SEEING VIETNAM WITH MY OWN EYES
RENNIE DAVIS
It seemed hard to imagine I was going back to Vietnam with an American antiwar delegation 40 years after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. It was harder still to explain what I experienced when I came back to the United States. This book was organized to share the experiences of our delegation to Vietnam’s 40th anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords. We attended official meetings and ceremonies from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. We met the president of Vietnam, the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, the head of Vietnam’s national assembly and Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, a living icon in today’s Vietnam. What happened on our trip is set out in this book. It was the continuing love and appreciation that the Vietnamese have for the millions of Americans who joined massive mobilizations against the war that most stood out for me during this trip back to Vietnam. To share my own experience, I want to paint a picture of who the Vietnamese actually are and what really happened during those years of war between the United States and Vietnam.
In January 2013, nine Americans with their spouses and significant others returned to Vietnam. We had all previously traveled to Hanoi during the war. On our first night back in Hanoi, Madame Nguyen Thi Binh unexpectedly invited Frank Joyce, his wife, Mary Anne Barnett, John McAuliff, Kirsten Liegmann, and me to a private dinner with her son and grandson. She held hands with me most of the night and presented me a gift of her autobiography, recently translated into English and just off the press. 2
When I read her book, I saw again her incredible love and appreciation for the U.S. antiwar movement. She described her relation to me like “a mother to a son” and since first meeting her in 1967, I have always felt the same. Before the negotiations in Paris began, the American public had a blurry image of Vietnam’s resistance leaders. No one imagined the official representative of the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front would be a woman, much less the enchanting and elegant Madame Nguyen Thi Binh. When she first stepped onto the world stage on November 4, 1968—a wise, sensitive, and articulate spokeswoman—she stunned and inspired the public. As hundreds of delegations made the trip to Paris to meet her, she won their hearts with her sincerity and kindness as she patiently explained the deeply flawed and brutal American war policy.
Madame Binh’s grandfather had been a beloved national scholar and early advocate of democracy for Vietnam. Her father had been a surveyor with the French administration who moved to the Mekong Delta when she was a child. Growing up, she lived with her family and later attended a French school in Cambodia where she excelled in math and sports and competed in cross-country races and basketball. In April 1951, her education was halted when she was imprisoned by the French. She spent three years in the most notorious French prison of the time after someone who had been brutally tortured gave up her name. In her autobiography she wrote, “I was cruelly beaten without stopping because an earlier arrestee had broken down under torture and given my name. First, they tortured us by savage beatings. Then they submerged us in water, then with electricity, then—I wanted to die so they would finish—I was most worried about breaking under torture and giving names, leading the enemy to arrest others.... Fortunately, the torturers saw they couldn’t wrest any information from me.” In recalling those brutal years, she said it gave her strength—the strength “to survive the most intense conditions imaginable.”
U.S. reporters who covered the events in Paris had little if any awareness of this personal history. Instead, many wondered why a woman was selected for Paris at all. Ho Chi Minh, the president of Vietnam, had traveled abroad and even lived in the United States. The time he spent in New York City and Boston was during the woman’s suffrage movement before World War I when he came to deeply believe that a woman should represent Vietnam to the world. He also knew that Madame Nguyen Thi Binh possessed the intelligence, openness, and kindness to win over the skeptics.
I visited her frequently during her years in Paris. Now it was the 40th anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords and she was in front of me again, still expressing her appreciation for the Americans who opposed the horrific U.S. war. In her book, she acknowledged many of the specific U.S. groups that came to Paris during the war, from Congressional delegates to families of American prisoners of war to antiwar activists. She wanted the people of Vietnam to remember the names of the Americans who had fought to end the war, especially those who sacrificed their own lives, some setting themselves on fire to protest the war. She specifically mentioned the work of Dave Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Cora Weiss, Benjamin Spock, and myself.
For the 40th anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords, Vietnam decided to host a national event in Hanoi with past and present political and military leaders, ranking members of the national assembly, chief justices, members of the secretariat and politburo, the minister of foreign affairs and other ministers, along with diverse representatives of foreign governments, NGOs, and organizations that had supported Vietnam during the war from around the world. The national ceremony included the past and present political and military leadership of the country. Our delegation joined the gathering along with hundreds of representatives of foreign governments, NGOs, and antiwar organizations around the world that had supported Vietnam during the U.S. war.
