In the last week of January in 1976, nine months after the collapse of the south and the dreadful rush of Americans and Vietnamese to get out, Graham Martin, the last United States ambassador in South Vietnam, made his first public appearance. A House Internal Relations subcommittee heard Ambassador Martin calmly state there were no failures of the Thieu regime or of his own controversial handling of U.S. policy in Vietnam and of the American evacuation.
The problem was a failure to counter “one of the best propaganda and pressure organizations the world has ever seen,” Ambassador Martin told the subcommittee. He named the Indochina Resource Center, a small group set up in 1969 by former volunteer relief workers and teachers in Vietnam and Laos. One reporter described Ambassador Martin at the hearing as the “compleat diplomat, with pale-blue eyes and a complexion the hue of tallow,” a man of “spectral distinction.”
“The fanatic who almost had to be carried out of Saigon is almost perfectly concealed,” the columnist wrote.
Two persons were cited by the ambassador, who complained of a “propaganda extravaganza” to arouse antiwar feelings. They were Don Luce and Fred Branfman, who had started the Indochina Resource Center with David Marr, a Vietnam scholar and historian. The chairman of the subcommittee, Representative Lee Hamilton, suggested to the ambassador that the government had some resources, too, like the White House, the State Department and the Defense Department.
“These individuals deserve enormous credit for a very effective operation,” Ambassador Martin said. He claimed Mr. Luce and Mr. Branfman “twisted and distorted” American humanitarian concern into opposition to continuing support for the war.
“It is fashionable in some circles to blame the Congress for the final collapse of South Vietnam,” Ambassador Martin told the subcommittee. “God knows there is enough blame over two decades to spare a bit for everyone, but the easy out of blaming Congress, in my opinion, just won’t wash. The President and the Secretary of State were calling it absolutely right. But, in the temper of the times, this just could not be enough.”
He explained that members of Congress were under so much pressure in Washington and from their home districts, it was clear why they cut the request for $1,600,000,000 in military aid to South Vietnam to $700,000,000 for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 1975.
“I have enormous respect for the abilities of Mr. Branfman and Mr. Luce,” Ambassador Martin said, not kindly.
Fred Branfman, a New Yorker, was considered something of a genius in the antiwar movement, not only for digging out and compiling the statistics on the air war in Indochina, but for making it clear what the peasants of Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia were enduring. When he married a young Vietnamese woman named Nguyen Thi Ngoc Thoa, who had come to the United States with injured Vietnamese children needing advanced medical treatment, a poem was read at their wedding that the guests had never heard. It was written by a soldier in the National Liberation Front whose fiancée, also a guerrilla, had been killed in the south.
Once I loved my country because of the birds and butterflies
Because there were days of escaping from school.
But now I love my country because in each handful of soil
You are there, beloved.
Mr. Branfman, who ran Project Air War, also worked at educating members of Congress on the air war, since it seemed to be perceived by the legislators only intermittently. Nor did the public always understand what the air war was except when reports or photographs of captured pilots aroused immense waves of pity or patriotic indignation.
Mr. Branfman and his wife, called Thoa, lived in one room at the Indochina Resource Center, sleeping on a mattress on the floor because they liked it and did not care about furniture. Neither of them seemed to ever have enough sleep. Both of them worked furiously and went without privacy, the smallest luxuries, or even a few days’ vacation. I remember him going up and down, down and up the long and cold halls of the Senate and House Office Buildings, trying to see members of Congress. In fact, although he was in his early thirties, he shuffled because he was tired or, being very tall, had not learned to stand up straight or his one pair of shoes did not fit, or something. People often thought he was a mild-mannered man; they did not always immediately see the passion, the fierce intelligence and the drive. Mr. Branfman rarely had any money in his pockets and often did not even realize it until he had a flight to catch or was in a taxi.
What he did not easily tolerate was the depression or sense of futility felt by people who slid in and out of the movement. He was always saying that the antiwar forces were at their most most powerful when everyone else said the movement was finished and over. Sometimes my own sadness and a lack of a sense of strategy would inspire him to tell me stories. They were always about people in North Vietnam, or political prisoners in the south, who had borne unspeakable ordeals. Yet they were even more calm, more courageous and more determined. Sometimes the stories would make me sadder. I had enough of my own memories, but he said, quite correctly, they were the wrong kind and that I would feel differently if I ever went to Hanoi. The triumph was how the Vietnamese had withstood and defeated the world’s most advanced technology.
“Progress involves, even necessitates, contradictions,” he would say, usually after midnight when he came to life. “Progress is not a straight even line. Adversity is a sign of progress . . .”
His wife, Thoa, so small a woman she did not even come to his shoulder, made an enormous difference in his life. He became stronger and more organized—his desk was a chaos, but what he needed was always in his head—and he trusted her above all others. She was tireless: cooking for friends, giving speeches, traveling, raising funds, confronting American officials, contacting other Vietnamese in this country. When Mr. Branfman went to California to help manage the campaign of the former radical and co-founder of SDS, Tom Hayden, for a seat in the Senate—which Mr. Hayden lost, although he received thirty-seven percent of the total vote—the separation pained Mr. and Mrs. Branfman. But they said each of us has our work to do and work came first.
In New York, when Don Luce heard he had been cited by Ambassador Martin, he thought it an honor for the Indochina Resource Center and for all the people who over the years had kept it alive. “The Vietnamese won the war,” he said. “They were so angry at the Saigon regime that no amount of U.S. aid, napalm or police advisors could have won the war for America.” He thought the American people were important in bringing the war to an end sooner, perhaps two or three years sooner.
“This means the peace movement saved at least two hundred thousand lives and prevented an incredible amount of agony that could never be measured in statistical form,” he said.
The Indochina Resource Center is still in the same dilapidated house on 18th Street near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. It has two staff members, both meagerly paid, and some volunteers. There was no other place like it in that city; I remember it as a strangely hopeful but humble place. The frailty of their finances caused a lot of problems; no one ever knew they were working for one of the best propaganda and pressure organizations in the world until Ambassador Martin said so.
IN SAIGON, DON LUCE lived in two rooms on the sixth floor of a small apartment building on rue Pasteur. There must have been furniture, for we sat on something, but the rooms seemed very uncrowded. There was a little kitchen and a bed with exhausted sheets. I had never seen an American civilian live so simply; even his toothpaste was Vietnamese. There was no American beer, whiskey, soap, shampoo, detergent, toilet paper, toilet-bowl cleaners with added enzymes, instant daiquiris, Wonder bread, instant coffee, instant pizza or chocolate cookies from the PX or commissary. There was no air conditioning, the windows were not screened.
He was then as he is now: a gentle and austere man, born without a temper, almost unable to return anger. He grew up on a small dairy farm in East Calais, Vermont. It was a beginning that could be guessed by his face and his manner. At twenty-two he had a master’s degree in farm management from Cornell University, the author of “Cost and Returns of Pig Production in Western New York”—Agricultural Bulletin No. 31. As an undergraduate at Cornell he knew some Malay students, liked to hear them speak of their countryside and thought of going to Asia. He went as an expert on sweet potatoes, the subject of his doctoral thesis, which was never finished. In Vietnam he was assigned to Banmethuot, as an agricultural volunteer running an experimental agricultural station for the International Voluntary Services to help the Rhade Montagnards grow a better variety of sweet potato. He talked with farm people—where to dam the tiny stream to get irrigation water to their vegetable plots, how to get better varieties of fruit trees in the area, whether rubber or coffee would be a better cash crop. The door of the experiment station was never locked; no one stole. It was 1958. He was very happy there. There was nothing he needed for himself or missed.
In front of the tiny bathroom in his Saigon apartment there was a door that led out to a balcony. You could climb over it onto another building that faced Pasteur and Le Thanh Ton streets, go inside, take an elevator and reach the street. Vietnamese students often came to the apartment to be with him; the balcony was the escape route if the police raided the apartment. It was a most important balcony.
He had a press card that year, but he was not like the other reporters, stuck in the tar of useless briefings, press releases, daily war stories, endless operations, endless assessments. He knew better. He lived apart, he did not go out on the Army choppers or mingle with the American troops, or interview official Americans. He did not seem to be pulled into the depressions that every so often flattened and mashed the rest of us, making reporters do peculiar things to be consoled and calmed. His life was austere. His was a Vietnamese world; so well did he speak and write their language, he could make jokes in it. His Vietnamese friends were not people he hired. Some came to him, as they came to no other American, with information. He kept careful clear notes on everything. He saved documents other reporters did not read. Yet the little apartment on rue Pasteur was oddly peaceful. You could see nothing but the Saigon sky. He did not want to move, but his Vietnamese landlady became nervous when the special police came around asking questions, wanting to know who came to see him, and their names, how often there were visitors. The balcony was no longer enough.
The trouble began after he led two congressmen and an aide to the cells known as the “tiger cages” on Con Son Island in July 1970. They flew there on a clear morning, uncertain if they could succeed in what needed to be done.
They had an escort, an American named Frank Walton, who headed the Public Safety Directorate, an advisory program under the wing of CORDS.
No journalists had visited the tiger cages since French rule. The Americans in Saigon said, to all inquiries, that the tiger cages were a thing of the past, yet some Vietnamese gave Mr. Luce proof that they were still in use. At 10:23 A.M., in the office of the Vietnamese warden on Con Son, the aide, Thomas Harkin, broke off the polite conversation, over little cups of café filtre, about the weather and the beauty of the island. He said to Colonel Nguyen Van Ve that he had a list of specific prisoners the group wanted to see. There were six names. It was, of course, Mr. Luce who compiled the names. Colonel Ve, who spoke English beautifully, looked sorrowful. He said permission would have to come from the Ministry of Interior in Saigon. The group said please do this. The colonel handed a telegram to a clerk, speaking in Vietnamese. “Whether they answer or not is not important,” he said. Colonel Ve was unaware that Mr. Luce understood every word.
Mr. Walton scolded the visitors for their request to see six of the prisoners. He suggested the congressmen go to the little shop that sold articles made by the prisoners and buy souvenirs. Finally the delegation was allowed to tour the place and Luce was able to speak to some of the prisoners when the guards were not close by. He heard wretched things from them. Randolph Berkeley, chief of the Corrections and Detention Division of the Public Safety Directorate, said in a jovial voice that Colonel Nguyen Van Ve even played soccer with the prisoners and was well liked. The visitors were taken to another part of the prison but they insisted on going back to Camp Four, where Luce had been told there was an entrance to the tiger cages. It was described as a narrow path between two walls, with some vegetables along the side. They saw a very small door, and in their desperation, shook and hammered it.
It was a tiny door. Colonel Ve protested: the door was always locked, was not interesting, led nowhere. But then a guard opened the door to find out what was going on, why so much noise. The congressmen, the aide and Mr. Luce plunged in. The tiger cages were small stone compartments which seemed not quite five feet across and about nine feet long. There were three prisoners in each cage. The men walked up a stairway and looked down at the prisoners below bars. The prisoners stared up. Not one could rise to his feet. Mr. Luce told the Vietnamese who they were, why they had come. He did not understand, in those first seconds, what had happened to them. They told. The prisoners were usually bolted to the floor, handcuffed to a bar or rod, or put in leg irons with the chain around a bar or rod. It did not take very long to ruin the legs, to bring partial or complete paralysis. The prisoners were occasionally released but always put back in the shackles. Always, they said, always. Above each cell was a wooden bucket of lime. Colonel Ve, following them, said the lime was to whitewash the cells, but the prisoners, shouting and talking together, told the foreigners it was used on them. They said they could not breathe, blood came up when the lime was thrown on them. Mr. Luce saw the floors of some cages were covered with lime.
