IV

ODD THINGS NOT YET FORGOTTEN

They were afraid of the dark, as they might once have dreaded it as children of five and six. Every day in Vietnam, when it was still light, the dark pushed in too soon, always ahead of itself. You could not drive on any of the highways much after five in the evening; you had to be someplace by six, and stay there. It was no use ignoring the dark, or trying to defy it, or hiding inside it. It was not a loving dark. The fear of the troops was considered a “major deficiency” in fighting the war, something stubborn and childlike which had to be overcome. A veteran lieutenant colonel put it this way: “Night operations don’t require comment; they require doing. The average American seems to have an innate fear of the darkness and will avoid night operations when possible. This applies to new recruits and officers in high commands . . . Until we can teach every U.S. soldier to consider darkness an advantage, the night will belong to the VC.”

So the night remained theirs, that did not change. Even the Americans who wanted to take risks, who were among the least timid, hurling themselves into the war, feared that in the darkness they would be wasted. Even the calmest of them were impaired by the night and remember it now so many years later.

“I had to move my kids in the dark and they were scared shitless, all of us were scared,” Ron Ridenhour, a former team leader of a Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol group, said, calling them kids because he is thirty now.

Sometimes the dark would be pierced by the flares which lit up the landscape like a sickly white sun, leaving small parachutes in the trees that hung from the branches like pale, sleeping bats. Sometimes, late at night, each man fired every weapon around the perimeter, and kept firing, for sixty seconds. This was called “The Mad Minute.” Its purpose was to scare off the enemy, in the darkest hour of the night, before the light came. The soldiers looked pleased, the extra noise excited them, no one out there came closer, nothing came back. In the light of the flares they looked like ghostly, busy men.

If it was not the dark, there were other things, and each man found a way to calm himself and push back the image of his own death or mutilation. There were things to wear that brought luck: beads, necklaces, tokens, symbols, rings, boonie hats with girls’ names on them, scarfs worn like headbands, which stopped the sweat. The Marines, needing to be perverse, liked to wear big disks that spelled out war. Most of the troops wore their dog tags not around their necks but outside their boots, strung through an eyelet. There were rituals and taboos to be observed. A few carried small Bibles; others wore crosses and religious medals.

Some of the soldiers, in the world’s richest-equipped army, found a degree of comfort and certainty in what they refused to do. There was a certain squad—a squad is only eleven men—who would not eat apricots. Apricots led to burns, smashed faces, broken bones, to being wasted.

A private named Thomas Hobbs told me about it. He would not touch them in his C-rations. He ate the fruit cocktail, the boned turkey, the spaghetti, the scrambled eggs, the grape jam. But no enlisted man in 2d Squad would touch the apricots. “The day we hit a mine a sergeant ate apricots,” Hobbs said. “If a guy eats apricots, he is not coming with us.”

It happened like this. On November 12, 1970, their column of eighteen armored vehicles passed over a mine of nearly 175 pounds that did not explode until the third track went over it. Afterward there was a hole about eight feet in diameter in the earth. Hobbs was thrown free, landing on squashy ground. But the driver, who was always holed up in the hatch, had his face slammed into metal.

“When I got over to him he was saying over and over ‘I’ve lost all my teeth, I’ve lost all my teeth,’” the medic said. His name was Burke. Everyone’s name was on a tag over his left pocket, so you did not even have to ask. The sergeant’s face—the nose and the chin—were a mess, Burke said.

It was wrong to call it an armored personnel carrier, Hobbs told me, looking at the big, shaky notes I wrote as we moved in that machine, which creaked and lurched and swayed. It was a gun track because it had 81-mm mortar.

All of them were as precise, always at ease with the machinery of murder, understanding exactly how it worked. They knew the arsenal so well: “See, ma’am, that canister round has something like seven thousand oblong bearings in it, with a range of four hundred meters, and it just rips everything to pieces out there, even trees.”

Hobbs was a country boy, a Texan, who liked to hunt. He had a cowlick and big feet. He was nineteen. He was exactly what the Army wanted and the Army got. Something about his neck and wrists made me think he might still be growing. You could imagine Hobbs, as a child, wanting to learn to drive and steering the wheel from the lap of a grownup.

For a little while the men in the squad came to life, pleased to be talking to someone new. The war had blunted and dulled them, teaching them what it was to be helpless and how to wait. They rarely saw the North Vietnamese, or any Vietnamese. It was hard to write a letter, to read a book, to think of anything, the medic said. He gave out tranquilizers. The squad knew nothing about Vietnam, or what was happening in the war, or what had happened a year ago. They did not see themselves as men who had burst into history.

The area of operations was near Nin Hokai Ridge, below the Demilitarized Zone which cut Vietnam in two. Circling those hills in their huge rackety machines, they could see older ruts made by the Americans before them and by those who had been there the year before. Hobbs did not care. He had only three hundred and one days to go, he said. That is how it went: each day had to be killed.

The column stopped for lunch. Someone had a transistor radio—someone always did—and it gave us “Baby, They Are Playing Our Song.” It was very still in that grey place whose birds and animals had gone. A Vietnamese in Paris had once told me there had been cattle grazing in Quang Tri, and wild animals, but I wondered if he had dreamed it. Hobbs thought that he had once seen wild geese which pleased him. Private Patrick Sand hoped to dry his socks over a small bonfire of litter. But he only scorched them. No one spoke again of the canned apricots.

In Saigon, I wrote to Hobbs’ mother, said he was fine and sent her a photograph of her son and his friend, Nate. Her answer came on pink paper from Junction, Texas. He had hit another mine on January 16. It was nice of me to write for she was always worried, always.

Now, so many years later, watching a television commercial, I was reminded of Hobbs and his friend Nate and the apricots and the man who lost his teeth. The little commercial was for a game called Tank Command, described as the strategic military game from Ideal. The two men playing it make a lot of faces to show you that it is an exciting, tough game. The man who has just been outsmarted looks up and says: “War is hell.”

We are an odd people with odd playthings, odd ideas of what is good for our male children. In June 1968, after the great Tet offensive in Vietnam, when American and Vietnamese casualties rose, George Gallup, founder of the American Institute of Public Opinion, concluded in an article called “What Combat Does to Our Men” that combat was beneficial. The Gallup Poll had analyzed the answers of 140 veterans of Vietnam in a survey to find out how they were affected. Mr. Gallup wrote: “In summary: These 18- to 25-year-olds command respect because they respect themselves. They have gained self-confidence, firmed up their goals. They have learned to follow and to lead, to accept responsibility and to be responsible for others. While only 26 percent wanted to go to Vietnam in the first place, 94 percent having returned, say they are glad for the experience. What kind of citizens will they be? Judging by the cross section we talked to, the answer is: superior.”

Quite a few veterans laugh when I show them the poll. It is not just that their benefits are mean—much less under the G.I. Bill of Rights than those given to World War II veterans—or that jobs are hard to find or even that the war was lost and they are uncomfortable, sometimes embarrassing reminders of it. Something is missing in them. I ask David, the ex-medic, who likes his job, his friends, the place where he lives. He killed no one. “It’s hard to be hopeful about anything,” he said. There it is.

In a later, more profound, study of college and noncollege youths done by Daniel Yankelovich between 1969 and 1973, the public-opinion analyst reported that the attitudes and characteristics of the Vietnam veterans were generally comparable to those of their peers. One important distinction did emerge. The veterans were markedly less optimistic about themselves and their society.

In January 1973 the Reverend Billy Graham, a close friend of President Nixon, said that he had avoided making public his personal reservations about the war in Vietnam because “then I would be forced to take sides in every war in the world.” He said that over the years he had kept his reservations about the Vietnam war quiet because “all through the period I have not been sure whether our involvement was right or wrong.” He “didn’t want to get involved on either side,” Reverend Graham said. Nevertheless, he told a reporter that the war in Vietnam was “a judgment of God on America” and that from the beginning he had “grave questions.” It was an odd interview, with the Reverend leaping from one answer to the next.

“A thousand people are killed every week on American highways, and half of these are attributed to alcohol. Where are the demonstrations against alcohol?” Reverend Graham said.

In the December 1975 issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal, during an interview in his home in San Clemente, California, former President Richard M. Nixon said: “We are so cynical, so disbelieving, it may take the shock of another invasion—in Korea or in Thailand. If American lives are threatened, we may regain our sense of belief in our country and our need for strength.”

What the former President is saying is that we need another war.

In the Dynacopy shop in Columbus Circle, the men who work the duplicating machines do not read what they copy. They are too busy and people resent it if they do. I invite them to look at my lists. NUMBER OF CASUALTIES INCURRED BY U.S. MILITARY PERSONNEL IN CONNECTION WITH THE CONFLICT IN VIETNAM BY HOME STATE OF RECORD and MILITARY SERVICE from 1 Jan 1961 thru Sept 1975.

“How many in New York,” the grey-haired man asked. He found out. Then he wanted to see New Jersey, where he lives.

“Oh my God, the cream of the crop,” the man said, looking at New York.

ALABAMA	1,181
ALASKA	55
ARIZONA	604
ARKANSAS	579
CALIFORNIA	5,448
COLORADO	608
CONNECTICUT	589
DELAWARE	120
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA	235
FLORIDA	1,897
GEORGIA	1,548
HAWAII	271
IDAHO	207
ILLINOIS	2,876
INDIANA	1,510
IOWA	818
KANSAS	613
KENTUCKY	1,037
LOUISIANA	870
MAINE	331
MARYLAND	992
MASSACHUSETTS	1,300
MICHIGAN	2,597
MINNESOTA	1,043
MISSISSIPPI	627
MISSOURI	1,380
MONTANA	259
NEBRASKA	385
NEVADA	143
NEW HAMPSHIRE	218
NEW JERSEY	1,435
NEW MEXICO	391
NEW YORK	4,033
NORTH CAROLINA	1,573
NORTH DAKOTA	192
OHIO	3,021
OKLAHOMA	973
OREGON	686
PENNSYLVANIA	3,066
RHODE ISLAND	200
SOUTH CAROLINA	883
SOUTH DAKOTA	187
TENNESSEE	1,274
TEXAS	3,316
UTAH	353
VERMONT	100
VIRGINIA	1,268
WASHINGTON	1,012
WEST VIRGINIA	713
WISCONSIN	1,131
WYOMING	117
CANAL ZONE	2
GUAM	70
AMERICAN SAMOA	4
PUERTO RICO	342
U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS	15
OTHER	120

The article on a veteran in the official newspaper of North Vietnam, Nhan Dan, on June 2, 1974, was called “Living in Between.” It was written by a man who signed the article Nguyen Khai.

A few years ago I made the acquaintance of a young poet. He came to see us after he returned from the battlefront. His complexion was dry and sallow from malaria, but his voice and his eyes seemed to throw flames onto his listeners. He told stories about the battlefields, he read poems—hundreds of poems he had composed during the years he was in there [in the south]. Some of the poems were beautiful, others were violently emotional. He lauded a way of life and a style of action, and condemned another way of life and another style of action which was alien to him. It was very interesting to listen to him, but it was difficult for me to embrace it wholeheartedly. I even felt concerned for him. He was still too innocent, too naïve, and was still unfamiliar with the ways of life. During the few days he spent in Hanoi, there was not one single night when he could sleep peacefully. Every night he went to see his friends and read his poems to them. Then he asked them to play music and songs for him to listen to; he wanted to be told about the situation in the field of arts and literature, the problems that existed, and about the difficulties and potentials of this field. During the day, while his friends were at work, he sat in one place and continued to write poems. He wanted to know everything, experience everything, to have an opinion on everything, and he wanted to be the most productive and best writer around. While he was living in Hanoi, he became even more emaciated and his hands were burning to the touch, as though he was in a fever. But his eyes were ablaze with fires, his voice was full of fire, and his movements radiated a fiery energy. Each of his days was filled with so many hopes, so much passion. He lived to the fullest.

Though I was very fond of him, I found his style of living very strange. It seemed eccentric and arrogant. When I communicated my observations to my friends, it turned out they too shared the same view. This friend of ours, this poet, was not only out of his mind but also arrogant. He was talented, but he was deluded by his immature talent. We concluded that there was not much we could hope for in this man. His was the first success, but that was all, and would not lead to anything.

I do not know whether our secret observations reached his ears or not, but when I saw him again sometime later, some changes had taken place. Recently, he had changed completely. His movement became hesitant, his look became hesitant, and his voice also became hesitant. Not only did he no longer read poetry to anyone, but when asked, he answered in a noncommittal manner: “I’m still writing, but it’s going very slowly!” Observations about him immediately changed. He now knew how to think with maturity and to live with modesty; he had become realistic in his assessment of his own and other people’s work. That is to say, he had become exactly like one of us, neither too passionate nor too indifferent, neither too happy nor too sad; he did not ask too much either from his friends or from himself.

So another person had found a pleasant way of life, one that was peaceful and “in between!”

David Elliot, who had worked for The Rand Corporation in Vietnam and was now doing his doctorate at Cornell, sent the article to me. In an accompanying letter he wrote that his wife, a Vietnamese named Mai, translated the article, and offered his understanding of it:

It requires some reading between the lines. My own interpretation is that he was a wounded veteran (hence he returned to the north ‘a few years’ before the large-scale troop rotation of 1974, and does not go to work). He has probably been away for some time, hence his passionate and insatiable curiosity about what has happened during his absence. The “fire in his eyes” is clearly due to the intensity of his relived experience. His inability to communicate it to his friends (who merely view him as “naïve” or “crazy” and “arrogant”) finally extinguishes the spark. This is one of several illustrations about how the youth (in North Vietnam) is living a life that is bland, and neither here nor there. Hence the title “Living in Between.”

Needless to say, the author feels this attitude should be overcome by a more positive attitude. But the description of how he and his friends drained the juices out of this vibrant, returned soldier and left him a vegetable is remarkably frank.

I wouldn’t draw any sweeping conclusions from this episode—the only one of its type I have ever run across. But it has an unforgettable poignancy. I’m sure many American Vietnam veterans would recognize the syndrome . . .

They did.

THE CRUELTIES WERE so constant, the weapons so huge, the victims so many, as the war drifted everywhere, that no one could pay much attention to a single incident.

It was often the Army which unwittingly provided examples of how the Vietnamese stayed loyal to each other and helped those who defied the Americans. Sometimes a little story would turn up in the river of press releases written by GIs working in the information offices of different units. It was their job to make the press releases both lively and flattering to the Army, in the hope that civilian reporters would pick them up. In November 1970 many correspondents in Saigon were mailed such a release.

Release No. 1111-70-546	INFORMATION OFFICE
	AMERICAL DIVISION
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE	11TH INFANTRY BRIGADE
	APO San Francisco 96217
LADY SAYS “NO BIK”	Tel: Bronco 148
SERGEANT HARD TO CONVINCE	26 October 1970

by Sgt Chuck Merdzinski

FSB BRONCO, Vietnam (AMERICAL IO)—A carefully devised ruse, developed by a sergeant of the AMERICAL Division’s 11th Infantry Brigade, met with success recently by nabbing two hard-core VC sympathizers in the act of hiding the “enemy.”

While searching for rice caches, Sergeant Rick Hupp (Newark, Ohio) of Company A, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, and his comrades passed through a small village where a poker-faced woman passively told them that she knew nothing of VC activities in the area. Her performance wasn’t convincing enough to satisfy Sgt Hupp and a lingering doubt remained with him as the men left the village.

He evaluated the situation and came up with an idea that later confirmed his suspicions. Hupp removed some VC clothing that the men had procured the day before and persuaded a Popular Forces (PF) soldier to don the enemy attire. The next step of the plan took place 20 minutes later when the PF soldier, disguised as a VC and carrying an M-2 carbine, wandered into the village and talked to the same woman.

He asked her if any U.S. soldiers were in the area and she replied, “Beaucoup GI.” In a worried voice, the allied soldier asked the woman if she could hide him from the American soldiers. The woman willingly led him to a concealed spider hole beneath the floor of her hut and told him to get inside. Minutes later, Hupp entered the village for the second time and asked the same questions. Again the woman denied knowledge of local insurgents.

Hupp then yelled “La Dai,” and the South Vietnamese soldier continued to play the role of a guerrilla by answering with “Chieu Hoi!” He came out of the spider hole with raised hands, surrendering his weapon to Hupp. The woman never found out about the hoax until she was escorted to Mo Duc for a questioning session by Regional Forces soldiers.

Much to Hupp’s delight, the trick worked again in another village a short distance away. The men of Alpha Company had a lot of chuckling to do that night over the incidents, and with any luck at all they’ll continue to chuckle their way through the hamlets of Quang Ngai province working their ruse.

No one knew what happened to the woman described as poker-faced and who was supposed to have said, to another Vietnamese, “beaucoup GI” when, of course, “beaucoup” was a French word used only by the Americans. It is an odd story as written by Sergeant Merdzinski, who thought “No Bik” means “No biet” or “I don’t know” in Vietnamese, who did not understand why the woman would hide the man, just as I would hide an American who was running from foreign troops. The press release did not attract much attention.

THE ARMY HAD its own green matches. On the cover it said: “The matches are designed especially for damp climates. But they will not light when wet or after long exposure (several weeks) to very damp air.” So they did not light.

BLOOD: SOMETIMES A GI would complain that the Vietnamese fighting him did not bleed enough. One man from North Carolina told me that when he cut himself shaving, he bled more than a “dink.” There were soldiers puzzled by this; it seemed to bother a few. The reason was the Vietnamese did not have as much blood, for they were much slighter, they did not consume the vast amounts of food the Americans do. In the field, it was not special for infantrymen to be supplied by helicopters with hot lunches every three days, whose odd diet for the tropics included barbecued beef, cabbage, potatoes, two kinds of soft drinks, milk and two kinds of ice cream. Some units were allowed beer; others were not. It was too hot for the men to often want second helpings, and too much food made them sleepy. They had so much to carry: packs that weighed sixty-five pounds or more, nine quarts of water meant another eighteen pounds, one hundred rounds of ammunition were another six. The Vietnamese never ate like that, could not have as much blood in their smaller bodies, which did not bulge or thicken as ours do.

The blood of the soldiers and civilians never looked the same red. The shade changed with the wounds. Sometimes blood coming from the eyes or the skull looked a bright, fresh pink, but the blood was dark and browner if the wound was in the stomach. In the heat the blood seemed to dry in greenish ribbons on the clothes of the Vietnamese. After a while the blood did not matter unless a man drowned in his own; it was the wounds the blood concealed which were worse. Once in a ward of the provincial hospital of Quang Ngai, where the Vietnamese went, where the smell was that of a wet and rotting rag pressed over the face, among the patients was a man with no blood on him at all, although so red were his eyes, which he never seemed to blink, that blood might have been inside them. He sat on the edge of a cot in that darkened room, wearing undershorts, no inch of his skin as it once had been. He was covered with small black marks—ears, lips, hands, neck, wrists—made by shrapnel, almost as if he had been a target in a shooting gallery, unable to get away, being moved forward again and again to be hit by steel. He was waiting for a doctor, but two days later a doctor had not yet come.

IN NEW YORK nothing worked like a liver. Jill Seiden Mahoney found out that if you mushed the liver on bandages, it made stains that looked like seeping, untreated head wounds. It looked ghastly and the smell was repulsive, which was fine. The liver was useful for the “die-ins,” the name for reenactments by the antiwar movement of Vietnamese villagers receiving brutal injuries from American weapons, chemicals, bombs.

