My Life So Far (52 page)

I am taken to another major dike in Nam Sach on the Kinh Thay River that was completely severed a few days before. Repair work is dangerous because of unexploded bombs. People in the province are preparing for the worst. I’m told everyone has a boat, that the top floors and roofs of homes have been reinforced, and that research is being done on crops that grow underwater.

A sulphur butterfly is resting on the lip of a bomb crater. Little things.

W
hen I get back to Hanoi I make a radio broadcast about what I saw:

I
am driven south to the village of Nam Dinh, which had fifty bombs dropped on it on June 18, a raid that destroyed about 60 percent of the hamlet. People are hard at work rebuilding their homes, but Quoc says that the area is bombed almost daily. The Cuban ambassador in Hanoi told me the other day that a dozen or more Cubans, accustomed to working in the fields with the Vietnamese, collapsed after three hours of packing the earth into a dike. Maybe they should have drunk some chrysanthemum-root tea.

W
e are driving back to Hanoi down a tree-lined country road, past rice fields and hamlets. The driver suddenly stops the car and speaks urgently to Quoc in Vietnamese. “Quick,” Quoc says, “there’s a raid coming!” I hear nothing, but then my ears haven’t been trained as theirs have in endless war.

Quoc makes me get out of the car and tells me to immediately get down into one of the “manholes” that line the road. These holes are everywhere in North Vietnam, dug into the sides of roads every fifty feet or so, each big enough for one person. In the cities, they are made of concrete and have concrete lids; in the countryside they are simply holes in the ground and the lids are made with thickly woven straw to protect people from the dreaded fragmentation pellets.

I am not yet able to run fast but am doing my best when suddenly I am grabbed from behind by a young Vietnamese girl with some books wrapped in a rubber belt slung over her shoulder. She pulls me down the road after her and motions for me to get into a hole directly in front of a thatched-roof house. No sooner have I climbed in than she wedges herself in with me, quickly covering us with the straw lid. This manhole is meant for one (small) Vietnamese body. But here we are, she and I, our bodies crushed together. One of her arms is around my waist; my hands are around her shoulders, my elbows pinned to my sides. Within seconds the ground begins vibrating with the noise of the bomber overhead, then
thud,
and another
thud,
and severe tremors that I assume come from bombs landing. It seems close, though it’s hard to be certain. Then silence. The girl’s cheek is pressed against mine. I can feel her eyelashes and her warm breath.
This cannot be happening. I am not jammed in a hole with a Vietnamese girl who has helped me escape American bombs. I know I am going to wake up and this will have been a dream.

Instead I hear Quoc shouting to me that it is safe to come out (there are no sirens in the countryside). Then I feel the sun, warm on my head, as the girl moves the lid aside and climbs out. I see her little pile of schoolbooks with the black rubber belt around it sitting by the edge of the hole where she’d dropped it. Quoc helps me out. In the far distance I see plumes of smoke that tell me the bombs have not dropped as close to us as I thought.

I begin to cry, saying over and over to the girl, “I’m sorry, oh, I am so sorry, I’m so sorry.” She stops me and begins speaking to me in Vietnamese, not angry, very calm. Quoc translates: “You shouldn’t cry for us. We know why we are fighting. The sadness should be for your country, your soldiers. They don’t know why they are fighting us.” I stare at her. She looks back, right into my eyes. Solid. Certain.

I have thought about this experience many times over the last thirty years. Out of the blue some schoolgirl gives me this foxhole analysis about the war being our problem, not theirs? Unbelievable as it may seem, it really happened—and it could not have been staged. There was no way to know that our car would have to stop when it did because of the air raid, no way to have planted that girl right then.

A
s we drive back to Hanoi, I am wondering if Vietnam isn’t some petri dish where God is developing a new, more evolved species of being. I am, as Daniel Berrigan once said about himself and all resisters, afflicted beyond remedy with idealism and glad of it. But I will soon discover that the extraordinary personal experiences I am encountering have nothing to do with divine intervention.

It is one of my last days here. I have been invited to a special performance by the Hanoi Drama Troupe of Arthur Miller’s play
All My Sons.
Apparently they want me, an American actor, to critique the production. The play tells the story of an American factory owner (referred to as the “Capitalist”) during World War II whose plant manufactures parts for bombers. He discovers that the parts are faulty and that there is a risk that planes will crash as a result, but he says nothing for fear of losing his lucrative government contract. He pays a price for this, however, when one of his sons, a pilot, is killed in a plane crash caused by mechanical failure. His other son, who knows the truth, condemns his father for the silence and greed that caused his brother’s death.

I am told that the Hanoi Drama Troupe has been touring this play to villages that have been recently bombed. I am perplexed: Arthur Miller? In bombed Vietnamese villages?

The play is performed on a platform outside. I cannot assess the performance, nor am I interested in doing so. It is the
fact
of the performance, not its quality, that matters. Sitting next to me, the director leans over and asks, “Is that how the Capitalist is supposed to look? We don’t know.”

The actor playing the factory owner is wearing brown-and-white lace-up saddle shoes, yellow pants, and a bow tie . . . polka dot, if I remember correctly. “Yes,” I say, “it’s perfect.” (Actually I do know a wealthy architect who dresses like that.)