Following stunning performances from dancers, singers, and leading artists of Vietnam, President Truong Tan Sang spoke of the January 1973 Paris negotiations as the ultimate achievement in Vietnam’s “history of diplomacy.” Acknowledging the pivotal work of Madame Binh, she was awarded Vietnam’s highest recognition that evening, the military’s hero award.
Today, Madame Nguyen Thi Binh is Chairperson of Vietnam’s Children’s Fund, Honorary President of the Association of Victims of Agent Orange, and President of the Peace and Development Foundation where she is devoted to supporting Vietnamese victims of chemical Agent Orange. To paint a picture of who the Vietnamese people really are, I should begin with my first visit to Hanoi during the fall of 1967.
Dave Dellinger, David Ifshin, and Rennie Davis confer near the White House, February 8, 1971.
Photo courtesy of The Baltimore Sun.
My first contact with a Vietnamese person was at a Vietnamese-American conference held in Bratislava (now the capital of Slovakia). Forty-two Americans came. Martin Luther King was invited but declined at the last minute due to a scheduling conflict. The U.S. delegation was a cross-section of antiwar, civil rights, and women activists with a handful of journalists. We flew to Paris, then to Prague before taking a bus to Bratislava where we met 23 Vietnamese delegates, including members of the North Vietnamese national assembly and ranking leaders of South Vietnam’s Provisional Revolutionary Government.
I slowly came to realize during the conference that the Vietnamese delegation was the highest-level gathering of officials outside of Vietnam since the Geneva Convention in 1954—the historic conference that had ended the Indochina War between France and the Viet Minh. That’s when I first met Madame Nguyen Thi Binh. I had no idea at the time that she had traveled six months from South Vietnam to attend this conference herself. She greeted us warmly, wearing a simple but elegant full-length, high-collared Vietnamese dress. In a few short years, she would become a world sensation, appearing in Paris as the articulate individual to head the South Vietnamese “Viet Cong” delegation—one of the four parties to the U.S.–Vietnam peace accord.
I could have left this Bratislava conference with a richer perspective on Vietnam if I had simply returned to the United States as planned. I would have come home more educated. But something unexpected happened—shifting my Vietnam awareness from educated and informed to up close and personal. At that conference, I was invited with six others to visit Vietnam and see for myself. I had no idea what that meant but knew I wanted to go. In Bratislava, I sensed correctly that I might be seizing the moment of a lifetime by saying yes to this invitation and seeing Vietnam with my own eyes.
Every American invited felt the same. We wanted to go. As risky as travelling to Czechoslovakia may have been, there was no comparison with the possible consequences of an unsanctioned trip into “enemy” territory. While I never considered declining the invitation, I found it hard to evaluate the risks. I could be bombed by U.S. Navy war planes stationed on carriers near Vietnam. I could be vilified by the press upon returning home. Believing the United States had strayed from its greatness—and longing for its return to democratic ideals—I felt motivated to be among the first Americans to evaluate the Vietnamese claim that American air raids routinely targeted civilian infrastructures resulting in large-scale casualties.
And so I joined one of the first delegations of antiwar activists to see what our Defense Department did not want any American to witness—the effects of the U.S. air war raining down its anti-personnel and 2,000-pound bombs on North Vietnam. Our delegation to Hanoi that year was Tom Hayden, Carol McEldowney, Vivian Rothstein, Norman Fruchter, Robert Allen, Jock Brown, and myself. We boarded an International Control Commission (ICC) aircraft heading for North Vietnam. ICC was an off-shoot of the Geneva Convention established to monitor the implementation of the international agreement that followed the French war in 1954. When its purpose to unify the country with nationwide elections was blocked by the United States, ICC continued to provide an airline connection to the divided country with flights from Saigon to Hanoi through Laos.
