Just As I Thought (10 page)

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Roger Dean Ingvalsen, Major, Air Force, F105 shot down May 28, 1968, in Quangbinh province near Donghoi.

“Hit by 37 mm. unit aircraft fire while strafing truck. Caught fire. Lost control, forced to eject. Boy sixteen years old captured me with three, four others. Didn’t know how I’d be treated, scores angry inhabitants tried to punish me. Militiaman interfered, protected me. Gave me water. Was not wounded, no medical attention. 28 days to this city. Treated well by guards.”

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Donghoi in Quangbinh was a city of 33,000. It had been beautiful with a great, grass-terraced open theater, an ancient thousand-year-old wall. Like my city, New York, it lay with its nose in the water. No one lives in Donghoi, no houses in Donghoi. White doorsteps as though Baltimore had disappeared into grass.

Mr. Gnach, war crimes commission head of Quangbinh province, asked, “Why do Americans hate this province and this city so? They have even smashed the Catholic cathedral.” We stood in the blue, pink, and orange rubble of a famous pagoda.

Then we stayed for a couple of days in little villages near Donghoi where families had lived underground for two years in tunnels because of day-and-night bombing. A Captain Boyd, speaking as a Winter Soldier witness a couple of weeks ago, explained, “I don’t know why it was customary for us pilots to dump all unexpended ordnance on Donghoi. It wasn’t an order. It was just customary.”

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Edwin Frankmiller, Lieutenant J.G., shot down May 22, 1968, photo reconnaissance west of Vinh.

“Had to eject, landed, dislocated knee. Captured soon by peasants in militia, carried me to hut. Given injections. Water. Medical man around put knee, back, and leg in cast. Okay for walking. When stationed on ship I thought if shot down I’d receive bad treatment, and I thought that was war. Little known historically. Medical treatment was good beginning.”

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Vinh City had been an industrial center of about 80,000. It existed powerfully in 1969 in decentralized settlements in the countryside. In one of these villages, a small, shy woman asked me, “How is Mrs. Morrison? Tell her we think always about Norman Morrison.”
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Anthony Charles Andrews was a captain in the Air Force, shot down in October 1967.

“As I bailed out I said, what am I doing here? Bruises on leg from ejection seat. I landed in a rice field a hundred yards from village. Three young men immediately approached. One had rifle. Fired it. Being in a highly populated area I had no intentions. I surrendered at once. Young people there. Very excited. Big event in their life and mine. Wise to be placed in hands of military. They showed fair restraint in dealing. Concerned about conditions. Informed about how to treat military men. We were short time in the village. Young men and women took charge. I was impressed. Led from village for miles. Had no shoes. They’d been removed because of serious bruises. I made this known. Taken to bomb shelter, kept overnight. I did not expect to be shot at, but expected poor treatment. Close to target area. Many times their emotions were strong. People not friendly, some downright hostile. But their restraint…”

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Thinking of Bruce Anello, I have written all this, because it seems likely that the troops will be brought home. (President Nixon also tells the truth.) The men who will not come home are the high-fliers, the meat-eating birds of our Air Force. Waiting in Thailand or Cambodia or Laos within easy devastation distance of all Indochina. The war will go on.

And that means, too, that 339 American pilots will spend many more years in exile, condemned by American anti-Communist insanity and the administration’s perversion of their situation.

—1971

“The Man in the Sky Is a Killer”

There’s a good deal of sentiment and dreamy invention attached to the American prisoners of war in North Vietnam. Politicians and newsmen often talk as though these pilots had been kidnapped from a farm in Iowa or out of a canoe paddling the waterways of Minnesota.

In reality, they were fliers shot down out of the North Vietnamese sky, where they had no business to be; out of that blueness they were dumping death on the people, the villages, the fields. And none of these men were forced into the job. They were not drafted, they volunteered. They were trained. Then, out of the American sanctuaries in Thailand, the carrier nests at sea, they rose, a covey of brilliant down-swoopers, high-fliers to do their work. Each one of these men may have accomplished half a dozen My Lais in any evening.

The Vietnamese have a saying: The man in the sky is a killer, bring him down; but the man on the ground is a helpless human being. The men who were shot down, the human beings who fell alive into the shallow paddies, on beaches, into villages they’d just bombed, became POWs. Their Vietnamese captors were often half their size, half-starved, stiff with the grief of continuous loss of dear family, but survivors with a determination to win. They shared their squash and water spinach with these captured Americans whose great frames immediately (it’s been reported) suffered the lack of beefsteak.

Nine prisoners of war have been returned to the United States, the last in 1969. I was a member of the peace movement delegation which escorted the last three from Hanoi to home. While in North Vietnam we talked to four other prisoners. I believe that the Vietnamese had great hopes for this program of POW return. With obvious logic, the Vietnamese had asked that the United States government not use these returned pilots against them again. But the United States was not ready then for any easing of war or righteousness.

Therefore, at the present time, they are all in or associated with the armed forces. Some are training younger pilots to fly out again and again over that tortured country, that laboratory for American weapons engineers. Some are part of the propaganda mill that continues the air war and enlarged it to include Laos and Cambodia—that makes new POWs.

I submit that the families of these men who, on the ground, are human beings, whose time of life is being used up in prison camps—these families must know that their men will not come home until the war ends. Removing American ground troops from South Vietnam will not end the Indochina air war. Automating the battlefields will not end the Indochina air war. Propaganda and punishing war will not bring those men home.

I would like to add two recollections that are painful to me, but I want to share the recollections and the pain.