“They crawled over on their hands because they couldn’t stand up,” Mr. Luce said. He kept translating for the congressmen as quickly as he could.
“The congressmen reacted very differently. Congressman Hawkins was very, very angry. You could see the anger. Congressman Anderson was sadder—he was more sad than angry. He was apologetic about asking me to translate, and one time he said ‘I’m going to stop this, I’m going to stop this.’
“My first, my deepest reaction, was so painful, is still painful. I kept thinking I can’t have been a part of this. Tom Harkin had given me a candy bar that he’d gotten from the commissary, I had that in my pocket, I wanted to toss it down between the bars to someone who looked starving . . .”
The prisoners chanted in thin voices of thirst, hunger, beatings. There was sand and pebbles in the rice, a man said. Another yelled that he had been shackled for months; still another said he had been a Buddhist monk who spoke out for an end to the war in 1966. The men told them there were women prisoners. They knew because they could hear higher voices rising into screams. The congressmen, the aide and Mr. Luce went down the stairs into an adjacent building. Each cage they saw held five women. Mr. Luce thought the women must have ranged in age from fifteen years to one woman who was seventy. Some lay without moving, while others tried to fan them with odd bits of filthy cloth. Many pleaded for water, but Mr. Luce had no water. Nearly all had sores on their faces and bodies. Their eyes looked strange, full of pus or a very deep pink.
When the group went outside, Frank Walton was waiting. His agitation was immense. “You have no right to interfere with Vietnamese affairs,” he said. “You have come here trying to stir up trouble. You are guests of Colonel Ve here. You aren’t supposed to go poking your nose into doors that aren’t your business.”
Congressman Hawkins said it was their business because of United States aid. Ninety percent of the funds used by the Saigon government came from the United States that year. The congressman said that he hoped the Americans who were prisoners in North Vietnam were being treated in a more humane way. Mr. Walton said in a louder voice that they were judging an entire prison of ten thousand inmates on how four or five hundred were being treated. “This prison is equal to the standards of many of the prisons in our own country,” he said.
“These are very bad people,” Colonel Ve said. “They will not salute the flag. They will not even salute the American flag.”
One of the male prisoners had a tremendous scar on his head, as though the skull was a potato that had been split by a cleaver. Mr. Luce could not bring himself to ask the man how it happened. Another prisoner had three fingers missing; others said the fingers had been cut off as punishment. One of the women pulled herself up to the side of the cage and called up to them how cruel were the guards. She was very short of breath but she kept on. There was one guard, she said, who urinated on them. The man came over then, in a fury, yelling at her in front of Mr. Luce and the others. The guard said the woman had refused to salute the flag when she came to Con Son. She said she never would do it, never salute it. All the time Mr. Luce kept translating for the others. Mr. Harkin took photographs.
In Saigon, before the delegation left, Congressman Anderson asked Mr. Luce to give something to the Vietnamese who had described the location of the tiger cages. The gifts were a letter opener and a key chain with the Congressional seal—the fierce eagle—on them. The Vietnamese was very correct when Mr. Luce next saw him. He looked at the letter opener and the key chain with their handsome seals. The congressman is very kind, the Vietnamese said, I accept his kindness, but I have no need for such things.
Mr. Luce was embarrassed. “He symbolically took them and then of course he gave them back,” he said.
After the congressmen left, Mr. Luce sent word to come to his apartment. It was the first time we had ever met. He told me about the tiger cages. I questioned him and looked at his notes for two hours. He wanted to give the story to The New York Times and to Morley Safer of CBS. I took unusual pains to make the report very clear, very certain. The story ran on page three of The New York Times, above a brief confirmation by one of the congressmen, who was planning to reveal more at a news conference. A denial by American authorities appeared on page one of The New York Times the same week. The editors were still cautious about giving credence to anyone like Don Luce in the antiwar movement. It made them nervous.
The U.S. Embassy was embarrassed and upset by the furor. Mr. Walton was forbidden to say anything. Reforms were promised. A spokesman for the United States Embassy said it would all be cleared up. There was no official comment. That month more than five hundred inmates of the prison were flown to Saigon, where they were to be released.
In the An Quang pagoda in Saigon, Mr. Luce took me to meet one of the prisoners, who was resting there. He was twenty-eight; I thought him to be over forty. Mr. Luce translated, going very slowly. The Vietnamese, who called himself by a family nickname, Anh Ba, said he had been in one of the airless, putrid tiger cages from 1965 to 1966. There were two to five men in each cell. He thought it was a little more than three feet wide, about six and a half feet long and almost six feet high. His calves were withered, no larger than my wrists, with deep rings around the ankles as if the skin had been sliced away. The scars were from the shackles, Anh Ba said. He did not wince or jerk when hot ash from my cigarette dropped on his left leg. I rubbed the skin, which felt like bark, but he could feel nothing. It surprised him very much to see me rubbing that light, dead leg.
He had been flown in a C-130 with an American pilot to Saigon, held in a local prison until his papers were in order, put in a truck and let out, with five other men, on a street corner in Saigon, where he knew no one. None had money. The others took turns carrying him piggyback to the pagoda, and he felt a little safe but his nervousness was very great, making his arms and hands jump.
Once I was a tailor, Anh Ba said. So many Vietnamese spoke of themselves this way. Once I was, they said. Once I was . . . He was from a village near Tay Ninh; on a July night in 1965 a clash broke out between the Viet Cong and South Vietnamese soldiers. When it was over, some national policemen came for him, saying he was an agent of the Viet Cong.
“But I said no, no, I was just sewing in my house. They did not believe me.”
He was taken to Tay Ninh, where things were done to him no matter how much he cried out and said no. The questions poured over him like gravel.
In the pagoda, he spoke very clearly, always looking around to see who might be listening. He sat on a cot. He could sit up and he could lie down, not more. The legs would not move unless they were lifted and tucked in. His face was the color of a man who had just died.
“Did I have liaison with the Viet Cong? I said no. Had I given money to Viet Cong? I told them no, no I did not. Had I given rice to Viet Cong? I told them I had not, I had not even seen the Viet Cong.”
The trial in Saigon was an astonishing thing. No one from the village was permitted to come, no one could watch, let alone speak for him. There was no lawyer. It was very rapid. He was sentenced to five years. At Con Son he began by being stubborn, not knowing any better. He refused to do hard labor, telling all who would listen that his sentence specified a term without hard labor. After he had spent a year in the tiger cages, he had to be carried to different prison quarters. He had forgotten what it was to walk. When he was released that July he had been at Con Son longer than five years; no one there was ever sure when they would be freed. Anh Ba said he hoped the right food and medicines would make it possible for him to walk again. We said nothing. I fed him cigarettes; money was given to him for the bus home, for food, for any medicines he had in mind. It was his hopefulness that I remember. He said he would crawl to his house if he had to.
I knew the name of the village but have never told it, because he was so fearful of being arrested again. Much later Luong and I went there to see how he was. But first we made ourselves known and did not start off asking where he lived. It was not difficult because there was a third, perhaps fourth, cousin of Luong’s who had a sister-in-law living in the same village. She knew we were not spies, were not working for the Americans or the police. But Anh Ba was not there; the people thought he was still in jail or had perished. The bus from Saigon always came, but Anh Ba was never on it. Something happened to him. They took such risks, these Vietnamese, when all I could promise was no more than a story in an unheard-of foreign newspaper, such a small, pale record of what they had borne, what they had said. We never found him.
THE HARASSMENT BEGAN slowly that year, after the tiger cages became one of the most widely printed stories of the war. He wrote about them himself; two Vietnamese newspapers in Saigon, Cong Luan and Tin Sang, printed his account, but the police confiscated copies. In September, Peter E. Galuppo, of the embassy, questioned three American acquaintances of Mr. Luce to see if he was collaborating with the Viet Cong. In October he was told by the Vietnamese head of the National Press Center, Nguyen Ngoc Huyen, that he would not have his press card renewed. It was then taken away. He was accredited to the Ecumenical Press Service of the World Council of Churches in Geneva and could show dozens of clippings of stories. Many other reporters, who were free-lance, had press cards but were not required to show proof of any of their work because it did not much matter. In October he was told the reason was the trip to Con Son. Then a plainclothesman began following him very closely, so closely that at times the policeman could have touched him. He was informed by an American captain that he could no longer receive or send mail through the APO system, a convenience granted to all Americans in the press and to those working for volunteer agencies. It upset him because the captain would not even hand over mail that had already arrived. “I have my orders,” the captain said.
It was all made worse when, in February, Mr. Luce disclosed that the construction consortium of Raymond, Morrison, Knudson-Brown, Root and Jones had a contract with the U.S. Department of Navy to build new “isolation” cells at Con Son to replace the tiger cages. The new cells were to be two square feet smaller. Mr. Luce persisted in writing that the increased budget for the Saigon police and for Vietnamese prisons was coming from American tax dollars. In May 1971 it was all over. His visa to stay in Vietnam was not to be renewed. Mr. Luce was told to leave.
In that spring of 1971 he thought he might be killed by the Saigon government. So did I. A Vietnamese friend in one of the ministries had warned him to be quite careful. I thought he might be run over by a truck late at night, but Luong said no, that was too simple, then everyone would know the government had done it. Mr. Luce did not know the details of such a plan. All he could do was talk to another Vietnamese, who he suspected worked in police intelligence, saying that in the event of his death a letter, which had been taken to Hong Kong, would be published. It was the only precaution he could take.
Mr. Luce was very calm. The night before he left, in May, his apartment was robbed. The door was kicked open, his papers and files scattered, some were removed. It did not matter because he had made copies. For the first time in twelve years in Vietnam he felt ghastly. Luong was sure he had been poisoned, but the sickness was the early stage of hepatitis. Luong said a man who had lived so simply, who had eaten Vietnamese food for so long from the streets and lived in the villages would not get such a disease. Nonsense, I said. We used to argue about it. The last night, Mr. Luce was given a party by some Vietnamese who had themselves been in prison, or had relatives in prison, and had formed a committee for reform. He promised not to forget them, not to stop speaking about them in his own country, never to stop telling Americans about the war. It was a happy evening although he could hardly eat or move easily. On May 11 he went. It was three days before the expulsion date, but he wanted to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee headed by Senator William Fulbright. He left a letter, in Vietnamese, for all his friends, saying it was time for him and all foreigners to leave, but that he would come back when there was peace.
HE HAD ALWAYS caused trouble; perhaps the surprise was that Don Luce had not been expelled earlier. In 1961, three years after he arrived, Mr. Luce became director of International Voluntary Services in Vietnam. Six years later he resigned, but not quietly, to protest the war. There were fifty of them, all civilian volunteer workers fluent in Vietnamese, who signed a letter to President Lyndon B. Johnson opposing the American policies of free-fire zones, the continued creation of refugees, defoliation, bombing of the north and south. The IVS volunteers were already a problem to the embassy; one of them had written a letter protesting defoliation which had been used by the antiwar movement. Mr. Luce went to the embassy to ask if the letter to President Johnson could be sent through the pouch. Colonel George Jacobson tried to dissuade him, then said he certainly could not see Ambassador Bunker, who was far too busy.
