II

FAMILIES: TOGETHER AND NOT TOGETHER

When American troops first arrived in Vietnam most of them were sent to the 90th Replacement Battalion at Bien Hoa, twenty-two miles northeast of Saigon, for what the Army called “in-country processing.” One of the first things they were ordered to do was to write their parents immediately saying they had arrived safely in Vietnam. Later, when they were no longer new troops, soldiers wrote home to their mothers to send them all sorts of things: garlic salt, machetes, wire cutters, wading boots, tennis socks, pickles and certain knives. Many of the mothers sent cookies; I saw a lot of chocolate chip cookies. In the rear, on the big bases, the PXs seemed bloated; at Cam Ranh Bay soldiers could buy Koolfoam pillows, Shag Time bath mats, brightly colored oversized beach towels, Chun King chow mein and garlic sausage. Vietnam was never the same place for the million six hundred thousand men who were sent to Vietnam.

There were always soldiers who found it hard to write home; it required too much concentration, it was too hard to explain what was happening or not happening, they did not know how to say it. In the field the soldiers wrote the names of their girl friends and their wives on their helmet liners or on the soft jungle hats—they were Phyllis, Monica, Susie, Wendy, Linda, Maryanne. They wrote too on the camouflage covers of their helmets: F.T.A. meant Fuck the Army. Peace, Peace, Peace, said the helmet covers, Love, Love, Love. It was sometimes a gaudy army: the soldiers wore love beads and peace symbols, crosses and bracelets woven out of black bootlaces, folded scarves or woven headbands around their foreheads, tinted sunglasses.

It was a defiant yet dispirited army. They were against the war, not because of political perceptions, but because it took away too much, it put them in danger, and they hated the nagging, the bullying, the hassling of the military. Everywhere we waved to each other by giving the peace symbol, the V, which meant getting out. The infantrymen—the 11 Bravos—liked to wear soft camouflaged hats; some hung the rings of grenades above the brim to show how many they had thrown. It was not permitted for the men to wear these hats when they went to a stand-down area or to the big bases. It meant they were out of uniform. It made them hate their superiors, who became the immediate, the visible enemy. On a C-130 from Cam Ranh to Saigon, just after Christmas, a Specialist 4 named James Blunt in the 23d Division, the Americal, kept talking about his boonie hat, as the infantrymen called it. Nothing he owned was so important. We were packed in as usual, shoulder to shoulder, knees almost touching in the long rows of web seats facing each other. Almost everyone except Blunt was going to sleep; there was no snoring, they all dozed quietly, like men who had been chloroformed.

“They’re always trying to take it away from me but I won’t let them,” he said. Blunt was twenty-six and his platoon had called him the Old Man. The hat was discolored and smelled damp. “One lifer at Long Binh said to me that I couldn’t wear it on the base and I told him I’d kill him on the spot if he tried to make me. He looked kind of startled. They won’t let me wear it lots of places but I don’t give a fuck. I do my job—I won’t let anyone else walk point, only me, that’s the way it is. This here”—the little hat was lifted up for me to see again—“is a kind of memento. There’s my wife’s name. She’s my second wife. It’s Donna, see. Well, when I wear it walking point, she’s kind of leading me, see.”

When Blunt the Old Man was wounded the platoon got the hat to him in the hospital.

In Saigon, I sent a telegram to the United States for a Lieutenant Alsup from Asheboro, North Carolina, whose wife had just given birth to a daughter whose name he did not know. The lieutenant was worried; his tour in Vietnam was almost over but he felt he should stay longer to be with his platoon to keep them alive. If the platoon got a new officer, a fool, or one who wanted medals, the men might be pushed hard to find the enemy and engage them. The lieutenant did not want any of his men put in greater risk. No one used the words “die” and “death.” A man was hit, not wounded. If he was killed, they said wasted or blown away. He bought it, or he bought the farm. He was greased or lit-up. Death was the Max. Each year the language of the soldiers changed a little as the new bunch came in.

Even now, so many years later, I still have the scrap of paper the lieutenant wrote his message on. It says: “Michelle, I am thrilled about the baby stop I live day to day thinking of you stop I cannot bear to even peek two days ahead for there are so many left but not as many as before stop I love you Bill.” But that day he could not make up his mind: to stay with the platoon or to go home to his wife.

The soldiers had a year in Vietnam, sometimes a little less. Over and over they counted each day gone and all the days left to get through. They counted all the time and told you fifty days were left, ten days, three days. The Army counted everything else, insisted that all things be counted, until the numbers meant nothing—but still the counting kept on. Sometimes there were contests for the troops which were based on points to be won and points that could be taken away. One contest in the 25th Division in 1969 called “Best of the Pack,” was for the best rifle and the best weapons platoon in the 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry, which was known as the Wolfhounds. One award was a two-day pass for best weapons in Dau Tieng; the other, for best rifles a three-day pass in Cu Chi. “The platoon will also have exclusive permission to wear a special marked camouflaged jungle hat when not on operations,” the announcement said. “Points will be awarded for the following”:

5—	Per man per day above 25 on an operation
10—	Each possible body count
10—	Each 100 lbs. of rice
15—	Each 100 lbs. of salt
20—	Each mortar round
50—	Each enemy individual weapon captured
100—	Each enemy crew served weapon captured
100—	Each enemy Body Count
200—	Each tactical radio captured
500—	Each individual weapon captured
500—	Perfect score on CMMI (inspection)
1,000—	Each prisoner of war

Points will be deducted for the following:

50—	Each U.S. WIA (wounded)
500—	Each U.S. KIA (killed)

If a man was killed, his platoon was penalized and had less of a chance to win the pass.

Many men were desperate to get out of the field, but until they were sick or wounded there was nothing they could do except go crazy, but there was punishment for doing that. I knew some who drank bad water hoping to get a fever of unknown origin, others would not take their malaria pills. There were men who felt terrible, but it had nothing to do with their bodies. At Chu Lai, headquarters of the Americal, there was a mental hygiene clinic and a psychiatrist who saw men on the base and those who had been on the line. He had a tiny room: a table, two chairs, and another chair where I was allowed to sit in a corner. Each man had ten or fifteen minutes with the psychiatrist—a captain—who was young and had never seen combat. He had been drafted under the Berry Plan, which allowed him to finish his residency in psychiatry before induction. At any rate, the doctor let me sit in the room and take notes. The soldiers were asked if they minded this, but all they cared about was talking to him. Not one of them said they were ill from facing their own deaths, they only said how something was wrong. It did not take long to realize the doctor could only follow Army procedures, assure them that it was normal to be under stress, and let them be sent out again. Perhaps there was nothing he could do but give them ten or fifteen minutes, and some pills.

A platoon leader said he had been very dizzy and almost fainted during an attack and that an enlisted man had taken over. The doctor said that when you suffered from hyperventilation, it was good to do breathing exercises with your face inside a paper bag. The soldier looked hard at the doctor, turned his head to look at me, then we both looked at the doctor again.

He said: “Doc, we were taking fire.”

“Yes, I understand, but how do you know this won’t work unless you try it?” the doctor said. He told the platoon leader how to do the breathing—puff puff out, puff puff in—and that was that.

There was a very pale boy with blond hair that stuck up in back. He could not speak distinctly and for quite some time the three of us sat in the little room waiting for him to be able to begin. His trouble was that his best friend had been killed, but since then he had seen the best friend twice, standing close to him, smiling, looking as he had once looked. The doctor decided the boy should be put to bed for one day and one night and sedated so he could sleep.

“I want to call my parents,” the boy said. He was not told yes or no. The psychiatrist said it was okay to let the boy go to bed for a while, but that was as far as the Army could let him regress. After that, the boy would have to go back on the line again.

MORE THAN MOST men he could make the other soldiers laugh. But he did not really joke or act playful. What came from him were huge, leaden outpourings of menace and of mockery. The other soldiers liked to hear it; there was nothing else to entertain them. Boredom glazed their dread and made their faces sink. In January 1970—when the war was nine years old and he was twenty—Michael Garrod of Palatine, Illinois, carried a light machine gun, the M-60, which weighed twenty-seven pounds. He was a grunt. This is what an infantryman called himself, but the officers preferred “trooper.” What the soldiers did—the walking, the searching, the hiding, the waiting, the ambushes and the shooting—was known as humping. Humping the boonies, they would say, hating it. To meet the enemy was to have contact, to be in a firefight. It did not matter if the boonies was elephant grass or a rubber plantation with slender, sticky trees, if it was the great tangled blotches of jungle or flat, scratchy land. It was all of these things and more. After a few months the canvas in their boots turned a sickly orange color. When the boots looked old and deformed the men loved them at last. They were proof of the ordeal.

In an army of big men, leaving such footprints as no one had seen before, Michael Garrod was very big indeed. He wore out five pairs of boots in Vietnam. He had worked as a bricklayer after high school. In Vietnam he was called Cy for Cyclops, a name he chose because it seemed so fierce. Around his neck Cyclops wore a jumble of small charms on chains: a religious medal, a ring, a peace medallion and a shiny little swastika that looked like a bright and pretty thing until you came close. No one knew, no one cared, whether he wore the swastika as a joke or because it was an ancient symbol to the Buddhists, whom he had been sent to kill, and was often seen on Vietnamese graves.

Cyclops talked a lot, even to strangers, and he liked to say that ever since he could talk he could joke. A favorite theme of his was how the Army was screwing the men. “A thousand screws a day,” Cyclops would bellow. The others did not disagree; soldiers are rarely bored to hear how pitiful and insane their lives have become. At the end of that January, when Alpha Company was sweeping north of Saigon in an area called War Zone C, Cyclops was no more or no less what he had been for quite some time: an unhappy man of great competence with weapons. He did not trust the M-16 rifle: it fired too fast, the rounds were so small you could hardly see where they went. But the M-60 moved him, it earned his love. Sometimes he would pat the M-60 as a hunter might lightly slap a favored dog. He was not eating much. At home he weighed two hundred and fifteen pounds; Vietnam took away thirty of them.

“We fight for each other. We’re really tight here,” Cyclops said. “Nobody else cares for us.” They often spoke like this: in the killing zone, among their own, they were not lonely or selfish any more.

There was nothing special about that day; the heat stuck to the soldiers as if it was paint. They rested by a road in the shade, their helmets off. Only then could you see that their foreheads were not yet lined. Cyclops had a crew cut, and wore very dark sunglasses when he was at ease and did not have to shoot. He was quite frightening-looking, but all of them could be. There were two stories he told once again. The other soldiers laughed, for they made fun of civilians, that strange and fussy race of people who were always somewhere else, clean, rested, fed, fat, unknowing.

The first was about his older brother, Steven, who had spent six years in college and in graduate school. The two brothers were drafted at the same time. It was expected that Steven would be the first to go to Vietnam and that Cyclops would then not have to go. The military did not require two brothers to serve in Vietnam at the same time unless one of them volunteered. The reason was always clear: they both might be killed. But Steven bolted from the Army and went to Canada with his wife; he was AWOL for thirty-two days.

“Instead of staying in the Army and getting some good friends, he fell in with a bunch of shaggy peace demonstrators who talked him into it,” Cyclops said.

This was the joke: Steven wrote Cyclops for a letter to show the military that his brother was already in Vietnam, in case he decided to give himself up. Cyclops did not answer the letter. He did not even keep it.

“Man, I burned that letter,” he said. Steven then turned himself in and received lenient treatment. “He’s in Germany now, sitting around, having a ball, and I’m here,” Cyclops said in War Zone C. “But I’ll get him. I’ll make him suffer in one minute what we have to suffer in a year in this rotten place.”

But the insistent clamorous dispute inside him kept leaking out; he always began to defend and explain the man he wanted to punish. “He was just telling the government to get fucked,” Cyclops said with approval.

But you had to stop communism somewhere, you really did, and Cyclops said he did not have it in him to run to Canada. So many of them said this; it did not matter whether they believed it or not. The Army did not reward men for trying to find the sense, the reason, for what they were doing; the idea was not to think at all, not to have a poet with the M-60, not to have a platoon that read Carlos Castaneda. It was all right for the clerk typists because not as much depended on them.

The other story he told was about the head of a dead man, a skull. He sent the skull as a Christmas present in 1969 to his mother in Palatine. It cost $1.50 by APO surface mail. There was a Big Red One patch stuffed between the stained, uneven teeth.

“I didn’t get a letter from her in two months,” Cyclops said. “She didn’t like it.” That made the men laugh, too. They could almost see the woman’s face, the way her mouth and eyes would change, when she saw what she was pulling out of the box.

Mrs. Garrod said it was quite a shock. More than three years later she still remembered the nastiness of it. “You know, I just couldn’t take it out of the bag, I just laid it down and put it on the floor,” she said. “I couldn’t touch or look at it. I had to wait until Bud came home.”

But Bud, her husband, had only laughed and put the skull on a shelf in the living room. It stayed there for a long time. Mrs. Garrod became quite used to it; her younger son was always a practical joker. She adored him, she forgave him, she wanted him back. It was typical of him to come back from Vietnam, without a word of notice, pulling up in a taxicab on an August afternoon.

“When I grabbed him his whole body was shaking,” Mrs. Garrod said. “It took him three days to eat something. He just couldn’t eat.”

Mr. Garrod asked me if I wanted to see the skull. Mike—no one at home called him Cyclops—had taken it back. The Garrods lived in a ranch house; perhaps it looked so grand because Mr. Garrod did some of the work and knew what should be done. He was a construction engineer, an architectural draftsman, who liked to make his own wine and wanted you to try it. They had built a studio apartment for Mike right next to their house. He put the skull by his bed, with a decal on the forehead. It said: THE GRATEFUL DEAD.

His platoon had wired an ambush; a Vietnamese had tripped it and died for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Americans called it a free-fire zone and it did not matter what the Vietnamese had wanted there, what he had hoped to find, if once it had been his village. They robbed him.

Cyclops said: “He was a Viet Cong. He had money. All of us got money out of it.”

It was not a confession, he did not seek atonement. The dying and the killing had not bothered him at all, he said. Friends would come into the room and see the skull and go Wow, wow, what’s that, as if they did not know. In the Big Red One he had gone out on shotgun operations where six men were dropped into an area for a week, not to fight but to find out enemy movements, then call in the howitzers, the cobras, the gunships to do the work. “We saw trees become toothpicks in front of us because we saw somebody moving out there with pajamas on,” Cyclops said.

After Vietnam he had married a woman named Jan, who had written him so often when he was in the Army, but it had not worked out. Cyclops did not want to talk about it. He would tell you about the war, about dead friends, about torturing prisoners with cigarette butts, but he would not speak of her or why she had to go away. “She was something, she really helped when I was there,” he said. “It wasn’t her fault. I had so many diseases. Jesus, the diseases. Bamboo poisoning, two ingrown toenails, urinal infection four times!” More than that he would not say; the subject made him sad and sullen.

“I don’t want to use Vietnam as a crutch,” Cyclops said.

Before the war he had used grease on his hair and hit people and busted up stuff. Now the hair is soft, fine, long; it falls like strange ferns around the big, rough face. The skull was not his only souvenir; he has a collection of hats worn by Vietnamese soldiers on the other side, and there are his photographs of captured and dead Vietnamese, women and men, neatly arranged in a scrapbook with white covers and clear plastic pages. On one page you see the foot of a Vietnamese woman who was badly wounded, then shot through the head by an American lieutenant. Another shows a Vietnamese woman on the ground, the rounds of an M-16 in her legs, looking at the camera. A GI stands behind her. Her face looks bruised and her long black hair, in a bun, has not yet come loose. The Americans were always taking photographs. They could not stop themselves; it was an obsession they could not explain. At home the pictures went into scrapbooks arranged by young women, usually their wives. If the films had been developed on a U.S. Army base in Vietnam, any part of a photograph showing a wound or mutilation was blacked out.

I had it wrong, Cyclops said, he had nothing at all against the Vietnamese killed in the ambush. Nothing at all against the man whose piastres the platoon took, the Vietnamese whose head had been mailed to that big comfortable room.

“He must have been great to take all that shit he was getting from us,” Cyclops said.

But he did not want to get rid of the skull. I thought we should bury it in the backyard. The Vietnamese who were deprived of burial or a fixed grave were called “wandering souls.” There was great pity and worry for them. On a day of remembrance even the poorest Vietnamese offered prayers, food, flowers, incense for the wandering souls who could never rest. The graves of their relatives and ancestors were so important to the living. There was a poem Luong knew, written by the great Vietnamese poet Nguyen Dzu, about the wandering souls. He recited bits of it once in a café in Hue. It was most dreadful, Luong said, for a Vietnamese to be buried when his body was not whole.

Cyclops did not listen as I said all this, how I believed that the Vietnamese would have their revenge on us. He needed the skull. I thought it would bring bad luck. There was nothing to do.

CYCLOPS DID NOT ever attack his brother. When he was out of the Army in 1970, he went to see Steven, who lived in Birmingham, a Detroit suburb, with his wife. Cyclops described Steven as a high-strung man, a quiet one, who never raises his voice. “It was good, a very good reunion. I didn’t feel like I had felt before. I really love him,” he said.

During his tenth, perhaps eleventh, month in Vietnam, when Cyclops had been transferred from the Big Red One to the Americal Division, when the war became so very much worse for him, he thought of what Steven had wanted to do by going to Canada. “I kept saying to myself, ‘If I had to do it all over again, I would have went his route.’ I wish I wouldn’t have went to Vietnam. I didn’t care for the country itself.”

The brothers did not talk about the war. Nothing was asked, nothing was told. It occurred to Cyclops that if Steven had been the one to go to Vietnam, he might not have made it back.

Their father: a large, hearty man, a buck sergeant in World War II, wounded by shrapnel in December 1944, hospitalized for four months. He wanted both his sons to enlist during the Vietnam war so they would get “a better shake.” His boys are very different, he says; Steven took to the books and Mike was the rebel. He was proud of Cyclops, who had been promoted from private to buck sergeant and won a medal, for the father was once sure he would end up in the guardhouse. Both men had had basic training at Fort Polk, Louisiana, both were in the 1st Infantry Division, both were in combat. It made Mr. Garrod glow.

“Mike and I talk about combat, my war and his war,” he said. “I’m glad I was in the 1st. Mike was in the mud, all right, he was in the middle of it.” What happened to Steven—the student, the gifted potter, the gentle man—made him uneasy. It was Mr. Garrod’s belief that Steven had been manipulated by the “peace people” into going to Canada. A very bad bunch.

“They were totally against this country,” Mr. Garrod said. “Totally against.” Mrs. Garrod said nothing. I thought she nodded, but her head did not really move.

The homecoming of Cyclops had been dramatic at first. “I’ve seen him sleeping—shortly after he came back I used to see him sleeping—and he’d be talking about things, yelling ‘Get it over there, get over here,’” Mr. Garrod said, laughing. “He was still fighting it. That’s the way he used to talk. Boy!”

The father did not stay in the room to hear Cyclops speak of the war, answer the questions, push himself back into War Zone C, Happy Valley, LZ Stinson. His mother stayed, but she had heard it all before, none of it was new: the ambushes, the snipers, the booby traps, the Chicano who once tried to take some chocolate chip cookies away from him.

At home he stopped paying attention to Vietnam, the protests and the fighting. The night of the cease-fire Cyclops was at the home of a girl friend, watching a National Basketball game with the Los Angeles Lakers, when the program was interrupted. He was indifferent about the interruption. “It wasn’t peace with honor, it was just that we lost,” Cyclops said. “We lost the war. They have a goal, they have the initiative, something in their hearts that says they’re going to win. They don’t even have anything to fight with; compared to us they’re throwing pebbles.”

But he wanted no part of it and he did not care what happened. The people or their history did not matter to him. “I hated them,” he said of the Vietnamese. He meant all of them, except for a few prostitutes. One girl had given him a thin metal bracelet which he still wears. The women gave him decent memories; with them there were lots of laughs, he said.