Mrs. Mahoney, who was single then, and her friends made up what they called the Emma Goldman Brigade, in honor of the anarchist. Before they demonstrated, the Brigade went to some trouble to make their faces look as if they had been scarred in the war. Their favorite method was to use a mixture of oatmeal, ketchup and liquid make-up foundations, which they put on their faces after twisting their skin with strips of Scotch tape. The effect was exactly what they wished: shocking.

The targets of their protests were often business corporations; in the spring of 1972 it was the ITT Building on Park Avenue. The ten women in the Brigade, dressed in black pajamas, with the liver-stained bandages on their heads and their faces deformed, rushed into the lobby when it was crowded in the morning with people coming to work. The first thing they did was to put up posters of wounded Vietnamese children on the marble walls.

“Then we started dying, we started our blood bath. We threw Baggies which had red stuff in them. We were screaming, yelling, dying, very dramatically. Here’s the sick part: the janitors started ripping down the posters of those fucked-up hurt little babies. After fifteen minutes the police came. They seemed sort of scared of us,” she said. “We were rolling on the floor; it was all they could do to get us to stand up and shut up. Each of us had a flare for drama and we were trying to imagine what it would be like for a Vietnamese woman under bombs. We had fun. It sounds childish to say that now, but it was exhilarating. That day we felt we were in control. If you’re rolling on the floor, screaming, nobody wants to get near you. When we finally limped out, some people applauded.

“I never knew if they applauded because they enjoyed the show or because we were leaving or they thought they were brave,” she said. “It was meant to disrupt; everybody was talking about us. Energy that might have been used in their jobs that day was going into talking about our demonstration.

“Oh, sure, I know that it is said that doing things like that alienated people. But look, any action will alienate somebody. You have to expect it.”

In the sixth grade in P.S. 104 in New York, she knew that her IQ was over 130. Her parents were not surprised. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967, she worked for an advertising agency, Cunningham & Walsh, in the city. “I was a Jewish princess,” she said.

In the streets young people were passing out pamphlets denouncing the war in Vietnam, and from them she learned about it.

“I would take time off to go to antiwar demonstrations; it shocked some people, who called me a Communist. The antiwar movement was personally and socially fulfilling and it was lots of fun. I miss it very much but I’m glad the war is over. I miss the commitment and the urgency—the commitment to selflessness. When it happened I thought we were all just the greatest, as a group certainly more generous than the people in the advertising agency.”

In those days she often wore a T-shirt saying “The East Is Red, the West Is Ready,” while her friend Coke, an unusually pretty blonde, wore one saying “The Vietnamese People Are Not the Enemy.” Both women did not care if people stared at their ample chests; they wanted the T-shirts to be read.

Some of their exploits were daring: ten of them bought tickets, at fifteen dollars apiece, to attend and disrupt the National Women’s Republican Club lunch in March 1972, which honored Patricia Nixon as the Woman of the Year. It was crucial for them to look like ladies. They obliged.

“Everybody still had one good dress,” Mrs. Mahoney said, who wore a pink-and-brown suit from Saks Fifth Avenue. Coke even had a fur coat which she had stopped wearing; it was skunk. The plan of the Emma Goldman Brigade was for five of them to release the rats they were carrying with them, healthy rats that had been secured from laboratories so no one could accuse them of using animals that might spread disease. They were always careful about small things like that. It went wrong in the lobby: a man she calls John Finnigan of the New York Red Squad, who was watching radicals, stopped seven of the women from going into the ballroom. Three of the rats had to be released in the lobby. Inside, Mrs. Mahoney, who did not have a rat, rose and in a strong voice spoke against the war, saying nothing—on the advice of a lawyer—that was either treasonous or obscene. Then she left, leaving the ladies at her table, who were Republicans from Westchester County, in an unpleasant, if not agitated, state of mind. Two more rats were released in the ballroom, causing some consternation, but the lunch and ceremony continued.

“The antiwar movement made a difference in me and in everybody who participated. I think if there had not been such a movement, they might have nuked Vietnam off the face of the earth,” she said. “It forced people to recognize what was going on or to become totally, unnaturally, blind.”

It still puzzles her why other people do not understand very much, do not even know that GVN meant the Government of Vietnam in Saigon, that DRVN meant the north, or the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, that ARVN was the army in the south.

“They can tell you someone’s batting average from 1948, or who hit the big homer in the 1932 World Series, but they don’t know the difference between the NLF and the NFL.”

The blindness, as she called it, always surprised her. On the day of the Emma Goldman Brigade’s die-in in the lobby of the ITT Building, it was raining. The group worried that the rain might wash off some of the mess they had put on their faces. It was decided to take taxis.

“We were totally mutilated. None of us were recognizable,” she said. “We got into two cabs at Fifty-third and Third. In each cab one person had to sit in front, so the drivers had to see what we looked like. We told them where we wanted to go and they didn’t say a word. Remember how we looked and what we wore, and besides that, we all smelled, it was the oatmeal and the other stuff. We smelled horrible. Neither driver said a word, or even did a double-take. And in one newspaper, I think it was the Daily News, they described us as ‘slovenly hippies.’ They just thought we were dirty.”

The Emma Goldman Brigade did not hold together but the women have stayed friends. Her marriage in September 1973 to Peter Paul Mahoney peeled apart. They had met in the antiwar movement, gone through the hard days before and during the Gainesville trial, endured all of it, only to find out how different they were. In those days she saw him as a valiant fellow who stood out for her among all the other veterans going to war against the war.

Even when the war ended and she needed a job, Mrs. Mahoney was not one to jump over her principles. She now works for a small trade magazine, having refused to consider better-paying jobs related to the military-industrial complex, the stock market, or the manufacture of foods or consumer items she thinks are dangerous. She does not want to ever contribute in any way to the misery of any people.

She will not eat bacon or frankfurters because they contain nitrates. She is even beginning to cut back on pastrami. She will not eat canned tuna fish because she deplores the killing of the porpoises caught in the tuna nets and she thinks the waters are filthy. She is quite specific about insect parts and rodent hairs in some American chocolate. When she has time she makes her own cosmetics, but she hardly wears any.

There are no regrets, just a tiny afterthought.

“The Brigade should have used indelible red ink for blood,” she said, “instead of Rite-Dye.”

IT BECAME QUITE commonplace in the antiwar movement for bags of “blood”—red tempera paint—to be thrown at structures which symbolized the war, or whose offices made the war possible. They were thrown, over and over and over again, in the names of the people of Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and their victims. On a Good Friday, April 20, 1973, to commemorate the shedding of the blood of Jesus Christ, bags of blood were thrown at five Boston institutions. Four people who threw blood inside the JFK Federal Building were charged with willful destruction of government property before a federal magistrate. The government claimed it took five men working for three hours to clean off the paint. The defendants were allowed five minutes for a summation statement. One of them, Madeleine Cousineau, pointed out that Pope Paul VI, in his encyclical “On the Development of Peoples,” stated that property must never take precedence over the common good of people, that peace is not merely the absence of war—and that she felt Americans who continued to commemorate Good Friday and to call themselves “one nation under God” had to reexamine “our way of dealing with our fellow human beings . . .” She was fined thirty-five dollars.

Then the paint seemed trivial and false, so the blood of humans was used. On a Saturday at the end of April in 1973, six vials of it were splashed on the tables and walls of the State Dining Room during an ordinary public tour of the White House.

“Claire got the tables and I got the walls,” Steve Cleghorn said. The woman was his wife. Both were in their twenties, described as Christian/Catholics who wanted to serve humanity. The couple both worked in a soup kitchen operated by the Community for Creative Non-Violence. Friends donated the blood to fill the vials. Nearly fifty people were in the room where White House dinners are given when the couple went to work. Some screamed out “Please don’t, please don’t, you awful people,” “Kooks” and “Bastards!”

The man and the woman each said the same thing as they emptied the vials. It was: “This is the blood of your victims.” Their manner was unperturbed and thoughtful.

“The blood is seeping through the walls and the blood is coming from underneath the varnish of the tables. It’s not that we have put it there. It’s already there,” the woman said later.

“In some sense, what we did is cast in Gospel terms,” Mr. Cleghorn, who had once studied in a Paulist seminary, explained. “The table of state is where the buying and selling goes on, internationally.”

In a handwritten statement that was only published in The Daily Rag, a community newspaper in Washington, D.C., which ran a long interview with them, the couple said: “There is no sanctuary from this blood. This is the blood of our brothers and sisters. We affirm this blood and life. We resist waste and death. We mark these walls and this table with the blood of your victims.”

In the White House, when the State Dining Room was blood-splashed, they were arrested by Secret Service agents. One of them asked Mrs. Cleghorn if she meant to embarrass the President.

“That wasn’t my intention; my intention was to speak the truth. If that embarrasses the President, let it be,” she said.

RALPH BLUMENTHAL, WHO was a young New York Times reporter in Vietnam for fourteen months, did a story for the newspaper on military chaplains in June 1971 after he returned to the United States. He covered a convention in Washington, D.C., of the Military Chaplains Association, composed of two thousand of the thirty thousand active and retired chaplains. The members cheered Senator Sam J. Ervin, Jr., of North Carolina—who two years later became a heroic, winsome figure in the Watergate hearings—when he said in a speech: “I think if you get in a war, you should get in to win.” The chaplains loved it.

“That’s not our job,” said Lieutenant Colonel James E. Shaw, a chaplain at Fort Lewis, Washington, when the reporter asked if he would preach to his troops against the slaying of innocent civilians. “I thank God we come from a country with rules of engagement,” he added. “The Communists don’t have that.”

Nearly three thousand chaplains served in Vietnam. The chaplain’s job was to perform the religious services of his denomination, provide ecumenical services for other faiths when necessary, and offer counseling on faith, family and personal problems. Mr. Blumenthal interviewed about fifty chaplains and commanders in a four-week tour around the country which included visits to Washington and various bases.

Lieutenant Colonel Reinard Beaver, a Roman Catholic who was head chaplain of the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson, told the reporter he did not agree with Christ saying that greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friends.

“He was wrong. Greater love hath no man when he lay down his life for a stranger,” Colonel Beaver said. “That is what the United States is doing in Vietnam.”

One of the chaplains, Major Emlyn Jones of the Church of the Brethren, who was then stationed at Fort Bragg, recalled his tour in Vietnam with vehemence. “It gave me sorrow,” he said, “but most of all it gave me a tremendous hatred of Communists. Man! I hated those spastics!”

Later, at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, where he was assigned, Major Jones said to me he was in Vietnam from December 1966 to the end of December 1967, at Tuy Hoa, where there was the 17th Aviation Group, an engineer’s battalion, an artillery battalion and a Korean infantry unit. On his return to the United States after a tour in Germany, the major said how shocked he had been by the reporting on the war on television and in the newspapers.

“They embroidered and embellished their documentaries with downright lies,” Major Jones said. Certainly he was very anti-Communist, he added. “Since Vietnam! Because I’ve seen Communists in action. I’ve seen them cut off fingers. Well, north of Tuy Hoa, in that area, down near Ninh Hoa. I’ve seen Communists get outside a city and throw in two hundred buzz bombs on children. I saw two hundred Communists one day—well, I didn’t see them do it personally, but they went into a little Catholic village where the priests and the nuns live, right outside of Tuy Hoa, and they shot them to death. When our battalion arrived they were dead. For no reason at all.”

Question: “You came upon the corpses?”

The major: “Well, they called us in and they dared us to come in.”

Question: “They called you in?”

The major: “We had been told by informers, you know. And our battalion surrounded this little village and they dared us to come in. Of course, nobody did because basically Americans are very humane people; there were children and old men in that village.”

Question: “The North Vietnamese challenged you, or the Viet Cong?”

The major: “The Viet Cong.”

Question: “They called out to you?”

The major: “Well, after they got there, yes. Of course, the entire battalion didn’t go up there, elements of it did. And they called, daring the men of the battalion to come in there and get them. They called by loudspeaker. They were calling insults.”

Question: “In Vietnamese?”

The major: “Well, I think it was Vietnamese because we had a Vietnamese who was a captain. Our people are very basically humane people. There are a few who are not, of course, but basically the American soldier is a very humane person. And they stood there, they stood there all day, and the South Koreans went in the next day and took them. No, we didn’t call in an air strike. You see, if that would have happened—and I suppose that would happen once in a while—that’s what Walter Cronkite would show and talk about.”

The South Koreans, referred to as “rock” for ROK, the Republic of Korea, were subsidized for fighting in Vietnam by the United States, who also paid the Thais. The Koreans were often cited by exasperated Americans, who were straining to “motivate” the South Vietnamese army, as a fine example of what an allied Asian army could become. The Korean army had, after all, been trained and built up by the Americans. But the Koreans were very much feared by the Vietnamese in the province of Phu Yen, whose capital is Tuy Hoa. They were much hated.

“Well, the Koreans are a very tough, warlike people,” the major said. “They had the philosophy that if you go to war, they wanted to win. There’s no sense to go to war and not win.”

It annoyed him, too, that a Time reporter he met on a flight from Saigon to Cam Ranh Bay did not come to see the Catholic school that had been built for six hundred children in the town of Tuy Hoa, or the orphanage for the Buddhists that had ninety-seven boys and girls in it, and the American-built Christian day school for two hundred kids in the Christian Missionary Alliance Church.

“It’s not newsworthy to do good things,” Major Jones said.

In Washington, D.C., Brigadier General Gerhardt W. Hyatt, the Army Chief of Chaplains, was asked by Mr. Blumenthal of The New York Times whether he and other chaplains were experiencing doubts about the course of the war. General Hyatt, a Lutheran, said: “A man of discernment has to give his government the benefit of the doubt.” Part of a chaplain’s role as a moral leader, the general added, is not to stir up scandal in public if the matter can be resolved within the military.

Four years after he wrote the story, Ralph Blumenthal said: “I was very surprised that no one else thought the story was surprising, none of the people on the paper or the friends I talked to about it. And the chaplains didn’t seem to think what they were saying was unusual.”

There was no one to confess to, no one to bestow forgiveness, no one to define a penance, no one who could undo what had been done. The chaplains, who tended to be conventional men, were dependent on the military system for salary, promotion and pension. They did not seem concerned about the behavior of the troops. If they did know something startling, then in most cases they did nothing. Not untypical was the Reverend Carl E. Greswell, an Episcopal chaplain in Vietnam at the time of the My Lai massacre, who told a military court that he had mentioned a report of the killings to army superiors. “In hindsight I feel I should have done more,” he said.

There were men who came back from Vietnam with nothing to tell and those who had too much, who were weighted and chained, who needed to confess, who wanted themselves and their country to change. Some of them met in a Holiday Inn in Detroit on January 31, February 1 and 2 in the year 1971 to speak openly of American war crimes. The meeting was called the Winter Soldier Investigation, organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Beacon Press published a small and punishing book of the testimony of seventy-five veterans and four civilians. They were among a larger number who gave firsthand accounts of crimes which they either witnessed or committed. But Richard Brummett, who was attending a small college in New York State, knew nothing of these hearings, knew no one at college who was in Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Instead he wrote a letter on October 27, 1970, to the Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird. He typed the letter on stationery used by the staff of the yearbook of Marist College in Poughkeepsie. It listed him on the masthead as Photography Editor.

Dear Mr. Laird,

The subject of which I am writing to you tonight is a very heavy one, one which I have had upon my conscience for over two years now. To the point, it is of similar nature of the My Lai incident which is so troubling our nation today.

From July 1967 to July 1968 I served in the United States Army in the Republic of Viet Nam as an armored crewman. During the months of Jan 1968 thru May 1968 my unit, A Troop, First Squadron, First Armored Cavalry Regiment, Americal Division, did perform on a regular basis, random murder, rape and pillage upon the Vietnamese civilians of Quang Tin province. This was done with the full knowledge, consent and encouragement of our Troop Commander, a Captain R__________, and one of our platoon sgts, a Sgt B__________.

These incidents included random shelling of villages with 90mm white phosphorus rounds, machine gunning of civilians who had the misfortune to be near when we hit a mine, torture of prisoners, destroying of food and livestock of the villagers if it was deemed that they had an excess, and numerous burnings of villages for no apparent reason. These are only a few of the many events that have been upon my conscience, I will not go further at this time. I hope that you will act upon my letter and expose those responsible for these acts. If you can not I must attempt to do so myself, my conscience will not allow me to do otherwise.

I hope that you do not think of me as one who is so bitter that he is attempting to destroy our nation. I have great faith in our democracy, it has the greatness to accept the fact that it is not perfect and to correct itself. Before the war I had an unquestioning faith, now I question. Over four years ago I joined our Army in a time when it was unfashionable to do so. I volunteered for Viet Nam when it was not necessary for me to go. The Americal Division changed much of that. You, Sir, I hope, by your desire for the truth will change it back.

So that you may identify me I shall give you my serial no. etc at the time I was separated from the Army.

Sp/5 Richard H. Brummett RA 12762829

A Troop 1/6 Cav, Ft. Meade,

Maryland

He gave the full names of a captain who was his commanding officer and a platoon sergeant, which are not used here. Mr. Brummett was informed by letter that the matter was being investigated.

On November 30, 1970, an investigator for the U.S. Army CID Agency, which stands for Criminal Investigation Division, questioned Richard Brummett in Champagnat House, where he lived at Marist College. The questions and his answers were typed on Witness Statement, file number 70—CI0052—06312.

Q:Mr. Brummett, did you write a letter to the Secretary of Defense stating that during the period of January to April 1968, members of your former unit A Troop, First Squadron, First Cavalry Regiment, Americal Division, did perform random murder, rape and pillage upon the Vietnamese civilians of Quang Tin province?

A:Yes, I did.

Q:Would you relate what the incidents were and where and when they happened and by whom they were committed?

A:Yes. On approximately 22 January 1968, in the vicinity of Tich An, VN, a mortar track, vehicle number A-18, hit a mine, blew up and killed two men. I heard Cpt R__________ on the radio in my tank order the 1st platoon to “take care of that village.” Psg B__________, in charge of the 1st platoon, had his men burn and level the village and shoot into the village area.

Q:What type of weapons were the 1st platoon using?

A:.50 Caliber machine guns and M-60 machine guns.

Q:Did you see B__________ or any of his men actually shoot into the village or burn it?

A:I didn’t see them light the fires, but I did see them shooting into the village.

Q:Did you recognize any of the personnel firing the machine guns?

A:No, I didn’t know any of the 1st platoon well enough to identify them.

Q:Did anything else happen at this time?

A:Yes, I was told that a young man who was standing in the vicinity where A-18 blew up ran and was shot. I saw the body of this young man, and saw Psg B__________ beat up an old man who furnished the young man’s identification showing he was loyal to the Vietnamese government. B__________ took the ID card away from the old man and threw him in to the mine crater.

Q:Was the old man killed?

A:No, but the ID card was placed on the engine of the blown up track and blown up with the destroyed track.

Q:Did you see any incidents personally?

A:Yes, sometime in mid-March 1968, in a village West of our base camp, B__________ threw an old man down a well and then dropped a hand grenade down the well. This failed to kill the man so B__________ then took his pistol out and fired three shots into the well.

Q:Did you see that the man was dead?

A:No, I did not.

Q:Did you check the well?

A:No, I didn’t.

Q:Were there any other incidents?

A:Yes, the day after the above incident B__________’s tank hit a mine and he was injured. The gunships flying cover for us worked the area around us over machine guns and rockets. I heard on the radio the 1st and 2d platoons firing on a village. They were talking about shooting the animals in the village and burning the village.

Q:Did you see anyone actually shoot the animals or set fire to the village?

A:No, I just saw the results as we moved up to the village.

Q:Did you see any other incidents happen?

