Vietnam as Has Been Apparent All Semester,

Vietnam

As has been apparent all semester, Vietnam had a profound and individualized effect on vast numbers of people. When you consider the stories we have read do you think these are purely the result of people living through a war, or are there distinctive features of the Vietnam War that shaped their experience?

Dang Thuy Tram's diary Last Night I Dreamed of Peace, offered a view from the opposing side of the Vietnam War that Americans have almost never heard, either during or after the war. Originally from Hanoi, from 1968-70 she worked as a surgeon in South Vietnam where she died in combat with American forces. Military intelligence officers captured her diary and ordered it burned, but Frederic Whitehurst disobeyed this order and kept for 35 years, finally arranging to return it to Tram's family in 2005. Naturally, the Vietnamese government made use of the story of a young heroine who gave her life for the cause, and the diary became a bestseller and was also made into a movie. Dr. Tram's experience of the war resembled that of many Americans in that she also experienced the heat, monsoons, homesickness, loss of friends and fear just as they did, although she was far more certain about the cause for which she was fighting. Indeed, anyone who has ever fought in a war had all of the same experiences as Dr. Tram, and this serves to humanize the other side in ways that few Americans ever have in regard to the Vietnamese. For example, she wrote on May 1, 1968 that "I miss Hanoi, Dad, Mom and my siblings terribly" (Tram 15).

At the same time, Dr. Tram mentioned her disappointment at not having yet been accepted as a Communist Party member, which is one of her main goals throughout the diary. She often referred to how certain people were suspicious of her relatively privileged background and "the more I wish to be accepted, the more miserable I feel" (Tram 16). Americans have often written of the class bias that affected their side in the war, with poor and working class men being drafted to do the fighting while more privileged middle and upper class men were often able to avoid service. On the Communist side, of course, no one was able to do so, and most seemed willing to make all sacrifices necessary in the name of nationalism if not always sympathy for Communism. Ironically, though, Dr. Tram's 'bourgeois', middle-class background counts against her with the Communists since they favored the peasants and working class as Party members. She refers frequently to the fact that the Communists do not fully trust and accept her, which makes her try all the harder to win their approval, with statements like "I am bourgeois in sentiment, not in attitudes as sometimes claimed" (Tram 37).

For Americans, even those opposed to the war, Dr. Tram's diary hardly makes pleasant reading, since she frequently expresses hatred of the United States for the death and destruction that it is inflicting on her country. She writes that "I hate the belligerent American devils. Why do they enjoy massacring kind, simple folks like us?" (Tram 39) and says of Americans "they are devils, robbing our country" (Tram 23). This is all the more reason to read it, since most Americans were naturally focused on the war did to their own country and the men who fought there in the jungles and rice paddies. They are absolutely dedicated to the cause, as American observers often noted during the war, and they never considered giving up. Tram felt the same way, writing that "we do not regret anything exchanged for freedom and liberty," which in this case meant freedom from foreign domination (Tram 19). They have already made tremendous sacrifices for victory, and it South Vietnam it seemed that "one hundred percent of the families had suffered a loss," while every family in the North had also lost someone to the war in the South or the bombing (Tram 24). From the start, Tram also made it clear that the quality of medical care available to the other side was far lower than that wounded Americans could expect, as when she had to operate on a young man without any real anesthetics but "he never groaned one during the entire procedure" (Tram 4). Americans know very well that the treatment their prisoners experienced at the hands of the North Vietnamese and NLF was poor and often involved torture, yet they also expected the same treatment if they were captured. Indeed, this was true as many witnesses on the American and South Vietnamese side confirmed during and after the war (Tram 11).

This diary deserves considerable reflection since to an American so much of it seems both familiar and alien at the same time, at least alien in the sense that it reports on the war from the enemy viewpoint. To be sure, the fact that Tram was a dedicated Communist and nationalist was hardly unique to Vietnam or this particularly war. Nor is the fact that she was a young woman from a middle class background trying to fit in to an army that had a mostly peasant and working class background -- although the Communist policy of favoring the lower classes is the exact opposite from the system in the United States. She experienced the pain, fear, friendship, comradeship and hatred for the enemy that is normal in all wars throughout history, but her side was far more certain about the justice of their cause and dedicated to total victory than the Americans. They had already been fighting since 1946 and were ready to keep sacrificing for twenty or thirty more years if necessary, but virtually no same person in the U.S. was prepared to keep fighting that long. They probably would have been had the war been fought on their home ground, but that was not the case.

Philip Caputo's autobiographical novel A Rumor of War is the type of Vietnam story far more familiar to Americans. He was a Marine Corps lieutenant who fought in the early phase of the escalation under Lyndon Johnson in 1965-66, who gradually became disillusioned with the war. This was hardly unusual for American veterans of the war, and Caputo joined the antiwar movement after he was discharged in 1967, as did Ron Kovic after he was wounded. Like Kovic and other veterans of his generation, he at first felt "the pride and overwhelming self-assurance" of the American empire at its apex, especially during the Kennedy-Camelot years -- the arrogance of a superpower that "could still claim it had never lost a war" (Caputo xiv). They had all been told that their purpose was to stop the expansion of Communism in Asia, but were totally unprepared for the real nature of the war in Vietnam, which had already experience twenty years of revolution and civil war by the time they arrived on the scene. By the time he returned to cover the fall of Saigon as a journalist in April 1975, Caputo was completely free of any illusions he once had about Vietnam. This war was fought with little mercy on either side against an extremely tough and determined enemy that was fighting on their home ground. Those who did not learn to respect this enemy had no chance of survival. Caputo wryly observed replacements arriving on a troopship from San Diego, who were as confident as he had been when he first arrived. He wrote that "of course they were gung-ho. No dysentery cramped their bowels, no fears shrunk their hearts, no ghosts of dead comrades haunted their memories" (Caputo 216). Among these was a friend of his he had trained with at Quantico named Walter Levy, who was killed very soon afterwards in an ambush.