When he was in Vietnam, Mrs. Garrod thought that if he was killed and she was given a medal, she would refuse it. She remembered hearing of a young woman who refused to accept the flag from her husband’s coffin, and she understood this. She saw the big demonstrations on television. “We used to see those things on TV and we’d say well, that’s good, bully for you, but it won’t do a bit of good, and it didn’t,” she said. “It never did.

It took a while for Cyclops to calm down after the Army. He traveled around—to Memphis, to Detroit, to Gainesville and to Daytona Beach. There were a few mishaps. In Palatine he once tried to carry off a red velvet and wrought-iron chair from a local spaghetti joint called the Imperiale. In Daytona Beach he made a racket trying to kick down the door of a woman’s apartment and the police were called. He had been drinking Ripple, a cheap red wine; in fact, he had finished two bottles before he kicked the door. In California he went to Oakdale to see a friend from Vietnam who made his living by feeding earthworms. In Riverdale he went to the address he had for another veteran who had driven a deuce and a half in Vietnam. But the house had burned down; there was a burned basketball in the swimming pool in back and furniture piled out in front. The surprise was that his friend still lived there although his mother had moved out. The house burned down because his friend had started to cook French fries and then fallen asleep watching television.

“The French fries blew up. About a week after the house burned down he smashed his mother’s car,” Cyclops said. “His mother told me that. We lived in that house for four days—he and a buddy and me. We were cooking in the fireplace. We went through about three loaves of bread. It was great. But the house smelled of smoke, there was smoke every place. But he lived there and he had a little dog, a puppy.”

He missed the men he had known in Vietnam; the ones at home had stayed the same and it was hard being as close to them. Cyclops worked as a laborer for $245 a week; it was heavy work and boring, but he did not seem to yearn for much more.

The last time I saw him he was drinking margaritas in Chicago, wearing shoes with high thick heels that made him walk in a slower, more uncertain way. He was tired of being interviewed, tired of so much talking about the war, and the margaritas made him sleepy.

The trouble was that he had not made up his mind. It did not seem important, not even necessary, to have a distinct or coherent point of view. Vietnam was something that happened to him, it was not happening anymore, he did not want to keep going over it. What he could not say, but what he felt, was there was nothing clear or sensible to say about the war. It was too weird, too strange, it did not neatly fit into an explanation.

He was angry about the fuss made over the returned prisoners-of-war. “They were clean when they got shot down, clean and well fed,” Cyclops said. “Way up in the air, they dropped all that tonnage. They just happened to get out of the air.”

It did not impress him that many of the senior officers who were prisoners described how they had been tortured by the Vietnamese. “So what?” he said. “We did it to them.”

There are things he remembers and wants back. There is the M-14 rifle, which he liked best of them all, and his M-60. Before he went to Vietnam he was a hunter; he shot rabbits in the backyard and birds with a shotgun. “I’d like to shoot up old cars, maybe an old tree,” Cyclops said. “Instead of using a chain saw, just shoot the tree down. Shoot something, see what it does to it. That’s one thing the war taught me, really. But I’m not into shooting something alive. Not even an animal.”

In July 1973 Cyclops wrote me a letter enclosing the photograph from his war scrapbook of the Vietnamese woman on the ground with the shot-up legs. All you can see is her face and the GI legs behind her. The woman is not screaming or pleading, she is just looking at the camera. I don’t know why I wanted the picture, but now I have it in a frame next to a photograph of Luong, his wife, Mai, and their three small daughters. The woman is in shock; the bad time has not yet begun for her.

In his letter Cyclops said that he had been traveling around a lot: “I’ve had a heavy thing hit my head and my life—my wife died in Oklahoma City two weeks ago and it is something very hard to conceive—I try not to think about it but it’s a real mind-wretcher.” He signed the letter “Love, Mike” with a little peace symbol by his name. I assumed his wife was killed in a car crash. I wrote him I was awfully sorry. That was the last I heard of him.

TWICE HE CAME to my room at the Hotel Continental and sat in the old green armchair. He had been a soldier in the army of North Vietnam. It was how he thought of himself. Luong arranged the meeting. He knew of the soldier through relatives of his wife, who knew the aunt of the boy, an aunt who had left the north to come south many years before. The green chair was strange to him. At first he was suspicious of its fat arms and high back and its deepness, for in all his life he had known only benches or straight-backed wooden chairs.

His name was Tien. He had been captured in a “liberated” village in Quang Nam province a few months earlier while he was convalescing from malaria. He was put to work in the rice fields while recovering. His face was very round, not like the boned, sharp faces of northerners; it was the illness that made it swell so much. His hair looked very dry and stood from his scalp like the bristles of a used-up brush. He could have been sixteen. He was twenty-one.

So ill had Tien been that he could not walk quickly up the stairs of the Continental.

It was his legs that startled me, not the illness that had almost killed him. From his feet to his knees there were scars from the ulcers and sores no man could avoid moving down the Ho Chi Minh trail through the jungles of Laos. For three months, in a company of one hundred and fifteen men, he had made the long march south. “We walked eleven hours a day and the longer we walked the more bored and morose we became,” Tien said. “There were many things I missed. First I wanted a real cigarette. Then I wanted to see my mother, to be close to her. And then what I wanted badly was a whole day of rest.”

After his capture he had been flown to Tam Ky in a truc thang, the Vietnamese term for helicopter. The words mean up and straight. Tien had felt a fear he could hardly describe. “The first Americans that I had ever seen were the two pilots. They looked unbelievably tall. So very huge. But they smiled down at me. I don’t know why. Some of my panic went away.”

I could not imagine chopper pilots smiling at any prisoner, but that is what he said. Then Tien asked if he could ever ride again in a truc thang. I said it was not likely.

He had dreaded being beaten by the Vietnamese who interrogated him at Tam Ky, but they were nonchalant and gave him a Salem cigarette. He was even allowed to contact rich relatives in Saigon who had left the north many years before, and it was decided that he would declare himself a hoi chanh, an enemy soldier who defected under the Open Arms program and was not treated as a prisoner of war. Tien had not defected to anyone, of course, he had simply been too weak to run away from a South Vietnamese platoon.

The last time he had seen his parents was on a June day in 1968 in his village, all that he had ever known, which was fifty miles south of Hanoi. “They gave a small feast for me the day I left home to go into the army. My father, who is a farmer, was unable to speak. There were no words in his throat. My mother could not help weeping. And I wept, too. As I left, she said: ‘You must go, I know that, but try to come back.’”

In his village there were no men who had come back. There were no letters from any of them. Before 1968, men going south had been granted fifteen-day leaves, but after the Tet offensive these were canceled. No family knew, or wondered aloud, who had been wounded or killed. The soldiers who did return acted like men with stirring futures. They would boast about their weapons; it made the children feverish and dreamy to hear such talk.

A member of the People’s Force, Tien was given a Russian-made K-44 rifle. Every day the villagers expected American bombings. Boys and old men passionately perfected their marksmanship. Targets were decoy F-105 U.S. jets, made of wood or bamboo, hanging from the branches of trees. Farmers practiced during their leisure time; so did students.

“The young did not take the war seriously. The only opportunity for us to use our guns was when American planes flew over. We were really disappointed when they did not come or if they only bombed another village in the neighboring area.”

Mrs. Nguyen Thi Ho, a widow with five children, was a most prominent figure in the Fighters Mothers Association in his village, which all women were required to join. Tien remembered how she said to the others: “If all three of my sons are sacrificed in the battle, it is not the end of the family because I still have three grandsons, and at least one will survive the bombings of the north. If my three sons die, I will suffer as a mother but I will also be proud of what they did.” Not everyone spoke that way, felt that way, he said.

All Vietnamese children in the north belonged to a Labor Youth force, were lectured twice a month by village cadres or political agents responsible for government propaganda. Over and over again he was told of crimes committed by the Americans and the victories of their soldiers in the south. After each meeting the hatred felt by Tien for the Americans soared and made him desperate to do something. “I thought that it was easy to fight against the Americans because even simple villagers could shoot down American planes flying over the north,” he said.

Yet when his turn came to join the army, Tien ducked it. It was easy to do. Many others also avoided conscription, he said, usually at the insistence of their parents. For while the older people never openly said what they felt, they feared seeing their sons leave, since none were coming back for years, if ever.

“In my hamlet I knew of at least eight other eighteen-year-old boys who delayed going into the army, but the grownups all pretended they knew nothing. Some boys just moved to other villages to live with relatives. Others put off the army by reporting to the village chief. You could say ‘I am planning to get married next month’ or ‘You see, my mother is very ill, so although I really want to go into the army this very minute, who will care for her?’

“I did not intend to delay joining the army, but my parents insisted I postponed it,” Tien said. “I could not decide what to do. On one hand, I knew it was my duty to report to the army, to fight alongside the Vietnamese people against the American imperialists, to go south to see what it was like. But I did not want to leave my parents. I was afraid of being away from home because I had never been away from home before.”

Finally, Tien, with a friend, had walked two miles from their village to the district town to report for duty. After four months of basic training in Hoa Binh province, the young soldiers were restless to start their war, nervous that it would be over too soon.

It took ten days for Battalion 1071 to cross the Annamite mountain range to reach the border of Laos. They passed by tree trunks on which thousands of men before them had stopped to carve their names, their villages and the dates of going south. Even battalion and company commanders had carved their names, Tien said, and the sight of those trees warmed him and made him feel less alone. I tried to smile to show him yes, I could understand that.

It was 6 A.M. when they finally reached the frontier. The soldiers crossed a rope bridge over a ravine. Go quickly, quickly, they were told, for the Americans often strafed and bombed here. Do not look back. But Tien did look back, he had to, and all he could see of his Vietnam was a blurred mountain range in the mist. He was told to move faster. Many of the men disobeyed, as he did, turning their heads for the farewell look.

The trail, to the surprise of Tien, who expected to see a wide road, began as a small lane winding through a bamboo forest. At first, after the days of wetness crossing the mountains, the soldiers were pleased that it was hot and dry in Laos, and Tien threw away his sweater so there was less to carry. The company moved apart from the battalion in case of B-52 bombings, but in the first days they were not fearful men.

Each soldier had a diary and could hardly wait to fill the blank pages. “The first day we cooked our rice in a rush in order to have time at night to write the first page in our diaries, how we felt being on foreign soil,” Tien said. “I wrote pages and pages about the terrain, the scenery and my impressions of being on foreign soil. Some of us exchanged our diaries to read. A few wrote poems. We were all tired but too excited to sleep easily that night.”

On the tenth day on the trail, the American bombers came.

The soldiers had heard about the B-52 strikes from some wounded soldiers who passed Tien’s company on the trail. These men were Viet Cong, or southerners, who told of the terrible sounds and destruction of the giant planes. “One man told me ‘You will never hear the approach of the B-52s. Suddenly there will be great undreamed-of noises around you, but still you never see the planes. If you are in the middle of where the bomb lands, you will die. If you are close, you will be deaf for the rest of your life.’” But an older veteran cheered up Tien by telling him, too, that the mountains and forests in Laos were so wide it was very hard for the B-52s to hit men. “He said to me, smiling, that the Americans used to kill trees instead of us,” Tien said.

On that day when there was a B-52 bombing it killed two and wounded four. It was the beginning. The effect of the first bombing, Tien felt, made the soldiers move more slowly, as if, in some way, they had all been hurt. The cadres saw this. A few days later the entire battalion grouped together on the trail for their first meeting. “The cadres took one of the poorest soldiers and praised him in public for his efforts to keep up with the other comrades even though he was so small and feeble,” Tien said. “Each leader of a company, of a platoon and of a squad then selected, and praised aloud, one man in his group for commendation by the battalion commander.”

The only Laotians the North Vietnamese saw were waiting on the trail to trade their cucumbers and bananas for the salt or needles and thread or combs of the soldiers. The North Vietnamese never saw a Laotian village. Tien had hoped to learn something of the Laotians and their lives. He never did.

There were two possessions that Tien, and his friends, loved and cherished in the long days of the march. One was his diary—it is lost now—and the other was his hand-carved walking stick made of song, a special kind of bamboo in North Vietnam. All the soldiers had competed to make the most artistic sticks. Most men carved their names, while some preferred the words Hoa Binh, which means peace. “The stick was precious to me because it was one of the few personal possessions I had,” Tien said.

The soldiers needed their sticks to ease their exhaustion while walking. In small passages the sticks helped them keep their balance. They could also be used to measure the depth of a spring they had to cross. When a tired man wanted to rest, he propped the stick up under his pack, so for a little while the weight was less.

“We called it our third leg. There was even a song sung by soldiers about these sticks,” Tien said. “I sang these lines many times.” And he did once more, in a high small voice, looking at the ceiling:

“It trains the legs for the long march
without letting them get away.

It trains the spirit to go forward only,
never backward . . .”

When Tien was tired of talking, when we could hear no more, I showed him my Philips cassette player and we listened to Country Joe & the Fish.

But not even Luong, who could dance back and forth between the two languages, could quite explain that music or why the American soldiers liked it. Tien thought the cassette player was a marvel, and looked at it carefully.

On the trail the soldiers passed different North Vietnamese who were stationed there. Liaison scouts met them and guided them down another portion of the paths, telling what dangers to expect, where hiding places such as caves or bunkers were located. The soldiers were often warned by the scouts to beware of what they called “leaf mines.” These antipersonnel mines, dropped by U.S. planes, were no larger than a pack of cigarettes wrapped in nylon cloth that was the color of the brown earth or leaves on the ground. When stepped on, they could seriously injure a soldier’s foot—and he was more trouble to his unit than if he was a corpse. This was the point.

“We walked eleven hours a day, always on the alert for antipersonnel mines, and the longer we walked the more bored and morose we became,” Tien said. “So we became quiet and paid less attention—we just walked, walked, and sometimes the cadres started singing and we sang, too. But after the song, there was quietness again, only the sound of our footsteps and the wind running through the trees.”

In his dreams he was a small boy again, standing next to his mother leaning against her, as she cooked.

The soldiers slept in hammocks, taking turns to cook their rice. They moved for seven days, then had one precious day for washing their clothes and their bodies. Their daily ration was 0.7 kilograms of rice, dried lettuce, dried pork or beef or dried fish. On rest day, as they called it, the men would catch fish by tossing a grenade into a stream, although it was prohibited. Only officers—or cadres—had cigarettes. The soldiers smoked water pipes with the tobacco they brought with them from the north.

Their company commander had sugar, tinned milk and vitamins as well as cigarettes, but his men did not resent it. “If you had better food, you had that much more responsibility,” Tien said matter-of-factly.

His company survived three B-52 bombings. The worst enemy turned out to be the growing malaise of the soldiers, their exhaustion and malaria. “We were all fed up with walking—we wanted to get into combat,” Tien said. “I stopped paying attention to the beautiful landscape—all my concentration went into keeping on walking, lifting my feet. Sometimes I saw nothing around me. Nothing. We passed many ravines, many waterfalls, many springs, but we thought only of one thing: washing our sweat off.”

The soldiers had medicine, water-purifying pills and antimalaria pills. Tien said the malaria pills were not good. Out of one hundred and fifteen men in the company, twelve were so seriously ill from malaria they dropped out and never finished the march. Every man had malaria by the time the battalion entered the south, through Kontum province in the Central Highlands. The battalion split up; Tien’s company went to Quang Nam province and separated into groups of five and six men. He was assigned to a “liberated” village to recover from his malaria. There was no time to say goodbye to his dear friends.

He did not easily speak of them, for the separation still pained him. “There was Hong, who was twenty-four, skinny but stronger than all of us. He was in love with his fiancée and every night he would stare at her picture. She would not marry him until he came back from the south when the war was won. Hong thought that meant only a year to go,” Tien said. “The other soldier was eighteen. Ngoan used to dream all the time, he sang well and he wrote fine poetry. He was not much interested in politics, but people excused him, saying, after all, he was an artist. He hated Westerners as we did, but there was always a little shade of doubt in his voice when he spoke of war. He told me that his two older brothers went south three years before. He felt they were both dead.”

Once, on the trail, they passed a group of wounded southerners—soldiers in the National Liberation Front—who teased them. “Some of them told us ‘Go fast or the liberation will be finished before you get there,’ and this worried us very much. One man told me that it was easy to fight the Americans. ‘They have very weak eyes,’ he said. ‘If it is sunny, they cannot see well.’”

Tien never did find out if the Americans were made helpless by the sun. He never fired an AK-47. His malarial attacks, which lasted two to three hours, were so intense that two soldiers had to hold him up as the company kept moving.

In Saigon, for the first time in his life, he owned a wristwatch and a pen. He wore white shirts. What Tien really wanted was to have his diary and his walking stick again, and to talk with his friends, the soldiers Hong and Ngoan.

He said wistfully he would like to find out where his unit was and rejoin it. But he knew it was not possible, he knew it very well, yet still he made this request. His relatives sent him to be an apprentice in a Honda repair shop, but he stayed listless and sad, a man of longing and few words, who did not seem to understand where he was.

THIS IS HOW Mrs. Joseph Humber of Westborough, Massachusetts, found out what had happened to her oldest son, called Teddy.

THE SECRETARY OF THE ARMY HAS ASKED ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP REGRET THAT YOUR SON, SERGEANT JOSEPH E HUMBER, JR. WAS WOUNDED IN ACTION IN VIETNAM ON 19 OCTOBER 1969 BY FRAGMENTS FROM A BOOBY TRAP WHILE AT AN OBSERVATION POST. HE RECEIVED WOUNDS TO BOTH LEGS, BOTH ARMS, THE CHEST, FACE, ABDOMEN, AND GROIN AREA WITH TRAUMATIC AMPUTATION OF THE RIGHT LEG BELOW THE KNEE AND TRAUMATIC AMPUTATION OF THE LEFT LEG ABOVE THE KNEE. HE HAS BEEN PLACED ON THE VERY SERIOUSLY ILL LIST AND IN THE JUDGMENT OF THE ATTENDING PHYSICIAN HIS CONDITION IS OF SUCH SEVERITY THAT THERE IS CAUSE FOR CONCERN. PLEASE BE ASSURED THAT THE BEST MEDICAL FACILITIES AND DOCTORS HAVE BEEN MADE AVAILABLE AND EVERY MEASURE IS BEING TAKEN TO AID HIM. HE IS HOSPITALIZED IN VIETNAM. ADDRESS MAIL TO HIM AT THE HOSPITAL MAIL SECTION, APO SAN FRANCISCO 96381. YOU WILL BE PROVIDED PROGRESS REPORTS AND KEPT INFORMED OF ANY SIGNIFICANT CHANGES IN HIS CONDITION.

KENNETH G WICKHAM, MAJOR GENERAL, USA, C-2179, THE ADJUTANT GENERAL, DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Then she found out more, and still more.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION RECEIVED STATES THAT YOUR SON, SERGEANT JOSEPH E HUMBER, JR. CONDITION REMAINS THE SAME. HE IS STILL VERY SERIOUSLY ILL. PERIOD FURTHER HOSPITALIZATION IS UNDERTERMINED AT THIS TIME. EVALUATION IS NOT CURRENTLY CONTEMPLATED. YOU WILL BE PROMPTLY ADVISED AS ADDITIONAL INFORMATION IS RECEIVED.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION RECEIVED STATES THAT YOUR SON, SERGEANT JOSEPH E HUMBER, JR. HAS ARRIVED AT THE 249TH GENERAL HOSPITAL, CAMP DRAKE, JAPAN. UPON ARRIVAL HE WAS REMOVED FROM THE VERY SERIOUSLY ILL LIST AND PLACED ON THE SERIOUSLY ILL LIST. IN THE JUDGMENT OF THE ATTENDING PHYSICIAN HIS CONDITION IS OF SUCH SEVERITY THAT THERE IS CAUSE FOR CONCERN BUT NO IMMINENT DANGER TO LIFE. PROGNOSIS IS FAIR. HIS MORALE IS GOOD AND HE CAN COMMUNICATE. EVACUATION TO THE UNITED STATES IS CONTEMPLATED IN APPROXIMATELY TEN DAYS. YOU WILL BE PROMPTLY ADVISED AS ADDITIONAL INFORMATION IS RECEIVED.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION RECEIVED STATES THAT YOUR SON, SERGEANT JOSEPH E. HUMBER, JR. HAS BEEN EVACUATED FROM VIETNAM TO CAMP DRAKE, JAPAN. ADDRESS MAIL TO HIM AT THE MEDICAL HOLDING COMPANY, 249TH GENERAL HOSPITAL APO SAN FRANCISCO 96267. YOU WILL BE PROMPTLY ADVISED AS ADDITIONAL INFORMATION IS RECEIVED.