A:Yes, in April or May 1968, we were West of our base camp and we stopped at a small village for a routine check. Cpt R__________ walked up to the cattle pen with an M-16 carbine and started shooting the cattle. Cpt R__________ had us gather all the rice in the village in to a pile and then placed 2 blocks of C-4 explosive in the pile and blew it up. Then in May 1968, Cpt R__________ ordered us to run through a village with tanks to knock all the buildings down, a small boy was standing in front of his house and jumped at the last minute to avoid being crushed by a tank.

Q:Do you know the names of any of these villages where the incidents happened?

A:No.

Q:Did you see anyone actually kill any Vietnamese villagers?

A:No.

Q:Did you see anyone actually rape a woman?

A:No, I did not.

Q:Do you have anything else to add to or delete from this statement?

A:No.

In February 1972 the matter was closed when Mr. Brummett received this letter from the U.S. Army CID Agency, Washington, DC.

Dear Mr. Brummett:

The Secretary of the Army has asked that I further reply to your letter of 27 October 1970, to the Department of Defense, concerning alleged atrocities committed in Vietnam.

Investigation by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command revealed that at an unspecified time, date and place, in RVN, during military operations mounted by your former unit, A Troop, 1st Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment, Americal Division, an unidentified person threw an unidentified Vietnamese National into a well. Subsequently, a hand grenade was heard exploding and an undetermined number of shots were fired. Of the numerous witnesses interviewed, only one stated that he observed the incident, but was too far away to determine the identity of the perpetrator. It could not conclusively be determined if the unidentified Vietnamese National died as a result of this incident.

Investigation did not support your allegations that former members of your unit committed murder, rape and pillage upon Vietnamese nationals at random.

Further investigation disclosed insufficient evidence to substantiate that the Commanding Officer of your former unit conducted himself in a wanton manner regarding his responsibilities as a commander; or that he, in fact, ordered and/or participated in the unwarranted destruction of Vietnamese property, to include livestock.

The letter ended with an unforgettable sentence: “Your interest in the military is appreciated.” It was signed Henry H. Tufts, Colonel, MPC, Commanding.

Mr. Brummett kept going back to Vietnam with his cameras. In 1970 he walked into The New York Times office in Saigon wanting to tell a reporter what he had seen as a Specialist 5 in I Corps. His memory was very good. Twice he came back to Vietnam as might a man who was looking for something, found it, then forgot he had, only to begin looking again. He seemed content to be in the company of journalists and other photographers; he was less stiff and forlorn when he was with them. Perhaps it was like being with his platoon again, among others he could trust and like. He took nice pictures. Go back to school, his older friends kept saying. He did, and has never seemed to be able to leave. In 1974 he received his B.A. in history; now he wants a Master of Fine Arts degree.

“I try not to think of the war, but I do so incessantly,” he said. “I feel cut off, I am out of touch. I just want to make beautiful photographs for their own sake. Even my few small victories over other photographers in Saigon brought me no joy. I can remember your saying in exasperation that I was too slow. I am.”

IN VIETNAM THEY all knew the name of the book; no man was so dull he did not recognize the shorthand of Catch-22 even if he had not read the novel by Joseph Heller. It meant lunacy, greed, a cluster-fuck, idiocy, farce, the Army. Few of them talked about the horror in Catch-22, the way Kid Sampson died in the scene on the beach. They liked to think of Yossarian rowing to Sweden and making it. Sometimes a soldier would say how really weird it was that Catch-22 was written before Vietnam.

I wanted to tell Joseph Heller this when he appeared at a fund-raising party in Easthampton that the food writer Craig Claiborne had been asked to give in his pretty modern house. The party was to raise money for opthalmological supplies for the Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi. Too many of us were standing on the sun deck of Mr. Claiborne’s house, drinking the punch he had made himself that morning, when I was introduced to Mr. Heller after waiting for more than half my life. As one of us said “Hello” there was a warning noise, a long and high gurgle of distress, growing louder on my right. People were sinking. One woman seemed to have lost her feet, then her ankles, and a bit of her shins. The grey boards of the sun deck were ripping and gaping under the enormous, jovial weight of the party. No one shrieked or began to moan and bleed. The evacuation was swiftly carried out as the men assisted the women to the stairs. There were no injuries, no bodies on the ground. Mr. Claiborne remained composed; when it was clear that no one intended to sue him he seemed quite cheerful about the damage, although he had no insurance to cover it. Mr. Heller disappeared. There were short speeches by the swimming pool. People really paid to come to the party to see what Mr. Claiborne’s kitchen looked like, to inspect all those knives and pots, but a decent amount of money was raised.

THERE WAS AMERICAN music everywhere in the Vietnamese cities, like a constant humming beneath the louder, deadlier noises. In the nightclubs of Saigon, Vietnamese rock groups and singers imitated the Americans, pushing out “Proud Mary” and “Have You Seen the Rain” as hard as they could in their high, thin voices. They called themselves the Magic Stones or Elvis Phuong or Candy Xuan, dressing and moving and arranging their hair as the American stars did. It was often too difficult for them to do, for Vietnamese is a tonal language, its music has different scales, but they were not easily defeated. In Saigon some of the cleverer foreign service officers wrote their songs about the war, in the spirit of “Country Joe & the Fish,” and copies of them were easy to come by. The songs were inspired by military advisors to the South Vietnamese with MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) or the older civilians who worked for USAID (United States Agency for International Development). There was even a song about bulgar wheat, a type of grain grown in this country that was sent in massive shipments to feed hungry Vietnamese under the Food for Peace program which reportedly cost $18,000,000 a year. There was a rumor that an official said the Indonesians liked it, so the Vietnamese would, too. But they detested it and fed it to livestock. The Vietnamese did not want to eat bulgar wheat any more than you and I want to eat the flesh of horses or dogs. It repelled them even when they tried to cook it.

Young men who lived in villas or modern apartments and worked in offices wearing jackets and ties wrote their silly, thin songs and made each other laugh, having a secret little war of their own with the older powerful men in the U.S. Mission, and in the Army, who knew best. They did not resign and leave, they just had their little jokes.

The younger Americans found comfort in mocking the war, as if they were not to be held to account for something so clumsy and going so wrong. It was the Vietnamese who wrote the wild and sad laments, the poem-songs not meant to make you laugh. The finest of them came from a young Vietnamese from Hue—the haunting and beautiful city in the center—named Trinh Cong Son. He was a guitarist and a composer who between 1958 and the end of 1970, when we met, had written more than one hundred and fifty songs, becoming a heroic figure to the young Vietnamese when he was in his early thirties. He had rough hair and wore eyeglasses with big black frames that seemed too heavy for such a face. He was their Dylan; there was no one else like him. His most famous music was banned by the Ministry of Information in 1968, but the ban was not rigidly enforced, for it could not be. In that same year an official of the national police asked Trinh Cong Son to write an explanation of his antiwar songs so that radio and television audiences would be enlightened. The request amused him and he refused, saying that explaining his work was not his job. It would have been foolish for the Saigon government to arrest him. They knew it.

Even in October 1970 he was still not afraid to speak about the war. “It is for nothing and it is idiotic,” he said in French. “Politicians—even the most intelligent of them are imbeciles. I call them inspired murderers.”

Tapes of his songs were played in the little coffee shops of Saigon and in the nightclubs where the young Vietnamese officers went in bunches if they were able to afford one or two soft drinks apiece. All wanted to hear his earlier songs about the war. On a Saturday night in October 1970, Luong and I, with three American men, went to the Queen Bee nightclub to hear a girl named Khanh Ly—a famous name in that city—sing his songs. No one sang them as she did, knowing so well what he meant them to say. Years before, the two of them had wandered from place to place performing for students wherever they found them. She did not sing in English, or tease her hair, or wear padded brassieres, or bend and wiggle when she sang. She stood quite still. That night in the Queen Bee, Luong wrote a note in Vietnamese to Khanh Ly, asking her, as a great favor, to sing “Love Song of a Woman Driven Mad by the War.” It was risky to sing that song—his most famous—but that night Khanh Ly did, and as the lovely voice wound and curled through the noisy dark room, the young Vietnamese lieutenants at the table next to us sat very still, stopped smoking and drinking.

I had a lover who died at the battle of Pleime,

I had a lover who died at Battle Zone “D,”

Who died at Dong Xoai,

Who died in Hanoi,

He died far away on the distant frontier.

I had a lover who died in the battle of Chu Prong,

I had a lover whose body drifted along a river,

Who died in the dark forest,

Whose charred body lies cold and abandoned.

I want to love you, love Viet Nam,

The day when the wind is strong

I whisper your name and the name of Viet Nam,

We are so close, the same voice and yellow race,

I want to love you, love Viet Nam,

But as soon as I grow up my ears are accustomed

To the sound of bullets and mines;

My hands are now free but I forget from now on the human language.

I had a lover who died at Ashau,

I had a lover whose twisted body lies in a valley,

Who died under a bridge, naked and voiceless.

I had a lover who died at the battle of Bac Gia,

I had a lover who died just last night, a sudden death,

With nothing to say, feeling no hatred,

Lying dead as in a dream.

All wartime capitals are gay cities, a famous writer in Memphis said, meaning it. Even Belfast was a gay city during World War II, even Belfast, and no one who had been in London during those years would ever forget it. The writer—a courteous and brilliant man who writes about one war better than anyone else in the world—is without deceit. He had supported the war in Vietnam for many years, he said, until the end of it when he knew the Americans could not win and should not win. He told about having lunch with President Johnson in the White House, a grand lunch which left him with a huge, affectionate memory of a President. His generation knew what it meant when an army invaded a border, the writer said, they knew you had to do something. He meant Hitler sending his army of Germans into Poland, into Czechoslovakia, into France. There was no border, I said, for the 17th parallel was a thread laid down in 1954 and made into a dead man’s zone with the land bombed into mush, Vietnam was one country. But he was thinking of London in the war years and Belfast, where the poor still live in old houses as close together as teeth.

Saigon was never a gay city during the war: it was malignant, cruel, crowded, costly and furtive, but never gay. That night in the Queen Bee, when a twenty-three-year-old woman sang in Vietnamese and finished the song of the mad woman, no one clapped. It was not a song to applaud, not that night in that year when all of us feared in the shadow side of our minds the war would go on forever, be such a long and greedy war there would be no one left to smile if it ever came to an end. I needed to persuade the writer in Memphis that Saigon had not been romantic, remembering the woman who asked me what I wore to officers’ dances and the others like her with fixed images: pilots dancing with women in black dresses and hats with little veils, an orchestra playing “We’ll Gather Lilacs in the Spring Again.”

NO PRISONER OF WAR can tell us everything. There is no language easy enough for them to use. Yet, in the Dunes Motel in Aurora, near Denver, for three days in July he tried to make clear what had happened in those five years. At night he went back to sleep at the army hospital, Fitzsimon General, where he was on convalescent leave. That first summer of release in 1973 he had the rank of staff sergeant. At the hospital, once the tests were done, they had the good sense to let him come and go. He was not a sick man in any way the doctors could perceive: his left leg was about one and a quarter inches shorter than the other and between fifteen to twenty percent out of alignment, but there was nothing to be done. The high school hurdler and high jumper walked with a limp. They checked all of him. It pleased him that the dentist could not dig out the old-fashioned filling which was done in North Vietnam to put in a new one. The hospital made him nervous. Once, standing by the laundry chute that suddenly made a sucking, whooshing noise, he flinched when no one else noticed it.

In the sitting room of the Dunes Motel the twenty-eight-year-old man sprawled on a couch, long legs pulled up, holding on to one ankle, answering the questions that were pushed in him like thumbtacks. Sometimes he seemed to stammer very slightly, or speak in circles. He would wind the different months together, circle them, go back, sort it out, begin again. There was nothing he forgot. It was a long story to tell and he could not take a shortcut. Sometimes, in remembering, he would pull his dark-brown mustache, which was new, or he’d play with the metal horseshoe on a chain around his neck, which he had just bought. He did not eat much, he shopped often, he drove too fast. Possessions seemed to confuse him, so there was always a bit of delay when he had to find the car keys and his sunglasses, which he needed because bright light or glare hurt his eyes after such a long time in dim rooms.

“I don’t regret none of it,” John Young said, of the 1,811 days as a prisoner of war of the North Vietnamese. When he broke down it was not because of the bad leg, which was almost cut off; it was not because of the five birthdays lost in the prison camps, or the letters from Erica he never received, or the son born to them that he did not see until the child was five. It was not hard for him to speak of pain and maggots and hunger, of dreams and a vision of his own death. What made him weep in the motel room were the memories of kindnesses: a Vietnamese medic, a Christmas dinner, a prison official named Cheese, a flower given to him by a Vietnamese priest which he kept long after it died, a composition he wrote in prison. And he wept again remembering how he had wept such a long time ago on a September day hearing of the death of Ho Chi Minh. It seemed better to leave him alone at those times: he did not want anyone to touch him or say “There, there.” When it happened he did not try to hide his face or put his head down, like the GIs in South Vietnam used to do so you would not see them crying.

John Young was freed, with close to thirty other prisoners, on March 16, 1973. It was not the happiest day of his life. The day before his release, the Vietnamese called Cheese said goodbye. “He told me ‘Do not lose your determination and do not forget us, for we will never forget you,’” Young said. There was a large Air Force colonel at the Hanoi airport who saluted him and shook his hand and said something like “Welcome back,” although the men still stood on the soil of North Vietnam. Young did not believe the colonel was at all glad to see him. He had made antiwar statements as a prisoner and he did not intend to say he was sorry or that he did it under torture.

There were two American soldiers to escort each prisoner of war to the big C-141 at the Gia Lam airfield. “One would grab your bag and one would hold your arm—they thought we were weak,” Young said. “I guess it was for show mostly. I told them ‘Hey, don’t worry about it, I’m all right, let me walk by myself.’ I just left them behind. I just went and went by myself.”

He did not make trouble, his behavior was correct. He did not wave or call out to any of the Vietnamese he cared for. He did not falter as he walked away from them. They had asked him to behave correctly and he did not disappoint them.

“I think walking up the ramp on the back of that plane was the hardest thing I have ever done,” Young said.

When the airplane rose, most passengers began to cheer and laugh and roar.

“No, I didn’t, I didn’t. I don’t think anybody of the eight of us cheered,” Young said. He had not stopped biting his nails.

The Eight: enlisted men who while in captivity made tapes and wrote statements for the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front which condemned the war and the American role in Indochina, deplored the deaths of GIs. Young had even appealed to American soldiers to stop fighting.

They were charged on May 30, 1973—by Air Force Colonel Theodore Guy, a senior officer who had been imprisoned at the same camp called Plantation Gardens—of collaboration with the North Vietnamese, of aiding the enemy in return for preferential treatment.

There were eight, then there were seven. One man shot himself on Wednesday, June 27, 1973, with a .25-caliber pistol in the house of his father-in-law in Commerce City, a Denver suburb. He was a Marine. His widow was twenty-two years old—Mrs. Abel Larry Kavanaugh, expecting a child.

“The North Vietnamese kept him alive for five years and then his own country killed him,” Sandra Kavanaugh said.

Six days after the death of Sergeant Kavanaugh the Secretaries of the Army and Navy both found on July 3 that there was insufficient evidence to take any cases of former prisoners of war to courts-martial. Colonel Guy’s charges against the eight men were dropped.

A coroner’s jury, in ruling that the accused former prisoner of war had committed suicide, criticized the military for its handling of the case. The jury said it felt that upon his release Sergeant Kavanaugh could not manage the readjustments necessary for his new life and its unfamiliar pressures, particularly the charges brought against him by the military; it was also of the opinion that Sergeant Kavanaugh should have received much more follow-up care by the military when he returned to Denver. In his testimony to the jury, Dr. James Selkin, a psychologist and director of Denver General Hospital’s Center for the Study of Violence, said Sergeant Kavanaugh was “unable to distinguish fantasy from reality.” Dr. Selkin had studied military records and interviewed the other former prisoners who knew the sergeant, and members of the Kavanaugh family. On his first night home with his wife and daughter after five years in captivity, Sergeant Kavanaugh packed his bags and said he was leaving the country, but his wife persuaded him to stay, the psychologist said to the jury. The former prisoner of war was deathly afraid he would be unjustly convicted and sent to prison by the American military. He said he would die before he went back to prison.

It was the opinion of Dr. Selkin that Sergeant Kavanaugh had been interviewed twice by an inexperienced military psychiatrist who did not appreciate his pain and confusion.

John Young was captured on January 30, 1968, only six weeks after he had arrived in South Vietnam and just before the Tet offensive. His first assignment had been in Danang, with Charlie Company, 5th Special Forces Group, working in security. Three days before the end of January he had been sent to Lang Vei, a small Special Forces outpost near the Laotian border, off Route 9, the French-built highway that cut across the frontier. There was a bigger Green Beret outpost near his; they called that one Lang Vei II. He was an advisor to Laotians, the 33d Battalion of the Royal Elephant Brigade. Young thought the Lao soldiers had been pushed back into South Vietnam after a beating.

On patrol there were seventeen Laotians, including one of their own lieutenants, and Young, who carried the radio. The Laotians could not speak English. Young used hand signals with them. They were moving southeast between Khe Sanh and Lang Vei to check out a village.

Young wore his tiger suit, those tight-fitting camouflage fatigues, and his hard black jump boots, not the softer and easier boots issued to GIs that had holes in them to let the water squish in and squish out. He loved his boots because they told you he was Airborne. He would not wear a helmet; branches scraped against it, making noise in the jungle.

The ambush came after they had crossed Route 9 in two columns. The point man suddenly went down and was only a small heap. Young went to him and knew then how close the North Vietnamese were to have been able to shoot the point man right between the eyes. The Lao soldiers fled. Young was trying to get to a clump of trees when he was hit twice by the same round. It came from an AK-47 rifle, or an AK-50, the 7.62 machine gun.

They saw him and kept firing: mortars, machine guns, AKs and SKSs, he said. He was afraid they would use grenades and get him.

“I figured, well, I am going to die so let’s go down fighting,” Young said, in the manner of men who are trying to describe a peculiar, passionate moment of panic. He fired fifty to sixty rounds from his M-2. He was still lying on his stomach in the gully when he felt the bayonets in his back. It was about nine o’clock in the morning. He had not even noticed how much he was bleeding or the pieces of bone that had pushed through his skin and were sticking out of his leg like huge toothpicks. He thought that he had tripped on a tree stump, until he tripped to get up. “It just cracked, crumpled, gave way,” Young said.

After his capture he was carried for a day and a half to a North Vietnamese base camp in South Vietnam, on the side of a mountain. He was given morphine, penicillin and a tourniquet. North Vietnamese officers interrogated him. He would tell them nothing except his name, rank, serial number, date of birth. They yanked his leg and hit him with the butt of a weapon on the head and in the back. He does not think he screamed when the Vietnamese twisted and bent his shattered leg. He hated them too much, Young said, to do that, so he stayed silent and let the pain shine.

Speak now or we will shoot two men, they said. He said nothing. They brought forward a young Laotian soldier and shot him in the head twenty-five feet from where Young sat. Twenty minutes later another Lao was killed. Young does not know why they spared him. He thinks they may have realized he was only at Lang Vei for three days, and they wanted information on the bigger Special Forces outpost, Lang Vei II, of which he knew nothing. The North Vietnamese were planning to overrun it at Tet. They did.

A long time afterward, when he had grown to like and respect some Vietnamese in the prison camps, he mentioned how the two Laotians had been killed. He was mistaken, the Vietnamese said. It could not have happened, their forces did not do such things.

