MISSING IN ACTION
The thought preys on the mind: there may still be some Americans there. Did we commit the soldier's cardinal sin -- did we leave comrades on the battlefield? Two recent movies, Uncommon Valor and Missing in Action, have played upon that nagging doubt and, in bursts of satisfying action, sent their heroes in to save American POWs and, belatedly, our honor. The voice of Charlton Heston is on the phone across the country raising money for Operation Skyhook II, an organization dedicated to bringing home American POWs. When an admiral representing the White House spoke at a candlelight ceremony at the Washington Monument on the eve of Veterans Day, he was shouted down by a crowd of veterans yelling, "Bring them home!"
In Bangkok, before I entered Vietnam, l arranged an appointment with the men running the Joint Casualty Resolution Center (JCRC), which since 1973 has been in charge of investigating whether any American POWs are still held by Vietnam. I spoke to Lieutenant Colonel Paul Mather, an Air Force officer who has been negotiating with the Vietnamese off and on for more than ten years.
"We get down to work every morning, open our case files, and the war's on again," Mather told me. "I really don't know if there is anyone still there. There's so much mythology about this, but we have no proof that would stand up in court. We hear hundreds of secondhand accounts. We're always traveling up to the refugee camps to check the stories out. But we never seem to be able to find the guy who'll say, 'I'm the one who saw them.' The possibility is there; we operate on the assumption that it could be. And we're not just keeping a vigil here. We're getting results, particularly on returning the remains of our dead."
Go to Part One of this article.
In Hanoi I met a Canadian named Michel Amiot, who has traveled all over Vietnam setting up family-planning clinics for the UN. He believes he has seen two Americans in postwar Vietnam. The first, a black woman, was in my opinion most likely a metis from the French war, not unlike women I saw outside Saigon. But the second fascinated me. "I was in a boat in the delta," Michel said, "when I saw this blond-haired white man in shorts walking along the bank. At first I thought he was a Russian, but he was muttering to himself, and as I came closer I could hear that he was muttering in English."
I was on the edge of my chain He took a sip of his coffee. "So what happened?" I asked.
He smiled. "When he saw me watching," he said, "he ducked into some bushes and was gone."
I heard several other stories like this: of a black man wandering about near the Swedish paper mill in Bao Bang, also muttering to himself in English; of the UNICEF man digging water wells in the delta who has seen "a few" Americans in hamlets. But as intriguing. as these stories are, they might all concern men who simply stayed behind. There are many Gls who never left Thailand; it is not unlikely that of the almost three million Americans who served in Vietnam a handful might have decided to stay. During the war there were Americans living in the back alleys of Saigon, junkies and hustlers and black-market kings acting out some Conrad fantasy; others may have fallen in love and moved into hamlets with their new families, disappearing beneath the opaque surface of Asia.
In Hue the vice-president of the provincial People's Committee told me an astonishing story. "We had young women who worked as prostitutes who opened up lines of communications with Americans. I would send them pamphlets and letters. After many months I had persuaded seven to join us. They left their posts and were traveling with us to the North, but we were caught by B-52s, and six were killed. The seventh fled back to the American lines. I heard he was severely punished, but I never saw him again."
Like the case of Bobby Garwood, this story nags at the imagination. Garwood was a Marine private who disappeared outside Da Nang in 1965 and then turned up again at a hotel in Hanoi in 1979. He became the only American POW tried for aiding the enemy. Garwood himself recently told The Wall Street Journal that he knew of at least 70 Americans still held captive -- a claim he chose to make five years after his return. When Garwood was negotiating his departure from Vietnam, he said he knew of other captive Americans, but he later recanted that story, saying he had offered it only to make the Americans want to get him out. When I was talking to Vo Thi Lien, a survivor of My Lai, in Da Nang, one of her co-workers, Major Nguven Be, casually mentioned that he had led a scout unit near Da Nang and that he had spent a good deal of time with POWs. "Garwood was with me for a year," he said. "He was with us as a liberation fighter. He lived better than my other men, but he was always sick. We kept trying to send him to the North, but he refused."
Garwood has consistently claimed that he did not collaborate with the Viet Cong, that he was a prisoner like all the other Americans, but that his ability to speak Vietnamese forced him into a no-man's-land, where he was not trusted by the guards or the prisoners. But I had just been told casually that he had actively worked with the Viet Cong. Were there others like him. What had happened to them? Are there any left? I had dozens of questions, but I got no more answers. It was as if the curtain had been raised for an instant and I had seen a shadow of what lay behind it -- but no more.
Co Dinh Ba is in charge of North American affairs at the Foreign Ministry. The MIA issue is his responsibility. Nor surprisingly, he dismissed the possibility that America, POWs were still in Southeast Asia. "They have all been released. There may be a handful who chose to stay here; the local authorities would know about them. But no one is being held here against his will."
"Finding information about the remains of MlAs is very difficult," he went on to say. "More than seventy-eight thousand Americans missing in the Second World War were never found. That's more than twenty-two percent of all the American dead. In Vietnam you say you have twenty-five hundred MIAs. That's only five percent of your dead. Still, we want to help. It is the humanitarian thing to do."
I asked why none of the remains of Americans on the original died-in-captivity list in the South had been returned, while all the names on the list in the North had been accounted for. "The fighting was very fierce there. The people are still bitter. And, listen, have you seen all those cemeteries of our heroes, all over Vietnam? Most of the bodies aren't buried there. Many thousands of our own dead were never found. Do we tell the people that the bodies of Americans are more important than the bodies of their own husbands and sons who died because of the Americans? We will keep looking, but frankly, it would help if we had better relations, if the people did not believe you were helping the Chinese in their -- "
"Multifaceted war of aggression?" I said, echoing the phrase I had heard wherever I went.
"Exactly," he replied, with the air of a man congratulating a good pupil. Irony is an underdeveloped trait here.