Our nighttime flight into Hanoi from Laos was the final leg of a journey that had begun in Prague and taken us through Beirut, Dubai, Bombay Rangoon, Phnom Penh, and Vientiane, Laos. We faced stormy weather that night that hurled our tiny prop plane sharply upwards before dropping it hard, over and over, making the passengers tightly bound to their throwup bags. I was relieved not to feel sick as we descended into the pitch darkness of this mysterious Asian city. At the last moment, just before touching down, a row of bright lights went on to illuminate the runway and then turned off quickly as the wheels made contact with the ground. Walking down the plane’s stairs, a group of excited Vietnamese welcomed us like U.S. tourists from the mainland are often greeted by natives in Hawaii. As I got my travel bag and walked to a caravan of jeep-style military vehicles, I felt overwhelmed with questions. Given the need to turn off the lights of Hanoi’s airport, were we in danger from bombs being dropped by our own country tonight? How would we get into a blacked-out city if the bridges into Hanoi had all been bombed?
Traveling by train from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) in 2013, with stops in Quang Tri and Da Nang. From left to right: Alex Hing, Rennie Davis, and Judy Gumbo.
Photo courtesy of Judy Gumbo.
Returning to Vietnam in 2013 and returning again in January 2015 just after Hanoi’s new terminal had opened, it is clear that Vietnam on one level has dramatically changed. These days, international flights to Hanoi don’t use ICC prop planes anymore. Instead, 500 passengers crowd onto one Airbus. The old airport is gone. Terminal two of the Nội Bài International Airport was inaugurated January 4, 2015, boosting the total capacity of the new Vietnam airport to 19 million passengers a year. Traveling the 17 miles from the airport to downtown Hanoi uses a brand new world-class highway that crosses the spectacular Nhật Tân Bridge, where many circles of gardens are in development but not yet finished.
When I came to Hanoi the first time, getting into the city was not that easy. The Red River—a major waterway flowing from Yunnan in Southwestern China to the Gulf of Tonkin—had to be crossed and the main bridge into the city had been repeatedly bombed. While it was never destroyed, it was deemed safer for us to board a ferry and cross the Red River discreetly. The United States was at war with Vietnam but on my first humid Vietnam night with its bright tropical moon casting a liquid silver light onto the faces of every Vietnamese passenger, they looked friendly and open to me. Except for the sound of the boat’s motor and one radio tuned to the music of a bamboo flute, all was quiet on the Red River. The music was elegant too. As I took in the idyllic scents and the serene scenery, I felt like a person who had stepped out of a modern world and time traveled into some ancient century.
Looking directly into the faces of the people around me, no one seemed stressed or worried at all. Not one person looked guarded or hateful like I typically experienced taking a commuter train from the O’Hare airport into downtown Chicago. If I had to pick one word to describe the demeanor of these war-time passengers, I would say innocence. Strange to say; nevertheless, that was my first impression of the Vietnamese people and it took me by surprise. Vietnam was being bombed every day by the United States of America, yet ordinary Vietnamese seemed entirely comfortable with our group of Americans and strangely free of any body armor, defenses, or cunning. Suddenly the radio music was interrupted by the voice of an announcer. Everyone hushed to listen. Unable to understand the language, I could only watch in amazement at everyone’s rapt attention to every word. Then the boat erupted in celebration with cheering and clapping. I turned to our guide to hear his translation as he said, “it was just reported a U.S. F-16 flew over the country and was shot down by an 18-year-old woman with a rifle.”
Now I was truly stunned—and conflicted too. My immediate thoughts went to the pilot. A U.S. serviceman had been shot down by a woman’s rifle and I was surrounded by a heart-felt flood of excitement and passion. Frankly, it is only possible now decades later to share this story publicly. That night on that ferry, I wanted the war to end but wasn’t prepared for this. I did not think it was possible that an American advanced fighter plane could be shot down by a Vietnamese teenager with only a rifle. As my emotions slowly settled down, I let myself see how the Vietnamese actually felt about this war. There was a genuineness in them I would witness again and again in the coming days. From my very first hours in Hanoi, I realized the United States might not be fighting an ideology after all or the narrow agenda of a rigid political elite. None of these people appeared like they were forced to celebrate the cause of their military. They seemed more like the perfect nation for “containing China” as our State Department mission had stated the United States was determined to accomplish.
Throughout my first trip to Vietnam, I watched everyday Vietnamese demonstrate over and over this was their country and their duty to fight for their freedom and independence. I felt like someone who had slipped into an American colony from Great Britain to witness a small band of freedom fighters during our own country’s war of independence. I was like that invisible Brit that got to overhear the news of a victory won by a ragtag American army fighting for its freedom and independence. In Vietnam, I was witnessing something similar.