The early days of capture were so clear to him, so much sharper than the days in prison camps, where small things did happen, but then they happened over and over again. The operation took place out of doors as he lay on a bamboo table. The doctor took off his tourniquet and Young saw the maggots that had been eating the decaying flesh around the wound and making him itch. The maggots looked like very small white grubworms. He could feel the maggots falling off.

The interpreter for the Vietnamese doctor told him: “He is not so sure he can save your leg but he will try.” Yeah, okay, do what you can, Young said. The doctor gave him Novocaine with a huge syringe. It surprised Young that a Vietnamese guard came to the operating table, took one of his hands, and did not let it go all the time the doctor worked on the splintered bone, put in the drainage tubes, fixed the bandage and the splint. It was the first of the kindnesses. Young says he did not feel great pain. But he was glad for that hand holding his, it was a help. They gave him twenty-four bottles of penicillin before he was moved, saying he must ask medics to give him shots whenever it was possible. Such a precaution astonished him.

For two weeks he stayed in a Bru village on the border. He lay inside a small peasant house on stilts, a typical Montagnard house. It did not hurt too much until he turned on his side or moved by propping himself on his elbows and sliding his body. There was a small fire in the room at the base of a pillar. He relieved himself by making a space in the bamboo floor and then he would sprinkle ashes down the little hole. Two girls brought him food: rice and soup. After a week the cast felt mushy and the leg began to speak with a foul smell. Two Vietnamese medics made him a ladder splint of wire with bamboo, but it cut his foot. He made his own splint—remembering the first aid he had learned in high school and in the Army—which went from the hip to the ankle.

The villagers moved up and down on a path outside the house. Sometimes they would wave at him and leave food for him. It was often sweet potatoes or cassava, which he would try to cook. He was glad to have the foot-long tobacco leaves that he could tear in pieces and smoke.

There was a small Montagnard girl, perhaps five, who came and sat by him, saying nothing. She played an instrument that looked like a one-string guitar. She would sit for several hours, playing and singing.

He stopped being terrified. Sometimes when he woke up the room would be full of North Vietnamese soldiers sleeping on the floor, their weapons right next to him, the loaded magazines near his body.

“If someone walked in with a weapon—well, I wasn’t even shaking or anything,” Young said.

They moved him to Laos, to a new prisoner-of-war camp for Americans captured in the south. A small medic named Thanh would often sit by Young and teach him to count in Vietnamese. Moit, hai, ba, bon. The American would count for him in English. They liked each other. The counting lessons went on. The little friendship made the sick and filthy prisoner feel better.

“It was so different—I never had this happen,” Young said. “I taught him hello and thank you and how are you. He remembered pretty much of it. He was trying to help me. You know, he’d give me part of his ration to eat. Every day he’d try and give me a little something extra. In fact, he went to the commander of the camp and got me a little bit of milk.”

It was powdered milk, wrapped in a piece of newspaper. The day Young was moved out, Thanh came to say farewell, but could not bring himself to say he would miss the American and the lessons. The two men shook hands but were unable to speak or hug each other. Goodbye to the medic Thanh. Sometimes Young would think of the Vietnamese soldiers captured in the south and how they were treated by Americans. “I know exactly what I would have done to them. I probably would have beat the hell out of them or shot them.”

He was carried up the Ho Chi Minh trail in a hammock slung on a bamboo pole. At first, South Vietnamese soldiers, also prisoners, carried him and hated it—the huge American who was so helpless he could not do more than open his pants when the dysentery came. They even had to lift him to a spot on the road. His leg stuck out of the hammock and sometimes it would swing into a tree or a rock, and when Young shrieked, the soldier hit him with a stick under his back to make him shut up. Once the bamboo pole for the hammock snapped. Young could hear it cracking and tried to brace himself as he tipped back and fell. There was no bamboo in the area, so the men cut down a hardwood tree. The new pole was much heavier than the bamboo one. The North Vietnamese then began to carry him. They did not complain.

“It really ate away at their shoulders,” Young said. “They were bleeding and they had huge blisters.”

They would move up the trails for nine or ten hours a day, stopping before it got dark. They walked on earth, on dirt, on gravel, on asphalt. In an area where North Vietnamese troops were bivouacked, a company commander came to the American prisoners and asked if they had everything they needed. He talked mostly to Young, telling him what a beautiful city Hanoi was. The officer had children and he showed his pictures of them. The North Vietnamese troops moving down the trails looked young and anxious. They stared at the prisoners but said nothing and kept going. Sometimes they gave Young cigarettes when he held out his hand and begged for tobacco saying: “Thuoc, thuoc.”

Perhaps, at the age of twenty-two, he almost died. The dysentery grew worse and he saw the feces were bright green. The leg was infected. He could not eat. His weight dropped to a hundred and ten pounds from two hundred. Young began to remember children who had been in kindergarten with him in 1950. He thought of his father and wanted to be with him. They stopped at the border of North Vietnam and put him in a hut. They persisted in keeping him alive. Medics came with precious things: sugar and water, penicillin and vitamins shots.

An artist came into the hut to sketch him as he lay on the floor on a straw mat. Young thought the charcoal drawings were good; no one had ever sketched him before and he rather hoped he might keep one. But the artist was sorry, he could not give Young a sketch to keep. They moved again after two weeks. A B-52 flew over and dropped bombs about three hundred meters from where they were resting off the side of a trail. The pilot only made one pass. Young had seen it all before. In Laos he had survived two B-52 strikes. He remembers the deep shaking of the earth and the sound of trees burning.

He entered North Vietnam in a truck. There was nothing to see but craters and land that was dead, land that looked like oatmeal. There were no birds or trees or people; no rice, no gardens. Nothing moved. “For hours and hours we’d travel through areas and there would be nothing but bomb craters. Just completely destroyed. In every direction there was nothing. Nothing.”

On the morning of April 15, 1968, the long voyage came to an end. He was in the prisoner-of-war camp in Nhi An province that the Americans called “Bao Cao.” It was a joke. The words mean “to report.” The prisoners had to tell the guards “bao cao” in order to do anything, even to go to the latrine.

The North Vietnamese seemed insanely curious. There were endless questions, and so many forms to fill out. How much money did you make, how many cars do you have, how big is your house, how many rooms, what kind of furniture, are you married, does your wife work, how much money does she earn, are there children, what are their ages?

Young and another American, who also resisted answering the questions, were told to report to another building about twenty-five yards away from their room. No one helped them. Neither man could walk. “We crawled. I crawled. He crawled,” Young said.

An officer with a pistol said they would have to cooperate. The prisoners looked at each other and one man told the other of the military regulations: Don’t do anything that will cause you harm or abuse. This is how they remembered the phrase from the Military Code of Conduct for prisoners of war. Then they talked: cars, wives, money, furniture, children houses, lawns, television sets . . .

The Vietnamese asked him to write his feelings about the war. He wrote that he thought the Americans were in Vietnam trying to fight communism and help the Vietnamese people. No one shouted at him, or struck him, or took away his food. He is not sure he really believed what he wrote, but this is what he had been taught by the U.S. Army.

He was twenty-two when he was captured; his twenty-third birthday was September 9, 1968. He hardly had a past, there was nothing splendid or surprising about his life. Words do not work well for him, for when he was growing up it was not language that mattered. Grammar was for old ladies and spelling was for girls. He did not read. He was a poor student, restless and inattentive. What seized him and filled him with longings and excitement were cars; it could be said he only cared for cars. His parents, of German and Dutch descent, considered him the baby, the wild one, and when things went wrong they would say it was “Dear John” again. Edward, his brother, was two years older and quieter. Their father, a big man with a strong voice, often went hunting in the woods; he had a Mauser, a twelve-gauge shotgun and a pistol. His sons did not sass their father nor did they have much to say to him. In their five-room boxlike house in Third Lake, Illinois—forty-five miles north of Chicago—no one else sat in the white-plastic recliner, only the father. He was an electrician. Dinner was at five, always.

When Young was a boy competing in school athletics, his father would always say: “Go out there and get it.”

He always did. The young, hard body never failed him. It was easy to race and jump, just as, years later, Advanced Infantry Training at Fort Knox and jump school at Fort Bragg would be easy.

“By the time I was through grade school—you know, eighth grade,” he said, “I had my whole chest just covered. With blue ribbons and red ribbons and yellow ribbons.”

He dropped out of high school in June 1963, in his junior year. He was seventeen and he joined the Army. He was stationed in Germany from November 1963 until May 1966. He reenlisted so he could marry Erica, a German girl, in October 1965. He wanted to stay in Germany, but the Army was pulling troops out to send them to Vietnam.

His father died from cancer of the lungs in November 1967 when he was at Fort Bragg. It changed him, Young said. He began moving away from his wife, feeling restless, wanting to leap anywhere. He was not a very good husband. That made him sorrowful when he was a prisoner. When he telephoned Erica from Clark Air Base in March 1973, Young said to his wife: “Are things still all right between us?” She said we’ll see.

He was always stubborn and proud, wanting to go places and get there fast. When the twenty-eight American prisoners, and North Vietnamese guards, left “Bao Cao” on the twenty-ninth of August at 7 A.M., Young refused to be carried any more. He was sick of that; he would do it himself. The wound was still open on his leg. The pain was so brilliant he had to ask for Novocaine. Young walked with a bamboo pole, but he could not keep up. The Vietnamese did not push him. Rest here, they said. Do you want to smoke?

They had just crossed a river and were moving onto a dike when fifteen Vietnamese guards suddenly came back and surrounded him in a circle. Then he saw the villagers yelling and throwing stones. They hit the guards with sticks; it was the American they wanted to beat. The guards kept moving, slowly, with Young looming up in the center of the fierce little circle they made, shouting to the villagers to stop at once, to go away. Those who came too close were knocked down.

He had almost reached the road where the other prisoners were waiting in trucks when he heard the sound of a Phantom, or maybe it was a 105, the jets that drop the big bombs, the 500- or 1,000-pounders. The first one hit the other side of the dike, behind the trucks. He heard three bombs explode. He had walked through the area and he knew there were no military targets, only a river and the dikes and the rice fields and the village. It was an ugly day. He never knew if any of the villagers were killed.

D-1 is thirty-five miles east of Hanoi. He spent two years there. The interrogations started again. He wrote his autobiography over and over. Young called them off-the-wall questions. How many girls have you slept with? Do you enjoy sex, do you enjoy sports, what recreation do you like? Describe where you live, how big is your village. Much later he realized the questioning was being used to teach the new interpreters, who had studied English for only six weeks. Every day different interpreters took turns reading reports from AP, UPI and the Hanoi news agency to them.

The Americans captured in the south were always kept together and were subject to the rules and policies of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, even though they were being held in North Vietnam. In late September, Young lived with Specialist 4 Michael Branch and Private George Sparks. Each one was given two cigarettes a day. They saved the tobacco from their butts as carefully as beggars working a hostile neighborhood. The trouble started when the men tore a copy of Vietnam Courier, an English-language newspaper printed in Hanoi, for cigarette paper. The Vietnamese asked who had done this. Young said he did it. Sparks said no, he did it. Branch said it was him.

Their punishment was having to stand up with their arms straight over their heads every day from 6 A.M. until 9 P.M., when they went to bed. They were given thirty minutes to eat at noon. They were on half rations—water and bread—and there was nothing to smoke.

It was not torture, it was punishment, Young kept saying in Aurora, Colorado, and long afterward. “Torture is . . . is . . . is getting your fingernails pulled out, soap and water, a knife to the belly, electrodes to the testicles,” he said. “But nobody was touching me. Sure it hurt. It hurt my back, my knees, my arms, my shoulders, everything. But the next day, if the punishment was over, you didn’t feel it at all. It’s gone.”

Sometimes, when the Americans knew the guards were elsewhere, and not looking in the room, they could lean against the wall and relax. The punishment changed. They were ordered to kneel on the concrete floor, arms raised straight up. On some days one man would be excused and would be permitted to smoke and eat while the other two still knelt. Young thought it was done to divide them.

Cheese called them into his office. He was the officer who dealt with the prisoners. The Americans thought of him as the head cheese; they had nicknames for all the Vietnamese. The two prisoners explained they had wanted cigarette paper. Cheese said no, you did it to defy camp regulations and the Provisional Revolutionary Government. It was true in a way, Young said. They said okay, okay, that was it. The punishment was ended.

“We looked at each other when we got back to the room and just busted out laughing,” Young said.

Cheese was something. He was a Vietnamese in his forties, who looked frailer than most of them to the Americans. His English was not fluent, but Young said Cheese knew the grammar better than he did.

“He was real thin. I mean, there was nothing on his arms,” Young said. “If you seen him in shorts, you’d think he had two toothpicks for legs.” It was a long time before Young became attached to Cheese. “At times he’d get on our nerves. But when he was gone awhile you’d start to wonder—damn, where the hell is Cheese at, he’s supposed to be here. He grew on you.” Not all the other men felt so warmly about Cheese.

They dared Sparks to break wind in the face of a guard. He did it, standing on tiptoes, through the little window in the door. The three men were put in isolation. Young was alone, back on his knees again. He began yelling at a guard one night that the NLF was a bunch of liars, all of them, all they did was lie, and they were a bunch of Communists, too.

Cheese called for him. “He asked me what I had said the night before. I started telling him what the hell I thought. He had a real strange look on his face. He got up and he walked around and he just knocked me off right off the chair. He just nailed me one. He picked me about a foot off that chair.”

The night he was so angry at Cheese, Young accused the National Liberation Front of using torture and lying about it. He hoped it would stop the practice of making the men stay on their knees. “We do not torture,” Cheese told him. “We criticize.”

In isolation, Young was allowed to go outside to wash, to empty the bucket he used as a latrine, to sweep an area. He slept on a small wooden bed. There was a mat and blankets. He liked to talk to the Vietnamese interpreters or cadres. There was not much to do but think and sleep. It was 1969. He always kept track of the months.

He could not do complicated mathematical problems, or remember poetry, or build houses in his mind, as other Americans have said they did during captivity. “What I was doing was trying to understand. Why didn’t they kill me, beat me, take tire irons or water hoses and stuff like that, when asking me questions. I just started thinking.”

At first it was like chewing fog. Cheese came often to talk to him. Young was still arguing a little.

“I was taking a look at the war. What did I see happen in South Vietnam? What was I told when I was in the United States and what have these people told me? Who was telling the truth?”

He was not scarred by combat in South Vietnam. He did not see any American friends die. What he remembered was the bombing he saw in I Corps, the northernmost provinces of South Vietnam; the removal of Vietnamese civilians from villages; the collection of ears from Vietnamese corpses owned by a sergeant. And the three fishermen who were picked up on the beach near Danang although they said they were only there to catch crabs. All had the required ID cards.

The Vietnamese were beaten and put in a Conex, a closet-sized box of corrugated tin. “It must have been a hundred and five degrees in there. They didn’t have any place to defecate or urinate. They had been given no food,” Young said. He ordered the fishermen freed.

In September 1969 he was at D-1, in a room by himself. He could not see or speak to another American. Ho Chi Minh died on September 2. There was a most terrible hush, as if the Vietnamese had stopped breathing. Young heard of the death over the camp radio. There was a speaker in each of the prisoners’ rooms.

He wept. The Vietnamese named Cheese came into his room, asked him quietly why he was so upset, then left. To this day Young remembers his grieving. You only had to see him in the Dunes Motel to know he could not be cured.

“He freed the country from the French, right, and the Vietnamese really loved and respected this man,” he said. “I think a lot of people around the world did. Even I did. I mean, I’d never known him. I’d just read about Ho Chi Minh in prison. But talking to the cadres . . . they’d talk about him with such esteem, such respect. You know, you don’t ever hear people talk about our President, any of our Presidents, as highly as the Vietnamese talked about him.”

He wanted to have someone like that; many people do.

In the fall of 1969 he read about the antiwar movement’s Vietnam Moratorium in the United States. There were Americans who really wanted the war to go off, Young said. He asked Cheese if he could write something to help the antiwar movement. Cheese said no. But Young tried to put down some of his feelings on paper. “I knew what the consequences would be with the U.S. military, but I says, well, I got a conscience,” he told me.

Cheese looked at it but did not praise him. He was always critical of his spelling, handwriting and sentence structure. “He said it was very bad. He said it was very sloppy,” Young said. Cheese always seemed disturbed by Young’s education. No one had ever paid that much attention to how much he did not know and could not do.

He was never allowed to study Vietnamese in the camps but he learned words and tries now to remember them. Once, shaving and looking into a small mirror, he saw that his face was not the same any more, he saw how all of it had changed.

It was a Christmas he could not believe. The Americans were always given a special dinner on December 25, but in 1969 there was a Christmas Eve party. The prisoners sang and laughed and could not stop talking. They went in shifts: fifteen men at a time. It had been six months since Young had talked to any Americans. It had been years since he had heard a roomful of men laugh like that. He was so happy to be with them, happy that for once no one was depressed.

The Americans had been allowed to decorate a Christmas room. Young had been given permission to whitewash it by himself. Others had made the green-paper wreaths that looked like holly, the snowman pasted on the wall, the paper fireplace and the big Santa Claus. There was a program, too, of poems, essays and singing. Young recited a little essay he had written on the meaning of Christmas and how he had spent it in Third Lake, Illinois. In Aurora, he remembered how people at home had stopped hollering at each other when it was Christmas, but he did not put all that in his composition.

The Vietnamese had sent someone to the mountain to cut down a tree, and the little white bulbs hanging on its branches had been painted different colors. Cheese had told them all that there would be photographers present, but none of the Americans seemed to notice, or much care.

He and Branch sang “Jingle Bells” and “Noël”; some officers sang “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” They sang wonderfully. At one end of the room was an altar. A church in North Vietnam had sent a cross and candlesticks. There was even a little crèche showing Jesus and the manger. He remembers an incense burner, too. The Americans went, two by two, to the altar to kneel and pray.

On Christmas Day he had a present: he was no longer alone. Branch moved in with him, this was the gift. Eight prisoners had their dinner at noon together. Young remembers how the tomatoes and carrots were shaped into flowers, something he had never seen before. He had been so hungry for so long, but that day he could not eat all that was given him. There was soup, turkey, French fries, hard-boiled eggs, bread, vegetables, beer and coffee. As a treat, American rock music was played over the speaker for the prisoners to hear in their rooms. He wanted Erica. New Americans came into D-1 that day.

Cheese looked very tired and his eyes were bloodshot. He asked Young to help him. The problem was a young prisoner—whom I shall call Banks—who was trying to kill himself and could not be left alone. Banks had been a prisoner since 1966.

Young asked him to play ping-pong. “He said they were going to castrate him,” he said. “We were playing ping-pong, but then he shut everything off and asked to go back to his room.”

Banks was hoping to die by biting through his wrist and cutting the veins with his teeth. He had gnawed through that arm quite deeply. The Vietnamese gave him iron and vitamins because he had lost quite a bit of blood. “He looks at the pills and he looks at me. ‘They’re trying to poison me,’ he says. But he took them,” Young added.

Banks moved in with Young and Branch so they could watch him all the time and keep him from chewing his wrist. One night Young dozed off and heard the guard calling his name. He saw that Banks was huddled in a corner, trying to get at his wrist. There was blood on his teeth. Young grabbed Banks and threw him back against the door and hit him.

Cheese was very angry at Young. “He said I had no right to do it.” Cheese did not punish him. He only said he was disappointed in Young.

THEY MOVED TO Plantation Gardens in Hanoi on the night of November 22, 1970. He does not remember how many antiwar tapes he made. There were a lot. In one broadcast for the Provisional Revolutionary Government, Young said in a letter addressed to President Nixon:

I no longer want to fight for you, or anyone like you. In fact, I won’t ever again fight for your kind of American democracy. I will, as I said, fight for my real American people and country. Not you, Mr. President, because you don’t represent the real America.

