Parenting & Family Quote by Neil Sheehan

The line lands like a rebuke disguised as reportage: Sheehan isn’t just correcting a factual error, he’s exposing the moral convenience behind it. “These people” appears in scare quotes because the phrase is doing the real work of war propaganda - a verbal quarantine that lets Americans treat Vietnamese deaths as statistically regrettable rather than personally catastrophic. The stereotype (“Asians don’t value human life like we do”) isn’t naïve ignorance; it’s a permission slip. If the other side is imagined as fundamentally different, then escalation becomes easier to sell, and grief becomes easier to ignore.

Sheehan’s intent is to puncture that protective fiction with the simplest, most destabilizing observation: ordinary parental love. It’s a deliberately unromantic choice. He doesn’t reach for ideology or geopolitics; he reaches for children, because nothing reveals the lie faster. The quiet sting is in “like we do” - he mirrors the arrogant moral metric back to the reader, then collapses it. The sentence forces a recognition that Americans and Vietnamese share the same basic attachments, which means Vietnamese suffering can’t be filed under cultural inevitability.

Context matters: this is Vietnam-era journalism pushing against official narratives that relied on racialized generalizations to sustain public consent. “Spend any time around them” is a journalist’s method statement and a moral challenge. Get close enough to see faces, families, habits of care; the abstraction breaks. That’s the subtext: distance produces cruelty, proximity produces accountability.