It never previously occurred to me that the Vietnamese might actually succeed in defeating the world’s most powerful and advanced military on the battlefield. The Vietnamese, however, seemed completely convinced that, in the end, they would prevail, just as they had many times in the past—against the French at Dien Bien Phu, against the Japanese during World War II, and against the Chinese and Mongols to the north repeatedly over many centuries. The Vietnamese I met clearly lacked the sense of desperation one might expect from hopelessly outgunned underdogs. Instead, they displayed a confidence that caused me to consider, for the first time, the possibility that the war in Vietnam could be more than just a misguided foreign policy about containing China. Anyone visiting Hanoi in those early days of the U.S. air war had to wonder if this was a completely foolish military strategy as well. It was difficult to believe the American argument that Vietnamese guerrillas were Russian or Chinese pawns in a global cold war game of chess. The people I met seemed like genuine patriots, fighting to preserve a nation they deeply loved and respected.
Where I lived in Chicago, most people had only a vague idea of what the Vietnam War was about. Unless a person was part of a military family fighting in Vietnam, there was little stake in the outcome beyond the safe return of loved ones in combat. Everyone on this river ferry, however, appeared to have a passionate stake in the outcome.
During my first visit to Vietnam, I realized what most Americans never fully got to appreciate: The Vietnamese people loved America’s founding principles and cheered us on as millions of Americans figured it out and turned against this misguided war. In Vietnam, we were the heroes as we still are today.
One evening in 1967, I strolled through the streets of Hanoi with one of my hosts. We came to a large truck caravan parked and waiting. Its destination was clearly South Vietnam. I noticed many of the waiting trucks had pictures on their windshields. A picture of Ho Chi Minh, the President of North Vietnam, was proudly displayed as I would expect, but a Western face was also common. I asked several drivers through my translator who that was—the Westerner next to Ho Chi Minh? Norman Morrison was the response. I had heard the Morrison story. He was an American Quaker who had committed suicide in an act of self-immolation at age 31, protesting U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The date was November 2, 1965 when he doused himself in kerosene and set himself on fire just below Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s Pentagon office. He followed the emulation of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, who had also burned himself to death in downtown Saigon to protest the repression of the South Vietnam government.
Morrison’s story was known to me but not widely known to the public in the United States. In Vietnam, he was a national hero. He had influenced Robert McNamara too. Filmmaker Errol Morris, who interviewed McNamara for his documentary The Fog of War (2003), captured the U.S. secretary of defense saying, “[Morrison] came to the Pentagon, doused himself with gasoline. Burned himself to death below my office...his wife issued a very moving statement—‘human beings must stop killing other human beings’—and that’s a belief that I shared, I shared it then, I believe it even more strongly today.”
Americans who knew Morrison remembered him as devoutly and sincerely sacrificing himself for the Vietnam cause. While he was not a folk hero in the United States, when he died, Vietnamese poet Tố Hữu wrote a poem titled “Emily, My Child,” as if Morrison was speaking to his daughter Emily and telling her the reasons for his sacrifice. North Vietnam later named a Hanoi street after Morrison and issued a postage stamp in his honor. Years later, during a visit to the United States, Vietnam’s President Nguyễn Minh Triết went to the Potomac near the place where Morrison immolated himself and read the poem by Tố Hữu to commemorate the act of Morrison sacrificing himself.
Vietnam had a different culture than our own. They truly enjoyed listening to bamboo music on loud speakers throughout the city. Broadcasting air raid alerts was the reason for the public sound system and when the flute music stopped and the alarms went off, our 1967 delegation was hustled into the nearest bomb shelter. During these intensive bombing raids, I couldn’t see anything in the shelter but I could feel the bombs exploding in the city. The ground would shake under my feet in our shelter. When we left Hanoi to visit a rural village, our hosts became more nervous about our safety. On one occasion, our jeep caravan was flagged to an abrupt stop by local residents shouting the words “danger, danger” that even I could understand. I was pulled out of my jeep and carried by one of my Vietnamese hosts to the nearest “bomb shelter,” which was a ditch on the side of the road. I was put in the ditch and covered with the body of my Vietnamese guide. Then in what seemed like seconds a U.S. fighter jet buzzed our position at very low altitude trying to stay under the radar on its way to its bombing target.