It was much better for the Americans at Plantation. There was a volley-ball court and a courtyard where they could exercise. Young liked to listen to the train that ran in back of the prison. If he was outside, he could even see the passengers.

“We always knew there was a possibility that we’d get into trouble with the military when we got back, but it didn’t make no difference,” Young said. “We wouldn’t have changed what we were saying. We weren’t ashamed of what we were saying.”

Cheese had gifts brought to them in the room. Young thought that other Americans were always there when the gifts arrived and that perhaps this was planned by Cheese. At first there was Kool-Aid, candy, milk, sugar, cigarettes. After 1971 there were no more American items, just ones made in Vietnam. That made Young feel more uneasy. He and the others had complained to Cheese. “We’d tell him, look, we don’t need it. We aren’t doing this because you’re giving us all this stuff. At first we refused it. Then Cheese says the camp commander says you have no right to refuse anything that we give you.” Young admits he was glad to have the cigarettes; so were the other heavy smokers.

“We felt guilty because we knew that children outside the fence were having a hard time getting this stuff and that they needed it more than we did. When we started getting Vietnamese stuff, why, their soldiers weren’t even getting what we were. We had enough sugar in our diet already. We had sweet rice on Sunday and sometimes they’d give us sugar with our bread in the mornings.”

Young claims that the men tried to share their extra food with the guards, who had been generous and polite to them. But the guards would always say no, no, the milk will give us diarrhea, the candy will be bad for our teeth, too many cigarettes make us cough.

It was early in August 1971. Young and four other men were walking across the compound to the kitchen where food for Americans was prepared. The five washed the pots and pans and dishes. Some senior officers were outside, shaving. Suddenly Captain Edward Leonard, Jr. shouted: “Kavanaugh, you and your men must stop all communication and collaboration with the enemy.”

One of the five yelled back: “I’ll protest this war until I die.”

Another officer later said that on that day one of the enlisted men also shouted: “Who’s the enemy?”

Young does not remember. He was watching the Vietnamese guards, who were always armed. The Americans were forbidden to talk, and for a second he thought the Vietnamese might open fire. It was an “asinine” thing for Leonard to do, Young said, it made him furious.

Major Edward Leonard, Jr., had his turn in July 1973. The thirty-four-year-old Air Force officer, who had been promoted on his return to the States, filed mutiny charges against the seven men under Article 94 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The long list of offenses included attempts by the seven to “advise, counsel, urge and to cause insubordination, disloyalty and refusal of duty” in another prisoner of war “by stating to him that the United States should not be in Vietnam, that the United States was committing atrocities against the Vietnamese people, that money to keep the war going was going to rich Americans and that American soldiers were being killed for no reason . . .”

The charges also accused the men of making a poster that said “Nixon Sucks,” of singing the anthem of the National Liberation, and of seeking political asylum from officials of the Army of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The Army dropped these charges too.

IN 1972, AS a prisoner of war, John Young read War and Peace, Romeo and Juliet, And Quiet Flows the Don, and The Arrogance of Power by Senator William Fulbright.

THE BOMBING OF Haiphong came on April 16, 1972. Be prepared, the Vietnamese told the prisoners in Hanoi. The siren went off the next day.

“I think the bombing was the most horrifying thing in my whole life. Worse than when I was captured, because I understood it,” Young said. The first raid was a short one. The men in his room sat on their beds and waited after the siren sounded. “We waited and waited and waited. It was only about five minutes but it seemed like an eternity. All of a sudden you could hear it off in the distance, you could hear the jets coming. Then the antiaircraft in the distance. Boom, boom, boom. Then a terrible and thunderous roar over the building and the shaking of everything.”

The bombers came during the day, and during the night, for more than five months. Young swung between outrage and fear and a terrible pity for the people of Hanoi. Six times he had been taken out of the prison camp on trips through the capital, dressed in a Western suit and flowered tie provided by his captors. He had been to the Museum of Natural History, to Unification Park, to the circus. He loved the circus, he can talk for a long time about that circus.

“We were feeling what the people of Vietnam were feeling,” Young said. You could smell the smoke in Hanoi after the raids and hear the ambulances and the fire trucks. He hated the delayed-action bombs, those that went off after the all-clear when people thought it was all over and they were safe. He hated President Nixon. “We called him every name in the book,” he said. “It was murder, that’s what it was.”

In October, the month when Henry Kissinger said that “peace was at hand” and that a final agreement on a cease-fire and a negotiating settlement with the North Vietnamese was only three or four days away, there were quarrels among the twelve men living together. Young says The Eight moved out and left the four men alone, because it was felt the attitudes of the others were too conciliatory. They thought the war was over.

“These men were doing an about-face,” Young said. “They figured they’d be going home soon, so they didn’t want to do anything. I says okay, if you want to cover your ass, you cover your ass.”

It was not over. The B-52s came back over Hanoi on the night of December 18.

“The Vietnamese always told us that when the U.S. government destroyed Hanoi, there will be nothing left to destroy in Vietnam, and when they destroy Hanoi, they will have to get out because at that time they know we will never give up. They will have to kill everybody in this country,” Young said.

First you could hear a distant rumble of the B-52s, a steady rumble which got closer and closer.

“It got closer and closer and closer, and you could look out the window and see where they were, for the sky was a fiery red. Then it was like an earthquake,” he said.

The prisoners dug shelters in their room. They could see the SAM missiles hitting the planes.

“It was worse than hell,” Young said. “I’ve seen so many of those planes go down, and I’ve seen so many of these bombs exploding, and it’s just at times unbearable. You want to lie down and die. Die. You do. Because you know the pilots didn’t have a chance, I mean, it hurt just as much to see them die as to know the Vietnamese were dying. They were our people, they were Americans too. And there was nothing you could do. You knew you were helpless and it just eats at you, it does.”

They moved to the Hanoi Hilton on December 27.

HIS OLDEST SON, John, who was born in Germany, was two years old when Young went to Vietnam. In spring of 1973 the child asked his father about the war that kept him away for such a long time.

Did you win or did you lose, the child wanted to know.

“I told him I was on the side of the winners,” Young said.

AFTER I CAME back from being with Young, another returned prisoner of war called me at eleven-thirty at night. I was asleep. He was a polite and determined man, with the rank of captain, who was getting out of the Army. He knew I had spent three days with Young. It was wrong of me to write only about Young, the captain said. That was only one side of the story and I must talk to other POWs. It wasn’t just that Young and the others were against the war, so were most prisoners, the captain said. I said I thought this was not so. He went on: But The Eight had taken gifts, accepted special privileges. It was bad for the morale of the Americans, it was bad for camp discipline. You had to have discipline.

For two weeks each time the telephone rang I dreaded speaking to another officer, back from D-1 and Plantation and the Hanoi Hilton, wanting to give me the full picture, ma’am. Each man has his own story, each man knows whom he cannot forgive.

Young and I met several times in the next two years. He grew more hair, the mustache was longer and thicker, the sideburns more bunchy. His deep-set eyes looked strangely bluer. He gained weight. He was going to Harper’s Junior College, giving antiwar speeches, and working with a local chapter of Clergy and Laity Concerned. Shortly after the first of the new year in 1974, five of them had their first reunion in northern Kentucky, in the home of Michael Branch, who lived in Highland Heights, across the river from Cincinnati. The first to arrive was Frederick Elbert, an ex-Marine from Brentwood, Long Island, who had been a prisoner for fifty-five months. Elbert said he had spent fifteen hundred dollars on new clothes, which looked a little snug because he kept gaining weight. He bought new furniture for his parents, a good stereo, a console TV and car. He spent eight hundred dollars on Christmas presents. Sometimes when he planned to go out at night his father wanted to go along with him.

His parents were not curious. “They never asked me a single thing,” Elbert said.

Mrs. Earl Branch, the mother of Michael, who was twenty-six and had been a prisoner for fifty-eight months, showed me the rosary that he made in captivity and gave to her. He had used the cord from the drawstring pajama bottoms the prisoners wore, and carefully knotted it. The cross was made from bamboo and old toothpaste tubes. The rosary looked very old and delicate, like something dug up two hundred years ago. “He only did what he had to do in order to survive,” Mrs. Branch said mournfully.

She did not understand that her son, or any of the others, regretted nothing and kept insisting they were not tortured into making antiwar statements. No one had explained this to her, or perhaps, considering her nerves, she did not want to hear it. Mrs. Branch said that she wished she could have answered all the letters people wrote to Michael welcoming him home. Young girls and lonely women wrote him. One letter read: “Dear Michael, Just a note to say I’d like to meet you sometime if you are not married. I heard you were married then I read how you were divorced so I’m a divorcee and would like to meet you. I would love to meet a POW and just talk . . .”

Elbert and Branch sat with William Hagedorn in the Gladiator cocktail lounge of the Travelodge Motel the first night of the reunion. He was Branch’s lawyer, who liked to drink with, and show off, his most famous client, who seemed to both like and be repelled by the attention of reporters. When Branch was a prisoner, all of his pay was sent to his wife, who had written him when he was a GI that only his daughter really missed him. That letter made Branch go berserk. He was captured the week he received the letter; he read it over and over.

Local television described his homecoming, the ruined marriage, the stalled life, the collaboration charges. It was voted as the best news story of 1973 in a local poll of television viewers and the film on Michael Branch was shown again. The lawyer was delighted.

The men moved around to drink in different places. They were joined by a doctor with a large local practice who said in World War II he had been a prisoner of the Germans in a camp between Berlin and Breslau. It was not of much interest to Branch or Elbert, but they had learned to listen politely to such stories.

The Americans and the Germans were much more alike than Americans and Asians, the doctor said, because Asians had little regard for human life. Everyone knew that.

“What about the six million Jews?” Branch asked. The doctor said something about a law being passed by the Germans. Branch said a law didn’t make it all right, did it?

The lawyer wanted to know something about the needs of the former prisoners of war but he didn’t want to know very much. “Listen, were you guys able to masturbate?” he asked. “I mean, that must have been the only way to get to sleep.”

Branch and Elbert laughed just a little, but they did not like the question much, perhaps because women were at the same table.

The men wanted Elbert to see the Beverly Hills, a huge place on a hill that looks as if it had been yanked out of Las Vegas and put down in Newport, Kentucky by mistake. There was a bar, a nightclub, a garden room, a ballroom and a wedding chapel. In the gift shop Elbert bought a little plaster statue bearing the words: “Somebody has to say it first—I love you.” He was going to mail it to a girl.

John Young was the only man who came to the reunion with a wife, although the others are all married now. Erica, a pleasant, pretty woman with blond hair and nice legs, was at ease with the other men and with Branch’s family. She spoke and wrote English more correctly than her husband, or any of the others. I asked if her husband was feeling steadier.

“He still has his moments,” she said. She joked about the posters and pictures he hung on the walls of a room in their house in Arlington Heights, Illinois. “There is Easy Rider on one wall and Ho Chi Minh on the next,” Erica said.

When her husband first came home he could not sleep on the big soft mattress after such a long time on floors, boards and concrete platforms, so he asked her if she would sleep on the floor with him. Erica said she would rather not. She kept on working, as she had when he was a prisoner of war, because they needed the money while he was at school. Young made so many speeches he became very good at it; his grammar improved and his speech was clearer. He would tell students that nobody wanted the war in Vietnam except the Army and big business, that he wanted Nixon impeached for keeping the war going another four years when he could have ended it, that the bombing of North Vietnam was mass murder.

At the reunion, Branch told Young what the doctor had said about the Germans and the Americans.

“He is right. We are a lot alike,” Branch said.

“No, Americans are the most brutal people in the world,” Young said. The booted motorcycle police in Chicago, dressed for winter, reminded him of the Gestapo and SS troops.

When we met again, it was in February 1974 at Iowa State University, which was having a week of speeches and seminars on Vietnam. In one class Young spoke to a handful of students but he did not mention his own personal experiences. When he finally mentioned his captors, finally spoke of Cheese, he slowed down, and those who were close to him could see his eyes were filled.

Everyone has theories about these prisoners of war. It has something to do with their fathers, a man in New York said to me, but almost everything does. A psychologist thought perhaps these particular prisoner might have had damaging or disruptive childhoods and that perhaps the Vietnamese, even when punishing them, gave them more time and attention than anyone else in their lives had provided or been willing to give. Maybe I said, maybe. A teacher said American education had failed them. A woman in the antiwar movement said they had understood the truth about the war and acted on it. Maybe, I said. Another woman said the split between the eight enlisted men and the other prisoners of war—the officers, the careerists—was only a sign of class war that would soon make itself felt in America despite all the “pacification” programs to keep the poor alive in line, and silent. But I know who can give us the answer. It is in Hanoi with some Vietnamese whose names we will never know.

He never thought of himself as a man to be pitied. He was glad he had been a prisoner.

“I don’t think Americans really know what love is, or what it is to love a country, or to love their own people,” Young said to me. “The Vietnamese in the north do. It’s unbelievable. They’ll do anything for each other.”

In December of 1975, when I telephoned, Erica Young said John was no longer with her and the boys. He had left in May, saying he had to get “all away from everything.” He asked for a divorce. Mrs. Young was composed but sounded clenched. She was thirty and their marriage was ten years old. She did not know why he had to leave. We remembered: how he had said how much he owed her for waiting five years for him, how much he wanted the marriage to be a good one, how hard he had worked to end the war and to make other Americans see they were the wrong side. She said his work at college had not gone particularly well but that he had liked becoming involved with the students’ senate.

“He wanted to do so much good,” Erica Young said. “And it was easier for him to do it in prison.”

LUONG ALWAYS SAID the same thing when the village dogs got closer and I wanted to run. It was this: Stand still and they will not hurt you. Sit down quickly on the ground if a dog begins to bite you, he would say. The dog would then feel bigger and act nicely. Luong believed in his advice. The young dogs and the old dogs, in a fury, would come racing out as we walked up the paths to all the Vietnamese villages where I wanted to ask questions.

The dogs were always the same dogs, overwrought, with crooked tails and watery eyes, dogs who had no names, for the Vietnamese did not consider animals to be equal with children. I was afraid of being bitten because I did not want to have so many shots in the stomach for rabies.

But perhaps there was another reason. The proud and worn village dogs, of all things Vietnamese, seemed free to show who was not wanted. I always understood this. The villagers had no choice: Americans could not be sent away, or told they had no right to ask so much.

Dog-fear was wasteful, Luong said. He meant foolish. Other things were to be feared: helicopters flying in a fog and crashing, helicopters being shot down, cluster bombs, white phosphorus, mines and booby traps, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and riflemen in all armies. But even after the ambush, the firefights, the American artillery that fell short and almost killed us, the helicopter being hit, I could not trust the dogs, any of them. It was not unusual to devise imaginary threats, or enlarge the littlest ones, in order to be distracted from the real dangers that were so constant and so brutal it was better to ignore them.

The American troops loved Vietnamese dogs. It was what they loved the most in that country. They adopted dogs, none of them very big, who grew fat and playful. They were cuddled, scratched, teased, talked to, wormed, washed, and overfed a good deal of the time. There were puppies everywhere: on fire bases, where they learned not to mind the great slamming noises of the howitzers; in base camps; in mess halls; at headquarters; in trucks and in tents.

There were dogs called Dink, Gook, Slut, Pimp, Scag, Slit, Rat, Zip and Trouble. Despite the paperwork, which most soldiers loathed, in 1969 GIs took home two hundred and seventy dogs, thirty-three cats, nineteen reptiles, twenty monkeys, twenty-six birds, one fox and three lizards. In the same year slightly more Americans—four hundred and fifty-five of them—received permission to marry Vietnamese women and take them home, which required more paperwork and unending bribes.

At Long Binh Post there was a Military Dog Hospital for the animals that were used as trackers, scouts and sentries. GIs were allowed to bring in their pets to a small, gleaming dispensary. It was a far better hospital than most Vietnamese could hope for. When there was a rabies threat, the head veterinarian, who was a kindly captain, had to tell quite a few GIs that their healthy dogs would have to be killed. The problem was that the dogs had not been vaccinated before a date determined by the Army.

Some of the GIs had to be told this several times, and then once more. They knew, even the dimmest man among them, that it was useless to argue with the Army. Some of them stood in the hall, holding dogs, trying to arrange their faces. Cats were brought in to the hospital too. A young sergeant, with the name of Kirby, walked by holding a two-month-old kitten, named Re-Up, that he was going to put down. The animal was very sick. “I have nightmares doing this,” Kirby said.

There was no one nightmare for all of them. For one man, Vietnam meant killing small cats; for others, it was something else. It was an army all to its own.

The scout dogs were German shepherds, held by their trainers on very long metal leashes. Something about them looked wrong, as if too many tiny wires inside their heads touched and smoked, making them mean and unhappy. Some acted as though they smelled a peculiar scent on me which made them more alert, and I tried to comfort myself by saying it was nail polish. The GIs had the same PX deodorants that I did, and used Desenex foot powder. There would be huge dark circles of sweat around their shoulder blades. Sometimes the infantrymen, the 11 Bravos, had bamboo poisoning, rotting feet, or boils on the backs of their necks from the heat and dirt. They called them dink sores, and would cut them open for each other with Schick razor blades. The animals did not bother them; the dogs were on their side.

The dog trainers seemed to be set apart. None of the wild bitter talk came from them or the sense of ill-usage which made men sullen, murderous or frantic. Once a trainer told me, as we waited for a helicopter, that when it was that hot the scout dog panted so much his tongue was apt to get sunburned. That worried him. Some Americans were very happy in Vietnam, happier than they might ever be again. They knew exactly what to do.

Later I knew I was right, when Luong and I talked to some Vietnamese who swore they had seen an American let loose his German shepherd to attack a man riding on a motorbike, an ordinary man on an ordinary road. Later we knew without any doubt that dogs had been used on some Vietnamese prisoners. There was nothing to do but stay as far away from them as possible, which I do even now.

THE GI WAS trying to explain to an older American civilian why he had given up marijuana for heroin.

“Grass is loud,” he said.

The soldiers liked heroin because it had no smell and did not give them away. The officers could not tell who was smoking or snorting it in 1971 before the Army started drug checks, raids and testing men’s urine.

“You can salute with your right hand and take a hit with your left,” a draftee said to me. He thought it was a splendid revenge. He saluted often when he smoked it.

In the third week of February 1971 a lieutenant told me that heroin was being sold everywhere in Vietnam. Luong and I went to find out and buy some. We bought more than forty dollars’ worth. Alvin Shuster, the bureau chief in Saigon, was nervous when he saw me come back with that heroin—it was the proof I needed for my story—so I flushed it down the toilet in The New York Times office. On the fifteen-mile Bien Hoa highway, which ran from Saigon north to Long Binh—the largest U.S. military base in South Vietnam—we bought the first vial from a little girl sitting alone under an Army poncho held up with poles. It cost three dollars for a vial about the size of a salt shaker served with meals by the airlines. Sometimes the price went up to six dollars. Across the highway was the entrance to the headquarters of Lieutenant General Michael Davidson, commander of II Field Force. The little girl sat there alone, humming, with a monkey on a rope and a bird in a cage.

