Just As I Thought (9 page)

“Humans out of the way, here come the Progressive American People, to view the insanity of their countrymen. Let them deal with this disgust and shame.”

South—past the Ham Rong Bridge, near Thanh Hoa—another pilot said, “What? It’s still standing?” Yes, standing—trucks, cars, bikes move over it continuously. We note its twisted girders shot with holes.

The Ham Rong Bridge, the pride of the defenders of Thanh Hoa, was the last bridge we saw that withstood the bombing. As we moved farther south along the road, the American intention was clear. The first order was to kill the bridges and destroy transportation. On the reconnaissance maps, a bridge was a bridge in some head, so for a couple of miles every river looked as though maniacs had been let loose by a fool. Hundreds and hundreds of bomb craters—whether the river (and bridge) was 2 feet wide or 1,000 feet wide. The next day, at whatever the small cost—$100 at most—a few planks restored traffic over the mountain streams. The craters—at a couple of thousand per bomb—cost the American taxpayer close to one million dollars.

The larger bridges were more of a problem, but we saw the remains of half a dozen bridges at some rivers. And the repairs varied—on occasion, bound bamboo pontoons; often the riverbed was raised with stones and we drove hubcap-deep across the river. But all along the roads piles of stones were prepared for the next attack of the madmen. Gangs of young girls working and boys, too—all of them, for no good reason, cheery and unbelieving at the sight of us.

Wherever we went, people said—greeting us hospitably, to put us at ease, guessing our shame—“We distinguish between the American imperialist war maker and the American people.” The child in the street believes this. “It’s not so hard to explain,” Dang Thai Mai, a writer, one of our hosts, said. “After all, General Giap and Diem come from Quangbinh—from the same district.”

Okay. So. Trying to be a logical American, I or we think, Well, of course it’s a war and they are bombing communication, transportation. It’s true, they are overkilling the Vietnamese countryside and the little brooks, but that’s America for you, they have overkilled flies, bugs, beetles, trees, fish, rivers, the flowers of their own American fields. They’re like overgrown kids who lean on a buddy in kindergarten and kill him.

Then we leave National Highway 1 and move into the villages to live for a few days in a guest house in a small field, which before we left was plowed, manured, and planted with groundnuts up to our door. I guess they expected no immediate guests. The villages. The village Trung Trach was in the Land of Fire. Mr. Tat said, “The Land of Fire for three reasons: first, the fire of the burning heat; second, the fire of continuous
day and night
American bombardment for three years, so that people never left their tunnels; and third, the fires of resistance that burned in the heart of the people.”

In all of Quangbinh province, not one brick house stood. This is true of the cities on the main road, too. Hoxa, the beautiful city—there’s nothing there—grass—some doorsteps. People in Hanoi asked in nostalgic pride, “Did you see Hoxa?” Donghoi—a city of 30,000—something like pictures of Pompeii. A city shaped like New York with its nose in the water, a great outdoor theater whose terraced seats remain, a magnificent blasted Catholic church (the French, in their war, spared the churches). Nobody lives in Donghoi. These cities will not be rebuilt until the Americans leave Vietnam. In the hills a new Donghoi will be built.

I return to the villages. The village Nien Trach Nuc Ninh, Trung Trach, and the village T and D in Vinh Linh Zone at the DMZ. It turned out that these villages far off the roads and highways were military targets, too. Each village had a House of Tradition, which kept the artifacts of other victories—the weapons with which they’d fought the French, Japanese, Chinese. Also deactivated CBUs, pellet bombs in one village, the belongings of the pilot Dixon, who is buried near the sea—with a cross over his grave—in case his mother should want to come see it after the war. It was in the bombed-out blasted torn-up villages where the entire population had been driven underground to live in tunnels for three years, to suffer in underground hospitals, to study in underground schools. It was into these villages that pilots floated or tumbled out of burning planes.

