My Life So Far (51 page)

F
rom the war crimes exhibit, I am taken to the Viet Duc Hospital. There I talk with Dr. Ton That Tung, who has begun research linking the U.S. chemical defoliant Agent Orange to birth defects in babies born to women in sprayed areas of South Vietnam.

“We are seeing more and more of these birth defects,” he tells me. Then, as if reading my mind, he adds, “Yes, I fear you will soon be seeing these things among your own soldiers.”

I know what I must do.

CHAPTER TEN

BAMBOO

—N
EIL
S
HEEHAN,
A Bright Shining Lie

A
S WE STEP
from the Viet Duc Hospital into the sunlight, I have made up my mind.

“I want to speak on your radio,” I say to my hosts. “I want to try to tell U.S. pilots what I am seeing here on the ground.”

I
am used to talking with soldiers, and my work with VVAW and the FTA tour has given me some understanding of their realities. I know that a growing number of airmen have turned against the war, and I remember hearing that the maps they were given of their targets had no Vietnamese names on them—only numbers, remote, impersonal. They have never been in Vietnam, have never seen the faces of their victims. I feel I must try to make what I am seeing as personal an experience for them as it is for the soldiers on the ground in South Vietnam. I have come to bear witness, and while I have not planned this, I feel it as a moral imperative. I do not stop to consider that this will have consequences for me later—especially since I know that other American travelers to Hanoi have spoken on Radio Hanoi. Some will later accuse me of treason for urging soldiers to desert—something I do not do.

T
he first broadcast is done live. Others will be recorded over the next week.*
 
⁵
Aside from a few notes I have scribbled to myself, I speak extemporaneously, from my heart, about what I have witnessed and how it made me feel. (A CIA contract employee, Edward Hunter, was brought before the House Committee on Internal Security as an authority on Communist brainwashing techniques. He testified that my broadcasts were “so concise and professional a job” that he “most strongly doubt[ed] that [I] wrote them [myself. I] must have been working with the enemy.” Committee chair Richard Ichord agreed. He was quoted as saying I “used a lot of military terms that wouldn’t be within [my] knowledge.” Obviously they were unaware of the time I had spent with soldiers.)

As I talk I see in my mind the faces of the air force pilots I have met. I feel as if I am talking to men I know and, eternal optimist that I am, I hope that if they can see what I am seeing, they will feel as I do.

This is a transcript of a typical broadcast:

A
few days later I am driven south of Hanoi. Following us in a separate car is French filmmaker Gérard Guillaume and a small crew. He is in Hanoi to make a documentary and has decided to film some of my visit as well. Since my goal is to bear witness and get word out as broadly as possible, I welcome his being there.

All that is left of the city of Phu Ly, formerly a thriving industrial center, is the occasional frame of a building, a doorway, the steeple of a church lying on its side. The city has been flattened into rubble. I am seeing what our makers of war assume Americans will never see.

W
e are driving back to Hanoi through the township of Duc Giang when air raid sirens let us know we have to take shelter. We tumble from the car and hurry to a half-buried A-frame shelter that is filling up with local Vietnamese. The film crew stumbles in right behind us. Suddenly the roar of Vietnamese antiaircraft guns explodes all around us, drowning out the sound of the American planes. It is a sound beyond sound. Do GIs hear this noise from their own guns? How do they stand it? I can’t fathom how anyone could ever grow accustomed to this devastation of sound. But still, except for their curiosity about who I am, the people in the shelter appear calm. Again someone asks if I am Russian, and when Quoc tells them I am an American actress they get very excited and seem inordinately pleased. Why? Why don’t they shout at me? I want to shout at them, “Don’t you understand it is my country that is bombing you!” Suddenly I feel claustrophobic, wanting to be out of there, to see firsthand what is going on, to film the planes that are bombing. Before Quoc can stop me, I grab my camera and bolt from the shelter.

(Thirty years later, over lunch in California, Quoc will remind me that he had pleaded with me to come back inside but that I refused. Poor Quoc. I should have obeyed him. He was, after all, the one responsible for my safety.)

The raid ends and a sudden, deafening silence descends. It all happened so fast. The planes are gone, none were hit, and at least in the immediate vicinity, I can see no signs of damage. Quoc takes me to a group of soldiers who are operating the closest gun installation. I am surprised to see that they are young women and that one of them is pregnant. Pregnant and fighting. I think that if she can have hope, so can I. Right then I determine to have a baby with Tom, as a testament to
our
country’s future.