At a festive dinner in a Hanoi hotel, a celebration of departure after arduous years of imprisonment, one of the pilots turned his ingenuous American boy’s face of about thirty to me. He said, “Gosh, Grace, to be truthful I really liked bombing.”

One summer day before I left for North Vietnam, a woman called me at home. She was a pilot’s wife. She had not heard from her husband in two and a half years. She asked me to get information about him in Hanoi, if any existed. I tried. But no one had seen or heard of him, neither the Vietnamese nor the pilots we talked to. When I came home I had to call and tell her this. She asked me why the Vietnamese insisted on keeping the pilots.

I explained that they were considered war criminals who had come 10,000 miles to attack a tiny country in an undeclared and brutal war.

She said, “Well, they’re airmen. They’re American officers.”

I told her about the villagers living in wet dark tunnels for years, shattered by pellets, seared by napalm—I told her only what my own eyes had seen, the miles of maniac craters—

She said, “Oh, Mrs. Paley, villages and people! My husband wouldn’t do that.”

I held the phone for a while in silence. I took a deep breath. Then I said, “Oh? Well, I guess it must have been someone else.”

—1972

Thieu Thi Tao: Case History of a Prisoner of Politics

Thieu Thi Tao is twenty-three years old—the age of my own American children. That coincidence helps me to think about her. As I write about Tao, I call up the lives my children have led these past six years and hold those images in mind; then I reflect on the fragments of information we have about Thieu Thi Tao.

Thieu Thi Tao has spent those six years as a prisoner. She was arrested in 1968, when she was seventeen, a student at Marie Curie High School in Saigon. We don’t know the exact day.

The government of the Republic of Vietnam says it has no political prisoners. The United States ambassador says this must be true, since the government says it is true. But Thieu Thi Tao was arrested “for spreading Communist propaganda”; there is no other charge against her.

In prison, Thieu Thi Tao was beaten on the head with truncheons. Her head was locked between two steel bars. Water was forced down her throat. She was suspended above the ground.

Then, on November 20, 1968, she was transferred to national police headquarters. The Vietnamese Catholic priest Father Chan Tin, in a plea for international concern about her case, wrote that she was “further beaten and subjected to electric shock.”

“She’s become insane,” Father Tin wrote, “unable to sleep for fifteen days, believing herself to be a pampered dog that could only eat bread and milk. Not being given these, she refused to eat and became so weak she couldn’t talk. When the wind blew she wanted to fly.”

Nothing like that has happened to my children.

Late in 1969, Thieu Thi Tao was transferred to the island prison of Con Son, along with her sister, Tan, who has since been released. We heard nothing for nearly a year, until July 2, 1970—an extraordinary day, when Don Luce managed to lead two United States congressmen into a forbidden section of Con Son, where prisoners were held in tiger cages.

There is a picture of the congressmen, William Anderson and Augustus Hawkins, looking down with Don Luce into the cages where some prisoners had lived for years, shackled, some to the point of being permanently deformed. On that day Thieu Thi Tao, who speaks English, described for the congressmen exactly what was happening to her and the other women.

She was one of five women in her cage. A bucket of lime stood above each cell. At different times, the women were doused with lime or sprayed with tear gas. During their menstrual periods, they were given no means to keep themselves clean.

Anderson and Hawkins reported what they had seen and heard; photographs and interviews were published; there was a great uproar, and it was assumed that the publicity would destroy the cages. But on January 17, 1971, the U.S. Navy gave a $400,000 contract to Raymount, Morrison, Knudson, Brown, Root and Jones to build 384 new “isolation cells”—two square feet smaller than the old ones.

Thieu Thi Tao lived three years in these cages. She had been sentenced to two years by the military court. But it was said of her, in 1971: “She is still obstinate.”

Tao’s mother was in Thu Duc Prison for Women at that time; she wrote this poem for her two daughters:

Dearest Children,

My heart is torn!

How I suffer in this lonely prison

How our love is severed.

I care nothing for myself

But for you, you at Con Son

    
A place with no rest

    
A place with no trust

How could you know

Our family was ripped apart

At the whim of a crushing regime

Here I waste at Thu Duc

You at Con Son

Your youngest brother, abandoned

Waits alone

O God

    
Why does such cruelty rule

    
Casting me into prison

    
Leaving my children alone and astray?

But no matter, our love will conquer!

At some point—we don’t know exactly when—Thieu Thi Tao was transferred once more, this time to the Bien Hoa insane asylum. From there she managed to smuggle out a letter to Don Luce. On that day at Con Son she had not spoken directly to him—because she speaks English she addressed herself directly to the congressmen and to their aide, Tom Harkin. But Luce had stayed in touch with her mother. The letter:

Dear Nguyen Van Don Luce,

Nothing but your name give me affection. What a pity that I couldn’t meet you on your coming to the tiger cages, but I’ve made acquaintance with you through my mother, your letters to her, and the newspapers. I still remember the gentleman who spoke with me. I don’t know his name, but he seemed very nice. If you happen to meet him, please remember me kindly to him. [The gentleman was Tom Harkin, who was himself elected to Congress in 1974 as a representative from Iowa.]

I think that you are well informed about my conditions of living. Like more than a hundred of thousands of political prisoners in South Vietnam, I’m suffering a hell on earth. For six years in prison, I have lost health, knowledge, intelligence, memory. I’m ashamed to admit that you know Vietnamese better than I know English. Six years constantly seeking for affronting torments and repressions, seeking for the way to be able to live in peace, but not a minute serene!