Dear Twos,
Has it been five months since I last wrote? I think half of me would have guessed less, and the other half would have guessed a lot more, but I never would have guessed accurately. I have no excuse for such negligence, no witty way of weaseling out of my wesponsibiwities. I have simply been part lazy, part busy and part absent, both in mind and body. Regardless, for the moment I am none of those things, and will now attempt to remedy my silence with more blather I have traditionally hoped to call pathetically poetic reporting.
Today I nearly laughed out loud at myself. I have written much about Vietnam, some to all of you together, some to a few of you individually, and some just to myself. Though now I realize that, as an American in Vietnam, it is somehow absurdly fitting that I have never once written about the Vietnam War, or of any presence that war has on my presence here. Why? Well, I suppose on some strange level it never occurred to me, on another I wasn’t really sure what I could possibly say that might mean anything to anyone, here or there. But, looking back at the past 9 months, I guess I would say that my main remark would only ever be how surprisingly little tangible presence the Vietnam War has on my daily life here. By and large people have no special reaction when I tell them I am from America, or, at least, if they do it usually has nothing to do with the War. There are no bullet holes in concrete walls, no craters, no old women yelling obscenities at me for their lost child. Just a few monuments here and there, some museum’s that I refuse to go to (such as the tunnels in Cu Chi, where I hear a chirpy tour guide takes you into tiny little tunnels and tells you all about how exactly the Viet Cong killed your uncle), and the occasional kid in the country that dies because the rock he thought he was throwing to his friend turns out to be a grenade that never exploded.
Having said that, I should not like to imply that I have not had interesting or meaningful experiences with regard to the War while I have been here. The earliest example of this was about six weeks after I got here when an American friend of mine and I finally worked up the courage to go to the War Museum here in Saigon. Upon entrance, the place actually seems kinda cool, it’s got all kinds of tanks, jets, helicopters and artillery pieces spanning nearly thirty years of warfare against both the French and the U.S. (the Vietnamese consider them to be kind of the same war). Further inside is a bit of comic relief where they list each American army division that fought in Vietnam and lists the number of soldiers each one lost, which somehow adds up to about three times the total number of American soldiers that died in Vietnam. I’m not quite sure how that works, but the communist party says it so it must be true. After that is a pretty interesting collection of pictures by western war correspondents that died during the war, with brief descriptions of the difficulty some of them faced in deciding whether or not to join the fight in the moments before they died. Then comes some evidence of atrocities by the Diem Regime, the government in charge of South Vietnam during the War. Then they show some captured Agent Orange delivery units, with some deformed fetuses in jars next to those, kind of a before and after display. After that is a number of pictures of the fighting, followed by some drawings made by school children depicting bombs dropping on villages and people losing limbs and heads. The museum ends with a display of a prison that the Diem regime used to torture political prisoners, along with the actual guillotine that the French government gave to the Diem regime (the obvious though unasked question being, why did the French government think the Diem family needed a guillotine?). This marvelously depressing place (it made me feel a little bit like a German at Auschwitz) made a turn for Kubrick when a cell phone began ringing to the tune of Jingle Bells, and for some unknown reason the owner of the phone decided that it was better to just let the phone ring rather than admit it was their phone. This way we could all sing Christmas carols while we looked at pictures of dead bodies and deformed babies.
Another random moment was when I was walking on the street with a friend near her house and an older guy walked right up to me and started speaking to me in Vietnamese. I understood nothing of what he said so, once he had finished and walked off, I asked my friend what he said. “Nothing that made any sense,” she said, “he’s a veteran of the war and I guess his whole unit was killed from an American bomb except for him. Since then he hasn’t made any sense when he talks, too upset I guess.” Later on we saw him again, and he said nothing but offered me a cigarette, which I politely took, thanking him, even though I don’t smoke.
The next time I was significantly confronted with the War was during Tet (the biggest holiday here in Vietnam, just a couple weeks ago). I was in a small village out near the border with
Cambodia, staying at an old man’s house and “eating tet”, as the expression goes, with his many sons. Tet celebrations consist of extended family getting together and eating and drinking nearly non-stop for four days. The amount of food consumed during this time is kingly, and the amount of alcohol ungodly. Each night the family went to the chicken coop to choose which chickens they would kill for the next day’s feast, each night new bottles of whiskey were opened, and each night new 24-packs of beer were dumped into buckets of ice, all to be consumed before the sun rose the next morning.
