Vietnam 67 (2 Viewers)

Bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail — No matter how many times we attacked it, the North Vietnamese transit network remained. In the end, it’s how they won.

The author is Merrill McPeak, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, 1990-1994.
 
“Recycling the Blood Road” by Rebecca Rusch, a professional cyclist.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail was called the Blood Road because so many people lost their lives there. My father, Stephen Rusch, was one of them. He was the weapons system officer in an F-4 Phantom fighter jet. On March 7, 1972, he was flying a strike mission over Laos to bomb trucks spotted along the trail. His plane was struck by ground fire and crashed to the jungle floor. He didn’t make it home.

In 2015, I set out on the most important bike ride of my life. I went to ride the entire length of the trail and to search for the place where Dad’s plane went down. I had no idea what I would find, if I could even get there or what the riding would be like. I started the expedition with so many questions, but now I can look back and see that my choices have always been preparing me for and leading me to this ride. My path as a professional endurance athlete has always been unpredictable, but something was always calling me to the remote jungles of Southeast Asia: a magnetic pull toward the map coordinates in an Air Force crash report.

The complicated network of paths that form the Ho Chi Minh Trail runs from the former North Vietnam, through the jungles of Laos and Cambodia, then re-enters Vietnam near Ho Chi Minh City. The trail, parts of which are still maintained today, was the main supply route for soldiers, supplies and ammunition as the North Vietnamese moved to take over the South during the Vietnam War. By shielding the route under thick jungle canopy, often pushing bicycles loaded with supplies, the North Vietnamese were able to evade American air strikes.

Forty-five years later, the bike is still the most efficient way to travel over there. Being on two wheels allowed me to cover distance and also be nimble enough to thread through the dense forest, dodge muddy trenches and cross rivers where bridges had washed away. In the most remote areas, locals had never seen a tourist or a carbon bicycle, and certainly never an American woman.

We stared at each other with wide-eyed wonder, greeting each other with a smile and palms pressed together, head bowed. Sitting in wooden huts, harvesting rice, raising children: This is the peaceful life they live now. But the scars of the devastation are everywhere. Bomb craters still mark the landscape like Swiss cheese, scrap metal from planes and bomb casings are repurposed as planters, buckets and roofs. There are even unexploded bombs that still threaten their daily lives.

My history is intertwined with theirs through shared loss and bloodshed. Even though my father was one of the pilots raining bombs on them, they opened their homes and hearts to me. Without words, they understood my journey.

After many demanding days on the trail, I finally arrived in Ta Oy, Laos, a small village near my father’s crash site. I felt as if the villagers there had been expecting me for a long time. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of his home, Mr. Airh, the village chief, told me the story of how his father had buried mine. Despite the fact that my Dad was dropping bombs on their village, Mr. Airh’s father respectfully laid the bodies of the two American airmen under a beautiful, ancient tree.

The tree was still there waiting for me. When I saw it in a small clearing in the jungle, I could feel my Dad’s presence. Though investigators had found just two of his teeth and a bone fragment at the site, finding plane debris reassured me that this was really the place. For the first time in my life as a professional athlete I was able to stop, pause and not think about what was next. I had finally reached a finish line I never knew I was striving toward.

I was three years old when Dad disappeared, and I don’t remember him. But under that tree, I finally had a chance to talk to him. “Hi Dad, I’m here.” I also spoke to Mr. Airh in the only Lao words I knew: “Khàwp jai lãi lãi” (Thank you.) He held my hands and we cried together as he whispered “Baw pen nyãng” (It’s OK.) He also told me that if his father had died that way, he would have come searching too. As foreign as we may seem to each other, in that moment we discovered a deep kinship.

My athletic career has spanned more than two decades. I’ve racked up countless wins and world championship medals. I’ve also learned that some medals are not worn around your neck, but instead are imprinted on your soul. As I neared the finish line of this 1,200-mile ride down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, I felt a sense of contentment and clarity that I had never experienced before. This ride wasn’t about death, destruction and closure, but instead it was about healing, forgiveness and discovery. To me, Blood Road no longer represents a trail stained red, but instead a path toward finding our family and shared connection in the most unexpected places.​

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Rebecca Rusch and Huyen Nguyen ride the Ho Chi Minh Trail in March, 2015.
 
