JOURNEYS TO REMEMBER
JAY CRAVEN
Days before National Guard troops shot 13 students at Ohio’s Kent State University and state troopers shot 14 African-American students at Jackson State in Mississippi, I was elected student body president of Boston University’s College of Liberal Arts. The students at Kent State and Jackson State had been protesting the Nixon administration’s expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. After the shootings, I joined student activists across the United States to stage an unprecedented national student strike that closed universities for the final weeks of the school year. It was 1970 and I was 19 years old.
Later that summer I attended the 10-day National Student Association (NSA) Congress that was held at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. That’s where I first learned about the idea for a People’s Peace Treaty. When I arrived on the Macalester campus, the feel of the recent spring turbulence was still reverberating.
The NSA had a fairly long history, having been founded in 1947 after an international student gathering gave birth to the International Union of Students (IUS). NSA leaders sought to animate free speech on campuses and advance their own opposition to McCarthyism, South African apartheid, and college segregation. Starting in the early 1950s, the NSA’s international program, where American student leaders met and developed contacts with foreign counterparts, was infiltrated by the CIA. Some NSA officers worked closely with their Agency handlers, gathering intelligence at gatherings in Europe and elsewhere. Other NSA officers were kept in the dark. One such staffer, Michael Wood, learned of the CIA connection and told what he knew to the popular leftist monthly, Ramparts Magazine, which blew the cover on NSA’s CIA connection in February 1967.
Seeking to restore its legitimacy, reformers set out to create a “new NSA.” They increased student services to include travel, insurance, and record-purchasing programs and brought a range of speakers to their annual themed conferences. The 1970 event was focused on “The Crisis of the 70s” and it identified a separate issue for treatment on each of its 10 days. Some days fared better than others. Students turned out in large numbers to hear antiwar speakers. But numbers dwindled on “Poverty Crisis Day,” when the meals served conformed to U.S. Department of Agriculture allotments to people on welfare.
Inside the Congress, I heard many speakers and special guests, among them former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, education activist John Holt, revisionist historian Gabriel Kolko, and civil rights pioneer Fanny Lou Hamer, who gave an electrifying speech about the connections between the Mississippi Freedom Rides and the Vietnam peace movement. She emphasized Martin Luther King’s legacy of non-violent civil disobedience and urged our next generation of students to use its power as a lever for change. I knew about Hamer’s leadership of the Mississippi freedom delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention—I never expected to see her at the Minnesota gathering.
Ex-Kennedy speechwriter Richard Goodwin gave a major talk Tuesday evening. Speaking for the students present, Goodwin warned President Nixon that, “Our freedoms are not yours to decide or dispose of and this is not your country but ours!” Nobody who was listening seemed to disagree.
Outgoing NSA President Charlie Palmer picked up on Goodwin’s theme of taking things into our own hands as he talked about his contact with South Vietnamese student leaders who had proposed the idea of a people-to-people student peace treaty. Members of the Chicago 8, Rennie Davis, Dave Dellinger, and John Froines arrived in a flurry and spoke further about the Vietnam War.
Using the May 1970 student strike as a backdrop, Davis spoke persuasively, in a rising cadence, as he proposed a massive civil disobedience action aimed at policy makers in Washington. “We will take the energy and conviction we showed last spring,” Davis said, “and we will carry it to a new level focused directly on the seat of power. Because we will bring tens of thousands of students to Washington next May, to mark the anniversary of the Kent State protests and take our movement to the next step, into the streets using a massive display of non-violent civil disobedience to demand an end to the war. Our purpose will be clear. And our slogan will declare, once and for all, that if the government won’t stop the war, we will stop the government.”
Rennie’s tagline was pretty bold—the kind of call to action that could capture the moment and move people to their feet. I figured it could also trigger a new round of grand jury investigations and conspiracy charges. I was immediately intrigued and also a bit scared—by the fresh memory of students gunned down at Kent and Jackson State. What might this look like—this massive effort to shut down the United States government?
Davis needed to light the fuse for his May Day call so he wanted NSA backing. He was used to projecting ambitious actions against the war, since he had been a leader of the potent and influential Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that spurred seven years of activism on college campuses. But by 1970, SDS had lost steam as it splintered off into the Weather Underground and Progressive Labor Party. May Day represented Davis’s most ambitious call that, by necessity, had to mobilize a younger post-SDS student generation.
Formal discussion on the May Day proposal was preceded by an address by that year’s Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Seymour Hersh, who detailed the events of mass murder and rape at My Lai. His speech vividly illustrated the savage brutality of the war. Despite this, not every student leader at the NSA Congress bought into Rennie’s call for May Day civil disobedience. Some feared that more students would get hurt. Others calculated that by even voting for the resolution they could get indicted and sent to jail.
I fell in with a group that supported May Day—and we spoke in favor of a formal NSA resolution to endorse Rennie Davis’s plan. Debate was fierce and, after several hours of it, the opposition moved to table the discussion for further consideration Friday night.
During the day on Friday, rumors circulated that if the resolution passed, a number of delegates planned to call a press conference where they would suggest that the May Day call for civil disobedience was part of a Communist plot. Some students demanded that delegates vote by name, in the event that conspiracy charges were pressed. Supporters of the proposal became disillusioned after opponents of the May Day resolution cried, “Right on!” after every speech against the bill.
Late Friday night, the vote was finally taken by a roll call of each attending college and university. The vote came to a tie: 140 to 140. A second vote was taken after a five-minute recess. The May Day resolution lost by four votes. Chaos broke out as some delegates hugged each other in joyous celebration. May Day supporters broke out in a mocking chant, “We want Nixon,” and on the following day local newspapers and radio stations reported, “NSA delegates support Nixon war policy.”
When Saturday night came, everyone purged his or her conscience by passing a modified version of the original May Day proposal. It called for May actions but ruled out civil disobedience specifically aimed at Washington. Even with the compromise, some student leaders moved to pull their colleges out of the NSA.
The Calm after the Storm
I returned to Boston from the NSA Congress and took off with my cool girlfriend for two weeks of camping in the dunes on Martha’s Vineyard. A month into the school year, I traveled to Washington to attend another student leaders’ congress, this one sponsored by the Association of Student Governments (ASG). I wasn’t sure what this event would look like, except that the ASG paid our expenses and put us up at the posh Sheraton Park Hotel. Once I arrived, I got the picture. The conference mostly featured Nixon administration officials speaking to 1,000 student leaders gathered in a huge Sheraton ballroom. The ASG was the Nixon administration’s orchestrated alternative to the NSA.
Whereas Lyndon Johnson had pretty much been prevented from traveling to college campuses because of his war policies, the Nixon team decided to bring student leaders to them. Speakers included Attorney General John Mitchell and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. Vice President Spiro Agnew did not speak, but he did walk around the lobby and hallways with Secret Service agents flanking him, sawed-off shotguns at the ready.
I came to Washington primed to pose a question to Defense Secretary Laird. The night before I flew from Boston to Washington, I ran into muckraking journalist I.F. Stone at a Cambridge party thrown by his daughter. I told Stone where I was going and his eyes lit up. “I’ve got a question you can ask Laird,” he said. “You see, while Nixon talked about reducing levels of violence on college campuses, after Kent State, the Pentagon got busy shipping trainloads of M-16 assault weapons to National Guard detachments across the country.”