Hanoi today has certainly changed. It is bustling now with people and commerce. There must be ten million motorbikes. Crossing a street is a decision to make a life commitment to a great dance of trust in the Vietnamese motorist. With the end of the war, the countryside has been booming and developing too. Like every major city in the world, the growth and consumption in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are not sustainable and the endless accumulation of cement is unhealthy, but one thing has not changed at all: The people of Vietnam are still stunning and beautiful. Their love for family and country has continued into a new generation. When I went back to Vietnam, everywhere I looked, people seemed bright-eyed and shining like few other places I know. Vietnam’s greatest resource without a doubt continues to be its amazing people.
What is not seen by tourists today visiting this new century of Vietnam are the third and fourth generation Vietnamese victims suffering from chemical Agent Orange toxins or unexploded U.S. bombs that still go off. In 1967, when I first visited, the United States defoliated 1.7 million acres in South Vietnam in the pursuit of a U.S. policy to clear the jungles. It was a war crime that left devastating birth defects and other unthinkable health effects that continue today. Four decades after signing the Paris Peace Accords, clean-up of the U.S. contamination had been limited to three U.S. military bases where the chemicals were physically stored. The toxic U.S. poison is still in ponds and lakes where fish and animals swim. As the people drink the water or consume the fish, new birth defects result in the present time from the chemical Agent Orange sprayed decades ago. It was the U.S. military policy to clear trees, shrubs, jungles, and food crops in Vietnam. The toxic chemical employed for that job was a mixture of two deadly herbicides, 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T. While Agent Orange does degrade over time, its human and environmental effects persist. Vietnam’s pre-war lush forests and jungles took hundreds of years to achieve their balanced mixture of flora and fauna, and natural regeneration may take centuries to re-create these extraordinary landscapes again. In some areas, land erosion and landslides have significantly decreased the nutrient levels of the soil with invasive grasses taking over.
Dioxin is a pollutant resulting from the accelerated production of one of the two Agent Orange components (2,4,5-T.) This dioxin is toxic over a far longer period and does not degrade easily. It attaches itself to soil particles, which are carried by water into ponds and lakes. People today, especially in the southern part of Vietnam, eat dioxin-contaminated fish or fowl and get sick. Genetic deformities are occurring in third-generation Vietnamese now. A vast remediation of Vietnam’s contaminated soils and water is urgently needed on a scale far greater than the three U.S. designated “hot spots” where the U.S. is cleaning up some of its worst contamination.
What I came to realize on my 2013 return to Vietnam was that the 1967 dioxins previously used in Vietnam had changed people’s internal cellular and chemical balance, creating severe health challenges or death today.
With the signing of the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973, the four parties to this conflict agreed to the unconditional withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. They also agreed to “support the healing of the wounds of war.” Despite that agreement, the war continued until April 1975. Normalization of U.S.-Vietnam relations took even longer through many difficult years and only with the considerable leadership of President Bill Clinton. I had to go back to Vietnam to fully realize myself that “healing the wounds of war” would need far more than a modest U.S. government clean-up of three toxic chemical hot spots. Virtually no U.S. public awareness even exists that 40 years after the Paris Peace Accord, new wounds of war continue to be inflicted today. Our own American Vietnam veterans continue to suffer under the radar as well. Third-generation Vietnamese are born with deformities because their grandparents were exposed to the chemical Agent Orange or because they live in a village where a buried unexploded ordnance is unearthed during an ordinary play day. When a buried bomb explodes, a lifetime of new suffering is created. For these victims, the war in Vietnam continues. Normalization of relations between the United States and Vietnam has certainly taken giant strides forward in recent years, but the U.S. desire to avoid its legal liability for unexploded ordnance or the genetic effects of chemical Agent Orange has kept the U.S. government immobilized regarding its 1973 pledge to heal the wounds of war.
It is not just the general public who is unaware of this reality. The historic U.S. antiwar movement has also failed to keep up with this development. In addition, a younger American generation has little knowledge of what the U.S. even did in Vietnam. That’s why I want to briefly explain again what actually happened.