Just off the Street of Victory Over the B-52s, in Hanoi, is a walled compound that holds the offices of FaFim, the agency that markets Vietnamese newsreels and documentaries. Inside are graceful one-story buildings of blue-green stucco and red tile roofs. Well-kept rosebushes surround a large pool. In one doorway a chicken strutted back and forth; in another two men in shorts were sharing a bamboo pipe, puffing contentedly. A young woman in high heels and jeans took me into a large room where I was shown movies about the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, including some brief clips of American POWs looking unrepentant. My interest in the films was genuine, but I was even more interested in where I was seeing them -- in what had been the main room of the infamous POW prison known as "the Zoo."
Whenever I brought up the POWs, I invariably heard how well they had been treated. Bui Tin told me that on Christmas he would take ox or a turkey and a guitar and sit around singing folk songs. Pham Tuan, a jet pilot, said that he had visited POWs and shared informal talk about flying. Co Dinh Ba insisted that they got better rations than their guards. "Go and ask them yourself," said Pham Tuan. "They will tell you they were treated fairly."
Well, not exactly. The POWs have given eloquent and depressing accounts of their treatment in the Zoo and the "Hanoi Hilton" -- the isolation, the interrogations, the torture, the forced confessions, the prisoners beaten to death. It is not a record that makes one feel comfortable about the fate of any Americans who might still be in Vietnam.
I returned from my trip believing that even if POWs were once there, they probably aren't there now. Live American POWs have long since lost any value to the Vietnamese, would in fact be an embarrassment -- how, after all these years, would the Vietnamese explain them? Despite their ingrained inability to throw anything away, their determination to hang on to everything until, someday, it has a use, even the Vietnamese recognize when something has out-lived all possible value. And when they realize that, they, like anyone else, get rid of it. This is my rational conclusion. But just as I was leaving Saigon, I learned that the Vietnamese had "discovered" a tourist from Hong Gong whom they had captured in 1975, and who -- unknown to the world -- had been lost in their prisons for almost ten years. Who else, comes the nagging thought, is in there?
SOLDIER'S RETURN
When I came to Da Nang in 1969, the airport was one of the busiest in the world. Fighters and transport planes competed with airliners on the runways, and in the sky helicopters of every description buzzed like swarms of dragonflies. The noise w as deafening. The airport itself was crammed with American soldiers and Marines. The waiting rooms were jammed with Americans waiting for flights, sleeping on their duff bags. The parking lots and surrounding roads were choked with traffic. In the background from time to time we could hear the sounds of shelling. On this trip, when I landed, there was only a strange, pre-modern silence.
During the war Da Nang had been a mini-Saigon -- loud, raucous, and teeming with refugees, mutilated beggars, hustlers. Now it was obviously less crowded; it was, in fact, back to a population of 350,000, its size before the refugees swelled it to more than a million people in 1970. We drove north from the city, with "Gloria" playing on the driver's stereo. We crossed the Nam O Bridge and began the climb up to Hai Van Pass. High up on a switchback I asked the driver to stop. I got out, the wet sea air in my face, and looked back on Da Nang. I could see almost the entire area of my unit, the 1st Marine Division -- from Elephant Valley out Route 37 in the north, stretching south past Ba Na Mountain, Charlie Ridge, and the Arizona Territory, and down the coast past Marble Mountain and beyond the Que Son Mountains, visible only as a dim smudge on the southern horizon. Beyond the narrow stretch of coastal plain, where the Tuy Loan and other rivers flowed out in a wide delta, were the mountains, hidden in clouds. On the mountain behind me waterfalls coursed down through tropical foliage; hundreds of feet below me gentle swells broke on deserted beaches scalloped from the rocks. It was one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen. It seemed unthinkable that so much war had been here.
From the car the only clue to the presence of an old American base was a sudden increase in scrap metal for sale in the houses along the road. We passed Phu Bai, the first American base built between the DMZ and Da Nang. All that remained was some rubble, a lonely, abandoned watchtower, and a few strands of rusty barbed wire. And so it was with all the trappings of what had been a vast American civilization in Vietnam: Red Beach, Marble Mountain airfield, Camp Eagle -- all gone. The huge staging areas, the movie theaters, the ice-cream parlors, the officers' clubs -- built to last forever -- have all vanished. At none of the old bases does anything grow; the bare red dirt lies on the earth like a scar.
We drove north from Hue toward the DMZ, into some of the most fiercely contested areas of the war. Among veterans of the war this is the heart of the beast, where names that have now faded into obscurity then told of the war's most brutal fighting: Hill 881, Con Thien, the Rockpile, Dong Ha, Quang Tri, the A Shau Valley, Hamburger Hill, Lang Vei, Firebase Ripcord, Khe Sanh. Stacks of old shell casings were everywhere, to be recycled into tools. Along the road and fields were stands of newly planted eucalyptus and falao pine. Throughout the war virtually the entire region had been a free-fire zone. The people had been evacuated, the fields abandoned, and the trees and houses blasted into the mud. Even Quang Tri, the one town of any size, had been obliterated in 1972, during the 138 days the Communists had held it against some of the heaviest bombing of the war. Now the people are back, and rice is being harvested and brought in from the fields.
Long before we should have arrived at the DMZ -- my mind being attuned to the old travel times in military vehicles along less than secure roads -- we were there. Some sampans floated idly in the Ben Hai River, for twenty-one years the boundary between the two Vietnams and for more than ten years a fearsome no-man's-land of bitter fighting. Without ceremony we crossed the bridge to their side. On the south side -- our side -- were rice paddies, a few houses, a boy on a water buffalo. Three women were wading slowly in the river, gathering water potatoes and oysters. An old Dodge van, converted to a bus, lumbered across the bridge from the south and stopped by our car. Five or six children poured out and ran off down a narrow trail, chattering and carrying their satchels from school. The wind made patterns in the yellowing rice. The mountains were gray in the distance. From the sea, clouds were blowing in. There was simply nothing to do but get in the car and go back.
