Meeting Sara primed the pump; gradually I began to kindle friendships with a handful of other girls: a girl with wild corkscrew hair who would become a community organizer and challenge the world; a quiet blond girl like someone in an A. A. Milne poem who memorized her favorite verses; her friend, Lolly, a brilliant artist; a girl with soft, fluffed hair and an independent stride who would become a sharp historian; a girl who wore pearl earrings and straight skirts like conservative society women wore, who asked me to her house for sundaes and laughed about people as if they were sweet trifles.
Sara was making her mother’s open-faced sandwiches: cheddar cheese and tomato slices on English muffins, toasted in her toaster oven. Everything tasted better when it was made at Sara’s house. We sat on their patio made cozy by plants like in a European garden, and looked at the birds twittering at her father’s feeder.
As the breeze tossed the red maple leaves around us and we chewed our little English muffin pizzas, we talked about how we hated our mothers. Sara thought her mother, who was really her stepmother, wished the worst for her. “She’s jealous of me, and she thinks I’m a loose woman just because I went to a movie with Dirk.” My mother drove me crazy because of her bossiness. She wanted everything her way. I hated how she took over when I helped her in the kitchen, and made me vacuum the house once a week, and thought Sidwell was a good school when it wasn’t.
“I can’t believe my mom,” I said. “One minute she’s yelling at me and the next she’s talking in the sweetest voice to her friend Margaret on the phone.”
Sara said, “You should see Linda. She’s so fake. She just wants my dad’s attention all the time.”
The truth was, though, we liked each other’s mothers. Sara’s dark, skinny mother had a sharp intelligence I found interesting, and she kept a rock grinder in the library on one of the dark, built-in bookcases. Any mother who ground rocks down to beautiful polished stones was worth studying.
Sara said, “Your mom is full of good practical advice.” I was secretly proud of that about my rounder mother in her stout oxfords and grey skirts.
We both agreed we had the best fathers in the world. Sara said about her father, “Isn’t he cute, with his little bushy mustache?”
I loved my father so much I couldn’t say a word.
Andy was over on the couch, talking to my father about foreign affairs. “Aren’t we doing something like President Eisenhower did in Iran or like President Kennedy did with Diem in Vietnam? Overthrowing people who are friendly to democratic ideas, dominating the affairs of other countries?” he said.
“Do you think the State Department and CIA are doing the right thing in Vietnam, Pop? Bobby Kennedy and a lot of people thought overthrowing Diem was wrong.”
“Good analysis, Jonge“ My father always called Andy by the Dutch word for young lad. “Though each situation is different, you’re posing some very valid questions.
“You’re absolutely right to wonder about our stance in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh was originally ardently pro-American. He looked to the American revolution and our constitution as his models. He only went over to Communism when we failed to support him in his struggle for his country’s independence.
“And, as you know, I don’t believe Communism is inherently evil,” Pop said. “It’s a bold social experiment. I’m sure Ho thinks he’s doing right by his people. And he could be. Political systems have phases. This may be an important one that will ultimately bring greater well-being to the people of Vietnam.”
Pop said he believed in giving other people the benefit of the doubt, in trusting them to come up with their own solutions, and in remaining open to the possibility of other governments’ solutions. “Other people besides us in the U.S. have smarts and creativity,” he said.
“And you’re right about intrusion. We have a foreign policy right now that involves pushing our way into other countries’ affairs. The war in Vietnam is a product of this doctrine. Vietnam is not about fairness. It’s about domination. It’s not about having an equal fight; it’s about having more weapons than the other guy. We Americans like to dominate where we can. . . .
“And each American president has to have his war,” he went on. “This is Nixon’s.”
Reading and thinking about Vietnam in 2005, I’d read Simon Schama, the cultural historian. Schama explained the audacity of imperialistic powers as a matter of perspective: force in the hands of others is viewed as an infringement on the laws of nature, while force in one’s own hands is the definition of freedom. But these ideas were way down the road; my twelve-year-old history-buff brother was noticing things about which, at this juncture, I didn’t have the dimmest notion.
