At first I could not understand such advice, did not even remember it for a very long time. The Vietnamese—his name does not matter—was a Communist, a southerner, who would only say of his own life that he came from Nha Trang. His English was not good, yet he understood Americans rather well: the war with them was then eleven years old. This was March 1972: I had come to Paris from Saigon, needing to believe I was finished with Vietnam at last because I had left it. He and I spoke in the white stucco villa in Verrières-le-Buisson that was headquarters for the delegation of the Provisional Revolutionary Government to the Paris peace talks. It was not unusual for an American to be in that large, dimmed room, with its vase of gladioli, its serious furniture, the pictures of Ho Chi Minh that made his eyes seem more quiet than in the photographs I had seen in books by Frenchmen about their Indochina, their war. Many Americans had been to Verrières-le-Buisson before me; some had even been invited to walk in the garden and had seen the little artificial lake with its swans.
But it could not have been so startling for them. Until that day I had never spoken to a Vietnamese who had chosen this side and was safe enough to tell me so. He and I did not even have to lower our voices. In Saigon a North Vietnamese infantryman, captured in the south and then freed, had sat in my room at the Hotel Continental—room 53—describing the months his company had walked down the Ho Chi Minh trail. Viet Cong, the Americans called them all, VC, or Charlie when they were fighting them. On the field radios they called the enemy Victor Charlie, or just Charlie. Now Charlie is the name of a perfume by Revlon, but no one seems to mind or even notice, any more than they object to a perfume called Ambush.
One woman prisoner was twenty-five, living in a cement room with barbed wire as its ceiling, confined with six other Vietnamese. She did not want an orange and refused a cigarette. But she told me who she was, that her husband was an intelligence cadre, that her child was four months old, that she did not need a calendar to know how many days she had been there, and then the guards discovered I was crouching in that room where it was forbidden to be and drove me out. That was in a village called Cao Lanh in Kien Phuong province: it is important to remember, to spell the names correctly, to know the provinces, before we are persuaded that none of it happened, that none of us were in such places.
Somewhere in 1971, in a village called Duc Duc, there was a captured nurse handcuffed to a girl of sixteen. It was the nurse I thought of for too long: even now I can remember something about her face and the color of the jacket she wore—it was not black but a greenish shade. There were handcuffs pulling the nurse and the girl together: they were made by Smith and Wesson. Her husband had been a soldier with the National Liberation Front, she had moved with him and his unit, the nurse said. There had been hardships, she had lacked medical supplies. Cocoanut milk had once been used in transfusions because there was no blood, the nurse said. Her voice was matter-of-fact. She did not expect pity. The nurse acted as if now she was afraid of nothing. When the Saigon government troops stared at her, she turned her back on them, so the girl handcuffed to her had to shift too. The soldiers did not like what the nurse called them, but they did nothing, standing there in a little schoolboy frieze, arms on each other’s shoulders.
So often did I remember the nurse, so much later in places that had nothing to do with Duc Duc, that some Americans in the antiwar movement became impatient. Once I even mentioned her in a restaurant on Mott Street, wondering if she had endured. I was advised not to be foolish, to stop being morbid, I must realize that others had taken her place, the friends said, as if that was the point, as if it was the space she left that haunted me.
Their wrists were so thin it made me wonder if handcuffs came in sizes, if they were held by handcuffs made for children. When the nurse and the girl had to board the helicopter they suddenly held hands so tightly that even the government soldiers knew then of their terror. The prisoners could not help themselves from staring at the land that began to rush from them as the helicopter lifted. All of them, even the farmers who had kept their faces locked, stared down with mouths and eyes that told you in that instant they saw what they were losing.
All I want to explain is that in the years I was there when the Americans were fighting in Vietnam, you could not interview the Viet Cong, you did not travel with their soldiers at night, or watch them set up ambushes. You did not have tea and long talks with their cadres or leaders. They did not permit it, did not want reporters with them. All you usually saw were their wounded, their prisoners, their dead. This is what made it so peculiar on that March day in Verrières-le-Buisson, to be with that Vietnamese in his dark suit and dark shoes, speaking such excellent French, who knew the beaches of Nha Trang and the color of the air at six o’clock and how the lobster tasted. But we did not speak of such things: he did not permit himself to be sentimental with a stranger. We spoke of the war, of his people, of my own. He knew, as did everyone, that there were Americans who so loathed what their government and their soldiers, their pilots and their diplomats, had done and were still doing, they honored the flag of his government more than their own. He knew there were Americans who wanted to work in rice fields, who would live in bunkers or care for the dying, who needed to offer themselves up, but his advice had nothing to do with any of that.
“They must love their country,” the Vietnamese said. “Love your country as we love ours. If you do not, you cannot change it.” Afterward I stood outside the villa, outside the gate, looking at the flag that flew from the balcony on the second floor. I had never seen that blue-and-red flag, with its gold star, look so huge and so new, only when it was stained, crumpled, folded, old. The flag was always a good souvenir for Americans in Vietnam. Some GIs—they were riflemen—preferred the hats, the belt buckles, the sandals, the shell pouches or even the diaries of North Vietnamese soldiers, which they could not read. But a Viet Cong flag was not bad at all. Yet no man was the same. Years later, when there was no such name as War Zone C, I came to know an ex-medic who has a photograph of a tiny Vietnamese child, a girl in pajamas, holding two very large paper flowers. The medic kept the photograph for himself after a firefight when his platoon had searched the bodies of the men they had killed. The photograph of the little girl stays in the same Bible he carried with him in the war, as if by putting the child between its pages he protects her from any harm, any more losses. That day in Verrières-le-Buisson, I stood so still, staring so long at a flag being pushed by wind, that a French policeman found it odd and suggested I move on.
GETTING BACK WAS not good. In New York a pleasant woman asked me what I had worn to officers’ dances; the question did not make me smile. There were none; in any case, I would never have gone. Others asked me how I had dressed, what I had eaten, what war I would cover next, if I had seen anyone killed. “You will never, never regret the experience,” a lady said as we both waited to have our hair cut in a place on 62nd Street. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance.” No one meant to be cruel. I did not want people to tell me over and over to have a nice day, to take care, to have a nice day. It was all I heard. There were awards: I took them. The Penney-Missouri Magazine Award was for “Expanding Opportunities,” as if no war need now shut out a clever, self-confident woman who did not mind a little mess, a little blood.
I went out on my own to collect evidence of what the war had done, as someone might go for the first time into a huge forest to collect leaves and branches, moss and soil, to take back and study. Some people said that because of Vietnam nothing would ever be the same, but others said this was not true. The war is boring, they said, it is much like having rheumatism, which will not kill you or quite go away. You learn to live with it. Once, driving in Texas, stopping by the Old and Lost River, I remembered what the Vietnamese in Paris had said: Love your country.
Turn the corner, people said to me in a kindly fashion. Forget the war. But I could not stop writing about it. Each time one more piece was published, there was always mail from men I did not know at all and did not ever meet.
“If you have reached the stage where you can write about it, you are almost home free,” a man named David Preston wrote, marking the letter November 13, 10 A.M. “I began to see what had really been done to us all when I casually mentioned the bottle of Vicks we used to kill the stench of the dead on the airplanes, by rubbing it on our nostrils. It wasn’t the reaction of the listeners so much as it was their matter-of-fact tone of voice that made the impact . . . You have finally realized what we almost all come to realize: you can chase people through all the words of all the languages, as Yossarian attempted, but you’ll never make them understand. Never. So you give up trying.”
Still another veteran, Jim Kairies, wrote this on lined yellow paper: on a cold night, a rainy one, he had worn his field jacket into a pleasant neighborhood bar. Sewn on his jacket were the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, the patches of the 82d Airborne and 9th Division, jump wings, the rank of lieutenant. A man of his own age moved next to him at the bar, looked at him and asked: “Ever do any skydiving?” Kairies said no. A minute later the man asked him: “Sell your jacket?”
“You know the feeling when someone asks you if you brought back any souvenirs or ‘What do you think of Vietnam?’ or why do you have to use the word ‘fuck’ so much . . .” the letter said. “I was a line infantry officer trying to keep men eight years younger than myself in one piece while ‘accomplishing the mission,’ and I didn’t have all the answers, and I was scared all the way, but I’m not ashamed.”
The second summer back I saw a man with an open silky shirt wearing an eighteen-karat-gold dog tag from Cartier that cost one hundred and seventy-five dollars. Business has been very good. You can order a much cheaper one in sterling silver from the TWA Flight Shop. It is $23.95.
There were people who were exasperated and puzzled by my indifference to the women’s liberation movement, which I had first known and admired in England when I lived there. I knew the immense value of the movement but I could not bear the posters SAVE OUR SISTERS IN DANANG or the women who would not join the antiwar movement because they felt it did not sufficiently stress rape as a crime, although, of course, it did. I could not rejoice when women I knew went back to school to be lawyers or doctors, when in 1973 I knew eleven Vietnam veterans, without college degrees, who were out of work. There were an estimated 36,000 Vietnam veterans unemployed in the New York area that year.
My own memories were too persistent and their bad endings made me deaf. Perhaps the interest in the women’s movement, the early excitement over its huge importance, ended that night in Saigon in 1971 when Germaine Greer was there on a brief visit. One evening there were half a dozen of us in the same room. She was witty, wonderfully bright, very talkative. She looked nice. Her manners were charming and she made the men in the room light up. What really provoked her, she said, was seeing a group of Vietnamese women filling sandbags near Long Binh, the biggest U.S. Army base in Vietnam, the ugliest of places. What she resented was a sign in English, near the Vietnamese women, that said MEN AT WORK.
It is true that I had trouble with officers in Vietnam, but none of it is important now. Sometimes they cared about where I would go to the bathroom and I did not. What is worth remembering is a mountain boy from North Carolina, whose name will not come back, telling me what he thought of “lifers.” The enlisted men called the career officers “lifers,” and later, in the last years of the war, they sometimes called them the “beggars.” The boy was in a mortar crew; he was saying that he thought lifers didn’t really like women or want them around much. And then he said something startling and wise: “We are their women. They’ve got us.”
He meant the enlisted men and he was right. I had always known how women were leashed, confined, made so small and uncertain. But in Vietnam, among the most helpless and humiliated were the soldiers themselves.
During the war I was equal at last, and often it was too much to bear. But the truth is there were times when I was turned back, sent away, by Americans who did not want me with them on the line. Perhaps they saw I was clumsy or untrained, perhaps they thought I might bring them bad luck. I met soldiers, so much younger than myself, who felt that one dead white woman was more bothersome than ten dead men—and who needed more trouble? It did not happen often. I would protest and be very firm. But one time I was grateful to lose, and this is why.
In May 1970 I flew on medical evacuation missions with a twenty-year-old warrant officer named Conrad Graf. He was the pilot of the helicopter and you called him Mr. Graf. The aircraft was called a “dust-off”—helicopters raised a gale of dirt, grass, pebbles and leaves—and there were no gunners aboard. It was an ordinary thing for a reporter to do, riding choppers collecting the wrecked. One American, named John, was picked up for a head wound and lay on the floor, not dead or not alive. The medic could not stop the bleeding. There were never doors on the helicopters, so the wind moved his hair where the blood did not make it stick. It all becomes normal, the other correspondents, men, would say. In time you’ll see. They lied.
Mr. Graf had to get in and out of small clearings in the jungle very fast. The light beating of that helicopter never seemed to stop: it barely touched the ground. The pilot could not help turning around, just once, to see the new wounded and the new dead. “I have to see their faces, I don’t know why,” Mr. Graf said.
Just before 8 P.M. the dust-off made a landing in a small clearing in a jungle northwest of Memot, in Cambodia. A light rain wet the faces and the bare chests of the Americans who ran toward us carrying two bamboo litters, pushing hard through the prop-wash to give us those bodies. It was almost dark. They had trouble getting the soldiers inside the plane in such a rush. Mr. Graf looked back several times in a worried way.
“Shit, man, shit, get the legs in,” a GI yelled. It was true that the feet of the wounded hung over the stretchers. There was something wrong with those legs, too, the flesh and the cloth in strips and clots.
The wounded were aged nineteen and twenty-one. I did not want to know their names written on those big white tags the medics in the field always filled out. The men had tripped one of their own antipersonnel mines, a Claymore. The medic gave the nineteen-year-old morphine. Only once when he raised his hands and opened them, as though trying to clutch something only he could see, did the boy appear alive. The older soldier could not seem to shut his eyes. He was cold. I wanted to hold his hand, but once before I had done this, the GI had died, his fingers curled with mine, and I had not wanted to let go, thinking the life would pass from me to him, until someone yanked my arm and parted us at last.
That night we flew to the 45th Surgical Hospital at the base camp of the 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, at Tay Ninh. It seemed important to try to stay with the nineteen-year-old with the bloody, bent legs.
We stood outside the little room where they laid him, looking through a window, as a nurse and an orderly began to prepare him for surgery. They worked very fast, but something went wrong. The boy tried to rise up and push them away, making a noise I had never heard from a man: it was a long and hoarse shriek. He fought to get away from them, but there was no escape. Nguyen Ngoc Luong—the interpreter and my friend—said softly: “Do not go in there, you can do nothing.” I held his arm, Luong held mine. We could not believe any of it.
That night they took off both legs above the knees. I had wanted, more than anything, to gain time for the boy, to make sure other doctors saw him and all were convinced the legs could not be mended. That is how much I knew—there are no second opinions. Later I found the Army doctor who had done it. He was drinking a Coca-Cola in the little bar for officers near the hospital. I said the nineteen-year-old had been in shock, but I was not brave enough to ask if perhaps a mistake had been made, why they had not waited.
“He wasn’t in shock, he was just frightened to death,” the doctor said. I did not know the difference then.
Mr. Graf, his co-pilot and the medic were on call from 8 A.M. to 11 P.M. They went out four or five times more, but I could not go with them. Mr. Graf said no, they were going into hot LZs. This meant they expected to take enemy fire in the landing zones. I did not argue with Mr. Graf, who had other things on his mind. Luong went, the photographer went, I stayed behind.
LONG AFTER TAY NINH, when I was living in Massachusetts, Luong wrote me a letter that put into words what the trouble was, what I had refused to admit. He said that whenever there was time, he and the reporters, the ones I knew and others who came after, would talk about me: “All have this remark about you: you are the only one who cannot overcome your Vietnam experience. There is an acute lack of forgetfulness in you about Vietnam, we think.”
Each winter, walking the streets of different American cities, I used to look at the younger men in surplus Army jackets, some with the patches on them I knew so well: the Americal, the Big Red One, the Screaming Eagle, Tropic Lightning. For a long time I could not bear those field jackets, always suspecting they had been taken off the American corpses in Vietnam, sanitized, pressed and sold as surplus. The real surplus was the men who had first worn them and were wasted.
Different places did not much help me think of other things, or did different kinds of talk. Once during a weekend in Kingfield, Maine, where he has a house and land, the writer Richard Goodwin took me on a walk and pointed out an old, slanting tree. The tree was in danger; it was ill or something was putting it in peril. The little story did not interest me very much.
“You would care if the tree was in Vietnam,” he said.
It was a veteran who helped the most. It was the ex-medic named David who kept the photograph of the Vietnamese child in his Bible. “Grow plants,” he said, giving me some. His father thought he might consider prison, but he became a conscientious objector and went off as an infantry medic. He never carried a weapon. Once, for Christmas, he gave me a book he had read in Vietnam. It was The Most of S.J. Perelman. Inside he wrote: “This book, a Merck Manual, Isaiah II, and a few Ace bandages are all you really need.” It used to upset him when he saw the advertisements used by the Army to increase recruitment. YOU DON’T GET TO BE INFANTRY SIMPLY BY CHOOSING IT, one of them said.
