Returning Veteran to Viet Nam says, "It is great to be alive."
The series of flights took 25 hours to reach Viet Nam versus the 33 days by US Navy flatbottom boat that it took me and my Marine missile battery, 35 years ago. This time it was for different humanitarian purposes that I returned to Viet Nam and the tour would be to see the entire country in 3 weeks and not a year in just one place. Now, it was to deliver medical supplies, work with the Vietnamese to improve the My Lai Clinic with money raised from people in America, meet with former Viet Cong, evaluate living conditions, the effects of Agent Orange and the status of landmines.
I went willingly to war in 1965, believing the lies that my country told me, that we were protecting the people in the Republic of South Viet Nam from communist aggression from North Viet Nam. We were told of atrocities by the Viet Cong (VC) to persuade the villagers of the south to overthrow their corrupt government. America to the rescue. This was to be a heroic adventure. What wasn’t clear to me was how my government was involved in the assassination of the former President of South Viet Nam, why the French had been defeated with full US military support 11 years earlier and to understand the US’s overall failure of diplomacy. My return trip was with reverence for all human life. It included a visit to one of the most terrible sites where US soldiers had committed atrocities, the massacre of 504 civilians at My Lai. More importantly, I was bringing medical supplies, funding and my labor to the My Lai Health Clinic to rehabilitate the 11-year-old facility built with donations by our sponsor, the International Mission of Hope (IMH) and its director, Cherie Clark.
I had not considered returning to Viet Nam until I met Cherie Clark in Iraq last October on a mission with the Veterans For Peace to rehabilitate a water treatment plant in Basra. It was in Iraq that I learned of the wonderful work that IMH does to connect unwanted children with families, providing them with health care until they are adopted. Cherie had been a long time friend of Fredy Champagne who has done restoration work in Viet Nam since 1988. She convinced Fredy to bring a Veterans For Peace (VFP) team back one more time. This would be his 17th trip to Viet Nam in 13 years. A group of 13 veterans and peacemakers would meet in Quang Ngai on 14th June to work one week with the Vietnamese workers at the My Lai Clinic. The task was to build an addition of a kitchen and dining room, a septic system, rewiring, installing glass windows where there are now only shutters and fencing around the clinic. Our group, made up of IMH, VFP and the Medics of Illinois donated $30,000 for this work. The Medics of Illinois provided all of the medical supplies that many of us carried with us into Viet Nam.
This trip through Viet Nam offered many opportunities to see the country and meet the people of Viet Nam, and the possibility of finding the site in Chu Lai where I had spent one year of duty. Chu Lai is only 25 miles north of My Lai, less than an hour by auto.
Only one major highway, the National Highway, Route 1, runs between Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon, as it is still called by Westerners) and Hanoi. I would call Hwy1 more appropriately, the ‘highway of terror!’ It’s entire length is under construction, to widen it 2 to 3 meters to a full 2-lanes with safety areas on each side. Everyone uses it, competes for space on it, every step of the 1700 kilometers. We would use it from HCMC to Hue, halfway to Hanoi. And be alert watching the oncoming motorized vehicles, beeping horns as they try to pass the slower pedestrians, bicycles, scooters and motorbikes. The constant beeping starts at daylight, 5am, and continues until 9pm when everyone retires to their *homes where many drink themselves happily to sleep. You don’t need a wake-up call, every imaginable sound can be heard on Hwy1 at 5AM. We also witnessed several accidents along the way, a reminder of how dangerous it is. However, that didn’t seem to slow down our driver!
Members of the group arrived in Saigon to meet the vans that would take us to Nha Trang, Qui Nhon and Quang Ngai, spending an overnight at each city. The night before the trip, we all met for the first time on the roof of the Rex Hotel, where the US media reported the Vietnam War. The meeting was cut short as a thunderstorm crashed overhead with heavy rainfall. A little like Camelot, it lasted only 20 minutes.
It was an all day drive to Nha Trang. With just one flat tire, delaying us only 15 minutes. Houses, cafes and shops crowded Hwy1 all along the route, thinning out only as the coastline narrowed. Many houses plastered the year they were built over the doorway, most were post-1975. We could see how much a luxury air-conditioning is here. The cafes we stopped at had large fans blowing down on the customers. Hwy1 weaves along the coast of the South China Sea. Beautiful sandy beaches stretch for miles. Shrimp, oyster and fish farms are everywhere to be seen as well as rice paddies. The only one-track narrow-gauge railway runs alongside Hwy1, varying from one side to the other with occasional side tracks to allow opposite-bound trains to pass.
Nha Trang is definitely a resort city. Our hotel was a block from the beach. I want to come back here. I found an internet café close by to email friends that we were on schedule, and to tell them it seemed like a vacation so far. More beaches in Qui Nhon. It was pointed out to me that on the south peninsula a clinic for leprosy victims was operating (another was pointed out later in Danang). The government is promoting the development of hotels and the tourist industry in these coastal cities.
