Just As I Thought

by Grace Paley

  Unless one is a journalist or a soldier or a battered civilian, an American doesn’t often have the opportunity to be present at a war. Of course, in the last couple of years interested men and women have visited, reported, and even entertained the wars in the Balkans. Several writers went to Hanoi before I did. A couple of them wrote books. Some were surprised later on that the Vietnamese did not turn out to be the absolutely intelligent reasonable people they seemed to be while being bombed.

  But certainly the Vietnamese were naïve. They really believed—having fought beside the Allies as guerrillas during the Second World War, against the Vichy French; having witnessed in their Socialist youth the way the American Marshall Plan raised up defeated Germany—and having seen the financial if bossy way the Japanese were helped after their defeat—well, the Vietnamese assumed that the United States, once the war was over, would surely want to offer a little restitution, at least maybe make a few repairs to a hospital or a school, or send over some prostheses for the broken kids they didn’t adopt.

  Instead, an embargo was begun. The war continued with economic assaults. If some early friends of Vietnam at war became disillusioned with Vietnam after the war, I want to suggest that the Vietnamese became embittered first.

  In any event, I could hardly believe my extraordinary fortune in having been asked in 1969 to go to North Vietnam. I had been working against the war for about eight years by then. To see for myself! To understand! Of course, when you go to a foreign country where you don’t know the language, you certainly can’t see or hear too much “for yourself.” On the long, long, twenty-six-hour flight I happened to notice a Diner’s Club magazine in the seat pocket. In it I saw to my amazement a wonderful map of Vietnam—kind of skinny with a fat little Mekong Delta bottom. Along the coasts there were stars—or were they tiny hotels where mountain resorts with stunning views of the sea would be planted by American hotel companies once the war was over? This was in 1969.

  So if my understanding of Vietnam was imperfect, my understanding of my own country was growing daily.

  In the following articles, two of which were originally talks, I have described the nature and the disposition of our tasks. We were seven—five men and two women. We had not come to sightsee, but we did see the terrible topography of war from Hanoi to the Ben Hai River, the Demilitarized Zone, the DMZ. Three of us were filmmakers and made a film (impounded on our return). Four of us had the task of accompanying three POWs back home. The Vietnamese had agreed to return these men through the offices of the antiwar movement. But all this is described in the next few pages.

  I should say that there are certain problems of what I’d call overlapping in the following reports—that is, repeated information, since I spoke these stories to different audiences. I have cut much of that kind of repetition out, but here and there kept some descriptions for emphasis. For instance, the greenness of Hanoi was described nostalgically by a Vietnamese woman I’d met in an airplane who had been sent south in 1954 along with her entire Catholic school. It was what she dreamed of, that green, she said. And then the women who met me at the small Hanoi airport wanted to know if I had seen Hanoi’s greenness. I thought it must be the way the New Yorker stumbling through slum side streets, truck-jammed avenues holds in her head the picture of the fish-shaped island city heavy with skyline at its gasping mouth. (My exiled city-loving head, anyway.)

  A story that I’ve told many times, but didn’t get to in immediate spoken reports: One does meet a few important people on journeys of this sort. You are assumed by your hosts to be an important person in your country, whereas you are really a kind of medium-level worker in one tendency in the nonviolent direct-action left wing of the antiwar movement. So it was that we seven met with Pham Van Dong, the second or third in power and authority in North Vietnam.

  This is the way these meetings usually progressed: After people are seated in some order we are welcomed in the kindest way. Then one of us (we are also drinking tea) expresses our happiness to be here in the country of our imagination, at last. One of the young Vietnamese men says how happy they are to see us here. One of us remarks on the great courageous Vietnamese people and our shame at their suffering, for which we are responsible. No no, one or maybe two of them say, it is not your personal fault, we know the great American people would not permit it if they had the power. One of the young Vietnamese continues: Soon the war will be over and we will meet here or in the United States and our families will know one another. My own heart is quite full by then, and I assure them our children will certainly know one another, and we will dine in one another’s houses—I see myself cooking up one of my good soups for Nhan and Phan (our translators), and so on and actually on.

  Suddenly one of our number, a passionate young man, speaks up, wants to wash away all that cant, that false sentiment. He states, No no, you will not want to come to our country, it’s a racist country, you will be looked down on for your color alone, it is a country with a violent tradition, you could not bear it, Vietnam is not its only terrible intervention. But one of the young Vietnamese is horrified to hear this speech, this disloyalty. He cries out, How can you talk about your own country like that? How can you say these things about your own country? Have you forgotten Emerson? Have you forgotten Whitman? Jefferson?

  We are all silenced. Americans and Vietnamese. Our American friend is abashed. He sits quietly. He does not, as I feared he might, begin to explain cautious Emerson, slaveholding Jefferson.

  A couple of days later in Quangbinh province, we are reminded that South Vietnam’s Premier Diem and North Vietnam’s General Giap both come from this beloved province of fire, one an American puppet, the other the genius general of Dien Bien Phu and—as it turns out—of the defeat of the United States six years later. We are expected to have learned something from this fact about the contradictory—even warring-to-the-teeth—factions in one’s own indivisible always beloved country.

