The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

  A Tale of Two Wars

  AVE MARIA, June 1967

  The United States Government is waging two wars at once: the war on communism in Vietnam and the war on poverty in the U.S.

  In the summer and autumn of 1964, when Mr. Johnson was campaigning for election as President in his own right, he spoke loudly and clearly about the war in Vietnam. On August 29, 1964, he said: “I have had advice to load our planes with bombs and to drop them on certain areas that I think would enlarge the war and result in committing a good many American boys to fighting a war that I think ought to be fought by the boys of Asia to help protect their own land. And for that reason I haven't chosen to enlarge the war.”

  On September 25, 1964, he said: “There are those that say you ought to go north and drop bombs, to try to wipe out the supply lines, and they think that would escalate the war. We don't want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. We don't want to get involved in a nation with 700 million people and get tied down in a land war in Asia.”

  Again on October 21, 1964, President Johnson said: “We are not going to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”

  The American electorate had reason to believe that Mr. Johnson would disentangle us from a remote Asian conflict which we slid into, almost secretively, not knowing why or caring, until it started to eat American lives. The Republican candidate, Senator Goldwater, terrified the electorate by proposing to “defoliate the trees” in Vietnam. President Johnson was overwhelmingly the nation's choice, as a man of peace.

  But he was also enthusiastically chosen as commander-in-chief for an entirely different war: the war on American poverty. Even before his presidential campaign, Mr. Johnson spoke ringingly of his intention to fight that good war to a victorious end: “For the first time in our history it is possible to conquer poverty.” In his first State of the Union message, as the newly elected President, he said, “But we are only at the beginning of the road to the Great Society. Ahead now is the summit where freedom from the wants of the body can help fulfill the needs of the spirit.”

  Splendid words, in spite of some embarrassed unease about the code name for this Administration. President Kennedy's “New Frontier” was a signpost title, showing where we might try to go. “The Great Society” sounded a bit like a premature boast. Still, you cannot build a great society on top of a crushed, impoverished minority, and everyone would like to live in a great society. Declaring war on American poverty and declaring distaste for war in Vietnam was a brilliant vote-getting combination.

  We hear less and less ringingly about the war on poverty and ever more fervently about the war on communism. Patriotic “nu-speak” and “double-think” trumpet us on to stand fast or defend the U.S. or honor our commitments or save the world from communism in Vietnam. The young dead Americans, whom we believed were never going to Vietnam, are used to justify sending more young draftees to this abominable war. When the President has time to remember the war on poverty, he talks of it in sorrowing tones. Evidently, the President and his advisers have decided that it is more vital to our national interests to destroy communism in a poverty-ridden country 10,000 miles from our shores than to destroy poverty within the U.S.

  We lisp in numbers, in the U.S. We are deluged by ample, often mysterious statistics. A few comparative statistics on the two wars are enlightening. Like many in this country, I have come to regard statistics with doubt and merely as a hint of the probable shape of fact. For instance: the estimated population of South Vietnam is 16,000,000, and we are supposedly saving them from communism. According to President Johnson, the estimated number of Americans living “below the poverty line” is 34,000,000 and we are supposedly saving them from another form of slavery.

  It is easy to define the South Vietnamese: they are the unfortunate people who live there. The poverty line in the U.S. is defined as follows: a family of four living on $3,015.00 per year or less. Bureaucracy cannot function without such arbitrary rules. Poverty goes up or down at the rate of $500.00 per member of family. A single adult with an annual income of $1,515.00 should then be a poverty statistic. But if such a person has $20.00 more a year, bureaucracy would not consider him poor, though he would rightly know he was. In any case, these figures have a dream quality; the poor are much poorer than the law allows.

  No one has explained how the census of the poverty line was taken. The eye can receive impressions but not concoct statistics: 34,000,000 would seem a minimum figure. This number paints no picture for the imagination. Then try to imagine the entire combined populations of Tokyo, New York, London and Moscow, living in want—and you begin to realize what 34,000,000 people “below the poverty line” means.

  The war on communism in Vietnam has not been fully, frankly “cost analyzed” since it started in 1955, when John Foster Dulles led the way into this quagmire. We know that U.S. military expenses are at least $2 billion now each month. There has been no denial of the carefully documented statistic (Sherrod: Life magazine) that it costs $400,000 to kill a single enemy, Viet Cong or North Vietnamese, which includes the expense of 75 bombs and 150 artillery shells for each corpse. One does not know whether the cost of killing uncounted thousands of Vietnamese civilians unintentionally is lumped into that sum.

  In 1966, USAID spent $600 million “to keep the South Vietnamese economy viable” and in direct gifts, such as corrugated tin roofs for refugees. The total of known USAID for Vietnam adds up to $3,005,600,000. No one can suggest that the U.S. Government has been niggardly of funds for the war on communism.