Many peculiar things were written about Vietnam veterans, as if all of the 2,300,000 men who were there during a twelve-year war came rushing back all at once. There were magazines I read, looking at winter coats and needing to care about such things again. In an article called “How to Treat a Viet Vet,” Glamour warned its readers: “If you avoid arguments because he’s been trained to killing and to anger, and you are afraid of his releasing them on you—another common problem—you’ve got to talk about it. Chances are he has been afraid about this, too.” The article did not say that men served only one year in Vietnam, that probably only one in twenty saw combat, that others typed or cooked, made charts or bar graphs, trained dogs or answered telephones, were clerk-typists and mechanics, did laundry or maintained aircraft. They did not do the killing, they only made it possible.
It is almost never suggested in these glossy little pieces that the war was wrong, only that the men returning from it have something wrong with them which must be tolerated.
In giving advice on how to talk to Vietnam veterans, Barbara Walters, the television commentator, wrote: “Keep the discussion generalized. Ask him what life is like in the cities of Vietnam, as opposed to the rural areas. Ask if his attitude changed while he was away. Ask him about the commuter aspect of the war, that men were delivered to the battle every morning and returned to the base at night—was that easier on the nerves than sustained fighting, or worse? Ask, if the medical side of the war interests you, about the quickness of aid for the wounded . . . Ask about the heat, the dampness, the housing.”
Ask none of it. Soldiers in the field rarely saw any Vietnamese cities. They were even off-limits to Americans nearby on big bases. Men who went into battle were not flown back that night; the infantry often stayed out for weeks. The aid to the wounded was very fast if the weather was all right and there was no enemy fire. Men were kept alive with horrendous injuries, although many did not know why they were exposed to such wounds. The housing was an air mattress on the ground, just the ground, a tent, a barrack. It was hot, it was damp. Sometimes infantrymen did not wear underpants because they rotted from the water and the heat and caused infections.
On television the Vietnam veteran is always a psychopath who hallucinates and thinks he is in a firefight. The police and SWAT teams are gentle and patient. Not wanting to hurt the veteran, who is armed and shouting again to his platoon, they wait it out and capture him with great cleverness. The veteran is led off. He will receive the best medical treatment. There are wonderful psychiatrists waiting to help. Some lies are hilarious. I wanted to write this to Luong, but it would have been too hard to explain. I wanted to tell him that I could not forget Vietnam because I lived in the United States. But instead I wrote him in 1974 that there were potholes in the streets of New York as deep as the ones in Saigon, that many dogs defecated in the streets, so we were not the obsessively hygienic people the Vietnamese thought, that the telephones did not work as well as I remembered, that the mail was very slow, that many people dreaded any sickness because it cost too much to get well, that it was not wise to walk alone at night, and that the President of the United States and some of his closest advisors had committed criminal acts.
THE FIRST SUMMER, during a day on Fire Island, a woman whose house I visited during the McGovern campaign complained to me about the television coverage of the Vietnam war, which she thought was confusing. She could not tell the difference between old movies about World War II and the combat footage, the real film, from Vietnam. Her name was Cynthia Bernardi. When I called her up more than a year later, still puzzled what she meant, Mrs. Bernardi was very nice about it, for I had been brusque that day.
“They looked alike,” she said. “The Second World War was very impressive to a child; it was also a kind of entertainment, and they painted Vietnam in the same style. It took some of the teeth out of it. It put Vietnam under the same moral umbrella as World War II.”
Errol Flynn was fighting in Burma late the other night on television. The men in his company keep the sleeves of their uniforms rolled down although they are supposed to be perishing from the heat. There are no leeches. There are no sores on the back of their necks from the heat and filth. Their feet are often wet but do not crack and bleed. The soldiers look clean; their faces are too filled out. The movie has nothing to do with Vietnam, but I pay strict attention. Everything is different: the shape of helmets and the helmet covers, the uniforms, rifles, boots, language, jokes, faces. There are no helicopters. On the field radio the actors say “able” and “baker” not “alpha” and “bravo.” All I learn is that even then soldiers used flares which light up the landscape at night like a strange and silvery sun so you can see who is out there to kill or to burn.
At the Brooklyn Museum that first summer there was an exhibition of sixty-eight photographs, black-and-white and color, called “Vietnam: A Photographic Essay of the Undeclared War in Southeast Asia.” The pictures were the work of nine dead men; six of them were under thirty. Some of the photographers were still described as missing because their bodies had not been recovered. Most of the photographs were of American troops, but there was Kyiochi Sawada’s picture of the Vietnamese prisoner being dragged by ropes around his ankles from the back of an armored personnel carrier. There was Larry Burrows’ picture of a Vietnamese woman, tears coming from her mouth and eyes, mourning a lumpy bundle wrapped in plastic, a bundle smaller than she. The tied-up thing was her husband. The photographs were separated; each man’s work was shown under his name. They covered wall after wall. I asked a young museum guard, standing in the center of sixty-eight photographs, surrounded by faces, what he thought.
“I don’t know, I haven’t seen them yet,” the guard said, who had been there for five hours.
The exhibition went on tour throughout New York State for two years. In Schenectady, a number of seniors in a parochial school for boys, Bishop Gibbons High School, were taken to see it. Thirty-two of them wrote short essays about it in Father Snapp’s English class. Everyone knew what he felt even if he could not spell words. The pictures of wounded children disturbed them; so did a photograph of a man falling out of a helicopter. They wrote about the way people’s faces looked, and how GIs tried to help each other. A few essays mentioned the photograph of a Vietnamese being interrogated as he hung by his ankles from a tree.
One student, Joe Fox, wrote: “I myself don’t think I could go to war after seeing this exhibition, not because of fear for myself but because I might kill or mame somebody like myself and I don’t think anyone should have the power to do that.” I wanted to write the boy called Joe Fox that the choice of killing or maiming might not be his to make, that once in the Army the soldier who would not fire or who wanted to be kind was considered a danger to his own people and to himself.
Still another, Tom Prindle, wrote this: “When I saw those pictures I realley was not surprised or shocked. After seeing so many of Vietnam pictures, scenes such as this are second nature to me . . . The hundreds of Vietnamese with their hands atop their heads and the V.C. prisoner being dragged behind an armored car showed me the overpowering strength of my country and that war is a matter of fear. The dead V.C. sprawled around the flag gave me a sense of pride while the V.C. strung up by his heels disgusted me . . . It made me think as to was it really worth it? All in all I was not shocked or angered, since I expected these pictures to be what they were. I would have gotten just as much out of a WWII re-run movie. The only thing I really felt was pity.”
Once, before I quit, the newspaper sent me to Social Circle, Georgia, to write a story on a contest of livestock auctioneers. I understood nothing and did not take notes on the cattle or the men who sold them. The little town made the contest into an excuse for a three-day celebration. I remember buying two cakes of Rosebud, a homemade sassafras soap, and watching Lester Maddox, a former governor of Georgia, ride a one-wheel bicycle backward in the parade down Main Street. I talked to some black men on a street corner as the parade went by. One wore the canvas and leather boots, another his Army shirt with the sleeves cut off. I wanted to stay with them. In Vietnam, Luong liked the black soldiers because they were not timid about themselves. He liked to see the black soldiers dapping. It was an elaborate ritual, a way for men to dance together, lightly and swiftly touching each other: palms, knuckles, wrists, arms, shoulders and chests. It ended in a loose hug. Twenty blacks—each man dapping with another man, then the next and the next—could slow down the war. No one could rush them or command them to cut it out. The Army was anxious to avoid trouble, to pacify the black troops as the racial disturbances increased.
There was so much Luong and I did not know when we started out, not even how much we were allowed to eat in the little mess hall run by the Americans in Hue. Among so much food, so much salad, there were piles of shined red apples and trays of hot cross buns. We were not certain that I might take two buns or that Luong could put an apple in his pocket and eat one there. The apples astonished him. They were so costly in local markets that only invalids were given them. It was allowed; take all that you can eat, a black sergeant told him, smiling. Luong asked me if it was true that the blacks came from poorer places in America and did not have such rich lives. Yes, yes. He did not quite believe it.
“How is it then that they are always the biggest?” Luong asked.
In Social Circle the black men are suspicious and uneasy if I hang around them. I had picked up the habit, so used to armies, of talking to anyone, but back home it makes Americans uneasy, for they do not know what you have in mind.
One of them, Daniel, says he wants to go back to Vietnam, back to Marble Mountain. “I left something there.”
“A girl?”
But he shakes his head: it is more important than that. He did not wish to tell me.
ON SUNDAY, WHICH was May 11, 1975, fat balloons bounced over Central Park. They were yellow and orange and white, with the words on them: The War Is Over! The more the balloons wiggled, the more they moved, the nicer it was. A thin man without a shirt, his beard the color of mustard, said he had not been persuaded the war was over until he saw the balloons and so many people in the park. It made the nails inside his head go away, the thin man said. It was an ending at last, the war in Vietnam and in Cambodia was finished, not only finished but over. There was a party; sixty thousand people came. They were young. But at some point during the day, perhaps when Joan Baez was singing, or when Peter Yarrow had begun the chorus of “If You Take My Hand, My Son,” and we sang too, everyone was the same age for a little while. People sat on the hard ground in Sheep Meadow, a large area in Central Park where there are deep, bald patches in the grass. “Come celebrate the victory of the peace and of the people” the handbills for The War Is Over rally said. “Theater, music, dancing, street theater, political booths and very few speeches . . .” The celebration was organized in just ten days by a coalition of antiwar groups, by people who had held on, pushing together as they had so often done in the past. There were some of them on the platform in the park that day who could remember more than ten years of it: the marches, the protests, the moratoriums, the rallies, the bus rides to Washington, the mailings and the petitions and raising money, the draft-card burnings, the teach-ins, the speeches, the trials, the lying down on marble floors and on pavements, eyes shut, pretending to be the dead of Vietnam. The memories of it were all in music; the singing went on for hours. The performers were patient, waiting their turn. People who never waited, waited.
Phil Ochs sang, Pete Seeger sang, Barbara Dane sang, Odetta sang and people whose names and music I did not know. The speeches, as promised, were short. No one was allowed to ramble. A woman from Bronxville remembered her son who was killed in Quang Tri seven years ago. The war was not finished, the handsome lady from Bronxville said, not finished. There were half a million Americans either in exile, facing charges or with undesirable discharges because they had opposed the war. Representative Bella S. Abzug, Democrat from New York City, said that if the government could open its treasury to Vietnamese refugees, it could welcome back “our own young people.” Actors spoke, a deserter from the Special Forces, a spokesman for the American Indian Movement. But it was the music that drenched the day, the songs like “Carry It On” and “This Land Is Your Land” that the crowd wanted, needed to hear. Later there were comments, worried ones, that the people in Sheep Meadow had seemed glazed, too dreamy, unpolitical. It was suggested that they had only come because of the fine weather and the music and not even in numbers larger than the crowds drawn by the free concerts of the New York Philharmonic.
In an article which said the antiwar movement had lost, since its understanding was primarily moral and not sufficiently political, an American writer, a very bright and good writer, referred to Thucydides, Book V, the Melian Dialogue. No one I know had read it. She thought the War Is Over rally had “the wanness of a class reunion.” But some of the people who were there, who sat on the hard ground for six hours and were glad of it, felt they were rejoicing because of an American defeat that had been too long in coming. They were in need of a celebration. They wanted to hear “Weave Me the Sunshine,” as I wanted to hear it, with its wonderfully childish lines “shine on me, shine on me again.” The music—the silly, lovely, thumping, chilling music—was the history that day of people who did not have any other history; it was a record of how they had responded in the days when those like Father Daniel Berrigan told them “No to their no, Yes to all else” and perhaps a million people knew exactly what he had meant.
A girl with a baby—there were lots of babies—said she supposed no other country had ever had people who celebrated their own defeat. Once she had read that in the last few years another Vietnamese soldier died every eight minutes and that if you kept thinking of that you could go off the wall. But still, it was a hard day to holler, the girl with the baby said. She had gone to Hunter College, she had been tear-gassed at a demonstration, it had made her sinuses act up for months, she could not take it again.
Some of the songs were songs you heard over and over in Vietnam, where the soldiers did not want their music taken from them, so they carried cassette players everywhere. I was glad to miss Paul Simon singing “Bridge Over Troubled Waters.” Even in delicatessens I do not easily hear it.
A young man came up to me, said he wanted to talk and had never been able to reach me on the telephone. I didn’t bother to explain I don’t answer the phone. He introduced himself. The young man said we had met in Vietnam when he was an information officer for the Americal Division. He was a lieutenant in Chu Lai. I never cared much for information officers, whose job was to see that reporters wrote what the Army hoped they would and to escort correspondents who might find out too much. It was a good job, as jobs went in Vietnam. He said how much he wanted my help in getting back to South Vietnam for a visit, and he went on talking for a few minutes before he noticed I was furious.
I said: “Why do you want to go back?”
“I just want to see it again.”
I said: “Why? What reason would you give the new government in Saigon, why would they want someone like you, an officer from the Americal, in their country again?”
“I can’t explain it, I just want to go. I want to see it again. There’s a place I want to see . . .”
“They will only let Americans come back who have been in the antiwar movement, and maybe not even many of them. The Vietnamese don’t want us back, we have no right to expect that.”
He said: “There are people there . . . there is a hootch maid I’d like to see again.”
A hootch maid was a Vietnamese woman who was paid by the soldiers to clean their rooms or barracks, do their laundry, shine their boots and provide whatever else she was willing to give. A colonel once told me that employing maids helped the economy of Vietnam. Maybe his words reminded me of that ugly conversation with the colonel. At any rate, he did not understand why I was getting so nasty, why he was provoking me so.
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t know her name.”
The war had bothered him a lot, the last four years had been very hard, the veteran said in a low voice, in a final polite plea. I said lots of people in the park that day had had a hard time and left him.
Other men have had other reasons for wanting to go back; to have been in a war does not mean you understand the memories of it. In 1972, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a winter afternoon in one of the coffee places in Harvard Square, a veteran who was a graduate student and a novelist was saying he would like to go back to Quang Ngai province. He was a nice man; there were few enough veterans at Harvard, his first novel was very fine. I tried to listen, but the story was such an old one by then, the ending was never easy to take. He had asked a village girl—she wore earrings, he remembered that, perhaps they were gold—if there were any VC around, was it okay for the platoon to go down the road. No VC. The girl was sure. The platoon moved on. But she deceived them. There were mines. Some of the Americans were wounded. The veteran wanted to go back and find the girl.
“I wouldn’t hurt her, or do anything,” the man said. “I just want to talk to her, to find out why she did it.” The reasons seemed clear but the man could not understand them. Maybe he knows more now, but that day in Cambridge, it was already five years since he spoke to the girl with the earrings in Quang Ngai who had wanted the platoon to be blown apart.
After so many endings, the real end was very sharp and clear in the early hours of April 30, 1975, when Communist troops entered Saigon, in tanks, in trucks and then the infantry in Indian file, in damp and muddy uniforms and sandals made of rubber tires. By the evening of April 30 the city was calm.
Sometimes it is surprising how far you can be hurled back again: I have a last letter from Saigon and on the top of it is typed “Ho Chi Minh City, 23 May 1975.” It was written by Nguyen Ngoc Luong, the longest letter he had ever sent. Luong liked to say his written English was “baby talk” long after he knew it was not really true. Some of his expressions—the American slang words—came from the “Dear Abby” column, which he liked to read in Stars and Stripes when there were long waits in the airports at Cantho, Danang, Phu Bai, Cam Ranh, at Hotel Three and the 8th Aerial Port in Saigon. I gave him a camera, and he became good at taking pictures, although his footwork was not perfect. He longed for the heavy dark necklaces of cameras and lenses that hung from the necks, from the arms of the war photographers who were everywhere and often moved like dancers, very fast, even the fat ones.