Caputo's disgust with warfare, including the loss of friends, the death and suffering he experienced, were common feelings of veterans in any war, as was the sense of bonding he felt with others in his until. As usual in warfare, this bonding was stronger in the field than in the rear echelon, and soldiers in all wars have felt contempt for those who have safe, secure, clean jobs behind the frontlines. In Vietnam, these feelings were extreme, however, given the nature of the war itself, which was almost never a conflict of set piece battles but snipers, ambushes and booby-traps. In all these skirmishes, however, "we learned the old lessons about fear, cowardice, courage, suffering, cruelty, and comradeship" (Caputo xv). As many other veterans reported, they could not distinguish between the enemy and civilians, while General William Westmoreland's strategy of brutal attrition and body counts led to an over-counting of 'enemy' dead' who were probably civilians and to a chain of deception that ran to the higher levels. In addition, the environment in Vietnam was one of malaria, fever, dysentery, jungle rot, leeches, heat, humidity and monsoons. They all called the United States "The World" which to them "might as well have been on another planet" and very often "we sank into a brutish state" (Caputo xx).

When he worked behind the lines, one of his duties was as officer in change of reporting casualties, which were not nearly as high as they became in 1967 and 1968 when the war reached maximum escalation. When he returned to his old unit once after a leave, they were cold as distant with him, and he wondered whether this was because he had been transferred to the rear echelon. Then he learned that a friend of his named Sullivan had been killed by a sniper when out filling the canteens by a river, and that the sniper was a very good shot and had "plowed one helluva hole right through him" (Caputo 158). Another man had been shot through the spine and probably would never walk again, and the unit had also been fired on by American helicopters by mistake. Caputo then realized that these were the first combat deaths they had experienced in Vietnam, since this was still very early in the war. These men had all joined the Marines in peacetime and had expected to serve out their tours with the same group. Later on, when the casualties became very heavy, "a loss meant only a gap in the line that needed filling" (Caputo 163). At this point, Caputo also realized that as a young, American male born in the most prosperous era in the nation's history "I had been incapable of imagining myself sick or old, let alone dead" (Caputo 162). In common with young men in every war, this initial realization that death was everywhere and might come unexpectedly at any moment proved to be a great shock.

2) In the conclusion of her book Winners and Losers Gloria Emerson focuses on three Americans- Ambassador Graham Martin, Fred Branfman and Don Luce (pp 339-358). Briefly summarize these intertwined stories. What do you think the author is trying to convey by telling these stories? Do you think these are important stories to tell? Why?

Fred Branfman and Don Luce had nothing in common with Graham Martin, the last U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, while Gloria Emerson despised him and all other civilian and military officials who led the war effort there. They simply appeared together at the same Congressional subcommittee hearing in 1976, at which Martin lied and obfuscated about his role during the time when Saigon fell in April 1975. This had been Martin's first public appearance since the end of the war, and like most other officials associated with it he kept a very low profile. Branfman, on the other hand, was an outspoken critic of the war. He had worked as an English teacher in Laos and observed first hand the bombing that destroyed the country, which he wrote about in his 1969 book Voices from the Plain of Jars. Very few Americans were even aware of this 'other war' in Laos, which had been going on for as long as the fighting in South Vietnam but was fought mostly by the CIA and by heavy bombing. Emerson knew Branfman well and reviewed his book favorably in 1972, noting that he was one of the few Americans who even spoke the language and understood the ancient culture of that country (Emerson 339-41).

Don Luce was the director of the International Volunteer Service in South Vietnam in 1961-67, when he resigned after writing an outraged letter to Lyndon Johnson, demanding an end to the war. He met Emerson was he was back in Vietnam as a correspondent for the Ecumenical Press Service, and revealed the story of the tiger cages on Con Son Island -- an old French penal colony. Tom Harkin, who later became a Congressman and Senator from Iowa, was with Luce and two other Representatives when they saw these cages, in which political opponents of the Thieu regime in South Vietanm were handcuffed and chained three or four together in spaces of five-by-nine feet, beaten, starved and denied medical attention. Emerson covered this story in the New York Times in July 1970, which was highly upsetting to the Nixon and Thieu regimes (Emerson 348-49). In 1976, he was part on an ACLU lawsuit against the CIA, including former directors Richard Helms and William Colby, because of their role in Operation CHAOS, a CIA surveillance program against thousands of antiwar individuals and organizations.

Branfman and Luce started the Indochina Resource Center and participated in the antiwar movement, and we there at the 1976 hearings of Lee Hamilton's subcommittee, at which former ambassador Graham Martin also appeared. Martin denied that there was any flaw within South Vietnam or its war effort, which he blamed entirely on the Congress for cutting off funds and air support. Nor did he find any fault in his own actions or those of Henry Kissinger in stalling and delaying the evacuation of Saigon until the last minute in the belief that the war could still be won or that the French would broker a ceasefire agreement that would allow the old regime to stay in power as part of a coalition government with the Communists. Only at the last minute was there a desperate scramble by Americans and Vietnamese to escape any way they could (Emerson 356-58). Martin came across as bewildered and confused by all these vents, and also seemed more concerned with finding his daughter's pet and recovering his wife's possessions than he did with the plight of the South Vietnamese. For Emerson, the war was an atrocity from start to finish, and the fact that it ended in confusion and defeat was no different than the way it had been fought all along. Nor was she shocked at this late date when officials like Martin turned out to be deceptive, even lying to Congress, in order to cover up their own failures and deceit.