After dinner we went for a drive around the darkened streets of Hue. A mass was in progress at the Hue cathedral, rebuilt as a strikingly modern structure grafted onto the Gothic architecture of the Hue seminary. In a field behind the church, during the Tet offensive, the Communists executed a young USIA employee named Stephen Miller. I am sure they did this as brutally and as matter-of-factly as General Loan executed the Viet Cong terrorist in the streets of Saigon. That execution, so dramatically caught on film -- the captive being led up, the pistol being raised to his head and fired, the man falling over, blood spurting on the pavement -- became a visual metaphor for the brutality of the whole war. Stephen Miller died no less brutally, but his death wasn't theater, and therefore in the practical terms of politics it might as well never have happened. While my guides smoked in the car, I stood in the field and bore him silent witness.
That night a hurricane blew in from the South China Sea. The wind beat against the windows of my room, the power, of course, went out, and the Perfume River rose steadily, churning with debris. The next day I had lunch with Nguyen Minh Ky, the vice-president of the province's People's Committee. Ky has the wavy hair and the good looks of a movie star. It was impossible for me to imagine that he had spent fifteen years living in the jungle. The Viet Cong whom we captured or who defected to us were tough, dedicated people, but they had the look of peasants who had just come from the fields. Ky looked as if he had just come from discussing a movie deal.
We ate lunch -- the most lavish meal of my trip -- on the roof of the hotel, overlooking the river, which by now was roiled and angry. The old city was barely visible through the storm, but I could see sampans balanced precariously against the howling winds in the center of the flood, the children on board searching for anything of value in the debris being swept past them. A young waitress in a yellow ao dai laid out giant prawns.
I asked Ky if he had been in Hue during the Tet offensive. He beamed. "Oh, yes. I was here for twenty-four days and nights. I was in the Citadel; I was everywhere in the city. The Americans and the puppets bombed us with everything they had, but we made them fight for every street. It was very fierce. The people had been living under oppression for fourteen years. Many of our fighters had not seen their families since 1954. They hugged each other and cried. It was glorious."
Ky asked me if I had seen the PBS program Vietnam: A Television History. "Everyone here saw it," he said. "I remember watching American troops throwing grenades into shelters. I thought of so many places I had seen such crimes. Those poor people were just peasants and laborers -- they only wanted to plant rice, and they were killed. I could have cried."
As he talked, my own memories came back. In 1970 I had spent several weeks teaching English at night in Da Nang. One of my students told me this story: "My parents were living in Hue in 1968. when the Viet Cong took the city. They were schoolteachers. The Viet Cong came to the door and took them away. They told my grandmother they had to ask them some questions. My parents never came back. They found their bodies near the imperial tombs. They had been tied up and strangled."
And I remembered a Viet Cong attack in 1970 on a hamlet south of Da Nang called Thanh My. The Viet Cong had gone from bunker to bunker, throwing in satchel charges. Anyone who tried to flee was shot -- old men, women, young children. W hen I got there the next morning, the mangled bunkers mere still smoldering, the bodies were laid out in long rows, and a few survivors with blank faces were poking in the rubble. They were "just peasants and laborers -- they only wanted to plant rice." And I could have cried too. and did.
"I remember two things about Hue," I said. "I remember your flag flying from the Citadel, and I remember the bodies of all the innocent people the Viet Cong killed."
A shadow crossed Ky's face, a fleeting moment of hardness that made me glad I was his guest and not his prisoner. Then the smile returned. "That was a total fabrication," he said. "It was completely to the contrary. We were the people. How could we kill ourselves?"
Having proved to his own satisfaction that such a massacre was, in metaphysical terms at least, impossible, he went on: "Since 1959 the puppets had brought the guillotine to every corner of our country. They tied us up and rubbed chili pepper into our mouths, noses, and eyes." He warmed to his theme. "They ran electric current into women's private parts. They nailed your fingers down and then tore out the fingernails. They put out your eyes and cut off your ears and wore them around their necks -- for publicity. The ripped open your belly and tore out your heart and liven They cut open the womb and yanked out the baby inside, then stomped it into the dust." He paused "Wow, that was terrible. If they could do that, they could make up any lie about us."
I asked him if he meant to say that his forces had not executed any civilians.
"That is correct," he replied, reaching across the table for some more prawns.
"Then where did all those bodies come from?"
He looked at me with sympathy. "It was a very chaotic time. A few criminals may have been spontaneously eliminated by the people, like stepping on a snake. But most of those bodies -- if there were any -- were probably patriots who helped us and were murdered by the puppets after we came into Hue during the war I pretended I was a fisherman, or a student, or a peasant coming to market. The Americans would come right up to me. They'd pat me on the back and offer me cigarettes."
"And what did you do?" I asked him, as the table was being cleared and the coffee brought.
He looked at me with a sly smile. "I just said, 'GI, GI, number one.'" With that he pushed back his chair and said good-bye. The flood was rising, and the rice harvest was in danger In today's Vietnam, where the people barely have enough rice to survive, nothing is more serious. Outside, the storm had abated. The trees that had blown over had already been cut up and carried away for firewood.
Milan Kundera writes about a Czech leader whose usefulness to the state had ended. For the leader to remain in official photographs of the period raised too many questions; it was inconvenient. So he was simply airbrushed out: he no longer existed. The massacre of civilians at Hue, the massacres at places like Thanh My, are now inconvenient, so they have been airbrushed out of history: they no longer exist. The Vietnamese stand in the flood of history and pluck from the water only what is useful; the rest flows out to sea. History is like the toppled trees of Hue, to be Cut Up and used to heat and light the present.