It was hard in the beginning for both of us when he came to work with me for The New York Times, it was so new for him, the asking of so many questions, the taking of notes, the details, the things we saw. Once he was working in my hotel room at the Continental, but stopped because the room was too large, so much space disturbed him. He was not good at all, the brilliance failed and the energy went, when we had to interview politicians or generals, anyone of rank or wealth.
In his letters he liked the abbreviations and language the reporters used for cables, in which capital letters could not be used.
Dear Gloria,
This is another baby-talk memo from NNL. Everything is all right with me and my whole family, at least for the moment. I received a letter from you well before the liberation of Saigon but I could not write you immediately because of evacuation of most of Viet staff so I had to be “political reporter,” photographer and messenger at the same time. Mal Browne, Fox Butterfield and I had the most exciting days before VN history turned to a new page. Then all of a sudden Mal and Fox left, while Fox and I were getting out of office planning to go and see fighting right on the edge of Saigon. They left by noon 29 May in such a rush that Fox did not remember to pay his hotel bill! (I later paid his bill with money left over in office.) Next morning Big Minh announced surrender and NLF troops moved swiftly into Saigon. I moved around taking pictures as usual, with some fear and much more excitement. That afternoon I asked aypee to radio seven specials for NYT, but unfortunately all communication with outer world was cut that evening. So no pix. Too bad. George Esper offered to buy my pix, and I refused on the ground that I was still with NYT, and my pix—good or bad—are for NYT. And I thought of those pix in a very sentimental way: a message to the paper, to friends like you, iver, craig, joe and barbara treaster, the markhams, the shiplers, Fox and Mal, etc. . . . those I have worked with, liked and loved, and I don’t think that I would see again. The message was that I am still alive and work as if nothing happens. The message is that I’m really a SOB who is too proud to leave his country and throws himself into the arms of foreigners, at their mercy. No, not that. I cannot lower myself to the same level of nguyen van thieu, nguyen cao ky, bao dai, etc. . . . Whatever will happen to me, to my family, I chose to stay in my country with the simple peasants, simple cyclo drivers whom I have had the real respect.
He wrote that he had, on the second day, decided to work for the Associated Press:
It is a way to save myself from the emptiness and nervousness that all Saigonese have experienced up to this very day. An unknown future, sloganized policies, everything is possible. That is the dark side of life. I have kept myself busy by working between 12 to 16 hours a day including what is called Sunday, working to exhaustion, to have no time to think of that dark side of life. And I kept telling me about the good things: witnessing the great moment of VN history, expecting the reunification of the country, no more killing, no more foreign advisors of all kinds, and later with stabilization and reorganization each and every person may, for the first time in his life, to feel really be himself, to feel really useful . . . I hate, as you already know, those Vietnamese who do not share the sufferings of the majority of the people in the past two or three decades. I have suffered in many ways, shattered in many ways, so I am proud and I look down on many people especially the so-called leaders, big and small, of the so-called Republic of Vietnam.
Forgive me about the above outburst! I will get back to factual report. I have kept the bureau open with all the rest of the Viet staff until May 9th when the office was sealed off. I kept it open because of these reasons: (1) why not? (2) with more than 100 foreign journalists in Saigon after Big Minh’s surrender and PRG takeover, there is a possibility that NYT men might find a way to get here again (3) the rest of Viet staff in office were so shaky and nervous that any kind of command, of leadership was to them a kind of tranquilizer.
During the 1–9 May period I kept contact with NYT bureau by calling every now and then from AP office. But finally I could not do anything but let the new rulers seal off the bureau. I had done my best . . .
Dear Gloria. Mai and I are expecting another child in three or two months—at the same time of Craig’s first child. I hope that situation is still good then to send you a pix of the child (Mai and my mother pray day and night that it would be a boy . . .)
Peter Arnett is scheduled to get out of VN tomorrow with this letter and all the pix for NYT. I can’t write letters to all friends. Please send them my regards. Keep up the hope that we may see each other again, somehow, sometime, in Vietnam.
There is no hope. I do not want to go back.
THERE WERE EIGHT to ten men who wanted to help build that big platform for the party in Central Park. They began work early on Saturday and finished it all by the next day, when, just before noon, Pete Seeger, then Joan Baez, started the singing. One of the men was Albert Lee Reynolds, a thirty-nine-year-old civil engineer from Elk City, Oklahoma, who worked at the World Trade Center. He carried boards, nailed them and built stalls for the little bright banners that ringed the field. The platform did him good: he liked working on something plain and strong in honor of such a day.
“I’m glad I hammered those nails down real good,” he said. “I knew there would be a lot of people up there with bare feet.” His wife, Linda, came down from 87th Street with their four-year-old daughter, Laurie, and one-year-old son, who wore a little white hat but began to turn pink from the sun on his shoulders and arms. Albert Lee Reynolds held the baby—whom he had wanted for so long, whom he had called Patrick Albert years before the birth—and raised him high, as if a baby could see and remember so much.
He is tall, with hair that was once redder, a quiet and quick man with light-blue eyes, sometimes humble, always polite. People meeting him for the first time, seeing that face and hearing Oklahoma in his voice still, do not expect him to feel what he does. He seems so mild and still shy. That Sunday, showing a friend how much the baby had grown, he said, “They’ll never get this child, I’ll never let them have this one.” He had made such a vow so many times before, the friend only nodded, smiled, praised the chunky baby in the white hat.
He always speaks like this: it means he will not let the Army take the child if another Vietnam by any name should come. No Patton will ever lead him. For more than five years the name of General George S. Patton III had a curious effect on this man. He sees Patton as a symbol of something so fearful and so cruel that for a long while he could barely control his surprise and sorrow and fury that there were such men, and they were ours.
“I hate Patton,” he said and wrote, over and over. “He loves war, he kills joyously. He is a slaughterer of children. Whether you believe as the Bible says that God created earth in seven days or you believe that man has slowly tried to pull himself out of the muck and ooze doesn’t matter. We all aspire to being better. Patton runs contrary to that human, that decent instinct.”
It began in New York years ago, in a place called the Cedar Bar, with an ugly story, no uglier than many I know, but startling for someone who worried that people with bare feet might hurt themselves on a platform with nails. A veteran who fought with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment commanded by Patton, then a colonel, told how he and others had taken revenge on dead enemy soldiers. It pleased Patton, the veteran said; the colonel liked his troops to show they were not little girls.
After that night in the bar, hearing so much over the beers, after he had read more about the war and heard still more stories from veterans: Albert Lee Reynolds wept often, was a trial to his wife, who rarely complained, went to meetings, wrote letters, gave away more money than he could afford, drank too much and invited veterans and deserters to sleep on the blue velvet couch in the small living room which opened out into a bed. The sofa, he called it. Some were men on the run.
Patton became the enemy: also the name for those in the military who called for war and needed the battle, eyes and mouths fierce with pleasure when they plunged into it, wanting the breaking and the bleeding and the moans, dragging with them into the darkness soldiers who were only boys and could not run away to hide from such cruel and powerful new fathers. This is how he saw it, still does.
A strange struggle began between the mild-mannered engineer and the Patton who would not go away, the Patton who had served two tours in Vietnam, won there a Distinguished Service Cross in 1968, a Bronze Star in 1969 and moved easily up the chain of command. Mr. Reynolds wanted to give back life, to help those who had been damaged by the war or who were still lost inside it. He wanted to undo what he felt men like Patton had done to them. Sometimes, when he felt a victory, he would write “Patton 0—Reynolds 2.”
He deeply admired the courage of Dr. Gordon Livingston, a West Point graduate and formerly a major in the Army Medical Corps, who served his third tour in Vietnam in 1968 with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment operating near Bien Hoa. During an Easter Sunday change-of-command ceremony for Patton, the doctor passed out a poem to some two hundred people:
God, our heavenly Father, hear our prayer. We acknowledge our shortcomings and ask thy help in being better soldiers for thee. Grant us, O Lord, those things we need to do thy work more effectively. Give us this day a gun that will burn ten thousand rounds a second, a napalm which will burn a week. Help us to bring death and destruction wherever we go, for we do it in thy name and therefore it is meet and just . . . Forget not the least of thy children as they hide from us in the jungles; bring them under our merciful hand that we may end their suffering. In all things, O God, assist us, for we do our noble work in the knowledge that only with thy help can we avoid the catastrophe of peace which threatens us ever. All of which we ask in the name of thy son, George Patton. Amen.
In August 1973 Albert Lee Reynolds spent his vacation in Gainesville, Florida, helping out in the press office—such as it was—during the trial of seven antiwar veterans and a supporter accused by the U.S. government of plotting an assault by automatic weapons, crossbow and slingshot on the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, 1972. Each morning the defendants had to pass through an electronic metal detector. He was there when three of them triggered it, and were ordered to take off their belts and shoes. The detectors had been set off by shrapnel still deep inside their bodies. None of the marshals looked embarrassed.
The U.S. District Court judge was often made impatient or furious by the defendants. He denied a request that the court observe sixty seconds of silent prayer and meditation to mark the end of U.S. bombing in Cambodia, saying it was inappropriate and utterly out of order. The veterans did it anyway.
When the Gainesville Eight trial ended in a victory for them, Mr. Reynolds gave a party and put up signs in his living room. One of them said Patton o—Mahoney 10. It was in honor of Peter Paul Mahoney, a former seminarian who did not become a priest but a first lieutenant in Vietnam. During the trial the government called as witnesses their paid informers. One of them had been Peter Paul Mahoney’s best friend. He tried to be charitable toward the informers. “I think his life ended at the close of his testimony,” he said of one such man who lied. The party pleased him very much. He still has that sign.
The letters of Mr. Reynolds were very emotional, yet the younger people to whom he wrote, who would never have used his language, understood and did not mind. In a typical letter to Dee Knight, a draft evader in Toronto who was co-editor of AMEX, the magazine of exiled war resisters in Canada, he said: “The next time you meet one of our exiled friends who is depressed, who is tired—maybe one that just got in from Sweden—remind him that he has changed history. Remind him that Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun or Colonel Patton III . . . lost a bit when he was born.”
There were hundreds and hundreds of such letters; for eight years he was unable to stop writing them. They spring from Albert Lee Reynolds like unending leaks in a pipe that looks fine but whose cracks grow deeper with each new wetness. He began in 1969, when he had been living in Bangkok for two years and was often sent to Vietnam by the firm Lyon Associates, who employed him as an engineer. He did structural designs for bridges of timber, of steel or concrete needed by the U.S. military, and sometimes for buildings for their bases. He thought Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma would know what a man like him should do. “Please let me know if I can help in your antiwar program,” he wrote from Bangkok on October 25, 1969. “I have approximately one month’s vacation time coming.” Senator Harris wrote him thank you but that his office did not have “any organized effort in this regard but was urging the Administration to move more rapidly in disengaging America from this tragic war.” Mr. Reynolds knew nothing about the antiwar movement, the days of rage, the red elasticized armbands sold in college towns, the Presidio Twenty-Seven, the Chicago Seven, the Boston Five, the Harrisburg Seven, the Camden Twenty-Eight—none of it.
In 1965 he had been in Somalia for two years, then there were months in Beirut and Okinawa before Bangkok and Vietnam. For a long time he refused to believe that men and women in Congress do not open their mail, that others read and answer it for them. He kept writing. He went on hoping that some men in Washington who understood his background—because it was also theirs—would end the war and punish the men who prolonged it. In 1973, believing that the men in the White House must go, he wrote to another Oklahoman, The Honorable Carl Albert, Speaker of the House:
They have abused us, Mr. Albert. They have abused the trust we gave them. You know this, as I do. Even though we come from opposite sides of Oklahoma—you from Flowery Mound and Bug Tussle, I from Elk City and Quarila and Anadarko and Chickasha and Eldorado—we both have the ingrained Oklahoma common sense of the farmers around Elk City to know when we’re being abused or cheated or hustled. I would watch the farmers around Elk City, when I was a boy, talk to the oil company lease hunters, when the oil field came in, and the farmers would usually pick up when the lease hunters tried to cheat them, and the lease hunters couldn’t tell that the farmers were so perceptive because the farmers wore overalls then—one brand name I remember was “Osh-Kosh”—but the farmers had a sixth sense, Oklahoma version, which would tell them when they were being hustled.
His own father was born in 1907, at the time Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state, and named Okla in the excitement of that year. He married a schoolteacher named Laura. They moved to Elk City when their first son, Albert Lee, was ready for sixth grade. His mother, Laura, taught first grade in Elk City for thirty years and misses it now; all the years of being with children make her voice and face seem babylike. In Elk City High School no boy did better: he was president of the Student Council, drum major for the high school band, a member of the Honor Society, president of Teen Town—an organization for the healthy and suitable entertainment for the young—and valedictorian of the class of 1954. The Rotary Club voted him the best citizen of the year. There were no bad jolts for him, although sometimes the members of his family went down, never knowing why. There was his grandfather, Albert Reynolds, a homesteader who worked 160 acres, retiring with enough money in a savings account to keep him for a long time. But he lived another thirty years. The money went and the old man was fearful of being sent to the county farm, where the poorest and the weakest ended up. It was bad luck, too, that his father, Okla, was a cotton broker for a large Oklahoma firm who fired him when he was fifty-five and still had a mortgage to pay and could not make it farming a little cotton and some wheat on his own land.
Albert Lee Reynolds went to Oklahoma State University. He belonged to Pi Kappa Alpha and at the end of his senior year in 1959 the fraternity chose him as Outstanding Graduating Senior. There was an “Al Reynolds Day”—his parents came from Elk City for the dinner and to see him given a plaque. He went to graduate school at Yale for a master’s degree in engineering; no one in Elk City had ever done that. It is a small, flat town in the western part of the state, a place with no surprises at all, with houses and refrigerators and backyards that you find everywhere. Older people can still tell you about the great punishing dust storms and droughts, and how more than forty-five years ago the poorest tenant farmers used old Highway 66 on their journey to California. When I was in Elk City, a teacher told me how children of the desperate would come to her school to ask for food. The principal told the teachers to give nothing to the children, so of course the woman obeyed him. She said so.
In 1970 and 1971 he thought he showed the classical signs of a man who was mentally ill, who had been driven to it by a war which everyone at home ignored. It did no good to say that his own father, Okla, would have understood the evil of the war, for Okla was dying during the months he and Linda were home in Oklahoma, and could not even hear about it. He could not be kind to John and Pauline Hassler, his wife’s parents, who lived in Nichols Hills, a fancy suburb of Oklahoma City. There was the time when John Hassler said to a friend that the invasion of Cambodia by the Americans and South Vietnamese was probably a good thing and was mystified by his son-in-law’s behavior. When in June 1970 Albert Lee and Linda Reynolds went to New York to live, his letters to the Hasslers were so harsh that Pauline Hassler began to intercept the mail he sent to her husband.