The following is a particularly sad story.

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"Lady’s Coffin,” by Rick Gauger

This is one of the things that happened at LZ Pony. The landing zone had been in place four or five days by the time this happened. There were about 30 American soldiers at Pony, including my little interrogating team. Fighting was going on elsewhere, so our helicopter support was sparse. We didn’t have our jeeps, our tents or our other luxuries. We were by ourselves on a bare hilltop surrounded by little hamlets and rice paddies in a valley in the mountains. We lived under our ponchos. For two weeks our luck held out. The weather was good and there was no enemy except for a sniper who used to fire one shot at us from a great distance every evening at 5 p.m.

The LZ commander sent out small patrols of seven or eight infantrymen, to explore the hamlets that dotted the big valley and its tributary valleys. As an interrogator, I wasn’t supposed to go on these patrols, but I did anyway. I was curious about this exotic place, the infantry needed interpreters, and it’s smart to scout around when you’re in Viet Cong country. My Vietnamese Army interpreter, Sergeant Xuan, was willing to go too.

I’d been operational long enough to know this was Viet Cong country: It was clean, orderly, and motor-scooter-free. Nobody wanted to sell us anything or wanted to come anywhere near us. There were hardly any people who weren’t elderly or taking care of small children. There were untraditional kilometer-wide paddy fields on all sides where the Viet Cong had forced the villagers to collectivize the villagers’ smaller fields for greater efficiency. The hamlets were like islands of jungle dotted across the flat paddy fields. Once you got out of the hot glare and into a hamlet, your eyes adjusted and you saw mazes of pathways through jungle trees and bamboo, beautiful thatched-roof houses, gardens, tea hedges, fruit trees and animal pens. You also saw pits with sharpened stakes, prepared defensive trenches, dugout bunkers, tunnels and booby traps. We were lucky we caught this place by surprise.

We wandered wide loops from hamlet to hamlet, avoiding the open paddies as much as we could. The few villagers we encountered froze when they saw us. We tended to shoot at anyone who ran away. On another patrol few days before, I had been scared out of my wits. A black-clad figure had suddenly leaped up and started running away. A Vietnamese civilian running away might have life-saving information for us. We yelled at him to halt, but he didn’t. I was drawing a bead on him with my M-16, deciding whether to shoot or not, when suddenly a woman burst out of the bushes and grabbed my elbow. Everybody in the patrol froze with their rifles aimed at me and her. We did a lot of “freezing” in Vietnam. I was still aiming at the fugitive. The woman talked too fast for me to understand. Finally Xuan gasped out that the woman was saying for me not to shoot, that the fugitive was the village idiot, running away out of sheer simple-mindedness. This scene lasted two seconds, but it is engraved in my memory like an hour-long TV special.

That’s how I happened not to shoot a village idiot. Or maybe the guy I didn't shoot was a valuable high-ranking Viet Cong with a lot of intelligence information, who was saved by a very brave and very fast-thinking Viet Cong woman cadre. We never knew much in Vietnam. But now, decades later, I know that the Vietnam war was a pointless fiasco. So I’m glad I didn’t shoot anybody that time.

Anyway, there we were, Xuan, six American soldiers I didn’t know the names of and me, a 24-year-old second lieutenant. We pushed down a narrow red-clay path between tree trunks and bamboo-fenced pigpens and emerged in a sunlit clay courtyard in front of an elaborate farmhouse. Out came a smiling little old Vietnamese lady in maroon pajamas and a turban to greet us. I understood about a quarter of what was going on. “Welcome to the farm,” she said. “Sorry, everybody is away.” Smiling with a few teeth, gesturing and bowing, with ducks and chickens around her feet, she offered us the run of the place. The soldiers, taken aback by the lady’s enthusiasm but trying to act businesslike, went through the motions of looking through the house and outbuildings, turning over baskets and checking under mats. I noted a foxhole in the middle of the floor of the front room of the house. The foxhole had a seat with armrests, neatly sculpted out of the clay floor. There was a dusty red cushion on the seat and a teacup on one of the armrests.

Back outside, she led us around a corner where we saw a heavy wooden box the size and shape of a refrigerator leaning against the back of the house. It was painted bright red, and it had old-time Chinese decorations, highlighted with gold paint, at the corners. The old lady, smiling so that her eyes disappeared in a washboard of brown freckled wrinkles that left only her gums and a few blackened teeth visible, talking a mile a minute, invited us to inspect and admire the object.

