W
hen the danger of miscarriage had passed, my sometime mentor Simone Signoret brought me with her to a huge antiwar rally in Paris. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were among the speakers. For the first time I felt embarrassed for my country, and I also wanted to go home. It was too painful being in France, hearing the criticisms, and not doing anything.
But what to do? I didn’t like criticizing America while I was in another country. I’m not a dabbler. If I was going to oppose the war, it would be in the streets of America with my fellow countrymen, who, I could see on French television, were marching in growing numbers in the States. The dilemma for me was that this could never happen in the context of my marriage to Vadim. (In years to come, he would publicly disparage me as a “Jane of Arc.”) While personally opposed to the Vietnam War, he was too cynical to commit himself to any movement to end it. Then, too, I knew that if I threw myself heart and soul into the antiwar effort, a return to the permissive, indolent life I shared with Vadim would be unthinkable.
A
round this time I had an experience that, oddly enough, would never have happened had my beloved former stepmother Susan not come to Paris to check up on me during my pregnancy. At dinner one evening, a friend of hers introduced me to a nineteen-year-old fresh-faced kid named Dick Perrin, who turned out to be a U.S. Army resister from the First Battalion of the Sixty-fourth Armored Brigade, stationed in West Germany. This was my first encounter with a U.S. serviceman who was actively opposed to the war, and it was my introduction to what within two years would become a major focus of my activism: GIs against the war.
Dick talked to us about an organization he and other American army resisters had just formed, RITA (Resisters Inside the Army). RITA’s goals were to spread anti–Vietnam War messages within the armed forces. Dick said that a soldier had the right, even the obligation, to dissociate himself from the military if he believed the war was wrong.
It seemed there was a growing underground network of American resisters and conscientious objectors in Europe. They were seeking employment and financial assistance. According to Dick in his book
G.I. Resister,
one of the “hideouts” for these resisters was a farmhouse southwest of Paris, near Tours. There Dick would drop off or pick up guys. He described how they sat at a fourteen-foot-long kitchen table where they could all eat together with the owner of the farm. This owner was a big, gentle American in bib overalls. Dick called him Sandy. Dick would gaze out the window onto the rolling farmland and see “crazy constructions that swung in the breeze and moved in nearly every direction.” Dick said, “I had no name for them because I had never seen a mobile before, nor even heard of one.”
Only later, sitting with his family in Canada watching “Sandy’s” obituary being announced, did Perrin discover that their benefactor was none other than the great American sculptor Alexander Calder.
I had often been at that farmhouse with Sandy and his wife, but he never told me they were helping resisters, and I had never met one there.
After that dinner I saw Dick Perrin and several other GI resisters from time to time, helping them get dental care, passing on some of Vadim’s clothes. I even invited them to a sneak screening of
Barbarella,
which would be released later that year. The young men with Dick described themselves as humanitarian rather than political and told how soldiers returning from Vietnam had joked about torturing Vietnamese prisoners. Yet, like me, they became defensive whenever a French person expressed criticism of America. At one of our encounters Dick gave me a book,
The Village of Ben Suc,
by Jonathan Schell. “Read this,” he said, “and you’ll understand.” I went back to our farm and devoured the short book in one stunned sitting.
In it Schell described what happened in January 1967 during the largest U.S. military operation in Vietnam up to that time, Operation Cedar Falls. Having failed in its previous attempts to “pacify” the village of Ben Suc and the surrounding area known as the Iron Triangle, the American High Command had developed a new strategy: to bomb (including with B-52s) and shell the area for several days; then bring in ground troops, both American and our South Vietnamese allies from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, to round up villagers and move them in trucks to a refugee camp. Bulldozers then leveled the village and the surrounding jungle, which was bombed again until no trace was left of what had once been a relatively prosperous farming village.
Perhaps it was the matter-of-factness of Schell’s writing that made it so powerful. We learn with him how embedded the Vietcong were in the life of the village, providing a full governmental structure and protections and involving everyone in their programs; how the captive villagers deliberately allowed the American soldiers to continue in their belief that the VC were a “roving band of guerrillas” who occasionally appeared out of the jungle and then disappeared again, rather than the governing body they clearly were. The reader comes to understand why the goal of “winning the hearts and minds” of refugees from Ben Suc was a grotesque joke. Schell quotes American lieutenant colonel Kenneth J. White, province representative for the Office of Civilian Operations, exclaiming as he looks at the resettlement camp for the first time, “This is wonderful! I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s the best civilian project I’ve ever seen . . . you know, sometimes it just feels
right.
”
I was shocked at Schell’s account of the smugness of the high-level U.S. military officers who seemed to revel in Operation Cedar Falls’ massive military destructiveness without seeming to consider the effects on civilians. In response to a question from Schell about civilian casualties of the bombing, one sergeant said, “What does it matter? They’re all Vietnamese.”
I closed the book. I knew that something fundamental in the general area of my heart had exploded and blown me wide open. I’m not sure how I had managed up until then to neatly compartmentalize my generic, liberal opposition to war and avoid knowing more about the realities of this particular one.
I felt sickened. Part of my identity had been that I was a citizen of a country that, in spite of its internal paradoxes, represented moral integrity, justice, and a desire for peace. My father had fought in the Pacific, and when he returned wearing a Bronze Star, I had been filled with pride. I sometimes cried when I sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I had been “Miss Army Recruiter” in 1959. I was a believer. Reading Schell’s
The Village of Ben Suc,
I felt betrayed as an American, and the depth of my sense of betrayal was in direct proportion to my previous depth of certainty about the ultimate rightness of any U.S. mission. I began telling everyone I knew about the book, and I was shaken by the we’ve-known-this-for-years, what-are-you-so-bothered-about? reaction I received from most people (including Vadim). I found it difficult to understand how they had known this and not done more to end it. But they were
French.