“We said if they would stop making refugees, stop the bombing, stop the defoliation, then we wouldn’t send the later,” Mr. Luce said. Colonel Jacobson said Mr. Luce and the others were trying to bribe the United States. He was suddenly sent in to see Ambassador Bunker, who was polite and cool. The Vietnamese always called him Ong Lanh, Mr. Refrigerator.
“He said it was impolite to send the letter, he said you are guests in this country, you should not send the letter because it would be upsetting to the Vietnamese government. And later he said if I sent the letter I would not be able to get a job with the United States government. I said I understood that but I did not plan on applying for such a job.”
Mr. Luce left Vietnam and spent a year as a research associate in the Center for International Studies at Cornell University, and speaking against the war. At the end of 1968 he went back, and a year later was working for the World Council of Churches.
In December 1970 a letter was sent to President Nixon and the Secretary General of the United Nations, signed by him and forty-eight others who were mostly Americans in Vietnam with voluntary agencies working on social welfare and development projects. The letter said that the United States actions in Indochina violated the Geneva Convention and other international treaties on the conduct of the war and the treatment of prisoners. The charges were very precise. The letter was five pages long. The signers were teachers, social workers, doctors, nurses, therapists, missionary teachers, agriculturists. But that year such a letter did not cause great excitement. It said: “Mr. President . . . we do not see peace any closer in Indochina today than it was when you took office in January 1969. We urge you . . . We urge you . . .”
There was no reply.
HE KEPT THE promise. Every day he kept it, he still keeps it. In July 1971 Mr. Luce started the Indochina Mobile Education Project. Its office was in a room on the top floor of the house in Washington on 18th Street. Project Air War was on the floor below. Both groups were part of the Indochina Resource Center, which served as an independent clearinghouse for information on contemporary Indochina. It had nine general sponsors from the academic community and sixteen academic associates to help provide information on the social, economic, political and historical realities of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The Center put out a newsletter called “Indochina Chronicle.” It also contacted and worked with legislators, set up briefings and seminars, and developed a series of audio-visual programs on Indochina to be loaned out across the country. There were always posters on the walls of the house, which seemed to burst with files, cabinets and people.
The mobile education project on Indochina consisted of photographs, drawings, slides, movies, artwork and crafts. The art was mounted on forty panels of large screens, which were set up in shopping centers, empty stores, schools or churches, auditoriums in small or medium-sized cities for a period of one to three days. During this time local groups—often those that were not connected with any position on the war—organized television, radio and newspaper coverage for Mr. Luce, who gave interviews, made speeches and met with local people to discuss America’s role in Indochina. Sometimes, on a single day, he had as many as sixteen meetings.
He traveled all the time, driving the little bus at night or sleeping while another person drove—there were usually two or three in one team—so that he looked far more tired and drained in his own country than he did in Vietnam. It was very odd how his face changed: the color grew a little greyish and his eyes looked duller, as if the food were wrong or the air not good for him. He went everywhere in the truck, sometimes sleeping in people’s houses, always talking about the war, getting the screens up. The curious thing about him is that he was always very patient, very tolerant, very unruffled. He never accused people of doing wrong; he said it was being done in their name.
Between July 1971 and October 1972 he went to twenty-one states. Mr. Luce, and the others with him, never knew in advance when it was going to get ugly.
It seemed quite routine the time they went to Missouri. The South County Shopping Mall in St. Louis had put out a big sign saying “Indochina Exhibit”; the panels were displayed in an arcade connecting the different shops. Someone wrote “nuke the gook” on one of the sketches done by a Lao refugee of the American plane bombing his village. Another person wrote bad things on a sketch made from memory by a South Vietnamese officer of Lam Son 719—the drive into Laos—which showed a soldier unable to hold on any longer to the runners of a helicopter. There were obscenities on other pictures too. Mr. Luce always carried the white correction fluid used by typists so he could paint clouds over the writing. He even had a competition with whoever accompanied him to see who could paint the fattest, nicest clouds.
“One of the things we found out was that if someone puts writing and graffiti on one picture and you leave the graffiti, within a matter of hours there will be more graffiti on the others,” he said.
At five o’clock, the first afternoon, the manager of the shopping mall asked them to move out because of a steady stream of protesting telephone calls coming in all day. But traveling in other parts of Missouri was calm and pleasant. Mr. Luce thought the most hostile state was Indiana, because so many people were indifferent or impervious.
He spoke at Indiana University in Bloomington; eight people showed up. In Columbus, Indiana, there was a debate, sponsored by the Columbus Peace Education Council. John Rutherford, the news editor of The Republic, appeared on the panel, opposing Mr. Luce and a Vietnamese named Doan Hong Hai, twenty-five, who was traveling with the exhibit. In Mr. Rutherford’s column on March 22, 1972—it is called “Hi Neighbor!”—he wrote of Mr. Luce:
He, in fact, did present a very convincing picture of the horrors of war and of the political repression in South Vietnam. Yet he failed to convince me that America was, and is, to blame.
. . . What I do not understand is how it is that so many Americans can come to know so much about other countries and yet know so little about their own country and what it stands—and fights—for.
The only time Mr. Luce was assaulted was in Augusta, Georgia. The exhibit was near the Dart Pharmacy, under a large awning on the street.
“One of the managers came out and was looking at a picture of a woman sitting in front of her house—it was only a culvert—with her boy, about four years old, standing by her. The caption explained that this woman asked me to take the picture to send to her husband, who was in the army. And this guy got very, very upset at this picture of a smiling Vietnamese. He said ‘You’re a foreigner!’ And I said ‘I’m not a foreigner, I’m an American.’”
The man yelled that if he was really an American, he’d be showing pictures of Americans, not pictures of “gooks.”
“He grabbed me by the throat and said he was going to kill me. I leaned up against a car; people gathered to watch. The man said ‘You’re a coward.’ He said he had been in the war—it must have been World War II. He was about five feet ten, slightly taller than I am, and wearing a suit . . . He wasn’t squeezing my throat very hard at that point and I said if I were a coward I wouldn’t have spent twelve years in Vietnam. ‘Well, I’m not a coward,’ the man said. ‘I’ve been in the war and I’ve got a scar across my gut to prove it.’
Jacquelyn Chagnon, a pretty, sturdy young woman with very long dark-brown hair, came over to the man attacking her friend and said he must leave Don Luce alone. The man told her to shut up or that night the women in his family would find her and yank every hair out of her head.
It was a Saturday morning; quite a lot of people were out. The crowd around the two men grew thicker and more curious.
“‘I’m not a foreigner,’ I said, ‘I am from Vermont.’ The man said ‘I told you you were a foreigner’ and walked off.”
The car he was pushed against seemed an old and trembly thing. When Mr. Luce finally stood up, an elderly black couple claimed it. The man shook his hand and said: “I wish you good luck. Thank you.” The couple was very relieved that nothing had happened to their car.
They had to move the exhibit because the supermarket next to Dart Pharmacy began to receive threatening telephone calls. One of the anonymous callers wanted to shoot Mr. Luce.
He only remembers all this because it was so peculiar.
The question that most people asked him was if he was ever in danger in Vietnam; it was the question that he most hoped would not be asked. “It was very frustrating because one of the things that people try to do is make you a hero, and I kept pointing out that what I was talking about was happening to the Vietnamese,” he said. “Sometimes in grade schools the children would ask a lot more. They wanted to know if I had seen anyone die.”
In Logan, Ohio, a small town with less than ten thousand people, it was decided on the day he arrived with the exhibit that the high school students could not come to see it, or hear him, until the teachers came first that night. But the special-education class was allowed to come on the first day. These were the children considered slower than the others. He thought perhaps their teachers felt the exhibit couldn’t do the slow learners any harm. There were about twenty. They looked at each of the panels very carefully. After school was over, all of them came back to see it again on their own time. A photograph showing a Montagnard crossbow was of interest to some boys who did not know whether you could shoot rabbits with it. One youngster, perhaps sixteen, kept looking at one photograph for at least five minutes. It showed two Vietnamese boys on a water buffalo, with heavy clouds in the sky. Mr. Luce watched the youngster leave the picture, come back to it, walk away, and come back to look at it again.
“Finally I asked him ‘Do you like this picture?’” Mr. Luce said. The boy said yes, it was a good picture, but it sure looked as if it was going to rain, didn’t it.
Some photographs showed injured small Vietnamese. These puzzled the children.
“Jacqui and I were both there at the time, talking to them, and they kept asking, well, why would anyone hurt a little child? They asked several times whether the children who looked hurt were in car accidents, and we said no, it was the war. Then they said but these are little children. They seemed to think that war only touched grown-up men . . .”
He always wanted Americans to see the Vietnamese not just as victims but a people who loved their land, their trees, their poetry, their music, their language, their food. He thought the antiwar movement might have made a mistake in showing only the people in pain.
He wanted to show their strength, not just their suffering.
“We found we got as much reaction to happy Vietnamese as to atrocities—sometimes as much adverse reaction, too. The hawkish people, who wanted us to win the war, would be upset by happy Vietnamese. My own analysis is that underneath what they were saying is a tremendous frustration that, with all of our bombs, all of our technology, we have not been able to destroy human spirit. That really bothered people, as it did the man in Augusta.”
IN SMALL, RURAL places he felt himself at home. The people would ask questions about the Vietnamese. What do they eat and how do they live. Very often people would say to him that the Vietnamese put a low value on life, that a Vietnamese family didn’t feel the way Americans felt if a son was killed, that they didn’t mind being made to move because their houses weren’t worth very much. If we stopped bombing in Vietnam, people would say, then they would kill each other because they don’t value life. They would talk of the Japanese kamikaze pilots and how Buddhist monks in Vietnam burned themselves to death.
“One time I was talking to a minister—I can’t even remember what city this was—who said something about the Buddhists burning themselves, how the Vietnamese didn’t care about life. I said but would you argue that Christ put a low value on life because he allowed himself to be crucified? He got very, very angry. He wanted to know if I was a Christian, because a Christian would not say things like that.”
They had a small plan to involve people, to teach them something about Vietnam, so they invited them to help prepare a Vietnamese meal, which was cooked by Jacquelyn Chagnon. She always carried a wok for cooking the vegetables; a Vietnamese salad was served. The chicken, Thit ga Nuong, was prepared and roasted as the Vietnamese do it. When people came together to chop vegetables—which took some time—Jacquelyn would talk about Vietnam, a country of farmers and the effect of herbicides on their crops and forests. She spoke very plainly and did not accuse them of anything. They played cassettes of Vietnamese music. In Iowa City nearly one hundred people came to a Vietnamese dinner given in a church.
“Even the sheriff of Iowa City came,” said Mr. Luce. “People were moving toward the food when, unannounced, a local guerrilla theater group, white-faced, wearing black, burst in. Five adults and two children. They sang a song, did a skit, then they shot the children. They had BB guns. They screamed a lot. Everyone was nervous because no one knew what they were going to do. No one knew what to do themselves. It was sort of sad . . . Everyone just stood there. People were going through the line picking up their chicken, you know, and people didn’t know—well, we all thought should we eat our chicken?”