The next day we drove south to Duy Xuyen District, a once bitterly contested area about twelve miles south of Da Nang. The district headquarters was in a low stucco building; I had been there before, during the war I was greeted by a delegation of officials and offered tea, beer, and fruit. I began to talk to Nguyen Truong Nai, the vice-president of the People's Committee. He had been part of the Viet Cong local forces during the war. He had joined the guerrillas in 1964, when he was seventeen. During the long years of the war he had been wounded eight times. He began to show me his scans -- "This one, on my arm, was in 1967. This one, on my leg, was in 1972. This one, my hand and my head, was in 1969, this one.... " His body was like a history of the war, written with M-16 bullets, artillery shrapnel, rockets, and bomb pellets from B-52s.
The worst year was 1969, he said, confirming what General Tuan had told me in Hanoi. "The situation was terrible. This whole district was a no-man's-land. There were thousands of Americans, Koreans, and puppet troops in the area, but there were only four of us left out of all the local guerrilla forces. Only four. We were hungry There was nothing to eat. I was the commanded We all gave serious thought to surrender. But each time, we talked about our traditions, about our country, and we kept on fighting."
Two young men from the rice cooperative who had been out fighting the flood arrived. One of the men seemed very young, too young to have been in the war. But he had been fighting since 1969, when he was nine. "I went to school during the day and helped the guerrillas at night.
We were scouts. We watched the Americans, sold them cigarettes and talked to them, and then reported back." He went on and almost idly pulled off a bit of the veil of kitsch that surrounds Vietnamese accounts of the war. "Part of my job was to identify the leaders of the strategic hamlets." I asked what happened then. "I helped work out ways to kill them," he said, smiling pleasantly, as if he were discussing the school fundraising auction. When history is on your side, killing a village official, even if he has been your neighbor all your life, is simply not a matter of much consequence.
"The tasks facing us after the war were enormous." said one of the officials. "The land had lain fallow for many years. We had to organize cooperatives, clear the fields of mines and bombs, develop irrigation and electric projects, plow and plant and begin to harvest. We had to plant trees and build houses and schools and clinics. And it was hard at first. All our lives we had been guerrillas. War is simple; our problems now are more complicated. We had, in truth, to start oven And we are far from finished."
I had been in Duy Xuyen during the war. Part of it had been known as Go Noi Island, which by 1970 had been cleared of all signs of life, like an apple peeled of its skin. There was nothing, literally nothing, there. No trees, no cemeteries, no houses, no fields, no people. It was the archetypal free-fire zone. In 1970 we began resettlement work. Land was set aside for villages, and some of the old residents were brought back and lodged in rows of houses with tin roofs-set beneath the blazing sun. It was not a bad effort, and it flowed from some of our best motives. But we were taking a terrible situation and trying to heal it with Band-Aids. We were trying to rebuild the land we had destroyed, in the name of the Vietnamese people, and wanting them to love us for it.
During the war I had flown over this area in a helicopter day after day. I had been struck by the thought of how beautiful it must have been, a fertile green blanket between the mountains and the sea, before it had been pockmarked by bombs and cleared of people. Now the people were back. Trees by the thousands had been planted. The free-fire zones of Go Noi and the Arizona Territory were again rice paddies, as they had been for centuries. Children on their way to school walked giggling down trails where Marine patrols had been ambushed, and rice dried on roads where tanks and halftracks had churned up dust.
Two miles southeast of Da Nang had been The Marble Mountain airfield, a large recreational area called China Beach, and the headquarters of the 1st Marine Regiment, an area notorious for its booby traps. We drove out to China Beach. Where once Red Cross doughnut dollies and Army nurses in bathing suits had drawn the hungry stares of thousands of lonely men, there was only one old woman, gathering seaweed. Driving along the beach, we passed some shacks. Inside one of them two men were playing chess. They were fishermen, uninvolved in politics. The older man, Phung Tha, was thirty. "We were all in the Viet Cong," he said. "All the boys and girls I knew fought the Americans here." An old woman, whose teeth were stained with betel, cackled. "All of us fought. Some of us, like me, fought with our mouths." I mentioned that she seemed a bit old for that sort of thing. "I am fifty-two," she said -- she looked at least seventy -- "and I fought for my country and for my husband." She gestured at a photograph that stood in the place of honor on a handmade shelf, the only piece of furniture in the house besides a bed and the table. "He was killed by the Americans." I asked them whether, after all that, ordinary life wasn't empty. They laughed. "We are fishermen. All we have ever wanted to do is fish. Now we do. So we are happy."
When I was here during the war, the Marines in this area had been commanded by Colonel P. X. Kelley, an intelligent, aggressive officer with a subtle grasp of politics, a dedication to excellence, and even a sense of humor. When I had left Vietnam, he had given me an eight-by-ten picture of himself, signed "Semper Fi, P. X. Kelley." He is now the commandant of the Marine Corps. On the days when he and the other colonels, the really good ones, were up at division headquarters, I would think that there was nothing we couldn't do. But today the area where we did our best for him, ourselves, and our country is the domain of fishermen and old women with stained teeth who gather seaweed on the beach.
Just inland from China Beach five mountains of solid marble tower up out of the dunes like the snouts of whales breaching out of the ocean. Pagodas and Buddhist monasteries are hidden away on the largest mountain, and around the base are hamlets of marble cutters who patiently carve Buddhas, bracelets, and little statues of roaring lions and dragons. On weekends during the war Marines would occasionally go there to visit a pagoda and buy some marble souvenirs. But there were several caves and pagodas on the mountain that were off limits. We supposed that the religious sensibilities of the Vietnamese would be deeply offended if we were to go there.
I had always been curious about the mountain; it had loomed over our area like a brooding shrine, honeycombed with caves and mysteries. Minh and I climbed up steep steps to the first pagoda. We then made our way along a narrow path, past gardens kept by monks, and came upon a grotto. We entered, and saw that it opened into a huge cave, seventy-five feet high, dimly lit through a hole in the ceiling. Statues of Buddhas, some twenty feet tall, had been carved out of the rock. Incense burned at several altars. There were other, smaller statues of soldiers and guards painted in dramatic reds, blues, and yellows. In one corner was a small shrine and next to it a plaque, which seemed oddly official in what was so clearly a religious place.