It’s a people’s war. The Army and the people are interchangeable in many cases. The Army sometimes works on the roads, the people in the self-defense units: the girls’ militia, the old men’s militia in the villages take to the artillery, to their rifles, to anything handy. The villages are bombed, restored in mud and thatch, to cultivate the land, to make paths between the craters which in one village had become duck ponds, fisheries, and irrigation sources. Water spinach, a wonderful vegetable, was planted in some. They could do this because nobody left the land or ran from the Land of Fire. They dug underground and lived in the rooms we saw, and crawled on hands and knees to other rooms and exits through supported tunnels—as we did. The people said, We could not have held out if we hadn’t, in these tunnels, been able to lead a normal life. Normal life is very important, family life, children’s education, care of the sick and old, rice cultivation—along with the resistance.” Threads were pulled, but the cloth of life mysteriously held. They are naturally proud to have held the greatest power in the world at bay.

I think they hide the cost—they did not, except in two or three cases, introduce us to the severely wounded or ill. The people we saw looked well after six, seven months of no bombing—or very little. The children, hundreds and hundreds, looked well. We did not visit hospitals. Bach Mai was bombed six months later.

So this is what we saw there: the destruction of the cities, roads, the bridges, and finally the villages. Some people do not like the word “genocide” and we will leave the word alone; still, in this kind of war, every person takes part, and the next thing a logical military brain hooks into is the fact that every person is a military target, or the mother of a military target, and they live in the same house; and since all military targets must be destroyed, it follows that the whole people must be destroyed. And that is what I think was attempted and that is what was absolutely thwarted.

The prisoners. The American war prisoners. This is what we were told about their treatment. When they first fall to the Vietnamese fields or dikes (which they’ve just bombed), they are taken into the care of the militia or self-defense unit, sometimes a couple of girls or a boy or two of sixteen. No abuse is permitted, and in only one case of seven men we talked to was any attempted.

One of the reasons Captain Wesley Rumble was so sick on the airplane on our return is that the Army doctors loaded him and his stomach was filled with Darvon and Librium for his worries. From what he told us, he was used to traditional Vietnamese medicines for stomach ailments.

The third fact that emerged from our conversations with these men was the adequacy of the food. Almost all said that they were fed more than their guards—the Vietnamese think the Americans have large frames which must be served. The truth is, the men lost a tremendous amount of weight in the one to three years of imprisonment. The diet is mostly vegetable soup, with a little pork on occasion, and bread and some rice. Monotonous to an American but adequate. On a more varied Vietnamese diet, in three weeks we all lost weight. I lost eleven pounds.

Now, the Vietnamese say they release these men from time to time, as an act in their own humanitarian tradition. They
still
consider these Americans war criminals. They
hope
that some repentance has set in. They bring them news of the world, through occasional radios and books. The Americans all asked questions that showed they were somewhat informed but not well. I wish they could see more American periodicals or papers. The statements of congressmen and the tremendous feeling against the war, as reported in our own establishment press, would be more useful as propaganda. The pilots are sometimes taken to the places they bombed, so they can see the land and the people—who seem only to be things when viewed at 650 miles an hour from a height of thousands of feet.

The three prisoners we brought home were taken to the museums in Hanoi and to the zoo before they left with us.

There’s no time and I want to tell two or three things about the prisoners. They said many things I haven’t sorted out yet—some of which horrified us, such as, “To be truthful I really liked bombing.” I don’t understand this remark, and for now I don’t intend to. “I wish I’d met you people in ’66”—the same man. “I went into this a military man and that’s how I’m coming out.”

Talking to another Vietnamese military man, one who worked with the prisoners, I said, “You release these men and many of them may make bad propaganda. They say one thing to you, then another thing later on radio or television.” “That’s all right,” he said. “We know they have terrible pressure from the American Army and Navy, but they know the truth.” I press forward, because I’m anxious: “Yes, you feel close to them, but they may not say what they feel.” He says, “That’s all right. We know it. They will go out and say something on radio, they will say something on TV bad, but at night they will go home and they will whisper the truth to their wife.”

—1969

Everybody Tells the Truth

Why did we older people waste time answering the ones who said, Who are you, you middle-aged do-gooders, to tell some kid he’s better off in jail? We could have saved not only Bruce Anello
¹
but the Vietnamese peasant he shot, who ran ahead of him across the field holding his ripped guts. We didn’t work resistance hard enough. We didn’t breathe with the hundreds of Vietnamese who would live if one American with his arms full of technology chose not to kill.