They’d ended
their
war in Vietnam. Ending it this time was our job, as Americans.
As I began to read more—including reports from the International War Crimes Tribunal—I began to wonder: Why had I not paid more attention and taken action sooner? It wasn’t that I was lazy or lacked curiosity. I think it had to do with giving up comfort—and I don’t mean material comfort. I mean the comfort that ignorance provides. Once you connect with the painful truth of something, you then
own
the pain and must take responsibility for it through action. Of course, there are people who
see
and then choose to turn away, but then one becomes an accomplice. In
Galileo,
Bertolt Brecht wrote, “He who doesn’t know is an ignoramus. He who knows and keeps quiet is a scoundrel.” I’m a lot of things, but a scoundrel isn’t one of them.
I wanted to act on what I was learning and feeling but didn’t know what to do. I knew (without acknowledging to myself what I knew) that if I became involved, it would mean leaving Vadim; but I couldn’t conceive of leaving him. Who would I be without him? I decided to go see Simone Signoret.
When I arrived at the bucolic country estate she and Yves Montand shared outside Paris, she was at the door to greet me. I could see in her face that she had been waiting for this to happen. Somehow, through all the silliness of my lifestyle, she had maintained a firm belief that what she loved about my father from his movie roles was waiting inside
me
to manifest itself through action. Sometimes I would catch her looking at me in such a deep way that I’d be tempted to look over my shoulder to see whom it was she was relating to—surely not me. It was her patience with me, the fact that she had never pushed or proselytized but had been content to put learning opportunities in my path, that told me I could trust her.
Bringing a bottle of fine cabernet and a platter of cheeses, she took me out to the back porch, where we ensconced ourselves in an arbor.
“I’m glad you read Schell’s book. It’s important,” she said. She’d read it the previous year, when it had appeared as a series of articles in
The New Yorker.
I asked if she had been surprised by it.
“Yes and no,” she answered. “We’ve known here for some time about your ‘strategic hamlets’ and the
bombardements de saturation
[saturation bombing], but never in such detail. It was the details that got to me. But remember, we were there before you, we French, and the attitudes that Schell describes the Americans having toward the Vietnamese—the total disregard, as though they aren’t human beings—these were the same attitudes
les colonialistes Français
had. The difference is that we didn’t need to try to hide it. Don’t forget, back then most people still believed it was all right to have colonies, whereas in your country people need to believe you’ve been
invited
in to protect a democracy.” And she cocked her head at me and gave me a look that said “Who do they think they’re kidding!”
“Explain it to me, Simone,” I asked, ashamed to admit how much I didn’t know.
“First of all, Jane, you need to know that at the end of World War Two, when France had to go to war to keep Vietnam as her colony, it was your country that paid most of our military expenses.
C’était monstrueux, n’est-ce pas?
The U.S. was supposed to be about independence, not colonialism.”
“I didn’t know this,” I said quietly.
“Yes. The French couldn’t have won alone, and colonialism is a terrible thing, Jane.” She described how the French had manipulated the economy of Vietnam to benefit themselves, how they gave schooling only to the privileged but left most Vietnamese illiterate, how they had cultivated a bureaucracy of colonial wannabes from the Vietnamese upper classes and gave privileges to Vietnamese who agreed to convert to Catholicism.
“These are the kind of Vietnamese who support your so-called president Thieu right now,” she said, “the same ones who supported
us
because they got power and privilege by identifying with the colonialists. Besides, they know there’s a lot of money to be made off you Americans. Listen, Jane, these parasites are the people who allow you to believe that there are Vietnamese who want you there and who support Thieu. You had them during your own revolution. How did you call them?”
“Tories,” I answered, beginning to understand things in a new way.
“Okay. You had Tories who supported the British. Did that make it a civil war?”
“No, it was a revolution.”
“That’s right. How can it be a civil war if one side is entirely paid for, trained by, and supported by a foreign nation?” She was getting worked up now. I liked Simone when she was worked up. “And you know who the Vietnamese revolutionaries thought of as the George Washington of their country? Ho Chi Minh. Americans are so blinded with anti-Communism that you don’t even realize that most Vietnamese, including people who aren’t Communists, still respect Ho as the founder of their country. He declared independence in 1945, for crying out loud! And when they had to fight France to keep their independence, Ho was certain he could count on the United States for help. You stood for national independence, that’s what your wonderful father fought for in World War Two. Do you know that Ho petitioned and begged President Truman to help them get their independence from France, but each time he tried, they ignored him? Think about it: If your country had paid attention back then, none of this would have happened. There didn’t need to be a war.” She stopped to sip her wine and let this sink in. I took notes.
“This president of yours, how stupid! He’s ‘not going to be the first president of the United States to lose a war,’” she said in a mock macho voice. “But you can’t win it any more than we did! Why can’t they get it through their heads?”
I told her about Vadim’s reaction in 1964 when he heard about the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. “Well, he was right. There’s no way. All your presidents have thought they were fighting to stop the Soviets and China when they were really up against homegrown revolutionaries with a cause they’re willing to die for. They’ve been fighting outsiders who’ve tried to take it away from them for centuries, and they always win sooner or later. Your GIs and those soldiers in Thieu’s army, they don’t want to fight because they have no cause to believe in.” She leaned forward and looked hard at me.
“Dad voted for Johnson. He was sure he would end the war.”
“Your dad and I have had many fights about this. I love him dearly, but he’s too gullible when it comes to your liberal establishment.”