One day my mother took us on another duty visit to my father’s boss’s wife at their house in the woods in Bethesda. It was another awkward-feeling hour like we’d had back when I was eight, with Mom holding her back stiff and asking about Mrs. Smith’s children.
Afterward, Andy said to me, “Did you notice Mrs. Smith kept saying ‘the Agency’ when she talked about Mr. Smith’s and Pop’s work?”
“What do you mean?”
“I dunno,” he said. Then he trailed off, his mind wandering again, probably to dumb elephant jokes or something, I thought. I didn’t realize my brother was growing up.
Looking up from my algebra homework another day, I saw my father, absorbed in the Washington Post. When he went into the TV room to watch Walter Cronkite, I wandered over and picked up the paper. I’d never before looked at the newspaper of my own accord in my life. On the front page was a photograph of a little Vietnamese girl in a village that had just been attacked by American soldiers. She was in ragged clothes, skinny as a wand. Her almond eyes were so frightened they were blank.
Suddenly the globe at the center of me rotated. I couldn’t sit here and eat my hamburger while over there in the padi, girls were screaming, girls were sobbing, girls were shrieking in fear. I pictured the raggedy girl in Taiwan.
I studied the photographs of soldiers, rifles slung over their backs, wading through padi. Was to be American to be this? Killing Vietnamese people: silent old men and children, with beautiful, grinning eyes like the raggedy girl’s? In Holland, we’d seemed all goodness. Now we seemed all bad. What was my country doing? What was I doing here, safe and breathing while innocent people in Asia were dying because of America?
My knee-jerk, self-centered, loneliness-spawned hatred of America spun, this instant, to a hatred based on political ideals. Perhaps this is how much political fervor is born. Emotion finds an ideological twin.
I charged into the TV room, pointing a finger at the front page of the Post. My mother left the room. She hated it when I criticized our government—or maybe, as she said, she just hated my tone of voice—so I railed to my father.
“Look, Pop, at what the CIA and our army is doing in Vietnam,” I said, shaking the paper. “Pop, you’ve always said that America’s strength is that we can be self-critical and self-corrective—unlike other countries. Well, Nixon is resisting all criticism about his nasty war, innocent people are being slaughtered by his soldiers, and draft protestors are being thrown in jail,” I said, mimicking the kids at school. “How is what Nixon doing any different from any other bully-tyrant?”
I was like a machine gun that was pelting the whole room—until I noticed that my father had turned down the TV and was just quietly listening. This released me to keep going—to give full vent.
“Why can’t we stand for peace instead of war? We could talk to the North Vietnamese, try to understand why they feel strongly about Communism.” This was what a Quaker activist who spoke at school advocated.
“And why are we the world’s bully? We are raining bombs down on these other people—’ordnance,’ as Nixon falsely calls them—and none are raining down on us. We are big and they are small. What is the bigger one’s responsibility? To take care of the smaller.
“Why can’t we be antiwar like Holland? Or like Switzerland? Or like Japan?” My fa
ther had told me about Swiss neutrality and the Japanese refusal to maintain an army after the horrors of World War II.
“Let’s emigrate, Pop,” I said. “Let’s move to Holland or one of the other small countries that can live by principles instead of power. Why can’t we?”
Then, opening the paper, I jabbed at the picture of the girl. “Look, Pop. Look at who we’re hurting!” I said. “What is our country doing?” My eyes started to spurt and my father, whose brown eyes looked deeply sad, opened his arms. “Oh Sweetie.”
Suddenly now I understood that my father had questioned the war too. This fortified me since my father was a man who carefully weighed and qualified. Only in my forties, on a return visit to the Normandy beaches, would I see what a strain Vietnam was for World War II veterans—how to doubt their government’s wisdom went against every fiber, how it cost them.
But, the product of my generation, I burned with hate toward America now. I burned to take a brave and serious stand: to protect Asia from America. My country was the enemy. Now I had an obligation to protect “my people,” only “my people” was the world.