“What is this thing?” we wanted to know. What’s the old lady going on about? What’s she saying? I began trying to decide if we should go to the trouble of opening this thing and looking inside. The issue of booby traps was always present in our minds.

Xuan tried to explain, but he was having trouble with the English words. He and I had to do some negotiating while the little old lady cackled on. Finally it came out: It was her coffin.

The American soldiers were amazed. “You mean she’s gonna get put in it when she dies?” they asked. “And she’s got it in her back yard?”

“That’s right,” Xuan replied, “and not only that, she says her son bought it for her. It shows how much he loves and respects her. That’s why she’s so proud of it and is showing it off to us.”

The Americans grinned and chortled and congratulated the old lady and each other. We walked away smiling. Maybe we felt that we were, at last, having the adventure in a foreign part of the world that the war stories of our fathers had promised us.

We w continued our patrol. Nothing else happened except a really nice stroll in the boonies and our return to LZ Pony in the evening in time to be missed again by the Five O’clock Sniper. I wish I could relive that day.

Soon after that, maybe the next afternoon, something happened, I don’t know what. Maybe one of the helicopter pilots thought he had been shot at. I was a little to one side of the LZ, by myself, doing I don’t remember what, when a gunship roared over me and launched a couple of white phosphorus rockets at something I couldn‘t see. Big white phosphorus explosions rose over the treetops, then the gunship turned and flew toward me firing its 40 mm grenade launcher directly at me, poop-poop-poop-poop, and a line of explosions came at me across the flooded paddy like a giant stomping across a lake. I was too surprised to move. I suppose the pilot realized at the last minute that he was about to hit near the LZ, and took his finger off the trigger just as the next stomp was going to get me.

I don’t remember what I did after that. I probably went back to where the officers were, to see what had happened. My team and I probably spent the day interrogating villagers and trying to make sense of what they told us. All the rest of the day, big fires burned in the hamlet beyond the trees.

The next day things were quiet, and Xuan and I went on another patrol with a different set of American infantrymen. We went here and there, various things happened that I don’t remember, and we found ourselves about 500 meters from a big burned out area. The burnt space was flat and open, all the trees and houses gone, littered with smoldering charcoal. Yes, the soldiers said, that’s what the gunship hit yesterday.

Xuan suddenly became agitated and began sputtering in an effort to say something in English. I looked more closely. Far away, in the smoke, I could see a human silhouette from the waist up. It didn’t move.
“That’s a dead Vietnamese, burnt to a crisp,” one of the soldiers said. “We saw it yesterday.”

I looked closer. And then I realized. “Xuan, is that …?”

“Yes sir,” he replied. “That lady we talk to. We talk to her.”

She was sitting up in her living room foxhole, a charcoal effigy of herself. No doubt when the shooting started, she took shelter in it. It didn’t protect her when her house turned to flame around her. Nothing can put out a white phosphorus fire. Her coffin was obliterated along with everything else.

I turned away, and I did not look at her again. For years afterward I would find myself doodling that image in the margins of papers when I was supposed to be working, a black silhouette of a stumpy torso, a skinny neck with a little round black ball on top of it. I’m sitting in a Starbuck’s in Seattle writing this. I only came here because I had an appointment at the VA hospital, and I’m getting tears in my eyes, but I have no right or reason whatever to cry about anything.

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Rick Gauger holding a dog at an American Army Camp in South Vietnam.
 
"In Thailand, I was Exposed to Agent Orange. The VA Doesn’t Agree," by David Geryak, an Air Force veteran and retired project manager and civil engineer.

During the Vietnam War, I served in the Air Force at the Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base, one of seven facilities the American military utilized to support the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign. I was a member of an armament loading crew for the supersonic F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bomber. The American buildup in Thailand, which began in 1961 and included thousands of airmen and Army personnel, is an often overlooked part of the war, because it was long a secret – we could not tell friends or even our families where we were going and what we would be doing, nor could we wear or display patches on our uniforms. The military was simply not ready to acknowledge our presence outside of Vietnam.