On one night in particular, as the night wound down and we all began to lovingly rub our stomachs and produce smiles that only happy stupors can produce, I sat down in the living room with the old man, who I was instructed to call Om (which means “grandfather”), and a couple of his sons, who were in their early forties or late thirties. As we drank hot tea, Om asked me if anyone in my family had fought in Vietnam. I replied that yes, actually two of my uncles fought in Vietnam, one of which still had a piece of shrapnel in his heart that was given to him while he was here. Om asked me in what way they fought here, I told him they were both Marines. He nodded and said that he would not have had any contact with them. He had been a general in the North Vietnamese army. He was in charge of the SAM missile batteries whose job it was to shoot down American airplanes. He told me about how he lost 31 men in a single night from a bombing run by American B-52s. He also said that during the war his men shot down 52 American airplanes.
It was at precisely this moment that my drunken stupor suddenly vanished. My only thought was that, my brother is a pilot, so this man was responsible for killing guys exactly like my brother. He then quietly got up and walked into his bedroom, a moment later returning with some small plastic boxes in his hands. He then began to show me all of the medals he was awarded for his service during the War, of which there were many. He spoke with pride, for he was quite obviously deeply proud of the service he had done for his country, but was never bragging, not even when he told me how many American planes his men shot down. This was not a desire to exert dominance or pride over an American, this was just him telling me what I had to know, whether I wanted to or not. He needed to tell me, and I needed to know, and that was it. It seemed quite obvious to me that this act of telling me all of this was as much or more for him than it was for me.
Nonetheless, as he spoke a deep sadness grew within me, a sadness that was beyond politics. I did not blame one side or the other, I did not regret America’s entrance into Vietnam, nor did I support it, I was just terribly and utterly sad that it had. Sad for the 52 men that were shot down, sad for the 31 men that died in that one night, sad for the deformed babies and dead photographers, sad for Saigon, sad for kids who thought grenades were rocks, sad for the kids just like me who had been sent to this terrible place to fight terrible people for terrible reasons, but, most of all, just sad for the whole damn thing.
I suppose it’s cliché to talk about the “effects of war” and how terrible it is, but that’s partly because just talking about it is meaningless. But seeing those effects, seeing how they are somehow muted and yet somehow so utterly rooted in the fabric of the country around me, that holds meaning beyond what any words could possibly hold.
Hell, I don’t know what more to say.
Love,
Has it been five months since I last wrote? I think half of me would have guessed less, and the other half would have guessed a lot more, but I never would have guessed accurately. I have no excuse for such negligence, no witty way of weaseling out of my wesponsibiwities. I have simply been part lazy, part busy and part absent, both in mind and body. Regardless, for the moment I am none of those things, and will now attempt to remedy my silence with more blather I have traditionally hoped to call pathetically poetic reporting.
Today I nearly laughed out loud at myself. I have written much about Vietnam, some to all of you together, some to a few of you individually, and some just to myself. Though now I realize that, as an American in Vietnam, it is somehow absurdly fitting that I have never once written about the Vietnam War, or of any presence that war has on my presence here. Why? Well, I suppose on some strange level it never occurred to me, on another I wasn’t really sure what I could possibly say that might mean anything to anyone, here or there. But, looking back at the past 9 months, I guess I would say that my main remark would only ever be how surprisingly little tangible presence the Vietnam War has on my daily life here. By and large people have no special reaction when I tell them I am from America, or, at least, if they do it usually has nothing to do with the War. There are no bullet holes in concrete walls, no craters, no old women yelling obscenities at me for their lost child. Just a few monuments here and there, some museum’s that I refuse to go to (such as the tunnels in Cu Chi, where I hear a chirpy tour guide takes you into tiny little tunnels and tells you all about how exactly the Viet Cong killed your uncle), and the occasional kid in the country that dies because the rock he thought he was throwing to his friend turns out to be a grenade that never exploded.
