My Life So Far (50 page)

It is one thing to refuse, in the abstract, my government’s definition of “enemy.” But being here with soldiers and trucks passing just outside the car window, I realize it is less simple. I am not afraid—it’s not that. It’s being here on the ground with people whose mission is to defeat us. Though I understand that they are fighting to defend themselves and that we are the aggressors, the “they” are right here at eye level, and the “us” is me. Everything seems upside down like in
Alice in Wonderland.

It is dusk as we enter Hanoi, a sprawling, former colonial city shaped by French architects, with wide, tree-lined boulevards, parks, and lakes. I am told that the targets of the eight planes I saw earlier were a cigarette factory, a hospital, and a brickyard at the height of their working hours, all in Hanoi’s outlying area.

We enter the old, colonial Thong Nhat Hotel through a rickety revolving door. There are quite a few Europeans and two American journalists sitting about the high-ceilinged lobby. I have been given an enormous room on an upper floor, with a ceiling fan and mosquito netting over the bed. Bed! My foot is throbbing terribly and I can’t wait to lie down. A thermos of hot water, a can of tea, teapot, cups, candy, and individually folded pieces of thick brown toilet paper have been laid out for me, and I’m told there is plenty of hot water for a bath. I am too tired for a bath but grateful for the luxurious accommodations and relieved finally to be here.

A
round midnight I am jolted from a deep sleep by shrill air raid sirens. A maid appears at my door carrying a helmet for me. She is there to escort me to the bomb shelter in the hotel’s backyard. As I hobble down the back stairs and out into the darkened yard, I can see the hotel staff calmly going about their work. Later I am told that the maids double as militia and during alerts don their own helmets and go up onto the roof with rifles. I am led down a flight of stairs into a long, tunnel-like concrete bunker lined with benches. A dozen or so people are already there, all foreign visitors.

This is easier to take than seeing U.S. bombers from the air. John Sullivan, director of the American Friends Service Committee—the Quaker peace organization—is here. He doesn’t recognize me—partly the cliché about seeing someone out of context (and this is about as out of context as it gets), but also because I don’t look like me: I am without makeup, disheveled, and tired. I’m tempted to say, “I used to be Jane Fonda.”

Sullivan asks when I arrived and why I’ve come. In his subsequent written report of the trip he will quote me as saying it was “vital that Americans speak out against this bombing because if they were silent, Nixon would ratchet up the damage as his peace plan was stripped of even the illusion of victory,” that I didn’t “believe that Nixon would accept a coalition government in Saigon,” and that “Hanoi would never accept a Thieu government after American withdrawal.” Not bad for someone who was still half-asleep and had a fractured foot, if I do say so!

T
here are two more air raids that night. Newly blasé, I stay in my bed for the third one.

Already up and outside the hotel at 5:30 in the morning, I am struck, as I was the previous evening, by the bustle of the place. I don’t know if everyone seems to be hurrying because the bombing doesn’t usually start until 9:00
A.M.
or if hurrying is their custom (of course, the bombing has
become
their custom). There are no cars to be seen—I’m told that no one owns a private car—but there is dense bicycle and foot traffic everywhere and a sense of purposefulness. Blanketing the scene is a mellifluous female voice being broadcast from loudspeakers mounted on street corners. Impossible to know what she is saying: the morning news? political propaganda? a story about Vietnamese heroes and heroines from the past? The voice, I will discover, goes on till nightfall, interrupted occasionally by a song. After a while it loses some of its charm—especially when I learn that mostly it is spouting political propaganda. I learn to ignore it.

I
t is just dawn as we drive through the city to the Vietnam-Soviet Friendship Hospital, where I am to have my foot examined. I can see camouflaged vehicles coming and going, their lights off. At the hospital, two male Vietnamese doctors who have been briefed about my arrival lay me on a table to take an X-ray of my foot—or at least they try to. No sooner have I lain down than the air raid sirens blare and I have to be helped into the hospital’s bomb shelter, essentially identical to the one at the hotel, only larger and now filling rapidly with doctors and those patients who can be moved.

I sense no panic; they seem to have grown accustomed to this ritual interruption of their daily lives. This is my first time sharing a bomb shelter with Vietnamese, and it makes the experience all the more surreal. I feel unspeakably guilty to be taking up space and the attention of two doctors while my country is attacking theirs. My interpreter for the day, Madame Chi, tells them I am American and this stirs up a lot of excitement. I search their eyes for some sign of hostility. There is none. Those unhostile eyes will stay with me long after the war ends.