Most of us were involved with the intense pace of the bombing campaign, a 24-hour, 365-days-a-year effort. We’d work 10 to 12 hours a shift at the far end of a runway; occasionally our food was brought to us to save time. Everything moved fast: We had to crawl under the aircraft dodging sharp corners, opening flaps and avoiding jet blast while duck-walking underneath to inspect each weapon, pull the safety pins and everything else involved in getting a plane ready. When they landed, we did it all again, in reverse. In between, we waited, with no shade from the blistering sun. The sequence repeated itself all day, every day.

During my 17-month tour, there were two crash landings by battle-damaged aircraft, the pilots physically shaken at the end of their bombing run. Another time I found myself facing a full rack of armed bombs that had gotten “hung” on an aircraft during the bombing run. The pilot, not being able to eject the hung bombs or rack before having to land, brought the F-105 down to the runway in a practically vertical position and slowly, carefully lowered his nose wheel knowing that he had at best inches of clearance between the bombs and the concrete, and could have set off the bombs with contact to the runway. When he rolled to a stop at the end of the runway, my partner and I had to disarm the bombs while the pilot waited, nervously, inside the cockpit.

I arrived back to San Francisco in May 1967 when my enlistment was up. Being in Thailand had made it hard to get news from loved ones about how the war was being perceived back home. As I walked through the terminal at the San Francisco airport with other airmen, we passed a group of protesters. I remember being called “baby killers”; some people were spitting at us. I encountered antiwar sentiment again when I went back to college. I learned to fit it; I grew my hair long and didn’t let anyone know what I did during that war. Even when the public’s attitude toward veterans began to soften in the 1980s, I didn’t talk about my service to my country.

It wasn’t until 2014, during my second marriage (my first wife had died), that I began to open up. My second wife had been in college while I was in Vietnam, and we were able to compare experiences. At a professional conference, we met a Marine general who, on hearing where I had been stationed and that I had type II diabetes, insisted that I visit the VA.

Type II diabetes is common among veterans who had been exposed to the Agent Orange. After extensive research, my wife and I found that the defoliant had been used in Thailand to clear the jungle around the base perimeters. I submitted a claim, only to learn that except in a few isolated incidents, the VA does not recognize that Agent Orange was ever used in Thailand. Unless you had been assigned to patrol the perimeter, you could not qualify. Everyone else on base, including the airmen who worked and lived at or near the perimeter, are excluded from Agent Orange disability benefits. This despite compelling evidence of widespread exposure, including photographs showing bunker foundations built out of empty Agent Orange barrels.

What I never would have guessed until I did the research was that so many of the ills I faced in the years since were likely the direct result of Agent Orange exposure. Over the years I have been treated for multiple autoimmune diseases, another common illness among Agent Orange-exposed servicemen. And yet, as my claim rejection notice said, I was “denied because there is no evidence that this condition is associated with herbicide exposure, denied because the required service in Vietnam is not shown, exposure or service diagnosis or treatment for these symptoms while still in the service” – disregarding the fact that some of these diseases and cancers can take years to manifest themselves, long after one has left the service.

Ironically, my location in Thailand, long a secret, was now the sole reason I was being denied coverage. Had I spent even a single day in Vietnam, by the VA’s own rules I would have been granted disability immediately. I’m not alone: In my research, I encountered many other Thailand veterans with far worse medical conditions that mine whose claims were also denied and who are still trying to receive their deserved benefits.

To add insult to injury, shortly after I received the denial of my disability claim, I received a notice from the VA Health Benefits Department that another claim I had submitted, asking for 10 percent disability for stress-related incidents, was approved, with the notification stating that I am “determined to be a Vietnam era herbicide exposed veteran.” In other words, one part of the VA recognized my condition, but another didn’t.

I do not regret my service to my country. I volunteered to serve in Vietnam, but instead was sent to Thailand. I should not be denied the benefits given to others who were exposed to Agent Orange, but happened to be assigned to the other side of an artificial line on a map – a line that the toxins in Agent Orange did not recognize.​

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David Geryak in 1967.
 
Lyndon Johnson’s Trip Around the World

By Kyle Longley, a Professor at Arizona State University.

At 11:35 a.m. on Dec. 17, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson called his personal pilot, Brig. Gen. James Cross, after learning of the drowning death of Australia’s prime minister, Harold Holt.