“Ask Laird to talk about that,” Stone said, eyes sparkling.
I waited for the Q & A session after Laird’s long-winded speech to student leaders in the huge Sheraton ballroom. A number of hands went up and a couple of students stood to ask questions about the draft and careers at the Pentagon. I kept my hand raised but Laird ignored me. Then an aide approached Nixon’s defense secretary on the dais, to signal that it was time for Laird to leave. Not wanting to miss my chance, I stood and shouted my question, citing I.F. Stone’s statistics of hundreds of thousands of M-16s, shipped to National Guard troops just weeks after Kent shootings.
Laird appeared startled, then angry that my question got through. He darted from the stage, but an Associated Press reporter snagged him at the stairs and asked him to comment. He confirmed the allocation of the military assault weapons to National Guard troops. Then the reporter came over to me. A small article appeared on the AP wires and it appeared in newspapers across the country the following day. Mission accomplished.
Back at my complimentary hotel room, I received a phone call indicating that a Mr. Donald Rumsfeld wanted to meet me in the lobby café. I said I’d stop by and took the elevator downstairs. Rumsfeld wasted no time and made me an offer. “It appears by your question at the Laird speech that you’ve done your research,” he said. The words sounded like a compliment but the way Rumsfeld said them didn’t.
“We like to be in touch with college students who are up on the issues,” he said. “Maybe you’d like to work with us; come to Washington to meet from time to time, to tell us what you think and what you’re seeing on campus.”
I replied that I wasn’t interested—that I knew the stories of government infiltration and co-optation at the National Student Association. I said that I thought people at the Pentagon already knew what students thought and that I had better things to do than making plane trips to Washington to drink soda pop and discuss student politics with Nixon’s men. Mr. Rumsfeld nodded and we parted company.
A week after returning from the ASG conference, I received a call from Michael Lerner asking if I could meet up with him for a conversation. Lerner was an assistant professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington and he was one of the activists indicted in the Seattle 7 conspiracy trial. Lerner and others led a militant February 1970 Seattle antiwar demonstration in the wake of guilty verdicts against the Chicago 8 defendants, for disruptions at the 1968 Democratic Party nominating convention. The angry Seattle protests resulted in confrontations with police and 76 arrests. Lerner and six others were indicted as demonstration leaders. He and fellow defendant Chip Marshall had also appeared at the NSA summer event, to support Rennie and publicize their own trial.
I met Lerner on a fabulous fall afternoon at a below-sidewalk café, Le Patisserie Francaise, two blocks from my second floor walk-up in Harvard Square. Lerner got right to the point. “Rennie Davis asked me to meet with you to see if you’d be interested in joining the NSA peace treaty delegation.”
I was immediately excited by the prospect. I remembered the peace treaty discussions and the contentious fight over Davis’s May Day proposal at the NSA summer congress. I had even shared a blow-by-blow account of the summer events with my history professor, Howard Zinn, and he loved the whole idea of a student peace treaty and civil disobedience planned for Washington. Zinn had been active in the movements for civil rights and against the war, and he had written a book Disobedience and Democracy (1968) that made the case for direct action.
“Sure,” I told Michael. “I’d love to be involved in the NSA trip.”
“There will be 15 student body presidents and college newspaper editors,” said Lerner. “The NSA is developing a list. But Rennie wants to make sure that some of the delegates will work for May Day—and he remembered that you helped move the May Day resolution at Macalaster College.”
“I support May Day,” I said, liking the idea of an effective action against the war but not really knowing what might actually happen. “And I think we can get Boston students to go to D.C.”
“If you go to Vietnam,” said Lerner, “you’ll need to do more than bring some students from Boston. Rennie will want you on the road to colleges across the country, speaking on campuses and to activist groups. He wants you to help lead this.”
Suddenly a lot was in play. “We’d go to Vietnam?” I said. “I thought the NSA meetings were planned for Geneva.”
“That’s changed,” said Lerner. “The U.S. student delegation will go to Vietnam. Some will go to Saigon and the rest will go to Hanoi. Are you willing to go to Vietnam?”
I thought fast. I was a political science major and had become active against the war. But I still thought I’d study law and maybe run for political office, inspired by Bobby Kennedy and Gene McCarthy. I wondered how a trip to Vietnam might affect all this.
“I’d go to Vietnam,” I said. “To Saigon.”
“I’ll tell Rennie,” Lerner said.
Rennie and Dave
A few days later, I got a call. “Hi, Jay? This is Rennie.” I’d not really met or talked to Rennie Davis but here he was addressing me as his good friend, in an easy, confident, laid back tone of voice. “I’m here in Washington and I was wondering if you could come down and meet a couple of us. We’d like to get to know you a bit and talk about this trip we’re pulling together for Vietnam.”
I didn’t know who Rennie meant by “a couple of us,” but I had been to Washington several times and I liked the city. I said I’d make the trip. A few days later I used my Eastern Airlines youth fare card to get a $16 ticket to Washington. My roommate Bobby Noble joined me, interested to see how all of this would play out.
We caught a taxi at National Airport and sped along Washington’s broad avenues and narrow tree-lined streets to Rennie’s apartment on Lanier Place. As I walked up the three flights of stairs, I felt nervous and still in the dark about who I’d be meeting. I knocked on the door. A slender long-haired guy opened it. “I’m Terry,” he said. “Come in.”
Terry introduced himself as Terry Becker, founding member of the Quicksilver Times, Washington’s underground newspaper. Only two others were there—Rennie, with his wide smile and thick glasses, and an older man I also recognized, who introduced himself simply as “Dave.” I knew who he was—Dave Dellinger, the lone older activist associated with the Chicago 8. Howard Zinn later told me that Dave drove an ambulance during the Spanish Civil War and spent several years in a federal prison for his resistance to the draft during World War II.
Dave smoked a Cuban cigar and sipped from a snifter of cognac. He briefly stood to shake hands and asked me to take a seat. My roommate Bobby shifted in his straight-backed chair beside me, suddenly unsure of why he had come along. Dave did most of the talking.
“What’s your history of opposition to the war?” Dave asked.
“Have you ever participated in civil disobedience?”
“If you are selected to go to Vietnam, will you be willing to devote the next six months of your life traveling and helping to organize May Day?”
“Can you take time off from college to do all of this?”
I don’t think I’d ever been so scared. I’d heard Dave speak to thousands of students at two antiwar rallies. And I saw him in the shadows of the NSA Congress in Macalester. Now, here he was, smoking a contraband Cuban cigar—looking every inch the movement’s Godfather, two years before the Brando movie even came out. He wanted a commitment.
I shared my history of activism, of how I’d campaigned for Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy but set out for BU thinking I’d join ROTC to help pay for college. Then, two weeks into my freshman year, I joined hundreds of BU, Harvard, and Radcliffe students to provide sanctuary in BU’s Marsh Chapel for AWOL solider Ray Kroll, who refused his orders to ship out for Vietnam. I described the round-the-clock teach-ins where I, like many others, spoke from the podium about my opposition to the war. I explained how, after a week in the chapel sanctuary, dozens of police and FBI agents charged in to seize Ray Kroll and take him back to the stockades for court martial.