He thanked the guerrilla theater group on their way out. The people thought the food tasted fine. The sheriff said he was glad he had come, it was an example of the community doing the kind of thing that the students at the University of Iowa were always telling them they should be doing.
THEY HAD POSTCARDS made of photographs of Vietnamese—happy-looking people and children—to sell. They collected translations of Vietnamese poems in a book called We Promise One Another. In 1973 Mr. Luce went on a long speaking tour for the American Friends Service Committee while others took over the Indochina Mobile Education Project. In May 1973 he was in San Diego at the University of California. A woman in her early fifties admired some photographs he was showing. The one she liked was taken in a rice-growing village sixteen miles outside of Hanoi. She was not pleased to hear it. “They’re Communists,” the woman said. “They’re despicable Communists.”
Toward the end of his speech, the dark-haired woman sat in the front row, saying over and over, in a low voice, “Traitor, traitor, traitor.” Sometimes only her mouth would move: Traitor, traitor, traitor. He spoke for twenty minutes, leaving an hour for discussion. There were not more than fifty people in the auditorium. Because he had mentioned the tiger cages, the woman asked Mr. Luce if the people kept in them were Communists.
“I said I don’t know. Some of them may have been Communists but they were not gun-carrying Communists. She said they’re all the same and they should be killed.”
There was a Vietnamese student studying physics who wanted to speak. The woman asked him if he was from North Vietnam or South Vietnam.
“Vietnam is only one country,” the student said. “I am from Vietnam.” The woman said: “You are a Communist if you think Vietnam is just one country.”
But Mr. Luce never spoke harshly, never insulted, never gave up with the people who despised him.
“I’ve been to thirty cities or towns in the last three months,” Mr. Luce said. “I have just been in Champaign-Urbana, which are twin cities. Before that, Springfield, McComb, Davenport, Iowa; a day in Chicago; three days in Windsor, Canada. Then I was in Kalamazoo, Lansing, Ann Arbor, Detroit, Omaha, Lincoln, Central City, Grand Island—that’s Nebraska—Fort Collins, Colorado Springs, Boulder in the Denver area. Before that, Phoenix, Albuquerque, San Diego, Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Ashland and Medford in Oregon . . .”
People asked him why he was doing it. The question was often “How much money do you make?” He told them his salary per month was one hundred and twenty-five dollars. People sometimes found it hard to believe, he said. They shook their heads and could not quite conceal their suspicion.
Sometimes it was not enough to talk about the Vietnamese, or even the American, deaths. He talked about money.
“I find that probably the strongest antiwar statement that I’ve been able to make in the last few months is that the United States is paying for twenty-five thousand barrels of fuel for the war each day,” he said in 1974. “Each barrel has forty-two gallons, which means a million gallons a day, three hundred and sixty-five million gallons a year. And if you go to get ten miles to the gallon, that’s three thousand, six hundred and fifty billion miles. That seems to be a stronger statement than in the first year of ‘peace’ in Vietnam in 1973 there were one hundred and twenty-five thousand casualties on both sides.”
He was often asked how many people in the United States saw Vietnam as much more than a well-intentioned mistake, saw it as a war of crime, and were sickened by it. A reporter suggested to Mr. Luce that maybe ten percent of the population had this view. “Ten percent is too high,” he said. “Less.” He never fooled himself about that. Three times he went to North Vietnam. On one trip, in 1973, he was led into the south and taken on a tour of Quang Tri province. The visitors went to the site of the former U.S. Army base known as Camp Carroll. The Viet Cong were raising chickens in the bunkers built and inhabited by Americans. The chickens pleased him. In the summer of 1974 he became co-director of Clergy and Laity Concerned, a group originally formed to protest the war in Vietnam in 1965, and moved from Washington, D.C., to CALC headquarters in New York. That same year he led an American delegation of two bishops and two reverends to North Vietnam.
Now, so much later, he is still making speeches, still winding his way through the country, talking to people about sending aid to Vietnam through a group called Friendshipment, a coalition of organizations raising money for the medicines and supplies and clothing so desperately needed. He is still talking about Vietnam, the need for unconditional amnesty, the high defense budget, the B-1 bomber, and political prisoners in other countries—South Korea, Indonesia, Iran, Chile and Uruguay, whose governments, he says, receive so much support from the United States.
He is now paid ninety-six dollars a week and shares a railroad apartment with two other people on Second Avenue and 10th Street. His bunk bed is over the john. He likes the neighborhood—considered run-down, if not menacing, by many people—because it is the closest thing in the city to a village in Vermont, or in Vietnam.
He does not think in terms of being happy or unhappy; the words mean nothing to him. In six years he has never complained about his life, never asked for a vacation, never said he was tired or that he needed a change now that he is forty-one years old. Yet there was one day that was wonderful, a day that renewed and restored him. It was not even a day, perhaps no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. He was in a village called Hai Duong, between Haiphong and Hanoi, in early December of 1974. He was talking to the villagers, then to one family. “Then we sat for a while,” Mr. Luce said. “I sat outside with three Vietnamese leaning up against the family house. None of us said anything. We just sat. And I felt . . .”
But he could not quite say what he felt, only that he needed it: the silence, the ground, the Vietnamese, the sky.
AMBASSADOR GRAHAM MARTIN, testifying on that January day, made a curious plea. He spoke of a dog named Nit Noy who had lived in Saigon, too, and made the perilous escape.
“The fact is that it was not my dog, but my daughter’s. The fact is that I did not intend to bring it out but had arranged for Nit Noy to seek asylum with the ambassador of France. However, a correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, a journal not noted for its uncritical support of American policy in Vietnam, decided otherwise. He put the dog under his coat and took it out, leaving his typewriter behind as more than compensating weight. To leave his typewriter behind certainly qualifies George McArthur as a qualified dog lover.
“I shall always be eternally grateful to him because my wife was devoted to that dog, and in my family, my wife suffered most in the evacuation of Vietnam. Her contribution to stability was an enormous one in those last days. Had we begun to pack our household items, the signal would have been all over Saigon.
“So all our small collection of things that were of great sentimental importance to us remained untouched. On the last day the Marine log shows that I returned to the residence at 11:03 and departed at 11:14. My wife had eleven minutes to pack one bag and walk away from all those things we had found comfortable to live with in the places we had served our country. I have been told our residence is now occupied by a very senior North Vietnamese official. One hopes the next time a senior American official visits Saigon, it might be gently indicated that the return of some of her things, particularly her granddaughter’s portraits, would be favorably regarded.”
These particular remarks upset no one. No man hearing the ambassador even laughed. The ambassador, who cared so much for that dog, who made it clear that the gentlemanly thing for the Vietnamese to do was to return every one of his wife’s possessions, did not seem embarrassed to bring up such matters. Indeed, he spoke as if he did not remember, had never known or thought about, the losses of the Vietnamese.
Civilian war casualties in
South Vietnam, killed or
wounded, 1965–1973
1,435,000
Civilian war casualties in
South Vietnam, 1973–1975
339,882
Refugees generated in South
Vietnam, 1965–1973
10,270,000
Among the Vietnamese disabled, it is reckoned that amputees number 83,000; paraplegics, 8,000; blind, 30,000; deaf, 10,000; and in other categories, 50,000.
Ambassador Martin also told the committee that when the “totally uninformed” criticisms of the evacuation began to appear, it made his wife furious. She told him that he had served his country for over one-fifth of its life and two-thirds of his own, that the record was clear and that historians would treat him kindly. Ambassador Martin ended his testimony by saying he thought his wife, even if prejudiced, might be right about the historians.
It is quite possible, of course, that the ambassador never knew that South Vietnam was a land of widespread malaria, bubonic plague, leprosy, tuberculosis and venereal disease. Studies done after the war by the World Health Organization revealed that four out of every five soldiers had venereal disease, the incidence of tuberculosis was one of the highest in the world, malaria was increasing, and that South Vietnam might be one of the few places on earth where leprosy was spreading and bubonic plague still taking lives. A two-day meeting in Manila in March 1976, organized by the World Health Organization regional committee for the Western Pacific, was an effort to help Vietnam and the Vietnamese. The Vice Minister of Health, Dr. Hoang Dinh Cau of Hanoi, gave some statistics. He told delegates that 7,600,000 tons of bombs—more than three times the total amount dropped during World War II—fell on towns and cities of North Vietnam during the war. Over half a million tons of toxic chemicals and 7,000 tons of toxic gas were also dropped in these areas between 1964–1969, Dr. Hoang said. The United States did not attend the WHO meeting, saying it was not American policy to give aid to the regimes in Saigon or Hanoi.
WHEN AT LAST, after his polite yet urgent letters, we had a reunion in California, I thought at first he was in disguise. He looked so peculiar in those California clothes: a zippered baby-blue jacket, in a clammy material that could be wiped clean, and plaid trousers. In Saigon he always looked fine in his old short-sleeved shirts, which often had ink on their pockets, and the same pair of dark and baggy trousers that were too old to even hold a shine.
Inside the new house he went barefoot although he kept on the baby-blue jacket, which made him look sallow and old. As many Vietnamese did, he found California in February to be a trifle cool. It was a Sunday, so he did not choose to get into shoes and socks. The entire family—all ten of them—kept their sandals outside on the front steps; this is how I knew it was their house. His wife spoke not a word of English, she could not manage hello or goodbye. But she smiled to see me again; she smiled at any American who came inside.
Please don’t give my real name, he said, seeing my notebook. We made up a new one, Mr. Bao. He was nervous about getting into trouble, or losing the pension paid by the U.S. government, which had employed him for nearly twenty-four years. We had not seen each other in four years. He seemed deflated and even more vague, as if he could not find his glasses or something which he had just put down. Mr. Bao said he missed his books in Saigon. The idea of losing his little library made him feel very mixed up.
We did not meet again that Sunday, in a flat little town three hours from Los Angeles, because in Saigon we had been friends. It was nothing of the sort. We both wanted something from each other, and we got it. Mr. Bao wanted me to bring him certain books. I wanted to know what had happened to one Vietnamese family who were among the 140,000 people evacuated in April 1975 and brought to this country. He had written me for the books. The number-one request was for an English translation of The Tale of Kieu, the literary masterpiece of the Vietnamese. Mr. Bao knew there were no copies of any book in Vietnamese, but the children were swallowing new English words each day. Bring Tale of Kieu for them, he wrote, and Fire in the Lake for me, plus . . . In Saigon he was always asking me for books, usually obscure volumes of poetry. I provided what I could and later learned that he had never opened or read the much-wanted books. He only needed to own them.
His wife gave us a Vietnamese soup for lunch, rice and vegetables, at a table in the kitchen. The children had beautiful manners and ate without fuss or chatter. They range from a sixteen-year-old girl and a fifteen-year-old boy to a fourteen-month-old baby who is greatly admired by the others. Mr. Bao looked into his soup; it depressed him to trace the last year of his life.
“We never believed we should leave Vietnam, not until the last moment. Everybody goes, we go. And I, I was considered ‘high risk.’ Yes, ‘high risk.’ It was a kind of frantic moment, so when we are given a chance to go, we just go.” In Saigon he read that any Vietnamese who worked for the U.S. government or the police was in danger. The American chief of the Reports Section in the Defense Attaché Office where he worked told him to get ready to leave, to pack lightly, to tell only the members of his immediate family. The family went to the airport in two sedans and Mr. Bao insisted that all of them had to lie down in the cars so people in the street would not see them, and spread panic.