“Cross,” the president said, “we may want to go to Australia tomorrow. You better get my big plane out and make sure it’s ready to go.” Two days later, the aircraft lifted off for the long trip across the Pacific, first stopping in Hawaii and Pago Pago, the capital of American Samoa, before landing in Canberra.

Throughout the trip, the Vietnam War dominated conversations, as aides recalled. For Johnson, it remained the open sore on the American body politic that extracted a heavy personal toll. After attending a dinner party with the president in late 1967, Senator George McGovern had described Johnson as “a tortured and confused man – literally tortured by the mess he has gotten into in Vietnam. He is restless, almost like a caged animal.”

To try to escape the quagmire, in September, Johnson had floated what became known as the “San Antonio Formula,” proposing a halt in bombing if Hanoi negotiated. Simultaneously, he acted as if there was no end in sight. In November he called Gen. William Westmoreland, the head of the American forces in South Vietnam, to the United States for a goodwill tour, trying to shore up political and public support for the war.

Even at Holt’s funeral, Johnson obsessed over Vietnam. Not only was Australia a key ally in the fighting, with more than 7,500 soldiers committed, but the leaders of several other allies were there to pay their respects. Johnson turned the funeral into a spontaneous strategy session. In a meeting with Australia’s new prime minister, John McEwan, he said that North Vietnam “is testing the will of the U.S. and its allies” and argued that “we must maintain our posture; not widen the war, not cut and run.”

McEwen guaranteed “no change in Australia’s commitment to stay steadfast with the Republic of Vietnam” until “a just peace” had been won. Johnson received similar assurances from another ally, President Park Chung-hee of South Korea, in a separate meeting. To cap it off, he spent two hours with South Vietnam’s president, Nguyen Van Thieu; the pair emerged with plans to thwart efforts by “domestic political forces in each country to pull the two presidents apart.”

Johnson was energized by the meetings, so much so that he decided not to return to Washington, but instead to fly overnight to Thailand. During the trip, a revitalized Johnson gave a long speech to the sleepy pilots and crewmen. “Let no man in any other land misread the spirit of America,” he said. “It is a spirit that is manifest in the steadfastness and the resolve of a nation that is holding firmly and faithfully to its course.”

Almost as soon as he landed at the Royal Thai Air Force Base in Korat, Johnson and his entourage made a short jaunt to the large American base at Cam Ranh Bay, South Vietnam. He visited the hospital and pinned Purple Hearts on the wounded before accompanying Westmoreland in reviewing the amassed units.

He opened by giving a short speech to high-ranking officers, describing an enemy hoping to outlast the Americans and break their will. “But we’re not going to yield,” he proclaimed. “And we’re not going to shimmy. We are going to wind up with a peace with honor which all Americans seek.”

In front of the thousands of troops gathered there, Johnson gave a much longer speech, emphasizing that America and its allies were in the war for the long haul. America, he said, “had come from the valleys and the depths of despondency to the heights and the cliffs, where we know now that the enemy can never win.”

Freed from the pressures of politicians and protesters back home, Johnson had found a new vein of optimism and resolve. And so he simply pressed westward, making a quick stop in Pakistan before jetting to Rome to talk with Pope Paul VI, a consultation facilitated by a former speechwriter, Jack Valenti.

Johnson began by recounting the conversations in Australia with his allies. Pope Paul VI responded: “We must declare to the world as friends of peace and foes of war. I must differentiate my position from yours although I very clearly understand your good intentions and your good hopes.” Then he asked, “Could I be an intermediary for you and say what I know to be true, that the U.S. truly wants peace?” Johnson immediately said yes.

They ultimately agreed to a joint statement, although the pope objected to a line saying that “we will never surrender South Vietnam to aggression or attack,” afraid it would appear he endorsed the war. The president struck it.

Afterward, Johnson noted, “I left the Vatican convinced that His Holiness understood our position and my hopes.” He immediately boarded the plane for the final leg home, completing an impromptu circumnavigation that was both unprecedented for an American president and vintage Johnson. He arrived at his ranch in Texas on Christmas Eve, having traversed 28,210 miles and spent 59 and a half hours in the sky and a total of 112 hours away from the White House. “Lyndon was riding high,” his wife, Lady Bird, noted.