In areas outside of Long Binh, called Ho Nai and Tam Hiep, Vietnamese sent children to sell the stuff to GIs driving convoys; it was easier for girls because the Americans were suspicious of all males, even small ones, who they felt could be Viet Cong. The Vietnamese called heroin bach bien, or “white opium.” The children were very clever. They never kept the heroin on their bodies or in the little boxes they held up which displayed sunglasses, Seiko watches, billfolds and headbands. They hid the drug in a nearby bush until the sale was made. One of the best routes to work was between Binh Duong and Ben Cat; sometimes the little girls went to Tay Ninh or to Long Khanh, for they knew the convoys stopped there. The little girls did not know where the heroin came from but they thought it came from Cholon, the Chinese twin city of Saigon. There was a pretty one, with a wide smile and coquettish manner, who lied about her age. She said she was seventeen, but Luong thought she was much younger. Her business was very good.

“More white Americans buy heroin than black Americans, but I don’t know why. If you see an American sniffing bach bien, you would certainly die of laughter,” she said. “His hands shake violently when he is given it. Then he immediately sniffs it, even poking it in the nose. Then he closes his eyes as if he faints. Some minutes later he wakes up and looks more intelligent.”

I HAVE MADE many people angry. Once, after speaking at a small lunch given at the University of Missouri, a woman came up to me and said it was shaming to have had to listen to what I said, when everyone knew the Americans were a kind and generous people—and I spoke so harshly of what they had done in Vietnam. Her son was in the Special Forces, the lady said, and all he had done was try to help poor weak backward people defend themselves.

The lady—who would certainly not want her name set down in these pages—spoke of orphanages, churches, schools and cleanliness. She spoke loudly because she was deeply distressed. People like me worked on her like sand in the eyes. “Is there nothing we did over there that you have the fairness to acknowledge?” the lady in the red dress said.

I have been thinking about it, needing to explain why even the most well-meaning plans and gestures did not help the Vietnamese, since, nearly always, it was we who had injured them and made them helpless. The wooden chests, for example, made by industrial-arts students in Pulaski County, Tennessee, which were sent to Vietnam in 1965, were filled with school supplies. Included also were softballs, baseballs, almanacs, world atlases, books of American geography and, sometimes, high school yearbooks. They were, of course, in English. I saw a child in Anh Giang province looking at a book from America that was a beginner’s manual on carpentry. He was holding the book upside down. The children of Vietnam did not need maps of the United States, or yearbooks, they needed to know how to find their own country.

It is true that there were small boys in Vietnam who imitated the GIs and were overwhelmed by them; it is true that there were women who did love some Americans. But so huge, so powerful, so rich were the foreigners, their presence became a poison in the Vietnamese blood. Even the garbage of the Americans was a garbage the Vietnamese had never seen; the children dug in it for food. All that was certain was the great wealth, power and the strangeness of the foreigners who were at the same time persuaded of their own kindness while being persistently cruel. A fourteen-year-old girl in Saigon wrote this poem; nearly all Vietnamese write poetry and there is nothing unusual about it. The title is “Americans Are Not Beautiful.”

They are called My,

Which my brother says means beautiful.

But they are not beautiful:

They have too much hair on their arms like monkeys,

They are tall like trees without branches,

Their eyes are green like eyes of boiled pigs

In the markets during the New Year.

Their hair is blond and not black,

Their skin is pink and not brown,

Their cars frighten cyclists in the streets,

Their flying machines and their dragonflies

Drop death on people and animals

And make trees bare of their leaves.

Here, Americans are not beautiful.

“But they are,

In their faraway country”

My brother says.

In Duc Duc, in the province of Quang Nam, where I met the captured Viet Cong nurse before she was taken away with the other prisoners, the villagers spoke often, and wearily, of the fierce fighting in March when North Vietnamese troops attacked. One American, who flew over Duc Duc after the fighting, said it looked like an overflowing ashtray. There was a man named Tanh who said he was not for the Communists, but the Saigon government and their own soldiers were too weak. It made him groan: He had never seen such a bunch. “The nationalist soldiers are all cowards and their leaders have no initiative. When we were attacked they only stuck to each other, and lots of houses were destroyed by their artillery fired point-blank, not by Communist fires,” he said.

That night a man yelled out, but there were always men with nightmares who moaned or called out in their sleep. In the morning we saw that the male prisoners—in the same group with the nurse and the girl—had not been lucky. There were sores, welts, cuts, bruises and a cigarette burn on one farmer’s face. The Americans said they had nothing to do with VC prisoners, the South Vietnamese handled them.

A South Vietnamese captain complained that under the Phoenix program he had a quota each month for VC and VC suspects which had to be met. He did not like what I said to him about torture and demanded to know if I was wearing a Viet Cong jacket. The label on my safari jacket was from a bad tourist shop in Nairobi, but the captain was not convinced.

In the only café in Duc Duc, which was a hut with several wooden tables and stools, Luong asked the woman who served us how it went in Duc Duc. He did not ask right away; it usually took him twenty minutes of conversation, if not longer, to come to the first question. Her answer was the longest of sighs; it seemed to touch the ceiling and drift down like smoke. She mentioned the little dispensary the Americans had and how the doctor could call in airplanes to take away the sick and the wounded. He was, in fact, an older man who had once been a Special Forces medic, a man who helped any Vietnamese who came to him. Three more cups of tea, then the new question: How would she feel if the Americans left Duc Duc?

“Bad,” she said.

Why?

“No more sick-planes,” she said, meaning the U.S. helicopters that came in for the wounded and very ill.

Luong said there would be such planes, only they would be flown by Vietnamese, not by Americans. He did not really believe it. “That will be good, won’t it?”

“No,” she said. “The Americans run; the Vietnamese go slowly.”

THE WOMAN IN Missouri might like that story; some people think it is very comforting. Perhaps this, too, would please them—unless they understand it. In the hamlet of Nhon Hoa, about twenty-five miles southwest of Saigon, it was decided by the Americans to create a Model Sanitary Hamlet. The site was a peaceful, lush, reasonably prosperous place on the Van Co Tay river where cucumbers, sugar cane, thick bushes of purple bougainvillaea and cocoanut trees grew and flourished. The idea came from an American public-health team—the Military Provincial Health Assistance Program Team II—based in the nearby town of Tan An. The head of the team was a major, regular Army, who was a surgeon. He said the Model Sanitary Hamlet was a self-help program and the people wanted to do it themselves. These were the magic words of the song that the Americans could not stop singing. The goals for the hamlet were inexpensive toilets, proper storage of drinking water, the penning of animals to keep them out of the houses, the building of sanitary wells, and to persuade women to let their dishes dry in the sun because this was hygienic procedure.

The major did not seem upset that he was not working as a surgeon in a province where the Vietnamese needed emergency medical care. The hospital in Tan An did not need him, the major said. He did not care to discuss the merits of letting dishes drain dry inside dark houses—the Vietnamese kept cooler in rooms where the sun was shut out—compared to the trouble of carrying them outdoors into the sunlight where the flies were thicker, and bugs or bird droppings might land on them. We were driven to the hamlet with a military member of the team as an escort, who was supposed to keep an eye on us.

“Health Is Gold,” said a little sign in Vietnamese tacked onto a cocoanut tree. “Sanitation Makes the Hamlet Cheerful.”

There were some Vietnamese who were depressed by such devotion to sanitation. A thirty-three-year-old schoolteacher found the plan puzzling because he felt it unnecessary. “Cities and towns are places where this kind of project should be carried out first,” Mr. Phu, the teacher, said. “Many people of this hamlet now have latrines, as they were told to, but they never use them.” They resented the cost and the work involved.

Other Vietnamese said they were either frightened to use the latrines, which were so constantly inspected, or did not choose to.

“They are good at night but in the daytime people still prefer the rice fields or the riverbanks,” one man said. He showed us the latrine he built, which was impeccable. His mother, who was eighty-six and seemed no heavier than a vase of leaves, said she was quite afraid she would slip inside the outhouse. It was very slippery, she kept repeating. Her major concern, which she expressed daily in her prayers to Buddha, was that neither of her two sons, both middle-aged, would ever drink or smoke. Luong and I smelled of tobacco; the fat and wooden American with us had whiskey-eyes.

There were complaints that the hamlet chief, an amiable man, had suddenly grown rather nervous. He had been yelling at small boys who urinated in a stream to stop it immediately or they would be put in jail, although most people knew the chief had been stopping by the stream nearly all his life.

It was a quiet hamlet. There had been no fighting for three years, not even a shiver. The Vietnamese worked hard and bathed several times a day. It seemed like a fine place, except for the unpredictable influx of visitors coming to inspect the hamlet’s latrines. It caused the children much excitement although it baffled many of their parents, who were made uneasy by the foreigners’ intense interest in their bowel movements. Several mothers told Luong it was unnatural.

As the American and I walked up to the sign of the Model Sanitary Hamlet, two small boys spotted us and began to scream out the news.

“Look, look, more toilet-Americans,” the children hollered.

IN THE MIDDLE of November 1972, when the last people I wanted to be with were professional soldiers charting their way up the chain of command, the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, requested my presence at an unusual weekend seminar. It was called, those two days, “The Military and the Media: Toward an Understanding.” The president of the Naval War College, Vice-Admiral Stanfield Turner, an urbane man, wrote in a “Welcome” to the visitors: “When you think about it, our missions have as much in common as they differ, for both protect the quality of life we cherish.”

I could never quite grasp that. I had not thought of myself on a mission while reporting in Vietnam, and the military there did not seem to be protecting any quality of life to be cherished. The admiral, who was no fool, added that he found a certain adversary quality between the military and the media to be healthy. He cautioned us that although some of the questions raised would be incendiary, everyone should work to discuss them both “dispassionately and unparochially . . . This conference will have failed if we allow personal and professional views to dictate judgment and conversation.”

But if either group had obeyed him, the officers and the journalists would have stayed silent, the reasons for facing each other would not exist. Some of us were pushed hard by memories and perceptions that were ugly. It was hard to be mannerly, to believe that anything could be shared; even language shoved us apart, as it had always done in the war. Vietnam flooded the Pringle Auditorium like dirty river water, rising to our waists, making us all shift and turn and use voices of different pitch. I spoke—and there were others who put it better—of a lack of truthfulness and honor among the career military in Vietnam, of a tendency in them to cheat, citing how the nation’s most esteemed medals were handed out like salted peanuts to field-grade officers. An example was the well-known brigadier general who received a Silver Star for acts of valor invented in a citation written by enlisted men who were ordered to do it. There is no need to give his name once more, in these pages, or the names of the officers involved—all have been printed in The New York Times. I grant them amnesty, for a priest who went to jail for his beliefs has told me that true amnesty must not be only for the draft evaders and the deserters, but even for the American Army, who are more in need of it. You cannot want amnesty just for one group of people, the priest said.

Afterward, at one of the War College receptions, where we were supposed to mingle, I was asked if I knew the general who had taken the Silver Star, the general to whom I caused such distress, if not embarrassment. I said no, we had never met. The officer at the reception assured me he was a fine fellow, one of the best, which made it clear that nothing I said had made a difference in the Pringle Auditorium, which was that men who practice deceit with medals or body counts are neither men of honor nor of valor. What I remember most clearly is another officer—most of them wore civilian clothes, which disguised nothing—who rose, after one panel finished, to ask why correspondents were sent to cover the war in Vietnam when they knew nothing about war or the military. It was a stunning question because he asked it sadly and sincerely.

“A sports editor wouldn’t send someone to cover a football game who was a novice, would he?” the officer said. He felt it was a shame that the press corps knew so little; perhaps he meant me and guessed I knew nothing of small-unit infantry tactics, of weaponry, or figuring out the range of mortars. I had sat through dozens of briefings in Vietnam and never learned anything, ever.

In the bar after dinner, in the officers’ open mess, another man asked me if Seymour Hersh, the reporter, was queer. He did not seem either a stupid or a vicious man. His eyes were a little too large for a correct military face, which should look sterner, more shut-down. I assured him Mr. Hersh was married, had two children, and certainly liked women. Did the officer want to go to the table where Mr. Hersh sat and be introduced? He refused, saying it was a shame what a man like Hersh had done. I do not know if he meant Mr. Hersh’s reports on the My Lai massacre, or the story on the massacre at another hamlet called My Khe, his disclosure of the Army’s attempts to cover up both, or the stories on the secret bombings of Cambodia. There was no reporter in the United States who had written the stories that Mr. Hersh had written, and has kept on writing, and he was hated for it. The rest of us, even a most famous novelist who were there, did not matter much.

It was a sad weekend with the well-mannered admirals and the promising battalion commanders, for underneath the rich lacquer of the U.S. Naval War College the different shades of anger splattered and smoked. The weekend reminded me—as nothing else had done for many years—how once I had thought of career officers as being grand and stoical men, made of superior stuff. As a schoolgirl I had seen World War II newsreels: the tanks with the long noses that were guns, the air raids, the searchlights moving back and forth like pointing fingers, the people looking cold. It was impossible not to believe in those years that Americans did not make up a warm-hearted, gallant, resourceful army led by officers who preferred to die rather than be dishonored. Each American generation is glued to its own moral imperatives and it is hard to rip them out of yourself. I cannot now understand why I thought for so much of my life that it was a lovable and self-correcting army, could not see the contradictions in this. It surely could not just have been the movie made of The Young Lions, in which the terrible sergeant is at last found out and court-martialed for treatment of an enlisted man.

When as a young woman I lived in Europe for nine years it pleased me to hear older people in Belgium and France occasionally say how gentil the American soldiers had been, what generous allies. In the villages of Europe, I would sometimes catch the names of men, from places in my own country I had never heard of, who had given away food or a blanket, and never been forgotten. The sight of them had made Europeans rejoice. Only one Frenchwoman complained to me of how clumsily the Americans had bombed in Orléans. She insisted the British were much more precise, and it made me furious. That was in 1964. Korea taught me nothing, for no one spoke of it when I was growing up, except something about how wonderful the girls in Japan were. Vietnam taught some of us more than we perhaps ever wished to know.

THE REVOLT OF the enlisted men in the Awards and Decorations Office, Adjutant General Section, 15th Administration Company, of the 1st Air Cavalry Division’s base camp at Bien Hoa began on the night of October 5, 1970. The soldiers who worked in Awards and Decorations were called in and ordered to prepare a descriptive narration of acts of valor so that the brigadier general—who had been assistant division commander for five months—could quickly receive a Silver Star before he left the 1st Cav for another assignment.

“That night I was at a party—a kind of movable feast in one guy’s hootch—when I’m called in by the captain. He doesn’t know how to do it, so I become inspirational and Napoleonic,” Private James Olstad said.

The captain, whom the men liked, appeared bitter about the order but insisted the citation had to be ready by eight the next morning even if the men had to stay up all night. He also said to make it for something done in the Cambodian operation. Specialist 4 George Tillinghast protested mildly to the captain, to no avail. The captain’s orders came from two majors at Bien Hoa, who were aware that no realistic records of any kind for the general were available. Specialist 4 Roy Trent, Jr., was so disgusted that he quit the office, leaving the work to be done by the two experts, Tillinghast and Olstad. There was nothing to go on, not a date or a scrap of information or eyewitness reports of what the brigadier general might have done.

Private Olstad, who came from Cashton, Wisconsin, and was a student at Dartmouth College before he was inducted in the Army in November 1969, was an exceptionally clever and poetic fellow whose work in Awards and Decorations was to polish, tighten or rewrite recommendations sent in for individual acts of valor. He had been doing it for four months. They were normally based on eyewitness statements and endorsed at company, brigade and battalion level in the division, which was then the second largest in Vietnam. The twenty-two-year-old private was known among his peers as a man of much talent.

“He’s a born artist,” Specialist 4 Trent said. He was well-read, mocking, brilliant, and totally unimpressed by the Army and what it required of him. Olstad’s face was thin and too inquisitive, too alive, for him to be an acceptable private. Specialist 4 George Tillinghast, who at twenty-six was the oldest of the men in the office, handled special awards and knew the files. He was as intelligent but more conventional than Olstad, who, possibly because of the party and the state it left him in, made sure that the citation bore his special stamp.

That night, to inspire themselves, the two enlisted men borrowed bits from the Silver Star citation awarded to another 1st Cav general who had commanded the five-day task force carried out by the Americans and South Vietnamese troops in the Fishhook area of Cambodia in June 1970. They needed to be reminded of what phrases the Army preferred in such citations. “Dynamic leadership” was always a favorite, so was “courage and devotion to duty.” It was axiomatic that the citation would end by stating that the actions of the officer were “in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit and the United States Army.”

The men picked the date of June 9 because it was the twenty-first birthday of Specialist 4 Richard Kemkens, who worked with them. It was also the birthday of his wife, so that made it a fine date for made-up history.

The citation began modestly, describing how on June 9, 1970, while flying with a co-pilot in his own command helicopter on a visual reconnaissance, the brigadier general spotted a ground unit near Fire Support Base Bronco in Cambodia taking fire from the enemy.

It was a normal beginning, but then Olstad, the poet and the cynic, went too far and could not stop himself. The citation went on to describe how the general’s aircraft, flying overhead as a firefight took place on the ground, made radio contact with the troops, who were perilously low on ammunition. In the draft, Olstad described the general as making “an immediate and flawlessly competent determination on the course of action to be followed.”

The general called in and coordinated supporting artillery fire to within one hundred meters of the American troops, Olstad wrote, and ordered his pilot to descend to a lower level in order to make sure his adjustments were correct and that no Americans were endangered. The aircraft came under enemy fire from light automatic weapons and machine guns.

“Ignoring this threat to his aircraft, and disregarding the personal danger to himself, he continued with his observations and adjustments, keeping the tactical situation calmly and totally in control,” Olstad wrote. The general flew back to Bronco for the necessary ordnance for the troops, returned to the area of contact, personally aided in the kick-out of the ammunition, and directed that casualties be placed aboard his aircraft. He flew them to the nearest facilities for the wounded. That was the part Olstad liked best in the citation. It was also the most dangerous part, for no records existed of such casualties being evacuated or treated.

“Brigadier General __________’s conspicuous gallantry and decisive leadership were the deciding factors in turning a desperate situation into a defeat of a determined enemy force,” Olstad typed.

It was something of a masterpiece as citations go. Although the final version was more compressed and a bit flatter than Private Olstad’s original work, omitting one or two thunderous tributes to the general’s abilities, it contained all the information the men had dreamed up. The private kept a copy of the draft so he could prove it was nearly identical to the citation.

Everyone was pleased. At Phuoc Vinh, headquarters of the 1st Cav, the chief of staff, a colonel, was delighted when he read it. It was the colonel who told his own staff to get moving on the citation. They did, by sending urgent instructions to Bien Hoa. When the colonel received the citation he said “Well, by God, it’s about time.”

“I reviewed it and quite honestly I was elated,” the colonel later said to me in Phuoc Vinh. “It read like a dream.”

The chief of staff said he had not checked the citation and had assumed there were legitimate records available. He said the brigadier general was such a modest man, he had not wanted to embarrass him by going to his personal crew for details but that he had often heard of the general’s exploits. “It sounded exactly like what I expected it to be—you know, what I heard discussed in the mess halls, that he was in the thick of everything,” the colonel said of the fictitious citation.

The brigadier general had been given the Silver Star on October 15 at a small awards ceremony at Phuoc Vinh. The Army claimed he did not have the citation and was unaware of how it was prepared.

It was Specialist 4 Roy L. Trent, Jr., who refused to forget and who wanted justice done. In the Awards and Decorations office at Bien Hoa, he sat next to an enlisted man who typed letters of sympathy to the families of those who died in Vietnam. That may have done it. Trent wanted a letter giving details of the incident to go to the late Mendel L. Rivers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. None of them knew that Congressman Rivers was hardly disposed to revealing or correcting such a practice.