  The war on poverty in the U.S. began two years and three months ago, with noble words, grandiose aims and limited cash. The total appropriation for winning this just war is $3,900,000,000 to date. Somehow that minor sum was meant to improve the lives of 34 million people in a country 57 times larger than South Vietnam. How could 34 million lives be noticeably improved when the funds have provided less than $100 to bring help to each of these poor? The war on poverty is unique: money could win it without a single casualty.

  The President has asked for an increase in funds, during the next fiscal year, in order to fight the war on poverty a tiny bit better. He wants $2.06 billion to slow the steady destruction of human life inside the U.S.; it isn't a wildly extravagant sum, considering the $2 billion used monthly for destruction inside Vietnam. The betting is that Congress will not agree to this request and will vote a smaller budget for the war on poverty. This January, in spite of objections from an admirable few, Congress granted an additional $12.3 billion to finance a mere half year of the war on communism.

  The Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) is the Pentagon of the war on poverty. OEO has overall command of strategy and finances, but each separate state, county and city sets up its own antipoverty operation. The resulting bureaucracy is, of course, large and complicated, though it is peanuts compared to the bureaucracy of USAID and the Defense Department. It is beyond my competence and this space to describe how the war on poverty is waged throughout the U.S., so I shall try to give a limited view of the battle in one large Midwestern city and its adjacent county.

  The population of the area is about 1,500,000 and someone has decided that 250,000 of the residents (mostly Negroes) are living below the legal poverty line. OEO, this year, allocated $11 million to raise a quarter of a million people above that dark line into the upper air. The figure of $11 million compares interestingly with these: $25 million to build a Pentagon in Vietnam for the use of 68 American generals; $18 million to construct two dairies in Vietnam for supplying reconstituted milk, cottage cheese and ice cream to U.S. troops; $39,500,000 for a year's stock of chemicals to defoliate trees in Vietnam.

  This Midwestern branch of OEO spends 46 percent of its budget on bureaucracy: staff, office rents, supplies, staff travel, and the maddening voluminous paper work that is bureaucracy's main product. Forty-five percent provides salaries for the poor, on learning jobs or
as assistants to the professional staff. Seven percent goes for services to the poor, such as medical examinations, educational materials, carfare to seek employment. Someday there will have to be a war on bureaucracy, which is a worldwide crippling disease. The U.S. is gravely infected. But the young OEO bureaucrats whom I saw in this Midwestern city were fine people, fired by a sense of justice and gentled by affection for their clients, the poor. One can only hope they will preserve their souls, as well as their jobs.

  There is nothing revolutionary about the war on poverty here—and here is a typical American city. The local OEO office gives money, advice, and supervisory staff to 45 existing public and private charities that have been dealing with the poor since time began. These 45 charities continue their usual work.

  They teach illiterate adults to read, operate birth-control clinics, train the young and the unskilled for jobs, run prekindergarten kindergartens, offer limited legal aid to the penniless, provide free tutoring in and out of school. The money is inadequate and so are the programs. Most of the 250,000 poor remain in their slum homes, unaware of the special benefits of the Great Society.

  But OEO, to its credit, has invented one new war tactic, called “Neighborhood Action.” For the first time, in their derelict streets, the poor have places to meet and a concerned, respectful staff to explain their role and rights as citizens. This is the most valuable and controversial of all the war-on-poverty operations.

  An evening meeting of a Negro Neighborhood Action Group, in a ramshackle OEO slum office, lifts the heart. The war on poverty fails for lack of money and vision and leadership. But hopefully, excitingly, little by little, the poor are training their own noncommissioned officers.

  The same Americans who detest and protest the war in Vietnam are staunch partisans of the war on poverty. These are the doves. A true hawk sees no need to waste money on the poor, to pamper the lazy, thieving lot; but would like more and bigger and better bombs to crash all over Vietnam. Dove and hawk are terms which entered our curious political vocabulary at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. President Johnson seems to have joined the present-day Vietnam hawks. But the doves are misnamed; they have bulldog blood.

  Our leaders tell us, again and again, that we are the richest and most powerful nation on earth; in fact, the richest and most powerful the world has ever known. None of them tells us that we are the happiest nation. How can a nation be happy when it has two wars on its hands and its people can't agree on either of them? Riches and power are not enough; we are short on wisdom and compassion.

  The Vietcong's Peacemaker

  THE TIMES, January 1969

  In November, this woman was unknown to the outside world. Then she appeared in Paris and the picture of a grave rather beautiful Asian face appeared in newspapers everywhere. Her name, we were told, was Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, and she was acting chief of the National Liberation Front delegation at the Vietnamese Peace Conference.

  The peace conference had involved only Hanoi and the United States, and was stale and bitter news. It had dragged on and off, mostly off, since May, while every week thousands of Vietnamese and hundreds of young Americans were killed and mourned, and this despairful, senseless war continued without change. In America, opinion grew that the Paris meetings were a fake, intended to soothe vast public disgust for the war, but not to bring peace.