“I even wrote them a letter saying they were a witch and a warlock dancing on the graves of nineteen-year-olds,” Mr. Reynolds said. “I thought they didn’t understand the death and horror of it and I had to make them understand. Linda used to say ‘Why have you singled them out for all this?’” But he could not tell her the reason, could never give her a good one. One time he even turned on Linda, whom he loves. It was a summer night in 1970. Leaving his office at the World Trade Center, he saw a group of men in wheelchairs at the foot of Dey Street. They were paraplegics, injured in Vietnam, trying to collect signatures for more extensive and better medical facilities for men like themselves with spinal-cord injuries. They had come from the V.A. Hospital on Kingsbridge Road in the Bronx. There were not many names on the petition, people were in a hurry to get home. When he came back that night to Linda, he was in the same state she had seen so many times in Bangkok when he had just come back from Saigon. He told her about the paraplegics. Linda was calm; she does not know how to be otherwise. That night he did not want her to be calm; he wanted her to cry out or rage too. He said she had no feelings about the death and horror of that war. He went at her, she cried out, he hit her again, she had no idea how to defend herself or push him back. He must have been crying and yelling all the time. He never forgave himself for that night—for years he kept confiding that he had broken her little finger—but it made him understand why men in Vietnam sometimes went “awry” when they came home, he said.
During the years in Southeast Asia, when he would feel himself lurching and falling back into the hole in his life, the hole he called Vietnam, the Bible would steady him or get him through the moments that were so hard. In Elk City his family always went to the First Baptist Church. For years Albert Lee Reynolds went to Sunday School at 9:45, a church service at 11 A.M. Then there was Training Union—an evening service for the young—before the last church service at 8 P.M. This was the reason he knew and loved the New Testament and could not help himself, so many years later, from quoting it to younger people in the antiwar movement. It did not matter if they happened to be Marxists or atheists or nihilists or were interested in Zen.
In March 1973 he volunteered to speak of his own experiences in Vietnam at the New York City Commission on Human Rights Hearings on the problems of Vietnam-era veterans. He put on his button, which said “I Support Vietnam Veterans Against the War.” He told them what he had seen in Vietnam, what he had seen in the spinal-cord-injury ward at the Bronx V.A. hospital, where he had tried to be a volunteer but could not stand it. None of it was new; there were others who knew much more. His final words were: “What’s done is done. We can’t bring back the dead. We cannot repair those severed spinal cords. But we can, and must, help these veterans who are here today literally pouring out their souls trying to tell us what it’s like. We must help them. Maybe that’s the way to ask God’s forgiveness. May God have mercy on our souls.”
The way he talked, so different from others, startled some people and made a few men and women wipe their eyes, sigh and wipe again. But there were also those whom he made a little impatient. They thought he saw Vietnam as an aberration, that he had not learned the lessons of the war at all, or did not understand the reasons for it, and that he never spoke of the millions of victims who were Vietnamese. But he did not know any Vietnamese, he only saw them or exchanged a few words. There was a Vietnamese draftsman in his office and the whores who hung around hotels. He heard talk among Americans of how villagers were tortured; it was called the “Bell Telephone Hour.” All that he knew he told. He never pretended to know more. It was always his belief then that if he kept on speaking about the carnage, other Americans would awaken and not let it happen again.
When the fiftieth-anniversary meeting of the American Orthopsychiatric Association met in New York at the Hotel Americana, he was one of the panelists in a round table called “The Vietnam War: Consciousness and Conscience.” There were many other workshops on the same day; not more than twenty people came to the Georgian Room.
He began: “I was a young man when we—my wife and I—set out to explore the world . . . the first overseas job was in Africa—that was the beginning—in and out of airports, strange ports in countries I had read about as a boy in geography class in Oklahoma. My wife was twenty-two and I was twenty-nine when it all began. When it was over, five years later, my wife was twenty-seven and I was an old man.” Then it came out, as it had come out hundreds of times before: “In those days they were being slaughtered like animals—in droves—fresh from the high school study halls and the after-school football practice and from working on their old cars. Those were the days of Hamburger Hill. I wonder—I always will—what the real motivation was for the officers who made them run up Hamburger Hill to die. Was their motivation a mistaken belief that they were helping America? Or were they thinking about their next promotion and their combat proficiency report and their career records back in the Pentagon?”
His voice was not even as he went on. People were silent, as if he were pulling them into a place they had not been and did not want to go.
“Even animals—even animals—protect their young,” Mr. Reynolds said.
The war electrocuted him. His office sent him out on a job to the Tan Son Nhut airport, where the military ran a mortuary for Americans. The bodies of the soldiers lay out of doors on concrete slabs. All was taken from them: fatigues and boots, socks and underwear, letters, pictures, dog tags, watches, love beads, peace signs on necklaces. The bodies were then hosed down—and it is this which he saw and remembered. He made the mistake of looking at faces, although in some cases the faces were gone. On another day in Vietnam he was being driven from Tan Son Nhut to downtown Saigon by a business associate, a heavy-soils engineer. Traffic was backed up because of ambulances crossing from the landing pads for medical evacuation helicopters bringing in the casualties from the field. The ambulances took them to the receiving area in back of 3d Field Hospital. It was not a great distance. The Americans were honking because the ambulances were holding them up, although they knew the ambulances must not stop. It was the honking that day—the way the heavy-soils engineer tapped his fingers on the wheel—that made him cave in, that finished the eager and hopeful man from Elk City, that made him something he could not even describe. He knew the receiving area at 3d Field Hospital because he had once gone there to get an ambulance for GIs injured in a jeep accident.
He speaks of it over and over again: how the soldiers lay so still on the canvas litters, their faces small, some blue, some too white; how their fatigues and boots were strained and mud-caked. He spoke of it so many times that his friends in New York, those who knew nothing and those who knew much more, grew accustomed to hearing it. They grew quite used to his letters that kept coming at them, always the same: the honking, the hosing, 3d Field. Sometimes he went to the 3d Field as a volunteer and the Red Cross ladies there asked him to push the magazine cart through the wards because it was a little too heavy for them. He remembers seeing a boy in a bed who wore a high school ring from Poteau, another small town in Oklahoma. It is always his habit to read class rings although he does not wear his own. The boy from Poteau had a terribly swollen face. They did not talk. In the wards, he knew the soldiers were people from his own life, his own class, people like his grandfather, Albert, and Okla, who were so easily made victims and did not know why.
“I was struggling desperately to avoid being sucked into that dark whirlpool of death and destruction and sickness, but it was no use,” Mr. Reynolds said in the Georgian Room. “I went down—America went down—we all went together.” His eyes were very bright, but he was not weeping the way he used to during the nights in 1968, when there was fighting in Saigon, when he heard the war at night and prayed that God would stop it. Sometimes, when not even the gin-and-tonics would do it, he tried to put himself to sleep in Saigon by thinking again of Okla on his light-grey Ford tractor, going from one end of the field to the fence row and back again, always proud of such straight furrows. His life in America became strangely discolored and urgent.
He went to Fort Carson to testify for the accused in the court-martial of Private Richard Bucklin, who had gone to Sweden, then to Canada, before he came home to give himself up. The deserter had slept on the sofa of the Reynolds apartment in New York. He was charged with two separate violations of being AWOL. Before the trial Mr. Reynolds brooded too much about what he might say to make it clear, very clear, that Richard Bucklin was a decent and moral man, but on the witness stand his chance never came. He wanted the jury—officers and enlisted men—to see the courage of the accused man, but nothing of the sort happened. The defendant was sentenced to twelve months. Mr. Reynolds, who knew nothing of prisons, visited him at the United States Disciplinary Barracks, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The visit set him back quite a bit: the prisoners reminded him of the GIs in Vietnam. Many had been. Later that year he drove to Allenwood Federal Prison Camp to see a Presbyterian minister serving six months for burning down a small ROTC building in Hawaii. He bought a secondhand flute for seventy-five dollars to give to Nancy, the wife of the Reverend Robert A. Warner, because she had lost a silver flute she once owned and loved. It was left behind when the Warners, who lived underground for two years, made a sudden escape with their first child, a baby boy named Sunshine, from armed FBI agents looking for them.
Mr. Reynolds joined demonstrations, usually small and orderly ones. He always looked out of place; you had the feeling, as one girl put it, that he washed his face and hands before he went out to join them. In April 1973 he marched in the “Home With Honor” parade with a VVAW group; the youngest was three and the oldest of them was sixty-seven. They shouted, “No Honor Here, No Honor There.” The parade, which had tens of thousands of marchers going up Broadway, lasted four hours; Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard officers headed it. Among the marchers were an estimated one thousand Vietnam veterans still on active duty. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War group—which had fewer than two hundred people—carried huge banners asking for improved veterans benefits and unconditional amnesty. At the reviewing stand at 72nd Street and Central Park West, they knelt down on both knees. They chanted, “You can’t turn your back on the truth, you can’t turn your back on the truth . . .” The officers in the reviewing stand rose and turned their backs on the kneeling men and women, leaving only one man in uniform, a Medal of Honor winner, looking at them because no one had turned his wheelchair.
There were many people who waved miniature American flags; WABC donated twenty-five thousand of them. The weather made it a bright, sugary day; the large sidewalk crowds seemed cheerful and frisky. There were string bands, drum and bugle corps, fifes, bagpipes. He remembered how one man had kept shouting “Honor America, honor America” as they passed. That April day made him realize, he said, what it was to live in a country that had gone insane. Many people made a thumbs-down sign or shook their fists at the VVAW group; others, leaning over the sawhorses, spit at them, then spit again. Three antiwar veterans and a spectator were arrested at 62nd Street in a fight with a patrolman and a police captain. It was the only untoward incident of the day, the police said later.
He did not know how to make things better. In New York, for five years, he held to the idea of eventually giving all the money back that he had made with Lyon Associates in 1968 and 1969. His total salary was $39,374.83; it was tax-free.
“It’s dirty, filthy, bloody money,” he told me. “Vietnam is full of bridges that I designed. I was one of the lower-paid civilians. It was a very profitable war—except for the soul or whatever it is that hurts so much now. All the time. All the time.”
The giving-back began in 1970 when he went to the office of Vietnam Veterans Against the War to give them fifty dollars. Later, when VVAW accepted him, was sure he could not be an informer for the FBI, he went to them quite often and was most useful in helping to write letters on their behalf. It was the only place where he found his balance. He did not tell Linda that he wished he could rid himself of the $39,000. Most of the money was gone, but he did give away at least five thousand, mostly to veterans who were out of work, or those who needed a “little cushion,” as he put it. They were the people he wanted to be with, not the men of his own age who had done well since he knew them at Oklahoma State and at Yale.
When a deserter was staying with them, his wife Linda worried that the FBI would burst in to capture the man and that their daughter Laurie would be taken away from them on the grounds they were unfit parents. He loved Linda for fearing for the child but it was not his fear.
“I don’t see the FBI coming in the door,” he said. “This may sound very naïve, but I’m very American. You know the song ‘America’? And the words ‘Thine alabaster cities shine’? Well, I’ve helped build those alabaster cities. Just because I think we were so horribly wrong in Vietnam doesn’t mean I’m saying that I’m un-American.” The alabaster cities are the two twin towers, each a hundred and ten stories high, the white spines of the World Trade Center in New York, which was largely financed by tax-exempt bonds issued by the Port Authority of New York City and New Jersey. It cost $900,000,000 to build; one year it was reported that losses were running at $10,000,000. He thought the two towers were very beautiful; his New York firm did the structural designs.
One of the ways he tried to cure himself of Vietnam, aside from writing the letters, was to clip four or five newspapers a day and magazines. He kept the clippings in boxes in the bedroom—which annoyed Linda, for his files spilled everywhere—or sent them to people in the antiwar movement. The important passages he marked in red, filling them in with yellow so you could instantly see what had enraged him. The slaughtering murderous bastard misses flying his helicopter he wrote on an interview in a magazine with General William Westmoreland, who had commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam. When asked how the war affected the country, the general said he did not feel it was very great. “Nothing happened in Vietnam that hadn’t happened in other wars,” the general said. “But there was all this emphasis on the irregularities that occurred in Vietnam.” Irregularities! Albert Lee Reynolds wrote on the margin. The murderous slaughtering bastard. When Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger said that the impact of losing part of Southeast Asia to Communists was “very slight weight indeed,” he wrote, with his red pen, “Then why why why were we there?” He hated the Secretary of the Army, who wrote: “Is Army service an interruption in a young man or woman’s life? Hardly. A golden opportunity is more nearly the truth.” Liar Murderer he wrote. He hated President Ford for saying at the seventy-fifth annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Chicago that “all wars are the glory and agony of the young.” No glory at 3d Field, no glory at mortuary, only death there he wrote. The trouble was that he expected these men to repent.
“I want them to say they are sorry,” he said. “They could do it again.” It was a very long time before he realized no one was going to say such a thing.
When he was twenty, Albert Lee Reynolds went to Mexico and visited the Basilica in Guadeloupe. Nearly twenty years later he can still see the penitents crawling on their knees over the paving stones, across a plaza, up the steps of the church, up the aisle, lurching slowly to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadeloupe.
“America should be doing penance,” he said, “She won’t, of course, with her arrogance and her ignorance and her Cadillacs and bombers, but America should be crawling over those rough stones on her Red, White and Blue knees to do penance. We have abused and maimed and slaughtered our young. Look what we have done to Alton.”
Then it was always Alton. He had been a corpsman, 2d Battalion, 9th Marines. In May of 1966, in an ambush south of Danang, he was hit twice in the leg with automatic-weapons fire. There was nothing unusual about this story except that when, at last, Alton was safe and out of there it all went wrong:
In Key West, at the naval hospital, I was in traction for six weeks with a splint on my leg. The flesh was draining constantly and they couldn’t put a cast on the shattered bones because of this draining. They put four nails in my tibia with a bar and then I had a strap at the base of my heel which held up all the weight of my leg. I remember, even though I was getting morphine and Demerol every two hours, that I could feel the pressure from the strap and I kept complaining about it, but nothing was done, and when they took me down, the strap had cut through my Achilles tendon—severed it completely and destroyed my post-tibial nerve. They didn’t tell me about that at the time. I thought my condition—the foot—was due to my gunshot wound in my leg, but it wasn’t. It was due to the strap cutting through the Achilles tendon. I learned this from a private doctor in Miami later.
When I was in Key West, in the hospital, I was drugged most of the time. They eventually took me off the harder injections of narcotics and put me on pills—codeine. I acquired a drug habit and they gave me no drug treatment therapy or physical therapy. They just gave me a brace and a cane and told me to go home.
Mr. Reynolds used these excerpts from Alton’s letters to put in a biography for the Gainesville trial; he assembled biographies for each of the veterans in case the journalists wanted them. There was not much interest; the case histories were hardly new.
Alton’s wife, Paula, wrote in 1975 to Mr. Reynolds that her husband had been apprehended for duplicating a prescription. He was briefly confined. “The day he got out of jail was the ninth anniversary of the ambush in Viet Nam and he’s been strung out ever since. You’ve said before we can’t let them take him. If he doesn’t clean up, they’ve killed him . . . There are so few people who can really see Alton . . .”
Alton wrote that the doctors in the Gainesville V.A. hospital had amputated the smallest toe on his foot. There had been three earlier operations to straighten that one toe. He was learning carpentry, the letter said, he and Paula wanted a baby. He wanted to forget Vietnam and to forget that he was a cripple-for-life, for what?
In July 1974 Albert Lee Reynolds went to an amnesty workshop scheduled during a large two-day conference of the General Assembly of the Universalist Association at the Hotel Americana. There were only a few people who came that morning to the Chelsea Suite; other educational meetings had been scheduled at the same time. He took two women there to the coffee shop. They were Mrs. Helen Boston of Trenton, New Jersey, whose son Ronald was killed in action in Quang Tri in July 1967, and Mrs. Patricia Simon, whose son David was killed in action at Cu Chi in January 1968, two days before his nineteenth birthday. He knew quite a few women like them, always trying to save other people’s sons. Both women work in the amnesty movement; Mrs. Simon is coordinator of Gold Star Parents for Amnesty, with headquarters in Boston. Her son had wanted to go AWOL to avoid being sent to Vietnam, but Mrs. Simon was uncertain of what to advise him to do. She had just moved to Newton Centre, Massachusetts, from Jacksonville, Illinois, with three young daughters. Her husband—whom she had left—wanted the boy to do his duty in the service. Mrs. Simon, once an elementary-school teacher, thought a man should advise the boy but she was uncertain where to find such a man. She went to a minister in Cambridge, who was of no help, who did not even know there was a draft counseling service in the basement of his own church.