REFERENCE MY TELEGRAM OF 27 OCTOBER 1969 STATING THAT YOUR SON, SERGEANT JOSEPH E HUMBER, JR. ARRIVED AT CAMP DRAKE, JAPAN. HE WAS NOT REPEAT NOT EVACUATED TO CAMP DRAKE. HE WAS EVACUATED TO CAMP ZAMA, JAPAN. ADDRESS MAIL TO HIM AT THE UNITED STATES ARMY HOSPITAL, CAMP ZAMA APO SAN FRANCISCO 96343. PLEASE ACCEPT MY SINCERE APOLOGY FOR THIS INACCURATE INFORMATION. YOU WILL BE PROMPTLY ADVISED AS ADDITIONAL INFORMATION IS RECEIVED.

YOUR SON, SERGEANT JOSEPH E HUMBER, JR. HAS BEEN EVACUATED TO VALLEY FORGE GENERAL HOSPITAL PHOENIXVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA. YOU WILL BE NOTIFIED OF HIS ARRIVAL BY THE COMMANDING OFFICER OF THAT HOSPITAL.

Many such telegrams were composed, all with instructions to Western Union not to telephone the messages. All of them used the same clear, correct and faintly solicitous language developed and refined by the Department of the Army for such purposes.

In Westborough, Massachusetts—a town of fifteen thousand in eastern Massachusetts—a notice to call Western Union for delivery of a telegram was left at the Humber house on October 30, 1969, at 8 A.M. No one was home. It was a small two-story frame house on South Street which the Humbers had been renting for five years. Stacia Humber was already at work that day; for fifteen years she had been employed as an assistant launderer at the Westborough State Hospital. Her husband, Joseph, had worked there as a handyman, but when I visited the family in late April 1973 he had been retired for some years—and it did not seem to suit him. His expression was suspicious and abused; when he spoke it was in short claps of thunder. His very bright blue eyes looked watery and accusing.

On that Tuesday when the notice of a telegram came, Mr. Humber was in Essex Falls, Vermont, visiting the couple’s oldest daughter, Rosemary, who was married to a medical student named William Notis. It was Billy, one of the Humbers’ three sons, who took the notice to his mother in the hospital and went with her to a telephone booth. Mrs. Humber had a lot of trouble. The Western Union office in Worcester told her they had no telegram for her. When she called Westborough no one in the Western Union office there could locate the telegram. Billy was a great help in keeping her calm and providing dimes. Finally she spoke to one man who seemed to have a more helpful spirit.

“I got real upset,” Mrs. Humber said. “I said ‘Look I have a son in Vietnam and this telegram is worrying me.’ I demanded that something be done. He was gone for several minutes and came back and finally said ‘Oh yes, I located the telegram.’ I asked him to read it to me. He said ‘Ma’am, I’d rather not.’ ‘What do you mean you’d rather not?’ I said. He said ‘I think it would be better if you read it yourself.’ I said ‘In other words, it’s bad.’ He said yes.”

Teddy, who is Joseph Humber, Jr., had enlisted in the Army before he finished high school, after eleven years of education. He did well and was promoted to sergeant. He was an expert marksman and a parachutist. He was in Vietnam with the 173d Airborne Brigade for four months when that October he stepped on a mine near Bong Son and lost most of both his legs. At that time he was twenty years old. In November 1972, at Thanksgiving, he came back to Westborough to live at home, after surgery and prolonged hospitalization at the Valley Forge General Hospital in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, and additional surgery and hospitalization at the Veterans Administration Hospital in West Roxbury; he also went to the V.A. Hospital in Jamaica Plains. Teddy said he was on his third pair of artificial legs.

All the children—except Jeffrey, a twenty-year-old college student—were at home that Saturday night when we talked. Billy, twenty-three, said he had wanted to be a conscientious objector but after Teddy was wounded he enlisted in the Army. Rosemary, who had two children, was there with her youngest child, a plump and docile baby. Kathleen, the youngest Humber child, was eighteen and also a student. We sat at the dining-room table, stitched together by Mrs. Humber’s cheerfulness and calm, her desire to make the occasion seem normal to the caller. Anyone looking in at us might not have guessed that all the questions and all the answers, all the memories and all the opinions, had to do with Teddy’s legs. They did not mind talking about it. Only Mr. Humber, who seemed the smallest and most frail-looking member of the family, glowered for no particular reason. The others did not look at him when from time to time he spoke.

The walls and floors of the house were not very thick. It was easy to hear Teddy moving about upstairs and taking a long time to come down the staircase, making slow, uneven thumps as he walked. His wheelchair was in the narrow hallway. Once seated, the ruined part of him hidden below the table, he was a pleasant-looking man, with dark-brown hair and deep eyes, big shoulders and strong arms. That night he wore a checked shirt with the sleeves buttoned. He rolled up the left sleeve to show the arm which still had dozens of tiny black marks made by shrapnel that had not yet worked its way out of the skin. Before the Army he had wanted to be a forest ranger, and now it was not certain what he could do. He said he had liked the Army.

“No, I would never have discouraged him from enlisting,” Mrs. Humber said. “I never discouraged any of my children from enlisting. Just hope for the best.” In World War II she had joined the Women’s Army Corps and liked it. This may explain why Mrs. Humber is a neat and well-organized woman, why she kept the telegrams about Teddy, his papers and records filed in order in a Christmas box.

“I feel bitter about it, but not that bitter,” Teddy said. “I mean, after all, we did save a lot of lives over there and we did save the country.”

After he was wounded, Mrs. Humber said very brightly, everyone in Westborough was wonderful, wanting to console her but not quite knowing what to do or how to do it. She is an attractive white-haired woman, with a nice smile, who suggests that she has spent years learning how to keep propped up and cheerful. People in Westborough had started a collection to send her to Japan so she could visit Teddy in the hospital at Camp Zama, but then the telegram came that he was being sent to Valley Forge.

Kathleen, who liked being interviewed more than the others because she had never seen a reporter, was a lively, long-haired girl who held nothing back. She remembered, could not forget, how she had told her aunt when Teddy went to Vietnam that she was sure she would never see him again as he had been. “In the same condition” is how she put it, wanting to be tactful. Even so, Kathleen was not prepared for the news of Teddy when it came. “I think a lot of people were afraid. They didn’t know what to say. You’d be on the street and they would face you, they didn’t break down or anything, but they were afraid to come into our house.”

Teddy did not seem to always know what the others were saying. He seemed busy with something else; perhaps it was pain. He sat at the table without moving, often without hearing. Once when the baby started whimpering, Teddy lifted his arms to take it, but the child was passed by him and quickly handed to someone else to cuddle and soothe.

“I think I can be very truthful,” Mrs. Humber said. “I think most people will tell you the same. We realized there was a war on, we thought it was horrible, but actually you don’t realize how horrible it is until it involves one of your own. I think any mother will tell you the same thing. Even the people in Westborough didn’t realize the horrors of the war until Teddy was killed.”

No one noticed that she said Teddy was killed. This is what I heard.

Rosemary said her brother was the first casualty in Westborough, which she described as “a middle-class, an upper-class bedroom town” where ninety-five percent of the students in Westborough High School go on to higher education. The people who were training for jobs, who were headed toward a profession, did not go into the war, she said.

Mr. Humber suddenly came to life, and erupted. “Money talks,” he said. “I’ll go back to the old saying: the rich man gets richer and the poor man gets poorer.”

“Money talks,” Teddy said. “People with money, people going to college on an athletic scholarship or something, they went into the reserves.”

He knew nothing of the long history of Bong Son, a coastal city in Binh Dinh province, or what Americans had been there before him and the 173d. Few soldiers ever did. They did not care. The war was cut into pieces that never came together for them; all that soldiers knew was what they saw and felt in the months they were there. But in 1966, when Teddy Humber was in high school, the 1st Air Cavalry Division fought its longest and largest operation around Bong Son. The campaign, known as MASHER/WHITE WING, lasted for forty-one consecutive days.

There is a big black volume, a congratulatory record, of the history of the 1st Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam—Memoirs of the First Team, it say—that calls the Bong Son campaign a success. “The statistics of the operation were impressive: 1,342 enemy killed by the Cav, with an additional 808 killed by Free World Forces. Five of the nine enemy battalions engaged were rendered ineffective and three field hospitals were taken,” the Cav “yearbook” says. No American casualties during MASHER/WHITE WING were given. It was always that way. The names of the different operations are in big black type, those foolish names the generals so loved: SHINY BAYONET, MATADOR, MASHER/WHITE WING, CLEAN HOUSE, CRAZY HORSE, WHEELER/WALLOWA (“the NVA never knew what hit them”). Even President Lyndon Johnson found some of the names grating. In talking to senior American and South Vietnamese official after the issuance of a joint communiqué at their Honolulu Conference, February 9, 1966, President Johnson spoke his mind. “I don’t know who names your operations,” he said. “But ‘Masher.’ I get kind of mashed myself.” The name WHITE WING was added as a precaution against an unpleasant, or squeamish, public reaction.

It was Binh Dinh province, with its long history of resistance against the French, which became the focus of American hope early in 1966 for their pacification program. But year after year, despite the American occupation of it, Binh Dinh never became a place they could overwhelm and change to be what they wanted. The number of dead Vietnamese and the refugees grew: Binh Dinh was never pacified.

Teddy Humber knew nothing of this, or even which side had almost killed him. It was not so strange for a soldier to be unsure. “It could have been a dead round,” he said matter-of-factly. “It could have been planted by an American.”

“I think people over there began to live a much better life as a result of the war going on and our boys being there,” Mrs. Humber said. Teddy did not contradict her. No one in the family called them Vietnamese, only “those people” or “people over there.”

There was still shrapnel in his eyes. He had headaches, Teddy said. But all agreed that the Army had given him marvelous medical care; all praised the Army for keeping him alive.

“Yes, the Army—but the V.A. is very bad,” Teddy said. “The people think they are doing you a favor. Even now you go into a V.A. hospital and they will give more attention to a World War I, World War II or Korean veteran than to a Vietnam veteran.” Then he told a few stories about the V.A. hospitals he knew, how in the ward the most helpless depended on the other men to assist them, how sad a place it had been, how uncaring the staff was.

Teddy said he was against war, that he thought everybody was against war, and if they were not, they should be locked up. “But those people, they came to the United States for help. If somebody came to you to ask for help and if you thought it was worth it, you’d help them. That’s what Kennedy did. Then the United States got more involved—in my estimation the politicians and everybody started to prolong it because the country was making money. America was making money on it.”

Mr. Humber brightened. “Money talks,” he said. Billy wanted to explain why he had been a member of the Baha’i faith, which he described as a religion of Persian origin that believes in all the prophets and is against violence. His allegiance to the Baha’i had diminished when he was at a community college and had so much work. Mrs. Humber smiled sweetly as Billy went on; she said she tried to be open-minded when it came to the younger children. Mr. Humber looked furious.

“I was against the war and I was for the war. I had a personal grudge against the war because it hit the home front, it hit my brother, okay?” Billy said. “If I had really done what I wanted to do, I would have probably gone over there and shot every one of those people over there myself. But, then, obviously, I was still against it, so there was a conflict. I didn’t know which way to swing.”

Rosemary said we certainly had no business telling another country how to run their country, but that the antiwar movement had not helped or even made a difference. This reminded Mrs. Humber of something unpleasant that had happened when Rosemary’s husband graduated from medical school at the University of Vermont in May 1972. She could not get over the sight of some of the demonstrators, although they were few in number. “They were dressed as Chinese, with grey faces, no, white faces, whitish grey,” she said. “With hunched backs and old dirty bandages. Dressed as Chinese, apparently the Communist Chinese people.”

Rosemary corrected her mother: the demonstrators were supposed to be North Vietnamese “who were being tortured by the Americans.” The demonstrators played a death roll on drums, she said. They shrieked and groaned. They carried fake guns. They fell down.

“I had a camera so, oh my, without thinking, I took a picture,” Mrs. Humber said. “There were eight, maybe ten, of them. I think they were young people but they appeared to be very old people. It was eerie, it was frightening, they looked so horrible.”

“We were appalled,” Rosemary said. “I think there was no reason to demonstrate at this particular graduation. They only chose it because they knew there would be news media there and they could get attention.”

Mrs. Humber said it certainly wasn’t called for, especially during such a happy occasion. “I was upset because it was something I wouldn’t do, and I wouldn’t want any member of my family to do anything that violent,” she said. “We all have our beliefs but we don’t express them in a way that would hurt people. It was very, very wrong.”

Teddy said people should be able to express themselves freely but without violence. Mr. Humber said there were a lot of Communists in the United States making trouble. He said it twice.

“Outside of the family we try not to express our feelings,” Mrs. Humber said. There was silence. Then she said it was nice to have a family in troubled times. “Together but not together. It keeps you going.”

“On the porch, as I said goodbye, Mrs. Humber suddenly looked less cheerful and serene. She had her head down. A few months later I went back to leave her a plant. Mr. Humber came darting out of the house as if he expected savage intruders and then disappeared again. Teddy leaned out of his bedroom window. His face looked strange and excited. “I’m busy,” he called out. I said that was fine and went away.

You kept on seeing Bong Son in the wire service stories from Vietnam, the stories that no one ever read. In January 1975 North Vietnamese forces attacked three hilltop positions west of Bong Son. The military command in Saigon said the enemy fired six hundred shells at government positions, then followed up with an infantry attack. Reinforcements moved in and drove back the attack, the command said. Bong Son fell on a Friday; there was no fighting.

It was ten years after MASHER/WHITE WING.

STACIA HUMBER HAD many things to say when I saw her two years later. The family was no longer in the house on South Street. She and her husband lived in an apartment, but they were moving out because she and Mr. Humber, after thirty years of marriage, were separating. Mrs. Humber had retired from the laundry and at the age of fifty-six wanted to start over. The marriage had not been a tranquil one, she said.

“I think it was worse for the children,” she said. Teddy and the other children approved of her decision. Billy had finished college and married a nurse. Rosemary’s husband was a doctor on the staff of a good hospital and they now had three children. Jeffrey had married and gone into the Army. “That’s my third boy; he’s been in for a year,” Mrs. Humber said. She regretted that he was not pleased with military life. It had something to do with some training he wanted but was not getting. Kathleen had quit college, gone to work for the telephone company in Boston and then joined the Air Force. Rosemary and her husband were heartbroken, Mrs. Humber said, but Kathleen wanted to “advance.”

Her most cheerful news was that Teddy had been married on May 26, 1975, to an eighteen-year-old girl named Bonnie Ryan, whom he had been seeing for a year and a half. “You wouldn’t know him now,” Mrs. Humber said. “Bonnie gets him up and out every single day. So far, so good.”

Only Billy had attended the wedding ceremony, for Teddy had not wanted the entire family to come. At the reception for twenty-five people, all the Humbers had been there. She showed me the color photographs: Teddy with a mustache, standing up, a white rose in his lapel, his hair cut, in maroon trousers and a striped jacket. He looked tall next to his wife, a tiny, dark-haired girl whom she described as ambitious.

“The state took her away from her mother when she was twelve,” Mrs. Humber said, “and placed her with foster parents. Bonnie met Teddy through a priest who was counseling her. We had such problems with Teddy. I used to rush home at times and never know what I would find. If she sticks by him, we’ll have no more problems. He had nothing to live for, you see; a child needs more than the love of a mother and father . . . He’ll always be in pain. The stumps still bother him. He has headaches. But when his stumps blister he treats himself. He hates the hospital. He’s scared to death in them. They’re not very nice to him—well, a little nicer in West Roxbury than Jamaica Plains, but they have no compassion at all for these Vietnam boys.”

The collapse of South Vietnam, the television films of a ruined army and of refugees were depressing. She thought that Teddy was resentful, but of course, his wife Bonnie didn’t realize what it was all about. “Teddy is the type of boy that shows no emotions, he was always very quiet,” Mrs. Humber said. “But there was so much sadness, the bombed people fleeing their homes, totally poverty-stricken. All those people coming here. America’s a lucky place for them. They could never stand on their own.”

The Watergate conspiracies, the jail sentences of important men in the government, the resignation of a President had been more shocking than Vietnam, Mrs. Humber said. Her husband came in as she was saying once again how much Teddy had liked the Army. “He wanted to reenlist, he enjoyed it and was doing so well,” she said wistfully.

There was nothing wistful about Mr. Humber, who said no son of his would ever go off to war again. He glared. “I went through it once with one boy. I don’t care what the President says, they’ll stay right here in the United States,” he said. “If it costs me the last red penny I got.”

Then he began to cry. He kept looking at us as the tears went down his face. He did not wipe them away, blow his nose or cover his face. He did not seem to know he was crying. It was not over for Teddy either, he said. “The doctors told me they don’t know where they’re going to stop cutting,” Mr. Humber said.

His wife protested that she had never heard the doctors say any such thing, but it was no use. Her husband gave her a dreadful look. Mrs. Humber said she didn’t quite know what she’d do if another war like Vietnam meant her other sons would be called up. “I wouldn’t demonstrate,” she said. “I’d go along with it and hope for the best.”

Mr. Humber had not stopped crying when I left. He seemed to be talking to himself.

WHAT IS YOUR methodology, a famous professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology asked me when I said I was writing a book on what the war had done to Americans. He did not see the joke when I told him half the book would be blank, to show there was no effect at all. Twenty-four states, I said, three years of interviews. He said it did not seem a precise or serious way to go about it. Most of the time I wandered about, talking to those who would talk to me. That is how I found Weasel in Michigan working in his backyard. At first I made a mistake and thought we had met before, on Highway 13, or at the Rockpile, when he was in filthy fatigues and wanted so much to sleep for two days in a bed with clean, cool sheets. Weasel was never there. It is a mistake I often make. A neighbor, who was separated from her husband, said Weasel was an angel, that he often came over to help her with her car, and that because he was so nice she did not mind at all the way his backyard looked, although some others in the neighborhood minded very much.

Weasel liked wearing a big-brimmed black hat, a dusty and banged-up thing, when he worked outside. The yard looked at first like a junk heap: there were beams and sickly-looking cars raised up for surgery, and lots of metal things lying about. The business is called Weasel’s Towing. He also does wrecking. Perhaps it is the deep, scuffed hat, the long and very fine brown hair, a deeply ruffled sapphire-blue shirt Weasel often wears that gives him the look of a man on the run, a reckless and romantic quality on a street where nothing else is a surprise. Weasel can even use a blowtorch, wearing that blue shirt, without fearing that the sparks will burn his sleeve or skin. You have to know what you are doing, he likes to say. “I love to work, the harder the better,” Weasel said. “In the army I worked KP like it was going out of style. I did it for thirty-eight consecutive days.”