I described meeting Howard Zinn and taking classes with him—and talked about joining 50 students to protest the presence of a General Electric board of directors meeting on BU’s campus. We rallied to object to GE’s role as a war contractor and charged the university with complicity for hosting the board meeting at a time when they knew students mostly opposed the war. Then, as we were leaving the vigil, 80 Boston police attacked us, clubbing students and arresting some. I explained how I got caught up in the melee and joined the immediate call for a student strike to protest police brutality and the university’s role in calling the cops.
I talked about my participation in the 1969 mobilizations in Boston and then Washington, and said that I’d shot a film about them.
“We’re thinking about making a film,” said Rennie, in his first real comment of the evening. “We’ve got some filmmakers from Newsreel and one of them, Robert Kramer, made a feature film called Ice that’s about a political uprising in the United States, triggered by an American invasion of Mexico. It’s gotten a lot of play in France.” I said I went to see a lot of films in Cambridge and Boston but hadn’t seen Ice.
Dave repeated his earlier question about civil disobedience. He wanted to know more about what I had done. I talked about my admiration for Martin Luther King and described how I’d regularly sneaked boys off campus at the boarding school I attended. I felt silly comparing this to Martin Luther King at Selma. Then I remembered the “hot dog cooperative” I’d started at BU and wondered if that might count.
“During the BU sanctuary for Ray Kroll,” I said, “ an older man named Ted Moynihan with a kind of hippie spirit showed up on the student union plaza to sell hot dogs. He’d grill them over big steel bowls and iron grates he’d set up on top of shopping carts. When he wasn’t grilling the wieners he’d play a harmonium and recite poetry. People liked him and bought his hot dogs—until the university had him arrested for competing with the University’s food service.”
“The cops took Ted to jail and he got off by agreeing to stop selling. So, I contacted him and said I’d pay fifty bucks for his shopping carts and grates. I re-opened the concession as a hot dog cooperative, charging “members” 25 cents for a Xeroxed black-and-white strip of paper that I called their membership card. For your quarter you were entitled to three charcoal-broiled allbeef frankfurters and an assortment of condiments that included chopped onions, relish, mustard, ketchup, and wheat germ.”
Dave looked amused, so I continued.
“My argument was: ‘This isn’t a business; we’re not making money; we’re just feeding ourselves.’ Within a week, I was selling 2,500 hot dogs a day with lines of students and faculty snaked around the block. The university didn’t know what to do. But then they cited me for trespassing—and I got hauled off to the police station. Professor Zinn immediately showed up at the station to offer his support, and he got me a lawyer to negotiate my way out of it. As a result of all this, I was elected president of my freshman class at BU.”
I looked at Dave, then Rennie and Terry, not sure of their reactions. This was hardly an anti-imperialist movement that I’d started, selling hot dogs in Boston. “Does this count as civil disobedience?” I asked.
Dave smiled and took another sip of his cognac. “I think it might,” he said. “Did anyone help you with this or did you cook all the hot dogs yourself?”
“There was this exotic art student and photographer. Her name was Sonia. She helped me some and made a flag with a white on black symbol she designed. It showed a clenched fist holding a hot dog.”
Dave looked at Rennie, who smiled. “I’d say you’re in. We’d like you to join the NSA delegation and go to Vietnam. And we want to work with you for May Day. Are you sure you’re ready to make this commitment?”
I wish Rennie hadn’t asked if I was “ready” because it reminded me of what I already knew—that there would be risk involved here, especially if I ended up being sent to North Vietnam, which would pretty much ruin any chances I had for going into politics. Or maybe, I thought, it would be another way of going into politics, which didn’t involve kissing babies or getting gunned down like Bobby Kennedy and Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba or the Yves Montand character, Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis, in Costa-Gavras’s film, Z (1969). But then I thought about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner—and others. I decided to stop thinking for a while.
After what felt like a pretty intense hour of questioning and dialogue, I was excited, not sure what was happening, and scared stiff. Then Rennie lit into a graphic discussion of the current situation in Vietnam, including a blow-by-blow account of Nixon’s escalation of the air war. He was even more worked up than Seymour Hersh had been at the NSA Congress, talking about My Lai. “We believe,” said Rennie, “that the war has reached a point where Vietnam’s actual survival could be in jeopardy.”
After Rennie’s half-hour litany of horrors in Vietnam, Dave finally said something funny. Thank God.
I said I would do everything Dave and Rennie asked me to do that night—and I did. That night changed my life and prompted me to face the fears that I felt at the prospect of this kind of bold activism. The evening in Washington marked the beginning of an extraordinary journey that would not have been possible without that turn of events.
“Saigon Gets Iffy. How About Hanoi?”
I traveled to Hanoi in December 1970, even though I initially hoped I’d go to Saigon. But the United States and Saigon governments wouldn’t allow us into South Vietnam, so I went north with the rest of the People’s Peace Treaty delegation (only one student, Doug Hostetter, managed to slip into Saigon). I’d gotten over my concerns about wrecking my future career prospects through a trip to Hanoi. At this point I was thinking about May Day and civil disobedience pretty much day in and day out. I’d read Noam Chomsky’s dense analysis, “At War With Asia” and Susan Sontag’s “Trip to Hanoi,” so the impending expedition north seemed urgent and fit into what I saw as an emerging narrative.
Theirrie Cook, Jay Craven, and Becca Wilson in Hanoi, 1970.
Photo courtesy of Becca Wilson.
I still wanted to go to Saigon, but I saw it just wasn’t in the cards. I liked that it was South Vietnamese student leaders who initiated this people-to-people diplomacy to highlight their call for an end to the U.S. military occupation of their country. I knew that even though the United States was allegedly supporting the South Vietnamese in the name of “democracy,” the Saigon students’ actions to make a peace treaty would trigger worse repercussions than any of the rest of us would suffer. Jail, torture, or even death at the hands of the repressive Thieu–Ky regime were real possibilities. Knowing that these South Vietnamese students wanted to take this risky and heroic stand, favoring peace and reconciliation among all Vietnamese parties to the war, seemed like the right idea at the right time.
We were banned from Saigon by the U.S. State Department and South Vietnamese government because we also planned to meet students from North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. Once we were blocked from the South, I wondered whether our travel to North Vietnam might also be stopped. Trips to North Vietnam were officially outlawed; it said so just inside the front cover of my sparkling new passport.
I did some research and discovered that Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas, playwright Arthur Miller, and civil rights pioneer W. E. B. DuBois had their passports confiscated when they set out to travel to prohibited countries, which then included China, Cuba, North Vietnam, and North Korea. But I also learned that DuBois had successfully challenged the travel ban, winning a 1958 Supreme Court case where the Court declared that “Congress had never given the Department of State any authority” to restrict travel for political reasons. I suddenly felt that I was on more solid ground. We had our visas to Hanoi. I appreciated the irony that I could get into the banned country, North Vietnam, but was blocked from going to visit America’s most high-stakes ally, South Vietnam.