After I left Saigon in 1972 Mr. Bao found a new job working for the Americans in the DAO in the big building at Tan Son Nhut airport, jokingly called “Pentagon East.” The work was tiring and difficult, he said. His job was to check the transcripts of intelligence reports from the field which had been translated from Vietnamese.
“The Americans send in these reports. I don’t know, sometimes they used the code G2 or G3—the man responsible was always an American field officer. Yes, yes, the American military was supposed to have gone away, but these were officers in civilian clothes. I had to make the reports readable in English, that’s all.”
Although the house could barely accommodate all of them, Mr. Bao had a place of his own, a little room the Americans call a den which had a deadening fake wood paneling on the walls. He had a few dozen newly acquired books on shelves.
“Will you always be a Vietnamese?” I said. It was a stupid question, even a cruel one, but he kept repeating that he and his family were immigrants. He knew they were not just refugees with a chance of going back. His English was always good, so he knew the difference.
“Yes. My spirit is. This”—he touched his clothes and looked around the room—“has nothing to do with my spirit. You gave me some books but I don’t have anything special for you except this poem. I just glorify Vietnam in my poems. I’m not for the left or the right. I believe in the history of Vietnam. Someday the south will liberate the north.”
But he did not explain why or how. The truth is that he was not interested in politics or historical analysis. He always said of himself that he was a poet and a mystic, a Confucian Buddhist. His poems always seemed unusually bad to me: flat and stale things derived from the French, full of perpetual clouds, lakes and Doomed Man. When we met in Saigon he was a forty-six-year-old Vietnamese who worked in the library of the American Cultural Center and who had already been married for twelve years to a strong and handsome woman from the Delta who each year seemed to be carrying another child. He was fond of his family. But Mr. Bao needed peace and distance for his reading and poetry. In 1970 he was clearly wretched in his job but he could not pull himself away after so many years in the employ of the Americans. There was nowhere to go.
“There were several times I want to resign, you know, but somehow I did not want to lose my seniority, so I keep holding on. Maybe because I had done studying in the United States, and I know so many Americans, so I want simply to stick to the Americans. I keep holding on, hoping that after I retire I will do free-lance writing and be on my own, no longer having anything connected to the Americans.”
He had been sent to the United States on a government scholarship to study at Michigan State University in 1954. It was his ruin, for that year was such a triumph, the voyage so long, the new friends and the journalism courses so exciting, that he felt honored. But years later in Saigon, when he was paid about five hundred dollars a month by the Americans, he acted as if some unspoken promise made to him had not been kept. When a small delegation wanted to complain about their wages, he went with them to make a call on Edward J. Nickel, director of the Joint United States Public Affairs Office, but nothing came of it.
“You know how he treated us? He put his shoes on the desk,” Mr. Bao said, meaning the American put his feet up. “We really resented that. Well, he was the boss. We were not well paid at all. If I had worked for The New York Times, I’d have been better paid.”
It was a reproach which I ignored. I had tried using Mr. Bao as a translator before finding Nguyen Ngoc Luong, and knew in the first five minutes it was hopeless. He could not concentrate during an interview. My questions bored or puzzled him, perhaps it was embarrassing for him. Although someone spoke for twenty-five minutes, his translation came out like a tiny coded telegram. Besides, I did not trust Mr. Bao. Saigon was a city that demanded constant suspicion, which grew like a ferocious fungus in a damp cellar covering everything. Spying was encouraged, if not required, by the Vietnamese and the Americans. Some people were paid, others did it because they had no choice.
But there was one interview Mr. Bao and I did early in 1970 with the head of a middle-class family in Saigon. He was a sixty-two-year-old retired civil servant named Nguyen Van Ba, an angelic-looking old man who grumbled that he worked like a “nursemaid” when any of his twelve grandchildren were underfoot. The traffic in Saigon, the noise and the poisonous fumes, discouraged him from leaving his six-room house. At night Mr. Ba turned on a Japanese-made television set and turned to the station of the Armed Forces network to watch The Fugitives and Bonanza. He found both programs most entertaining while never quite catching on to the plot or the dialogue. Afterward the television set was carefully put back into a large carton to protect it from dust or damage. Mr. Ba had three sons—none in combat, all in the army—and a rose garden. He and his wife, who kept talking about high prices, both knew a little of the My Lai massacre although their government ignored the accounts published in the American press. The Thieu government did not want the massacre discussed or reported. It embarrassed the Americans. Besides, it was of no consequence, a cabinet minister had said.
“It may be true and yet it may not be true,” Mr. Ba said. “For reports of such things are often exaggerated.” He saw no reason to reach an opinion about it. Mr. Ba and his wife had also heard about the large numbers of Americans protesting the war but they thought these must be worried mothers.
There were many middle-class Vietnamese, some rich, others not, who did not know much about the war beyond the inflation and the draft and the presence of so many foreigners. They could not imagine what was happening in the villages, what had been done. One reason, of course, was that ordinary Vietnamese could not clamber aboard Army helicopters to go watch the war for a day, as reporters did, or go on operations.
Mr. Bao kept his distance from the war. “We just stayed in Saigon and did not see how the war was going—except through American magazines, Time and Newsweek,” he said that Sunday in Southern California. He did not see the irony of it.
“Why did you ever work for the Americans?” I asked. For his career with them went back to 1951 when he was hired by the United States Information Service in Saigon.
“Because I don’t have any degree from any Vietnamese school, from any Vietnamese university. So I had to find a job to support myself. I passed a test and I was admitted as a junior translator. I kept thinking it was a way to improve my English.” It was.
THEY WENT FROM Saigon to Clark Field in the Philippines, then to Guam for a week, then on to Camp Pendelton in California for a month before an American sponsor was found. At Camp Pendleton, which became a Vietnamese village, it was cold and uncomfortable for them living in a tent with two other families. It made him feel like a prisoner, he said. A Vietnamese friend advised him to try for a sponsor from a church, any church, and to convert if that is what it took. He did.
An American who had been a missionary in Vietnam took the Vietnamese family to a ranch in California where they were housed, fed, clothed and put to work. The chores came as a slight shock to Mr. Bao. “We had to work hard, we become farmers. We cleared the land and planted seeds. All my children have helped. My wife must have planted twenty sunflowers!”
Through the church they found a couple in the small town willing to help them resettle, find housing, get him a job, make dentist and doctor appointments, find church funds for such expenses, get the children into school, and begin to show Mr. Bao and his wife the hang of things. He was given a job as a teacher’s aide in an elementary school. The salary was minuscule but he had a pension from the U.S. government for his years of employment. His wife and the older children do go to church. When we were having lunch, the sponsors came in: a young American couple who were serious and energetic. They often dropped in, as Mr. Bao did not have a telephone or a car. I spoke to the man, who was in his thirties and thought we could have won the war in Vietnam if we had not lost our will. He was disgusted that Lieutenant Calley was tried. It was his opinion that Calley should have wiped out all the Vietnamese at My Lai, yes sir. Mr. Bao paid no attention. He was eating his soup and trying to remember how many books he had left behind in Saigon.
“I am very confused,” Mr. Bao said later. “Even when I sleep I think about returning to Vietnam, but I have no other dreams. Sometimes I dream of returning even for a visit. My wife—well, she wants to lead a simple life with parents and relatives in the Delta. She is from Rach Gia, you know. Even the children say something about missing Saigon.”
But it was too late. There was not much hope at all that the Vietnamese now in this country could get back, I said. Perhaps in twenty years. Be patient. You cannot blame the new leaders for not trusting you.
“We sacrifice everything for the children, my wife and I,” Mr. Bao said, as parents are apt to do. “So that they can decide their own future. We thought that if we stay in Vietnam, the authorities would tell them what to do. At least here they have a chance to do what they want.”
He did not sound convinced of anything. Later he sent me a copy of the letter he wrote to “The Head Librarian, Library of Congress” explaining who he was and what he had lost and asking them to advise him where he could order the works on Tibetan Lamaism and mysticism, particularly those by his favorite writers. “. . . The books I desperately need for my studies,” Mr. Bao wrote.
Before I left I handed over a suitcase of clothes to his wife, thinking the children could use them. But in the walk-in closet there were already so many piles of sweaters, shirts, pants, blouses, pajamas that the shelves were jammed. The older girls were very excited about the walk-in closet. They had never seen so many clothes, in such colors. They did not know of course that the clothes did not do them justice and took away much of their grace and delicacy.
Saying goodbye to Mr. Bao, I warned him that I did not think I could really find a copy for him of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I wished him well but I felt no pity for him, no real interest, no pleasure at the reunion. He was as he had always been.
One thing more: I was having coffee on Third Avenue with a young man who had worked for Newsweek in Vietnam and had not much liked it. He was telling me about his very last trip to Saigon, after the American troops had left in February 1973 and when the press corps became so much smaller. The city was quiet and full of ghosts for him. We talked, as all of us always do, about the Vietnamese, when he asked a question that I had never heard before, and I did not know how to give him the answer he wanted.
“Do they miss us?” he said.
THEIR ELDEST SON, Robert C. Ransom, Jr., died shortly before Mother’s Day in May 1968 in a surgical hospital in Chu Lai eight days after he stepped on a mine in Quang Ngai province. He was a twenty-three-year-old second lieutenant leading a platoon. In such a war, there was nothing unusual about his terrible injuries. The boy, who was always called Mike, was born when his father was in the European Theater of Operations during World War II, a first lieutenant with the OSS attached to the Ninth Army. A telegram was sent to him announcing the birth of his child and namesake on October 2, 1944, which he received in Maastricht, Holland. The Americans in G-2 were working in military headquarters set up in a high school. By coincidence the telegram was delivered to him by a signal officer whom he remembered from Deerfield Academy. He knew of the birth of his son because his wife, Louise, had immediately written him, but his own father, William Ransom, a former president of the American Bar Association and partner in a New York law firm, had pulled strings to have the telegram sent because he thought mail might take forever, and no one in his family was quite sure where the lieutenant was.
Mr. Ransom remembers that telegram, how the words were pasted in little strips on a piece of paper so it looked like a commercial telegram. This one was signed Dwight D. Eisenhower. The language of the message was in the peculiar stilted voice of all Army messages and told him to acknowledge. When he did not, another telegram came asking when acknowledgement from Lieutenant Robert Charlie Ransom could be expected. His middle name is Crawford not Charlie: it was the word used in the military alphabet to designate the letter C. It rather amused the lieutenant to be Robert Charlie. The baby was no more than ten days old when the Eisenhower telegram reached him. When the child was eight months old, the lieutenant was able to come home suddenly on leave, surprising his wife, who was asleep, and seeing the baby at last. Something of the joy of that morning still moves across his face when he speaks of it.
Eight months is such a wonderful age for babies, he said. Mrs. Ransom’s father, a dignified lawyer, felt the celebration so deeply that morning that when they at last sat down for breakfast he poured a little bourbon in their orange juice.
Robert Ransom and his wife were married in September 1942, the day after he graduated from Officers Candidate School. After the war he finished up at Yale Law School, and they had five other sons, naming them Lawrence, Mark, John, Matthew and Daniel.
Mrs. Ransom remembers not just the huge grief caused by the death of Mike, but the anger she and her husband felt, which was not diminished by the reaction of others they knew. “People would come up to say ‘Isn’t it satisfying that he died for his country?’” she said. But they did not believe their son had.