They began to call him Weasel early in school because he had a way of sliding out of things, although it is not clear what bored or displeased him, except for sitting still, perhaps, and grammar. Weasel talks in long, fast plunges, holding very little back, but finding it hard work to go much beyond the first bare outline of an idea. “Progress can’t presume without war,” Weasel said. “We’ve got to have the rich make war for the poor to fight. It’s a hell of a way to put it, but there you are. Since we’ve had the war in Vietnam we’ve had more people working. There are more jobs ’cause more guys didn’t come back. That is what we call progress.”

Weasel wondered if I was the squeamish type. He spelled it out: everyone cared for one thing—it was called money. Their lives went into the getting and the spending of it, see? Men in his city did not hate the war, they hated being out of work, Weasel said. Ten thousand six hundred of them were laid off at the plant that spring; it was worse than the draft.

Nothing in his voice indicated mockery, sarcasm, wonder or sadness. It all works out fine in the long run, Weasel said. Two or three men he had known were shot up in Vietnam and one was killed, but their names did not come back to him. “Well, he died for a cause, didn’t he?” Weasel said of the dead man, not wanting an answer. “The only thing that upsets me about the war is the draft dodgers. Those guys that went to Canada were just scared. Maybe the Communists proved a point: we’ve got more of them than ever right here.” It was those Americans who disgusted him, Weasel said. He spoke as if the war—which he saw as a very important test of moral and material superiority—had not gone well because of them, the surrogate enemy.

Talking to Weasel was like watching an interview on television. The question goes out, the person responds, the face is before you, the voice is clear, the speech is simple. But what you hear is language you cannot understand, as if it were baby talk in Polish or Cantonese.

Why should men want to fight a war which, according to his theory, was conceived by the rich for the poor to fight? This was the question. But Weasel moved on, saying it had always been that way, that it made for progress.

Weasel is twenty-eight years old and the father of three children. He has had two wives, three ceremonies. The first was seventeen when they married, and there is a second wife, described not unkindly by Weasel as a Polack on drugs, whom he married twice. Now there is a small brown-haired girl, who wears shorts even on cool days, who carries their son, an amiable and alert child on her hip. A hillbilly, Weasel said fondly of her, and a good housekeeper, but he does not think he wants to go on marrying.

“I never went out on my wives,” Weasel said.

This is how it went so often for me: people could not talk for very long about Vietnam any more than they could talk about the weather and the reasons for it. Asking them how they felt about the war, I have heard stories about termites, the evil of welfare, diets that did not work, poor bus service, abortion, the horrible costs of feeding cattle and teenagers, busing, crime, useless back operations, the evil of welfare, whether hair dyes cause cancer, how hard it is to pick tobacco by hand, the danger of eating certain fish, crime, the trouble with a car called Capri, busing, why Coca-Cola costs more than beer, ugly marriages, crime, and even how liquid vitamin E and butter can be rubbed on the arm of an addict to get rid of needle tracks. Sometimes I do not sleep well at all, wondering what it is that I am finding out and why some people insisted that after Vietnam nothing would ever be the same again.

Weasel said his earnings were four hundred dollars a week; fifty dollars is payroll-deducted, he said, for child support and is divided equally between his former wives, for each has a child. Weasel’s parents had four children. They divorced and each married again. His father had three more children. Weasel left home at the age of thirteen to work for a farmer at seven dollars a week. “When everything here is going too fast I think I’d be happier on a farm,” he said. Most of the time it goes too fast for him.

He lives in a city of 85,000; more than thirty thousand work for General Motors.

There had been ugly incidents and small but intense agitation about court-ordered busing, but Weasel did not speak of this. There had been very little overt reaction to the war. It was like the weather; people accepted it. He did not much like the controversy he knew it had aroused.

“It’s a shame America is being put to dirt,” he said. “Not nobody ever helps us at all.”

He was drafted in 1967 and sent to Alaska with the 108th Engineers in the Quartermaster Corps. The Army was a challenge, Weasel said, for any man as competitive as he is. “I took pictures of everything I did,” he said. “Everything.”

He wanted me to see his house, anxious that I admire the crinkled, tufted, black imitation-leather of a couch, and two chairs, in the living room. Above his bed is the only cheerful and conclusive document Weasel may ever have: it is an honorable discharge from the United States Army, in a frame under glass.

A stepbrother named David, who is nineteen, drove with us back to Detroit. He had a big, dreaming, wide face and a low voice. He and Weasel liked driving around, they did it all the time, David said. He was in the Army on his way to Germany with the 1st Division, the Big Red One, as men have always called it. David had been told the way to get along with the Germans was to bargain with them over the prices in shops. He means to be nice and to make friends. At Fort Knox, David heard older men speak about the war in Vietnam: sharp and ugly scraps of stories whose beginnings and endings he does not know.

“The reason most everybody smoked a weed over there is because nobody could stand all the time to see some kid come up and blow himself up with a grenade,” David said. The children would try to kill GIs. Vietnamese did not mind dying, which made it harder for the Americans. “See, the Vietnamese never really had anything nice, so when they see a pine box, when Charlie sees a pine box, he goes crazy to get in it.”

Weasel had been talking about Walt Disney, whose death almost made him cry. He was slumped low in the driver’s seat, one hand barely touching the wheel, the black hat making shadows on his face. He did not seem to have listened to the coffin-talk. “Them Viet-ma-nese have guts,” Weasel said suddenly. “That’s for sure.”

Many Americans cannot pronounce the name of the race.

IF THE CHILDREN helped the National Liberation Front, they risked punishment, as did any other Vietnamese. If they were caught helping the enemy, there was no one to protect them. Nothing could be done to prepare them to rise above the punishment. It was often a complaint of the American soldiers that the Vietnamese children, whom they found so cute and so lively at first, so pleased to get candy and cigarettes, could not really be trusted. In the swollen, confused cities and near the American bases even the youngest Vietnamese became pimps and thieves. It often angered the soldiers when the children behaved in an ungrateful fashion. Sometimes they did things that led to the sudden death or injuries of the GIs, so even small boys were feared and hated. Many of the soldiers would say this only proved what a lousy country it was because the kids were into the killing. They did not understand that in such a war children are never left out, that in a country of such huge and dangerous disorders, the children do not stay childlike.

In Danang the police chief wanted to show how the local Communists recruited the very young and exposed them to risks. It was arranged that Luong and I could see two prisoners, one of them a boy who had recently been captured carrying explosives and weapons, and a girl who was a messenger for the Viet Cong. Both came from the same village. Dang Van Song, the head of the Special Police Branch in Danang, supervised the interviews, which took place in an office. He had done many interrogations of youngsters; that June there were still seventeen children being held at the Detention Center. The largest prison for children was at Dalat in the Central Highlands, but reporters were not allowed in.

“During interrogation they know how to dodge questions like grown-ups do,” said Mr. Song. “With children the interrogations are different; questions are put in a gentle voice and are simpler.” Sometimes, he said the interrogators gave the children money to buy extra food because they were always hungry; Mr. Song said that the officials received only 27.4 piasters, or about ten cents, to feed each child a day. It was not enough.

The boy was twelve, Nguyen Dinh Chinh, captured in Danang, March 28, 1971, when he was carrying a satchel holding nearly twelve pounds of explosives, two detonators and two M-26 grenades. He was on his way to meet an older man, a Viet Cong agent named Huy, who planned to blow up the American headquarters of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team in downtown Danang while the boy stood guard. In the four months of his confinement the boy’s response during interrogations had not been “satisfactory,” Mr. Song said, shaking his head.

Chinh shuffled into the room, uncertain where to look, what to do. “I was on my way to meet Brother Huy when I saw a policeman who just got out of his jeep and was staring at me,” the boy said. “There was something very strange in his eyes which frightened me. I was in a panic. He was staring at me as if he saw the explosives and grenades in my bag. So I ran away and hid the bag under a garbage heap in front of the high school, but the policeman was still there and he stopped me and said ‘What are you doing? why do you run away? where is your bag?’”

The boy was finished.

Mr. Song had heard the story many times before, so he did not pay close attention to what Chinh said. The story was always the same. He and the other policeman did not try to interrupt or intimidate the boy, who leaned close to Luong, speaking in a low little croak, sometimes whispering—unable to keep his hands still, unable to stop plucking or rubbing his clothes.

“I am so frightened,” Chinh said. Four or five times he said this. Even I knew the words in Vietnamese for that. At one point, when Mr. Song and the other policeman were distracted by a messenger bringing in papers for them to look at, the boy whispered: “After my capture I was tortured on the first night. They poured water up my nose. They used electricity on me, too. Very painful, no sleep that night.”

He began to quiver and cry again. We had no food with us, so Luong gave him two cigarettes to divert him and fool his hunger. Chinh preferred Salem to Pall Mall. He was kept in a small cell by himself, which Chinh said he could not bear. There were three windows—he called them “holes”—but they were too high for him to reach. Once a week, on Saturday, he was taken out to wash, but he always had to wash by himself, with the guard making him hurry.

“I am very frightened to be alone. I cannot sleep at night because of so many mosquitoes, so I sleep in the daytime. I have nothing to do. There is a wooden bed but I sleep on the floor because it is very hot. The food is very bad, there is no breakfast, not even rice soup or bread. Since my capture I have been given fish only three times.”

When Luong put his face down to hear better, the boy whispered to him: please, help me, give me money to buy a can of fish, please do what you can to get me out of that room, I am so frightened, I only wish that I can be out of that room, please.

A few feet away you could not hear him pleading. The child looked very pale, almost waxy, with dark circles under his eyes. He trembled and seemed uncertain each second of what any of us might do to him. At first he seemed worried because Luong was being kind, not sure that it was all right to lean against him, let the arm of the man go around him.

Then he realized that as long as we were in the room, nothing would harm him and he was no longer alone. His father was a farmer in Thanh Phong village of Dien Ban district, Quang Nam province. He had been squatting to relieve himself behind a bush of sugar cane, near a tobacco field, when Americans on operations shot and killed him. Thanh Phong was considered a Viet Cong stronghold. Many villagers had left the area, but his father stayed; he was old and sick, the boy said. He spoke only in whispers, his voice did not work. In 1967 the mother of Chinh went to Saigon, where she and the boy and other relatives lived on Nguyen Van Thoai Street. There were many, many bars there for the Americans and even the children knew what they wanted. There were eight-year-olds who pimped.

“In Saigon, I did very well in third and fourth grade,” Chinh said. “I was among the best in the class. Once, once I was rated number two. In 1969 I followed some friends who were making money by leading Americans to prostitute houses. I did not go home. I did not go to school. My mother caught me, brought me home, smacked me and then sent me to Danang to stay with my cousin.” He had not stayed in Danang, but went to the village near his home to work as a water-buffalo boy. He was trained for five days in explosives, shown how to make the detonator work by using his teeth, Chinh said. He was told not to tell the other children. He never did. He was sent to Danang to carry out missions.

It was a young girl with long hair who gave him the explosives with instructions for that day in Danang, Chinh said. He knew many older Viet Cong cadres, men, who came to Danang and gave him tiny amounts of money to live on. A man named Sau had even given him a watch, which he needed for his missions. The cadres were patient, affectionate, cheerful with him.

“They were very nice to me,” Chinh said. But the man he dreamed of was not any of them. It was his father who came back to him. “Once I had a dream in which I saw me already dead, I was dead at home in my village. But my father was near me. It was he who was alive. Another dream took me home, too, and my father said, ‘Come back quickly after classes.’” When he awoke from the dreams and kept crying out, the guard came in and shouted at him and cursed and kicked him.

The Special Police Branch had made posters showing Chinh’s picture with details of his arrest to warn others helping the Viet Cong. When Chinh was shown the poster he cringed, as if now he was going to his own execution. He could not stop sobbing. Mr. Song was used to such behavior and did nothing. The other policeman looked bored.

“I have seen such pictures at Cho Con bus station,” Chinh said. “There were pictures of this girl and everybody said now she has died. If my mother sees these pictures, she will think I am dead.”

We could not keep him with us any longer. The next child came in as he was leaving. Both lived in the same village. Nothing passed between them. They looked at each other sadly but without recognition, without a gesture or a pause. The girl’s name was Pham Thi Hoa, her age was eleven. Mr. Song complained that the girl had not been very cooperative. She had lived with a succession of important Viet Cong members, who treated her like a daughter, he said, solemnly. “This girl is very stubborn. But we have found her weak point. She is very afraid of having her hair cut off. So we say that we will cut off her hair if she is not more helpful.”

He spoke in English, but the girl Hoa seemed to understand that he was talking about her hair again. I had never seen a child like that: so fearful yet unyielding. Once I tried to pat her hand to comfort her, but she drew back. Not once did she cry. But the small hands moved and moved as if a separate, frenzied life was in them: fingers rubbing fingers, touching each other all the time, clasping and unclasping. Even when she hoped to make her face look stern, the hands betrayed her. She had been arrested as a messenger for the Viet Cong; there was a letter in her pocket. A defector identified her. She had been in the Detention Center for five months; she did not know the time, the day or the month.

“I have no father. My mother lived in Saigon,” Hoa said so softly Luong could barely hear. “My mother gave me to Mrs. Xuan when I was very small. When Uncle Xuan died I lived with Uncle Chi. When Uncle Chi died I lived with Uncle Hien.” She was not related to these men: “Uncle” is a respectful term in Vietnamese. The girl looked at no one as she spoke. She did not even seem to see her own hands doing their urgent, strange little dances. “Only Uncle Hien loves me. My mother does not love me. She gave me to Mrs. Xuan. Uncle Hien asked me whether I wanted to go to school and I said no. He said ‘You decide. If you want it, I will send you to school. If you don’t, stay here with me.’ Uncle Hien and the other uncles love me.”

She had lived in Thanh Phong village in a bunker under a large bush of bamboo. At night Uncle Hien put up a hammock for her to sleep in. She remembered only one girl her own age living nearby, but then the girl’s mother took her to Danang, where she worked as a servant. Hoa was picked up at the Cho Con bus station in Danang; the letter in her pocket for Sister Chin was all the evidence that was needed. Hoa said she had been taken away by the Americans twice in her village but that she had not been afraid at all because there were so many other Vietnamese with her. Each time all the Vietnamese were released after being kept for one night.

It made the girl tired to tell all this again, but she knew she had no choice. None of it was helpful to Mr. Song, who said he used little fish to catch big fish. Hoa was very thin; sometimes she seemed to shiver although it was hot in the police office. Once she whispered to Luong that she had been beaten. There was no time to ask her more questions.

The second police official said he had offered to adopt Pham Thi Hoa and take her home to live with his own children. He repeated the offer, smiling at the girl.

“I prefer to be in prison,” she said. “I like prison.” Then she was taken away.

Perhaps because Luong’s face looked odd, perhaps because I looked queer, too, and we sat there without speaking, Mr. Song gave some advice, wagging his finger. “Now don’t write an antiwar story,” he said in English. “Write how the Viet Cong exploit children.”

A lot of money was given, not once but twice, to the guards at the Detention Center to pass my parcels of food to the children. I dreamed of helping them escape and knew I never could. In Saigon, I begged a kindly man from the International Red Cross to help improve the conditions for the children, but he sighed and told me of worse cases, of reports that were ignored. It was useless appealing to the Americans. They already knew. It was they who created the Special Police, paid them, taught them, urged them on, expected results. A reader wrote to The New York Times complaining that my story only put the children in more peril, and still another wrote to complain that I had not ever written of the children killed in Communist rocket attacks, as if I were cheating at a game of tit-tat-toe and had better watch myself. In Saigon a middle-aged and educated Vietnamese, believed to have contacts on all sides, listened to my story of the children and said there was nothing anyone could do, to stop worrying. Perhaps someday the children would be proud of what they had endured. “I envy them,” he said. The man disgusted me.

The boy Chinh must be seventeen now, the girl Hoa sixteen. It is their hands I remember more than their faces.

IN SOUTH VIETNAM the smaller bribes needed to proceed with everyday life were sometimes called “coffee money” by the Saigonese, while the big bribes, the crushing and dreadful ones, had no special name. A male wishing to avoid the draft could buy a forged identification card with a false age, making him younger, if he had one hundred dollars in Vietnamese piasters. This was not “coffee money”; it was the equivalent of a monthly salary of a Vietnamese working as a clerk or the pay of a first lieutenant in the Saigon army. As a precaution, many parents changed the ages of their male children when they were still very small, but the war went on for so long it did no good in the end. Ages went backward: a schoolboy of thirteen was really fifteen; at seventeen he was still safe from the draft because the papers said he was only fifteen. No one felt safe as the war grew older and the inflation swelled. The bribes grew bigger: nearly two hundred dollars in piasters in 1971 to get a soldier transferred from infantry to a desk job in the rear. The poor could never pay; sometimes if they sold all that they owned, the money was raised, but their sons were pulled into the war anyway. There was nowhere to hide, for in each village, in each hamlet, in each neighborhood of the cities were police who checked and rechecked the papers of all males. Those who had none were arrested.

Strange and desperate things were done for money. A family could care only for its separate survival. Each year the fear and the grieving grew stronger as the land held more dead and there was less room in the cemeteries. On the Saigon-Bien Hoa highway, some twelve miles north of the capital, there was a reminder of the great unhappiness in the country. It was supposed to be a war memorial, but some Vietnamese believed it was human while others said it was a gentle ghost who could not rest. The memorial was a thirteen-foot concrete statue of a Vietnamese infantryman, resting, a rifle across his knees. He was ARVN, as the Americans called both the South Vietnamese Army and its soldiers. It was a statue of a spent and haunted man; its name was Sorrow. The figure was put up at the end of 1966, below the entrance to the Vietnamese national military cemetery.

There were people who swore the statue came alive; they had heard it sigh and ask for water. A Vietnamese military policeman had once seen it step off the pedestal, take off its helmet and pack, and lie down on the grass. There were villagers who believed the statue had moved at night, during the 1968 Tet offensive, to warn people of the fighting. Once, they said, the statue had stopped a twenty-vehicle convoy headed for an ambush. There were even Vietnamese who told you that they had seen the statue cry in the spring of 1971 when the South Vietnamese were sent into Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail and could not do it.

Once, the statue was moved from its site to be sent back to the workshop of its sculptor, Nguyen Thanh Tu, so he could recast it in bronze. Women in the neighborhood thought of the statue as a shrine. They came to see it, very quietly, placing flowers and joss sticks before it, kneeling to pray below its huge boots. The taxi driver in Saigon who drove us to Mr. Tu’s house was startled to see the statue again. “I thought it ran away early this year—we heard it was lost,” he said.

No one in Vietnam could run away. There were different places but there was nowhere to hide for very long.

IN THIS COUNTRY there were children who remembered how they once thought—as the war seemed to go on forever and each birthday took them closer to it—of running away. The first to tell me was a boy named Michael Silberman in New York, who was eleven but going on twelve, he said. At the time the American troops left Vietnam in February 1973 he liked to read, build model ships and airplanes, and take pictures. He was precise and composed. He said: “I guess I’ve been conscious of the war since 1968. Before then I probably heard about it, but I wasn’t conscious of it and I didn’t understand war, not really. I’ve gotten permission from Mom to let me watch the news when I don’t have a lot of homework. My father watched Vietnam on television sometimes when he came home week nights. Mostly all I saw was tanks rolling by. Tanks didn’t exactly make me sad. But recently I did see pictures—not running film, but pictures of where the children are fleeing from the napalm, a picture of the little girl running down the road. I thought it was awful that we used this kind of stuff. But this time it was the South Vietnamese who did it; they made a horrible mistake in calculation in dropping their stupid bombs. We used incendiary bombs, atom bombs, five hundred-pound explosive bombs. Incendiary bombs break apart and it throws shrapnel. And they also used fire bombs that have jelly gasoline, which bursts into flames and burns people up. But napalm is chemical burning, acid.

“I didn’t really hear about the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam until afterwards because I was mostly involved in playing with my cousins and my sister. Because at Christmas time I’m playing with my toys and everything. But I found out because of news reports on Channel 4 and also listening to WNBC radio.