“The three of us sat for about an hour . . . And I was rambling on, as usual, and probably saying the wrong things, and not knowing what to say to stop the sorrow, which isn’t possible, of course, but wanting so much to stop it,” Mr. Reynolds said. Mrs. Simon wrote to thank him for coming. “I wish you joy with your new child,” she said. It made him weep. He thought of taking the new child, Patrick Albert, and the others and running away to live somewhere else so the boy would always be safe. He did not tell Linda this, and after a while the idea passed.
On Monday, May 12, 1975, an American cargo ship named Mayaguez reported an attack in the Gulf of Siam and seizure of the ship by Cambodian Armed Forces. The next day the Mayaguez was sighted by American reconnaissance planes near Tang Island off the Cambodian coast. A land-sea-air assault was launched on May 14; the two hundred Marines landed under fire in Tang Island—but the American crewmen were in a small boat, flying a white flag, in great danger from U.S. bombardments. As the little boat, manned by five Thai fishermen, approached the destroyer Wilson, air strikes were being carried out on the Cambodian mainland. The American attack was not halted when President Ford received word that the Cambodian government was willing to release the merchant vessel and its crew. It has never been explained why air strikes were carried out on the Cambodian mainland at almost the moment the crew members were reaching safety. On May 16 the President appeared on television to announce the rescue was complete. There was elation everywhere.
The Harris Survey showed how dramatically the President’s popularity increased after the Mayaguez. “The President’s decisive action seems to have eliminated the negative effects of Vietnam and at least temporarily restored the confidence of Americans in their presidency,” Louis Harris said. The Harris Survey asked a cross section of 1,428 adults across the nation for their reactions. Positive, 79 percent; negative, 18 percent, not sure, 3 percent. Mr. Reynolds felt quite sick.
“By heavy majorities, Americans accept the White House’s reasoning in responding to the Mayaguez incident quickly, decisively and with force, even if it meant the loss of American lives to rescue the ship and crew. For many people in this country, the incident seems to have provided symbolic reassurance that the U.S. has not ‘lost its will to resist aggression,’” Mr. Harris wrote.
Before he moved to Richmond, Virginia, in August 1975, to a new job, Mr. Reynolds had yet another streak of writing, as if he were composing a last will and testament:
We have rescued the Mayaguez. The President’s men—in evening clothes—laughing over their victory. The President says “It went perfectly. It went just great.” David Hume Kennerly’s photograph captures their self-confidence, their assuredness, their glee. “I’m very proud to be an American today,” says Nelson Rockefeller. “Damn, it puts the epaulets back on,” says a White House aide. “We are not going around looking for opportunities to prove our manhood,” says Henry Kissinger. “Blow the hell out of ’em,” says old James Eastland.
It’s a hot Memorial Day weekend in New York and the tourists from Ohio and Pennsylvania and New Jersey are here with their cameras and we have rescued the Mayaguez. “There was all these deep bushes (on Tang Island). You couldn’t see nothing,” says Private Kendrick Deckard, nineteen years old, Nacogdoches, Texas, who was shot in the leg.
The Kennerly picture tells us that we haven’t learned anything. Sleek Donald Rumsfeld, thinking about ambassadorships; Henry Kissinger, thinking about power and David Hume Kennerly, who photographed so much in Vietnam, now close to the power. Perhaps the picture tells us that David Hume Kennerly hasn’t learned anything, either.
The death toll that the Pentagon chooses to release to us, as of today, has reached thirty-eight dead, with three others missing and presumed dead. Forty-one dead kids. There were thirty-nine crew members on the Mayaguez . . .
As I watch the reactions, I realize that as a country, we learned nothing from Vietnam. A few—a small group in this massive country—have been driven mad by Vietnam. And the rest of the country has learned nothing.
Nobody wants to listen, Miss Emerson. We are like voices from the tomb. We remind them of death too much. They don’t want to listen. It’s really too ugly for the mind to comprehend.
It’s just a matter of time until we do it again, Miss Emerson. All we can hope to do is postpone it for as long as we can. And all the energy and all the tears and all the grief were for nothing. But, of course, even knowing this, we have to keep on trying to postpone it because nothing else really matters very much, does it.
That’s the lesson of the Mayaguez. “Blow the hell out of ‘em,” says old James Eastland, and Alton’s dream is almost complete except for the child brought into a world with no more wars. And the Mayaguez steams on. And nothing has changed. We have learned nothing.
In Richmond, the Reynoldses’ green frame house with its darker green roof is less expensive to rent than the crowded apartment in New York. The children have a large backyard. He still subscribes to the Elk City Daily News—Western Oklahoma’s No. 1 newspaper since 1901, the banner says—but his letters on amnesty to the publisher and columnist, Larry R. Wade, have not made a dent. OH, GOD, SAVE ELK CITY FROM HER SINS, WE PRAY, a full-page advertisement for the Eastside Baptist Church said in April 1976, but he thinks unless the people of Elk City start caring about Ned Lemley, a draft evader in Canada whose father was Albert Lee Reynolds’ Sunday School teacher, the Baptists are wasting time. He wrote the governor of Oklahoma—he had gone to high school with his cousin, Carlton—and several other governors asking them to observe Amnesty Week, February 22 to 28. They did not. His letters to officials are not so pleading now, no longer so certain that these men want to see justice done and the suffering stopped.
He began to see connections between the war and everything else. He read that 24,300,000 Americans—more than 10 percent of the population—were classified as poor in 1974, up from 23,000,000 in 1973. The official definition of the poverty level—an annual income of $5,038 for a non-farm family of four—seemed to him an evil deceit to conceal the real number of the poor which he thought must be closer to 40,000,000. He read that the top 20 percent of the population recieved 41 percent of all income; that the wealthiest 5 percent own 83 percent of all corporate stocks.
“We couldn’t have done Vietnam without being this way,” he said.
What he fears is that America has become a nation convinced that the violent sacrifice of its male children is inevitable. War is routine, he says. He thinks Americans tolerate the intolerable. The sales on Veterans Day make him feel furious.
“Honor the dead of Khe Sanh and the blinded and burned of Indochina by saving up to $12.98 on a 12-inch Magnavox Color TV” he wrote on one newspaper advertisement. He thought the men who were war criminals had been forgiven and that Yale had much to answer for because of Ellsworth Bunker and McGeorge Bundy. After Mr. Bundy, chief foreign policy advisor to President Johnson, class of 1940, a former Harvard dean, now president of the Ford Foundation, was invited to speak at a banquet given by the assembly of the Association of Yale Alumni, he protested to President Kingman Brewster, Jr., in New Haven.
“We must think of national problems in university terms,” Mr. Bundy said in his address at Yale. Yale values and snobbery, Mr. Reynolds wrote across an account of the speech in “News from Yale.” This man helped fill 3d Field. Mr. Brewster, who had opposed the war, wrote him a sympathetic letter, pointing out that the role of some Yale men in the war did not “tar all Yale men of their alma mater; nor do its vices rob its perpetrators of their virtues in other fields.” He reminded Mr. Reynolds that McGeorge Bundy was a “most accomplished, skillful and wise” Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard.
“Knowing Mac Bundy as I do, I cannot doubt his motivation, even though I may cavil at his judgment on the war,” Mr. Brewster said.
The plan of Mr. Reynolds is to try to rescue people, one at a time. There is sixteen-year-old John Henry Rollins, who was imprisoned for breaking into a school after a long record of minor offenses. John Henry said he was being attacked and abused by other prisoners, so he cut his wrists “to get attention.” It was the only way he knew. The boy is slight and considered slow. He was released last March in the custody of Mr. Reynolds and will live with the family until his sentence is finished. There is a deserter—who after spending seven years in Canada gave himself up, received a dishonorable discharge—sleeping in the porch room of their house. A few blocks from where the Reynoldses live is the Virginia penitentiary. He has been there to visit a twenty-seven-year-old veteran named Clifton Powers, Jr., who has thirteen more years to serve. The prisoner said he was in the 101st Airborne in Vietnam, started drugs there, was hit twice, won a Bronze Star for pulling a wounded infantryman out of the line of heavy enemy fire, was hospitalized in Japan four months for what he describes as a “nerve problem.” He was jailed for breaking and entering while on parole after serving a year and four months for burglaries. His court-appointed lawyer pleaded there was no excuse for what he had done but that his Army record of service “says something about him.” The judge thought not.
“Twelve million men served in the nation’s armed services in World War II,” Judge William E. Spain said. “I never heard a World War II veteran use that war as an excuse for a drug habit that led to crimes like those this defendant is guilty of.”
“I couldn’t take all the killings,” the prisoner says. Drugs made it easier.
When Mr. Reynolds went to see him, with the parents, the father said Clifton had been “wild as a buck” when he came home, that it seemed as if his son kept wanting to tell him something but he couldn’t get it out.
THE WAR BEGAN like this: one man died, then another, then one more, then the man next to that man. The dying was one by one. The war began to finish in January 1975 when the capital of Phuoc Long province fell. It was the first to go. Troops in the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam tried to stop the T-52 tanks of the Vietnamese from the north. ARVN had American-made shoulder-fired rocket launchers. They did not stop the tanks. American military analysts felt that ARVN might have fired at too close a range: a distance of thirty feet is necessary in order to destroy a tank. Then, one by one, the provinces that were threatened caved in. There were no great battles; sometimes men did not even open fire. In Pleiku, the soldiers ran through the streets shouting for the people to run for their lives, quick, quick. As the war rushed to them, civilians and soldiers fled Pleiku, for their own commanders had been told to abandon the city. A Vietnamese journalist named Nguyen Tu wrote this account from Pleiku for his Saigon newspaper, Chinh Luan, as he moved with the huge and weary file of people going toward the sea:
Not a single doctor, either civilian or military, was to be found in the city. . . . No organization of any kind was set up for the evacuation en masse. . . . [The exodus] has given me such disgust that I find the slight hope I have been nursing in my inner self since 1954 has disappeared . . .
Despair was not what the Department of Defense wished American military men who served in Vietnam to feel. Accordingly, as the country known as the Republic of South Vietnam grew weaker and dimmer, as its death grew closer in April 1975, James R. Schlesinger, Secretary of Defense, sent a message, unclassified, to the members of the Armed Forces:
As the last withdrawal of Americans from Vietnam takes place, it is my special responsibility to address to you, the men and women of our Armed Forces, a few words of appreciation on behalf of the American people.
For many of you, the tragedy of Southeast Asia is more than a distant and abstract event. You have fought there; you have lost comrades there; you have suffered there. In this hour of pain and reflection you may feel that your efforts and sacrifices have gone for naught.
That is not the case. When the passions have muted and the history is written, Americans will recall that their Armed Forces served them well. Under circumstances more difficult than ever before faced by our military services, you accomplished the mission assigned to you by higher authority. In combat you were victorious and you left the field with honor.
Though you have done all that was asked of you, it will be stated that the war itself was futile. In some sense, such may be said of any national effort that ultimately fails. Yet our involvement was not purposeless. It was intended to assist a small nation to preserve its independence in the face of external attack and to provide at least a reasonable chance to survive. That Vietnam succumbed to powerful external forces vitiates neither the explicit purpose behind our involvement—nor the impulse of generosity toward those under attack that has long infused American policy.
Your record of duty performed under difficult conditions remains unmatched. I salute you for it. Beyond any question you are entitled to the nation’s respect, admiration and gratitude.
On April 29, 1975, President Ford made the official statement: “This action closes a chapter in the American experience.” It was not a war. It was an experience. The President declared an end to it on May 7, 1975.
MANY PEOPLE IN the United States, and the government itself, wanted a happy ending to the war which lasted twelve years for the Americans. They wanted to feel we had won something. In February 1973 it was the return of 566 thin and smiling men who had been held in North Vietnam. In the spring of 1975 it was the arrival of two thousand Vietnamese children, described as orphans, who were rushed here just before the Communists prevailed. In June it was the rescue of a cargo ship. But each time the illusion of winning was questioned and attacked: The Mayaguez was used as an excuse to bomb Cambodia and punish the victors. The Vietnamese children were snatched out of their country, when peace seemed certain, to reassure us what very nice and decent people we are. The prisoners of war would not have been captives if we had not bombed a small rural Asian country, and they were fewer in number than the Americans who died at Hamburger Hill. We needed something alive to forget the dead. These were the arguments.
Eight times in one day I saw on TV the prisoners of war returning and heard the little speech of the man who had been for seven years in prison, ending with “God Bless America,” and hearty reply of the admiral, “God Bless America.” It is perhaps my fault but I cannot help asking, in all sincerity, for what?
The writer of the letter was Maurice Braddell, of New York, who said he was seventy-two years old and had “got bombed and bombed and bombed” in England during World War II.
Each year that it lasted Americans who took opposite sides on the war seemed to hate each other more than the Vietnamese who opposed us. The quarreling was fierce; sometimes it did not seem as if the war alone could be the reason for the hatred. I have a box of this bitterness: they are letters written to Seymour Hersh, who in 1969 was the first American journalist to write about the My Lai massacre and Lieutenant William Calley and Charlie Company. In 1970 he won a Pulitzer Prize and his book describing the massacre and the participants, My Lai 4, was published. He often appeared on national television. Some letters said he had written about the massacre of the Vietnamese because he was a Jew. Condemnations were often written by other Jews, who thought he would make trouble for all of them. Mr. Hersh read each of the letters once and did not answer any of them.
A woman named Rosenfeld wrote she had seen Mr. Hersh on NBC. “You Jewish boys are well known for making a buck on our poor fighting boys,” she said. Another woman in Beverly Hills, California, asked: “How can you live with yourself when you are a Judas to our Army and country. Your face shows it! I’ll bet you and your family never went to war.” From New Orleans still another woman wrote: “How much did Hanoi pay you?”
One letter said: “You are a lousy stinking anti-American and should be kicked out of the U.S. You went on an ego trip on the My Lai affair, just to get your name in the papers. All lousy jews are alike. Give them protection and let them come into the Country, and immediately they start an underground revolution. Heads of every country know this and Hitler was wise to the Jews. Too bad he didn’t get rid of them all—what a lovely planet this would be without them.”
A retired captain in the Air Force wrote that his son had served with the Americal—the division of Lieutenant William Calley and of Charlie Company—in Chu Lai. His son only saw Jews at desk jobs. The father said: “One cheerful possibility remains however, that if and when we are attacked and overwhelmed by the Reds, the potion to be meted out to you so-called Jewish intelligentsia could well be another holocaust even as your widely-shouted six millions in Germany.”
A letter from a doctor and his wife in Albuquerque, New Mexico, said that they “never for a minute doubted My Lai . . . We are sure there have been tens of thousands of similar ‘atrocities’ committed by our GIs and other fighting men in the history of this great Nation. A soldier is a murderer only when he kills his own allies, not in the line of duty.” It was their feeling that President Nixon should award Lieutenant Calley the Medal of Honor and a presidential pardon. As for the protests over the bombing of North Vietnam, the couple wrote that in World War II the bombing of little German villages like Hildesheim ultimately “broke the spirit of the German people and won the war.”