I asked Minh to translate it, and then I knew why it had been inappropriate for Americans to visit here, even though the cave was only three miles from the center of Da Nang and was square in the middle of one of the largest concentrations of American troops in Vietnam. The plaque said that this cave had been a field hospital for the Viet Cong. Now it was empty and the only sound was that of water dripping from the hole in the roof. I walked out of the cave, and a few steps away I could look directly down on the main road that had led to the 1st Marine Regiment's headquarters. We had driven right by here on our way to China Beach. The Viet Cong in the hospital must have heard our trucks, and the helicopters from the airfield, every day. No doubt they could listen to the parties at the airfield or China Beach -- the Filipino bands singing "Proud Mary" and "We Gotta Get Out of This Place."
How little we knew. And our enemy had been so certain of our ignorance, so confident that we would learn nothing, that he had hidden his hospital in plain sight, like Poe's purloined letter. To have been defeated was bad enough. To have been treated with such contempt seemed far worse.
LOOSE ENDS
We were leaving Marble Mountain when I saw her. She was a girl in her early teens, working at one of the small stands selling marble bracelets, carved Buddhas, busts of Ho Chi Minh, and other souvenirs. For a moment I didn't know why she had caught my eye, but there was something about her, about the way she stood, about her features, something different . . . And then Minh, who didn't miss much, noticed my stare. "So you've seen the Amerasian girl?" he said.
She was the first Amerasian I had seen on the trip. I hadn't been prepared for how powerful the experience would be. I had become conditioned to Vietnam as it was, and she was a living link to the past I had lived here. We Americans were all gone, but we had left behind a new generation neither American nor Vietnamese -- outsiders, wearing history on their faces -- as if the power of sexuality had proved stronger than all our armies, all our weapons, all our technology. She had been raised a Vietnamese, had spent all her life in a hamlet, but still I felt a bond with her. I felt guilt when I saw her, guilt and fascination.
Her name was Huynh Thi Dien. She was fourteen years old, a student in the seventh grade. That afternoon she had been at a meeting of the Good Nieces and Nephews of Uncle Ho. We were sitting at the table inside her house, which was behind the souvenir stand. There was only one room. Her mother sat on the bed; her grandfather, an old man with a wispy beard, dressed in white cotton, slowly moved about the room, preparing tea, and then sat down in a corner and smoked the cigarette I had given him.
Her mother began to talk about Dien's father. "I remember his name but not his address," she said. "He was in the military police. He returned to the U.S. in 1971; he wanted us to come with him, but my mother was sick and we couldn't go. I had a letter in 1974, but I haven't heard from him since."
She had applied for a visa for herself and her daughter to go to America; they were waiting for it to come through. I asked Dien if she wanted to go to the United States. She looked at the marble bracelet on her arm and said nothing. Tears began to flow down her face. The house had gradually filled up with villagers. More than forty people had crowded into all the available spaces, pressing around us. It was suffocating, claustrophobic. 19o one made a sound.
I asked her if she was crying because she wanted to go or because she wanted to stay.
"Both," she said. "I have a father. . ." She began to cry again. "And I have my native land . . ." She paused. Her mother watched her from the bed. The room was quiet. Her dilemma was public; I had unwittingly asked her to choose between the country of a father who had abandoned her, which and whom she had never seen, and Vietnam, the people around her, the only world she had ever known -- and to do so in full view of the whole hamlet. "But I don't know my father," she said, and then she began to sob, her shoulders shaking. I squeezed her hand, told her that she would like America, that it would be different but that she would like it. Minh translated as the girl cried. The villagers listened in silence.
On the way back to Da Lang I told Minh that I blamed the father, that he had behaved as irresponsibly with the mother as we had with our Vietnamese allies. Minh didn't agree. "You can't blame the father," he said. "He was a soldier, far from home. I'm sure he didn't intend to create such a sad situation." No, he probably didn't intend to, any more than we intended to make a whole people dependent upon us and then abandon them. But he had done it, and so had we; he had walked away from it. and so had we.
WAR MEMORIES
The Viet Cong veterans I met had been bombed by B-52s, shelled by battleships, pounded by artillery, incinerated by napalm and white phosphorus, and drenched in defoliants. They had been strafed by jets, rocketed by Huey Cobras, and attacked by AC-47 "Spooky's with their array of mini-guns, each firing up to 6,000 rounds a minute. I went down into one of their tunnels at Cu Chi, in the Iron Triangle. northwest of Saigon. It was cramped and claustrophobic and wet; furry creatures ran over my hands. After half an hour I was desperate to get out. They lived in such tunnels for years, under intense bombing, coming out only at night. They had taken terrible losses and when they were wounded had only the most rudimentary medical care. Their rations had been a few balls of rice. And they had been separated from their families and homes, many for ten or even twenty years.
Our experience could hardly have been more different. We controlled the air, so we were able to maintain headquarters areas and bases in reasonable security. We were never bombed. We had hot meals and mail and Bob Hope and R S; R. And we stayed only a yeas Officers normally had only six months in combat. Yet many Americans returned with serious emotional problems, many of which survive to this day. The Vietnamese I met, including a number of doctors, agreed that such emotional problems had by and large faded away for them. One woman, for example, told me that for a few years after the war whenever she heard a helicopter she would fall to the ground. Then again, she said, she didn't hear all that many helicopters anymore. But even Vo Thi Lien, who survived My Lai, told me that she no longer had nightmares. "Everyone suffered," she told me, "none of us more than anyone else." Even the Vietnamese vocabulary reflects this attitude. The word sacrifice is used only to mean death, as in "Many of my comrades sacrificed." For them, only death is worthy of the word; every other hardship and suffering was simply the common lot and therefore unremarkable.