When we arrived in Quang Ngai, we were immediately invited by the hospital and local officials to a Welcoming Dinner at our hotel. There we met the hospital and clinic staff and the head of the Communist Party. They made us feel at home and we toasted the success of the project. The next morning we drove 12 kilometers to the clinic where we delivered medical supplies, heard the outline of the construction project and told how the $30,000 from US donors was distributed. After a tour of the 18-bed clinic, many of the group helped the workers lay the foundation for the new kitchen addition. We demonstrated our group’s solidarity with the Vietnamese by everyone symbolically carrying a brick. We made clear our intention of working with the workers every morning.
Later that morning the group drove 200 meters to the Son My Memorial where Vietnam and US soldiers have preserved part of the hamlet where 504 Vietnamese women, children and old men were massacred by US soldiers. Several of the VFP have been here before. My friend Frank gave me some of his incense to show respect for the dead, placing it at each marker. Frank quietly shares his emotions with me as I follow him from marker to marker and to the ditch where 170 Vietnamese were murdered. Beside the ditch is a mural, ‘The Wall of Tears’ depicting the helicopters bringing the soldiers and the resulting terror. Large tears fall from the mural. During our visit we met 10 cadets from the US military academies. They were traveling through Viet Nam on an unstructured field trip. I was encouraged to see how open they were to hear our thoughts and concerns of our country’s continued military solutions in resolving world conflicts. They seemed to understand that war makes victims of us all and there must never be another My Lai.
A week later I returned to the Son My memorial alone with another veteran, Billy. He asked me to videotape our visit. This is another opportunity to share feelings. While there, a class of young Vietnamese students arrived and were told the stories by a guide and led into the museum where pictures and graphics showed the terrible scenes. Also pictured there is Hugh Thompson, a hero of My Lai. A US Army pilot who stopped the killing when he landed between the soldiers and the villagers and rescued about 12 of them. He was brought back to Viet Nam in 1999 by ‘60Minutes’ to meet the mother and daughter he saved. I spoke to him on the phone when I returned to Boston. He told me that when he was there this past March 16th, the anniversary, he met the one survivor in that ditch. I can’t imagine the horror the boy felt, but I could hear the joy in Hugh’s voice.
The week working at the My Lai Clinic went by quickly. We worked every morning in 90F heat-in-the-shade, oven-like conditions, literally melting, inviting dehydration. But enjoying the results of hard work with other hard workers. We proved ourselves to the 15 workers that we Americans aren’t afraid of hard work nor of taking directions from them. We performed unskilled labor and let them do the skilled jobs of bricklaying, etc. We communicated with a few Vietnamese and English words and sign-language. We laughed and whistled and sang, the universal languages.
Lunch was had 5 Km down the road at another beautiful beach. Refreshing 85F water! Great surf, good food, ice and service. Ice is always a risk but here it is made from clean water. We invited the workers for one lunch. We invited college students we’d met for another lunch. They wanted to practice their English on us. They adopted us as uncles. It turned out that they all knew our in-country host/guide/translator Mr Tap, who is also the English teacher at the college! The afternoons were spent visiting hospitals, shops, internet cafes. Quang Ngai is the poorest of the provinces. Quang Ngai had the worst internet connections. The hotel did not have internet. The public was just becoming aware of the internet. The government has the only decent connection. The government recently designated an area north of the city an industrial zone. In 2 years they’ll build an oil refinery with oil from offshore of the Mekong Delta.
One afternoon, Mr Tap offered to take me to find my duty-base in Chu Lai. It would be Mr Tap’s persistence that made it happen. I had been told that there was a big Vietnamese army base there now and you couldn’t get near it. The sun was high when we reached the end of the paved road along the Chu Lai beach. The road had been washed out. Mr Tap told the driver to backtrack and find a trail around the gully. He did and we got back onto the road that seemed to be heading toward the familiar peninsula. The road was in good condition, it had been built by the marines. At the end of the road I recognized the helicopter landing/parking area, and ‘t-bone’ island in the distance. I now had my bearings – we had passed the side road to my site. The side road was paved for 200 meters, then bike paths. No one wanted to accompany me further, citing unexploded ordnance. I walked the bike trail several hundred meters, out of sight of the van. The earth had been moved to form walls for defensive positions. As I walked steadily further a familiar view opened up to me, one I had seen everyday for a year. It was the view of the entire Chu Lai basin. It was more beautiful than ever. It seemed unspoiled, no longer the curls of black smoke from marine outfits burning refuse. As I panned the slopes of the peninsula, I felt something wonderful. Nature had reclaimed it! There were no trees anywhere 35 yrs ago. Only the tall, sharp-tipped elephant grass. Now there were conifers everywhere. Not very tall, someone had purposely planted them here after the war. And there were no unexploded ordnance/landmines here. I found out a few days later that there hadn’t been an incident in 2 years and a non-profit group, Mine Action Group, had recently confirmed there were no landmines in Quang Ngai Province.