As the daffodils held balls in the greening woods of Rock Creek Park, I read of eighteen-year-old boys from Kansas, Washington state, and Mississippi who’d died in the padis of Vietnam, and I clutched. While thirty thousand had been killed in all the previous years of the entanglement, in Nixon’s first year in office, ten thousand more young men would have died.
For alive and dead soldiers now, I had opposite responses. Toward the uniformed soldiers I saw walking along the streets near the Bethesda Naval Hospital or in the caravans of jeeps that sometimes trundled through town—contrary to the way I felt as a young girl in Taiwan or Bethesda—I felt contempt. They seemed like automatons, with their shaven heads and erect postures. I didn’t see them as the epitome of bravery as I saw those at the guard posts of the American embassy in The Hague. My mother said the young men were brave, but, to me, her words were thin. How can they go along with this evil war? I thought. Why aren’t they courageous enough to go to jail or to Canada? Like for my father, it was hard for my mother, an old-fashioned, bobby-socked patriot who knitted scarves for soldiers through her high school years, to think soldiers could be doing something wrong.
When I saw the photographs of dead soldiers in the paper, though, I felt sucked in with pain. Why weren’t people more involved, worried, protesting? Young, beautiful American boys were dying for no reason! I saw no contradiction in my reactions—or was there one?
Then came the day I came across a photograph and article that clogged my heart. It reported on the death of a boy just my age, whose brother had recently died in Vietnam, who’d burned himself to death like a Buddhist monk, on the steps of the Capitol, in protest against the war.
I cut out his photograph and kept it on my bedside table. I looked at the boy’s picture for hours. And every night afterward, I gazed at it with wonder and awe. What did it mean, this bravery? I felt his desperation so strongly, it was almost as if I was him. War was that important: the most important thing of all. We should all have been flinging ourselves at senators, burning ourselves on the Capitol steps, blocking the president’s office—anything to stop the war. Those were the sacrifices for country that were needed.
One day my mother found the article while I was at school and was holding it in her hand when I walked in the door.
“Sara, what is this?” Her hand was trembling; her eyes were urgent and moist—fierce with fear.
“An article from the Post.”
“Sara, I don’t want you looking at things like this.”
“It shows how bad this war is.”
“And what good did his death do?”
“Maybe the government will pay attention.”
Suddenly my mother’s voice had a shriek in it. “Sara, his death did nothing. Do you think the government is going to pay attention to one boy’s suicide? His death was a tragic waste. His poor family. Throw that thing away.”
I heard her talking to my father in bed at night. My father was saying, “She’s all right, Lois. She’s all right.”
Depression made me focus on black-and-white patterns—in the air, in music, in newsprint.
In a way, this heavy mood felt holy—a link to my past. And true—in the face of Vietnam. As my father’s child, I’d been trained to live inside world events. As a child raised in the diplomatic corps, and who took “when in Rome . . . ” seriously, I had an emotional obligation to feel everything the Vietnamese felt. I was the one assigned to gaze straight into the eye of the monster. I was the sherpa of sadness.
And, true to my unwitting status as a spy’s daughter, I was the carrier of the unseen, the unacknowledged truth. Ironically this was exactly the role of mid-level CIA officers like my father. As investigations would reveal again and again, it was the on-the-ground government officials who interviewed people and scoured the situation abroad who held the truth in their files, while their leaders refused to countenance the facts if they contradicted their worldview. It was as if they thought by ideologically based pronouncement they could jam the world into their image of it.
This was my modus operandi: If I didn’t carry the truth of the world’s horror, people might deny its existence. If you wanted the truth that the world was hiding, just ask Sara. She would tell you, “Yes, it happened.”
I didn’t realize that if I dared to be happy the sadness would still be there.
I felt helpless. The only way to make the war and the orchestras of spring daffodils add up was to eat plain bowls of rice, wear a flowered dress, and haul a pail of sadness.
When you’re very lucky, depression can dovetail with an issue that transforms it. As the psychologist Erik Erikson said, “The task of youth is to find an ideology that fits. Then he comes clear to himself.”