The president repeated the message he had carried around the world at the State of the Union address less than a month later. The enemy “continues to hope that America’s will to preserve can be broken,” he said. “Well, he is wrong. America will persevere. Our patience and our perseverance will match our power. Aggression will never prevail.” He also declared, “Our goal is peace — and peace at the earliest moment.”

And yet his aides could sense his old doubts starting to creep back. “I felt an urgency as he spoke those words, almost as though he ached,” wrote Joseph Califano, his domestic policy adviser. If Johnson felt a sense of foreboding, he was right: Two weeks after his speech, the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong began the Tet offensive. On March 12 he nearly lost the New Hampshire presidential primary to Senator Eugene McCarthy, who ran on an antiwar platform. On March 31, Johnson withdrew from the race.

Johnson wanted his round-the-world trip to represent a new turn in the war, and his own political future. Instead it was the last light before the darkness settled on his, and the country’s, fortunes. And it revealed how his optimism and resolve were ultimately blinders, preventing him from seeing the dire truth about the “bit*ch of a war” in Southeast Asia until it was too late.​

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President Lyndon B. Johnson speaks with Gen. Westmoreland during a visit to Cam Ranh Bay, South Vietnam on Dec. 23, 1967.
 
“The Camps,” by Thomas C. Fox, who lived and worked five years in Vietnam between 1968 and 1973. He is retired and lives in Roeland Park, Kan., married to Kim Hoa for 46 years.

Days out of Stanford University, I joined International Voluntary Services, a nonprofit with operations in South Vietnam. What seemed like just a few hours later, I stepped down the stairs of a Pan Am 707 jet, engines still humming, into Saigon’s notoriously muggy heat.

Only years before the French had referred to Saigon as “the Pearl of the Orient.” By 1966, the pearl had lost much of its luster. Tens of thousands of American servicemen were pouring into Saigon in those days, and with them came hucksters, pimps, prostitutes, bars and brothels, pushing aside alienated Vietnamese.

The footprint of my group, on the other hand, was meant to be smaller and minimally disruptive. As workers in a “people to people” organization, we were told to blend in, to listen and to appreciate Vietnamese culture, not remake it. A few among us were conscientious objectors. Most, at least at the start, were apolitical and had, like myself, received draft deferments. We were encouraged to live simply and eat like the Vietnamese.

Many of us even dressed like them, wearing, at times, farmers’ black pajamas to the utter incredulity of American soldiers we would encounter on city streets or in the villages. We did not carry guns and packed only our young ideals. Our mission was simple: to better people’s lives. Nothing more.

International Voluntary Services was established in 1953, its roots in the Christian pacifism of the Mennonites and Quakers and the Brethren organizations. It arrived in South Vietnam in 1956, after the division of the country, to help resettle refugees from the north. At first, I.V.S. workers were mostly agricultural advisers. But by the mid-1960s, with funding from the United States Agency for International Development, I.V.S. had expanded to also teach English, work with university students, and assist Vietnamese farmers displaced by the war.

Once in Vietnam we underwent four weeks of all-day language training. At the end, most of us could speak in simple sentences. I was then assigned to the provincial capital of Tuy Hoa on the coast in central Vietnam. I was to work with refugees in two sprawling camps, Dong Tac and Ninh Tinh, each with several thousand Vietnamese, mostly the young and very old.

The camps comprised rows of corrugated tin panel huts and little else. The children never dared to leave the confines of the camps. As many as 50 refugees lived in each hut, crammed in two layers of hammocks where they stayed mostly idle, avoiding the heat. On the floors stacked against the walls were the meager possessions they carried with them when they fled their villages: metal tea pots, ceramic tea cups and rice bowls, tin spoons and knives. There were by far more women than men in the camps, as able men had been drafted into the South Vietnamese Army or local Vietcong forces.

Often, the adults kept in their pockets small green bottles of medicated oil to relieve and ward off colds. They also carried old family photos, once part of ancestor shrines. Adults had to keep on them a plastic-covered, government-issued ID card. Failure to produce one when asked was a ground for arrest and imprisonment.

