'...different pieces of ground told different stories to different people. We also knew that for years now there had been no country here but the war.'
Dispatches, Michael Herr.
I've not known where to start with this. Picking up my notebook and pen numerous times, carrying them to the nearest bar or coffee shop, ordering a beer or a banana shake, expectantly holding pen above paper, and then promptly placing it down again on the table, unsatisfied with what I was about to write. I would then sit in contemplative quiet for 5 minutes before giving up all together, striking up conversation with whichever hapless soul was unwittingly sat at the table adjacent to mine - it's not like being in London, here you can talk to strangers uninvited without them assuming you've just escaped from Broadhurst.
At first I had delayed writing about this because I didn't understand it properly. The more internet research I did, the more books I read, the more people I questioned, the less I could grasp the situation. More information only made me more confused. Also I was reluctant to write anything until I was properly versed on the subject. The whole topic is already so frustratingly marred with misconception, red herrings and emotive historical rewritings that I was adamant my writing should not simply add to the mass of biased entanglement which exists on the subject. I'm talking of course, about the Vietnam War.
In the three weeks we have spent moving North from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, I have observed an obvious and marked change in attitude towards the country's history. This wasn't a huge surprise given that American involvement was initiated by the Northern Communist government changing it's policy of 'political struggle' to 'armed struggle' to the Catholic South in 1960. The country was split in two, battle lines were drawn at the Ben Hai River and the remnants of this North/South civil war can still be very much detected in the way in which Vietnamese people discuss their past. On a trip around the De-Militarized Zone of the Ben Hai River a tour guide from the North told me, with a Rictus grin fixed unnaturally on her face, 'Now we are all one Communist country!'. For the sincerity of it she may as well have said 'we are all one big happy family!'. People in the South have whisperingly confided in me that despite the prominent Capitalist ethos of a country full of business minded, money focused, entrepreneurs in the making, Communism still casts an ugly shadow. The government allows the people to go through the rigmarole of voting for local leadership at election in the pretence of democracy but the decisions have already been made. The ballot boxes are a cursory distraction from the autocratic state rule. The only way I could think to accurately tell you about the multitude of suffering on all sides, the devastation to life and freedom for all who were here between 1963 and 1975, is to offer you the testimonies of six different faces which have stayed with me. Faces which illustrate this war and cover a broad enough spectrum of experience so as not to colour your opinion with bias. It's going to be a long one, and I imagine you might get bored and want to give up halfway through, but three faces will only mislead you, so either stop now, or read to the end.
The first of these faces is Stefan, one of our Easy Rider drivers in Dalat. During the war years Stefan fought in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam alongside the American, South Korean, Australian and New Zealanders that were deployed here. When the war ended in 1975, the Northern government stormed the gates of what was the parliament building in Saigon, what is now named Reunification Palace, and the last American troops escaped from the roof of the building by helicopter. Men who had been fighting for the ARVN, their families, and indeed anyone who was suspected of being a supporter of the Republic, were imprisoned in re-education camps. Stefan was among these captives. From 1975 until 1977 he was held in detention in a makeshift cell with 80 other men with no promise of trial, escape or release and subjected to water torture on a daily basis in an attempt to institutionalise him to the Communist regime. For America, for the Northern troops, for the historians and for the worldwide press, the war was over, but still innocents were silently incarcerated. Stefan was one of the lucky ones, in 1977 he was driven into the countryside and allowed to walk home to his family - no concrete case or evidence could be brought against him, many more of his former cellmates were executed by firing squad. Erased from history, unrecorded, missing in action, taken for revenge after the world declared peace in Vietnam. When Stefan was telling me all this he mimicked being blindfolded and shooting a gun and said 'they kill them, they kill them.' I said the word 'executed' and he took a notebook from his top pocket, scribbled the word down, thanked me for helping to improve his English and said 'I never forget this word now, I not forget it.' No, I bet he won't.
Andrew X. Pham, the writer of Catfish and Mandala, was a 7 year old Vietnamese boy living in Saigon during the war years, and he is my second face. When the Viet Cong (Communist guerrilla army) had taken the South, his parents made the decision to evacuate the family by boat to America. His father had been the director of an anti VC propaganda movement meaning that after 1975 it was obviously too dangerous for him to stay. Catfish and Mandala is Pham's memoir of his travels around Vietnam by bicycle, 20 years later, in search of his broken heritage. He recalls a time when after 18 months in America he shouted at his teacher in a history lesson over the way in which the Vietnam War was being taught, 'America left Vietnam. America not finish war. One more day bombing, Viet Cong die. One more day! No. America go home! America chicken!'. So many wanted them gone, and yes, they should never have been here at all, but for some, their departure was the hardest blow to bear. It signalled abandonment and defeat, waving the white flag to a war that was never theirs to surrender and leaving others to deal with the consequences after they had made their escape.