The answer to my troubles in America came on the city bus.
One day on my morning commute down Wisconsin Avenue toward school, the bus was crammed with people carrying peace signs on their way to a march. I was grumpy about being pressed against all the people in the joggling bus, staring at the floor as usual, and then I noticed the hems of the corduroy jackets of the couple next to me. Following the cords of the cloth upward, I was suddenly struck with sunlight. This is how people should look, I thought: worn corduroy jackets, ribbed scarves doubled and pulled through themselves, just-out-of-bed blond hair. The people were holding signs. When I heard the couple exchange words in Dutch, I was slammed with happiness.
Suddenly, I was back on the cobblestones outside the Binnenhof in The Hague. Bear-sized provos were milling around, shouting, hoisting ban-the-bomb signs toward the castle-like government offices across the shining pond. A yellow ray beamed down on them like a spotlight. I breathed deep and the hunched wings of my gargoyle shoulders settled for the first time in weeks. I felt as though I was floating like an eagle abreast the top of a cathedral the whole rest of the bus ride.
That evening I scrubbed myself hard in the bath, and emerged clean and fierce, and with a brand new and saving notion: I would join the antiwar movement kids at school were always ranting about. I would be an American provo. I retrieved my pup tent and hammered in the stakes.
Green of pines and hickory dabbed with persimmon and goldenrod. We were all flopped out on the lawn for Meeting for Worship in back of Zartman House.
Mr. Johnston, who was bent over and bearded like St. Peter in a Rembrandt painting, rose up into the silence and moved his large, hoary hand in an arc, like a circlet or halo covering us all. He said, “In this time of horror, with so many young men struggling in the jungles of Southeast Asia, I’m keenly aware of the light in each of you. How each of you is precious.”
I pictured the soldiers, rifles on their backs, faces sweating under their helmets, threading through the Vietnamese brush, jumpy and twitchy as rabbits—bull’s-eyes for the VC lying hidden in the sog. Then I looked around at all the students here sprawled, safe, on the lawn. Each face was li
ke a face in a biblical painting—eyes downcast, oval shapes of cheek and chin, glinting cascades of straggled hair— backed by the piercing blue of the sky and the spring-tipped, keen-green of the trees. A sob rose in my throat—and suddenly tears were standing in my eyes.
For this split second, all these kids were beautiful, and I was one of the group, and each one of us was a precious being to be cherished.
I swept my eyes in a searchlight across all the boys. Some of them had low lottery numbers. What if they were . . . to go to war?
Another teacher rose to her feet and, standing in her baggy, African dress, spoke about the eloquent speech made by a Democrat in the house. She ended with the Quaker adage we heard all the time. “Speak truth to power.” Each one of us can do it, she said. “Find the courage, and we’ll change the world.”
These moments are why I sent my own children to Sidwell, despite my ambivalence. With time I was able to reconcile the bad and the good.
The war now became a funnel sucking in all my stray thoughts—and bringing them to a sharp point.
In May, the New York Times revealed the secret bombing of North Vietnamese camps in Cambodia. The bombing was meant to arrest North Vietnamese aggressions into the South, but it would fail. Vietnam specialists and CIA experts had apparently expressed doubts about Cambodia’s significance, but Nixon had gone ahead with the campaign, theorizing that tanked-up aggression and the implied threat of nuclear intervention would force the Communists to negotiate a peace. All this while, “Vietnamization” of the war was supposedly in progress. Nixon was furious about the leak, and later investigations would reveal that at this time Nixon and Kissinger ordered wiretaps of journalists and Kissinger’s own staff. The Cambodia attack caused an outcry all across the country, but Nixon persisted in seeing himself as a victim of the liberal Eastern elite.
I grabbed my father the minute he came in the door, galvanized by the arguments of kids at school. “What on earth are we doing in Cambodia, Pop? This is outrageous. We’re expanding the war when Nixon and Defense Secretary Laird said we were pulling back!
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