I talked to Viet Cong veterans several times about American veterans. I tried to explain post-traumatic stress syndrome -- the flashbacks, the blackouts, the bitterness, the paralysis of will, that still seem to afflict many Americans. It was incomprehensible to them. "We had to rebuild our country. We had too much to do to think that adjusting to peace was a problem," Tran Hien, a former Viet Cong company commander, told me. "Life goes on." Simple ideas, believed without question, sustained men like Hien then, and sustain them nova Truly nothing, in their minds. is more important than independence and freedom. Then memories of war are remarkably unconfused. I had the sense of being with men and women who had done extreme and even terrible things but whose consciences and hearts are limpidly clear. They do not look into their selves and see angst or guilt or confusion, if they look into their selves, in our Western, self-infatuated way, at all. They did their duty, like everybody else. For them, the war is over. Life does go on.
In Duy Xuyen, over coffee and beer, I talked to Viet Cong veterans about their comrades. "When we were in the jungle and in the mountains," one said, "the bonds of comradeship weren't only in fighting but in everything. The strong would help the weak. We carried each other's burdens, cooked each other's meals, did everything together. If one of us was wounded, we would risk our lives to bring him back. When you have gone through such things together, you have a bond that can never be broken."
Hien had been sitting quietly. He took one of my 555 cigarettes, lit it, and said, in a soft voice, "It was a pure world. Those who had more gave to those in need. We shared the same bamboo bed, we shared the same shirt or blanket. That kind of sentiment, so pure, was even more than I have for my blood brother. And when we lost our comrades, when they sacrificed, the pain gave us strength in fighting."
Two days later Hien and I were waiting at the airport, sipping tea amid the eerie silence. Through the window I could see the old hangars. One still bore a huge sign that said VIKINGS. It was almost fifteen years to the day since I had arrived here for the first time. I asked Hien if he ever saw the men from his unit.
"At Tet and other feast days my men and I still try to get together," Hien said. "We have a lot of memories: when we had to fight an enemy ten times stronger; when we were so hungry we had to chew uncooked rice; when we were surrounded and had to fight day and night, once for twenty-four days and nights, against constant artillery and bombs and helicopters firing rockets; when the days and nights ran together in hails of fire and fatigue. But we never gave up. We can't forget any of that. But above all we will never forget the day we came into Da Nang as victors, the day we liberated our home. That will be with us always. "
As I listened to his memories, my own memories came back: of ambushes and booby traps and days and nights in the jungle looking for Hien, for an enemy we never seemed to find; of all those men, so young and brave, being wasted for nothing. All in all, I would rather have his war memories than mine.
Hien asked me politely how the airport had changed since I was last here.
"It's a lot quieter," I said. "And it's yours."
THE PEARL OF THE ORIENT
I first saw Saigon in the spring of 1970, its late Baroque period. The graceful French city had by then been smothered by a sprawling, energetic American one. Coming to Saigon from the war was almost the same as going to Bangkok, except that there was a curfew and more barbed wire in Saigon. Otherwise it was next to impossible to detect that a war was going on. In part that was because the war was the least of what was occupying Saigon. What occupied Saigon then, as now, was opportunity. Today many of Saigon's most blatant excesses have been suppressed, but beneath the surface it is the same city. Saigon is, in fact, the government's number-one problem. It is a direct challenge to party ideology and morality. Under the emperor, under the French and the Japanese, under the Americans, it survived on its own terms, but today, under the Communists, it seems finally to be gasping for breath. Not that the Communists have been particularly successful in Saigon: any issue of than Dan, the official Communist Party newspaper, is filled with accounts of corruption in the city, of plots and counterplots, of the latest outrages committed by "subversive" and "antisocial" elements. Still, the Communists need Saigon almost as desperately as they hate it. Even they recognize that beneath Saigon's "antisocial" exterior are the most efficient and successful economic institutions in the country.
Everything is still for sale -- everything. Within five blocks of my hotel I was offered Buddhas plundered from Cambodia, rare Chinese antiques, gold jewelry, sex with male or female prostitutes, heroin, and -- my favorite -- a stamp collection (which, in fact, I bought). I was asked to change money, buy cigarettes, get my shoes shined, sell my camera. I saw markets selling everything from U.S. Navy silverware and American weapons to the latest cameras and stereos.
But more impressive, everything works. The clerks at the hotel speak excellent English. The elevator noes up and down. The orange juice in the morning is fresh squeezed, the croissants hot and newly baked, the coffee superb. If other foreigners had not begun conversations with me by saying, "I saw they had two cops following you today," I could almost have imagined that I was back in civilization. In Saigon one meets many cultured people, familiar with the West -- good conversationalists. Unfortunately, in most cases they are not the people who won the war.
And then there is the matter of its new name: Ho Chi Minh City The renaming of things is the essence of conquest. Hotels, streets, and landmarks all have new names, and some have new uses. Graham Greene's Continental Palace hotel is closed to the public. The bars on Tu Do Street are gone, replaced by the ubiquitous antique shops. Soul Alley, where dark-skinned Cambodians and metis from the French war catered to black soldiers, is no more. The American Embassy is now the headquarters for the petroleum agency, the Cercle Sportif a youth recreation club. The Majestic Hotel is the Cuu Long, Tu Do Street is Dong Khoi Street, and so on. Some of the names have actually taken hold -- but although I rarely heard the name
Tu Do I often heard the same street's name from a previous conquest: Rue Catinat. Except from a few top-ranking functionaries, however, I almost never heard the name Ho Chi Minh City. Granted, that name was written on all my documents, the airlines used it, I could say Ho Chi Minh City and be understood; but given all that, the city is still Saigon.