  Madame Binh's arrival was news and sensational. The N.L.F. had been recognized as a power and this unknown woman was equal in rank to the American negotiator, Mr. Cyrus Vance, a far from unknown figure.

  The National Liberation Front of South Vietnam is the brain, the guiding force, the government, while the Vietcong is the army. Madame Binh does not bother with these definitions and distinctions. She speaks of all the South Vietnamese on her side, simply, as “patriots.” The Johnson Administration did not bother with definitions and distinctions either: those on Madame Binh's side were, simply, “the enemy.”

  The press has found an easy adjective to describe Madame Binh: she is “austere.” Austere, according to my dictionary, means “harsh, stern” this she is not at all. She wears the long Vietnamese tunic and trousers with a European woollen jacket for warmth. She uses neither make-up nor a hairdresser. She is small, very thin, pitifully and heroically tired, undaunted, probably shy and certainly modest. She has great dignity, her eyes are sad. Yet she laughed in the delicious way of her people, like a child crumpling into giggles, when I said with wonder that she has no lines on her face, not a single one, after such a life. Madame Binh does not think her life is special; it is how Vietnamese “patriots” live.

  When Madame Binh was a girl of 18, the Second World War ended and the Japanese were defeated and expelled from her country. Since older “patriots,” led by Ho Chi Minh, had been largely responsible for this result (and in those days Ho was honored by the American Government), the Vietnamese expected to be free and independent, rulers in their own land.

  Madame Binh had just finished her education in a lycée “I learned French, and French history. Not our history. Our ancestors were the Gauls.” Her smile was brief, ironic, like a shrug of the shoulders. “I had vague patriotic ideas. We were despised by the colonialists; I was often indignant, humiliated. I saw how poor my people were. I wanted then to be a doctor, to help my people. I saw how they went to doctors and were asked first how much money they had.”

  Her grandfather had been a famous patriot, imprisoned in his day by the French, but he died before she was born. Her father was a civil servant, “a small fonctionnaire, neither rich nor poor.” She was the oldest of six children, her mother was dead. In 1945, they were full of hope, the war was over, now they would live in peace, at home among themselves.

  But the French returned; the “patriots” were cheated of their nationhood, again to become second-class citizens in a colony. So the “patriots” took up arms a second time in September 1945, and Madame Binh's father joined them: Vietnam for the Vietnamese.

  “From 1945, we had no money. After he was arrested two or three times by the French, my father had to escape to the maquis. I stayed; there were five children to look after.”

  She was in Saigon alone at 18, teaching “little classes of children” to earn money, taking courses to qualify for a proper lycée post, and “participating.” “I could not have done it without help from friends.” First she worked with students, then with women's organizations, then with “the intellectuals.” “The great majority of intellectuals in our country have always been patriots.”

  How did she know what to do? “Me, I never received any political education"—again that brief smile. “I learned from experience. We organized protest marches against the arrests of patriots, we distributed leaflets, we met and discussed.” For six years she kept her family of brothers and sisters together and “participated.” Then, at the age of 24, she was arrested by the French. She spent four years in prison.

  “And I was tortured too, you know, to make me confess to subversive activities and to say I was a communist. I did not speak, but they wrote anything they liked in anyone's dossier.”

  I asked who tortured her.

  ‘'Vietnamese, with the French directing. Just as now it is Vietnamese who torture, with Americans directing. There are people like that in every country. Mercenaries, who torture their own for money.” She says the word mercenaries with loathing. But she would not speak of what had been done to her; she dislikes talking about herself as if the subject was without importance. Her memory is full of the endurance of others.

  “When I was in prison,” Madame Binh went on, “there were hundreds and hundreds of women with me who did not even know why they were there. They asked, what have we done? They did not know when they came but when they left, they knew. They left as patriots.”

  Her brothers and sisters were dispersed among friends, it was really the end of the family. Four locked-up years, and finally the “patriots” won and the French were defeated. The prison doors opened. The agreement reach
ed at Geneva looked forward to elections that would eventually unify the country. “We were so happy,” Madame Binh said, “so happy to have peace at last and to be free. My father came back, and the children.”

  In that short spell of hope, she married “someone I had known for a long time. For a few months, we were all together.” This is the best memory; her eyes shone. For a few months in 1954 is the only time they have been “all together.” Madame Binh is now 41 years old and the mother of two and she has never had a home with her husband and children.

  When the people poured into the streets of Saigon to celebrate the Geneva Agreement and their freedom, Diem's police fired into the crowd. Madame Binh was there that day, when rejoicing instantly changed to fear and a girl friend of hers was killed by a bullet in the stomach. The “intellectuals” understood quickly that the Geneva Agreement would not be respected, and Diem's “repression” grew.

  “There would be a police raid, closing both ends of the street, and the police would look at identity cards and collect the young men and take them away to the army; it happened like that even in cinemas. And patriots were arrested and shot. Later even whole villages would be decimated with machine guns. They pulled the guillotine through the streets of towns and villages to intimidate the people. They executed people openly in market squares and made their families watch.