Korean Job Discussion Forums

[The Bobster]

It's very rare I expect read what I might otherwise call Literature inserted withing the Comments section of a blog, but I ran across this at Talking Points Memo cafe this evening and wanted to share it with someone. You guys got lucky this time ... or otherwise, as you may interpret for yourselves. Some of what is mentioned here is not suitable for enjoying a sandwich while surfing, so you have been warned

I confess I was moved by this, in several different directions. Eventually, I'll find one among them I prefer ... the rest of you make up your own minds about it.

At Christmas, 1966, one of my Captains asked me if I would go with him to a Christmas party that was being held for the children at the Children's Hospital in Saigon. His mother's social club back home had organized a gift drive to give to the children, and my Captains wanted me to take picture that he could send back. I agreed.

The kids were so sweet with their bright smiles, in spite of their amputations and burns, but one child, an 8 year old boy, dominated the ward. He had been so badly burned by napalm that his body had to be braced in a standing position by stainless steel rods that were pinioned by screws into his bones, and his head could only be described as pink pulp, sporting remnants of facial features, such as part of an ear generally where an ear should have been, some two or three teeth in that generally area, a hole that could have been a nose, and one eyeball hanging half of what should have been an eyesocket, and it was looking.

Napalm does more than burn. It's chemical toxins actually dissolve bone tissue for the unfortunate survivors, and the child was suffering a gradual loss of his skull. It seems like I stood in front of the boy for an eternity, eye to eye, but I'm sure is was a very short time. I turned behind me an a beautiful young girl, who had no legs, was smiling shyly at me, and so on with the rest of the children, who really seemed to enjoy being noticed, and acknowledged. I can only hope the standing boy felt this was also, as there was no possible way he could have communicated and emotion.

I took my Captain aside and told him that for some reason that I didn't understand, I couldn't take pictures of the kids. He just said that he felt the same way, and told me not to worry about it.

There were about thirty other Americans there besides us, mostly General and Field Grade officers, some Embassy folks, and a smattering of journalists. They were standing around with martinis chatting with each other. The pleasant smiles on their faces overwrought and contrived. I just regarded the whole scene for a while, just trying to get a handle on what was going on. It was like this. The kids were on their beds watching these folks - it's hard to describe - craining their heads forward in a sort of yearning posture, trying to be noticed, to make eye contact, to exchange smiles and acknowledgements. But the American's wouldn't look at them. None of them. When they turned around they lowered their eyes to the floor until the lined up with their next chatting partner and raised their head back up and installed those jack-o-lantern smiles on their mouths. It was repulsive to me. I saw that the standing boy was taking it all in, his eye moving this was and that, not missing a thing in his field of vision. I think I was falling apart from the inside out because I wasn't smart enough to protect myself from the kids.

But that's not the end of the story. There are two other things. One happened some months later when I traveled with a translator I worked with to the farm of his family's friend, about 60 klicks NE of Saigon. While the man was giving me a tour of his small farm, we intruded on a group of Vietnames nuns playing volley ball at their convent. The farmer, a Buddhist, had sold-off some of land to the convent, which had formerly been located far to the north in the Ba Moi Thot area. Mother Superior, a French woman, had moved the convent further south with the fighting up there got too dangerous.

And she came out and sent the nuns into hiding, and came over to us and said "There is really not much to show you here, but let me show you our chapel. It was awkward, we hadn't intended to intrude on the convent. But we followed her and viewed the small chapel, complimented her and thanked her and began to leave. But she turned to me and just stared into my eyes for the longest time - like I could feel her looking all the way to the back or my head. And she told me this, enunciating each word precisely and slowly: "If they really understood what that are doing, they wouldn't do it!" I was shocked a bit, I think. I didn't have any idea, at the time, what she was talking about - out of the thin blue sky, just like that.

When my tour was up, and I seperated from the Army, I picked up an issue of Ramparts magazine and opened it, and right there was a large picture of the standing boy. I felt rage creeping up my gullet - it was devastating. I think it was the voyeurism - a deep violation of some puzzling ethic that demanded that if you looked at that child it was only permitted if he KNEW you were looking at him. To this day I cannot shake off the repugnance that I felt. Of course that particular issue of Ramparts was THE legendary "anti-war" issue, which, in a fury of controversy marked a very important stage in the building anti-war movement which I fully supported even when I was in country.

I am a red-diaper baby - weaned on the SF waterfront strikes and the first sentence I uttered must have contained "Harry Bridges" in it. So I had no illusions about the rights and wrongs of Vietnam. But I went anyway. I visited all the old Reds I knew before I left, and I knew they were harboring doubts and conflicts about my going, but they were very kind, family and friends alike. They all wished me well.

And when I returned, with the antiwar movement fast approaching full swing, I did experience some of the criticism and scorn you are talking about, but it wasn't really that bad. Except for employment - employers weren't critical of returning vets because of any particular disenchantment with the war, but rather that there was a widespread believe that us vets were unstable and likely to blow a fuse at any given moment. They feared us.