I
have found that the few clothes I brought—a pair of blue jeans, khaki slacks—are too hot for the days when I am mostly outdoors, so Madame Chi takes me to a small shop near the hotel where I purchase a pair of loose black pants and rubber sandals.

I
travel to visit schools in outlying rural areas. When I ask if the war has created obstacles to the children’s schooling, I am told that on the contrary, they have succeeded in gaining widespread literacy in the north. For a people who have gone directly from colonialism (which had left all but the privileged few illiterate) into war, it is an astonishing commitment to education.

I
am taken to the Hanoi film studio, where I meet with a director and watch the most famous Vietnamese actor, Tra Giang, perform a scene in a film about a war heroine. I am surprised that they are continuing to make films despite the bombings. Tra Giang is from South Vietnam and about my age, with deep, sad eyes and an exquisite beauty. She is also pregnant. I will not forget her face.

N
guyen Dinh Thi is a well-known writer in Vietnam, and as he speaks fluent French, we can converse in the hotel gardens without a translator. As it happens, he is also very handsome, a Vietnamese cross between historian Howard Zinn and my dad: a long, lanky drink of water with expressive hands and black hair that flops over his forehead the way Dad’s did in
Young Mr. Lincoln.
He is my favorite person to talk with, not only because of how he looks, but because of the way he has of capturing the essence of his country’s struggle in brief metaphors, which he laughingly delivers like a gift on a tray, enjoying them as much as his listener does. He tells me, “We Vietnamese, because of our unique circumstances, have developed a deep sense of patience.” He looks hard at me, making sure the words sink in, before continuing. “In our mountains here in the north there are huge limestone caves. We know these caves were not made by supernatural giants. No, they were made by little drops of water.” And his grin stretches from ear to ear: It is the long-term, cumulative effects of seemingly weak things that achieve the impossible.

I
t is 3:00 in the morning as we leave the hotel in a camouflaged car to drive to Nam Sach forty miles east of Hanoi. We travel at night because of the danger of strafing by U.S. planes. Yesterday twenty foreign correspondents who had come to examine the damage done to the dikes three days earlier were witness to a second attack. Twelve Phantom jets and A-7s dove at the dike the journalists were standing on and released several bombs and rockets. The reporter from Agence France-Press wrote on July 11 that they “all felt the attack was clearly against the dike system.”

This is what the United States is denying. This is what I have come to document.

The sky is beginning to lighten as we enter the province. Many people are already in the fields working. I am told they do a lot of work at night, when there is less danger of bombing. The whole area is protected from flooding by a complicated system of crisscrossing dikes.

The filmmakers are with us again. We walk through the mud on the narrow paths that run between rice paddies. It is impossible to keep my poultice out of the mud, but at least I am walking and no longer need crutches. The sun is high overhead; sweat is running down my body. A flock of what appear to be starlings turns on a dime above us. Ahead I see my first dike, rising gradually eight or ten meters above the fields and built entirely of earth. Some men and women on bicycles and a few water buffalo pulling carts are moving along the top. Do they feel the heavy heat as I do or are they immune to it? On the other side is the Thai Binh River.

The particular spot that has been attacked for the second time just the previous morning is the most strategic, for here the dike must hold back the waters of six converging rivers. These rivers will be raging down the mountains in about two weeks. I am told that Nam Sach has been attacked by U.S. planes eight times since May 10 and the dikes have been hit four times. Although the planes are expected back, there are people all around, knee- and elbow-deep in mud, planting their rice and carrying huge baskets of earth to repair the dikes.

One of the committee members shouts to the people that I am an American actor, and this is greeted with smiles and waves.
Why?
Why don’t they scream and shake their fists at me? That’s what I would do in their place. Their lack of hostility seems passive and I feel the urge to grab their necks and shake some sense into them.
Get angry, dammit!

As I stand on the dike, I look in all directions. I see no visible military targets, no industry, no communication lines—just rice fields. Then I suddenly see the bomb craters on both sides of the dike—gaping holes, some ten meters across and eight meters deep. The crater bottoms, I am told, are two meters below sea level. The crater that had severed the dike is almost filled in again, but the main worry are the bombs that have fallen on the sides of the dike. They cause earthquakes that shatter the dike’s foundation and make deep cracks that zigzag up the sides. Antipersonnel bombs have also been used; they enter the dike on an angle, lodging underneath and exploding later. This damage does not show up on aerial reconnaissance photographs. I am told that if these cracks aren’t repaired in time, the pressure from the water—which will soon reach six or seven meters above the level of the fields—will cause the weakened dikes to give way and endanger the entire eastern region of the Red River Delta.