egarding “The Day America Lost the War” [Winter 2023]: in about 1651 Father Alexandre de Rhodes, a Catholic missionary, developed Quoc Ngu, an alphabet using Roman characters and accent marks to convert more Vietnamese. Traditionally the Vietnamese used the Chinese writing system. France colonized “French Indochina” in the 19th century and reformed the local education system, imposing Quoc Ngu by decree early in the 20th century. We arrived in the mid-1950s trying