“I really didn’t think anything then, but now I think it was really awful. And in Rolling Stone, Joan Baez wrote an article. She was in Hanoi when they were doing the Christmas bombing. She said it was sad and terrible to see the American planes come over.

“In school we’ve had very interesting discussions about the war, about President Johnson, about President Truman, mostly in social studies, and once, interestingly enough, in English. The teacher, Mr. Hurst, said we are having a discussion and not a discussion of personal feelings; he said you should give facts instead of feelings. He especially said we shouldn’t express our personal feelings about the Presidents because, I guess, that’s mean after they’ve died. In the class I said I felt President Truman was not really such a very good President because he did a lot of bad things—for instance, starting the Cold War, dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and things like that that weren’t very smart. Also establishing NATO, which wasn’t so good.

“I don’t really know why the war began. I didn’t ask Mr. Hurst. Maybe because we had some important military bases in the islands around there. I don’t know. I guess we didn’t want the Communists to come and take over our land. President Kennedy decided, well, the Communists must be stopped, Communists aren’t very good. But I don’t see what’s wrong with it. I mean it’s probably not the greatest thing to live under probably, but I did study China in the fourth grade and I thought it really didn’t seem very bad. It didn’t seem great, but it didn’t seem very bad.

“I think there are more people against the war now than there were before. Mostly it’s old war veterans from the Second World War that are for it really. I really don’t know why, probably because they’re used to this thing about the American way is the right way and Communists are rotten.

“There isn’t any more draft. I was worried that I would be drafted. I started worrying about that about the same time I realized Vietnam was happening. Last year I really thought about it. I said to my parents that I probably wouldn’t want to get drafted and would probably resist. Mom and Dad said they would shelter me if I did resist. I don’t know if I would have gone to Canada. I don’t know what I would do. Most people flee. They get shelter from friends.”

SOME CHILDREN WANT to forget how frightened they were that the war would snatch them up. They are older now, not so willing to admit such fears. It was Joanne, my cousin, who told me how her son had begun to cry the day they heard President Nixon on the radio explaining why Americans had entered Cambodia. The child, whose nickname is Tico, cried because he did not want to be a soldier, she said, making a sad face, shaking her head. His mother had taken him and his two older sisters to an antiwar demonstration, but he was too little then to understand.

The war is over now; he does not think about it. His grades are good, he has won a blue ribbon for broad jumping in school. Tico shows me the textbook for the eighth-grade class in social studies. He is finished with it now. The book is called Promise of America: Sidewalks, Gunboats and Ballyhoo. It is one in a series on American history. The book is beautiful with its fine illustrations and layout. There are two and a half pages on Vietnam, a little section called “Idealism and Self-Interest: A Modern Example.” The Vietnam part comes after a section, “Taking the Philippines” and “Was McKinley Right?” It says:

The war in Vietnam is another example of a foreign policy issue that has posed questions of idealism and self-interest. Here are two letters written by American soldiers fighting in Vietnam in the 1960’s. Are these soldiers fighting for idealistic reasons (concern for the Vietnamese and other foreign peoples), for reasons of self-interest (concern for the United States and for themselves), or both? Write down the exact words of each soldier to support your answers.

. . long hours of sweat and blood

Hi Mom, Dad, and all,

. . . It’s hard to sleep, eat, or even write any more. This place has definitely played hell with us. It’s been a long hard road, Mom and Dad, and I think I’ve proved myself so far. I know you all have a great confidence in me, and I know I can do any job assigned to me. I’ve engaged with the Vietcong and Hard Core [communists] so many times, I lost track of them. I’ve got a right to boast a little cause I know I was right in hitting the licks, just like other good Marines have done and are doing and always will. We’ve put long hours of sweat and blood in this soil, and we will do our best to get these people freedom. Also protect America from Communism.

I only wish I could do something to encourage the boys that are burning their draft cards to stand up and take their responsibilities for their country, family, and friends. You can’t defeat Communism by turning your backs or burning your draft cards. Anyone who does it is a disgrace and plain yellow. They haven’t got the guts to back up their fathers and forefathers before them. Their lives have gone to waste if the sons today are too afraid to face the facts. . . .

There, I’ve said what has been on my mind! I hope this doesn’t bore you, but I just had to put it down on paper.

Mom, Dad, and kids, whenever the national anthem is being played, whether over TV, radio, or at a game, please, Please, stand up. Show your patriotism. After all, I am not fighting for nothing.

Am I ?!!

We’ve got to have a flag, also; do we have one?

Dad, try in every way, whether little or big, to push a little of the patriotism kick into Bob and Ron! Please! Also religion.

GO TO MASS . . .

Goodbye for now, and God bless you all.

I love you all.

Doug

Yesterday I witnessed something . . .

Dear Mom,

. . . Yesterday I witnessed something that would make any American realize why we are in this war. At least it did me. I was on daylight patrol. We were on a hill overlooking a bridge that was out of our sector. I saw a platoon of Vietcong stopping traffic from going over the bridge. They were beating women and children over the head with rifles, clubs, and fists. They even shot one woman and her child. They were taking rice, coconuts, fish, and other assorted foods from these people. The ones that didn’t give they either beat or shot. I think you know what I tried to do. I wanted to go down and kill all of those slant-eyed bastards. I started to and it took two men to stop me. These slobs have to be stopped, even if it takes every last believer in a democracy and a free way of life to do it. I know after seeing their brave tactics I’m going to try my best. So please don’t knock [President} Johnson’s policy in Vietnam. There is a good reason for it. I’m not too sure what it is myself, but I’m beginning to realize, especially after yesterday.

Love, Bill

QUESTION

The two American soldiers both supported American involvement in the war in Vietnam. Here are some statements by critics of the war. Which say that the United States became involved for idealistic reasons? Which says that the United States became involved for reasons of self-interest? Which say both?

a.“The United States became involved in Vietnam to protect the supply of Indochinese rubber, tin, and other materials that American corporations need.”

b.“President Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all tried to prevent a communist victory in South Vietnam because they believed that people are better off under any noncommunist government, no matter how bad, than under any communist government.”

c.“The United States government supports all anticommunist governments in Asia so that it can continue its policy of expansion. The United States wants to keep Asians under its thumb.”

d.“The United States became involved in Vietnam to prevent Communist China from taking over all of Southeast Asia. American officials believed that if China gained control of Southeast Asia, it would be in a better position to attack the United States.”

e.“American policymakers thought it was their duty to stop communism from spreading. They believed that each gain made by the communists further weakened the power of the democracies.”

Some letters will never appear in the series Promise of America. This is one of them. On February 27, 1970, a nineteen-year-old named Keith R. Franklin of Salamanca, New York, wrote to his parents just before he was sent to Vietnam as a medical corpsman. He asked his parents to open the letter only in the event of his death. Less than three months later he was killed in Cambodia, May 12, 1970.

If you are reading this letter, you will never see me again, the reason being that if you are reading this I have died. The question is whether or not my death has been in vain. The answer is yes.

The war that has taken my life and many thousands before me is immoral, unlawful and an atrocity unlike any misfit of good sense and judgment known to man. I had no choice as to my fate. It was predetermined by the war-mongering hypocrites in Washington.

As I lie dead, please grant my last request. Help me inform the American people, the silent majority who have not yet voiced their opinions.

“Consider the pathetic irony of all those peace movement leafletters, sign carriers, letter writers, petition signers, speechmakers, demonstration-goers, writers of articles and teach-in participants in having their children read in school textbooks that ‘their country came to the defense of democratic South Vietnam,’” a forty-seven-year-old professor of philosophy of education wrote.

The professor is William Griffen, who teaches at the State University of New York at Cortland. He and two other men, John Marciano and Robert Knowles, also teachers, have analyzed interpretations of the war found in twenty-eight textbooks used throughout the United States for secondary education.

They found the textbooks written and published between 1961 to 1967 tended, in general, to be more conservative, taking the view that the United States was standing firm against Reds from North Vietnam who were invading “free” South Vietnam and that this invasion was instigated by the “red” Chinese and the Russians. More liberal, dovish textbooks, written and published between 1968 and 1973, were often apt to depict the United States as having honorable motives in Vietnam while becoming entangled in a war that could neither be understood nor won despite these good intentions. One brief report, written by the three men, said of these textbooks:

The textbooks thus exclude, even as a valid thesis for examination, the position that the conflict was a logical conclusion of racist and imperialist policies which brought the United States to China, the Philippines and Korea; that our efforts were simply an extension of earlier French colonialism. There is simply no recognition that U.S. involvement was one continuous litany of lies and distortions designed to hide the invasion of a peaceful and enlightened civilization. The perspective of radical historians such as Gabriel Kolko, who argues that U.S. policies provided overwhelming evidence of “how devious, incorrigible, and beyond the pale of human values America’s rulers were throughout this epic event,” is simply outside the limits of debate.

While the earlier conservative-hawk texts viewed South Vietnam as a “Free” nation under attack by the “Reds,” the liberal-dove view freely admits the corrupt nature of the Diem family and successive regimes, but in a manner which does not shed any substantial doubt on the fundamental causes of the conflict nor of U.S. motives in supporting such regimes. While the massive destruction and death is covered, carefully balanced by tales of North Vietnamese and “Viet Cong” terrorism which equally blame both sides for the violence, the later texts basically reveal a pathetic tale of the kind-hearted but stumbling American giant becoming trapped and manipulated by South Vietnamese allies—wishing to help but held back by the likes of Diem, Ky and Thieu. . . . American high school students could thus read twenty-eight leading social studies and history textbooks without considering the possibility that they lived in the nation which had committed the most blatant act of aggression since the German invasions of World War II.

In another textbook published in 1970 by Ginn and Company, a Xerox company, called American History for Today, there are nearly six pages on the war. Some captions on photographs say: “Vietnam: something new and something old. Helicopters were something new in the war. Refugees and heartache were something found in all wars.” The book says:

. . . The Viet Cong used terror tactics in an effort to win. They raided towns and killed men, women and children. Often they blasted heavily populated places with bombs and mortar shells . . .

Most Americans found themselves somewhere in the middle. They wanted the war to end. But they did not want to abandon the South Vietnamese to the Communists.

In noisy demonstrations, war protesters brought pressure on President Johnson. But the President would not change his stand. He insisted that for its own safety the United States must help the one billion people in non-Communist Asian lands to defend themselves.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk also remained firm. He warned that if the United States did not live up to its promises, no other nation in the world would ever trust us again.

Such textbooks do not point out that a poll taken in Sweden in 1973 by the University of Göteburg showed that a large majority of Swedes thought that United States policies were a greater threat to world peace than those of the Soviet Union. The poll conducted among a cross section of 2,500 Swedes in conjunction with the 1973 general election was not released until the summer of 1975.

Mr. Griffen and his collaborators—who said they had no illusions about what they would find in existing history books—have written their own history of the war in Indochina but they have not yet found a publisher. They had been told it is too “soon” for such a work, or there is no interest. The men want schoolchildren to be made familiar with the Pentagon Papers.

“It isn’t a question of our propaganda versus their propaganda,” Mr. Griffen said. “The case for what really happened will be made by presenting the war-makers’ own words, own cables, their own planning documents not for our eyes. For most Americans and for almost all the young, the Pentagon Papers are still unread and still a secret.”

On the list of the twenty-eight textbooks the men compiled is the first edition of The Free and the Brave by Henry R. Graff, identified as a professor of history at Columbia University, which was shown to me by a seventh-grade student in a junior high school in Long Island. In referring to the Paris peace talks, the textbook says: “A series of determined efforts which aimed to make known that the Americans wanted to end the war met with no response from the ‘other side.’” The students are informed that President Johnson tried “all the time he was in office to get a peaceful settlement.”

“Many South Vietnamese officials were corrupt,” this textbook says. “They used American money to enrich themselves . . . In spite of the graft, much good was done. Hospitals were set up and teachers, nurses and even a police force was trained. Americans taught new farming methods to the Vietnamese. New officials who would serve their fellow countrymen were honestly trained. All the steps taken in the ‘other war’ were to prepare the Vietnamese to run their democracy once peace came.” The point is emphasized again: “Even as the fighting went on, the United States trained the South Vietnamese in the ways of democracy.”

It is an astonishing assessment; it has nothing to do with the country and the war I knew. I remember the elections in South Vietnam. They were required exercises, having little meaning to the Vietnamese, for many realized going to the ballot box was simply another gymnastic to be performed for the benefit of their superiors. The Americans were very keen on elections, because they appeared to be proof of their claims that South Vietnam was a free and just society where the people determined who would lead them. But the Vietnamese who won seats in the lower house, or the National Assembly, and tried to oppose President Thieu and the war, ran the risk of being imprisoned. If they were effective opponents, they knew their careers would be short.

The seven million registered Vietnamese voters in the south had no choice but to go to the polls. If their yellow voting cards were not punched by officials at the polls, they were warned they would be punished. In the August 1971 elections for the lower house of the National Assembly—the parliament of South Vietnam—voters were required, in one district in Gia Dinh, near Saigon, to pick six candidates out of seventy-eight who were running. None of the candidates who ran from forty-four provinces were required to be residents in their local constituencies, so often the local Vietnamese did not know who they were. It was harder for the soldiers who had not seen any candidate on television or heard speeches on the radio.

In the presidential election of October 3, 1971, there was only one man to vote for. He was Nguyen Van Thieu, who was already President and wanted to be reelected. Despite the last-minute, intense attempts of Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker to persuade and recruit another Vietnamese, Major General Duong Van Minh, to run against Thieu, “Big Minh” refused, and later said that he did not choose to be used for the convenience of the Americans who had no intention of permitting a free presidential election. Hoang Duc Nga, a relative of President Thieu who held a position of high importance in the Saigon palace, told the bureau chief of The New York Times, Alvin Shuster, that the President would be reelected by a vote of 94.6 percent. Mr. Nga was amused as he confided this on the telephone. The Vietnamese were advised that if they chose not to support President Thieu, the only name on the ballot, they could make a cross or another mark, or tear part of the ballot.

“Everyone understands what Thieu is up to and his stupidity in being alone in a democratic election, but the people don’t know what to do about it,” a sergeant in the Popular Forces, a paid and armed home militia, said. “It is safer to have an attitude that is noncommittal in such uncertain times. Yes, the people know they can tear the ballot or mark it, but they are ignorant and afraid, so they will vote for him.”

Some Vietnamese tried to protest the one-man election. It was as easy as it would be for Americans to try to dismantle the Dow Corporation, or Honeywell.

A group of Catholic priests, politicians, intellectuals, Buddhists, disabled veterans and students burned their voting cards as a symbolic gesture of contempt for the October 3 elections. Students tried to demonstrate, but the police were too numerous, too fierce and drove them back. One Catholic who taught philosophy at the University of Saigon, Professor Ly Chanh Trung, explained the resistance to anyone who would hear him. “For the older Vietnamese, religion once came before the country,” he said. “Now for the younger Catholics the nation is just about as absolute as the religion. Nationalists are those who cannot accept dependence on foreigners, and more and more Catholics are saying no to the Americans.”

A deputy in the legislature, Mrs. Kieu Mong Thu, who opposed the war and Thieu, said that to attack and destroy Thieu it was necessary to attack those who kept him alive and propped up: the Americans. A group of university and high school students organized hit-and-run teams of four members to burn American military vehicles and the American soldiers who were driving them. They used plastic bags of high-octane gasoline, which they threw in the vehicles, then tossed in burning matches. The students claimed they had burned more than fifty vehicles; one American in the Navy received second-degree burns. We heard that he died.

One of the leaders of the student group was a twenty-three-year-old woman named Vo Thi Bach Tuyet who claimed the organization had burned more than thirty-two American military vehicles in six weeks. “I do not think the Americans understand the war in Vietnam and many of them perhaps feel that their soldiers are here to fight under a good banner, to fight Communists,” she said in Vietnamese. “So if the American people see that it is the Vietnamese people in the south who are hurting the American soldiers, they will better understand the situation.”

They were not Communists: they were only part of Vietnam’s sentenced generation—children of refugees, of the displaced, of the dead, of the very fearful, who at fifteen and sixteen saw themselves as resistance fighters. It was hard to understand why the older students had waited so long to act if their convictions were so powerful. The student leaders said they had not dared do anything in earlier years, when the American troops were more numerous, because they would have been accused of being Communists, but now, now, it was different; the people were with them. This is how they put it. Why had they not joined the Viet Cong if they opposed their government and loathed their American allies?

“It is not a question of ideology,” a twenty-five-year-old University of Saigon student said. “We don’t exactly know what the other side feels, you see, and this way we know what we are doing and it makes us feel useful to the people.”

I went out with a team of four Vietnamese on a fire-bombing mission to write a story. The students went on two motorcycles to a busy downtown street where Americans often drove by in jeeps. We waited nearly twenty minutes. I remember praying that no one would come, praying that no American would pass by us, warning myself over and over again to stay out of it and not to interfere, not to remember the crusts and the smell of burned men I had already seen in hospitals. The plan was for one Vietnamese to run out in front of the vehicle, waving his arms, so the driver would stop. Then another student would hurl the plastic bag of gas inside the vehicle. The third Vietnamese would toss in the lit matches.

After fifteen minutes, perhaps longer, an American Army half-truck was spotted. As it came closer, you could see the face of the GI, who must have been whistling. He looked sleepy. There was that second when I could have screamed, yelled, rushed forward to warn him, given the plan away. But the sixteen-year-old student moved too fast for me. He threw, but he aimed badly and the plastic bag of gas hit the windshield. The GI veered, shouted out “you fucking idiot,” and drove away from us so fast that people on the street knew something had happened. “Bad shot,” said the law student who held the matches. The four Vietnamese were not pleased with their failure. They needed more practice, the sixteen-year-old said. It must have been a few seconds before my legs would work again, before I had a voice that sounded like my own.

The people were not always grateful to these students. One September night, no later than 6 P.M., a U.S. Army van near the Tan Son Nhut airport was set on fire. But the driver was Vietnamese, an employee of the Americans, and the crowd was sympathetic to his dilemma. He would be dismissed, the driver said, and blamed. A neighborhood woman said she had seen two boys speeding by on a Honda and thought they must be students. A neighbor turned to her. “Dumb woman,” he said angrily. “What else can they be?”

No one knew how many Vietnamese were supporters of Thieu or how many despised him or felt nothing, or only feared the Communists. All you knew was that most Vietnamese wanted the war to end: it was choking them. They wanted an end to their unhappiness, to their fear of hunger, their fear of dying. They wanted only to be themselves. One professor who taught political science at the National Institute of Administration said of course he would vote for Thieu. There were others like him: bright, cultivated, ambitious men, who liked to say that no democracy was perfect.

“We have to choose the least of the bad possibilities,” Professor Nguyen Ngoc Huy said. “What can those who are critical of democracy in South Vietnam say about the assassination of Robert Kennedy? Is that democracy? In a country with two hundred years of democracy? A man wanted to run for the presidency and he was assassinated!”

He did not wait for an answer.

The fire-bombings by the students, and their demonstrations, very much displeased Professor Huy. “I would say to these students, if I could speak to them,” he said. “‘Why don’t you march in bare feet, not ride on your motorbikes? Why don’t you stop buying such modern clothes and dress as the peasants do? Don’t they realize that eighty percent of our needs are covered by American money?’”

Not all the Vietnamese who burned their voting cards, who risked detention, imprisonment or beatings, had strong political convictions or philosophies. It was that they could not bear their lives or the lives of those whom they loved. They did not want the war and they suspected Thieu did, that it was the only way he could stay in power and that without such momentum, he would shrivel to nothing. Sometimes it was the Vietnamese women who spoke more fiercely than the men and could not be easily shut up.