I had never traveled outside the United States except for a snowy romantic interlude in Montreal and Mont Tremblant, Quebec, where I fell for a Philadelphia schoolgirl who became my very fun high school sweetheart. Now I was headed to a war zone and was told that our plane from Vientiane, Laos, to Hanoi could be shot at by Laotian Pathet Lao resistance fighters who faced constant American bombardment. Or maybe we would encounter problems with American air fighters—they were constantly in the sky. I knew from my research that there had been ICC (International Control Commission) flights, in particular, that had to take evasive action flying this route.
So I felt a sense of intrigue, mystery, and a little danger as I peered out the window of our Aeroflot propjet to Hanoi. I looked at the rugged mountains and gnarly countryside of Laos and imagined how a person could get swallowed up in these dense forests and tangled mountain passes that constituted the area Americans called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, where thousands of Vietnamese, under constant air attack, guided bicycles laden with supplies headed to the war zone in the south.
It was early morning when the mountainous Laotian countryside yielded to a patchwork of irrigated rice paddies below us. As we floated lower, toward our Hanoi landing strip, I picked up more detail. Narrow dirt banks divided the paddies and peasants in conical straw hats tended rice shoots. I was immediately struck by how tidy and organized everything looked. Every square inch of land appeared to be either cultivated or studded with wellkept huts and outbuildings.
On the Ground—History Comes Alive
We landed safely at the airport outside Hanoi and piled into a small bus for the trip over rough dirt roads that ran next to the paddies and fields where peasants toiled oblivious to us. I hadn’t been in a Third World country before—and I was struck by the poetry-in-motion of people’s hard work. Guided by a willowy teenaged girl wielding a thin switch, a water buffalo pulled a simple cart stacked with twisted branches used for firewood. Other carts hauled bolts of cotton or bamboo.
A pair of women irrigated a rice paddy by rhythmically swinging small wooden water buckets hanging from a long pole resting on their shoulders. Our guide, an astute former diplomat and music composer, Xuan Oanh (pronounced like “Swan WAN”) pointed out bomb craters that pocked the countryside.
“You probably wonder why the U.S. aircraft would bomb a field,” he said.
“We wondered that, too.”
Oanh looked carefully at the members of our group to see who, if any, picked up his irony. Several did. He smiled.
“When we saw them start to bomb our fields, we scratched our heads and said, ‘There’s no military value in a field.’ But, of course, a bombed field can’t produce food. The crater draws all the water into it, enticing mosquitos, eroding the soil, and making it impossible to cultivate rice.”
Oanh sneaked another curious look at the members of our group. “We needed to do something. And we saw that the craters looked like small ponds, so we decided to breed fish.”
Again, Oanh smiled. “The B-52s make the biggest holes. For more fish.”
As I got to know him during our trip, I learned that Oanh loved to tweak us with vivid tales of Vietnamese ingenuity, history, and culture. He was fluent in seven languages and had served in a variety of respected government positions, including at the Paris Peace Talks. He spoke of his love of Hemmingway, Steinbeck, and Jean Genet.
Xuan Oanh wrote the national anthem of his country and he translated foreign periodicals and books, including Star Wars, Jeffery Archer’s Kane and Abel (1979), and Jacqueline Susann’s The Love Machine (1969). When I asked him what American he would most like to meet, he replied, “Babbit,” the character from Sinclair Lewis’s eponymous 1922 novel that satirized American middle-class culture and was widely credited with helping Lewis win the Nobel Prize for Literature. “And I’d like to drive an Oldsmobile,” Oanh added, with a chuckle.
Our other Vietnamese hosts, older men like the very serious Mr. Quat and calm and wistful Mr. Mai, were friendly and they kept us on schedule and on task. Oanh emanated dry wit and keen intellect. He was irresistible. And fun.
Still in our small bus, we traveled across the wide Red River by way of an improvised wooden floating bridge that swayed a bit against the force of the current. Travel at river level across the floating bridge was snail-like, but the reasons for our impeded movement were clearly evident. Looming high above us to the south we could see the twisted steel of the Long Bien Bridge, repeatedly bombed by U.S. jets, then repaired, due to its crucial role in bringing supplies into the city by road and rail, then bombed again.
The bridge had been built in 1899 during the first French occupation—and it was designed by Paris’s Eiffel Tower architect, Gustave Eiffel. A less well-constructed bridge would have crumbled under the impact of so many air assaults, but the bridge endures to this day, albeit mostly for pedestrians, mopeds, and slow-moving trains. The Long Bien Bridge stands as an indelible reminder of the American war, evident through still-visible bomb damage.
The bridge also stands as a testament to Vietnam’s long history with France, reaching back to the eighteenth century when missionaries set up operations and intervened in local culture and social practice. Wars with France date back to the Napoleon III–ordered attack on Danang in 1858, when Vietnamese pushed back against growing western religious and political influence, and the French Catholic insistence on monogamy that threatened the status of Vietnamese courtesans.
From 1884 until 1954, the French played a continuing role as occupiers and colonizers. Insurrections against French rule started in 1885 and continued, without much success. During World War II, France’s Vichy government ceded its influence to Japan which, in March 1945, moved to fully occupy Vietnam.
Vietnamese nationalists and communists, led by Ho Chi Minh, fought the Japanese, who relinquished their hold at the end of the war. Ho Chi Minh used the end of this war to claim independence for Vietnam but intense machinations among the French and Chinese forces loyal to Chiang Kaishek caused a new round of intense fighting that persisted until May of 1954 when Ho’s Viet Minh decisively defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu.
After its war with Vietnam, the French agreed to the terms of the 1954 Geneva Agreements, which promised independence to Laos and Cambodia and promised speedy elections to unify Vietnam. The U.S. disliked the agreement but agreed not to interfere—although U.S. forces began immediately to sabotage the Geneva Agreements, through anti–Viet Minh propaganda and psychological warfare, cross-border and covert operations in the North, and support for the militantly anti-communist Diem regime being established in the South to oppose and prevent the promised elections from taking place.
France, to its credit, became a friend to Vietnam after its Indochina war, working behind the scenes to host the Paris Peace Talks between Vietnam and the United States. And, according to close Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., writing in his Robert Kennedy biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times (1963), French President Charles DeGaulle acted as part of a multinational diplomatic effort to advance a political settlement prior to the war’s escalation.
An excellent and detailed account of this effort can be found in Working Paper #45, produced by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. It shows how DeGaulle’s effort complimented a series of extensive discussions, already in motion, that started as early as Kennedy’s 1961 Vienna meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and continued through back-channel negotiations involving Indian, Russian, French, Italian, and Polish diplomats, along with the U.S. Ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith. Kennedy’s hope, according to the Wilson Center report, was to implement a negotiated settlement for a South Vietnamese coalition government similar to his Laos Agreement of 1962.
According to the Wilson Center working paper, progress was being made and, by the summer and fall of 1963, initial agreements were taking shape for economic, postal, and cultural exchanges between North and South Vietnam that included trades of South Vietnamese rice and beer for North Vietnamese coal. The assassination of crisis-plagued South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, in November of 1963, and the JFK assassination, three weeks later, appeared to put an end to the most promising of these diplomatic moves that, according to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and others, represented a missed opportunity to prevent the looming U.S. escalation.