The play ends and we all have our picture taken together. Then I ask the director why the troupe has chosen to take this particular play on tour. Here is his answer:

Again I am speechless. What is there to say in response to this most beautiful and utterly sophisticated answer? All I can do is put my arms around him. I have moved from the hallways of awe into its mansions. I finally understand why people have reacted to me the way they have and why all the Americans who have come back from Vietnam recount the same experiences of friendliness. This is no accident and this is not a race of superbeings. The development of their attitudes and worldview has taken a deliberate, strategic, and Herculean effort on the part of the North Vietnamese (Communist) government. This play is one example.

All My Sons
is a play about betrayal, a father betraying his son. For me the war is a betrayal; the U.S. government has betrayed its people, its own sons. The Vietnamese are using the play to help their people forgive our government. Why is this harder for me to do?

It dawns on me that war is easy. Peace is harder. This sophisticated striving to build bridges is harder.

I
am a novice. This is the first time I have ever been in a revolutionary situation. I don’t yet know that, historically, revolutionaries are poetic during revolution and that when it’s over, when bureaucracy sets in, things can get grim. But right now, here in Hanoi, I am certainly not looking ahead to protect my flank from whatever is to come once the war ends. All I know is what I am experiencing.

This does not mean I want my country to “lose” the war. Nor does it mean I want us to be killed. I just want us
out.

F
ast-forward to 2002. I am with Quoc again, this time in Little Saigon, an area in Orange County, California, where many Vietnamese have settled. He is elderly now, like me, but his eyes are still warm and his face, though rounder, is still pixieish. He is leading a delegation of young people who are visiting the States from Hanoi. Together with John McAuliff, an old friend from the war days, we talk over lunch.

“The young girl who took me into the manhole with her,” I say. “How could she have been so . . . sophisticated . . . especially under those terrifying circumstances?”

“The girl was not so unusual,” Quoc replies. “Many of our young people had this understanding. It just happened that she was the one who brought you this message that particular day. Our young people knew a lot about your country. They read Mark Twain and Hemingway and Jack London.”

B
ack to Hanoi: This is the day when I am scheduled to meet seven American POWs, something many American visitors before me have done. The men are driven from their camp, the Zoo, in a bus with blacked-out windows to the headquarters of the army film studio on the periphery of Hanoi, where the meeting is to take place. The French crew is also here to film the very beginning of the meeting, then they are ushered out. (I will show this footage at my press conference in Paris.) The POWs sit in a row, dressed in striped prison pajamas, and I sit facing them. In addition to the film crew there are several Vietnamese men present—guards, no doubt. The POWs appear to be healthy and fit. One of them has been a prisoner since 1967, one has been there since 1971, and the others were shot down this year (1972). All of them have called publicly for an end to the war and signed a powerful antiwar letter that they sent out with a previous American delegation to Hanoi.

I tell them the obvious: that I am against the war and that I decided to make the trip because of the reports of bomb damage to the dikes. They already know all of this because unbeknownst to me some of my radio broadcasts have been piped into their rooms over wall-mounted radios. A few of them tell me they, too, are against the war and want Nixon to be defeated in the upcoming elections. They express their fear that if he is reelected, the war will go on and on (they are right, it will) and that bombs might land on their prison. I have heard this fear before, from former POW George Smith and from POW families who have received letters. I am asked to convey their hopes that their families will vote for George McGovern.

I ask them if they feel they have been brainwashed or tortured, and they laugh, indicating it was not a part of their experiences. I do not mean to imply that the atmosphere is relaxed. It isn’t. It is self-conscious and awkward for all the obvious reasons. Besides, there is at least one guard present throughout. A few describe things that demonstrate to me how much they have changed since being captured. One man tells me that he read a book by the American Friends Service Committee and it helped him realize how much of his humanity had been lost during his sixteen years of military service. Another, marine lieutenant colonel Edison Miller, tells me that he too has done a lot of reading in prison and is writing a book about Vietnamese history.

A large, impressive man sitting in the middle seat, navy captain David Hoffman, proudly raises his arm up and down over his head and says, “Please, when you go back, let my wife know that my arm has healed.” He tells me that the arm had been broken when he was ejected from his plane. I assure him I will let his wife know (and I do, as soon as I get back).

After twenty minutes or so, the seven are escorted out of the room. Though they seem genuine, I realize that the men could have been lying to protect themselves, but I certainly see no signs in any of the seven that they have been tortured, at least not recently.

I
t is my last full day in North Vietnam. In spite of having made it clear to my hosts that I was not interested in visiting a military installation, I am going—and today is the day.

It is not unusual for Americans who visit North Vietnam to be taken to see Vietnamese military installations, and when they do they are always required to wear a helmet like the kind I have been given to wear during the air raids. I am driven to the site of the antiaircraft installation, somewhere on the outskirts of the city. There is a group of about a dozen young Vietnamese soldiers in uniform who greet me. There is also a horde of photographers and journalists—many more than I have seen all in one place in Hanoi. (I later learn some of them were Japanese.)