One relic of the old Saigon still tolerated by the government is the Rex nightclub. I rode up in the elevator with two Russians who were busily combing their hair, turning up their collars, and checking each other's clothes. The Rex is a classic nightclub, dark, with discreet waiters who whisper, "Would you like a taxi girl, sir?" after they take the drink order The music was stunningly professional; a woman named Cam Van sang basic nightclub songs in an eerily perfect imitation of Linda Ronstadt. The women were fashionably dressed and spoke good English; they were even good dancers.
The puritan world of Hanoi could have been on another planet. "Many men have fallen in love here," my companion told me. Officially, everything is chaste; the women all go home alone. But I spoke with several men who had arranged private meetings; as everywhere in Saigon, anything is possible. I asked one of the women to dance. The first thing she said was, "Can you help me get to America?"
Throughout North Vietnam, and even in Da Nang and Hue, I had felt I was in a basically stable culture, beset with problems and apprehensive about the future, but committed to it. In Da Nang on my walks I had encountered a few people who had asked me to help them get out. But Saigon -- well, as always, Saigon was totally different. Saigon felt like an occupied city. Everyone seemed to be whispering to me -- about the government, about the police, about how bad things were, and, most of all, about how they wanted out. "Sometimes I think that all anyone does here is plot to leave," a visitor from Hanoi said. Even the wife and children of the government press coordinator in Saigon live in Los Angeles.
More than a million Vietnamese have fled their country since the fall of Saigon, and another million are trying to get out by legal means. When the news spread in Saigon that I was an American, I became a walking mailbox. Wherever I went, people would stuff letters in my bag, my pockets, my hand. Their desperation was undeniable: they wanted out, and they wanted help to make it. There were letters to relatives, letters to congressmen, letters to President Reagan, but mostly there were letters to the Orderly Departure Program (ODP) office in Bangkok. The ODP was established in 1979 in response to the plight of the boat people, who were fleeing Vietnam and dying by the thousands in the South China Sea and at the hands of Thai pirates. The ODP is under the UN, but the countries that are the most common destinations -- the United States. Canada, France, and Australia -- run their own programs. The Vietnamese government has been the crucial link in making the program work. Eager to erase the image of the boat people, it has processed tens of thousands of exit visas for Amerasian children and Vietnamese citizens with relatives abroad. As of October, according to Vietnamese officials, there were 70,000 Vietnamese with exit visas waiting for approval from host countries.
Of the 500,000 people currently on file in the American ODP office registered as wanting to leave Vietnam, barely 13,000 made it out in 1984, up from less than 10,000 in 1983. At that rate, just to clear every person in the current files would take forty or fifty years, not to mention all the new cases that come in among the 100,000 letters the ODP gets in a year. Many of the people trying to get out were committed to us, worked for us, risked their lives for us. When we left in such inexcusable panic, in 1975, we left them behind. The gate out of Vietnam could be closed any day, as the gate out of Berlin was, as gates everywhere else have been. Vietnam often gives exit visas to people who don't meet our entry requirements, and denies visas to some people who do. But for our part, the U.S. government continues to do the bureaucratic slow shuffle. We agreed to take more Amerasian children and their families, but then we reduced the number of other refugees from Vietnam we would accept. At Tan Son Nhut airport, in Saigon, when I was leaving Vietnam, I listened to Canadian ODP officials boast good-naturedly to their American counterparts that, not counting the special Amerasian program, Canada was on the verge of accepting more refugees than the United States was taking. It was one of the worst things I heard on my entire trip.
ANOTHER COUNTRY
Peace is better than war, and for that reason alone the people of Vietnam are better off than they were when we were there. In the barren wastelands of free-fire zones crops are being planted and children go to school. People no longer live in caves and tunnels, their babies tucked away on shelves in the clay, to avoid bombs. Millions of refugees have returned to their villages. The air-raid siren no longer screams its call to shelters and antiaircraft batteries. The cycle of rice planting and harvesting again dominates the lives of the peasants.
But underneath the surface is another reality. A driver in Hanoi complains that he is sick but can't even get into the hospital unless he bribes the clerks and the doctors. A restaurant owner groans about his high "taxes." A woman in Da Nang grabs up her child and flees when I sit down, saying, "If they see me talking to you, they'll kill me." Policemen at a ceremony designed to inspire young people to patriotism casually beat back uninvited young people with bamboo sticks, as if they were shooing away stray dogs. Foreigners who work in Vietnam tell endless stories about their employees reporting on them, and each other, to the police, and their fears that they will be sent away to reeducation camps on the slightest suspicion. The refugees who have fled the country since reunification have their own stories of corruption and repression, to which the hardships they braved to get out are eloquent witness.
Vietnam has no independent news, no freedom of speech; information is much more rigidly controlled than in the more liberal Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe. One crusading newspaper, however, regularly publishes stories about corruption and mismanagement, about abuses of the peasants and the people, about failures of the government and the Party. It is, oddly, orphan Dan, the Party newspaper. In each issue its readers learn about kick-backs and bribes, about insensitivity and brutality, about mistakes in ideology, policy, and practice. Case studies of the problems of establishing cooperatives and collectives openly discuss opposition from peasants and failures of leadership. There are stories of zealous tax collectors seizing personal property of Party members running smuggling rings, of payoffs for jobs, exit visas, apartments.
Two themes run throughout these accounts. The first is that the power of the central government is far from absolute. A Party member confirmed this for me. "The old saying that the power of the emperor stops at the gates of the village is still true. Even on the province level they basically do what they want to do. Cables get 'lost,' orders get 'misunderstood.' In most cases of practical government we cannot simply give orders and expect that they will be followed; we have to persuade. At the level of the village and the cooperative that is even more true. We cannot command allegiance; we must earn it." The second theme is that the transformation of the South into the socialist model of the North has been far more difficult than the regime ever expected. Ten years have passed since liberation, and still the North and the South might well be two countries. "The politburo believes that so far as the South goes it's now or never," a senior diplomat told me. "And they've decided that it's never."