The most desperate letter came from Mrs. Anthony Meadlo from New Goshen, Indiana. Her son had been in Charlie Company when they went through My Lai and left hundreds of dead civilians. She said her son “looked just like he had been whipped” when he came home missing his right foot. Paul Meadlo told everything, first to Seymour Hersh, and then, in a long interview on the air, to Mike Wallace of CBS. His mother wrote: “I only hope and pray that there will be a day coming that you will suffer for what you have done to us . . . You are so rotten you surely don’t have a mother or heart . . . so now you got him in all this trouble, now see if you can get him out of it. Your no good your filthy low down. I only hope I meet you again someday.”
ON A SATURDAY in January, in the year 1973, there were many Americans who believed that Vietnam had finished with us at last. The peace agreements were signed on January 27. When it was dark, or nearly so, in most of the country, the cease-fire had begun. Here and there, church bells and mill whistles, fire horns and tornado sirens sounded. But in so many more places there was nothing at all, none of the shouting or singing of people who have finally had their way. An elderly woman in Virginia, who wrote poetry as a girl, said it was not a night to put flowers in our blood. She remembered the strutting, the thumping, the kissing when other wars had ended.
There were no speeches. It was America’s tenth war and the longest of them all. Reporters were sent out to ask people how they felt. Some felt nothing. A black mail-room clerk said the war had brought the South Vietnamese their freedom and given us inflation, high taxes and unemployment. A New York jeweler, Michael Berkowitz, said it was the only war he was old enough to remember. It made him feel “really bad” that he would not see a victory parade down Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, Mr. Berkowitz said.
Not everyone was indifferent, wistful or depressed. A New York executive on a travel magazine saw a bright future. “The end of the war is going to mean an increase in the travel business,” Richard Gollan said. “There’s no doubt that Vietnam is a tourist destination for the future, along with mainland China. If you have a lot of money to invest, Vietnam has beaches second to none,” he added. “Watch the Holiday Inns move in. People will want to go to Saigon, which has the reputation of a lively city, and any American who gets there will want to see Hanoi.”
There were no tourists during the war. Congressmen came, and student delegations; scholars and writers came, and once a delegation of clergy, who tried to chain themselves to the gates outside the United States Embassy to protest the war. They were quickly taken away. There were no tourists but there were postcards to send home to prove you were in a combat zone. It was the first war to provide postcards of American troops, in black and white or in color. There was “Mine Detecting” and “Street Fighting” and “Night Convoy Moving Cautiously,” among others. Sometimes the postcards showed South Vietnamese troops, but the Saigonese did not like them much and they were expensive.
ALL OF US lived comfortably in Saigon; it was easy for well-paid civilians. In 1970 there were more than 2,100 Americans working for the United States Mission, the name for the embassy, the consulate and other government agencies such as Agency for International Development and United States Information Services. It was the largest U.S. mission in the world. There were Western restaurants on or near Tu-Do Street, the pretty little spine of downtown Saigon, which once had trees that caught and held the rain. They were cut down to widen the street for military and civilian traffic. The good places to eat included Aterbea and Ramuntcho’s, where Americans could have Bloody Marys, good steaks, salads that were safe. The doors of the restaurants were locked, even at noon, so the Vietnamese could be kept out. The fear was that Vietnamese soldiers would demand a table, eat, be unable to pay and make a scene before they left. There was the chance they would throw grenades or shoot. Perhaps the real reason was that it would make the Americans—the constant clients—uneasy to eat with them. Only the richest Vietnamese, or the most powerful, were looked upon with favor, but most of them ate at home. In the months before I left Saigon, the restaurateurs seemed more nervous. In February 1971, at Ramuntcho’s, three Vietnamese officers did get past the man who let people in after peering at them through a peephole. The Vietnamese lieutenants were polite and solemn. There were white airborne wings on their shirts. One man was missing a leg but had pinned his trouser up rather neatly. His crutches seemed too high for him. The owner of Ramuntcho’s, a short and swarthy fellow who was always amiable with us, spoke harshly to the officers and said there was no table. It was untrue; there was space upstairs. It made the officers very angry. They did not move. One of them—not the man with the leg gone—looked around the room, at all the foreigners, and said long and ugly things to the restaurant owner. None of us spoke or moved or looked up. The military police came and forced the Vietnamese out. We did not go on eating until they were gone.
Saigon was never a city that loved its own soldiers; they were too poor, there were too many of them.
The Americans endlessly entertained each other; there were many parties for those who were departing or arriving. Invitations were engraved. The June 1971 issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine had a playful letter from Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, who was then seventy-seven years old. For seven years he had never faltered in supporting and augmenting American policy in Vietnam. He was thought of—in the kindest terms—as a fierce, brilliant, cold, stubborn man.
Sirs: This is in reply to your letter inquiring into the activities of the Saigon Yale Club.
Like the Yale band at half-time, we are strong on spirit but weak in form. We have neither an executive committee nor a headquarters—although one disappointed Saigon visitor did call my office recently to arrange for overnight accommodations at the Saigon Yale Club. There are also no dues and no obligations other than attending an annual dinner at my residence and a passing acquaintance with Yale songs. We have established the minimum in this regard as an ability to render at least one verse of the “Whiffenpoof Song” and the opening lines of “Bright College Years.”
For want of permanent location, the Yale Club of Saigon is temporarily quartered in my residence, where we held our initial gathering on December 18, 1970. Fourteen Elis attended and were duly inscribed as charter members of the association.
The group was refreshingly diverse. It included representatives from our diplomatic and military services, private citizens, an academic, a vice minister and one member of the sixth estate. There was much talk of bridging the generation gap, Yale’s football season, a few comments for the benefit of our brethren in Cambridge and, I must admit, a rather patchy rendition of Yale songs. Unfortunately, no photographers were on hand to record the event.
Membership in the Club has now grown to twenty-four and we would like to have as many associates as there are in Elis in Vietnam. Regrettably, our list for the first gathering was quite incomplete. To correct this situation, I wish to encourage all Vietnam Yalies to send me their names, in care of the American Embassy, APO San Francisco 96243. All are welcome, but we are especially interested in tenors, as we would like to do justice to the songs at our next meeting.
Ellsworth Bunker, ’16
United States Ambassador, Saigon
In December 1971, much to Ambassador Bunker’s pleasure, thirty-three men attended. Thirty-three Yalies, as they are called, came in sports shirts, except for a Buddhist monk with shaved head who wore saffron robes. He was the Reverend Quang Lien, a high school principal in Saigon. The ambassador was in an excellent mood. He spoke of the Class of 1916 warmly and his recent trip to New Haven for the fifty-fifth reunion. The Class of 1916 was behind the war, the ambassador had said, on his return to Vietnam.
There was one enlisted man, Specialist 4 Joseph H. Flynn.
When the ambassador took the floor after dinner, he said that the Vietnam alumni chapter had grown 250 percent in the year since its inception. The Yale Club of Saigon was up from twenty-one to forty-eight men. The growth rate, he said, was faster than any other program in Vietnam. There was gentle laughter. The Minister of Finance, Ha Xuan Truong, smiled too.
The ambassador told the men of his own military carrer after Yale: he had joined an artillery unit during World War I that was not sent to the front but south to Mexico to fight Pancho Villa. The ambassador said he ended up cleaning stables, much against his initial intentions. He added that he had been cleaning up after others ever since. More laughter.
The first song they sang was the “Whiffenpoof.” No one could lead the singing on the piano but one man managed on a guitar. Voices rose and grew loud. “We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way: Baa Baa Baa,” the men sang. “We’re little black sheep who have gone astray: Baa Baa Baa.” The ambassador looked happy.
THE SEVENTEEN-DAY PERIOD of bombing began in December 1972. It cost $25,000,000 a day and sixteen B-52 bombers and two F-111 fighter bombers were among the twenty-eight aircraft lost, a man from the Defense Department said. The American bombing of North Vietnam was so precise that Hanoi residents felt it safe to come out and watch the attack on military targets, Dennis J. Doolin, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, told the House Armed Services Committee. No one hooted.
In Hanoi, Vietnamese officials were quoted as saying that from December 18 to December 29 about a hundred thousand tons of bombs were dropped on their capital. The Bach Mai Hospital in the center of Hanoi was bombed on December 19 and again on December 22. The hospital was destroyed. It is believed that twenty-five doctors, nurses and pharmacists were killed. When asked why the B-52s had damaged a hospital, Jerry Friedheim, the Pentagon spokesman, said, “We don’t know what went on in that place.”
A report based on a preliminary survey made by the North Vietnamese, and quoted by Hanoi radio on January 4, 1975, said there had been more than five hundred B-52 attacks against the North Vietnamese capital. The North Vietnamese asserted that the United States had razed what it described as economic, social, educational and cultural establishments in 353 places. Some areas, it was said, were hit as many as ten times.
The report claimed that 1,318 people were killed and 1,261 wounded by the United States bombing raids on Hanoi. The workers’ quarter of An Duong was said to have been obliterated on December 21 by six hundred bombs dropped by B-52s. The bombs cut a swath more than half a mile long and half a mile wide in this section, destroying two hundred homes and schools, day nurseries, kindergartens, food shops and grocery stores. According to this report: “Kham Thien Street with nearly thirty thousand inhabitants, most of them working people, was attacked on December 26 by thirty B-52 bombers.” The investigation said that 534 houses were destroyed, 1,200 others damaged and “dozens of food shops, pagodas, temples, kindergartens, reading rooms and libraries ravaged.”
The bombing spoiled the Christmas of some Americans. It was reported that in Fort Wayne, Indiana, for example, nearly five hundred parishioners of St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church took away their big, gaily decorated Christmas tree from the altar. They tore the branches off and smashed the pretty little lights and decorations. The mess was stuffed into a large box and mailed to President Richard Nixon in Key Biscayne, Florida. He never knew about it.
IN PARIS THE cease-fire agreements were signed in the forty-foot-square ballroom of the old Hotel Majestic under a ton of crystal and gilt chandeliers. One wall was covered by a three-hundred-year-old Gobelin tapestry with hawks, doves, swans and other birds in it. Enemies and allies sat at the gigantic table—whose shape had once caused the Vietnamese delegations to quarrel—which was covered in yards of green baize. It was here, at the Centre de Conference Internationale, a six-story stone building on Avenue Kleber, that Ho Chi Minh had met with the French in 1964. On that Saturday in Paris, Secretary of State William Rogers signed sixty-two documents. “It’s a great day,” he said later at Orly Airport.
But the Vietnam cease-fire agreements were signed in what one observer called “an eerie silence, without a word or gesture to express the world’s relief that the years of war were officially ending.” The negotiations had taken nearly five years. The morning ceremony on January 27 lasted eighteen minutes; the afternoon ceremony, eleven. Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, Foreign Minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam, provided a small surprise. She was dressed up for that day. Madame Binh wore an amber-colored ao dai, the Vietnamese tunic, with some glittery embroidery below one shoulder. She looked handsome and calm, a symbol of what 2,300,000 Americans who served in Vietnam called the Viet Cong and often thought of, the way one GI put it, as “runty people, with not much flesh and bad teeth.”
Many Americans believed the Christmas 1972 bombings of North Vietnam led to the Paris Peace Agreement. Few knew that the Vietnamese Communists regarded it as a victory for them, for the agreement provided for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops, military advisors and military personnel associated with the pacification program, armaments, munitions and war matériel of the United States. It defined the military demarcation line at the 17th parallel as “only provisional and not a political or territorial boundary.” It did not specifically prohibit military traffic between the two regions and it permitted civilians to move freely across the 17th parallel. It referred to “two South Vietnamese parties” as established governments without conferring sovereignty on the government of President Thieu, who had very much wanted this, wanted the total withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops, wanted the 17th parallel to be clearly defined as an international political frontier.
A majority of Americans, perhaps because the Paris Peace Agreement provided for the return of our prisoners of war, thought that President Nixon had achieved “peace with honor” and that the bombing of North Vietnam had done it.
IN ALBANY, IT made some people cross to see how Theodore S. Adams was carrying on about the cease-fire in Vietnam. A few seemed vexed by his good spirits. They told him the cease-fire meant nothing at all, that it was naïve and foolish to believe the United States was really getting out, that the bombing of Cambodia had not ended. Vietnam had been changing his life for so long, no matter how he tried to turn from it or keep it away. The war was like a wild and brownish wind, smelling bad, touching and pushing him even in rooms he knew and loved. He was forty-six years old on the day of the cease-fire, the husband of Rezsin, father of Frances and David, seventeen and twelve, an assistant professor of American Literature at the State University of New York, in Albany. He wanted to rejoice on January 27, even if it was just for a little while.
“It was like the day the children were born,” Mr. Adams said. “You felt like rushing out to embrace the trees.”
The pleasures of Mr. Adams were many: the writings of Willa Cather, some paintings in a local museum, and washing the dishes at night in the old-fashioned double sink, singing, as he mopped and rinsed, “Death and the Maiden” or “Yes, We Have No Bananas” or “Don’t Go in the Lion’s Cage Tonight.” He had never wanted more than he knew in Albany: the family, the three-story old house on Chestnut Street, where he had a room of his own to work in, left quite undusted by Rezsin, who was too busy; his books, the library nearby; and teaching, which he considered an honor and a privilege. He loved doing lesson plans. Nothing in his life bored him.
It was easy when the war was still small not to think of it at all. But Rezsin, who was named for a Hungarian grandmother, did not wait to be told what to do. There were demonstrations, marches, vigils, visits to politicians, letters, peace groups. But he did not want to hear or see an inch of the war. The Adamses had no television set—just as they saw no need to own a car—so he was safe there. He was cautious listening to the radio. If a magazine showed six pages on the war, he skipped over those six pages.
But it did not work.
“I like American modern poetry. But every poet who was any good wrote about Vietnam. Even Marianne Moore, who approved of it, wrote about it. Every single one did. Conferences on the study of metrics would become a discussion on Vietnam.”
The name dropped like a stone, again and again. He turned to short stories. Reading “The Greatest Thing Since Custer” by William Eastlake he calmed himself by saying that the author was using symbolism, the American soldiers had not really cut off and collected the ears of their enemy, such things were not done by Americans.
“It was a perfectly clear story,” Mr. Adams said. “I just didn’t want to accept what was happening.”
Nothing had stayed the same at SUNY, where the middle-class children of middle-class people began to heave and yell, threaten and be rude. He did not know, having a slight aversion to most newspapers except for the Christian Science Monitor, which was always several days old when he read it, that other campuses were more chaotic. He had no idea. Although he approved of the antiwar activities at SUNY, the students often angered and touched and grieved him. He was damaged by them, as the war grew bigger and the draft grew deeper, taking a hundred thousand men a month. It became impossible to abide by his standards of marking fairly. He could no longer be scrupulous and just, when that was what had always mattered the most, even more than sharing “My Antonia” or “Shadows on the Rock” with them.
“I invented this crazy mark,” he said, sitting in the little dining room of his house where the Great Books Club meets, confessing at last.
It was a B double minus. In those days young men would say to him “Are you going to give me a B or are you sending me to Vietnam?” He had wanted to tell them off, to say “What the hell do I care? Your work is poor work. I’ll send you to Vietnam.” But he could never have spoken like that, and he did not do it, even with the dumbdumbs, as he privately called them. The B double minus was to distinguish between the student who had a genuine B minus and the boy who must be kept back from rice paddies and guns and cutting off ears.
He had never wanted that kind of power, or even dreamed that such decisions would come before him. He knew the students were trapped in the university.
“In other words, they were saying ‘Since I’m a prisoner here, you have to make it easy, and you have to make it fun,’” Mr. Adams said. “It was a terrible thing, it was a terrible thing.”