Of course though, there is no escaping the fact of the damage American troops did throughout their occupation. Ella and I visited Hoa Lo Prison in Hanoi this morning, the jail where captured American POW's were held, amongst them the former presidential candidate John McCain. There is a proudly displayed photograph of him being dragged from a river by a group of VC troops after his plane was shot down. There was also video footage of the bombing to the North of the country. There were no targets, everything and everyone was fair game - schools, residential areas, markets, temples - by the climax of the war the G.I.'s had become so trigger happy that all men, women and children who crossed American paths became bullet fodder. 'If it looks VC, it is VC. Shoot it', a line I picked up somewhere on my reading. My third unforgettable face is a North Vietnamese woman from the video at the prison. The camera sticks to her as she frantically searches for her baby through the rubble of what was a nursery building. Cutting her hands on the concrete, black from ash, breaking her back from the work and barely able to see through her tears, the camera is still rolling when she unearths the lifeless body of her little boy, no more than 3 years old. She screams with a sound more animal than human, throws herself over him, and the camera pans away as she lies heaving with sobs in the dirt next to her dead child. Ella left the room at this point, and I know she won't mind me telling you that later she realised 'that was the first time I've cried in 2 months.'
On our tour of the De-Militarized Zone we were taken to the Vinh Moc Tunnels. This area, just on the Northern border of the Ben Hai River, endured endless years of American gunfire given the positioning of a G.I. base on the other side of the water. Rather than move from their land into dangerous jungle territory strewn with chemicals and landmines the community dug a network of tunnels, and 300 people spent 6 years living in the dark, dank, humidity of it. This became common practice around the countryside in the highland provinces, by 1973 there were 10,000 North Vietnamese living underground. We went down in to the tunnels and were led around with torches for 30 minutes or so and let me make this very clear - I am not afraid of the dark or of creepy crawlies, and I am not claustrophobic, but offered the prospect of 6 years down there I can honestly say that I would have run to the surface and taken as many bullets as they could fill me with. In the museum connected to the tunnels there was a photo of a smiling little girl who had lived in this community, 17 babies were born underground and she had been one of them. Embarrassingly I cannot remember her name and did not think to write it down at the time but learnt that she later grew up to write about her experiences. A quote under her photograph read 'My childhood, what have I got? It is the ground that I lie on and the tunnel that I walk in.' She is my fourth face that just will not go away.
I picked up a book the other day which I'd been hunting for since we arrived here. After some amiable bartering the street seller who sold it to me told me that I was his last customer of the day, which would give me good luck. Someone told me this when I was their first customer the other morning but I've found it's best not to argue logic with Buddhists, wonderfully they have zero frame of reference for it. Anyway, I was overwhelmed and unconvinced by the 3 weeks of anti American propaganda I had swallowed at every corner of our journey in Vietnam. The War Remnants Museum in Saigon, although unquestionably informative, heartbreaking, and for the most part, depressingly accurate, still looks like an A to Z historical manifesto of why America is the Devil. The Communist-run museum believes firmly in the principals of black and white: Viet Cong = good, America = very, very bad. The problem I had when walking around there is that I knew this was not the whole truth, there is no black and white, everything about this was was grey. So I bought Dispatches. An incredible book by the war correspondent and journalist Michael Herr, it gives an account of his time spent with American soldiers at ground level during the war. He writes that before going out on night patrols the medics would give the soldiers pills. Amphetamines to hype them up, blur reality, clear their vision and intensify every sound. Like little boys carrying plastic guns fighting in a computer game world, they would run through the jungle in the darkness high as kites looking for people to shoot at. They were attempting, I suppose, to make it less real for them, so that they could kill without the messy interruptions of conscience and independent thought. The American army destroyed these young men, pumping them with drugs, placing them in situations of unimaginable gore and bloodshed, forcing them to become interrogators and torturers and then wondering why so many found it hard to readjust on returning to the comforts of home.
Herr recalls, 'I knew one 4th Division Lurp who took his pills by the fistful, downs from the left pocket of his tiger suit and ups from the right, one to cut the trail for him and the other to send him down it... In the coming hours he'd stand as faceless and quiet in the jungle as a fallen tree, and God help his opposite numbers unless they had at least half a squad along, he was a good killer, one of our best.' This man, my fifth face, was sent mad by all he saw. Herr writes that on his return, this nameless soldier 'couldn't hack it in the real world.' He would sit all day in his bedroom at his parents' house pointing a rifle out the window, training it on people and cars that passed by. He was forever frozen to that time, the perfect student of all he had been taught, distrusting of everyone but his gun and permanently on patrol. And he can't have been the only one can he.
If you are still with me, thank you for your patience and interest, we are nearly there. At the War Remnants Museum they have a section on the victims of Agent Orange. One of the many, and if not the most heinous war crimes committed by the Americans was the dissemination of this herbicidal acidic poison. Spread across vast areas of jungle as well as populated land the aim was to create deforestation thereby minimising the VC's opportunity for ambush, as well as for outright chemical warfare - infecting all who came in to contact with it. Vietnam is strewn with beggars who are disformed, disfigured and missing limbs, these are the descendants of this crime, generations of disabled babies born to people who encountered the chemical. One photo in the museum is of a South Korean veteran, his arms near paralysed and contorted behind his back.
I have left him until last, face and body number six, because his quote underneath the photo summed up everything for me. It made me understand why I couldn't understand. Nothing is as clear as right and wrong, there were no pantomime baddies or dashing goodies, nobody won, everyone lost. However inadequate it may be this is the only truthful conclusion I can make from looking in to the eyes of these six faces, as I do, day and night, night and day. His quote read, 'What am I? Not a hero nor a criminal, but a victim of the history.'
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