Now the dead and the living are telling us about the war. No matter whose side they’re on, they tell the truth. When Lieutenant Robert Frishman, Navy airman, returned POW, runs around the country crying, “I was tortured, I was tortured,” it is certainly true. He fell out of a plane from a great height. His elbow, with which he might have been a great warrior (and still may become an administrative admiral), was shattered. He is a tall, bossy person, and he was at the tough call of small, yellowish people, some no higher than his hip. He had to wear a collarless gown and pajama pants like hospital patients he may have remembered. No brass buttons on this nightie, no cuffs, no neck buttons or tie to hold his throat, no way of being himself. When on his way home he cried out, tears included, to the State Department official, “I’m a military man, I’ve got to have my uniform,” it was ordered at the Tel Aviv airport and practically stood by itself, waiting in Athens a couple of hours later, along with an assortment of naval attachés, old pals who understood.

In Vietnam he told us, “You know, compared to the Vietnamese, we pilots are living high on the hog … We eat better than the guards.” Over an American steak, back home at last, it seemed to him he must have been starving, and that was true. In Vietnam he told Captain Than (who happily and innocently reported this to us) that he would “go home and work as a teacher, go deep into the study of social science, there is a need, biology, too.” He spoke the truth; but he was being tortured. His brains were being washed, as they say in Central Intelligence, and it hurt. Thinking of the New Man they hoped to create someday, the Vietnamese were trying to turn Lieutenant Frishman into a useful citizen, which for him would be a 180-degree turn. In pain his mouth seized a couple of social options. But within four days, among his very own (I mean, me, Rennie Davis, Jimmy Johnson, Linda Evans, and the Newsreel gang—the delegation which had gone to North Vietnam to return the POWs to the United States), he began his cry—well, chant—which was “I came into this a military man, and I’m going out a military man.”

Before we left the little Hanoi–Vientiane plane for the American world just outside Vietnam, all sorts of naval and U.S. state power climbed aboard, beefy, cheery in ordinary suits and summer mufti. Lieutenant Robert Frishman, former prisoner of the Vietnamese, new prisoner of the Americans, in a paroxysm of painful saluting said, “Sir! Sir! I have not been debriefed. When will you debrief me? I haven’t said anything, sir. I won’t talk until I’ve been debriefed.” I am ashamed to say that I laughed at this fit before authority and saw the cocky, joyful meaning of my own pacifist anarchism. Still, I knew that his words proceeded from a head that had been nearly turned (tortured) and was turning back in pain.

Where had he bombed? He came down near Hanoi in the black flak he had dropped on the steel bridge at Thanh Hoa a number of times. He couldn’t believe it was still standing. Though on the mountain not too far away it said in white stones, as large as a plane can see,
DETERMINED TO WIN
.

There were five other POWs we met in Hanoi in August ’69. I want to tell who they were, where they came down, what their target areas looked like when they were finished. They made a few remarks to us when we talked about their first crash—contacts with the Vietnamese people. These are fairly verbatim—somewhat staccato, because my shorthand left out a lot of connective tissue in order to get the verbs and nouns right.

Most of them flew F105s out of the American sanctuary in Thailand; others, off carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin.

The first man is Robinson Reisner, Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Air Force, shot down September 1965, ten miles north of Thanh Hoa.

“Down 16th September, 9:00 a.m. Had not reached target, treetops, to get away from fire. Saw smoke tracers, airplane received jolts, cockpit filled with smoke, only had time to get out. When I looked, plane hit ground burning. I landed on paddy wall. Jumped down, ligaments tore, rolled in rice field on shoulder … had drawn pistol, nearly fatal mistake. Looked around, saw civilians and military militia. Young man, a boy, ordered me to drop gun, raise hands. Obeyed order. Pleasant surprise. I was not abused, not manhandled. This was remarkable. We had dealt them a lot of misery. Heavy-hit people, they had right to intense feeling against me. They tied my arms, grimaced because of tight ropes. Man loosened them. A comfort … they weren’t interested in abusing me, I started to learn. They led me to a hamlet courtyard. I took bath, washed, clean clothes. Food, tea next day. I was sick, shock, pain, back and knees. Wanted to give me rice. Doctor came, inoculation, treated wounds and pain. People came to look, no one threatening, raised voices. Strange behavior on part of people I had just been bombing. Acts of discipline. Seeing my discomfort, they raised my head. Just an act of kindness. Different.”