He felt it debased him. Sometimes he would call in a student to whom he had given a B last semester and tell him that the mark was undeserved and that he would have to do better this time.
“If it was a cheaty B, I shouldn’t ever have given it,” Mr. Adams said. “What did I mean by demanding more work of him? Sometimes he would be resentful, and then I would be so impossible and angry, he would get yellier and I would get yellier, I would think what’s wrong, should I go to an analyst?”
For the first time in his life he had put up a big sign on his office door: “Here is my phone number. Call me any time between eight in the morning and ten at night.” They did. They wanted to tell him how upset they felt. He was kind, he said he knew, and did not give them advice, for he really had none.
He is a tall and slender man who walks on the balls of his feet, so it makes him bounce a little, like a pleased and eager child. Sometimes he wears a red bandana around his neck or a long scarf when it is cold. Rezsin is very small and round, with clear skin and a lovely smile. When friends drop in everyone sits in the kitchen, unless it is the Great Books Club, which always meets in the dining room.
She traveled often during the war. The telephone began to ring quite early in the morning. She belonged to the Capital Area Peace Center, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the New York State Legislative Forum and Albany County New Democratic Coalition. He had never minded all that. He was proud of her. But he had never stopped teaching during the war even when there were picket lines and demonstrations. Nothing in the world could have persuaded him to cancel a class.
“For I had said I’ll teach when I feel like coming to the classrooms and I’ll teach when I don’t feel like it,” Mr. Adams said. “I felt the students had given no such promise. They were free to leave. I was not.”
He had stood vigils with Rezsin and her friends, but it was hard to do and sometimes, after half an hour, he would think: Well, let the damn war go on.
On a Saturday, April 15, 1967, they had gone to an antiwar march and meeting in New York. In Central Park, where there were speakers, he had wound his scarf around his chin and worn earmuffs, for it was cold. He had a book with him, Little Dorritt. He did not see the seventy students who burned their draft cards. Next to him, on the ground, was an old lady of some eighty years who had a long snooze, which pleased him. People came and took his picture—he was not sure why, so he went on reading.
“A black man came up and shook my hand in the oddest way, in some sort of brotherhood way. It was very pleasant. Students came by and congratulated me, saying they were glad I was supporting them. All I had to do was sit and read Little Dorritt and I was supporting them.”
He saw all the huge, foolish flaws of many of the antiwar groups, who often opposed each other on how to best oppose the war, but nearly eight years after it happened he could not, without his face changing, speak of a meeting at Union College.
“We ate a sacrificial meal of rice, and the ladies who cooked the rice were afraid it would be too bleak, so they dressed it up with something. There were six priests, two nuns; there were ten Quakers and Rezsin, atheist priest of the Albany region. There was a woman who sang an ancient Hebrew song without accompaniment,” he said. “It was a ludicrous affair and very moving. Perhaps it was the acme of the converted preaching to each other. And I felt something strange—severe, exalted, ridiculous.”
He had cried violently.
When the war was very old, he asked the students what they thought of the December bombings of North Vietnam in 1972.
“There was a kind of rationed silence that you feel in a Russian play. It isn’t that somebody’s forgotten his lines or that something has halted. I would ask about the Christmas bombing, and a fierce silence, a fierce silence, would fall.”
He had never been too fearful for Rezsin, who went to many marches, in Albany and in Washington, where no one seemed to intimidate her. A million voices raised and nothing coming back, he had said. She kept working. There was even a mimeograph machine in the downstairs hall near the kitchen. She was jailed once for three days. In his diaries he noted it all, briefly and without comment, making the books beautiful by pasting in pictures or illustrations which caught his fancy. But he had worried.
“I thought: She’ll go all day, she won’t be able to go to the bathroom and she might lose her lunch and have nothing to eat, she might not have a chair to sit down in, she might want to phone me and not be able to.”
When the protests were still new and startling, there had been nasty telephone calls. Once he wrote a letter to a friend describing it all, on the back of a Democratic Sample Primary Ballot dated June 20, 1972, for he hated to waste anything. The house was always stacked with such papers that could be used.
“Some people would begin to rant right away. ‘I want you to know how I hate your wife and the filthy rotten anti-patriotic activity she is engaging in. We’re going to run her out of town, and that means you, too, Buster.’ When I would interrupt to say ‘Who is speaking, please?’ they would reply ‘Never you mind who this is.’ I would tremble a bit,” he wrote.
It had exhausted and troubled him, making him see clearly that he was a man apart from the age.
“Any idea of any importance bores me, generally. I don’t care who’s President. I know Nixon’s bad, but don’t tell me about it. I know Dow Chemical is bad, but don’t tell me about it. If Rezsin wants me to run to the post office at midnight, or lick envelopes, or fold mimeographed sheets—thousand of them—I’m willing, especially if the radio’s on,” Mr. Adams said. “But I want to give my mind to Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath. I know I ought to think about Dow and Nixon and Kissinger and the rest of it, and I can’t. I’d rather cut out paper dolls, look out the window, daydream. I know it’s dreadful, but that is the way it is.”
He left it to Rezsin, who had always understood. It did not in the least frighten or worry her after the cease-fire that the government appeared even worse, not better, than it had been ten years ago.
“We pushed and we pushed,” she said. “So they stiffened.” She knew there were people in Albany who had made fun of her, a middle-aged woman dressed in blue jeans and sweat shirts, but she did not care. It had been many years since she wore dresses or used make-up. It was easier to keep her long grey hair loose. She knew there were people who despised her, were startled by her, or astonished, or thought she was goofy and naïve. The war did not ever go away. It just became other places and other problems.
At the last vigil she had held up a sign that a Quaker had handed her, not even seeing what it said. The sign read: WITH MALICE TOWARDS NONE. It was the wrong sign for her.
“I don’t feel that way at all,” she said. “I see absolutely no reason we should forget or forgive those bastards.”
In his classrooms he went on teaching, but sometimes he tried to poke the students very softly, to feel for a tiny gland that was not there. He wanted them to stand up for themselves. Do not pay $1.50 to the film groups here to see movies that are badly projected and have bad sound systems, he would tell them. Don’t pay, or if you do, go up at the end and say you want your money back.
Or he would urge them to refuse to let the registrar use their Social Security numbers and tie them into the 1984 world system, as he put it, reminding them of their Orwell, which not all of them had read.
“Just tell them they have to stop all that nonsense, I would say,” Mr. Adams said. “But they only answer ‘It wouldn’t be of any use, they’ve got our numbers now, they’ve used them but they wouldn’t tell us.’”
The new students were not ones to complain.
SOME PEOPLE WHO knew and even liked her thought that Mary Jane Nolan Kelly made such a fuss about the war because she hadn’t found a good job with a future and wouldn’t have a baby. Their feeling was that other people no older than she—the Vietnam generation who came of age during the war—had gotten over it and moved on. Mary Jane, however, did not settle down. The war caught and held her like a giant hook going through the chest; she heard Vietnam not as a name of a country but as a word for death and disgrace. She did not know many people who agreed because she lived in Bay Shore, Long Island.
On the night of the cease-fire she said the war had been won by the Vietnamese who had fought us, whose names we would never know. The honor and glory was theirs, she said, the ruins were us. That was the way Mary Jane talked; some people thought it was her Irish blood which made her excitable.
In Brightwaters, Mrs. Yale Solomon wanted to share a gift, which was a case of Piper Heidsieck, to mark the American departure from Vietnam. She and her husband, an ophthalmologist, invited Mary Jane and her husband, Peter, to dinner on the night of the cease-fire; three other people from the peace movement also came. Isobel and Yale Solomon were Mary Jane’s best friends. They were so well known for their long opposition to nuclear weapons and war that at a Long Island bar mitzvah in 1972 one of their four sons was asked if his father was the “Ban-the-Bomb” Solomon. Mary Jane liked that story; it made her smile.
That night she kissed Michael Solomon, the youngest child, harder than usual. He was ten years old. “He had never been alive a day of his life when we were not bombing or killing someone in his name,” she said.
There are a good many people in Bay Shore, a community of forty thousand in the town of Islip in Suffolk County, Long Island, who could not stand that kind of talk or such a peculiar pitch of emotion. She did not have many friends except the Solomons and some others who had also worked as volunteers for McGovern. In 1972, seventy-two percent of the voters of Suffolk County, which takes in the eastern two-thirds of Long Island, were for Nixon, which made it an unbearable place to live, she always said.
At the Solomons’, there was nearly a whole bottle of champagne for each person. That was nice, Mary Jane said, but it had not been a gay, or even comfortable, evening.
The war was the hardest test that everyone in the Solomons’ living room that night would ever have to face, she said, and they hadn’t made it. With each march and each rally, she had grown less hopeful that anything would change.
“It didn’t and it didn’t and it didn’t,” she said. “So we ended up talking to each other because no one else would listen.”
At times she exasperated and even bored her husband, Peter, although he, too, thought the war was wrong. But he didn’t think of it that much, not all the time, as she did. He asked her why she took it so hard and why she felt so guilty. She never knew. Once Mary Jane Nolan Kelly said of herself that maybe “some of the right pieces were not nailed on.”
That night, in Bay Shore, when she and Peter got home, Mary Jane began to look in her dresser drawer for something she suddenly wanted. It was a button that said CAMBODIA NO. She had first worn it in the spring of 1970 when the Americans and South Vietnamese plunged into Cambodia. For the next eight months she often wore CAMBODIA NO but no one really noticed one more button. She had thought of Cambodia as a plump and gentle country where there were small houses on stilts and yellow pagodas. She remembered reading of the confusion and fear of the Cambodians on the day they saw the war come to them on Highway 1, how some had bowed with folded hands to armored personnel carriers while others waved little white flags, unable to look into the faces of the foreigners. On the thirty-sixth day of the bombing of Cambodia by the United States, she put the button back on.
She and Peter met as undergraduates at a small Franciscan university in Olean, New York, called St. Bonaventure. It was a peaceful campus: no sit-ins, no panic, no fury, no threats to burn the place down. The males wore jackets and neckties, women wore skirts. The students were white, Catholic and mostly docile. She came there, not knowing much, from Butler Area Senior High in western Pennsylvania where she grew up, the oldest of ten children who learned early on how to cook, clean, sew, pray and not to be selfish or lazy. She was a pretty girl, very small and gay, with huge blue eyes and blond hair that she washed a lot and let grow very long because Peter liked it. At the university there was a mandatory ROTC program, considered the best route to avoiding a war which no one thought could last much longer. Peter joined ROTC because he felt it was an obligation he owed his country.
Some St. Bonaventure students surrounded the Administration Building with squirt guns to protest the war, but she thought it was a dopey thing to do. In 1967, teaching a class on the New Testament, Father Aeden Duffy, a middle-aged priest who had once been a military chaplain, was asked what he thought about the war in Vietnam.
“We were talking about the Sermon on the Mount and blessed are the peacemakers because they shall inherit the earth,” she said. “Father Duffy told us ‘If Christ were alive today, he would be a Marine carrying a rifle.’ If I had been braver, I would have spit on him and cried out ‘Shame, shame.’”
She transferred to another class, but the memory of what Father Duffy had said, and what she had not done, provoked her for years. Peter, who was in the same class, could not remember any such remark made by the priest.
Peter was inducted in January 1970 and assigned to Fort Sill in Oklahoma as a second lieutenant in an artillery unit. She had been working as an assistant buyer in a department store in Rochester, New York, until they were married on July 4 of that year. Mary Jane was always warning him about the war. “I said to Peter ‘If you ever go to Vietnam, I will leave you. I will not stay married to you, that is my feeling.’ Fortunately, Peter broke his leg playing soccer for the Army, so then they sent him to survey school, not to Vietnam as a forward observer.”
He thought she was worried that he would be killed. But it was more complicated than that: she did not want him to have any part in the death of those small-boned people with black hair who never seemed to grow fat. They lived in a small apartment in a village called Medicine Park because she did not want housing on the base. In Rochester, she had once been on a peace march during her lunch hour, and had gone to the memorial services at the University of Rochester for four Kent State students killed by National Guardsmen.
She never saw the war on television or read much about it, but every day at Fort Sill she heard it. There was the artillery, the big 155 howitzers, firing on the practice ranges, so there was no escape from what she called “the booming and the crashing.” In the summer of 1970, when Fort Sill seemed to swell and shine from the heat, there was a Firepower Demonstration Day. Wives and children of officers sat with them in a grandstand to watch a little parade and see the weapons working. There were old, wrecked cars, painted red and yellow, as targets for the artillery. Everyone cheered, even the very small children, when a car was destroyed.
“All those little babies around us kept yelling ‘Hey! hey!’ every time a car was hit,” she said. “And I kept getting colder and colder, and I was shaking more, because there they were hitting cars but somewhere else those things were going into people.”
Peter was always patient and kind when she acted like that. He liked the Army and working with enlisted men back from Vietnam because he felt it was a challenge to try to help them. After his discharge, at the end of 1971, they moved to Bay Shore. She did not get a job with a decent salary or a promising future, for in the spring of 1972 she went to work as the coordinator for the McGovern campaign when Isobel Solomon said everyone was needed. Peter was not pleased. Their total income for the first ten months of 1972 was $1,300 until he found a job in November. She was rarely home and he complained she was too wound up and working too hard. Peter thought some of the other McGovern workers were in it for a lark, and did not much like them.
Her mother was puzzled and asked Mary Jane why she wasn’t doing anything. Mary Jane, who was working ten hours a day, had no answer. On election night she went to the McGovern headquarters in Bay Shore to watch the results, and a long time later she could still tell you what he had said in the little television speech he made acknowledging his defeat. She had not expected any of it to turn out so badly.
She sat watching television, drinking from a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine, looking at Senator McGovern. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget his face,” she said. “He said that he wanted us to remember that if we had made peace come any closer by an hour or a day, then every bone-crushing minute had not been in vain. I think I started to go down. And somebody came over and held me up so I could see the rest of it.”
In February 1974 she saw Senator George McGovern in person for the first time when he made a speech at Brandeis University. She was startled, then angered by a sign in the auditorium, a big hand-lettered sign: “LIBBY STRAUSS SAYS HI TO SENATOR MCGOVERN.
The sign did it. The students near her, squeezed together on benches, were puzzled by such unhappiness. Mary Jane Nolan Kelly, who was then twenty-seven, did not cry quietly, covering her face. The noises she makes are harsh and loud. That night her face was all wet and some of her hair too. She could not seem to stop.
She thought it was the cruelest of all endings: McGovern in a school auditorium telling the kids not to despair or give up, when none of them looked as if they had ever been tormented—a cool and critical audience who was not pleased with him for losing, and among them, Libby Strauss saying Hi.
“I don’t like to cry, but it’s something nobody can take away from me yet,” Mary Jane said. “They can’t stop it yet. No one can come to me and say, ‘All right. You’ve cried your last.’”
In 1974 she went to a conference in New York sponsored by the journalism review [MORE] too see Dr. Daniel Ellsberg speak. When the panel was finished she went up to him and thanked him for letting the country see what was in the Pentagon Papers. He was polite and shook her hand. She took the sign with his name on it from the panelists’ table to take home. Watergate, the tapes, the prison sentences, the resignation of a President did not make her gloat. Nixon had used up too much of her energy, she said, for hating always made you tired. It all came too late. It did not save a single life. She wondered if the disgrace was our punishment for a war. She did not think it was enough punishment.
“It’s giving Congress too much credit to say they acted on Watergate to make up for the years they did nothing to stop the war,” Mary Jane said. “They felt threatened but they didn’t before because the blood didn’t go on them or on their sons. It would have been easier, it would have taken less guts on a practical political level to stop the war. They could have done it without a lot of clanging and banging.”