It was the “born artist” Olstad who composed it, informing the congressman of “a grave infraction of military policy and an abominable insult to the integrity and intelligence of all lower-grade enlisted personnel.” Private Olstad wrote that an inquiry should be initiated for several reasons, among them “the vile reflection one can perceive cast by these events on the entire American military structure.” It was Roy Trent’s letter, but the five others, including Olstad, signed it although some of them knew too well what consequences they might face. Perhaps it was Olstad’s idea to send a copy to The New York Times. They never did hear from Congressman Rivers’ office.

“I wanted to write to Nixon—there are guys in the field getting killed, really acting with valor, and sometimes nothing is submitted for them to get an award, or their awards are downgraded, even if they are approved,” Trent said to me.

There was a terrible fuss. It was the strict policy of the Times that the accused must be told of the charges and given a chance to reply. At Bien Hoa, I had to track down the two majors who had ordered the captain to order the citation written. One of them stayed calm but his hands began to shake uncontrollably, until he finally put them in his lap where I could not see. The cast of incriminated officers was large. One lieutenant colonel thought the enlisted men had sent the letters because they were “disgusted at having to work late.”

The bureau chief of The New York Times and I went out to Tan Son Nhut to speak to high-ranking information officers at MACV headquarters and then we flew in a helicopter to Phuoc Vinh to see the colonel who had started it all and whose career was now in trouble. He was charming and controlled on what must have been one of the most horrid days of his life, for he well knew that the Army does not look kindly on chiefs of staff of a division who make a mess of getting one medal to one general. I might have almost liked him if he had not said he thought the enlisted men were being “sanctimonious.”

The cruelest part of the meeting with the colonel was when—still insisting that the award was valid—he summoned the general’s aide to say yes, yes, it was true that it all happened on June 9. The aide said he was in the helicopter. Even the colonel looked sad as the lieutenant stuttered and moved his feet and half shut his eyes. He tried to defend the general. I did not take notes on the lieutenant’s moment of disgrace, I just looked down at my sneakers. I seem to remember that he was a southern Baptist and made some mention of going in the ministry.

When the colonel realized at last that I was going to write the story, his final plea to me was based on everything he thought was decent and maternal in women. “If you print the story, think how it will affect the mothers of all our dead boys who won decorations.”

It was a mistake. I was thinking of all the dead, just as Trent and Olstad and the four others had been thinking of them. For a long time I was afraid that the enlisted men would be punished and sent into the field despite being clerk-typists, for even cooks could be shifted around in Vietnam, whose every corner was considered a combat zone and every man expected to fire a rifle.

It was Private Norman Shantz, a New York boy, who during the peak of the Army’s frenzy, said what had made them do it. “The lifers lie to us, expect us to carry out the lies for them, and then, see, we can’t say anything back to them.” I said yes, I saw that. The officers looked on the enlisted men as “nothing much,” Shantz said. He and the others saw the officers not as courageous men making lonely decisions but as men willing to accept pettiness, untruths, a rigid and relentless pecking order, and even glad to do it.

When the Army turned its eyes on him, Private Olstad did not wither in the hot white blaze of their disapproval. He was certainly not nervous about any impending punishment. None came. The enlisted men were protected by the publicity they had received. The Army would have risked losing even more by slamming down on the culprits who were telling the truth.

“It is possible that the brigadier general could have seen a lot of action, but he did not see this action and the Silver Star award he accepted is for action that never existed,” Olstad kept saying. “He is an accomplice for accepting it.” When I asked him for other examples of citations he had written for awards for valor to high-ranking officers, he said he had done dozens of them. He could not remember the names of officers because there had been so many of them. In cases where the Army did not supply sufficient information, he had only one course of action and the Army knew it. He added that he did not claim the recipients of the awards were unworthy in every case. “I just make it up,” Private Olstad said. “I don’t know what they did.”

Olstad said he did not believe in the concept of medals in a war. In fact, he did not believe in war. “Sadly, there are many who believe in decorations and what they mean. I may disagree with them, but I respect the sincerity of their beliefs. Given this difference of opinion, I still do my job. I support that other man’s faith to this extent. I have a soft life—I am not being shot at, I am not slogging through mud, I am not sleeping in the rain,” he said. “If that other man believes an award is adequate compensation for his sacrifices, I will attempt to maintain the integrity of that belief. If a man performs an act of valor and receives an award for it, I see no justification in an officer, a general, let us say, receiving a higher decoration for no action whatsoever.”

That was Private Olstad being openly, unabashedly solemn, but at heart he preferred satire. The Silver Star inspired him to write a poem, which he sent me. It went:

“Why yes, I earned the medal,

Of course,” the general said.

He went into his toilet,

He believed it in his head.

With his little wooden soldiers

And his tiny tin-tin men

He crumbled all his enemies

And frightened all his friends.

Behind his bathroom door

He fought his Mitty war,

Emerged again a victor

He came panting after more.

Let me go into battle

A Hero I shall be,

I’m forty-four, I’m still alive,

And the Army’s mind . . . is me.”

On October 28, 1970, a printed memorandum for correspondents was distributed by the U.S. Army which said that the brigadier general was not aware of the circumstances relating to the preparation of the citation for the Silver Star and that he had not read it until his return from a leave. The general, when informed of the circumstances, left the matter in the hands of Army authorities for resolution, the memorandum said. Action was taken to rescind the Silver Star “due to administrative irregularities” which the Army said had been disclosed by its own inquiry.

The general took over his new job, in Saigon, which was the assistant chief of staff for the agency known as Civil Operations and Rural Development Support. Called CORDS, it was directed by American civilians and military who headed what was called the pacification program and whose stated objectives in South Vietnam were:

TERRITORIAL SECURITY

PROTECTION OF THE PEOPLE FROM TERRORISM

PEOPLE’S SELF DEFENSE

LOCAL ADMINISTRATION

GREATER NATIONAL UNITY

BRIGHTER LIFE FOR WAR VICTIMS

PEOPLE’S INFORMATION

PROSPERITY FOR ALL

There were letters about the medal story from readers, some belligerent, others reminiscent. One of them came from a man named John Maas in Philadelphia.

Your “Silver Star for General” story takes me back to 1944 when I was a clerk in a Heavy Bomber Group of the Army Air Forces in Italy.

A major had his heart set on getting a “Distinguished Unit Citation” for the Group. He picked out the mission of which we had the best pictures and wrote up a fine presentation. The photographs still did not look sufficiently dramatic, so he had me put in flak bursts with charcoal pencil (I was a commercial artist in civilian life). Then we rephotographed the doctored photos.

We got the Citation and the pretty blue ribbon with the gold border.

I can’t say that I was upset at the time. It seemed like a just war. Now I am twenty-six years older and wiser and convinced of the total depravity of the U.S. Army. I am glad you exposed that racket, which has probably been going on since George Washington.

The file is still with me: more than fifty citations for medals awarded to generals in Vietnam; one colonel is included. They are for the Silver Star or Distinguished Flying Cross. Some of them have the flair and drama that Olstad himself quite relished. The generals are always flying their command and control helicopters in extremely hazardous flying conditions, with complete disregard for their own safety, to assist and direct rifle companies on the ground in contact with the enemy. The generals do it all. They arrange for artillery and air support, they sight enemy positions, they order the door gunners to open up, they give tactical guidance, they bring in more ammunition, they get out the wounded. Sometimes they come down and stay. It is, as one citation says of a general, to confer with their subordinate commanders and to urge on the troops in pressing the attack.

Only one general did operate on the ground, so unusual a thing that his citation noted it and said: “It was from this vantage point that he felt he could best estimate and determine more fully the tactical situation.” The general is praised. “Regardless of the continuous and heavy volume of rockets, automatic weapons and mortar fire, he was on the ground inspiring and giving confidence . . .” the citation goes on, as if it was much more heroic for a general to put up with such danger than a draftee.

The citations always end by commending the officers for gallantry/ outstanding courage and devotion to duty/ valorous actions/ disregard for personal safety and courageous determination/ selfless dedication to duty and great personal bravery/ extraordinary heroism/ gallantry in the face of withering enemy fire/ in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit and the United States Army.

But it was the draftees who gradually came to represent an increasing proportion of the soldiers who risked the most and whose deaths rose. In 1965 draftees represented only 16 percent of the total battle deaths in the war; a year later they constituted 21 percent. By 1967 they made up 34 percent; in 1969, 40 percent; and in 1970, 43 percent of all those killed in action, according to a Nader report on veterans. By 1969, 62 percent of all Army deaths, due to combat or hostile causes, were draftees. Draftees represented 70 percent of all combat soldiers for the fiscal year 1970.

In 1969 the casualty rate for Army draftees was 234 per 1,000. The lower their education and socioeconomic background, the higher their chances for being wounded or killed. “The Army assumed a remarkable shape in Vietnam,” Paul Starr wrote in his Nader study. “In most organizations it is the permanent long-standing members who usually take on the most critical tasks; the more transient and less-skilled members are relegated to support roles. But not so in the Army during the Vietnam war. There the ‘regulars’ did less of the fighting than the amateurs who had been pressed into the enterprise against their will.”

Sixteen million one hundred and twelve thousand five hundred and sixty-six American men served in the Armed Forces between December 1941 and 1946. For a long time I kept asking World War II veterans, especially those who had been enlisted men in the infantry, what they thought of Vietnam, of the ordeal of a new generation of riflemen the ages of their sons. But most did not think about the war at all. In New York the fastest way to meet such veterans was to take taxis, for they are still driving them.

But it became more and more meaningless, and the little talks in the taxis cost too much. The older veterans did not have much to say, they did not have pity for the men doing what they once did, or concern, or fury. They were passive, detached, and usually willing to tell stories of what had happened to them thirty-odd years ago. Sometimes the stories lasted all the way from the 59th Street Bridge to La Guardia Airport. There were drivers who said the GIs in Vietnam had it easier because of helicopters dropping them in or lifting them out of combat. One man laughed and said Vietnam was a better place to be wounded than during the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium, where anyone who could still stand had to go on fighting, even if he was bleeding. It was that way, he said, there were no choppers coming in for them.

Another cabdriver of Italian parentage said that when he worked at Walter Reed Hospital some nurses who had survived Bataan were in a special mental ward and behaved strangely. It was very sad; some nurses screamed and pulled off their clothes. Lots of soldiers acted strangely too, this pleasant and serious man said. He had been a medical technician in Italy at a convalescent center for troops not severely hurt. They all had to go back to their units. Some of the soldiers pleaded with him to help reassign them to the convalescent center, or not to discharge them so soon, but he could do nothing. At night they became other people, the driver said, they seemed to shrink and made noises when they slept. He should have thought of becoming a nurse and going to school, but he had not planned enough. He hadn’t paid much attention to Vietnam, it probably cost too much, a lot of people probably made money, and look at all the potholes in Manhattan and in Queens which hadn’t been fixed. It was the best work he ever had, the driver said about World War II, just before I left him.

In Texas, miles outside of Houston, another World War II veteran—who shall be called Max Wilson—wanted to tell everything, for he saw himself not just as a survivor but as a man who had profited from the war more cleverly than all the others. He lives in a fancy residential community where the low big houses rim a large man-made lake and sit apart from each other in a rich, solemn stillness. His house, which has several bedrooms, a very long living room and a kitchen-dining area where twelve people could easily be seated, is on an acre and a half of land, so the value of the property could be as high as two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The house was full of American triumphs. In the kitchen Mr. Wilson and his wife, who works in his silk-screen supply business, have the largest and the yellowest refrigerator I have ever seen. Then there was the Corning stove top, a flat white surface which has no grill or visible heat, and the trash masher that does just what its name says. Mr. Wilson demonstrated how the stove and the trash masher work, showed me the bathroom with a built-in black-marble shower and sink, and his collection of fancy Jim Beam whiskey bottles from the years 1955 to 1975 which were displayed on bookshelves in the living room. The couple have four children, two boys and two girls, ranging in age from twenty-nine to eighteen.

There is night jasmine blooming outside the back door where you walk down to a little pier and the boat they own. The stereo can be heard even here because Mr. Wilson installed an outdoor speaker. No one would simply let the door open to hear the music because the house is intensely, perfectly, centrally air-conditioned.

Mr. Wilson, who spent two and a half years in Army hospitals after he was badly wounded in the right hand, has a good many souvenirs and treasures he collected during World War II. They are a source of deep pleasure. “They remind me of good times,” he said. “I like to look at them.”

On his left hand he wears a heavy gold ring with an intricate crest that a barber in the United States once assured him belonged to the Royal Family of Italy. The barber, an Italian, was curious about the ring. Mr. Wilson first said the ring was his father’s heirloom, but the barber knew better and explained the crest to him. Then he said how he had taken the ring off the hand of a captured Italian officer. Mr. Wilson was not sure if the man had been an officer but he was sure the man had been “something.”

“They called me ‘Loot’ and his Forty Thieves,” he said, laughing a little. He was drafted in 1941, trained as an M.P. and fingerprint expert, then went into the infantry where after Officers Candidate School he was commissioned a first lieutenant. He served with heavy weapons, an infantryman in the 3d Division, in General Mark Clark’s Seventh Army. He was in campaigns in Africa, in Italy, in France. Mr. Wilson is a large, blunt, hard-working, humorous man with a very military grey mustache that has waxed and curled ends. It looks like the fierce and theatrical mustache of a British sergeant major in World War I. Mr. Wilson called his mustache a “breaker”; it reminded some people of a Calvert’s Man of Distinction advertisement, he said. He remembers the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and the four months at Anzio. American troops were landed there to draw German forces away from Cassino, where the Allied advance to Rome was being blocked. The 3d Division, which could not retreat except into the sea, was trapped at Anzio by intense German bombardments. The Americans were on the flat ground, the Germans above them.

“They had their Big Berthas—which took up two railroad cars—pointing down on us. They could see us—when we went to the latrine, they knew it, they knew what color paper we used, they knew everything,” Mr. Wilson said. “They were looking right down your throat. It was like a doctor looking down your throat.”

The damp cold hammered at them; they tore up blankets and wrapped them around their boots. They slept with blankets covering their faces like heavy veils hanging under their helmets, and they never stopped being cold. His mother-in-law managed to mail him fresh eggs, which arrived unbroken because she packed them so cleverly. The smell of the eggs frying drove other men wild. They lived in holes and in caves which they dug, where they made peat fires and huddled by them.

“They put in screaming-meemies. The Germans are very good at rockets—there was a bunch of rockets they had which had no directional. They would send out these six or eight rockets and it would just go into an area like the old archers used to send out bows. Or as if you took a handful of pebbles and threw them out. You never knew where they were going to go. The sound itself, when you heard them coming, was enough to kill you.”

When the break-out came, when it finally came, it took them a week to get to Rome. That was June 1944. Mr. Wilson claims he got to Rome at five in the morning and that General Clark came at seven. On the way out of Anzio, men in his company captured one hundred and thirty-three Germans.

“We started in fleecing them down,” Mr. Wilson said. There were one or two Germans who were older—the ages of the Americans—but the rest of the prisoners looked fourteen or fifteen years old. “When I captured a prisoner I told him ‘I’m a Jew,’ and I laughed at him. I’d say ‘Ich bin Yid’—I let them know I was a Jew capturing them, and if they didn’t move fast enough, I’d shoot at their feet and then they got the message—Ich bin Yid, move, macht schnell.

“I had wristwatches from the prisoners; I had them all up my arm on this side and that side. And as I was walking up the street other infantry people, or officers, would come to me saying ‘Hey, what kind of watches you got? How much for this one?’ I’d sell. I made a fortune just like that. We couldn’t just fight the war for the politicians back in the United States . . . Well, I took everything. I had an idea what’s valuable. Some of my men, they wanted money. When we would capture prisoners I told them ‘Okay, you guys take the money, I’ll take the jewelry.’”

He said he really had a good time in Italy. The odd thing is that he does not even seem to mind the months at Anzio when the men could not even move, when it rained so much they even slept in wetness. “When it was all over, it was just one of those things,” Mr. Wilson said. “When you look back at it, and you came out of it alive, you had a good time.”

In Rome the 3d Division policed the city. He saw the Pope. He became much richer. He bartered candy bars and soap and everything else. And he knew how much he wanted the ring with the family crest when he saw it on the hand of the Italian. “He had nothing to say about it, I had a Baretta at his head,” Mr. Wilson said. “I had nothing against the Italians, I had nothing against anybody, all I wanted was jewelry and things of— Look, the men liked me. They’d have killed for me. In this fact, this Italian with the ring almost got killed because he was a little reluctant to take it off. And my men told the guy either you take it off or you don’t go anywhere in life. He took it off. Then we sold his car, he had a little Fiat, we sold that to a bunch of Australian soldiers who had a big two-and-a-half-ton truck. They pushed the little Fiat up into the back of the truck.

“I liberated a lot of things in Rome. I got sterling silver from the Grand Hotel, I liberated that. I’ve got sterling silver that you wouldn’t believe. I had to fight the war for some reason. We were using sterling silver in this house for breakfast, dinner and supper. And I’m talking about out of the Grand Hotel in Rome! And I took good things. I hit the glasses and listened to them ring. And if they rang nice, I packed them up and sent them home.

“My mother-in-law always expected to find a dead body being shipped home because I was sending stuff home left and right. Southern France was a lot better than Italy, see, for the good times. The people there, well, you could talk to the people.”

On D Day his division landed at St. Tropez; he remembers even now the sweet French cantaloupes they gorged on. “We walked sixty-one miles the first day,” Mr. Wilson said. “We walked sixty-one miles the first day.”

He said he landed in the long-awaited invasion of Southern France with a blanket folded and tied up, like a scarf, which held twenty cartons of cigarettes, about fifteen bars of soap and twenty Hershey bars from the PX in Italy. He did not smoke. It rained for three nights and he had no raincoat and he could not use the blanket as a cover because it held all the precious things that were wanted so much by the French.

“I want to tell you one incident that happened to me, though. One day I had a loaf of bread, I was coming out of this bakery in a village. Some refugee, a Jewish refugee, come up to me. He asked for some. I says ‘Yeah.’ I cut him a piece. Then he asked me for some more than what I gave him, and I said ‘You goddamned Jews, I mean we’re fighting this war for you and now I give you enough bread and now you want all of this. I mean listen, this don’t go. We’re taking care of you and that’s it.’ I mean, a Jew to a Jew. I mean there’s some people like that in this world. You give them an arm and they’ll ask—”

“He might have been starving,” I said.

“If he was, all right. But how many other soldiers could he have gone up to, too? A GI is a very outgoing person. When a GI is in a war he’ll give you anything you want. He doesn’t give a damn. I mean if a dog is hurt he’ll stop the war and fix that dog. He’ll take care of it. That’s how a GI is. Anyway, that was one little incident there.”

He wanted to make a dollar, as Mr. Wilson puts it.

When elements of the 3d Division were sent into the Alps—he thinks they were near Grenoble—the men were in snow up to their knees. They slept on the snow and lived in it. There was talk among some enlisted men and some officers of leaving the war. “We were close enough to Switzerland that there were times we said to hell with it, let’s walk that way, and we get interned in Switzerland, we were that close to Switzerland. Well, no, not deserting, just let the war take care of itself and we’ll take care of ourselves.” But they did not.

Not once, in the hours we talked, did he ever mention a close friend in his unit or talk about the wounded and the dead. There were those, but he skipped over them.