American troops stationed in Vietnam escalated from 3,500 Marines—initially deployed for “defense”—to 450,000 servicemen and women. When I first visited Vietnam in 1967, the U.S. was raining down 2,000 bombing sorties weekly on North and South Vietnam. The total ordnance dropped that year was 1.5 million tons of explosives—a nearly inconceivable carnage that grew to nearly 8 million tons by the war’s end, making an area the size of New Mexico the most bombed nation on Earth.
After the Vietnamese decisively defeated the French at Dien Bein Phu, an international conference split French Indochina into three countries—Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Vietnam was provisionally partitioned along the 17th parallel pending a countrywide election in 1956 to unify the country and democratically elect a new national leadership. With direction from the U.S. State Department, the American-backed South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem rejected the elections, knowing his country’s overwhelming public support for the popular Vietnamese resistance leader, Ho Chi Minh.
In other words, the United States completely lost its way in Vietnam. Fortunately, tens of millions of Americans did not. We figured it out. In one of America’s greatest historical moments, millions of people, many in their twenties, broke free of the entrenched mindset that always insisted that protesting an unjust American war was somehow unpatriotic. We challenged the traditional American view of patriotism. When our antiwar movement pushed and demanded that the United States become a better nation, it wasn’t treasonous at all. A massive citizen effort opposing an ill-conceived war in Vietnam emerged in America like a breath of fresh air. I felt proud to oppose a ruinous war in which our own country supported one of the most brutal dictators in history and rejected the legally required elections to unify this ancient country. Looking back, everyone can see today that it was our own U.S. policies that were the only real threat to the American homeland. Eventually, the vast majority of American public opinion came to agree with us—even Robert McNamara, the U.S. secretary of defense, joined in after the War’s conclusion to denounce the Vietnam War policies he had once managed.
Nevertheless, throughout this entire antiwar history, the U.S. government mostly struggled to figure it out. Our officials could not comprehend how a peasant country such as Vietnam could endure thousands of planeloads of bombs and chemicals along with our vast U.S. troop buildup. The odds of a Vietnamese victory was considered “impossible” by the U.S. military, but the fact remained that Vietnam was able to successfully mobilize the most advanced guerrilla force in modern history. No media network fully explained to the American public why millions of ordinary Vietnamese were willing to pay any price to defend their freedom and independence. While the U.S. government publicly insisted the “Vietnamese communists” were an “enemy” that had to be “contained” to secure the “free world,” I belonged to an amazing generation that came to appreciate the people of Vietnam as inspiring and not that different than our own ragtag patriots that defeated the British at the beginning of our country.
When the Vietnam War ended on April 30, 1975, the last U.S. helicopter was barely able to lift off in time. For every person who escaped the final Vietnamese offensive that overran Saigon, there were a thousand more that could not. The world’s superpower had been militarily humiliated. It was curious to me why our U.S. commanders were unable to understand the reasons why. Visiting Vietnam during the war and coming back again in 2013, the reasons could be plainly seen.
I made a second visit to Vietnam in 1969 to bring American prisoners of war back to their families. I knew no Westerner had traveled to the area between the 19th and the 17th parallel since the U.S. air war concentrated on this tiny region. Facing challenging logistics to make a trip into this area, I wanted to go but did not think it could happen. I was, of course, delighted when our hosts said yes.
And so seven Americans traveled from Hanoi to the Panhandle. I was especially curious to see the “gateway to the south”—the city of Vinh—that had once been an important center of revolutionary activity in earlier centuries. Ho Chi Minh’s birthplace was near Vinh. During the French occupation of Vietnam, the city was developed into an industrial center. During the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, Vinh was returned to the “stone age,” to hear U.S. pilots tell it. I had a picture of Hamburg or Dresden, where urban areas were carpet-bombed during World War II. In those horrific devastations, a bombed out structure might have one wall standing. A person could speculate that a bombed out building had once been a house or factory. In Vinh, however, the landscape more closely resembled the moon. There was crater upon crater with no evidence that any building ever previously existed. Vinh looked like an atom bomb explosion without the radiation.
What I never anticipated were the people of the Panhandle. They looked like a community that had missed the largest aerial assault in human history. A parade of smiling, energetic people had dug deep into the ground to set up living quarters inside the Earth. During my visit to the Panhandle, I squeezed through one of the narrow passageways to see for myself one of the underground corridors that led to a large open space under the ground. Our delegation sat in an underground theatre watching a play with local actors singing and dancing about a free and independent Vietnam. In “basement” theaters like this, Vietnam’s culture seemed alive and buoyant despite the unimaginable bombardment from the sky.