That June the couple went to Dorset, Vermont, where they have a house, to attend the wedding of the daughter of close friends. The minister was the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr., who for some time had been active in the antiwar movement and was encouraging resistance to the draft. She listened to him when he said how much he wished the mothers in America would object to the war, and risk arrest. “He opened a path,” Mrs. Ransom said. On July 3, 1968, she began: chaining herself to a draft resister at an antiwar demonstration at the Whitehall Street Induction Center in New York, taking the risks just as Reverend Coffin hoped she would. At night, on weekends, and whenever he could, her husband started draft counseling to hundreds of young men in Westchester County.
She went to Washington, D.C., to give back the two medals posthumously awarded to her son by the government of South Vietnam. She left them with a letter to Ambassador Bui Diem at the South Vietnamese Embassy, saying it was a tragic irony that her son died to “help perpetuate a regime that has devoted itself to destroying . . . freedom . . .
“We will accept nothing from such a government.”
The couple replied to all the official letters of condolence. Mr. Ransom answered a letter from President Johnson: “Why can it now not stop? Why is it that we ourselves do not have the courage to confess the past errors?” To Congressman Richard Ottinger, he wrote: “It is just not possible for us to believe that our son died in a ‘just cause’ . . . Though we are Republicans, we have voted twice for you and will continue to do so in the belief that you will do everything in your power to oppose the efforts of the Administration to prolong this senseless war.”
When they were first informed that their son was wounded, Mr. Ransom, a high-ranking lawyer for IBM, called everyone who he thought could give them additional information or advice. What he did not know, could not even imagine, was that in those eight days he could have reached the hospital in Chu Lai by taking a commercial flight to Saigon and then Army transport to the 2d Surgical. In World War II, fuel and places on aircraft were not given to civilians seeking their sons; there were no jeeps or helicopters for such a purpose. It did not occur to Mr. Ransom that he could have gone there until long after the death, and then it occurred to him many times. An Army nurse, Captain Connie Schlosser, wrote them that she had cared for their son daily during the last eight days of his life. “I have never written a letter like this before, but then in my six years of nursing I have never met so courageous an individual as your son,” she wrote. Her letter, which reassured them that no mistake in identity had been made, saved the parents from having to open the closed casket. The nurse spent a weekend visiting them in Bronxville.
In April 1973 Louise Ransom and Carl Rogers, a Vietnam veteran who had been in the antiwar movement for many years, joined with others to form a group called Americans for Amnesty. Mr. Ransom backed his wife, as he always had, taking her to places where she was a speaker, writing letters himself, speaking out on the war even when it was not welcomed. They lost some friends—“those on the other side,” Mr. Ransom calls it—and made new ones. In the antiwar movement they were an unusual couple, not because of their age but because of their background and connections, and their assurance.
An energetic and good-natured woman, Louise Ransom graduated from Vassar, class of 1942, an English major who liked creative writing. She has an open, cheerful face with the large blue eyes of a child. But when she speaks about the war and for unconditional amnesty—not for a pardon, which implies guilt—then something happens to the well-dressed and high-spirited woman from Bronxville and an urgent, different person calls out.
They neglected their five children; both admit it and worried, but their sons understood and bear them no ill-will. In January 1974 Mr. Ransom went to South Vietnam with a small group of Americans opposed to the war. It was a short visit, but he took one day for himself in Quang Ngai province and went to the area, described by his son in his letters, to see where the boy had been so hurt. He says he found the place; he knew he did.
“I feel my son’s life was utterly wasted,” Mr. Ransom said on more than one occasion. But neither he nor his wife could bear to think of it as wasted, so this pushed them harder to work more. Mrs. Ransom directs Americans for Amnesty in a tiny, cluttered office where funds are always a problem. It is one of twenty-four national organizations affiliated with the National Council for Universal and Unconditional Amnesty. Over her desk is a sign saying Densister.
THE LETTERS OF Lieutenant Robert C. Ransom, Jr.—United States Army, Company A, 4th Battalion, 3d Infantry, 11th Infantry Brigade—and two citations for the Bronze Star and the Bronze Star with First Oak Leaf Cluster were privately printed by friends of the parents. In his last letter, May 2, 1968, he wrote how much he liked Sergeant Richard Western, who was twenty-one and from Larchmont, New York. The lieutenant had recommended the sergeant for a Silver Star because he had grabbed and thrown back a grenade tossed by an enemy soldier. The lieutenant jokingly suggested that the two mothers meet to talk about their faraway sons. Sergeant Western was killed in action nine days after Lieutenant Ransom died. Mr. Ransom went to that funeral, but his wife could not.
Their other sons were not safe as each year the war grew greedier and needed more men. Their second son, Lawrence, failed his Army physical, to their relief. The third son, Mark, applied for conscientious objector status, was turned down by the draft board without a correct hearing, appealed their decision but was not classified as a C.O. until a year later. Still another son had to register. It was not until the fall of 1971 that the two younger boys were exempted from military service when Congress amended the draft law to provide that the brothers of a combat casualty could not be conscripted.
In August of 1975 the couple went to Montreal for a convention of the American Bar Association’s three-hundred-forty-member house of delegates which determines policy. There was a very brief, heated flare-up on amnesty among the ABA members, who presented two resolutions. Mr. Ransom was denied permission to speak when he failed to get unanimous approval, usually a formality, from the delegates. Another lawyer said it was the first time in his twenty-five years of meetings that he had seen anyone denied the right to talk. When the question of allowing Mr. Ransom to speak was put to a voice vote, half a dozen delegates shouted: “Objection!” The reason was their impatience to cut off the debate on amnesty, not to let it go on. It was not an issue of compelling interest to most of the lawyers.
“They spent a good two hours allowing everyone to talk on resolutions dealing with obscure criminal statutes, but on an issue that’s crucial to all Americans, debate was limited to two minutes,” Mr. Ransom said later.
His wife was furious. She has always been good at writing pointed, clear letters; this one was sent to The Montreal Star.
To the Editor:
I read with interest your coverage of the final session of the House of Delegates of the American Bar Association at which my husband was denied the privilege of speaking in favor of unconditional amnesty for American war resisters.
There is an interesting irony to the juxtaposition of that story with the announcement of the awarding of the ABA’s most prestigious award to Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski. Over thirty years ago my father-in-law received that same award for his contribution to the “search for true and universal justice.”
A further irony is that part of Mr. Jaworski’s citation honored him for his role as prosecutor in the Nuremberg war criminal trials following World War II. Those who created American war policy in Vietnam have received their de facto amnesty, surprisingly without even any reference to the possible application of the Nuremberg principles that Mr. Jaworski helped to formulate. Sad indeed that the leading organization of attorneys and judges in our country will not now even permit debate on the question of amnesty for those who refused to implement those war policies.
My husband would have liked to inform the bar that universal and unconditional amnesty would honor our oldest son, killed in Vietnam in 1968. We are far better qualified to make that judgment than they are.
As we return to New York, we would like to express our appreciation to all those Canadians who have provided the haven for our many American sons that they are denied at home.
The letter was printed without the last paragraph.
The last time I saw her speak, on the stage of the auditorium of Washington Irving High School, she said that the best memorial for the Americans who died would be unconditional and universal amnesty; a memorial for the Vietnamese who died would be the reconstruction of their beautiful country. Amnesty, reconstruction, reconciliation. Then she called out a deserter from the Marine Corps named Austin Hodge who had been on the run for eight years until he gave himself up in February 1976.
“I want all of you to know that my own son did not die in Vietnam because Austin deserted, he died because of the policy of his own government, and it is important that you understand this, that you see us here together tonight.”
She kissed Austin Hodge on the cheek, then again. People cheered and clapped.
The memorials still do not exist. Sometimes, although not often, she finds it hard to keep up the practiced cheerfulness, the necessary optimism. She has become fond of many of the young people in the movement, the deserters and the draft evaders whom she has known. But they all worry her, too, at times, even the most outgoing and stable among them.
“How can a generation continue to struggle, with no victories?” Louise Ransom said. “They’ve known nothing but losing.”
THE LETTER CAME as a surprise; I read it twice, then again. It came from Bruce Payne, a thirty-four-year-old political scientist at Duke University. He had been kind the night of a party at Duke, for I had lost my temper when a professor said his own wife had made a better movie about our involvement in Vietnam than the film Hearts and Minds, which had not affected him very much. The wife—a pale and handsome lady—looked pleased by such puffery, although later I found out her film, shown on television years before, was not brilliant. It hardly mattered. I considered sliding the salad on my plate over the head of the professor, but instead, went to sit in the kitchen. One of the hired cook-dishwashers had just joined the Marine Corps, intended to stay in for life and knew it would work out fine. It was Mr. Payne who finally persuaded me to leave the kitchen when the party was over and the guests had gone. He was a modest man who, when pressed, would tell a few stories about the years in the South in the civil-rights movement, the years in the North in the antiwar movement. The early stories—even his memory of the day he was pulled out of a car by two other white men and beaten—seemed more cheerful than the later ones, for they had a beginning and an end, and even little victories.
“Your friend who thinks Vietnam gave you direction has misunderstood quite a lot,” he wrote, for I had complained to him about the remarks of someone who thought the war had made me a better writer than I might have been. “Vietnam was a dead end for most of our best hopes and purposes, and many of those who worked against the war are casualties. We need to free ourselves of the bitterness, and heal what we can of the hurt—not to forget, but so that we can remember and use the memories and the learning to save lives and strengthen what decency we can find. The aftermath of the war has been like a long and terrible grieving for someone we loved, a crippling kind of grief that is hard to get beyond . . .”
This summer there is no anger, no accusations, no ridicule. Once again the face of Senator Hubert Humphrey is on television and in the newspapers, the eyes nearly always wet, as he whacks out the old and frozen speeches that thaw fast enough. There is no rank smell to him now. He is not the villainous creature he was at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where he found the protesters more of a problem than the war. He is speaking now at another convention of Democrats, spraying the air with his Fourth of July promises: I expect a ghostly yell, an echo, perhaps, of “Dump the Hump”—the terrible shout from Chicago—or some reminder that he was a disgraced man, but no one calls out anything and no one even sees him as a joke. They clap.
“But there has to be forgiveness,” the veteran said. It was a telephone conversation three years ago. The veteran was Bob Mueller. The other person was complaining that the consequences of the war were not being felt by McNamara, by the Bundy brothers, by any of the men on the board of directors.
“Why?”
“Otherwise we’d all go crazy, right?” Mr. Mueller said. It was interesting advice coming from a paraplegic who had been in the Marines, in Vietnam, in demonstrations, in all of it.
A FORMER NAVY pilot in Holt, Georgia, who bombed North and South Vietnam, is not proud of what he did. “It’ll take a pretty good cause to convince me to send my three sons off to the next war, and I’m sure other veterans feel the same way.” Many do not. In Dothan, Alabama, an ex-infantryman does not think the war was worthless. Vietnam is not worming inside him. In a small town in Tennessee, a man who was driver for his battalion’s commanding officer says he wouldn’t have missed being in Vietnam for the world.
“Sure it was a funny war,” he said. “You got all sorts of people that’s come and gone from it. Some of them give their life for the United States in fighting. Some would fight because they believed in it and some wouldn’t spit across the street.” There wasn’t much else to say, he thought.