One of them was a housewife named Tran Thi Bich. She was fifty or fifty-one that year, a widow, with a fine, intense face, a high forehead and thinning hair worn in a bun. She was a Buddhist, who had publicly burned her little yellow voting card. The monks had approved. “I hated it,” Mrs. Bich said. “It stands for nothing. The government wants the war to go on because officials get fat and rich from it. Oh, anyone is better than Thieu. But whoever is in power, the Americans will do something to bribe him. The people don’t have faith in any individual at all.”

She was a talkative woman, not made shy by a foreign reporter. When Luong took her picture, she put on her only pair of beads and showed her profile, which was handsome. She kept standing long after the picture was taken, not knowing how much time it required. “When Thieu first took power he promised peace. Where is it? Since he has been in power, prices have gone up and up. And there is so much robbing and snatching nowadays. Peace for what people? Every day I see more of the young arrested on the streets because they do not want war, but they are taken and forced in the army.”

Then, to make it quite clear why she hated the war, in case we knew nothing, she began a precise recital of her reasons, not asking for pity or help, only describing what had happened to each of her five sons, who had all been in the army. The eldest, who was thirty-two, was wounded in a mortar attack. Part of his face was missing and his left hand was useless. He could not find work, perhaps it was because of the horrible new face he had, but then, many veterans had no work. The next reason: a thirty-year-old son who had become a madman who could do nothing for himself. “A bright child, a nervous child, a good son,” she said of him; he was the one she had loved the most. The third son was a lieutenant on active duty. A fourth son, a twenty-three-year-old soldier, had been missing for “a long time,” she said. The last reason was the youngest boy, a deserter from the army and in hiding. All this she told us matter-of-factly, always circling back to the son who had gone mad.

“He became strange after a battle, a fierce battle—and he came home two years ago with this look on his face,” Mrs. Bich said. “He wouldn’t eat anything I cooked for him. He sat there and wept. Then we wept with him. A friend of his told me that my son saw too many men die, and that for three days and three nights he was unable to move away from the corpses.”

Luong went on translating, making his notes, a bit more slowly this time, while I took my notes and kept asking questions. We had done it so many times before.

The woman did not know what mental illness was, nor if there were doctors who could treat it. She took that son to the largest military hospital in the south, called Cong Hoa—just outside Saigon—but she was never able to find out if the son was treated, or how, or by whom, or where they kept him. She was not allowed to visit him, to talk to him, to hold him, to bring him food. On visiting day, relatives of men in some mental wards were allowed to line up and see the patients. But there was barbed wire between them, Mrs. Bich said, so they could not even touch each other or speak, only look. The visitors, nearly always women, could not even stand there too long because guards kept the line moving. There was not quite a minute.

“He knew me,” Mrs. Bich said. “He always knew me. He would try and come to me, but that was not possible. He would stand there, his eyes always on my face, calling out to me.”

She could do nothing. Then the woman sat there, quietly, finished with the story of the second son, who kept calling out Mother, Mother, until the guards hauled him away. She always heard his voice.

Afterward Luong and I did not speak. We went to the tiny soup shop, down an alley off the street, called Pasteur to have pho. It was a way of steadying ourselves, drinking the noodle soup with beef and red peppers. From that time on, I began to count the days I had left in Vietnam, just as the GIs always did, for I was stupid enough to think that leaving would be the cure. There were times when Luong and I tried to help: I brought back two wheelchairs from Hong Kong to give to paralyzed men in one ward at Cong Hoa Hospital and it was he who did the paperwork for permission, took days to make sure the wheelchairs would not be confiscated by the customs at Tan Son Nhut. It was never enough. I did not know that for the next five years I would suddenly think of that woman, putting on the amber-colored beads, telling us the story of a second son who wanted to put his head in her lap and not be afraid of night any more.

The last demonstration against the one-man presidential election that I saw in Saigon was on a Saturday, on the steps of the National Assembly, the seat of the legislature, a curved and fat white building with a more frivolous past. It was once the French opera house. There were nine deputies, a senator and three lawyers; all had opposed the war, the corruption and deceit of the Thieu regime. On that soft and muggy day some of them held up three banners for the Saigonese to see. “The Oct. three elections betray the people’s interests and must be smashed” was written on one of the white cloth banners. Another banner said the elections would establish a dictatorial regime “serving foreigners.”

The well-armed combat police, with their weapons, their gas masks and their tear-gas grenade launchers, stood and waited for a signal to attack. Behind them, the Vietnamese were bunched in the streets and in the little square facing the National Assembly, many of them quite surprised to see such a spectacle. It was a deputy named Ly Qui Chung who was the first to shout out: “I condemn Mr. Thieu as a dictator!” There were no American MPs or troops around; there did not have to be. The grenades were fired, the khaki-colored canisters made in Saltsburg, Pennsylvania, by Federal Laboratories, Inc. The ordinary Vietnamese were often afraid of the American tear gas—no one was sure if it would lead to the spitting of blood later on, or blurred eyesight, but many deputies, students and the Buddhists of the An Quang pagoda had smelled it many times before and knew you could survive it.

That Saturday was not an ordinary failure that ended with the police squashing everyone. Something surprising came about. Ngo Cong Duc, a Catholic deputy from a wealthy Delta family, the nephew of the Archbishop of Saigon, one of the Vietnamese prominent in the Third Force, as the Americans liked to call it, publisher of a newspaper called Tin Sang which was shut by the government for its opposition, did not stand quietly as the tear-gas grenades came at them. Each time the first canisters landed he kicked them back at the police, leaping, twirling, stretching in an urgent and strange ballet. Some Vietnamese, watching it, smiled and looked pleased to see the young man, who was a handsome and strong fellow, kick back the punishment. But it did not last long. The tear gas emptied the streets, the police in their masks and with their sticks and weapons chased the protesters. Banners fell. Later Ngo Cong Duc had to escape from the south before Thieu had him arrested on whatever charges he chose. I saw him in Paris—he cooked a Vietnamese dinner—and then we met again in New York York. Some of us were not persuaded he would want to go back when the war was over. He was not an austere man, not a revolutionary, not someone accustomed to sacrifice. He said himself his family were merchants, the bourgeoisie, not peasants. But he went home.

“It is a Vietnamese government,” Duc said. “At last.”

For me he was always the man he was that day in Saigon, the hell with the tear gas and all the guns, swinging his leg that high, arms out, his face bright and tense as he kept kicking and kicking.

The demonstration made no difference. President Nguyen Van Thieu was reelected by an impossible ninety-four point something percent. The familiar farce was over. Saigon was so still that day. Only the police and the soldiers were everywhere, looking for troublemakers.

THE VIETNAMESE WHO opposed the U.S. government have their own history of the war. Dr. Nguyen Khac Vien, a northerner and a physician, historian and editor, was asked by a reporter in Paris in February 1973: “Could we try to define the U.S. motives during this war? By definition, isn’t this an unproductive war for them?”

His answer:

“Obviously it’s not the economic exploitation of Indochina and Vietnam which can bring them back the two hundred billion dollars they have spent. Even if the U.S. exploited Indochina for a thousand years, they couldn’t recoup their losses. So there must be another reason for U.S. intervention.

“That reason can be traced to a global strategy of counterrevolution promulgated by Washington at the end of World War II. In 1945 the U.S. assumed the ‘white man’s burden.’ Socialist countries were established, and socialist revolution threatened to spread. National liberation revolutions were growing. Movements for peace and democracy were developing in capitalist countries.

“All of this constituted a world-wide revolutionary movement which threatened all capitalist countries, and the U.S. found itself leading the defense of the capitalist world. Its global strategy of counterrevolution was aimed first against the Soviet Union, which in 1945, greatly weakened by the war, did not have the atomic bomb and was isolated. The U.S. was immeasurably stronger.

“From 1945 to 1950, the U.S. was not interested in third world countries such as India, but in Iran and Turkey, countries having a common border with the Soviet Union, and which could serve as military bases. This strategy became obsolete after the fall of Chiang Kai-shek. Socialist countries in Eastern Europe gained stability, and the Soviet Union developed the atomic bomb. A direct attack against these great socialist countries would have been dangerous for the U.S. So Washington turned its global strategy against the third world countries.

“The gradual reversal took a decisive turn with Kennedy. Reread Strategy of Peace. The techniques, weapons and tactics to crush national liberation movements are outlined there. Once third world countries were conquered and under U.S. tutelage, then the socialist camp would be isolated. Hence, Vietnam was a stumbling block. There the war of national liberation took its classic form. It had to be crushed to serve as an example and to test all the various weapons, tactics and forms of military activity. It was necessary to suppress Vietnam so that fear of the U.S. could be maintained all over the world.”

SO MUCH WAS said about this war, the words came down like landslides, first pebbles and dirt, then rock and stone and trees. When the demonstrations were over—and indeed they were noisy, for desperate people do not whisper or take soft shapes—the speaking still went on. Sometimes it seemed that those who opposed the war were only speaking to each other, for around them were the deaf and the bored. There are records of what public men in public office said, records of what the outraged said, and what others had to say about them, but it is not likely that any schoolbook will print the words of a historian named Arthur Waskow, who in April of 1975, when the end of it was certain, spoke to a group in Washington, D.C., called Fabrangen. In Yiddish the word suggests “coming together.” Fabrangen is the name of a Jewish community group in Washington, D.C., whose members work to seek a different, a holier life process. In a Friday night service, this man named Waskow, who is both a joyful and scholarly man said: “The war was a great flash of lightning. There we were, sleepwalking in the thick, thick dark, a dark so thick you could touch it, a dark so thick it was the dark itself we kept bumping into, breaking a leg as we stumbled over . . . something—gashing a cheek as we stumbled into . . . something—crying, mumbling, helpless, blind. And then the war: lighting up the knife-edge of the military institutions, lighting up the pit of corporate power, lighting up the ferocity of racism, sexism, lighting up the destruction of the biosphere . . .

“In the glare of the lightning we discovered what country we live in . . . Maybe instead of joining the old May Day, the one our great-grandparents gave the world, we should remake a May Day from our own lives . . . a May Day of the maypole, of spring and sexuality, of women and men—and a May Day that remembers jail in Washington, death at Kent, ‘Strike strike strike!’ on the lawn at Yale, a May Day that remembers napalm. Maybe the burning draft card is our bitter herb. Scorch our fingers in memory of napalm . . .

“And in every generation, every human being must look upon herself, himself, as if we ourselves had gone forth from Vietnam.”

VERY FEW PEOPLE have such an intention. It is easier to claim the war was impossible to understand, therefore Americans need not feel pain or guilt or the necessity to see themselves differently. After the death of President Lyndon B. Johnson—a day before the cease-fire in January 1973—a first cousin named James Ealy Johnson remembered how much the President wanted to see it end. The cousin said it was an awfully difficult war. “Hardly anyone understood it,” Mr. Johnson added.

It is a calming theme, used often with rich results. More than three years later a former governor of Georgia campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination kept reassuring Americans that they were blame-free and had been badly used. At the West Shore Senior Citizens Center in New Cumberland Township, near Harrisburg in Pennsylvania, Jimmy Carter told his audience: “We killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese—little babies and children and mothers and fathers. But we never really wanted to fight over there, without quite knowing why . . .” No one ask him how the war could have gone on for twelve years if this was so.

The trauma of Vietnam is a popular expression, a convenient one for writers in magazines and newspapers, but the trauma is often as hard to detect as a virus. In “An American Woman’s Bicentennial Prayer,” the author thanked God because “never have we turned our back on another nation in need . . .

“Help us stop criticizing ourselves so much, God,” she wrote in the Ladies’ Home Journal.

A new generation of singers-composers do not care about the war but put it differently. One of them, Janis Ian, said it was boring to “proselytze” in her songs. “Remember when everyone was doing ban-the-bomb songs?” she said. “Bomb-bomb-bomb. Yatta-yatta-yatta. Bomb-bomb. Napalm. Yatta-yatta. The minute you preach, you’re interfering with somebody else’s life.”

Some American fathers put up memorials to their children killed in Vietnam. I have only seen two of them, but there may be others. In North Troy, New York, a man named Raymond Tymeson wrote a poem honoring his oldest son, his twenty-year-old namesake, who died on December 2, 1968, with the Marine Corps on what the father calls “a stinking little hill in Quang Nam they tried to take for three days.” Mr. Tymeson, who has three other children, wrote the poem very quickly although it was his first. “It came to me like that—boom,” he said. The poem is inscribed in raised bronzed letters on a twenty-foot concrete memorial which was erected on the ground of what used to be the Little League playing field in the neighborhood. The little monument is enclosed by fencing; the American flag is lit up at night. There are two other names on a plaque: Cpl. Peter M. Guenette, USA, January 4, 1948–May 18, 1968, and Cpl. Paul J. Baker, USMC, Aug 23, 1948–March 26, 1969. The poem reads:

Summer days were little league days,

When you were a boy of ten.

The high pop flies and RBI’s

Were all you thought of then.

The field once more is slick and green,

Just right for playing ball,

Where you and your trusty bat went down,

On many a three-strike call.

First and second are white and clean,

The pitcher’s mound is high,

Third and home, so near, and so far,

That left you high and dry.

But I remember one sunny day

When you were on the mound

And three came up, and three went down,

With the bases loaded all around.

It’s fun to think after all these years,

And every now and then,

I long for those happy little league days

When you were only ten.

But now another boy like you

Stands on the pitcher’s mound

He’s tall and straight and eagle-eyed,

His skin is deeply browned.

He burns them in, and they go down

Just like you used to do.

And I know you’re pleased from way up there

That every strike your brother throws,

He’s bearing down for you, cause

Ray, we miss you so.

I first saw the poem, and wrote it down, on a winter’s day in 1972. It was nearly three years later before I had the courage for such an intrusion and spoke to Mr. Tymeson, who was most cordial, even explaining that RBI’s, which he used in the third line of the poem, means “runs batted in.” Mr. Tymeson loves the game. He said his son was buried close by in St. Peter’s Cemetery, and that from their house they could almost see his grave. I said I was sorry a stranger had to speak of the death, but Mr. Tymeson said it was all right, you could say that the family had gotten over it by now. He had been a soldier himself, Mr. Tymeson said, he had seen combat in Europe during World War II with the 42d Infantry.

“I saw what could happen,” Mr. Tymeson said. “No one wants war or likes war. But my son gave his life fighting for freedom. And I say this, and I wrote it to Ray in Vietnam: Where you stand, there stands America. Where an American boy stands, there stands freedom.”

IT WAS ONLY a sunken fortified room made of packed earth whose walls were planks of rough wood, the kind used in big crates, and strips of metal. Two thick beams ran across the top of the room, which was no longer than thirty feet. Tarpaulin darkened the window and the low carved-out doorway, keeping out the dirt. There were five litters, but a sixth could be squeezed in. There were three doctors, all with the rank of captain, twelve medics, and a rather shy chaplain who had been raised in Belfast and did not seem very certain how to comfort men unless he was giving them last rites. The place was called B Med. There were no beds, no sinks, no x-rays, no hospital gowns. It was only a room with a crude floor. There were supplies stacked against the walls and tubes hanging down over the litters. At night the bare electric-light bulbs shone too hard on all faces. Only emergency lifesaving procedures were carried out at B Med. The idea was to get the wounded out in twenty minutes, but some amputations could not wait, certain wounds made men choke on their own blood and vomitus, there were hearts that began to give up. Sooner or later they all left as they came, by helicopters, which took them, the living and the dead, to the 18th Surgical Hospital in Quang Tri.

By the middle of March 1971, B Med was three months old; one hundred dead and more than eight hundred wounded had come and gone. They were casualties of the operation called Lam Son 719, the drive by South Vietnamese troops into Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh trails, to at last punish the North Vietnamese by slashing their great supply route which took their soldiers and their supplies to the south. The Americans, who did not send their troops into Laos, only their helicopters and crews, provided air and ground support from a newly built vast base at Khe Sanh. It was an old name in the war, where, in 1968, six thousand Marines were kept under siege from January 21 to April 26. But the siege had nothing to do with that spring, there was nothing to remind you of them. At first the casualties at B Med were the American helicopter pilots and crews who flew Vietnamese troops and supplies into Laos, then men in the infantry and engineer battalions sweeping and clearing close to the Laos border. There were many cheerful briefings on the progress of Lam Son 719: there was much talk of thrusts, sweeps and pushes; of plunges, drives and growing mountains of captured supplies. There always was. In Vietnam, soldiers never straggled or stumbled into battle, they plunged, smashed, thrust. The truth is sometimes they were tired, so uncertain, their packs so heavy, they moved like sleepwalkers who had forgotten how to find their beds.

At the briefings for the press, there was no bad news. One day a South Vietnamese major cheerfully announced that government troops on a sweeping operation inside Laos had turned up two hundred cooking utensils, two tons of writing paper and pens and two thousand caged chickens and ducks belonging to the enemy. He was not used to the American press, so the major did not know how to answer, and he looked distressed when asked who had counted the chickens and ducks, as if a great discourtesy had taken place. On the days when some of the Vietnamese generals at their different command posts in Khe Sanh would agree to talk to reporters, they spoke fiercely: their troops were sixteen miles inside the panhandle of southern Laos, twenty-two miles inside, going deeper; Tchepone was taken, Tchepone would soon be taken, Tchepone would fall next week. You could not tell anything from the way they spoke or looked as each day their army withered and fell back.

Inside B Med, there was an enlisted man with a thick bandage over his eyes who, for a little while, thought that his girl had come to be with him, for he spoke to her by name. Not all the wounded were critically hurt, but most of them kept their eyes shut when they were brought in and would not look around them right away. On a March morning, still early in the day, a Chicano enlisted man, with long black eyelashes and a clean, sweet face, lay on one of the litters. There seemed to be no holes in him anywhere, but a tiny piece of shrapnel was in his windpipe. They could not save him; one of the doctors banged his chest so hard it seemed as though his ribs might crack and give way. Sometimes Captain Robert Roth, who was a twenty-nine-year-old pediatrician from San Francisco, still seemed surprised at what he was seeing, even after being there at B Med for more than forty-nine days.

Often at night, when the shelling began, he would wear two flak jackets, so his whole chest and back were protected. It was very cumbersome. He did not care, he wanted to live.

“Who could conceive of this?” the captain said. “Even as a doctor I could not conceive of this.” He slept inside a bunker and wrote very long letters to his wife, describing nearly everything. He told her about a twenty-year-old soldier, name unknown or forgotten by then, whose legs and part of one arm had been destroyed by a booby trap while his unit was clearing a landing zone near the Laotian border. They operated on him in B Med. Just before the doctors began, the soldier asked Dr. Roth to pray with him.

“Then he asked me ‘Will my parents treat me the same?’” Dr. Roth said.

Some of the wounded felt cold and wanted to be warm. There were men who could not stop talking at first to the medics and those who seemed to have lost all memory of the language they knew. Often the medics took off the boots of the wounded: their feet looked strangely pale and smooth only because the rest of them was always filthy.

“We’ve noticed the amount of pain,” Captain Roth said. “We have to use more morphine than in a civilian practice, sometimes two and a half times the average dose of morphine. I think a lot of it is anxiety—they come in afraid of what will happen.”

In the beginning it had disturbed Dr. Roth very much to realize that the families of the men on the litters would not know on that day what had happened to their sons. The families would be watching television, or eating, or going to work.

“I kept thinking here I am, standing here, with their child dying,” Dr. Roth said. Then he learned not to think about it except when he wrote to his wife inside the bunker. The other doctors were laconic men but he was not. It still made him angry to think of the day when Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird said in Washington, D.C., that the invasion of Laos was going according to plan. Someone had run into B Med and told them.

“Then the plan must be to get all of us killed,” Dr. Roth said.