Vietnam knew from the start the horror that was coming from the United States. By 1965, the country had made the decision to survive the complete destruction of their nation. With the passage of decades and 20 years of “normalization,” there has been a steady public recognition in our country that Vietnam is not an American enemy after all. Perhaps now that we have gotten over our “mistakes” in Vietnam, we can shed our historic blinders and finally figure it out. We could let ourselves see what really happened during the war in Vietnam and why the Vietnamese deserve our respect and admiration.
Vietnam was a people’s war where every citizen became a soldier and every village, street, and plant were made into a battlefront fortress. In North Vietnam, cities were moved to the countryside. By the time I visited in 1967, Hanoi’s population had been reduced by half. The entire economy was decentralized. Large factories were relocated in caves or small rural villages. In the Panhandle region, people built tunnels and then moved into their underground complexes. While food shortages were widespread, people shared and supported each other. When a bridge was destroyed, it was quickly replaced by dirt fords or ferries that were durable, easily repaired, and nearly impossible to stop with bombs.
Inside the Panhandle in 1969, I saw for myself what I still see today in Vietnam. The nation’s greatest resource is not its military equipment, but the spirit and enduring strength of its people and culture. Even earlier, as the U.S. war started to escalate, nearly 500,000 Vietnamese organized in the North just to repair the coming bomb damage. Supply trains and truck convoys were formed into small units that traveled only at night. There were trucks and equipment to carry and haul supplies but the largest logistical capacity consisted of carts, wheelbarrows, and two baskets on a pole carried on a woman’s shoulder.
There was no possibility that a national political party in the United States was going to go down in history for losing a war. Consequently, neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party was able to withdraw from an undeveloped nation half the size of Texas because they were wrong. “Losing a war” did not compute in the Oval Office of the White House. Both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon constantly reminded their advisors that the United States was the military leader of the “free world” and its foreign policy in Asia had to “contain communist China.” Losing a war was not going to happen on their watch. The Vietnam War was the only way to prevent every Southeast Asian country from falling like dominos into Communist hands. The fact that this bedrock assumption was proved altogether inaccurate by subsequent events—that no dominos went falling after the U.S. military left Vietnam and a divided Vietnam was successfully reunited to become an American trading ally—did not mean the architects of America’s war strategy could grasp what actually happened.
History will remember the Vietnam War as one of America’s saddest, darkest chapters. This year is the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War. The Department of Defense is organizing 10,000 events across the United States as part of the anniversary. I personally believe the antiwar movement should insert itself into these events. It is time for our country to remember that the American public came to its senses about the Vietnam War. We should remember at this anniversary that out of a small 1965 antiwar march of 25,000 young people in Washington, D.C., organized by Students for a Democratic Society, the U.S. antiwar movement grew to a thunderous chorus to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam. Following demonstrations at the Chicago Democratic National Convention where a police riot assaulted demonstrators to the horror of the whole world, public opinion polls shifted and our demand to end the war was supported by a majority of the American people. Even many of the officials who managed the war eventually joined in. Civil rights, women’s rights, and human rights also took flight during this unique historical moment, creating one of our great American legacies. For the 50th anniversary, let us never forget the history of what actually happened.
The participation of Vietnam veterans against the Vietnam War became the great turning of U.S. patriotism that had always previously proclaimed, “my country, right or wrong.” With thousands of GIs choosing to leave that point of view to become new patriots for America, many of them gathered in front of the U.S. Capitol Building in 1971 to return their medals and awards won for valor in Vietnam back to the government. No previous American generation ever witnessed such a phenomenon. The bedrock of American patriotism was challenged from every quarter of society, including the GIs themselves. Let’s not forget that, either.