At the time of the Diem assassination, a hot and politically divisive debate was roiling the White House, especially about the impending coup against Diem that resulted in his death on November 2, 1963, one day after the coup began. The coup occurred with support from U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, the CIA, and, apparently, with approval from JFK’s roving ambassador Averill Harriman. Indeed, the anti-Diem conspirators were handed $42,000 in American cash by CIA operative Lucien Conein on the morning of the coup.
Now-released White House tapes and documents from the days preceding the coup show Attorney General Robert Kennedy, on October 29th, arguing hard against it and Kennedy insisting, hopefully, that if he wished to call it off, he could. But pro-coup advisors dominated the discussion and discouraged Kennedy’s wishful thinking, saying instead that “the train was already moving” against Diem and the U.S. surely wanted to be on board.
But I digress.
Into the City
Driving into Hanoi from the airport, every new sight felt intoxicating. Lowslung faded-yellow buildings showed the influence of the country’s years under French colonial rule. Thousands of people rode bicycles along wide boulevards, even in the damp chill of December. I felt a refreshing change from the congested traffic of Boston and New York. During a visit many years later, however, I had to dodge the dense swarm and thick blue-gray exhaust of non-stop motorbikes moving like a school of fish along every city street in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). I wished for those earlier days.
Our time in Hanoi was spent in meetings, museum visits, sightseeing, and symbolic activities like a day spent helping students at the agricultural university haul rocks to lay the foundation of a research building they were building under the cover of a forest, in order to shield the planned building from American air attacks.
We stayed at the ancient Hoa Binh (Peace) Hotel, a French stucco structure with large tile floored rooms and four-posted beds where elegantly draped mosquito netting created the feel of nineteenth century colonialism. One night, we were roused from our sleep by the sound of air raid sirens. An American F-11 fighter jet attacked a site on the edge of the city. We weren’t in any danger, but the Vietnamese clearly took no aircraft incursion for granted.
Floating to Haiphong
One day, as we crossed the Haiphong River on our way to the monkey-infested mountain islands of Ha Long Bay, Xuan Oanh brought out a silver pipe and a leather pouch. He took of pinch of thuoc lao, a potent herb that contains nine times the nicotine as regular tobacco. Oanh lit the pipe and passed it around as members of our group inhaled and coughed, eyes watering. None of us had dared to bring marijuana on this long trip, so Oanh figured his thuoc lao would create a cultural bridge to the young Americans. I think each of us tried it—and we got a slight buzz—the kind you get from an unfiltered Camel, if you’re not used to smoking.
Drifting across the Haiphong River, we passed the pipe while Oanh slipped out his clunky Russian-made cassette machine and pushed the play button. Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” filled the air as we crossed on the ferry. By playing Dylan’s song, Oanh showed his interest in all things American, including Dylan’s politically themed music that talks about activists getting their phones tapped. I wondered whether he knew that Dylan’s line, “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” inspired the name taken by the Weather Underground that targeted U.S. buildings they felt represented the war.
Oanh smoked some thuoc lao and turned to speak two or three of us. “The music of Bob Dylan takes me back to my life as a child in the rural countryside,” he said. “It reminds me of the first sounds of Vietnamese music that floated through my window.”
I had a tape player, too, a small SONY rig that a guy from CBS News had brought to JFK airport just before we left New York. CBS wanted me to record interviews and shoot film with the high-end Super 8 camera they also supplied. I shot footage of babies who had been born to mothers in affected areas of South Vietnam, sprayed with Agent Orange. But when I showed it around after returning, no one was interested in broadcasting it.
I also grabbed beauty shots of Ha Long Bay that I gave to the Newsreel filmmakers, Robert Kramer, Ellen Ray, John Douglas, and Peter Biskind. These were the filmmakers that Rennie had told me about in Washington. They were making a 16mm antiwar documentary called Time is Running Out that I and other organizers played at hundreds of college and community venues, to drum up support for the planned May Day actions. I got to hang out with them, the first “real” filmmakers I’d met, and they used my footage for a lyrical interlude amidst intense shots of the war and the May Day call to action that followed on-screen displays of our Peace Treaty provisions.
I didn’t use the CBS tape recorder for much, but it came in handy in moments like this when, after Oanh’s Dylan song rolled out, I switched on a tape I’d brought of the Jefferson Airplane’s “Volunteers.” We continued ferrying across the wide river to the strains of Grace Slick and Marty Balin.
I’d used “Volunteers” as part of the musical score for my first film, a Super 8 epic in which I mixed footage of thousands of people marching in the fall 1969 Boston and Washington moratoriums with shots of five-year-old boys playing football with their dads, and Bergman and Antonioni–inspired images set against a steel-blue cornfield in late fall and the industrial wasteland of Dupont’s 1400-acre Chambers Works Plant, where, over the years, workers manufactured smokeless gunpowder, explosives, and radiological materials used for the atomic bomb. I slipped “Volunteers” in to score the final section of my film, shot during the huge Washington march, as militant protestors broke away, late in the day, to charge police at the Justice Department.
Now, floating across the Haiphong River, I was playing the song on my tape recorder. I thought my song would complement Oanh’s Dylan tune, but I suddenly felt self-conscious, like the American college kid I was, trying to link Dylan’s poetic meditation with the Jefferson Airplane’s self-admiring 1960s call to action. I thought about the two different worlds and sensibilities represented in the music. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” felt universal while being specific to an American time and place. “Volunteers” felt a bit generic, a pop culture anthem about a “revolution” that was fun to imagine but never came even close to being realized.
Vietnam had embarked on an actual revolution under Ho Chi Minh and, decades later, the monumental effort and tragic cost of it persists. Their struggle seemed endless and, no doubt, tiring. Ho, himself, didn’t live long enough to see the end of war. Perhaps the U.S. military failed in its goal to establish lasting political control over Vietnam but it certainly exacted (and paid) a terrible price. I felt this as we crossed the Haiphong River and I’ve re-visited and elaborated on this feeling many times since then—including during my two subsequent trips to Vietnam.
On both of these trips I got this sinking feeling of how much is demanded of those sent to the front lines to fight any war. Of course, this applied to the Americans as well as the Vietnamese on all sides of the conflict. In his book The Sorrow of War, peddled on Hanoi streets alongside The Ugly American, Vietnamese writer Boa Dinh expressed this phenomenon well, saying, “Each of us carried in his heart a separate war. But we also carried the immense sorrow of war.”
I and most of the people I knew who opposed the war had friends who fought in Vietnam, but our experiences were a world apart from U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, let alone the Vietnamese. I and many others didn’t want to fight in Vietnam because we felt that the U.S. military occupation was illegal and unjust. What had these people done to us?