She never did meet Father Daniel Berrigan, whom she had admired so much for opposing the war. She thought that if she ever had been able to talk to him, she might have said: “Lead me, I will do anything that you say, what is it we must do?” The change never came. It made her angry when people said they were bored with the Berrigan brothers, that they were men whose time had passed, but it did not surprise her much.
After the war ended in January 1973 and ended again in August after Congress voted on June 30 to stop all bombing in Cambodia and then did not seem to end at all, she still could not look for a job. She was the campaign manager for a Democrat named Tom Downey when he ran for the county legislature, and won. Later, at the age of twenty-five, he became the youngest man ever elected to the House of Representatives. She was not proud of him. His voting record in the House was good, but she thought all Congressman Downey cared about was being in the news. “Mr. Hit-and-Run,” she calls him. She quit politics, saying she was not meant for that kind of work, for caring so much about how people voted. At the end of 1974 she found a job in a large literary agency in New York although she could hardly type a letter; she had never wanted to know how. She still prays to St. Anthony when she cannot find something in the files.
In 1976 she was given a large black-and-white poster of Ho Chi Minh, sent from Bangkok, which she put up over her desk. The face of the dead Vietnamese so upset one of the older women that it had to be taken down.
She and Peter still live on Smith Avenue in Bay Shore, in the little shingled grey house that fills with sea breezes in the summer and is damp in winter. On one wall of their bedroom is an immense sign, meant to be pasted on a billboard, which says McGovern-Shriver. If it were on a billboard, the headlights of trucks would make the names glow at night. Underneath it is the name card for Daniel Ellsberg. She has no intention of removing them.
Their lives are safer now. Her husband has a master’s degree in health care administration and supervises a Suffolk County methadone maintenance clinic. They have a car, an Irish setter, a decent income.
But there are days now when she wonders if she will ever put her own touch on the world. She does not drink Gallo wines—no more Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill—because of the boycott called by Cesar Chavez’ United Farmworkers Union. It has come to that: the things she will not drink, the lettuce and grapes she will not buy. When the troubador, the child of the sixties, Phil Ochs died, it was a death that made her reel. The singer hanged himself at the age of thirty-five. She felt related to him, the man who wrote “Draft Dodger Rag” and “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.”
“I will never be the person I probably started out to be,” Mary Jane Nolan Kelly said.
Yet no one could call her a sad or spent person. Just the other day she was talking about baby oysters being found again in the Hudson River. She was really pleased about the baby oysters.
“The one thing that’s still walking from the sixties is the ecology movement,” she said. “They can’t knock it down or kill it.” Otherwise there was not much left, she thought.
HE HAD ONLY a flashlight to wiggle on the night of the cease-fire. There was nothing else. Earl E. Rhodes, a fifty-seven-year-old bachelor of Durham, North Carolina, did not know quite what to do at first. He did not have a car with a horn he could blow. It was too dark to hold up a sign. He had always made his own, very carefully, on the biggest sheets of white cardboard, taking care that the letters looked as big and black as possible. It meant spending money to have the best marker, but he was always willing.
His favorite sign, which no one could say was inspired by Communists, was SEND LIFE NOT DEATH TO INDOCHINA. The last one he had made was much more daring: IMPEACH DO NOT INAUGURATE THE MAD HOSPITAL BOMBER. But there was not a suitable sign ready for this occasion and it was too dark to show one.
There was only the flashlight.
Once more he walked from Cleveland Street to the corners of Main and Morris, where five streets came together. It was always here, at Five Points, where the peace vigil had been held in a little park. He had stood there many times before, on Thursdays from twelve to one, often the only one to show up.
Mr. Rhodes was alone that night too. There were no pedestrians in that neighborhood. He waved and circled and moved the flashlight and made a peace sign with his other hand. Quite a few cars drove by. Some people honked for peace. He found that quite nice.
After an hour or so he went back to his rooming house, where he is one of twelve boarders but pays no rent in return for doing the chores of a caretaker. It is one of many in an old neighborhood of big crooked trees and dusty cut-up frame houses that have porches and very large cupboards. In his room there is a brown rocking chair, two other chairs that are stuffed, a high and neat bed, with Christ on the cross over it, and the first television set he has ever had in his life. There are some paintings he likes, and the calm of the room helps him to write his poems.
The retired clerk and schoolteacher, the survivor of five nervous breakdowns, the poet and the caretaker, was glad he had not just stayed in his room that night. Other wars had always meant disgrace and isolation, except for this one. He had been a pacifist since 1933, when he was a freshman in a Southern Church College.
In World War II he had been a conscientious objector who had been scorned and put away for not wanting to hurt or kill. He had been kept in three detention camps for four and a half years, places meant to punish and humble men like him. They were called Civilian Public Service camps and were often administered by church groups, although the entire conscientious-objector program remained under essentially military control and was subject to the whims of Selective Service, whose officials, throughout the war, reflected the attitude that such men were criminals. His home had once been in a village called Newport, in the eastern part of North Carolina. He was the son of a gentle, very uncertain schoolteacher whose condition was politely described as high-strung and a high school principal who was a self-made man of harsh and hammered ways. No one in Newport, aside from his parents and an older brother, tried to understand why he refused to fight. Other members of the family were aghast. The death of a first cousin, who had joined the Navy, raised their level of bitterness and kept it up there, like a black and crooked painting on every wall.
Twelve years after World War II ended, he came back to Newport to nurse his mother, who had Parkinson’s disease. But there was no forgiveness from them. “Some of my closest and dearest relatives wouldn’t speak to me,” Mr. Rhodes said. “They were so intolerant. They still are. Still.”
He was never violent or threatening during his breakdowns. He simply could not sit still, or lie down, as other people did. He could only keep walking, like a man with secret orders never to stop moving. Once he had been told that his illness was an acute and chronic anxiety with panic agitation.
But to see him is not to think this at all. He looks like a small American walnut of a man, with his precisely parted white hair and firm voice and lovely manners. He remembers trying to defend himself from his father when he was very small, but how the man would whack and hit him with almost anything, even a coal shovel, while his mother could do nothing but plead softly for it to end. She was more afraid than the child.
“I remember my father killing chickens,” Mr. Rhodes said. “I used to run and hide because the chicken was me. I would feel like that chicken.”
It had weakened and wrecked him for more than five decades, making him unable to teach, unable to work, unable to write as much as he wished. The most he could do was lead a small life, taking tiny and careful steps, staying away from what he called conflict or crisis.
But when he moved to Durham in 1969 things began to happen to him which he liked. He came to know young Quakers in the peace movement, who told him about bombing and antipersonnel weapons which are meant to injure, not kill, because the wounded are more trouble than the dead. He saw Senator George McGovern on television, and was so moved and so pleased, he rather rapidly composed two poems and sent them to Washington. He even tried to work in a local McGovern for President campaign office, where they had posted one of his own poems on a sheet of red paper as well as the senator’s acknowledgment.
“There were telephones with many buttons on them. I didn’t know how they worked,” Mr. Rhodes recalled. “I knew so little. Another thing—they had this map showing where people could register. I could not read the fine print. I could imagine people calling up to know where to go. I wouldn’t be able to tell them.”
He spoke to a lady about his nervous troubles, and she excused him. No one was unkind. He joined the peace vigil and went to demonstrations. Once he was even called upon to make a speech at an antiwar rally in April 1972. It was most frightening, but he had tried to speak very clearly, in a distinct voice, so that everyone could hear.
“I did not know if I appeared absurd, but I wanted to participate,” Mr. Rhodes said. “It was not noisy or raucous.”
For what he most feared and disliked were belligerent crowds who shoved and screamed. He had never pushed anyone or been insulting. No matter how dreadful the war was to him, he never said, “Down with us,” or wanted the government overthrown.
Some of the old fears began to lift. It was not just the tranquilizers which he had been taking for years. He did things which would once have been unthinkable and made him ill. He had, for example, organized a fast against the war for more than fifteen people. For nine days he ate nothing, only drank fruit juices. The twelve dollars he saved—later he was not certain if the amount was not larger—had been donated to a fund to help Vietnamese children.
The American Friends Service Committee in Durham went to Washington in January, and he went, too, for the first time. There had been a huge gathering in a church. For the first time he heard Joan Baez sing. He had never heard such a voice. It made him shiver. It made him want to get on his feet and holler his pleasure, but of course he did not. The next day he went, with others, to visit their congressmen, wearing his best suit, a brown one, and a good necktie. Representative Ira Andrews, newly elected, made some people in the delegation unhappy when he told them, rather wearily, that he would ask for a special briefing on the war. A red-headed woman told him sharply that neither the Pentagon nor the State Department would be the place to go to for the truth about Indochina. The face of Representative Andrews relaxed when Mr. Rhodes rose and spoke of their desire, as his constituents, that he vote to end the war, or to, in any way, help shorten it. Representative Andrews looked relieved as he listened to such a polite man who looked so respectable, whose demeanor was so pleasing.
In the office of Senator Jesse Helms, also newly elected and a man Mr. Rhodes feared to be of a reactionary disposition, an assistant told the group that they could not be given a hearing.
“He said the office was too small and that we would disrupt the work,” Mr. Rhodes said. “By that time I felt my self-confidence coming along, so I spoke. ‘Sir, we have come, some of us, hundreds of miles because of a feeling. We wish to express our thoughts and feelings about this matter, and if it is customary to give priority to the clerks in your office . . .’”
So the assistant to the senator heard them. Before they left, Mr. Rhodes shook his hand and sent his best wishes to the senator, whom he considered less than perfect but still a human being.
Long after the cease-fire, before the Congress ended the bombing of Cambodia on August 15, 1973, he still held vigil at Five Points. He had learned to speak his mind. A man walking by looked annoyed at the group and said: “Well, what will you have to complain about when they stop bombing Cambodia?”
Earl Rhodes broke the silence for once. “Sir, we are not complaining. We are witnessing. It is you who is complaining.”
Sitting in the brown rocker, he said to me that the last few years had made him a happier man than he had thought he could ever be. People were beginning to speak out and to question. That was a marvelous thing for him to see. “I think my age saves me from the depression and cynicism that the young people might feel, for they see so little seemingly come from their efforts,” he said.
It was different for a man of his age who could remember how he was raised and who had seen blacks working for old clothes and warmed-over food. He could still see them, sitting on the doorsteps, with the Blowing Flies around them, the name Southerners used for the flies that left their eggs or maggots on meat, the flies that always were close to the poor.
The last few years in his life had been brightening, Mr. Rhodes said. Brightening years, he called them.
I NEEDED TO find other women who knew what I knew, and more. I needed to talk to women who had seen unspeakable things, who were without self-pity, who had faced the liars and lunatics, who had survived all of it and, in surviving, made a difference. The second summer back, although she did not know my real reasons, Lillian Hellman said okay, come to see me. I was to do an interview, but I arrived on the wrong day and stayed for lunch, stayed for dinner, which she cooked, and stayed for breakfast. In Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, the house with its rosebushes is on the edge of the ocean. In the living room is the high, stiff sofa with a carved wooden back which came from the set of her third play, The Little Foxes, which opened in 1939 when Lillian Hellman was quite young. Years later she taught the writing of fiction, not of plays, because she thought drama students were apt to be the show-offs. She was at Harvard in 1961 and again in 1968, at the University of California in Berkeley in 1970, at Hunter College in New York two years after that. She had been close to students in the antiwar movement, and gone on liking and caring for them long after those defiant and excited days.
“I never thought I’d live to see any kind of student movement in America. I don’t think there had been one before,” Miss Hellman said. “It was a great pleasure to see. There was a good generation in the sixties. The student movement is completely dead—I realized that at Berkeley—but I still think it deserves a lot of credit and did a lot of good.”
She said: “It took me quite a while to realize they meant what they said. I don’t think I ever recognized its importance. I know I didn’t. I am sorry to say I learned a kind of caginess during the McCarthy period.”
The fifties were a damn dull time, except for McCarthy and his purges, with a dull and stupid generation, she said. Her own generation had not been too great either. It annoyed her in the summer of 1973 that so many people were beginning to say they were terribly tired of everything they had been through in the last ten years, tired of Vietnam and tired of Watergate.
“Yes, but I wonder what they are tired from,” she said. “What have any of us done to be tired? What are we tired of? We wear out very fast when it comes to something we don’t like.”
Some students surprised her in the early 1960s by asking about the Spanish Civil War—she had supported the Loyalists, the anti-Franco forces, and written from Spain—and later, in the same decade, there were students curious about the most bitter period in her life. It was the years, in the fifties, when the late Senator Joseph McCarthy publicly accused hundreds of Americans of pro-Communist activity and disloyalty to their country. She became well known for her refusal to give any names of any persons to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Others had.
“We forget everything. I think as a people we can remember almost nothing. That was one of the reasons I was sure the McCarthy period was going to be over, if one just had the courage to wait it out. Because we don’t remember anything. We have no national memory,” she said. “Maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe it’s a mark of a young and vigorous people. Maybe it has great virtue. The day he was over, he was over forever. I think we’ve already forgotten Vietnam. It’s over there. It’s as far back as Korea, except for the poor bastards who were hurt.”
Sometime that afternoon, before she went for a swim, Miss Hellman asked me how many men had died in Vietnam. I told her.
“My God, that’s the size of a town,” she said.
The total number of Americans who died from January 1, 1961, until April 13, 1974: 56,555. There were 7,198 blacks. Sixty-four percent of the men who died in action were twenty-one years old or younger. Dead officers: 6,892. Dead enlisted men: 49,639.
There were two kinds of death: 46,229 men died from enemy action or, as the military describe it, hostile causes. Deaths from non-hostile causes, which are those that did not result from combat injuries: 10,326.
If a man’s death happened because he ran into the blades of a helicopter, was shot by mistake, fell from a watchtower, sank in a river, was blown up by his own explosives, the Army said, in effect, his death had nothing to do with combat. The implication was that the war was not the reason.
The most common hostile cause was gunshot wounds: 18,447. Multiple fragmentation wounds: 8,464. Grenades and mines: 7,428. Non-hostile deaths by drowning or suffocation: 1,017. Suicides: 381.
Among the soldiers who died in Vietnam:
| 12 | were seventeen years old |
| 3,092 | were eighteen years old |
| 14,057 | were twenty years old |
| 9,662 | were twenty-one years old |
General William C. Westmoreland, who had constantly asked for more American troops in Vietnam, said in October 1975 that the press was sometimes “untruthful, arrogant and hypercritical” and that it “needs to examine itself as never before.” He said he had no animosity toward the press as an institution.
“I did not exactly cherish some of the verbal flak my colleagues and I had to endure in Vietnam,” the general said when he was on a panel of prominent people who had themselves made news at the Associated Press Managing Editors Convention in Williamsburg, Virginia.
He complained of inaccuracies in coverage of the war. For instance, he said, there were not 55,000 combat deaths, a figure he thought was widely circulated and reprinted.
The general pointed out that about ten thousand of those deaths could be attributed to accidents or natural causes. That many young men would have died on the highways or in other ways even in the States, the general said, but he added that to observe this was not in any way to minimize the losses “which we all regret.”
In January 1976 the Department of Defense issued an updated fact sheet called “In Connection with the Conflict in Vietnam,” which included casualties incurred in the Mayaguez incident. Total deaths due to hostile and non-hostile causes were raised to 56,869. It gave: 2,802 who died while missing, 80 who died while captured or interned, 798 men listed as still missing as of December 31, 1975. The wounded totaled 303,704. Hospital care was required for 153,329.
The Department of Defense does not give a breakdown of the serious injuries, so no one knows how many blind, how many burned, how many paralyzed, how many amputees there are.