In Vietnam, ideology has always come in by the back door. "The Communist Party inspired the people to fight out of patriotism," said Xuan Oanh, one of Hanoi's leading authorities on America. "Then, when we had their allegiance, we could persuade them of our ideology." That worked against the French, and it worked against the Americans. The goals were transcendent: drive out the foreigners, unite the country. If Communist ideology was the price that had to be paid for that -- and if it would get rid of the landlords too -- then the people would pay it. But today no more epic battles for independence and freedom are left to be won. Now the only incentive is the Party's own authority: you will follow this ideology not because it is the only way to liberate the country but because we say so. "After the war," I was told, "we expected the same spirit of patriotism to continue. "We expected it to pervade the South. We overestimated the fervor. It was a serious mistake."
Having organized the Vietnamese in a heroic effort to drive out the foreigners and unite the country, the leadership seems less capable of inspiring its people to improve their lot. Part of the problem is the legacy of one of the longest and most destructive wars in history. But the single biggest stumbling block to mobilizing the country's naturally industrious and entrepreneurial people has been the bankrupt Marxist ideology, which has little to offer a country wishing to create a modern economy. This problem has not escaped the Party leadership. Without the drama of Deng Xiaoping's headlong dash away from Marxism in China, they have begun to disengage themselves from the centralized, state-planning approach to economics that is the Soviet model. The talk is still of three incentives: for the suite, for the collective, and for the individual -- but almost all the attention is going to the last two. The pragmatists have discovered that the desire for personal betterment -- the capitalist vice of acquisitiveness -- is a much more effective motivation for hard work and economic growth than exhortations about social good. The evidence is undeniable: the countryside is better off than the cities, because the peasants have been allowed more opportunity to produce for themselves; the South is better off than the North, because in the South the desire and the ability to create wealth still exist. But once the leadership committed itself to improving the lot of the people, and accepted that only with more individual motivation would it bring that about, it got more than it bargained for. The loosening of economic ties to allow individuals to produce more has inevitable loosened social ties as well.
To the casual visitor North Vietnam seems almost a religious state. Public morality influences all behavior. And although there is a ubiquitous network of informers, much of the behavior seems not imposed but internal, built in. At the same time, there is a good deal of evidence that even in the North the belief that society is more important than the individual is no longer universal.
There are robberies in Hanoi now; even five Ears ago they would have been virtually unthinkable. The black market is rampant. High officials try to insist that this is a problem only in the South. but even they have trouble keeping a straight face as they say so. From clerks to ministers, every government worker must sell his rationed food, cigarettes, and clothing on the black market in order to survive. A government worker makes about 300 dong (roughly $1.30 at the black-market exchange rate) a month; a doctor about 400 dong ($1.70). A bowl of soup is 30 dong, a grapefruit 20 dong, a pack of cheap cigarettes 35 dong. If a worker buys one of each of these a day, as most workers seem to do, he will have spent his entire month's salary in less than four days. And so everyone holds several jobs -- sweeping out pagodas, teaching night classes, weaving mats, stringing beads; and everyone has to work the black market, often selling rationed rice on the black market and going without even a basic level of food to do so .
Vietnam is a society accustomed to sacrifice on the verge of having sacrificed enough. To ease those sacrifices the country must grow economically, but that means opening the door to all the Western social effects that old Party members find so threatening. So far the Westernizers like Communist Party leader Le Duan are winning, but the purists are watching and waiting. On several occasions I heard people mutter, "Did we fight the war for this?" Until the leadership can answer the question of what comes after independence and freedom, until they can truly convert their warrior culture to peace, their victory will remain bittersweet.
HILL 10
As we approached Hill 10, we came upon a ditch cut through the road. Beyond the ditch, where the base had been, was only a red scar on the hilltop. I got out and walked up to it. I could remember perfectly how it had been: where everyone had lived and worked, where everything in that little world had happened. I walked over to where the command post had been, where the Filipino bands had sung, where the PX and the enlisted-men's club had stood, where the showers and the mess hall had greeted us when we came in from the bush. This hill had been a little piece of America, our connection to the world, to reality. Now there were only the paddies, the mountains beyond, and the silence.
Hien, the former Viet Cong company commander, my old enemy, the man we had built all the Hill 10s in Vietnam to kill, walked quietly up to me and stood at my side as I stared toward the mountains. With a stick he drew diagrams in the dirt of how his company could have attacked Hill 10. I watched with interest, but there was really nothing left to say. In the end he didn't have to attack it; all he had to do was survive until we left, and then the country was his.
Four months before my trip to Vietnam, Americans of another generation revisited their battlefields on the beaches of Normandy. President Reagan spoke, his voice quavering. The veterans and their relatives cried. The American flag flew over a cemetery where crosses stretched as far as the eve could see. It was a powerful, patriotic moment. I thought of that moment as I stood on Hill 10. I did not feel patriotic; I simply felt sad.
"It is easier to start a war," the North Vietnamese general had told me, "than to end one." A valuable lesson, seldom learned. The cost of that lesson is beyond calculation: the long black wall in Washington, with all its names of young Americans who died so far from home; the cemetery just down the road, with its headstones bearing the word hero; the grief of the woman whose husband I might have killed, the grief of every family who had lost someone here. There are times when such costs must be paid: we had to fight the Nazis. We did not have to fight here.
I looked around this deserted hill for one last time. I could imagine a line of Marines making their way across the paddies, bound for the hill. The images were from a dream I still have, fifteen years later. My old platoon is returning to Hill 10 from the mountains. In the shadow of the base we are ambushed. No one comes to help us. We are cut to pieces.... But this time there was no ambush. The men just kept coming, headed for home, together.
As I turned to go, I noticed an old empty sandbag lying buried in the dirt. I picked it up and took it back, as a souvenir. When I returned to New York, I washed the sandbag over and over, but I could never get it to come clean.
Copyright © 1985 by William Broyles, Jr. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; April 1985; The Road to Hill 10; Volume 255, No. 4; pages 90 - 112.
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