He was wounded in November 1944. He kept calling it “a million-dollar wound,” but I argued with him. It wasn’t that at all: a “million-dollar wound” is one that gets you off the line without resulting in mutilation or deformities. A million-dollar wound, the GIs used to say in Vietnam, was being hit in the rump, in the fleshy part, not in the rectum, someplace where it didn’t cause too much pain or scar you up. Mr. Wilson’s hand was hit by fragments of a mortar. It went through his glove, through the skin, removed the knuckle and cut the tendons. He was not unconscious. In that war there was no medic assigned to each platoon; the men all had first-aid kits and took care of each other. It happened when the company was moving near Strasbourg, on the side of a river. The platoon had walked through a marked minefield to reach a roadway when the attack mortars hit them. Mr. Wilson tried to help the men who were most badly hurt, the ones with the open wounds, then told one of his men to go back to get help. The soldier said no, he didn’t want to have to cross that minefield again. So Mr. Wilson did. And all the time, holding the mashed and dripping hand, he did not worry about stepping on a mine that might not have been marked. He only thought of how he would never be able to pull a bow and arrow again. Archery was very important to him when he was that young. He reached an aid station, sent help back to the platoon, and was treated.

Born in January 1917, he was the first son of a corset maker, one of four children who grew up in Staten Island with hopeful, loving, attentive parents. His father was a Russian immigrant, his mother’s parents were Russian. He moved to Texas in 1950 and has been married thirty-two years. None of the children gave him any problems, he said, they all abhor drugs. He wanted his second son, an architect, to go into the Army. But Vietnam did not seem to interest him very much. Mr. Wilson looked puzzled when I asked why, since he knew so much about war, he would want younger men to go through what he had endured.

“It makes a person out of you,” Mr. Wilson said. “Because without pain you don’t know what it’s like, you have no way of telling.” His twenty-one-year-old daughter, who wanted to study fashion, said very quietly that she disagreed with her father about Vietnam. At a junior college in Texas she saw a number of Vietnam veterans; several were paraplegics or disabled in other ways. Her father did not seem upset by such soft-spoken if firm opposition. He wasn’t sure of how the other children felt because he said he had not “polled” them.

“I say this: that everybody, every man, should belong to the Army, to the armed services. They will learn discipline. No, my son didn’t want to go. But in the Army when you give them an order to do something, they’ve got to do it and not say ‘Ah, I don’t want to do it,’ like in a parent-son relationship. You get more people killed in automobiles than you do by war, so your chances of dying are slight.

“I’ll be honest with you, if they had taken my sons into the Army, I wouldn’t have cared. But if they were going to send them overseas, I was ready to go to Washington and tell those bastards that they’re full of crap, that they weren’t going to send my sons there until they decided to declare war. That’s right. I wanted a war to win. And that’s the only way to play. You play to win, an American plays to win. And we could have won the war, by bombing or burning the goddamned place.”

I spoke of a man in Pittsburgh, a bartender, who had been wrecked by his son’s death in Vietnam and who could not seem to stop grieving. He had refused to accept a posthumous decoration for his son.

“I wouldn’t be destroyed because I’ve been in war, I know that in war there’s death,” he said. But he thought that his wife would have “broken up” if a son had even gone to Vietnam. His children were a different story from the people of his generation. They had never missed a meal in their lives, Mr. Wilson said. They never missed a meal in their lives, but he could remember soup made of hot water and catsup.

“Today’s kids don’t have patriotism and they’re very selfish. They don’t have anything, it’s just ‘I, I, I.’ They want to be either left alone as pacifists or—I don’t even know if they’d even fight if somebody tried to steal something from them, some of these kids, you see?”

He thought the antiwar movement had been disgusting. “It was atrocious and very unpatriotic,” Mr. Wilson said. “And very bad for the children themselves because it’s going to be a stigma against them later on down the line. As they get older, the Russians will have an idea of who they were and what they were, and as our country starts going they know that these people are weak—because they couldn’t stand the gaff of the Army, that’s probably what it was.”

He could not understand any male who refused induction. Most of the men who had bought homes and land in his community felt the same way; they were ex-GIs.

“We know that your chances of being killed is very remote. So the kid has a little bit of a hard time living in the outdoors, but it’ll make a man out of him,” Mr. Wilson said. “The Army’ll make a man out of you if you’re a sissy or stuff like that. If these kids would turn as much energy toward fighting taxes as they did about the war, this country has a better chance of survival. You see, we’re paying tax, tax, tax . . .”

I told Mr. Wilson he didn’t seem like a poor man to me, despite his taxes. He said there is no poor man any more. Uncle Sam pays him.

He was sorry that he had never used the G.I. Bill of Rights. “I didn’t have an education. They tell you with an education you can make five hundred thousand to a million dollars a year. I could have made more money. I have a happy life, but see, I could have been educated. I could have been a lawyer or a dentist, those are the two that I would have liked to have been. See, I’ve got a different background than the average guy. Before the Depression my folks had a little; after the Depression we had nothing. I bummed around New York State and worked on farms. I went to South America on a tramp steamer. I was a wanderer, I had a wanderlust, I wandered all over this world. I was in the CCC—the Civilian Conservation Corps—when I was seventeen. I learned discipline. I geared myself. Hell, there was one time I was hitchhiking through Niagara Falls and I went to the police station and asked them to put me up for the night. ‘We can’t, son,’ they said. ‘We’ll have to book you if we put you in jail.’”

He tried to find a doorway he could sleep in. He remembers falling asleep on a scale outside of Woolworth’s until a policeman came and told him he would be picked up. He ended sleeping on a chair which he put inside a pit near a gasoline station.

“In the morning I got up and walked away. Now as I look back on it, it was something that helped make a man out of me,” Mr. Wilson said.

When I suggested that the Depression might have scared him to death, been worse than the wound to his hand, he looked amused and denied it.

Mr. Wilson thought I made too much fuss about casualties in Vietnam. “Now, every man wants to live,” he said. “But the trouble is we’re all born to die. So what the hell is the difference if we die when we’re eighty or if we die when we’re twenty-six.”

A lot of difference, I said.

“Maybe it is. Not when you see things happening and you got this trouble and all the crap on you. Maybe sometimes you wish oh Jesus, I wish I were dead. No, I don’t wish that. I want to live a long life but I don’t want to live long enough to see the Russians get over here. Their people will be in power. We’ll have Americans, but the strings will be pulled in Russia, just like in Poland, or in Czechoslovakia.”

His wife had a relative who had been an M.P. in Vietnam; the experience bored Max Wilson. “He thought the war was rough. I told him he doesn’t know what rough is. And that no war is rough. It’s what you make of it. But if he went over there with a chip on his shoulder, if you want to look at the bad side of things, then the time in Vietnam could be rough. I guess he was against the war, I don’t know. I really never asked him. I don’t even bother with him because he’s so straight-laced. Goddamn, he’ll arrest his own mother if she did wrong. He thinks J. Edgar Hoover was the sun and the moon and the stars, or he did when Hoover was alive.”

None of the men who lived as he lived, who had been in the war, who worked as hard as he did, were for amnesty, Mr. Wilson said. “There’ll always be a war, because as the population grows you gotta knock people off the earth,” he said. “They’re not for amnesty toward these kids. Let them suffer.”

Afterward we went into the Wilson’s bedroom. He kept talking about Sorrento and a jeweler he knew there who taught him how to tell good cameo from bad cameo in exchange for the bread Mr. Wilson gave him. There was one pin that the jeweler had made of marquise diamonds with his wife’s initials on it. It was shaped like a dog. He wanted to show it to me. But he couldn’t find it in Mrs. Wilson’s top drawer or jewelry box. That bothered him. He really kept rummaging for it. But then, holding up a cameo to the light so I could see what a good piece it was, he looked happy again. He was thinking of the good times. The point is that he had risen above the war, it had not made him a loser, he had his triumphs, you could touch them.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER NAMED Denis Cameron really liked the American pilots; it didn’t matter what they flew, B-52S or the little Hueys. The pilots were interested in his cameras, those lenses and filters and how he took pictures. There was no one better. During Lam Son 719, there seemed to be dozens of photographers covering the drive into Laos, some saying this was the last big push of the war, when it was not. They wore little towels around their necks like mufflers to soak up the wetness, they never wore dark glasses as the reporters did, and they hated having to photograph in that deadly, dusty glare at Khe Sanh. Newsweek assigned Cameron to do a big spread on all the Army helicopters used in that massive operation. He took pictures of the little fat UH-1 Huey, called a slick or bird, which cost $300,000, and of the daintier OH-6 for observation which cost $100,000. He did the Cobra gunship—cost, $500,000; the CH-47 Chinook for troop and cargo transport which cost $1,500,000 and could lift 19,000 pounds of cargo or twenty-four injured men; and the Flying Crane, the $2,000,000 CH-54 which took a 20,000-pound load of equipment. It was a stupid assignment for that March in 1971—a child’s primer on helicopters which had been used for more than ten years—when a lost army was lurching to its grave, when the lies in Washington and Quang Tri, Khe Sanh and Saigon were more baroque than usual, when the very word Vietnamization was not just a joke but a word for slaughter. He took all the pictures, but what he wanted to do was photograph the pilots and crews; they made him happy.

But his first picture in the Newsweek spread was of a dead man, face down on a stretcher, with a Huey in the background. You knew he was American by the length of him, but you could see nothing of the face or the head inside the helmet, nothing of the body concealed by a flight suit or the boots. The left arm hung over the stretcher and what showed was no more than a wrist. The photograph had been taken in that Khe Sanh glare, the light so harsh you could not see the faces of the men carrying that weight. There were so many shadows.

One woman saw Newsweek and knew, without question, the pilot was hers. All the mail on the photographs was sent by Newsweek to Denis Cameron, who was asked to identify the men. Two women thought their husbands were on the stretcher. One of them was right, for the pilot was First Lieutenant A.M. (Butch) Simpson. The wife wrote to Newsweek, who cabled Cameron. He cabled back yes, it was Lieutenant Simpson, whom he had known and liked. Her letter rattled us, for the picture showed nothing more than a wrist. The photographer had no idea how she knew; no one has ever explained it. He wrote the widow. Sheryl Simpson wrote him back in April:

If you happen to have any more pictures of Butch or any other information concerning him, I’d very much like to have it and will take care of any costs involved. I’m greatly indebted for all that you did. I hope that somebody is looking after you—I know that you are in just as much danger as the troops over there.

It was not quite true. The press corps could always pull out. Unlike the troops, we were all there for a good story, to advance our careers and go on making money, war profiteers of a kind, but more useful than most.

In one of the other pictures, Cameron photographed a thin and young man with very long legs, one foot in the doorway of an observation helicopter. A man named Bennett wrote from Saufus, Maine, because the image, he said, “beared a great likeness to a very dear nephew of mine who was a helicopter pilot in Southeast Asia until his death last February.” In May, Mrs. E. Schlutter wrote from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, thinking it might be a picture of her son, also a pilot, who had been killed that March. I have told the photographer to throw away the letters—it has been five years now—but he is unable to do so.

In Washington, D.C., that same March, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird was anxious to dispel the reports in the press that Lam Son 719 was a failure. Lieutenant General John Vogt, known as one of the best briefers the Pentagon could produce, gave a news conference. The general said a vital enemy oil pipeline had been destroyed in the Laos operation, and showed a three-foot length of pipe as a bit of cheerful color. But it was not a piece of pipe that had been taken during the Laos invasion at all, only something brought back months before by South Vietnamese commandos. A correction was made by the Secretary.

SOME WOMEN HAD premonitions, and knew it was useless to deny them. Mrs. Brenda Cavanaugh Genest of Manchester, New Hampshire, became a widow at twenty-one, just as she was certain she would. She was married to Richard Genest in November 1967 in a traditional Catholic wedding; the reception was at the Manchester Country Club. Both families were proper and prosperous: the Cavanaughs sold cars; the Genests had a bakery.

“We dated steadily for two years,” she said. “We couldn’t understand how a war, nowadays, could go on for years.”

Her husband joined the National Guard in New Hampshire to stay out of the draft, but his unit was called up in the spring of 1968. She first heard it on the radio. The uncle of a friend, a brigadier general in the National Guard, had said it would never happen unless there was an attack at the Merrimack River. The idea that Richard would be sent to Vietnam made his wife unstable. The couple went to see Senator Thomas McIntyre, when he was back in New Hampshire, but the senator said he didn’t know, he couldn’t tell them anything, really. She began to cry. Specialist 5 Genest was sent to Fort Bragg, but he kept coming home every weekend.

“All our bank account went down, but it was worth it,” Mrs. Genest recalled. “He was such a perfect person to me.” Their son was born in June 1968; two months later her husband was in Vietnam as a cook with Battery A, 3d Battalion, 197th Artillery, at Fire Support Base Thunder III, north of Saigon, near Highway 13.

Every day he was there she felt herself to be in some kind of shock. But he was only a cook, so everyone who cared for her said it’s all right, cooks don’t have to shoot or be shot at.

“Dick never had good luck, he always got the raw end of the deal. I knew if he went to Vietnam he was going to get killed, because there was no way he was going to survive with his luck. After his year there, when he was coming home, I thought he’s going to make it, maybe. It was his last week when he was killed. The whole year I was really prepared for it.”

He left the fire base in a convoy, but the driver of his truck went over on the side of Highway 13 and hit a mine; there were four of them who died.

“The night before I found out, I was sitting on the lawn of my parents’ house. This little neighborhood girl said ‘Dick’s dead, isn’t he?’ I said ‘No, he’s not, Dick’s away and he’s coming home soon.’ She was only four, she didn’t understand what she was saying. And she goes ‘Well, I know he’s dead.’”

It was true. The four men came back in the light-grey metal caskets, each in a clean uniform. Senator McIntyre was at the airport, but she did not want to go near him. At Goodman’s Funeral Home there were two soldiers in the room with the casket, which was covered with a flag.

“I told them ‘Just leave, get out of here, you don’t care, you didn’t even know him, what are you doing here,’” Mrs. Genest said. She wanted them to remove the flag and to get it out of her sight.

The funeral was unusual for a conservative town like Manchester. A few people were shocked and thought she must be a dupe of the Communists. There was a harsh comment in the arch-conservative newspaper The Manchester Union Leader. Mrs. Genest wanted nothing military or warlike or official in St. Catherine’s Church that September day. Her younger sister, Jill, sang “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and “Abraham, Martin and John” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Two young men played guitars. Thomas, one of her brothers, read from The Prophet. Instead of the usual stiff floral arrangements, Mrs. Genest asked that money be sent to an antiwar group, Another Mother for Peace. A friend picked sunflowers to put in the church, and there was a little basket of spring flowers.

Afterward letters came. Some were from people who read of what she had wanted the funeral to be and sent her congratulations for her courage. General Creighton Abrams, commander of U.S. Forces in Vietnam, wrote it was his hope that she would find solace “in knowing your husband gave his life for a noble cause, the defense of liberty in the free world.” And a colonel, the commanding officer, wrote that “while serving in our organization, Richard never failed to devote himself to the task at hand.” But such letters could not reach her, for she knew by heart what Richard had written about the war, so she went out in the world to speak against it. During the March Against Death in Washington, D.C., the name of the dead American soldier that she carried on a sign was his.

Some letters from Richard still came, although by then he lay in the family vault. He wrote that he and the others wanted to be lifted out from Thunder III by helicopter because the highways were dangerous.

“He wrote ‘As usual our last request was denied,’” she said. “That really got to me.”

The last time they saw each other was January 1969, when he had R and R. They had a week in Honolulu. He looked tanned and fit, she said, he seemed himself. After his death a medic came to visit her in Manchester and mentioned that Richard had developed a nervous twitch in his face, but she saw nothing like that on the R and R.

On that last morning in the Hilton Hotel they rose at four, for he had to leave at six. It was decided she would not go to the airport. They said goodbye, he left her in that room, started down the hall, made the mistake of coming back to see her just once more, and then went away forever.

“I said to Dick if you get killed promise me that if there is any way you can communicate with me that you will,” Mrs. Genest said. “But he wouldn’t talk about it.” She was always hoping for a signal of some kind from him but none has ever come.

Even four years later, when she was living with a decent and affectionate man from Manchester, when her son Richard seemed fine, when the couple were thinking of building their own house in the country, Mrs. Genest could not stop from crying.

SOMETIMES THE PILOTS in the small choppers were bored; one meager amusement was to try and alarm run-of-the mill civilian passengers, especially reporters. The pilots would fly very low over the trees to tickle the highest branches, or tilt the choppers. They could not see our faces, so they spoke on the radio to the door gunners, who would watch us, grinning. But I loved the flying: the dread began on the ground.

But some jokes were not as crude, were not meant to be as playful. In the summer of 1970, after a long siege, the Special Forces Camp at Dakseang, eight miles from the border of Laos, was no longer a perilous place. There were still eleven Americans there, eleven Green Berets, although the Special Forces were leaving Vietnam that year. Dakseang seemed a wretched place in the most startling blue landscape: the camp was a long grey cooked rectangle of barbed wire, bunkers, sandbags, howitzers. For years the Montagnard men had been recruited, trained and paid by the Special Forces. Their little army was called the Civilian Irregular Defense Group.

It made the Montagnards unhappy to be turned over to Vietnamese command; there was a strong distrust, and often hatred, between the two groups. The Green Berets were not pleased to see me, did not answer questions, did not want reporters there. I was a disappointment to them: perhaps too thin, too old, too serious. One officer tried to tease me, but nothing girlish or coy came back. I remember them as having huge skulls and pale eyes. One had a dog on a leash; he said if the dog ran free, the Yards would eat it. It made him chuckle. The Americans loved the Yards. On this subject they would speak. It was an old litany, and their favorite. Yards were uncorrupted by the vile cities, did not cheat or lie, were superior to the Vietnamese, they said. Yards were their kind of men. The Green Berets at Dakseang seemed to feel that the war had been taken away from them and ruined. They would say no more.

There were two hundred and sixty Montagnard families there, who lived in dark, stifling bunkers, cruel places that provided no relief from the deadening heat outside. There were two hundred and forty-seven children. The Americans had an underground medical clinic and I watched as a medic attended to a Montagnard with a stunning gash in his head. The Special Forces medics were very good, perhaps the best, and it was a pleasure to see them at work.

A Vietnamese minister and his aides arrived for a meeting at Dakseang in their own helicopter; when the group was ready to leave, there were no seats, so Luong and I sat on the floor of the aircraft. We were used to it. Two of the Green Berets who had come to the landing pad to say goodbye, suddenly leaned inside to get me. There was nothing to hold on to except the ankles of a Vietnamese in a white shirt and suit. He recoiled but did not move my hands. Luong could not help me. We had an agreement that he must never try to interfere when I was in trouble, even if I called out and looked for him, because there was nothing an ordinary Vietnamese could ever do. It was wiser for him to stay away. The Green Berets dragged me out and raised me into the small seat of the door gunner, which was outside, the most dangerous place to be if the aircraft was fired on. It was their little punishment to show a reporter who would have the last word. I kicked and I hollered; I may even have yelled “Please” for the first time. The Vietnamese sat in silence, not turning their heads. The chopper trembled and rose; in the door gunner’s seat it was always cold and the wind punched. I pulled my jacket over my head and huddled next to the gunner, but he paid no attention. We did not speak. I never understood how the Green Berets could have guessed how much I hated the door gunner’s seat and the machine gun. Later it hardly seemed important.

They just treated you like a new guy, a southern friend said. They would have treated a senator the same way. He thought it funny. Your trouble—this is how he usually begins the light quarreling—your trouble is that you think no one wanted to be in Vietnam, that every man felt such reluctance. He was in the Special Forces: sometimes when he is drunk he sees himself as he was, moving through the Ashau Valley.

“The way you see it, every man wanted to be home practicing the piano,” he says. He is persuaded that I cannot understand that there were some men who came alive, who wanted the war, who miss it. But I understood it very clearly that day at Dakseang—and then again and again.