News website VnExpress on Sunday said both Thanh and his son Ho Van Lang, have been wearing sad faces and staying up all night ever since returning to "civilization."

While Thanh was taken to a medical station, Lang has been introduced to modern life and now wears clothes and slippers, uses utensils, watches television, and uses a motorbike.

But he recently also told his cousin Ho Van Lam, in the Cor language, that he wants to be taken back to the jungle. “I miss it. I don’t want to stay here,” he said.

He also said he does not understand why people took him and his father out of the jungle.

I wonder if he and his father would entertain the idea of training me and my wife to live among them. They’re the lucky ones. The survive of their wits and the resources around them. They have no enemies because they’re not a threat to anyonw nor do they take from anyone.

IF I could find a place like that, I’d be gone. The other “IF” is if I could afford it.

They couldn’t “afford it.” They just went. A friend sent me this article in Vietnamese from Nha Trang. Village people, especially minorities can pull this off. City folks probably could not. It also helped that he had been a smith and there are lots of iron scraps lying around. It is interesting that both are in generally good health except for the malnourishment of the old man. He probably needs more protein but at 82, he bounced back pretty quickly in “captivity” with better food.

Boys of my generation read about Jim Thorpe and his extraordinary talents on the gridiron, on the diamond, as well as at the Olympics. In the course of reading biographies of Thorpe, we became acquainted with the Carlisle Indian School and its experiment with the children of American Indians to, in the language and ideals of the Victorian age, educate and civilize these kids so that they would assimilate into white American civilization. It was a typical exertion of progressivism.

The experiment at best had mixed results and it is fair to say that the experiment has now become a metaphor to determine whether one is on the left or the right and revisionist historians are certainly not finished pushing the conclusion to one side or the other.

My point is to demonstrate how difficult it is to bring aborigines into the modern world. One ought to consider how difficult it is to bring a being out of the Stone Age into the digital age with good intentions. Other examples of the difficulty in persuading Stone Age peoples, aborigines, and feral children to adopt civilization exist. One need merely point to the feral children of Germany, sisters who were found in the wild having been raised by wolves. The tribes of the Brazilian rainforest can be pointed to as another example.It was not so easy to civilize Geronimo, he kept breaking out of the reservation as did Sitting Bull and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce to name some more.

In considering these difficulties we ought to ask ourselves, why do we have such a difficult time nationbuilding in Iraq and Afghanistan? Not that the people of Iraq or Afghanistan are aborigines, but we are trying to change not just a political system as political scientists but a culture, a way of life, a religion, a worldview.

As conservatives, we might ask ourselves why we lose elections the low information voters?

Is it because we assume people think the way we do? The Travon Martin case should have thoroughly disabused us of that notion by now.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.