I lived with one other American in Tuy Hoa, in a simple two-room cement house. I never carried a gun. American civilian advisers to the South Vietnamese thought this was unwise. Tuy Hoa was the capital of Phu Yen Province, a Vietcong stronghold. At the same time, many parts of the province had been designated by government authorities “free fire zones,” meaning anything seen moving inside the boundaries was an open target. Korean, Vietnamese and American helicopters roamed the skies as machine gunners watched for movement below.

Arriving in August 1966, I found the camps lacking in nearly all essentials. There were few wells and no latrines. Almost nothing grew in the sand-clogged land around the camps. Hunger and disease were widespread. Women searched for edible plants nearby or twigs to light fires to boil tea. Some haunted the local market, waiting to pick up rice grains that had fallen on the dirt. It could take a whole day to fill a small cup, which they would bring back home to cook to feed their families.

The children were thin and weak. Some were dying from undiagnosed diseases, stricken in their last days with lethargy and diarrhea. Those children healthy enough to move about had little to occupy themselves with. I wrote to American toy companies, which sent boxes of marbles to distribute. How precious were two or three marbles to these children! With them they would play for hours at a time.

I vividly recall the first time I was asked by grieving parents to help bury a child. We walked together early one morning, the dead 2-year-old boy wrapped in a blanket. The father and I took turns digging into a sand mound on the edge of the Dong Tac camp. Each parent hugged the boy before the father placed him gently in the hole, no more than a few feet deep. There was no marker to leave.

I was the only person, Vietnamese or American, who attended to the camps. I had little to no leverage with local government officials or their American advisers. The bureaucracy was ruthlessly impersonal. After all, these refugees had already been resettled, I was told.

As my pleas for help generally fell flat, the refugees recognized I could not do much to help them despite my efforts. I felt increasingly impotent. In a curious way, my powerlessness seemed to bond me in unspoken ways with these equally powerless people.

Once, following months of pleas to send food aid to the camp, the Saigon government allowed a one-time shipment. On the designated date two trucks, carrying large bags of bulgur wheat and shiny tin cans of cooking oil, pulled into the camp. Each bag and can was stamped, “Gift from the people of the United States.” (Bulgur wheat, a surplus commodity in the United States at the time, was by far the most commonly distributed food distributed to the needy during the war, even though most Vietnamese refused to eat it. Instead they would feed it to their pigs.)

Distribution moved painfully slow, as only one person per family could come forward. By dusk only a third of the aid had been distributed. The next morning, camp refugees came running up to me, saying that as soon as I left the night before the trucks had driven away. When the trucks did not return the next day, I complained to the American adviser to the Phu Yen provincial chief.

The local Vietnamese refugee administrator insisted the supplies had been distributed. The American adviser said it was my word against the administrator – and I was not to “rock the boat.”

Who knows what happened to the aid, but the temptation for corruption was overwhelming. The siphoning of military hardware and civilian supplies, including refugee aid, became the norm – and all the Americans knew it.

I began writing letters to Edward Kennedy, who at the time ran the Senate subcommittee on refugees. He later traveled to Vietnam to investigate and I spent an evening briefing him. But the situation never really improved for the camps.

Not all was dire. I found the Vietnamese in the camp to be caring, humorous people. As little as they had, they were often generous to me. Hardly a day would go by without some family inviting me to have tea and sometimes rice cakes. When I met a Vietnamese family for the first time, the questions were usually the same: Are you an American? How old are you? Are you married? Then, invariably, do you want to marry a Vietnamese woman?

“Yes,” I would answer, eliciting an outburst of laughter.

And then, someone would often respond, “I have a granddaughter” or “I have a niece,” sending some young woman, peeking from around a corner, scurrying away.

I felt at the time these exchanges allowed for light interaction. However, they also allowed for the Vietnamese to explore my thinking toward them. Was I the kind of person who would seriously consider marrying a Vietnamese?

As water for tea boiled, our conversations would turn to other aspects of family life. How many brother and sisters did I have? Were my parents alive? In turn, I would ask about their families. Soon they were taking out faded family photos to show me a deceased father or grandfather, or, sadly, a son or daughter. A few minutes later the oldest male would raise a hand slightly, offer a palm and say, “Moi, anh,” (“Please, friend”), inviting me to drink. Only after I first put the tiny tea cup to my lips would others also drink.

I listened to their stories. Often, they talked about village life before the war. It sounded idyllic. They talked about their hardships, their losses. They talked about their hope the war would soon end, avoiding anything that might be construed as political.