I once walked onto the base at Fort Bragg with Jane Fonda. It was just the two of us with no security. Thousands of GIs surrounded us as word spread like wildfire that she was there. It was a moment when I experienced her courage. What I saw in her was impressive and beyond words even today. She stood before the crowd and spoke her convictions that nearly every American would agree that the war was brutal and a mistake for our country. While the audience included many antiwar GI friends, not every soldier was ready to embrace her new patriotism that day. Her message of patriotism at Fort Bragg that day was to support GIs by bringing them home, but it made for a tense moment. When Jane Fonda traveled to Hanoi, a picture was taken of her with Vietnamese women defending their homeland. That photo went around the world, and the American patriots who still proclaim “my country, right or wrong” have mocked and ridiculed her for years because she did not support our GIs; however, I remember her supporting our GIs with her call to bring them home. Perhaps one day, the people who “hate” Jane Fonda for traveling to North Vietnam during a time when U.S. war crimes in Southeast Asia went utterly and completely out of control will consider taking a page from our own revolution. During that time, there were many Americans like Jane Fonda who had the wisdom to leave the British tradition of “my country, right or wrong” to support the dream of a better world. Because she believes in the ideals of this country, I understand why she might wish that picture had never happened and prefer somehow to take it back if she could. Should you ever have the opportunity to speak with her, may I encourage you to remember that Jane Fonda pioneered, along with millions of Americans, a new patriotism that must never fade away. Use your good fortune of being with her to thank her yourself for what she did to support and advance the dream of a wiser United States.
Changing the bedrock of a nation’s patriotism takes decades or centuries. During the time when the United States lost its way in Vietnam, Gold Star Mothers and veterans against the Vietnam War became the shining light of our movement with its new American patriotism. Vietnam veterans marched to Arlington National Cemetery in support of the Gold Star Mothers who had lost their sons in Vietnam. When the mothers were refused entry to lay their wreaths in the national cemetery, the veterans refused to back down until those antiwar mothers were eventually let in to the national monument.
In 1932, World War I veterans camped out at the nation’s Capitol demanding to be paid their promised service bonuses. President Hoover sent in troops and used tear gas, bullets, bayonets, and torches to destroy the veterans’ camp and drive them out of the city. In 1971, Vietnam Veterans against the War came to Washington to return their medals for bravery back to the government. In doing so, they touched the heart of America. Recognizing the public mood had changed, Nixon announced, “I see no reason to go in and arrest the veterans and put them into jail at this time.”
Standing on the steps of the nation’s Capitol, American veterans from every service stated their names, units, and citations before throwing their awards and mementos back to Congress. One by one for three hours, they tossed their decorations earned with bravery back to the government. One veteran said, “I hope someday I can return to Vietnam and help rebuild the country we tore apart.” Another announced, “here are my merit badges for murder.” Veteran Paul Winter took the microphone to pray for forgiveness as he threw back his Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Distinguished Service Cross before limping away.
Fifty years after the Vietnam War, that spirit is urgently needed again. The U.S. Department of Defense with its 10,000 ceremonies that will remember the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War has no plans to remember what actually happened. A majority of the American public opposed this war, including many GIs. That’s what happened. The overwhelming majority of the Vietnamese nation mobilized every man and woman to drive the United States out of its country. That also happened. Will the Defense Department during the 50th anniversary be pointing out that the wounds of war continue today? That is what is happening now. Since we have shown in the past that we can rise to the occasion and shift an “inevitable” outcome in a new direction, we could reconnect and do what is needed ourselves. Because there are new technologies that could dramatically assist victims of chemical Agent Orange with safe, non-toxic therapies and breakthrough water and soil clean-up discoveries that could be made available to Vietnam today, the tens of millions of Americans who once opposed the Vietnam War are needed again to come back and support Vietnam once more with their donations, volunteer services, health therapies, and soil and water clean-up technologies. If the government won’t heal the wounds of war, why not do it ourselves? A citizen-to-citizen America–Vietnam Initiative would be welcomed in Vietnam. We could develop our own victim income-generation programs. We could build victim home construction projects ourselves that support rehabilitation and vocational education schools for disabled children as well. We could bring our own breakthrough energy medicines to Vietnamese and American victims for our own 50th anniversary. We have among us thousands of health professionals and humanitarian activists who could significantly support the war-affected communities of Laos and Cambodia as well as Vietnam. The Vietnamese would love our volunteers to plant trees and help them build victim rehabilitation centers or provide large-scale financial support for the professional organizations working tirelessly in Vietnam to remove unexploded ordnance.
For our 50th anniversary, a new generation could take bold steps to heal the wounds of war ourselves. In fact, we may be the only ones who can.