  The poem “Two Villages” and the “Report from North Vietnam” are from a talk I gave at the Washington Square Methodist Church after returning from Vietnam. The year was 1969, the month August.

  I didn’t know it at the time but ’69 was a key year, the one in which the war might have ended, but Nixon and Kissinger decided (while talking peace) to continue the war. (See Haldeman’s diaries, also the resignation of Kissinger’s key aides1 over that decision.) When our little delegation stopped in Vientiane we were told by a young (at the time) fellow named, I believe, T. D. Allman, that B52 bombers were flying over Laos. We tried to talk about this at press conferences in New York, but were not heard, or at least not taken seriously. By the spring of 1970, the destruction of Cambodia had begun.

  * * *

  I must mention Lady Borton here. She was, is, a Friend, a Quaker. Her job during the war was to fit prostheses on Vietnamese civilian amputees. She was the woman who brought a congressman and the press to My Lai. She’s lived in both South Vietnam and North Vietnam. She published a book, Sensing the Enemy, about the Vietnamese boat people.

  I wrote a preface to her most recent book, After Sorrow, which is about living among Vietnamese families in the Mekong Delta in 1989 and ’90. I haven’t included it because almost everything in that preface appears in the early reports in this section. But attention to her and her work belong in this book. I often wish I could have done this world some good in that Lady Borton way, offering political understanding and labor directly to those whose suffering was surely my responsibility.

  * * *

  I believe “Conversations in Moscow” needs no explanation. It seems fairly clear that we wanted Russian dissidents to know they had the active support of most of the antiwar movement. We hoped these remarkable people would recognize the troubles of those suffering U.S.-exported repression—Chile, Guatemala as examples. Of course, the Russians explained, that’s what it said in Pravda, too, so how could they believe it?

  Home

  Going to Minneapolis by air one day, on air, that
is, held up in space on currents of air by a noisy, unimaginable machinery—skimming that air like some pebble of a casual god, I was crammed into a seat next to a woman who looked like a Vietnamese actress. Of course, I thought, she is really a middle- or upper-middle-class Asian woman, with rouged cheeks and narrowed lips, her hair done up by the dresser’s hand, her eyes lined into an approach to Caucasian.

  Why did I think she was an actress? Because I’ve been in Vietnam. In 1969 I traveled by jeep on a dirt road called National Highway 1 from Hanoi to Vinh Linh, a tiny hamlet on the DMZ near the Ben Hai River. During this journey along the Vietnamese coast we traveled under what could be considered the American sky—since that’s where Americans were seen, floating, flying, dropping tons of ordnance (bombs), sometimes even falling down out of their planes to death, injury, prison on the Vietnamese earth. We often stopped in villages or in fields that had been villages to see how people could live on the floor of blast and carnage. We saw rosy, rouged theater groups playing to the thin, pale people, making some kind of cheeriness in those caves and underground households. Since then, I never see an Asian woman wearing lots of makeup without thinking, Ah! an actress! A theater person.

  Naturally I wanted to speak to my neighbor; she had the window seat and there was no reason for her to turn toward me. When we were about twenty-five minutes from Minneapolis, I said, Excuse me, but where are you from? She looked at me out of a half minute’s silence. I’m Vietnamese, she said. Then I asked her the following questions all at once, in rapid, nervous order: What city are you from? What province? Do you have children? Where do you live now? When did you come here—to this country?

  She answered in a friendly but factual way. I am from Saigon. I have two children. I am here six months. My children are in the Sisters School in Maryland, the nuns that helped us get here. My husband is dead. He is an American. German. I live with his family in Wisconsin.

  Then I asked her: Was your husband a soldier? Were you born in Saigon?

  No. No, he was a businessman. He was much older than I. He was very rich; real estate was only one of his businesses. He was in Saigon from the late fifties. He died of a long illness. Oh, we have lost over $200,000 in the rush to get here on time. No, I was not born in Saigon. I was born in Hanoi.

  We drank our pre-landing orange juice for a while. I had to make a decision. Should I tell her that I had been in Hanoi, that I had gone with others as a political antiwar woman to record the devastation of American war and bring back (at the North Vietnamese initiative) three American prisoners of war? I thought, No. Better not. God knows, she could become angry and attack me with the sorrow of her exile. Then I thought (since opposing thoughts often succeed one another), Yes, I will tell her. Otherwise this air talk will remain just another chitchat, nothing moved further, no knowledge gained on either side. So I told her I had been to Hanoi a few years earlier. I had been a guest of the North Vietnamese and I had worked against the war. With all my strength, I added.

  You were in Hanoi? she asked, turning to me, probably to see my eyes which had seen her home. What was it like? How were the people? And the streets?

  I told her I had walked every morning along the Lake of the Restored Sword. I had lived in the Hotel of Reunification.

  What’s that? she said with a little irritation. Then: What else?