The raid is over, and we return to the X-ray machine—only to be interrupted a second time by the sirens. Perhaps an hour goes by before the doctors are finally able to get the X-ray of my foot. Sure enough, there is a slight fracture across the arch. As they are removing the Soviet-made cast, they begin to laugh and chatter to each other. Madame Chi, who has remained by my side throughout, tells me they are laughing at the poor job the Soviets have done: They had neglected to put gauze between my skin and the plaster, and because it was mixed improperly, the plaster hasn’t hardened on the inside . . . thank God! Had it hardened, my skin would have come off with the cast.

The doctors explain that they are going to strap a poultice made from chrysanthemum roots onto my foot and ankle. They tell me that it is so full of healing and strengthening elements that pregnant women in Vietnam drink tea brewed from the same roots. “Because of the war,” one doctor says, “we have to rely on whatever we have, simple things, to meet our medical needs.” (I wonder if Adelle Davis knows about this.)

The stuff is truly foul smelling, but the doctors tell me they are certain that within days my swelling will go away and the fracture will mend. Anything that smells this bad is bound to work! The irony of this whole episode is not lost on me: Here is this besieged, agrarian country accused by the United States of being a Soviet pawn when in mind, spirit, and medicine, at least, its people seem remarkably independent and to be “making do” just fine.

D
riving through Hanoi, I notice that the streets are swept clean; I see no litter anywhere, no signs of poverty, no beggars, no homeless people—and few children. Most children, Madame Chi tells me, have long ago been evacuated to the countryside, where life continues. “We have moved our schools, the university, hospitals, and factories out of the city and rebuilt them in the countryside, sometimes underground and in caves.” Flexibility and adaptability must be skills they honed during their war against the French colonialists—or maybe against the Japanese, or the Chinese, or the Mongols.

We attract a good deal of attention as we drive. I assume this is because there are so few cars to be seen, and ours signals the presence of a VIP. People wave and a few teenage boys run alongside, peering through the window to try to get a look at the passengers inside. When they see me, they shout something at the driver. Madame Chi tells me they are asking where I am from—am I Russian? The driver shouts, “She’s an American,” and they actually cheer!

“Why are they happy to see an American?” I ask Madame Chi, incredulous.

“You won’t find any ‘Yankee Go Home’ slogans here,” she replies. “Our people aren’t anti-American. When we see a bomb crater we say ‘Nixon’s’ or ‘Johnson’s,’ not ‘America’s.’ ”

I find this incomprehensible. I wish Tom were here so we could ponder it together.

I
am visiting the nine-hundred-bed Bach Mai Hospital, the largest in North Vietnam. Although it has been bombed on numerous occasions over the years, the hospital has continued to function. Some of the surgeons, still dressed in their blue hospital garb and masks, have come out to speak with me. I ask them how they continue their work. They describe how during bombing raids they carry patients into the shelter, where an operating room has been built.

I
t has been only two days, but I no longer need crutches and the swelling in my foot has almost disappeared. When I get home maybe I’ll market chrysanthemum root for its healing properties!

Walking gingerly over ruins in Vietnam.

(© G. Guillaume/Magnum Photos)

In Hanoi’s War Crimes Museum photographing a “mother” bomb.

Looking at photographic evidence of the effects of U.S. antipersonnel weapons and defoliation spraying.

(© G. Guillaume/Magnum Photos)

I visit the Committee for Denunciation of U.S. War Crimes in Vietnam, run by Colonel Ha Van Lau, who will later be named Vietnamese ambassador to the United Nations. Colonel Lau guides me through the exhibit. There are the twelve-thousand-pound daisy cutters, the guava bombs, pineapple bombs, the Willie Peters, cluster bombs, pellet bombs—weaponry I had heard described by veterans at the Winter Soldier investigation. Sitting on the floor like a piece of metal sculpture is the casing of a three-thousand-pound “mother” bomb, the bearer of the little bomblets that are so devastating to humans because they float down and explode later. The smaller weapons are displayed on shelves inside glass cases with photographs next to them, showing the effects of the particular weapon on a human being or, in the case of the defoliants, an entire forest.

This is the true face of Vietnamization that President Nixon hopes Americans won’t find out about: American soldiers may be coming home from war, but the war is escalating and more Vietnamese are dying. Does he hope we’ve grown immune to the suffering of others? I resolve that no matter what, I will keep my heart open and try to communicate what I am seeing to other Americans back home.

Colonel Lau explains that since Nixon became president, the weapons have become even more sophisticated and damaging. “Before now,” he says, “we were able surgically to remove the pellets. But now they have been made in such a way that they can’t be removed without doing even more damage. Some of them now expand once inside the flesh.” And he points to another X-ray. I am grateful for the colonel’s air of detachment. Had he expressed anger, I would have disintegrated.