LITMIR.BIZ

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food was available.

      I had “made water” a couple more times and learned that these two words accompanied by crotch pointing made it clear that I had to take a leak. And as I thought about the phrase “taking a leak,” I realized, with minor amusement, that it would probably be thought more strange by a Vietnamese than “making water” seemed to me.

      Various groups and individuals looked in on me through the day as word apparently got around. To these simple people, I was obviously quite an oddity, a subject of curiosity in any case, and a rare flesh-and-blood sample of the Enemy. One group had been all children, I guessed from the local school. I was the subject of their current events field trip. Their young teacher had been as wide-eyed as her pupils when they all squatted down a few feet from me as the cadre who brought me there related—with considerable animation and detail—the odious crimes I had supposedly committed upon their country. This was to be my first experience of the incredible hold the Communists have on their people when they control every input from birth on. Children were taught daily that my government and country were the reasons for their need for total sacrifice and deprivation in the defense of their homeland and for the unending harshness of their existence. They needed a scapegoat to explain away what, I would soon see at first hand, was actually the inefficiency, unresponsiveness, and total failure of their state-controlled agricultural and industrial programs.

      Just after the clanging of the gong that ended the nap period after lunch—around 2 P.M.—the cadre apeared in the entry with a very old man. The two of them talked with a great deal of intensity, pointing in my direction frequently. Finally the cadre left and the old fellow shuffled toward me and hunkered down a few feet in front of me. But for a lifetime in that flat-footed, knee-rending posture, eating, gossiping, gambling, and observing, there was no way that septuagenarian body could have swung down so easily into such a squat, at least not from my western perspective, which glorified chairs, benches, and stools. There weren’t a lot of those to be seen around here.

      Squatting there with his clear but somewhat watery eyes, he seemed to contemplate me and the reasons for my presence there. Finally, after several minutes—so many, in fact, that I was just beginning to ignore his stare—he blurted out suddenly, “Why you come Vietnam?” There was true inquiry in his voice and just a hint of hostility. “Why you come Vietnam?” I was startled both by his question and his English. “Why you come Vietnam?” His tone and expression indicated he was genuinely perplexed at why I’d come to Vietnam and also that he honestly wanted to know. I stared back at him, my mind grappling with the question.

      Wary at first that this could be some very clever attempt to interrogate me, to trick me into saying more than my name, rank, serial number, and date of birth, as required by the American Fighting Man’s Code of Conduct, I decided finally that there was no guile in the old man’s questions. Why indeed had I come to Vietnam?

      My mind raced back several months to the home squadron’s weekly intelligence briefings. The Intelligence officer had intoned matter-of-factly:

      “During the Japanese occupation of Indochina during much of World War II, the French presence had dwindled to a minimum. Their preoccupation with the European front had effectively left a colonial vacuum in Southeast Asia, which the Japanese had gladly filled for as long as they could. During the war, the Vietnamese patriot, Ho Chi Minh, organized the resistance against the Japanese. During his leadership of the resistance to the Japanese, Ho and his followers built up a strong and very nationalistic guerrilla movement. They were called Viet Minh (Vietnamese Communists) because of Ho’s political background and ideology. Nevertheless, there had been many instances of cooperation against the Japanese between the Viet Minh and Allied forces, especially in the safekeeping and return of downed U.S. flyers in Indochina.

      “After the war, the French were eager to reestablish their colonial presence. Ho Chi Minh—through unofficial channels, since his was not a recognized government— requested the support of Western nations in unilaterally establishing an independent Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The U.S., however, mostly because we perceived Ho was at least as much a Communist as a Nationalist, and because of our knowledge of the brutal Communist regime in Russia after Stalin, chose to support our longtime ally, France, instead. During the early postwar years, the French, with our blessing and military aid, reoccupied Vietnam. And the bloody, protracted French Indo-Chinese War between the French Colonial Army, Legionnaires, and locally conscripted Vietnamese, and the Viet Minh Guerrilla forces began!”

      It occurred to me that the old man squatting in front of me had lived a part of it all. He had probably lived that entire briefing I was now replaying in my mind. Where had he learned his English? From some American pilot whose plane had been damaged raiding Japanese forces in southern China, but who had been able to limp to a safe area where indigenous friendlies could help? Had he, an indigenous friendly twenty years before, rescued, aided, and ultimately helped repatriate an American airman like me? Was he, too, reflecting on this peculiar irony of history?

      “After the French defeat, an international conference was called in Geneva to help decide the future of Vietnam. Because most of the French forces, infrastructure, and sentiment were centered in Saigon, in the South, and the majority of the Viet Minh forces and support were in the North, centered around Hanoi, the country was divided in two at the 17th parallel as an interim measure. The space immediately on either side of this line was declared a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), a buffer to facilitate the disengagement of the two opposing forces. In 1956, there was to be a free national election to decide the fate of the entire country.

      The situation polarized rapidly. However, with eleven million people in the North ruled with an iron hand from Ho Chi Minh’s Hanoi, and only nine million in the South, ruled temporarily and barely by an aging mandarin, Bao Dai, who had been favored by the French, one could see the obvious outcome of any election.

      The election was not held. The government in South Vietnam stonewalled the whole process, refusing under the existing circumstances to discuss arrangements for the elections or any aspects of reunification. Finally, the entire plan broke down and the international commission established to facilitate and monitor the reunification process disintegrated. The people of South Vietnam, through a series of governments succeeding one another due to abdication, coups, and classic Oriental intrigue, began building—albeit inefficiently—a free and independent nation. They had been blessed by the cream of Vietnam’s agricultural land, natural resources, and beneficent climate. On the other hand, the weather in the North was more harsh, the land more stingy, and subsistence more difficult. These factors alone throughout history had kept the people of the North and South separate and sometimes openly hostile. The North Vietnamese, under the leadership of Ho’s Viet Minh military council, stepped up the guerrilla infiltration and subversion of the South until finally the war between the North and the South was on.”

      The old man had smoked his third cigarette down to a tiny stub that he could barely pinch, then tucked it between the dirt floor and the sole of his rubber sandal to crush it. He lit another, and again I declined his offer, shaking my head and uttering the Vietnamese thank-you I’d picked up. “Cam Ud!” He shifted his weight—I thought in preparation to leave—but he just repositioned his butt on the inside of his ankles and closer to the floor.

      “The fighting between North and South escalated over the years. Although in the early sixties President Kennedy never envisioned the use of regular U.S. combat forces in Vietnam, he pledged generous technical and material support to the South Vietnamese in their struggle to remain free of Communist tyranny. He also founded the Special Forces— Green Berets—and from their ranks sent advisors to South Vietnam. They were designated in noncombat roles, training the South Vietnamese army units, villagers, and even the mountain people in couterinsurgency warfare. Given the context of the time, the earlier anti-Communist warning of John Foster Dulles seemed well founded. Stalin’s brutality had been well documented, and Khrushchev’s nasty threat—“We will bury you!”—was becoming more than just rhetoric. The earlier Communist blockade of West Berlin, the defeat of the French by the Vietnamese, Castro’s consolidation of his Marxist government in Cuba, followed by the Soviet’s brazen introduction of missiles there—all combined to reinforce the need to make a strong stand against further Communist expansion. Besides, Kennedy realized that

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