  I told her there were trolley tracks along the park and the cars were packed with people, stuffed, their heads and legs and arms stuck out of doors and windows. I told her I saw a military parade, but the lines were not straight, and children and women joined the march and then went off. I walked up and down streets of French Mediterranean houses.

  She said, Most people think Saigon is much handsomer than Hanoi. They think Hanoi is gray. Was it much damaged?

  I told her about the individual shelters sunk along the streets like big garbage cans for individuals caught in sudden bombing. In 1969 it had seemed a poor, bike-riding city. But the trees were wonderful, plane trees, and what was it—eucalyptus.

  Yes, it’s green; it is green.

  Why did you leave? I asked.

  Oh, long ago, she said. In ’54, when the French left us, we were taken south, tens of thousands of schoolchildren, by the sisters—in trains and vans and buses. So that we should not grow up to become Communists and forget our Jesus. My father was already dead, but my mother—I never saw my dear mother again. I remember I looked back, she said, and in my mind it has remained always a mist of greenness.

  * * *

  In ’69, my friends and I flew into Hanoi, from Phnom Penh, a big busy city, stinking of bad automobiles and, streaming among them, the Cambodian ricksha runners hauling upper blue-collar workers from office to lunch to home. We were greeted at the little hidden Hanoi airport by women and men, their arms full of flowers for us—Americans who amazingly hadn’t flown all the way to Vietnam, 12,000 miles, just to kill Vietnamese.

  The woman from the Women’s Solidarity Committee took my arm. She spoke enough English to be able to ask, after embraces and the delivery of the flowers, and the taking of my arm as we walked, loving the sight of one another, toward the car, Grace, from the air, tell me, did you see our city, how beautiful and green it is, did you see our green Hanoi?

  —1980

  Two Villages

  I

  In Duc Ninh a village of 1,654 households

  Over 100 tons of rice and casava were burned

  18,138 cubic meters of dike were destroyed

  There were 1,077 air attacks

  There is a bomb crater that measures 150 feet across

  It is 50 feet deep

  Mr. Tat said:

  The land is more exhausted than the people

  I mean to say that the poor earth

  is tossed about

  thrown into the air again and again

  it knows no rest

  whereas the people have dug tunnels

  and trenches they are able in this way

  to lead normal family lives

  II

  In Trung Trach

  a village of 850 households

  a chart is hung in the House of Tradition

  rockets

  522

  attacks

  1201

  big bombs

  6998

  napalm

  1383

  time bombs

  267

  shells

  12291

  pellet bombs

  2213

  Mr. Tuong of the Fatherland Front

  has a little book

  in it he keeps the facts

  carefully added

  —1969

  Report from North Vietnam

  Our interpreter Nhan said, “Grace, if you would stay another two weeks, I could teach you the tune of the language. Speaking is singing—a lot of up and down anyway. The word Hoa means flower, Hoa means harmony. The tune’s important. Okay.”

  Our twenty-one days in Vietnam happened in three parts. The first—Hanoi, the city, the officials, the organizations, useful information, making friends. All necessary to the second part, a seven-day, 1,100-kilometer journey to the Ben Hai River, which is the seventeenth parallel, the riverbank of American power. We washed our hands and feet there, a lot of symbolism. Reality too, almost—the roadway was shelled right after we left. American reconnaissance planes which we’d seen above us had noticed a jeep or a movement.

  A word about Hanoi. One of our hosts said, from the plane, “Did you see how green we are?” Yes. Old trees, parks, lakes, a beautiful city, old, much of it in bad shape, no new construction in the city. The suburbs had been built for the workers, and bombed flat by us. Hanoi was wildly defended—from the rooftops everywhere—one of seven pilots we talked to said, “Downtown Hanoi, the flak, you don’t know what it was like—the air was absolutely black.”

  As we started from Hanoi on fair roads, immediately the destruction of public buildings, hospitals, schools was apparent. The first city we came to—
Phu Ly—totally destroyed. We were not military men, not even people who’d been to wars, we weren’t bored by the repetition; we didn’t even get used to it. So the destruction we saw happened first to our eyes: the mud and straw huts, and beyond them the cities, where a wall or two of small brick stucco-covered houses remained, and maybe one wall of the larger public buildings. And all the way on National Highway 1, the people—something like Fourteenth Street in Manhattan for about 650 kilometers—going back and forth, about their business of life and repair, carrying on their backs, on bamboo poles, balanced baskets of salt, water spinach, fertilizer, young shoots for transplanting, mud and stones for the roads, firewood for cooking. Bicycles doing the work of trucks. The children—little boys lounging on water buffalo, fishing with nets like sails in the rivers and ponds—and bomb craters. All this life moving on the road and alongside the road, so that Ching, our driver, who looked like a tough Puerto Rican kid, drove hundreds of miles with his fist on the horn.

  “Humans out of the way, here come the Progressive American People, to view the insanity of their countrymen. Let them deal with this disgust and shame.”

  South—past the Ham Rong Bridge, near Thanh Hoa—another pilot said, “What? It’s still standing?” Yes, standing—trucks, cars, bikes move over it continuously. We note its twisted girders shot with holes.