Indeed, Ho Chi Minh’s forces advanced U.S. interests during World War II, working closely and extensively with Americans in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to fight the Japanese, gather intelligence, and help retrieve downed American pilots. Ho wrote a telegram to President Harry Truman, on February 28, 1946, begging for the Americans to oppose the return of French colonialists to Vietnam and honor what Ho felt were Roosevelt’s promises of the Atlantic and San Francisco Charters, to support Vietnamese independence after the war. But Roosevelt was dead—and the Cold War was getting started. Truman backed the French effort to re-take Vietnam.
Vietnamese Voices From the War
I’ve made two trips back to Vietnam, but not until 2003 and 2013. In 2003, I met with a leading poet, Le Minh Khue, a deeply reflective woman with a permanent sadness etched in her thoughtful and handsome face. She talked to me about her experience working for some 10 years along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, starting as a teenager, detonating unexploded bombs and filling in the gaping craters left by American bombs, so that supplies could move to the front.
Khue remembered her time during the war as one when she gave everything to the epic fight for national salvation. By 2003, she felt bypassed by the vision of revolution that had inspired her selfless commitment for all those years—with so many pressures, sacrifices, and intense pain. But how could the nation’s leaders have delivered on the high expectations that people inevitably needed to fuel the sustained fight—especially given such heavy losses? Added to this weight of history is the simple truth that the nation’s leaders advanced because of their ability to mobilize and fight a war. They were not necessarily positioned to lead a visionary peace.
Vietnam scholar Dana Sachs writes about Khue’s dilemma in her fine essay, “Small Tragedies and Distant Stars—Le Minh Khue’s Language of Lost Ideals.” In Khue’s short story “The Distant Stars,” writes Sachs:
Three teenage North Vietnamese girls detonate unexploded bombs and…theirs is an uncertain existence. Explosions bury them in rubble. Bombs drop dangerously close to their hideout. But the young women approach their duty with good humor and a love that is “selfless, passionate, and carefree, only found in the hearts of soldiers.” War, as seen through the eyes of these young women, becomes the noble struggle of people who fervently believe in its goals.1
Sachs points out that in Khue’s early story, one of her teenaged characters expresses her feelings during the time of the war: “I loved everyone, with a passionate love, a love beyond words, that only someone who had stood on that hill in those moments, as I did, could understand fully.”2
In 1990, when she was 41, Khue published her story, “A Small Tragedy.” According to Sachs:
Once again, Khue presents an image of three girls at war, but this image is not a positive one. An important political official orders thousands of young people to fill bomb craters along a riverbank during the middle of the day. Although precautions might have been taken, none were, and when American AD6s fly over and drop bombs on the young people, many are killed. As one witness describes the scene, “I’ve never seen so many people die like that. They were empty-handed, puny, running like ants on the naked riverbank. I tried to dig into one depression to pull out three young girls but they died in such a tight embrace I couldn’t even untangle them.”3
Sachs points out how Khue’s earlier apparent optimism seems to have faded after the war, replaced with a helpless sense “of three girls martyred for no reason whatsoever. In thematic terms, war, which once seemed like a valiant fight for freedom and self-determination, becomes an enterprise in which the powerful rule over the lives—and the deaths—of the powerless.”
Khue was not alone in her reconsideration of the war. Other Vietnamese writers, starting in the 1980s, also began to examine the war from a critical perspective—not to suggest that the fight to expel the Americans was wrong—but that war did not lead to the dream of social and economic transformation that sustained so many people during the long war that cost some three million lives.
During my 2013 trip, I met Danh, a former NLF guerilla, over coffee at a café in Hanoi. He was a poet and had been a documentary filmmaker, too, in his life after the war. But Danh had been in bad health since his days of fighting and was now dying from his exposure to Agent Orange. He, too, felt bypassed by time and history and the reality of what could be accomplished in his country after the end of the long and costly war. Before he died, he said, he had one request: “I feel that the American soldier who came here feels sorry for what he did,” he said. “I am sure of it. It’s all I need to know before I die. That the American solider understands and that he is sorry.”
I am sure that Khue and Danh also carry an experience of what we call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from the war—although Vietnamese to whom I spoke know nothing of PTSD, its diagnosis, or possible treatment. Their experience adds to my sense of the destructiveness of war. It hardly matters what side you’re on when it comes to the lingering impact—the life sentence that is conferred on those who must fight.
Back to the River
Maybe it was the thuoc lao we’d smoked, but, drifting that day across the Haiphong River, I suddenly felt what should have been obvious from the start: how different our worlds were. Our antiwar experience in America charged and defined our time and culture. It gave us meaning, as we worked to stay the hands of Johnson, Nixon, and Kissinger, who were forced to react. They escalated the war with impunity but they also had to yield, at certain key junctures, to the pressures activists mounted through opposition and resistance.
We were able to suspend business as usual—and to increase the price the government would have to pay to continue the war. Draftees resisted; students marched; Gold Star Mothers joined hands to oppose further killing; radical Catholic clergy including the Berrigan brothers, Philip and Daniel, broke into draft boards and poured blood on draft files; Yippies mocked the establishment through political theater; and soldiers returned home to testify to war atrocities and throw their hard-earned medals onto the Capitol steps.4 More than anyone, Vietnam veterans exposed the war’s brutality and futility to anyone who was listening. And, through a combination of actions, Johnson was pressured to withdraw from politics and Nixon was forced to stop the war.
For the Vietnamese, the war was simply a matter of life and death, of the right to self-determination, and of national salvation. Whole generations had to postpone their lives in order to resist foreign occupation. And when they prevailed against the Japanese, the French took over. And when they decisively defeated the French, the Americans took over. And, even after that, the Chinese got into the act, in 1979, when Chinese forces invaded Vietnam in retaliation for Vietnamese actions in their conflict with Pol Pot’s Kampuchea (Cambodia).
War and thwarted revolution were simply a part of everyday life. As we saw during our trip, people everywhere were intimately aware of the country’s long history of resistance to invaders. As we drove from Haiphong to Ha Long Bay, Oanh described how the Vietnamese had repelled subsequent waves of Japanese and French invaders during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And he took particular relish recounting their 30 years of resistance to Mongol invaders from 1258 to 1288 A.D. In one battle, the Mongols landed to find Vietnamese forces mounted on battle elephants. The Mongols were ordered to fire their arrows at the elephants’ feet, causing the animals to panic and retreat.
During the climactic final battle with Kublai Khan, in 1287 and 1288, the Mongols attacked with a huge force, “the last invader who brought 500,000 troops to occupy Vietnam,” Oanh explained. “The Mongols landed in 500 vessels which the Vietnamese destroyed by outflanking them in an intense and bloody sea battle.”
“We had to build the Mongols a new navy to send them home,” Oanh said, wanting to make clear that the Vietnamese would never accept defeat and that they would be gracious to their former enemy, even in victory.
During our relaxing trip to Ha Long Bay, we cruised among a cluster of small mountain islands in an open boat. We got off at one of the islands and climbed toward caves where we saw birds and monkeys. Back at our hotel along the beach, our lunch on the open-air patio was interrupted when our waitress, dressed in the traditional Vietnamese flowing tunic, the ao dai, approached our table calmly. She carried a World War I–vintage single-shot rifle and a pith helmet.