They also talked about ghosts, an unfamiliar topic for me. Leaving their villages had enormous consequences for them. They were no longer able to attend to their duties to their ancestors, breaking promises and obligations with serious consequences. They told me that were they to die away from their ancestral graves their souls might end up wandering in a kind of perpetual purgatory. This was not just idle talk. I learned that some of the older men, fearing just that, had returned to their villages – and to almost certain death.​

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Tom Fox with a South Vietnamese villager.

— Continued in next Post.
 
— Continued from prior post.

As the war intensified we were being forced to ask ourselves some difficult questions: Were we really helping? Or were we simply “bandages on the genocide,” as one of my colleagues asked one day? The answers did not come easily. What was becoming clearer was the seeming circle of madness of this war.

My work was both disheartening and fulfilling. I made a difference in some lives. Noticing many children with cleft palates and harelips, I matched them with a local Korean medical team. I started handicraft shops, organizing sewing and hat-making classes to help provide income to girls, vulnerable to the lure of the brothels that lined the nearby Tuy Hoa air base. Nonprofit groups gave me the sewing machines and cloth, which the girls and their mothers made into pajamas. I arranged for American military medical teams to conduct simple medical examinations and distribute medicines.

One day, I invited a half-dozen of the elders to my house in Tuy Hoa. We drank tea and I served rice cakes. After a while I asked them what they thought I could do to help in the camp. They talked among themselves and after a few minutes one of the men, speaking for the others, said, “Tell your people what’s happening to us; tell them about the war.”

We did. My colleagues and I, often the only Americans for miles in rural Vietnam, wrote monthly reports to the I.V.S. leadership in Saigon. In the summer of 1967 the leaders drew up a five-page letter to send to President Lyndon Johnson. “We are finding it increasingly difficult to pursue quietly our main objective: helping the people of Vietnam,” the letter, signed by 49 of us, stated. “The war as it is presently being waged is self-defeating in approach.” We called for an immediate de-escalation of the fighting; the end of bombing and defoliation; talks among all parties, including the National Liberation Front; and the establishment of an international peace commission to negotiate an end to the war.

Don Luce, who drafted the letter, asked me to accompany him to deliver the letter to Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in the American Embassy compound. Stiff and proper, Bunker could hardly contain his anger, telling us our action was “unethical and discourteous. You don’t criticize your host when you are guests in their country.” We replied we were speaking out against American policies. That did not placate him. The letter made the front page of The New York Times. Luce and three other I.V.S. leaders resigned. The rest of us stayed to continue our work as best we could.

The week after I returned home in the summer of 1968, I received a letter from my draft board ordering me to report. In Milwaukee, I met with five men who sat behind a table and made up my draft board. I told them I believed the war to be immoral and American policies were betraying our country’s ideals. It was not the message they wanted to hear. I told them if drafted I would refuse induction, but I was willing to return to Vietnam as a civilian volunteer.

I had applied for a deferment to attend Yale University’s Southeast Asian graduate program. The draft board members eventually said they would offer me a deferment if I would stop speaking out against the war. It was a condition, I told them, I could not accept. Two weeks later I received the notice of deferment in the mail. They apparently had decided not to push my case.

Those were especially lonely months, as I had grown estranged from Americans who didn’t seem to care about what was going on in Vietnam. I had felt much more at peace in Vietnam, where there were people I had come to know and who were living within the tragedy of the war. I returned to Vietnam whenever someone would pay my way. Once as a guide for a congressional fact-finding group; another time as a guide for an inter-religious peace group. Finally, I ended up as a local hire for The New York Times and Time magazine, where I wrote articles about the impact of the war on Vietnamese.

I eventually married a Vietnamese social worker whom I met in Saigon, where she cared for war-injured children. We now have three children and seven young grandchildren. Looking back five decades, I gain a certain perspective on my life. Once young and restless, I took a risk, traveled to Asia, and immersed myself in another culture. Part of me never returned. I wound up a richer person for the journey.​
 
The Beatles of Vietnam — How three siblings in Saigon became The CBC Band, one of the hottest acts of the War.

As the article notes, “Some Vietnamese kids brought joy to American G.I.s by performing rock concerts in the middle of a war that killed young people on all sides.”
 
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