Nguyễn Chí Thanh is the man who caused me to go to law school.
Eh?
Now, Nguyễn Chí Thanh was a General in the North Vietnamese Vietnam People's Army and former North Vietnamese politician who died in 1967, when I was just four years old. How could this be?
Well, he was the figure who thought of what became the Tet Offensive of 1968.
From a Vietnamese middle class family, Thanh's father died when he was 14 which forced Thanh into farming, as his family entered poverty. Perhaps it was this experience which lead him in 1937 to join the Vietnamese Communist Party, which in turn lead to being sentenced to French labor camps. He was both a political and military figure, and following 1960, was principally a military one. It was his idea to launch what became the Tet Offensive of 1968, a disastrous, in military terms, general uprising that cost the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese over 100,000 casualties, over twice as much as the Southern effort lost, and which ended so badly that Gen. Võ Nguyên, who accented to the plan and help prepare it, thought that he was going to be arrested and potentially suffer the fate of all who get blamed for stuff in Communist societies do.
Thanh didn't get the blame, for the military failure. Nor did he get the credit for the massive political success, as the offensive shocked the American public and lead to the US abandoning South Vietnam to its fate. He was killed from wounds sustained by a B-52 raid in 1967.
What's that have to do with law school?
Well, this.
In 1980, I had to write a paper in my community college freshman composition class. I was still in high school, but I only went half days and took freshman comp at the college in the afternoon. I wrote a detailed paper on the Tet Offensive of 1968, taking the position that the U.S. had won the battle militarily, but lost the war due to it due to the huge public reaction.
That thesis is widely held now, but at the time, not so much.
Sometime in the next couple of years, I had an American history class of some sort. I can't recall, but I do recall it was well attended. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the professor was a lawyer, but one who had largely not practiced, if he ever had, after doing a stint in the U.S. Navy. I had to write a paper, and what I did, which was legitimate, was to revise and dust off my preexisting one.
Keep in mind, this was in the typewriter days, so that was more difficult than it might sound. Indeed, writing in general was more laborious in those days.
Anyhow, when it came back, I had received an A, and the professor had marked "You should consider an analytical career".
The part of the story I usually don't tell is that I asked my father, "what's an analytical career"? That's probably as I don't want to have my father tagged with any other problematic career stories other than the one that's been mentioned before, which is unintentionally dissuading me from becoming a game warden. Anyhow, he mentioned lawyer. I think that's the only analytical career he mentioned. It's probably the only one that occurred to him, and frankly, it is hard to think of analytical careers.
And hence the seed was planted.