“Please,” she said. “Take these and stand under the stairs. You will be safe there.” I walked toward the stairway carrying the rifle and helmet, and I heard the Vietnamese waitress’s voice. “Sir,” she called. I turned and she made a gesture, as if putting the helmet on her head. “Put it on,” she said. “We can’t be sure where the bombs will fall.”
We followed instructions and, within a few minutes, we returned to our tables to finish eating our prawns, rice, and spring rolls that we seasoned with pungent Vietnamese nuoc mam sauce. Our waitress returned to collect my hat and rifle. “We believe the jets were attacking the coal mines nearby—a favorite target,” she said.
During our final days in Vietnam, we met with students to conclude our discussions about the Peace Treaty—and we were introduced to a group of doctors and women, with their young children, who had been exposed to Agent Orange during U.S. defoliation missions in South Vietnam. The children showed a range of severe deformities that the doctors said resulted from their exposure to the chemical defoliant. They presented charts that showed chromosome damage and the women gave statistics indicating how long they had lived in sprayed villages, how much contaminated water they drank, and how their children immediately showed signs of distress. Some babies, they said, died.
I used the Super 8 movie camera that had been provided by CBS news to film the women and doctors. I didn’t film much else—the Vietnamese resisted color film and photographs, which they said could be used by the U.S. military to target bombing raids. Black-and-white still photos were considered generally OK. But I did film the children and their mothers, along with footage at Ha Long Bay. Back in New York, I gave my footage to filmmakers making the May Day documentary.
When I arrived back home in Cambridge, I also sought out the eminent Harvard geneticist and molecular biologist Matthew Meselson, to show him what I brought back and ask him to speak out against the use of Agent Orange. Meselson had been a resident at the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency where his particular interest focused on biological and chemical weapons, which he believed had little military value but could cause long-term damage. He was influential and, in 1984, he received a MacArthur “genius” award.
Meselson agreed to meet with me and I told him what I saw and heard from the Vietnamese doctors. He dismissed what I had as being insubstantial and inconclusive “propaganda.” I was discouraged when I left his office but, years later, I discovered that he had been instrumental in arguing for the termination of herbicide spraying in Vietnam. In fact, he had been to South Vietnam just before we traveled, to begin a pilot study of the ecological and health effects of the military use of herbicides.
I realized later that what I perceived at the time as Dr. Meselsen’s indifference was probably just due to the fact that he was working with far more detail and substance. It seemed to me that he disbelieved and belittled the Vietnamese doctors we met and the information I brought for him to review. I now believe he played a substantial role in the ultimate termination of the U.S. military’s application of Agent Orange, which was used from 1961 to 1972 and resulted in the spraying of 19 million gallons of herbicide over 4.5 million acres of land.
The impact, of course, has deeply affected hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and probably just as many U.S. soldiers and their families. Battles still rage, in and out of court, where Vietnam veterans argue that the effects of their exposure includes everything from rashes and muscular dysfunction, to birth defects, cancers, leukemia, and a range of psychological disorders.
In 1979, a class action suit, on behalf of 2.4 million veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange, resulted in a settlement with chemical companies amounting to $240 million. The Vietnamese say that half a million children were born with birth defects related to Agent Orange and that two million more people are suffering from herbicide-related cancers and other maladies. In 2004, a group of Vietnamese citizens filed a class-action lawsuit against 30 chemical companies, many of them the same ones that settled with the veterans. In March 2005, a federal judge in Brooklyn dismissed the suit; another U.S. court rejected the final appeal in 2008.5
As we drove toward the airport on our final morning in Vietnam, I took a last look at the legions of people on bicycles, going to work or school or wherever they needed to be. I thought about how the streets were teeming with people, unlike the time Vietnamese had to be evacuated from the cities during Lyndon Johnson’s air war, Operation Rolling Thunder, which ran from March 2, 1965, to November 2, 1968.
During this extended period, people throughout North Vietnam experienced heavy bombardment—as the U.S. mounted its most extensive and challenging aerial assault of the Cold War. All told, the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marines flew more than 300,000 bombing sorties against North Vietnam. Official goals of the campaign were to boost the sagging morale of the Saigon government and convince North Vietnam to abandon its support for the NLF insurgency against the South Vietnamese government. Targets included bridges, railroads, roads, factories, and air defenses, although there were also plenty of bombed hospitals, schools, and homes.
I remember seeing the “personal fall-out shelters” on every street, sixfoot deep holes, lined in concrete and with a concrete lid. During the heaviest times of bombing, people would take shelter in these individual hiding places. The argument: more people will survive if they are each in their own protective space. If they assemble in mass shelters, a bomb could kill 300 people. This way, it might only kill five or six.
Heading Out
As we arrived at the airport to head to Paris and then New York, Xuan Oanh asked me what I’d do when I returned to Boston. I said I’d work to circulate our People’s Peace Treaty and organize people to go to Washington in May to commit civil disobedience.
“Will you go to jail?” he said.
“Probably,” I replied.
“I have been in jail,” he said. “During the fight against the French. It’s bad but you’ll be OK.”
I smiled and extended my hand. Oanh handed me a folder of papers. In it was the diary of an American soldier who had been killed in battle in South Vietnam. I had been told, before I left New York, that such a diary might exist in Hanoi, since it was believed that NLF soldiers fighting in the South had found it on the battlefield. I asked about the diary when I first arrived but got no answer and no promise that anyone would look into it.
Surprised and grateful, I thanked Oanh and said I would make sure that the diary found its way into the hands of the soldier’s family. Oanh nodded and hugged me. Then he said his good byes to others in our delegation and dipped his head, in a sign of farewell. He winked and flashed a two-fingered peace sign.
“Keep the faith,” he said.
Our other Vietnamese hosts also offered parting words. Then we took off from the airport. As we lofted into the sky, the now-familiar rice paddies grew smaller and clouds fluffed the sky, leaving us in our private thoughts about all we’d experienced during our two weeks in Vietnam.
As we gained altitude, I turned to the soldier’s dairy in the folder Oanh had handed me. The young man, Buddy Anello, was three years older than I was. His mom had died when he was four years old and his father, apparently feeling overwhelmed, sent him and his three brothers to the Milton Hershey school for orphans. I’d grown up around Philadelphia, too, and when I was 12 years old, I landed a job on the grounds crew of a Pennsylvania boarding school. I found a mentor there, Tom, a Milton Hershey grad who had also served in Vietnam but got discharged from the Army because of his tendency to get into fistfights. I was the only kid on the crew and Tom liked me well enough to show me the ropes and tell me a few hair-raising stories about life at Milton Hershey.
As we cruised high above the Ho Chi Minh Trail and on to Vientiane, Laos, I read Buddy Anello’s diary intently—taking in every word and placing it into the context of the immersive experience I’d been through with Vietnamese from the north, south, liberated zones, and, now—an American soldier drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam. Here are some excerpts, published with permission of Buddy Anello’s dad, in the May 15, 1972 issue of Win Magazine, and used here with permission.