A woman living in Contra Costa County who wanted to be a revolutionary, who began in the Free Speech Movement in 1964 at the University of California at Berkeley, now grows organic vegetables for herself and is learning to weave. She feels worthwhile making her own spaghetti and bread. In New York a thirty-two-year-old receptionist remembers being in a demonstration against the war at “some fort in New Jersey” but now she feels it was the wrong way to change anything.
“Not with a bayonet at my nose,” she said. “That isn’t me, or my kind of thing. I’m coming from a stronger place now. Revolution is in your head. I don’t believe in that kind of confrontation; you take on some of the characteristics of the aggressor.” A psychologist, all smile and water, says TM helps bad dreams, as if dreams were unnecessary, an impediment to life. Sometimes Luong comes into my dreams; I am always glad to see him there.
A man from Richmond, Virginia, who was too young to have had to worry about the draft, said he was concentrating on his consciousness and how to lift it. “As far as Vietnam is concerned, I went to all the demonstrations, all the peace marches, but I never knew what any of it meant. I kept trying to translate the rhetoric into human terms. I am realizing now that so much of that rhetoric, even on ‘our side,’ is part of the oppressor’s language. It doesn’t translate; you have to look behind it and look somewhere else.”
A draft evader from Ohio who spent six years in exile, and wrote constantly about the war and men and women who defied it, has moved to a small town in Colorado, where he finds it hard going to be a journalist. What he writes is not so useful now. A deserter who gave himself up, after seven years in Sweden and Canada, served a short sentence in prison and now works in a hospital in the Bronx as an orderly. He likes it. Some men feel guilty for avoiding the draft and some are proud because they did not. In Illinois a man with a doctorate in physics said he did not evade military service because he could not bring himself to accept what he saw as the advantage of being middle-class.
“There was also another factor for me: I decided that I could only refuse on moral grounds to perform specific immoral acts, as opposed to the generality of military service, which presumably was not a priori unethical (not being a Quaker). At any rate, my two years in the Army were not unpleasant. I made no terrible sacrifices. I saw no combat. Nevertheless, I have always been proud of what I did. I have also been very reticent about discussing the matter, perhaps because I expect people to think I am a liar or a fool.”
In Washington, D.C., yet another man who might have legitimately avoided the Army went in and for fifteen months worked on Armor Magazine (The Magazine of Mobile Warfare). He feels that the men who avoided the draft “disrupted their lives more significantly than those of us who could not honorably resist and thereby joined.
“Many of those who stayed out continued on in school so long that it has permanently affected their ability to function in society. They are not so much transformed by the Vietnamese experience . . . as stymied, forever unsure of their role in society. In some respects they are true victims of the war.”
I did not see them as victims that strange jellied year I stayed at Harvard, hating it. It was never easy to talk to the students. Many of them were so bright, so curious, so ferociously informed, they knew everything about the war except how it felt to be in it. Nothing could have come as a surprise to them. One day I tried to speak of the war with a few students whom I liked. I did not tell them of the woman hung by her hair to a tree or a burned boy in Saigon, for they were too important. I spoke only of the day, on Highway 13, when Luong and I had tried to get directions to a village from a half dozen Vietnamese resting by the road. He spoke, and then there was silence. He spoke again, still nothing. They would not move their eyes or lift their faces. We were not there. They heard and saw nothing. That was their answer. But the soft little story was an anticlimax to the students who knew of so many cruel things and it made them uncertain about what I was trying to say.
A radical from the sixties insists that huge and fine changes came from the antiwar forces, for he says that now, in 1976, everyone sees Vietnam as a mistake, when ten or eleven years ago such an idea was unthinkable. No one bothers to argue that many people feel the war was lost because the United States did not want to win, but occasionally a voice goes up. In Kentucky a retired admiral, once the chief of chaplains for the Navy and Marine Corps during the war, is now a minister for two tiny rural Baptist churches. The sixty-two-year-old minister would like to see a monument go up in Washington, D.C., with a frieze of grieving or tormented figures and an inscription that reads: “When you send us to war, make sure you give us everything we need to win. Or, don’t send us.” It is the minister’s feeling that the Congress and the President didn’t have the will to win the war or the guts to call it off. It was all for nothing, he said. The one thing the radical and the minister have in common, although they do not know it, is that neither of them believes there will not be another war. Everybody expects one.
FOR A WHILE there was a name for the rage and guilt felt by Vietnam veterans who had been in combat. It was Post-Vietnam Syndrome, or PVS, a label for an incapacitating guilt and anger that the survivors experienced. But in Kansas City a large and affable fellow who still wore his GI boots with the shrapnel hole in one heel didn’t think the PVS stuff was that special. He insisted on calling it Post-Vietnam Struggle, not Syndrome. His name was Randy, he had been a medic with the Wolfhounds, a unit of the 25th Infantry Division. He had gone to Vietnam—not wanting to—because prison seemed much worse.
“I was in Mississippi in 1964 working with SNCC and I had the same situation. When I came back I’d say ‘Wow, wow, man, the dogs jumped on these people and the sheriff’s patrol beat us and blah-blah’ and pretty soon people would say ‘I went to a party last night,’” he said. “You could have the Post-Black Mississippi Struggle or the Post-East Harlem Struggle or the Post-Prison Struggle. It’s being put in a situation you don’t understand and that nobody else you like or relate to can understand either. You say ‘I saw this brain laying there in the dirt and somebody put a cigarette package inside the skull to take a picture’ and people answer ‘I have a date tomorrow’ or ‘I got laid last night . . .’”
He was nonviolent, Randy kept saying. He had not wanted to carry a weapon in Vietnam, but that was a hassle, so he did.
“The first firefight I shot up all the ammunition I had in about three or four minutes. Somebody had to come down and tell me to quit shooting. It’s pretty hard to be Gandhian unless you’ve had a lifetime of training. I fired all the time, I fired at anything.”
He thought he had been a good medic, he always tried his best. Sometimes things went very wrong. Once when the unit called in artillery because they wanted white phosphorus to hit some enemy bunkers, the shells felt short—he said the company that made them probably saved millions of dollars by shorting the powder, an ounce to every shell—and the Willy Peter, as they called it, came in about two hundred yards from their own position.
“One guy caught a great gob of it in the chest and he fell down screaming. I ran over, but I didn’t know whether to shoot him with morphine and let him die happy or try and dig it out with a knife real fast. But it was burning through his chest cavity so fast that with one hand I was trying to scrape it off and with the other hand I was shooting him full of morphine. He kept screaming. The morphine took effect in twenty minutes and he lived about forty minutes.”
In Kansas he was able to get a job with the Head Start program working in different areas with Indians, then migrants, then on career development programs. He worked with the local antiwar groups, he gave speeches and he showed his slides from Vietnam, but there were never any of the American dying. He was always too busy to stop and take pictures when there were American casualties. Or he didn’t feel like it. After a while it became so ordinary to see their own dead that the soldiers stopped seeing them at all and were even able to eat their C-rations not far from corpses, for they had to eat somewhere. One morning in the war he had been out with men minesweeping a road when they discovered some Americans who had been ambushed. The faces of these men had been deformed, although he did not know whether it was done by a machete or an entrenching tool, the military name for a shovel. It was a precaution taken by the VC, he thought. None of the living felt sick or swore revenge.
“Maybe they did it that way to save ammunition; we used to go around and do it with a rifle, making sure everyone was dead,” he said. “We had no reaction. After the first two or three you didn’t pay any attention, unless, of course, it was a friend.”
The dead man he remembered was a Vietnamese who was beginning to stiffen a little. A GI stamped on his hand to open it and then wrapped the fingers around a beer can and raised the dead man, an arm around him, to pose for a photograph. A colonel had seen it, been furious, and said leave that body alone you sadistic son of a bitch.
“But those colonels, they were as much a cause of it as anyone else. They didn’t give you a pass unless you killed so many people—then they came out and gave you hell for doing stuff like that,” he said.
On a trip to Washington, D.C., he had gone to see Congressman Richard Bolling, a powerful Democrat from Kansas City, first elected to the House in 1948, a World War II veteran who for years had been active in national veterans’ groups. The congressman was unmoved by the encounter. “He wasn’t really curt with me, but what he was saying was that I didn’t represent the large majority of veterans. He didn’t want to hear me out. And as far as me having any strength to do anything about the war, I could just go back to Kansas City and forget about it. I guess he was right.”
He was thirty-four years old when he told all this: none of the veterans are young men any more, although it is hard to picture them as old men with wide waists and empty eyes. There had been discouragements, Randy said, the huge changes had seemed close, then not come closer at all, but even the people in the war-against-the-war could not have forgotten all that they learned.
“Look at me, yes, look at me. There is no way I’ll buy the American dream again. I’ve seen what we’ve done to people. I see what we do to people in prisons, I’ve seen it in Vietnam, I’ve seen it in the civil-rights movement. I mean you’re never going to sell me that shit again. That’s all there is to it. There were a lot of people clubbed in Chicago who said the system is all screwed up and who are now driving Cadillacs and working as IBM salesmen. But they had experience, they got some foresight into the system. That’s never going to be purged; it has a carry-over that is never going to be taken away from them.”
Others are not so sure. Again and again there is someone to say we have always been people who dropped the past and then could not remember where it had been put.
AS EACH YEAR goes, the war fades as surely as one of the huge harsh chalk murals on a city wall begins to smudge and lift, so the great lines of it are there only for those who get up very close to look. “What is napalm?” the young man named Gregory asks me. He is a twenty-three-year-old assistant in a publishing house, two years out of Williams, a gentle and well-mannered man. I explain its chemical composition, how it spreads so quickly, how deeply it eats the skin. He listens solemnly. “It certainly sounds like a satanic invention,” he says, looking sad. I report the conversation to a twenty-seven-year-old editor, who says goodness, someone not knowing about napalm makes him suddenly feel quite old.
But the editorial assistant is not so young. It is only the blanks inside him that give him the blameless air of a small boy. He is older than many of the lieutenants in Vietnam, certainly not younger than the demonstrators in Chicago that August week in 1968 who were so easily cut down by the police. The beatings were not just for them, of course; others had their share: some reporters, the campaign workers for Senator Eugene McCarthy from Minnesota, even the people who were standing quietly behind the police barriers in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel watching the protesters across the street in Grant Park. They were the ones pushed through the plate-glass window. The police had tear gas, Mace, clubs, plexiglass face shields and an old-fashioned fury that made them attack like the ideal troops that generals always hope to have. There was also the National Guard, some tanks, two-and-a-half-ton Army trucks and jeeps with thick rectangles of barbed wire in front. The young called them Daley’s Dozers in honor of the Mayor of Chicago who loathed them.
A month after Senator McCarthy lost the nomination to Vice-President Hubert Humphrey—as even his supporters thought he would—he and his wife went to the French Riviera to rest. With them were Howard Stein, finance manager for the campaign and head of Dreyfus Mutual Funds, Mrs. Stein, Mrs. Don Edwards, wife of the California representative, and a songwriter named Bart Howard. The senator was in hiding, but the editors in New York wanted a story soonest, their cables said. I flew to Nice, then went by taxi to a famous French hotel. It was an interview I dreaded, expecting to find all of them saddened and unwilling to speak of the horrors of Chicago. No such thing; they were sitting on a sun deck of a cabana, changing color. The senator was composed, witty, grateful for the sun and briefly interested in a blister on his heel that came from playing tennis.