The little Bible was found inside B Med, but no one could be sure which of the wounded had lost it or where he had gone. A medic asked me to take it to the hospital in Quang Tri to try to find out if the owner was there. It was a pocket edition of the New Testament, with steel-plated leather covers and a message from President Franklin D. Roosevelt for all men in the Armed Forces, as well as these words: “May the Lord Be with You.” Inside, someone had written Virgil Carson of Iuka, Mississippi, and the year 1943; much later, another man had written Lieutenant Carson on that same page. He was the son. The lieutenant had the Bible with him, as always, in the breast pocket of his fatigues on the morning of March 22, 1971, when operation Lam Son 719 was crumpling. Three battalions of South Vietnamese troops—anywhere from one thousand to one thousand five hundred men—had been lifted out of Laos on March 18 by American helicopters in a rout denied by both Saigon and Washington. The fighting was described as “bitter” in a headline in The New York Times, whose desk men may not use words such as ghastly or fearful, only “bitter” or “fierce.” The South Vietnamese were failing in their campaign to cut the Communist supply lines, failing to show that by themselves and without American troops they could win. It was a winning the Americans most urgently wanted. The war, as it always did, refused to stay fixed: it moved back across the border of Laos into South Vietnam. The artillery, rockets and mortars of the North Vietnamese punched and tore earth and men, grass and trees.

He knew nothing of the retreat of ARVN. His unit was near a dirt country road, perhaps one-quarter of a mile from the old colonial Route 9 which ran into Laos, a place thought of as the last secure position near the border. Lieutenant Lane Carson, leader of 1st Platoon, Alpha Company, 1/11 Infantry, 1st of 5th Infantry Division (Mechanized), heard the artillery coming toward his group; they curled up, hiding their faces, trying to make themselves very flat and small, but it was of no use. He felt, at first, as if he had been buried alive, as if he had been hurt everywhere. He was dragged to a bunker, treated by the platoon medic; others kept offering him cigarettes, but he did not smoke. His glasses were gone, he prayed, the helicopter did not seem to come for a very long time, once on it he felt freezing, and then the morning was at last over. He did not remember B Med. He did not know where he had lost the Bible.

I never found him at Quang Tri, or any other hospital in Vietnam, for many of the wounded were quickly sent to military hospitals outside a combat zone, in other countries. It was nearly a year and a half later that I wrote to the postmaster in Iuka, Mississippi, asking if the Carsons still lived there. The answer came in a letter from New Orleans, a polite and neat letter from Lane Carson, saying how much the Bible meant to his family and offering to reimburse me for any expenses incurred in returning it. I was invited to visit them. There was no way of telling, when we met at last in New Orleans, if I had seen him before, among the dozens of men in the place called B Med.

Lane Carson married Laura, a graceful and bright woman, quite slender, who likes buying and refinishing old furniture. The two dated at Fortier High School and at Louisiana State University, where he was a major in business administration, the class of 1969. Their marriage came after six and a half years, after Vietnam, after the open fracture of his left humerus, the wounds in his left forearm, left thigh, left foot, left flank and chest. Later he knew that the doctors considered cutting off one foot and one hand, but it had not been necessary. They only amputated at the joint of his third toe.

He was grateful for the Bible but he did not want to give his opinions on the war. It made him uneasy. In the kitchen he said someday he might try to run for political office in Louisiana. Of course, it was good to be a veteran, but saying the wrong thing, making remarks that might later be a considered controversial, was a risk he did not wish to take. It was all said so quietly, and with such modesty, that no one could have been cross. He is a careful man, a neat and serious person, a Baptist, who was studying law at Tulane University. At Louisiana State University it had been compulsory to join ROTC in 1966 and 1967 in freshman and sophomore years. He had not minded it at all.

His classmates at Fortier High School voted him most likely to succeed. At LSU he joined a fraternity, was president of the junior class, on the varsity debate team, on the committee for the Union of Current Events, chairman of the Scholarship Committee, and his grades had been fine. He knew what NATO was, and SEATO, and some agreement at Baghdad; it all made sense to him. They were commitments to be honored.

“When we were going to high school we spent, oh, I don’t know how many weeks, on communism; they showed us people killed by Communists,” Laura said. “There was a real big push on—you know, ‘you don’t want to be a Communist.’ Nowadays in high school—my mother’s a teacher—they present communism but there’s not as much emphasis on it.”

The Army sent Lieutenant Carson to Fort Lewis in Seattle; he was an executive officer for a company learning basic combat training. There was too much paperwork to please him and the hours seemed excessive: 5 A.M. to 9 or 10 P.M.

“It was rewarding in many instances, meeting young men and trying to help them,” he said. “Basic training was good for a lot of them. Every company always tends to have the big lug, kind of a dumb kind of a guy, and the rest of his friends make fun of him. Well, for the one we had, it worked out well. He felt he accomplished something. When his parents came to see him they were really proud and they said it had really made a man out of him.”

He thought so too. There was a lot of talk about Vietnam at Fort Lewis. “A lot of drill sergeants, a lot of people I talked to in the military indicated how much of it was good duty there,” he said. “If you got a good position, you could have a tremendously good time. You could get good money, you’d have tax incentives, you could buy stuff cheaply and you could have a good time.”

None of these perks interested him; the good life was not what he had in mind. He volunteered to go to Vietnam at the end of 1970, when the war seemed stifled, forgotten, no more intrusive than a day of rain or a commercial for cat food. His parents took it well. Laura was the only one who kept asking why he chose to do a stupid thing like that. After he was there she began to look at a National Geographic map of Vietnam, closely and often.

“Sometimes I think it’s just essential to have been there, to be able to say ‘I was there, I witnessed it, I saw it,’” Lane Carson said of Vietnam. “I’ve got that experience behind me, good or bad. For whatever it’s worth, it’s behind me, it’s part of me now.”

He did not speak of the Vietnamese, for like most soldiers, he was cut off from them and did not, perhaps, wish it otherwise.

“I came in contact with maids washing clothes quite a lot at Quang Tri. They’d wash them but they’d get everything mixed up, of course. Yes, they were a very small people; I think their teeth were usually poor. The women seemed friendly and questioning.”

Laura thought it was curious how the antiwar movement had begun with types you might call hippies and then became many other people as well. “After a while it got to be middle-class America, Mom and Dad. It just got to be everyone.” But she did not mean that she had done anything in the streets or raised her voice or made a fist.

He was convinced the war could have been won. He spoke of how Lincoln had blockaded the South, how we might have put a ring around North Vietnam and prevented anything from coming in, as if he did not remember China was there.

Lane said he had joined the local Veterans of Foreign Wars—he felt that their lobby in Washington defended veteran benefits—and the American Legion because he wanted to be involved in community affairs. It was too bad that more Vietnam veterans did not join; the older men would die and then there would be no one to take their places.

“I think our intentions in Vietnam were definitely good. I think it was nice for a group of people to try and help another group of people at a tremendous sacrifice, even if perhaps the reasons why may not be perfectly clear to people,” Lane said.

He knew what others had said about the war: that Indochina was a testing place for new weapons, that the military-industrial complex needed a war, that there was oil in Vietnam. “No, I don’t believe that,” Lane said. “Generally I think our motives were good. I admire that aspect of it.”

His father insisted on coming to the apartment on South Claiborne Street that night to thank me for sending back the Bible, which his own father had given to him. Three generations of men had cared about it, and two of them had gone to war with the little Bible close to their hearts, hoping the Lord would be with them.

Mr. Carson, an energetic and outgoing man who works as a mechanical contractor, seemed elated by the occasion. He remembered his distress, so deep and wild, when Lane came back wounded. In the hospital the first words the father spoke were: “Oh, my boy, is it all there?” Perhaps I reminded him again of the ordeal. That night I was with a man who seemed to regard his child as a rare and splendid blessing. Mr. Carson, who wanted to make the evening a treat, took us to the Café du Monde, a bar and coffeehouse, an old and famous one. When I was having my second cup of coffee, eating the third sugared doughnut, Mr. Carson looked at all of us, his face brightening, and said: “Isn’t this a great country?”

THE STRICKEN MEN wanted to speak. The survivors of Lam Son 719 did not remain silent, they did not care if everything they told Luong he told me, an American who wrote it down, page after page after page, as they talked. They came out of Laos often missing their helmets, their combat packs, their M-16 rifles, with their uniforms ripped and stained. Nothing mattered to them except to get out, nothing. Sergeant Minh, of Battery F of 2d Marine Battalion, said in Laos his unit had orders to withdraw on Saturday, but there was an attack; on Sunday they were ordered to destroy their howitzers, and did so. On Monday, another attack; they were shelled the entire day, with no artillery of their own. Bad weather—fog, rain, thick mist—kept the helicopters from coming in for them. The helicopters were helpless things.

“We knew that was the end for us. For days we were so desperate with their constant shellings and assaults, with their strange attitude of ignoring death and always moving ahead. Never were the Marines in such a situation as this. We were never afraid of the enemy as we were this time,” he said. “They considered us to be babies. They acted as our hosts. They knew everything about us. They shouted: ‘We know that you are Company One of Battalion Two. Surrender, friends, we have hot meals and tea for you out here.’ And hearing their shouts of ‘assault, assault’ all around us, we almost wet our pants. And the running away— Oh God, I wanted to throw everything down to move faster.” Sometimes he could not help trembling as he told all this to us: the running, the thirst, the fear, the tiredness. He had not yet been able to sleep as well as he once had. All soldiers seemed to be able to fall asleep instantly, anywhere, yet Minh said now he could not.

The two armies, American and South Vietnamese, were chained to each other in the war and loathed it. But during Lam Son 719, the South Vietnamese kept up the pretense that they were in charge of the operation and that it was going well. This time they were a bit freer to show their resentment of their allies by sending away the American reporters, by booting them out, after years of smiling, of being amiable, of straining to speak English. There were high-level orders not to speak to the foreign press corps, and this pleased the Vietnamese command. It was a huge relief. Two miles west of Khe Sanh, the Vietnamese Airborne Division had its headquarters during the operation, and without Americans to run them, there was confusion and carelessness, as though madmen had made the arrangements.

The wounded Vietnamese were laid so close to the helicopter pad when a giant American Chinook came in to pick up the casualties, the fierce prop-wash of the blades blew away the dressings of the nine men who had been left there on stretchers, lifted up their blankets and bandages and tubes as if a forty mile-an-hour wind had suddenly swept over them. Twenty lightly wounded Vietnamese ran toward the Chinook before it landed, wanting the first places on it, not seeing the deathly ill men who were on the ground being washed by grit and dirt. A Vietnamese soldier holding a stick in his hand tried to direct the proceedings. Inside a large tent, half a dozen Vietnamese officers, nearly all of them doctors, were sleeping or drinking from two bottles of Scotch. One bottle had a Chivas Regal label.

It smelled inside the tent. Luong and I stood before them, but no one said we might sit down. No one offered us water or tea, although both were on the table with the liquor and food. Perhaps it showed on my face that I found it strange to find doctors drinking inside a tent, and napping, when outside the chaos was so constant, the cruelty so surprising. One officer addressed me in English while the others teased him in Vietnamese for speaking the foreign language so well. Luong told me all this later. The doctor told me they did not want foreign reporters, only Vietnamese; they knew the maneuvers of the foreign press and how we preferred to write nasty things about them. Another doctor boasted that he had taken away the camera of one American journalist. I must have stood up for ten minutes, and then sat down on the ground because I had not slept for a long time and was starting to wobble. We went to find the Vietnamese officer in charge of press; he was playing cards and said no journalists allowed, leave here, out! I was angrier then than I had been in months and yelled some nonsense at him, saying I wouldn’t go at all. But he said get out of here now. I did. The officer behaved correctly; it was I who was outrageous.

But on that March day I felt the hatred the GIs often had for the Vietnamese. The soldiers always told stories of operations with ARVN, how the Vietnamese would whistle, or smoke, or deliberately make noise to warn the VC and avoid a firefight. They always had stories, their own or those handed down from men who had since gone home, of ARVN running away, of ARVN being chicken. Cowards, thieves, cheats, bums, motherfuckers, rats, pure shit, scared rabbits, the GIs said of ARVN—there it is. It was a favorite expression, which sounded theological the first few times you heard them say it in Vietnam. There it is, they said, when it rained, or the beer ran out, or the mortars came in, or their feet began to rot. They could not understand such an army, could not perceive why ARVN was so bad, so flakey, so without pride, so indifferent to American deaths and to their own reversals.

The Vietnamese I despised were never the soldiers, that human and desperate army, an army without a country, a powerless army that was never loved and who robbed and abused its own. They were victims seeking their own victims. The fury I felt that day—which woke me up, made me forget how much I wanted sleep, clean hair, very cold water—was for the Vietnamese doctors in the tent, whose faces were getting blotchy and soft from the Scotch while outside the Chinook made the bandages whirl like stained and tangled streamers.

An American with the 101st Airborne Division at Khe Sanh said it wasn’t safe for Luong to stay among the GIs. There was a possibility that he might be shot if he left the press tent at night. The soldiers were keyed up, the sight of any Vietnamese might make them open fire. No one wanted him there. The 101st Airborne—the Screaming Eagles—was being shelled in the morning and at night, sappers had gotten in through the perimeter to the trench lines and bunkers, there were red alerts. The cooks kept cooking; one of them said the shelling was always at 7 A.M. and close to 7 P.M., with God knows what in between. He was right. One night we ate something veal, and cherry cobblers, on paper plates in a light rain before the mortars came in. Soldiers were told to walk, not run, when there was “in-coming,” but I never saw one who could. All of us scuttled or leaped. I reached a bunker crowded with soldiers; we sat on benches while a lieutenant—again the southern voice, so new to me, coming from a corner of Alabama or North Carolina—said to expect a ground attack.

We sat in the blackness, pressed to each other, making no sound, as if breathing too loudly, or one cough, might bring death quicker. Next to me was the hard arm of a man whose face I never saw. The lieutenant said our bunker could expect to receive rocket-propelled grenades; still none of us moved or spoke. The bunker seemed higher than the others: half in the earth, half above it. It was an easier target. When the shelling stopped for a while, we ran out, the soldiers to take their positions for the expected assault. “We’ll give you a forty-five, ma’am,” the lieutenant said. I refused it, and ran to hide. The reason I might have given at the time was that correspondents were civilian noncombatants and that I would kill no one. It was a long time later before it came to me that in refusing a weapon, all I had done was to make it necessary for a GI to do the defending, that to refuse to take part in the killing only meant that others would have to do it for me.

The attack did not come that night.

A PLATOON SERGEANT named Co had clung like an insect to the skids of one American helicopter that came for his battalion in Laos on March 6. Only one hundred of the four hundred got out: there was no room for all of them. As the soldiers raced to each helicopter, shoving and pushing the slower or weaker ones out of their way, the American crews had to use their feet or fists to stop so many men. The Americans were afraid the helicopters could not rise with too heavy a load. The Vietnamese officers watched and could do nothing. No one listened to orders. The sergeant was older, with muscular arms and thicker wrists, with wider bones than the other Vietnamese, who did not often weigh more than one hundred and ten pounds. Few men had been able to hold on to the skids of the helicopters once the aircraft rose and the wind began to slam and freeze them. Sometimes, on the ground, reporters saw the soldiers fall, unable to hold on any longer, but you could not hear if they howled or cried out when they dropped.

He was not ashamed of what he had one, the sergeant said; to be ashamed was a luxury he could not afford. “Each helicopter would have been the last one, so what choice was there for me?” he said. “Only the madmen would stay and politely wait for the next helicopter.

“The wind, the wind, so terribly strong. Sometimes I nearly fell off. Jesus Christ, my hands and legs were dead when we reached Khe Sanh . . . They fired on us night and day, not saving ammunition as they did here in the south. With eighteen years in the army and fighting so many battles, I never had such an experience as this Laos operation . . . Sometimes we talked to the North Vietnamese on the radio. They told us to surrender to survive . . . ‘You realize too well that we are all around you, and can move in at any time, not because you are bad soldiers, but because you are so few, so tired, so lonely and a little frightened. We are Vietnamese, why do you fight for the American imperialists? You should be fighting for your country, the Vietnamese people.’ This is what they said. And some of us swore and called them names on the radio: ‘Sons of bitches, you are working like dogs for the Chinese, for the Russians, you are selling the country to them, motherfuckers.’ That kind of talking went on for ten minutes and they used to cut off by saying on the radio ‘We expect you to be nicer. Now it’s better to stop. We will call you again, friends.’”

There were many such stories we heard in Khe Sanh. Sergeant Co was AWOL, but he did not care.

“All that counts is surviving this Laos operation,” he said. “Being absent for a few days, getting some punishment, that is nothing to me.” He wanted to sleep, to eat, to drink beer, to be with friends all at the same time.

There was a twenty-two-year-old Marine named Private Moc—he walked through the jungle for two nights and a day before being airlifted back—who kept sucking on one cigarette after another, a man who seemed to be drinking smoke. He could not stop it. His unit had been near a fire base called Delta on Hill 547 about eight miles inside Laos; he wanted to tell why the South Vietnamese troops ran for their lives, each man struggling only for himself.

“The last attack came at about eight P.M. They shelled us first and then came the tanks moving up into our positions. The whole brigade ran down the hill like ants. We jumped on each other to get out of that place. No man had time to look for his commanding officer. It was quick, quick, quick or we would die. Oh God, now I know for sure that I am really alive.”

Squatting, he moved his head from side to side as he spoke, sometimes in a voice that became a whisper. “They were everywhere and they were so daring,” Private Moc said. “Their firepower was so enormous and their shelling was so accurate, what could we do but run, run for our lives.”

There were others—in the 1st Infantry Division, considered a crack outfit by the American advisors, in the Marines, the Rangers and in the Airborne Division—who had not ever imagined such an enemy and who could not understand how they survived American air strikes and B-52 bombings, which they themselves feared so much. Many complained that since the drive into Cambodia in the spring of 1970 had been so easy, there was so little resistance, they had not known what to expect in Laos. The trouble was they now knew what to expect and thought they could never be ready again for such an ordeal.

Corporal Ti—few men wanted to give their full names—was a Marine who fought on Hill 547 in Laos on the night of March 22. Many of his friends had killed themselves because they were wounded. The American helicopters could not extract the injured because of heavy antiaircraft fire.

“The papers and the radio kept on saying there was a Laos victory, I have learned now, but what a joke,” Corporal Ti said. “We ran out like wounded dogs.”

This was the most heartbreaking thing to him.

Corporal Ti said: “We left behind our wounded friends. They lay there, crying, knowing the B-52 bombs would fall on them. They asked friends to shoot them, but none of us could bring himself to do that. So the wounded cried out for grenades, first one man, then another, then more.”

The men who could still stand up and move began to disperse at 8 P.M. At midnight they thought they could hear the sound of the B-52s coming in.

“Some men who were wounded in the arms or legs tried to run out with us, but they could not make it,” Corporal Ti said.

Private Binh of the 2d Marine Battalion had the same story to tell about a wounded friend: “He waved me closer to him and told me in whispers ‘No way for you to help me out. So please have pity on me and give me a grenade, Binh, don’t hesitate, give me it and run out now.’ I gave him one. Seconds later I heard it explode. Poor boy, poor boy. There were about one hundred and fifty left behind. They cried, asked to be shot by friends, asked for grenades. And the withdrawal was terrifying. A group of about one hundred stuck to each other and nobody wanted to be first in line. On the way all were afraid of running into ambushes. Sometimes we were fired on by North Vietnamese or by running-away Marines . . . Once Captain Tien had to swear at us loudly and angrily. ‘Goddammit, be courageous. Be soldiers. I’m worrying about my survival too, so when I advise you to go this way or that way I think of you as well as me. Okay, move now. Okay, I move first.’ And he pulled out his pistol and ran uphill. And we followed him.”