October 16, 1967. It all starts in the San Francisco Bay. Feelings are the color of the ship. Gray. I look at the night and the city lights and remember all the beautiful things I’ve done there—and I have to turn. I look at the bridge with the many people traveling their happy way, but not knowing the ship below carries a load of deep thought. And the lights play on my mind. So I have to turn. Just three miles away, behind the old smoke stack. You can’t see it. But that’s where I live. I know it’s there, but they don’t know I’m here, and I have to turn. I turn to the faces whose thoughts are just like mine and only seem to make the ship grayer. And the stars offer me no help cause now I look at them alone. So I turn for the last time and walk away with my eyes to the ground.
October 18. Tomorrow we pass under the Golden Gate Bridge and everyone will say, “Isn’t it beautiful,” and I’ll say, “Yes, wasn’t it.” But hopes are always there, for it’s not a terrible long time, It’s just an eternity.
October 23. Finally arrived. We had to wait for General Westmoreland to give his welcome speech, salutes, and all that flag waving jazz. Meanwhile, my weapon was strangling me and my duffle bag was trying to pull my arm off my shoulder. Then, of all things, we had a parade. All I could remember from training was “don’t bunch up.” General talked to the guy next to me, but to have him tell it, it’s like he got kissed by the Pope.
October 24. Still waiting for supplies before we move out. I was told I’m supposed to be a tunnel rat. My platoon sergeant likes me (sarcasm).
October 27. Left for another place today. Duc-Pho. It’s finally back to C-rations again. It rained all night. A trio of misery: cold, scared, and hungry.
October 28. Why are we here? A question always on my mind…l think and stink a lot more… I think about what I’m going to do after I serve my two-year sentence for being an American citizen and what’s Mary, Brother Don, Al, Bill, Papa Joe, Gwynne, Moreen, and the bus driver who left me off in Harlem and said good luck, thinking or doing right now.
October 29. A hell of a night. Definitely. I went out to take a piss and someone whips a grenade my way. One leap and I was back in the bunker. Call me Jack-be-nimble…. Two men killed last night.
October 30. Hot as hell. A perpetual steam bath. My feet are two big mosquito bites at the end of my ankles. I could care less about the war. Just leave me alone and I wouldn’t bother you.
October 31. 6 A.M., I get up and I read the obituary column and if I’m not listed, I go eat breakfast.
November 2. The hardest day so far. Close to 80 pounds of shit on my back, raining like hell and we’re tramping through the rice paddies. A man got blown up last night by our own artillery. Who can you trust?
November 19. The helicopter couldn’t make it in so that meant no cigarettes. The hell with the food.
November 21. Lost respect for a bunch of people today. For no reason, they tore down this hootch, burnt it, tramped down their garden, ripped out their trees and there wasn’t even any suspected enemy. I told him I hope someone kicks in his TV tube while he’s over here. Like he said: “Just to let them know we’re here.” Really made me sick but what am I to do? Stand and watch and forget.
November 25. Back to hoofing and humping again. Froze last night. But how do you write it? It’s hard to explain the cold to someone who’s warm.
December 6. When will it ever end? You can’t fight what you can’t see. Yet we walk like we’re in a shooting gallery. The Major sits at his desk smelling of starch and saying, “There’s a lost regiment out there somewhere. Search till you find them. And I ask, “How do we find them?” And he says, “Wait until they shoot at you.” Yet we walk, fools that we are, because it will never end.
April 4. lt seems that the latest fad is to build up a kill record. Since our platoon got in that battle, we killed 45 V.C. The other platoons are jealous so now they kill any body just to match our record. I’ve seen—skip it. I’ll write about that later. I can say l’ve seen brutality to the utmost. Grossness, ridiculous and senseless killing. And no conscience whatsoever. l get the usual statement handed down since from the days of the cavalry and the Indians. “The only good gook is a dead gook.”
April 6. Now back to what I’ve seen. The grossness of character. One guy walked up to this old man, asked him for an I.D. card. The old man didn’t pull it out fast enough for him. So he blew him away. Then to add to it, he lit a cigarette and put it in the bullet hole in his head. People out in the fields running, so they mowed them down. When they went to check, it was an old woman and children. “They should know better than to run,” was their excuse.
Another old man asked for a cigarette. They gave him one, put it in his mouth, then busted his jaw. Rat patrol at night. Things I’ve heard: Rape at bayonet point. One guy made a woman blow him while she was holding a kid in her hands. Walk into a hootch and just blow them all down. Record it as a kill.
And they wonder why the war is taking so long. Why should anybody want to be V.C. Yes, America—we have power, we have strength. We fight for freedom, the name of peace. The name of God. And to me it’s all in vain.
May 2. Walking on point today. Saw a man about 20 years old, so I yelled “La day” (meaning come here). He turned and saw me. His eyes went big—and he tore off running. So I shot him. He ran a hundred yards down some trails with his guts in his hand…. The thought of what I did made me sick. l’m not proud of what I did.
May 8. I feel kind of funny, knowing I’m going on leave and all my buddies are stuck in Dragon Valley. I’d be a fool to turn it down. But I just can’t get over the feeling that I’m letting them down. Of course if I was there and some dude cancelled his leave just to help out—I’d be calling him a fool, too. I only hope nothing happens while I’m gone. It’s a strong wish-due to circumstances. But I wish!
The End Game
After he wrote this final passage in his diary, Buddy Anello left for five days of R&R in Taipei. When he returned, he told stories of his time away to his G.I. pal, Dave Lang. Lang says he talked about the days and nights Buddy spent in Taipei with a bargirl. He talked about choosing the girl, who was sitting in a corner, away from the line-up of girls being paraded for G.I.’s to select. Lang wrote that Buddy liked that she seemed uncomfortable with the bar scene and that she was only there because her family had problems and needed the money. Buddy told Lang how he had to sign the girl out of the bar, like he would at a library.
Buddy told Lang of things he did in Taipei, like buying bouquets of flowers that he and his bargirl companion would give to unsuspecting people in the city, running up and down the streets. When people were astonished or startled, Buddy would turn around and use his camera to shoot a picture of them, even though his camera had no film.
Buddy told Dave Lang that, after his five days of R&R, he had a hard time getting on the plane to return to Vietnam. Lang wrote that Buddy said, “Toward the end, I really didn’t want to go back.”
“And he told me it was really hard getting on the plane. And he threw in a comment about an MP when he was getting on the plane saying, ‘Hey, trooper, your hair’s a little bit too long.’ And Buddy said, ‘Forget it, pal, I’m not even going to listen to you.’”
“He said he had these three nightmares. He was walking up a hill. It was green elephant grass. He was the only one there. He was walking by himself. And he said he kept walking and walking and walking. And he just couldn’t get out of Vietnam. He was trying to walk out of Vietnam and he said he just couldn’t do it. He said, ‘There I was left. I couldn’t get out of Vietnam. For the rest of my life that’s where I’ll have to stay, just trying to walk.’ He said he had this dream three nights in a row. This was his premonition of dying.”
Buddy Anello was killed in action on May 31, 1968, during a nighttime firefight. During his time in Vietnam, Buddy was awarded the Purple Heart, the Silver Star, the Military Merit Medal and a marksmanship citation. He was also given, posthumously, a medal from the Army of South Vietnam. When he died in Dragon Valley, Vietnam, Sgt. Bruce Anello was 20 years old.