“The gift of tears is pretty much gone in religion—you see more of it in politicians these days,” he said. “There are the politicians who cry straight. Others just well up but the tears never really come. It’s a great gift, that welling up.”
For a while they joked about what he might have done if he had been elected President. The senator lay on a mat and mumbled, so that unless I bent over, or sat on his legs, it was impossible to hear. He knew it, and said he mumbled so I wouldn’t hear him. I had been afraid that day that he might be so sorrowful I would sink myself, but instead he made all of us laugh. That summer it was the best of gifts.
“It’s been pointed out that we are the first great nation whose military establishment is called the Department of Defense—and if you thought of yourself as always being on the defensive, there was no limit to what you can do. I would have a Department of Offense to keep the Department of Defense busy,” he said, looking for the suntan oil.
That throw-away manner of speaking, the refusal to ever gallop and jump, the ironic epigrams, the elegance of his speech, made some people furious or distraught. They found it almost indecent. He’s not serious, they said. They still do say it.
The police had burst into the rooms of the McCarthy headquarters on the fifteenth floor of the Hilton on August 30. He remembered that some of the kids had been playing bridge; one girl told him later she held a twenty-one-point hand when the attack came, which the senator said was much like the shooting up of a saloon when you had a straight flush. None of this made Mrs. McCarthy smile, as he, perhaps, hoped it would.
His campaign organization was not much but the people in it were great, the senator said. “There were many personal acts of heroism. Just people standing up to”—he groped for a word to describe the police—“those things. There were no riots—there were only the police charges. No one charged the police.”
Sometimes I see him in New York, maybe once or twice a year, and am glad of it. Someone who worked in his campaign said the senator had paid a very high price for opposing the war: a lost career and a divorce. Others are not so sure. He would probably not care for such an assessment himself. One year he worked for a publishing house in New York but did not do much in the way of roping in moneymaking writers. Well, too many books were being published anyway, the senator said, he had done his bit to keep a few more from emerging. Then, at lunch at a good restaurant in the Fifties, he seemed deeply angry at how many old people on Social Security could not manage enough to eat, but he put the anger away and did not speak again of it. The next year, because I had filled in for him at a lecture on women’s rights—I spoke of Cambodia, not the Equal Rights Amendment, to the annoyance of some in the audience—he took me to dinner. First we had drinks, in a huge soft beige living room that had a startling view of the East River, with a woman writer who knew him much better and an Irish poet. We were talking about Libya or California or poetry when he mumbled something. I caught it, for by then I had learned how. He was speaking to no one in particular.
“We should never have gone to Chicago, not with the National Guard there,” he said. “Not when there were those ‘people detainers.’” That was the official name for the jeeps with the barbed-wire plows, the Daley’s Dozers.
I had no idea what suddenly on a winter night reminded him of that week in August six years ago, but perhaps almost everything does.
HE CAME TO Saigon in 1971, on one of many trips, and it was a relief, although at first I hardly knew who he was. The senator from South Dakota was not pompous or confused, not seduced by the military and the helicopter rides, as were so many of the legislators who came whizzing through, wanting to know it all in a day and have a little taste of war. It was a long time before George McGovern spoke of a son-in-law who had been a Marine fighting in the Ia Drang valley in the fall of 1965 and who said it was a war we might not ever win. He is not the sort of man to unroll everything all at once. The week he was in Saigon it was not calm. A terrible explosion blew up a nightclub on Tu-Do Street, just down the block from the Hotel Caravelle, and it occurred to me that the palace would not have been too sad if the senator had been inside it that night. His views on the war were well-known to the South Vietnamese government. When a most secret meeting was arranged in a room in a church for Senator McGovern to meet a few Vietnamese who opposed the Thieu government and wanted an end to the war, too many of them came. It was hardly a surprise when the Saigon police plunged in, caused panic, made some arrests and broke the meeting up. The police chief later said the senator had been meeting with the Viet Cong—which was untrue—and the senator demanded an apology, which of course never came. I was glad to see him go before he was hurt. To be that suspicious was a sign of health, not madness, in that city that year.
Afterward, when it seemed like ten years but was not more than two, Senator McGovern talked about losing the election to Richard Nixon. It puzzled him why so many intelligent people still said that Richard Nixon was good in foreign affairs.
“I don’t consider it a great foreign policy record,” the senator said. “You know, it’s like a deathbed confession by a gangster. You don’t say this man had a marvelous life of purity when at the last hour he gets right.”
He thought the next three and a half years under President Nixon were going to be unhappy ones; he was never a man to overstate.
“I was asking the people to recognize the war as a mistake and to learn the lesson so that we wouldn’t repeat it. President Nixon wanted it interpreted as a glorious venture which we were justified in undertaking and that we therefore must not end on any terms except victory or glory. That required no humiliation.”
He had waited until the spring of 1965 to speak to the new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, about the bombing of North Vietnam, and the conversation was so bizarre he remembered it word for word. The senator said he began respectfully by asking the President if he did not see the dangers in the bombing. Senator McGovern put his case firmly but in his courtly, pleasant way.
“I said ‘If the bombing is pressed to a certain point, one or two things could happen. First, you’d get major land movements from the North Vietnamese. Since they don’t have air power, they may respond on the ground. My understanding is that they have only a handful of troops in the south, but if we start bombing, they have an army of three or four hundred thousand men and they may commit a major part of it to the fighting in the south. Or the Chinese may enter the war.’
“The President said ‘I’m watching that very closely. I’m going up her leg an inch at a time . . . I’ll get to the snatch before they know what’s happening, you see.’ I said ‘Well, Mr. President, sometimes when you start that kind of thing you get slapped.’ He said ‘I’m aware of that.’”
The last time Senator McGovern saw him was during his own presidential campaign when he went to the LBJ ranch near Austin, Texas, to confer with President Johnson, who had been out of office for four years. The meeting shocked many of his supporters, who saw President Johnson as a warmonger.
“He said ‘I thought you were as crazy as hell in your opposition to our efforts in Vietnam and I still do. I suppose you haven’t changed either, so there’s no point in getting into that.’ So we never discussed the war at all. I was there for four hours. He spent most of the time giving us political advice. He said he had heard I didn’t like to use the telephone but, he said, ‘nevertheless, you should discipline yourself to do that.’ He said he had done it for John Kennedy when he was his running mate in 1960 and it was a great help in the campaign. He also urged me to talk about my love for America, he didn’t think it was coming across as well as it should in public statements . . . I really do love this country and that didn’t require any act on my part, that’s one of the reasons I hated this war because I love this country.”
He was able to conceal his sadness that summer; for a few months the clarity of his defeat—being crushed in the 1972 election, as everyone put it—had made him a weary and brooding man. He recovered.
“What do you regret most in your political career?”
He did not mention the disastrous choice of Senator Thomas Eagleton as Vice-President, whose concealed history of treatment for mental illness became public and required his being dropped from the ticket. He did not mention losing anything for himself.
“I regret voting for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It angers me that it was used as justification for accelerating the war. No one would have voted for it if we had been told that is what it was for.”
There was heavy mail long after his defeat, as if people had no one else to whom they could turn. “My heart aches for you because you lost the election and that crumb Nixon is still in power,” Mr. Michael J.P. Gorman of Clarksburg, Massachusetts, wrote.
I’m a Vietnam veteran. I got shot in that miserable war making Viet Nam safe from Viet Namese. How the hell can those creeps in the White House want to cut my pension after they were so damn willing to send me there. Mr. McGovern I can’t work because I can’t walk. I’m not very educated and I need my pension to survive. Please don’t let the Nixon lackies take the bread off my table. Jesus don’t I rate something for my sacrifice? A sacrifice I didn’t give willingly. I was drafted, I didn’t say “send me to Nam and get me shot.”
I’m in bad shape, but friends of mine like Bill Decotean, he’s got brain damage and a left hand like a lobster’s claw, he can’t sleep nights cause he sees the dead he killed haunting him. That’s his gift from Viet Nam. Russ Roulier has an arm like a pendulem. It just hangs on his shoulder. How can he work? We’re just people without college degrees, sons of factory workers, we fought that crumby war and got shot up in it. Don’t let them cut our pensions. They’ve already cut our dreams and hopes.
In Clarksburg, Mr. Gorman said he was no great writer but he had always liked English lit. His life after high school had been so strange. He had gone to vocational school to stay out of the draft; he worked part time as a welder and went to school, then he transferred to North Adams State to major in English but the math and science courses bored him and he quit before he failed. For eight weeks he stuffed feathers into sleeping bags and then the Army had him. He was trained as a single turbine utility helicopter mechanic, then because his eyesight was so good he had a second Military Occupational Speciality as a door gunner.
“When I was young I could always run further and run faster and swim longer than other people,” Mr. Gorman said. He wasn’t tall, he said, he had only been five foot six, so that meant he couldn’t go in for basketball of course. In the wheelchair he looked no special size. Sometimes muscle spasms made him have to shift his weight for relief.
“I don’t blame the North Vietnamese, I blame the United States government. I like the North Vietnamese better that the South Vietnamese. And that’s the honest-to-God truth. We were afraid of the North Vietnamese, we respected them. They would never run away from you. Boy, they were brave. The VC were good at laying ambushes, and that was about it.”
He saw the face of the man who shot him. That day the AK-47 bullets hitting the helicopter sounded like bees coming at him. He was in the left side of the ship, firing, when he saw the soldier in the pith helmet crouching down in the clearing, firing right at him.
“We were only about forty to fifty feet off the ground, what we used to call ‘low and slow,’ no better than forty or fifty knots, when the major said ‘Gorman, there’s a spot of gooks down there.’ I saw them before he did. I started shooting and they moved. Except for this one guy who just crouched in the middle of the clearing. I was trying to hit him, he was trying to hit me. We were almost on top of each other. And then my gun, the M-60, jammed, because it was double-springed, I know that’s the reason. I bent over to cock it, then I could see the twinkle of his rifle, the muzzle flash.”
In the hospitals in Vietnam he had been bothered a lot by some of the other patients. One man next to him had been shot in his vocal cords; all he could do was make a small, squeaking sound. He couldn’t be comfortable lying down or sitting up. He made those little squeaks all the time, Mr. Gorman said, he must have felt like he was suffocating all the time.
Much later, in a V.A. hospital, he had an unforgettable friend in the bed next to him, a man he loved whose name he never knew how to spell. He was a young psychiatrist who was dying of encephalitis. It was the only psychiatrist he ever talked to; no such treatment was provided.
“Ah, he was such a nice guy,” Mr. Gorman said. “Doc Melofski, what an intelligent man. When the people in the wards used to get on my back—they’d say you’re not doing enough—he had a saying for me—and was it true. The people in the wards were just people hired off the streets; they didn’t have any training. They were always on you, they used to keep at you, telling you what you could do if you really felt like it. In other words, they were saying you were malingering. Doc Melofski would say, ‘Everybody knows how to be a paraplegic, don’t they.’”
The young asked him questions because they were curious, Mr. Gorman said, and it was okay, he said he had been shot. Sometimes older people wanted to know his story, but then they didn’t let it go, sometimes they began acting very chummy, which he said he hated, it drove him nuts. People will always be kind, I said. He smiled and knew exactly what that meant.