Having said that, I should not like to imply that I have not had interesting or meaningful experiences with regard to the War while I have been here. The earliest example of this was about six weeks after I got here when an American friend of mine and I finally worked up the courage to go to the War Museum here in Saigon. Upon entrance, the place actually seems kinda cool, it’s got all kinds of tanks, jets, helicopters and artillery pieces spanning nearly thirty years of warfare against both the French and the U.S. (the Vietnamese consider them to be kind of the same war). Further inside is a bit of comic relief where they list each American army division that fought in Vietnam and lists the number of soldiers each one lost, which somehow adds up to about three times the total number of American soldiers that died in Vietnam. I’m not quite sure how that works, but the communist party says it so it must be true. After that is a pretty interesting collection of pictures by western war correspondents that died during the war, with brief descriptions of the difficulty some of them faced in deciding whether or not to join the fight in the moments before they died. Then comes some evidence of atrocities by the Diem Regime, the government in charge of South Vietnam during the War. Then they show some captured Agent Orange delivery units, with some deformed fetuses in jars next to those, kind of a before and after display. After that is a number of pictures of the fighting, followed by some drawings made by school children depicting bombs dropping on villages and people losing limbs and heads. The museum ends with a display of a prison that the Diem regime used to torture political prisoners, along with the actual guillotine that the French government gave to the Diem regime (the obvious though unasked question being, why did the French government think the Diem family needed a guillotine?). This marvelously depressing place (it made me feel a little bit like a German at Auschwitz) made a turn for Kubrick when a cell phone began ringing to the tune of Jingle Bells, and for some unknown reason the owner of the phone decided that it was better to just let the phone ring rather than admit it was their phone. This way we could all sing Christmas carols while we looked at pictures of dead bodies and deformed babies.
Another random moment was when I was walking on the street with a friend near her house and an older guy walked right up to me and started speaking to me in Vietnamese. I understood nothing of what he said so, once he had finished and walked off, I asked my friend what he said. “Nothing that made any sense,” she said, “he’s a veteran of the war and I guess his whole unit was killed from an American bomb except for him. Since then he hasn’t made any sense when he talks, too upset I guess.” Later on we saw him again, and he said nothing but offered me a cigarette, which I politely took, thanking him, even though I don’t smoke.
The next time I was significantly confronted with the War was during Tet (the biggest holiday here in Vietnam, just a couple weeks ago). I was in a small village out near the border with
Cambodia, staying at an old man’s house and “eating tet”, as the expression goes, with his many sons. Tet celebrations consist of extended family getting together and eating and drinking nearly non-stop for four days. The amount of food consumed during this time is kingly, and the amount of alcohol ungodly. Each night the family went to the chicken coop to choose which chickens they would kill for the next day’s feast, each night new bottles of whiskey were opened, and each night new 24-packs of beer were dumped into buckets of ice, all to be consumed before the sun rose the next morning.On one night in particular, as the night wound down and we all began to lovingly rub our stomachs and produce smiles that only happy stupors can produce, I sat down in the living room with the old man, who I was instructed to call Om (which means “grandfather”), and a couple of his sons, who were in their early forties or late thirties. As we drank hot tea, Om asked me if anyone in my family had fought in Vietnam. I replied that yes, actually two of my uncles fought in Vietnam, one of which still had a piece of shrapnel in his heart that was given to him while he was here. Om asked me in what way they fought here, I told him they were both Marines. He nodded and said that he would not have had any contact with them. He had been a general in the North Vietnamese army. He was in charge of the SAM missile batteries whose job it was to shoot down American airplanes. He told me about how he lost 31 men in a single night from a bombing run by American B-52s. He also said that during the war his men shot down 52 American airplanes.
It was at precisely this moment that my drunken stupor suddenly vanished. My only thought was that, my brother is a pilot, so this man was responsible for killing guys exactly like my brother. He then quietly got up and walked into his bedroom, a moment later returning with some small plastic boxes in his hands. He then began to show me all of the medals he was awarded for his service during the War, of which there were many. He spoke with pride, for he was quite obviously deeply proud of the service he had done for his country, but was never bragging, not even when he told me how many American planes his men shot down. This was not a desire to exert dominance or pride over an American, this was just him telling me what I had to know, whether I wanted to or not. He needed to tell me, and I needed to know, and that was it. It seemed quite obvious to me that this act of telling me all of this was as much or more for him than it was for me.
Nonetheless, as he spoke a deep sadness grew within me, a sadness that was beyond politics. I did not blame one side or the other, I did not regret America’s entrance into Vietnam, nor did I support it, I was just terribly and utterly sad that it had. Sad for the 52 men that were shot down, sad for the 31 men that died in that one night, sad for the deformed babies and dead photographers, sad for Saigon, sad for kids who thought grenades were rocks, sad for the kids just like me who had been sent to this terrible place to fight terrible people for terrible reasons, but, most of all, just sad for the whole damn thing.
I suppose it’s cliché to talk about the “effects of war” and how terrible it is, but that’s partly because just talking about it is meaningless. But seeing those effects, seeing how they are somehow muted and yet somehow so utterly rooted in the fabric of the country around me, that holds meaning beyond what any words could possibly hold.
Hell, I don’t know what more to say.
Love,
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