After a Farewell Dinner by our hosts, we drove to Danang. There I toured the fantastic Marble Mountains and swam in China Beach. From Danang we drove north through the Hai Van Pass, 350 meters(1100-ft) road with fantastic views of more beaches. Two-hours later we reached Hue, the old capital of the emperors. Danang and Hue offered some real insight to the old culture of Vietnam, with Buddhist Pagodas and Sham shrines and burial sites. CNN reported that a renowned archeologist was in Vietnam researching these ancient sites.
From Hue and the Perfume River we took the train to Hanoi, a 17-hr journey. Hanoi is a vibrant city, with a definite French influence. The Americans are new to the people of Hanoi. They have not been Americanized. Here I saw the International Mission of Hope in action. They were very busy holding receiving ceremonies for new parents here to pick up their Vietnamese babies. I met one couple from Loeminster, MA, cuddling their 5-month old boy, Tho, ready to go to Saigon with Frank to get their papers from the US Embassy there.
One historical site I saw that amazed me was the Temple of Literature, built in 1054CE. They gave college degrees here and have the tablets preserved for the graduates. Buddha had walked through here in 550BCE! Luckily, the US 1972 Christmas Bombing had not destroyed it.
Our goal in Hanoi was to get approval to hold Stonewalk Vietnam in 2002/2003 for the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, MA. (This Stone dedicated to ‘Unknown Civilians Killed in War’ is currently in Liverpool, England to be walked to London on 15th July.) We went to the Vietnam Peace Committee and Fredy found that his old friend, Mr Nguyen Van Huynh was now in charge and had the authority to approve Stonewalk! It was like old-home week! Fredy and Mr Huynh had worked with each other since 1988. Mr Huynh gave us a 50-yr Anniversary booklet with pictures of he and Fredy walking in the 1993 Peace March. I gave Mr Huynh a copy of the 2001 North Shore Peace Poetry Contest Book. He said he would translate it into Vietnamese.
On our last day, Mr Huynh arranged for us to visit the Friendship Village, a project to help victims of Agent Orange. This project was initiated in 1988 by John Schuchardt of Ipswich and George Mizo, now of Germany, both VFP. The buildings were dedicated and became operational 3 years ago. They can now only help ‘average’ victims through standard operations and to learn skills and return to society. We met with about 100 children, joining them in daily exercise, and with 15 veterans. Through our translater, Mr Nghi, we asked them what they thought of US veterans returning and the US government. Several said they respected us, returning to their country to make peace, but were angry with the US Government for not keeping their promises of cleaning up the Agent Orange/dioxins nor landmines.
(Last week, CNN reported that Vietnam and the US had finally come to an agreement and an Agent Orange study will begin next Spring!)
This trip only made the US War in Viet Nam more confounding to me. I found Vietnam a country leaping into the world markets, open, friendly, with a great work ethic, looking ahead, rebuilding, construction everywhere preparing for foreigners and ex-patriots to help them engage the new world economy and technology. When I read of the Brockton HS Principal who chose fisticuffs over non-violent alternatives such as mediation or even competitive sports or Beverly HS choosing Jr ROTC over challenging, non-military projects, or when Gloucester accepted the Pentagon’s help in bringing in JrROTC because it had no money for a phys-ed program, I see the failure of our educational system and our culture. In Vietnam it was the failure of human rights and respect. The US culture teaches us to take action when they see trouble occur to an underdog. But that action always seems to be violent, so we are the same as those we accuse of being unjustly violent. And we don’t care if innocent people are killed or harmed. We can always apologize. And how do our moral ethics shine bright when a Wellesley college professor asks us to overlook our soldiers criminal actions of murdering prisoners because they saw their atrocities first-hand in Dachau? When does righteous killing stop? Who says we are more right than they? When do we take responsibility for our actions? Will might always be right? Ask the Vietnamese. 25 years after the war, who has won? The 50 million Vietnamese who weren’t born then, or the World Trade Organization and Globalization? Certainly not the 58,000 + Americans and the 3.5 million Vietnamese who died doing their job for freedom. When does the hate end and the forgiveness and moving on begin? As the United Nations song ‘Let There Be Peace On Earth’ promotes, let it begin with me.
I thank all of the courageous veterans who have returned to Vietnam to find peace and forgiveness and tried to make a positive difference in the lives of the Vietnamese there. They made it easy for me to return. We have all lost something to Vietnam and it is up to each of us to face it and take charge of our future.
**Vietnam is not behind me, it is in front of me, it has been and still remains, part of my life. The war disintegrated my soul, my integrity was compromised when what I had been brought–up believing that it was wrong to kill, ‘first, do no harm,’ and then placed in the dilemma of the strong using force to protect the weak by any means, using forceful action to save lives immediately. A concept that I now see as short-sighted and wrong.
The US-Vietnam War legacy to me is that one can make mistakes but it is what we do, our moral actions, when we realize that fact that tests our character, to be better than we are. I hope to do just that. I say it’s great to be alive and to have a 2nd chance!
Thomas Gale, July 4, 2001