There was nothing more Private Binh could tell and nothing more to ask. Lam Son 719 was the death of the army in South Vietnam, and the total collapse came four years later when province after province in the south was pushed and then quickly collapsed. There were no great battles; in some places the armies did not exchange fire. Americans were surprised, some outraged, by the spectacle they saw on their television screens and what they read in their newspapers. The eyewitness reports told of Vietnamese soldiers who seemed to have gone insane as they ran, pleading, begging, pillaging. Soldiers kicked, battered and fired upon civilians to get aboard the last aircraft to leave Danang. There was no pity in them.

Two hundred and sixty-eight people were the last passengers to leave. Only two women and a baby were among the soldiers of the ARVN 1st Division who fought their way on that flight. When the aircraft rose at last, the soldiers did not cheer at their luck. They were silent, for they understood what they had done. When Danang fell, it fell to a thousand Communist soldiers who came into the city and shortly restored order. Even the Vietnamese who won were surprised. In August 1975 Radio Hanoi said an outstanding achievement of the revolution was the stabilization of social order and security in the southern region, where there had been “a mad and disorderly society having the most unruly troops ever seen in the world.”

RENNIE PERRIN, A middle-aged Vermont barber, was sound asleep when his wife a nurse, came home from her shift at the Veterans Administration Hospital, so she thought it wiser to wait until the morning to tell him their son, Richard, had deserted. Mrs. Perrin heard it on the radio at the hospital, where she had night duty. The next day—it was in September 1967—Mr. Perrin had to be told, for there was a story on their son, a nineteen-year-old private, in the local paper, the Springfield Times-Reporter. Mr. Perrin, a veteran of World War II who had been discharged after a year in the Army because he had tuberculosis, listened to his wife, Betty. Then he began to cry. She stayed very calm.

“Somebody had to,” Mrs. Perrin said.

Five years after Richard Perrin made that choice, his parents were still anxious and shy about talking about the son who had so much changed their lives, as if they still feared he might be hurt. For quite some time Mrs. Perrin thought certain Americans might go to Canada and try to kill the deserters living there.

The couple live in a mobile home in Sharon, Vermont, off Route 14, about ten miles north of White River Junction. They moved here in 1972 from North Springfield, where they lived for fifteen years and raised three children. Springfield is a factory town with not more than ten thousand people, known for its machine tools and often called “precision valley,” Mr. Perrin said. He had his own barbershop, called Ray’s, but he left it at the age of sixty-three. He only says of all this that business was slow because men were letting their hair grow longer and that he wasn’t trained to do the hair styling that younger customers wanted. He does not give his son’s notoriety as a reason for leaving. They moved to Sharon to be nearer the V.A. hospital where Mrs. Perrin has worked since 1966 in the orthopedic and neurosurgical wards.

It was in December 1973 when I saw them. They are not cheerful now at Christmas. Mr. Perrin speaks with effort, as if his words were little roots that had to be pulled up carefully from hard ground.

“We had a terrible time for a long time,” Mr. Perrin said. “As long as he is in Canada, it will never really be over for us.” He thought that people whose sons had been killed in Vietnam might find it easier to accept their loss, find it easier to go on with life, than he and his wife did. Their boy was always missing. “You make up your mind they’re gone now and you can’t bring them back,” he said. “But with Dick, he’s alive and can’t come back.”

The unspoken fear of Mr. and Mrs. Perrin was quite clear. It was that one of them—he at sixty-four, or she at fifty—might fall ill and not be able to see Richard before death. The other children would come to them, of course, but without Richard there was always a space and a longing.

“You’d be surprised at how fast things can happen to people,” Mrs. Perrin said, meaning the heart-can-go, the lungs-can-go, the-kidneys-or-liver-can-go, just like that. She looked at Mr. Perrin; he looked at her. They did not want to complain about how they had been treated or tell me the names of people who had snubbed or wounded them. They did not want to be considered whiners.

Mr. Perrin was still a member of the American Legion because he paid his dues, but he had stopped going to their meetings. Mrs. Perrin was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

“I’ve never been back because I know how they would feel. It would be hard for me to listen to them talk—oh, I know how they talk,” Mr. Perrin said, “You know they all went to war, and anybody who doesn’t do that—well, I feel I’m just as good a legionnaire as they are. I believe in this country. I love this country. Even if Dick did desert, he said himself that he loved this country. There was the time when they asked him if he wanted to become a C.O. and he said no. He wasn’t against all wars, just this one. If someone came to attack this country, he’d fight for the defense of it . . .

“In the beginning it was terrible for us. I was very patriotic, like most men are. I used to make statements like those I’ve heard people say in front of me since Dick deserted. People saying ‘Anyone who deserts should be shot.’ It’s awful hard for people to understand. When this first happened we didn’t go along with Dick because we didn’t understand it. Like most people don’t. But when you’re involved in it you start asking yourself questions, why all this happened. Now that we know, we feel a lot better. In the beginning it was terrible.”

Mr. Perrin was born in France, in Vosges above Nancy; he remembered his parents talking, with bitterness, about World War I. He came to Vermont as a child, growing up in Barre, but no one could pronounce his real first name, Rene. They called him Re-en, or Rinay, or Rin, so he called himself Rennie, for everyone could pronounce that.

Richard Perrin was nineteen, a tank mechanic in the 1st Battalion of the 64th Armored Brigade stationed in Kitzingen, West Germany, when he deserted and went to Paris to begin an organization called RITA, which stood for “Resist Inside the Army.” It was an underground antiwar group of GIs trying to encourage dissension. Perhaps the most shocking time for his parents was December 11, 1967, when they saw their son on CBS television from Paris with the black radical Stokely Carmichael, who had recently called for the defeat of the United States in Vietnam.

I remember the deserters who came to Paris. A very tall boy from Florida who liked scrambled eggs slept on my living-room floor for three nights, but we thought it better if I did not know his last name. He went on to Sweden, he could not bear being in Paris. None of them were sure if the French government would not turn them over to the Americans, if there would not be a knock on the door at midnight, and the door kicked down. The deserters had pledged that they would engage in no political activity while in France, but their existence was a political act, their being in a room meant the war and the Army were in the room too.

The notorious interview took place at midnight in Paris after long, secret arrangements which took the CBS television crew and a New York Times reporter to a middle-class apartment. White bedsheets were hung in one room to shield a Dutch activist who had arranged everything. He stayed behind the sheets as he spoke of increasing desertions. Private Perrin walked through the sheets to sit down and face the camera, which rested on him like a huge, unblinking eye. He was calm and spoke quietly of his life, recalling how at fifteen he had joined a march in Chicago in 1964 led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“About this time I began thinking that, maybe, everything I was told in school, maybe, wasn’t all like that,” the private said.

In Springfield, Vermont, his parents were horrified. Mr. Perrin told a reporter: “We don’t go along with what this boy did but we realize he has been brainwashed.” He insisted that his son had been a “good soldier” when he first enlisted. Local people, who considered Carmichael a Communist if not something even more evil, were very critical and let their opinions be known. A picture of Richard Perrin appeared on the front page of the town newspaper with the headline AWOL GI RECALLED AS AVERAGE STUDENT.

Mrs. Perrin was worried that the two younger children, David and Nancy, would be bullied or taunted. “That day when I sent them off to school—it was David’s twelfth birthday—I remember telling the kids to hold your head high,” she said. “When David went in his classroom one of the kids said ‘Is that your brother?’ and David said ‘Shut your big fat mouth.’ That’s the way he handled it.”

She is dark-haired, small, quicker to smile than her husband. Both speak softly. Their son once said of them, in an interview with another American in exile, that his parents were outwardly conservative people but more liberal than their Vermont friends.

“With my folks there is a sort of basic humanism which stuck in my head,” Richard Perrin said. “They wouldn’t tolerate me saying nigger, Polack, anything like that . . . I was always truthful with them, anything I did, I would always go home and tell them about it.”

The word “deserter”—the ancient, horrid word with its dreadful picture of a cringing, failing man who flees—made them feel sick. It is a word they still do not like. It makes most Americans nervous, too, for they think of a battlefield and a soldier running from it, leaving other men in a lurch. No one thinks of courage or convictions.

It took Mr. and Mrs. Perrin nearly three years to accept what Richard had done and to see his reasons, although they always defended him even when they disapproved. Her husband was ahead of her on that, Mrs. Perrin said.

After graduating from high school, Richard had been unable to find a job because of his draft status. He went to California to visit his half brother, Ronald, the child of Mr. Perrin’s first marriage, who was fifteen years older and always had a stunning and gentle influence on the younger boy. It was he who had worked for civil rights and made Richard see its importance. That year Ronald, who was teaching at the University of California, was in the antiwar movement, but nothing about Vietnam seemed to reach Richard Perrin until after he enlisted and was in advanced infantry training.

While sitting in a PX cafeteria at Fort Leonard Wood, Private Perrin, an E-2 squad leader at the armored vehicles repair shop, overheard two sergeants reminiscing about Vietnam. One described how he had gotten a confession from a captured Vietnamese by pushing the naked prisoner against the very hot engine of a tank so his genitals would burn. The sergeant was talking in a normal voice, not as if he was telling a secret. From then on, Richard Perrin began to pay attention to everything about the war. At the end of June 1967 he was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Ronald, who had earlier told him not to desert, had heard that a Private Andy Stapp, also at Fort Sill, was organizing GIs to protest the war. Richard later described his good friend Andy, who formed the American Servicemen’s Union, as “anticapitalist, antiimperialist” while saying of himself that at Fort Sill he was just “antiwar.” But he was that, and he worked hard.

“He was learning and reading about Vietnam. He was really tore up. He called home, very upset, and begged us to see it the way he did,” Mr. Perrin said.

“But of course we didn’t,” Betty Perrin added, “we believed what we were reading in the papers at that time. We wanted him to just get the three years over and get home.”

At Fort Sill, during a press conference of antiwar GIs, Private Perrin handed out his own statement, which received considerable attention in the press. He was eighteen.

“I was being trained as a truck mechanic and was on my way to Fort Sill to work on armored trucks and self-propelled artillery,” the statement said. “I realized I was being trained to support these atrocities. At this point I decided to find out for myself whether there was any justification for the war. Everyone said there was, but they couldn’t tell me what it was.”

He ended the statement by saying that he hoped the people in the United States would wake up to the fact that they were being led through a period that would one day “be called the darkest in our history.”

For his failure one night to sign out on the pass register, shortly after the press conference, Private Perrin was arrested, handcuffed and taken to the city jail in Lawton, before being turned over to the military authorities. He was charged with an article 15, nonjudicial punishment, which he refused to sign. He demanded a court-martial. It was clear to him he was only being punished for his antiwar activities, not for neglecting to sign the pass register.

Mr. and Mrs. Perrin were flown down to see their son and told by officers to try to bring the boy around to a reasonable point of view, that the military only wanted to straighten him out. They talked to a captain, then to a general, who explained the domino theory to them and the importance of South Vietnam being protected. When they saw Richard, who was in the stockade, they could hardly believe it.

“It was an awful shock,” Mrs. Perrin said. “His head has been shaved but they wouldn’t let him shave his face or change his clothes.”

“He didn’t look like our boy,” Mr. Perrin said.

“He said he was ashamed to wear the uniform,” Mrs. Perrin said.

Richard Perrin said later that when the Army assumed he repented, they offered to shorten his sentence of thirty days’ hard labor. If he stopped his antiwar work, the Army said, they would send him to Germany, not Vietnam. Perrin agreed, but in Germany the racism on the bases—much more acute than in the United States—the memory of the stockade, his fatigue and disgust with the military led him to desert. He refused, in all ways, to be a soldier any more. In Paris he wanted RITA to inspire soldiers to challenge and harass the military.

“I was sort of hanging on to the old liberal myth: There’s nothing wrong with the U.S. . . . The war is just a mistake . . . We can stop this and elect a new administration,” Richard Perrin said of himself in 1968.

In Springfield nothing was quite the same for his parents, or ever could be. Some people wrote letters to the paper protesting what Richard Perrin had done.

“One letter, I remember, said that we or the schools had failed in not having the Perrin boy read the story of The Man Without a Country,” Mrs. Perrin said. A disabled World War II veteran wrote in his letter that deserters like their son should be shot. The man’s wife was a friend of Mrs. Perrin’s; they were both nurses. “We never talked about it, we just never even mentioned it,” she said.

A lot of people asked his parents about Richard, including some whose own sons had been in Vietnam.

“You’ve heard me say this, Betty, but sometimes I had the feeling that some people, not all of them, would ask me about Dick because some of them were pumping me and that deep down they were probably hoping he was having a hard time,” Mr. Perrin said, shaking his head.

But there were a few people who tried to tell him, when he was still puzzled and sorrowful, that his son had done the right thing. The couple were encouraged to keep in touch with their son, not to turn their backs on him, by Phillips B. Henderson, pastor of the North Springfield Baptist Church, who had known Richard and had liked him.

Mrs. Perrin felt as if she and her husband had lost a child. “If they were mean, it made me mad. If they were kind, it almost brought me to tears,” she said.

She was more often on the verge of tears. When Richard wrote from Canada for a grade transcript, the Springfield school board refused to send it to him. One board member was the father of Richard’s closest friends in high school. He told his own children never to associate with their classmate again and he forbid them to write the deserter. When I asked them about the reaction of relatives in Vermont and New Hampshire, Mr. and Mrs. Perrin looked at each other but said nothing.

Richard moved to Canada in January 1969, working for a year and a half operating two hostels and a counseling service for the Union of American Deserters in Regina, Saskatchewan. He married a Canadian girl and both worked at a center for retarded children in Moose Jaw. At twenty-two Richard Perrin said that he did not think he would plan on returning to the United States and that he would be of no use there. At twenty-five he was in Regina working as a garage mechanic. He had always loved working on cars, that was one reason he never let his hair grow long, for he couldn’t stand having it get in his eyes when he worked. His two-year-old son was named Shayne.

“He was the quietest of the children,” Mrs. Perrin said. “There was a wide streak of idealism in Richard, together with an impatience with hypocrisy. Richard was the most quiet, I didn’t always know what he was thinking because he didn’t talk much, but when he did open up to talk you better be ready to listen . . .”

They are stubborn people, refusing to give in to the strain and isolation they had felt for so long. Perhaps they had not even known how taxing it had been until the Perrins went to an amnesty conference in Vermont in the fall of 1973. It was so new for them to be surrounded by people like themselves, people who were proud of their sons for escaping the draft or leaving the Army. One young man went up to Mr. Perrin to shake his hand because he had a son in Canada. It was a man who had gone to jail rather than to Vietnam. Mr. Perrin spoke of that handshake, and the encounter, as if he had suddenly received an award.

“Even if they did let them come back, maybe it wouldn’t be very pleasant for them—there would always be someone saying something and pointing them out as deserters,” Mr. Perrin said. “Dick wouldn’t want to come back to live.”

The couple had visited their son and his family five times in Saskatchewan. The visits had been happy. David, the youngest son, had spoken often of the brother who went to Canada, for he was proud of him. Richard did not become a ghost. Mrs. Perrin showed me some color photographs of their reunions in Canada: there was Richard Perrin, a tall dark-haired man with a face that was a little blurred in the photographs.

“He doesn’t look like a criminal, does he?” Mrs. Perrin asked.

ON SEPTEMBER 16, 1974, President Ford announced his clemency program for convicted and unconvicted draft evaders and military deserters, which he said was an “act of mercy.” His offer was delayed a week because of the President’s pardon of former President Richard M. Nixon, which provoked a furious and inquisitive reaction throughout the country. The amnesty program applied to those men who had evaded the draft or deserted the military between August 4, 1968, and March 28, 1973, the strange and poisonous period bounded by the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam. The President’s program had three autonomous parts: the Defense Department handled unsettled military desertion cases; civilian draft evaders went to the Justice Department; and a nine-man Presidential Clemency Board handled civilians and servicemen already convicted and punished. The board was headed by former Senator Charles Goodell, a Republican of New York who had opposed the war. His defeat for reelection by James L. Buckley was believed to have been engineered by Nixon forces. The board, a mixture of men of different backgrounds and political persuasions, included a retired Marine general, the thirty-one-year-old executive director of Paralyzed Veterans of America, a former cabinet member and counselor to President Nixon, and the president of Notre Dame University, who had been chairman of the U.S. Committee on Civil Rights.

The program was riddled with inequities, ambiguities and different perceptions of degrees of guilt. The Clemency Board itself disbanded—after two extensions of the program—in a sour spirit, with four of its members refusing to put their names to the final report, which they considered to be too lenient.

Although the President thought the clemency program would heal some of the deepest tears in the country, it only inflamed them and gave fresh energy to antiwar groups, or those who argued for an unconditional or general amnesty.

On the last day of the very last deadline—March 31, 1975—the American Civil Liberties Union bitterly criticized what it termed “the numbers game” of the clemency board:

In six and a half months since the inception of the Clemency Program . . . the Board claims to have received about 16,500 applications. It has so far managed to process 65 of these cases to date—less than 1/2 of 1 percent. At this rate, the Board’s clemency processing will be completed in 125 years, in the year 2110. Mr. Goodell has announced that he is urging the President to double the size of the present nine-member Board. That should cut the time required for processing to about 60 years, till A.D. 2035.

The Clemency Board has received only 8,334 applications from persons whose eligibility has been established. About 4/5 of them come from Vietnam-era veterans with administrative Undesirable discharges from the military. The Board can offer them a) a pardon which they do not need, since they were never convicted of a crime, not even by court-martial for a military offense, and it can offer them b) a Clemency Discharge, which gives them neither greater dignity nor any veterans benefits whatever . . . And for these dubious advantages the Board will require up to two years of alternate service from these veterans. For 80 percent of the Board’s applicants, the clemency is a cruel hoax.

More than 750,000 persons were in need of a universal and unconditional amnesty after the decade in Vietnam, the ACLU said, but only 137,000 were eligible under the Ford plan.

There was resentment over the alternate service—up to two years—required of men who avoided the draft and were not convicted and deserters without convictions. Deputy Attorney General Laurence Silberman, explaining the program, said the government would place such men in public service jobs if they could not find jobs themselves which met with the government’s approval. Such work wouldn’t be hard to find, Mr. Silberman added, “because they are low-paying jobs that many people don’t seek.”

In January 1976 the ACLU made public a copy of the final report of the Clemency Board and challenged the claim that the program had been a success.

The board’s report said that 113,227 persons were eligible for the amnesty program but only 21,729 had applied. Of this group. 5,052 had been recommended for outright pardon, 7,551 had been given varying periods of alternative service and 911 had been denied any form of clemency. There were 8,215 cases not resolved.

The report also said that 10,115 fugitive AWOL offenders had been eligible for inclusion in the program and that 55 percent had applied, that 4,522 unconvicted draft offenders had been eligible and that 16 percent had applied, that 90,000 discharged AWOL offenders had been eligible and that 13 percent had applied, and that 22 percent of 8,700 convicted draft offenders who were eligible had come forward.

“The program has completely failed in all areas,” Warren Hoover, executive director of the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors said.

Ramsey Clark, former Attorney General under President Lyndon B. Johnson and one of the few men who had held high office who later denounced the war, said the ACLU gave too small a number. Rather than the 750,000 Americans the ACLU thought would be affected by a general amnesty—which Mr. Clark said did not include hundreds of thousands of men who had not registered for the draft and were omitted from census counts—the number was far greater. Mr. Clark gave the number of Americans in “legal jeopardy” for war resistance close to 2,000,000.

Such numbers—they sailed out like tiny black butterflies. In Washington, D.C., there are quite different numbers and their numbers are in battle with these numbers. I know what I am forgetting now: the face of the boy from Nebraska who hid in Paris, the book he kept reading over and over. His face is not clear, it becomes the face, thin and careful, of Richard Bucklin on the day he had visitors in the army prison at Leavenworth. He said he had left a letter in his shirt pocket, that this was forbidden but that the punishment was not severe.