“And that division of our country, it was to last only two years until we could vote, and instead it lasted for always. Children do not remember ever seeing their fathers who went north with our army as the treaty planned. We have a profound tradition of the family in Vietnam; men and women remain faithful, all these years, without ever knowing happiness.”
Madame Binh taught mathematics in a Saigon lycée and helped to organize “peaceful protests.” But her husband had been forced to flee to the country in 1955, her father was gone too; their meetings after that were rare, secret and perilous. Peaceful protests meant marches and petitions and they became a guarantee of arrest.
In 1957 Madame Binh left Saigon to hide in the country, “moving from one place to another, always moving. Sometimes we would arrive and be told no, you must go on at once. We lived underground often, never coming out into the air except at night. 1957 through 1959: those were the black years. By 1960, the people could not bear it any longer. They demanded the right to fight and protect themselves.
“We organized village by village. Those who knew how to fight taught the others. It was the third time we fought, you know. The Geneva Agreement was torn up by Diem; we knew we would never have the vote to decide how our country should live. And then the Americans came. I think the whole world knows that our patriots are brave.”
During her first year of hiding and flight, Madame Binh bore a son, and four years later a daughter. These children, now aged 12 and 8, have always lived with friends in what has so far remained a safe place. “I can count the days—not weeks, not months—in all these years that I have seen my husband. My children count the time they have seen me or their father in days. People say we are accustomed to this life. But we have the same desires and wants as everyone else. The same. It is difficult to live as we do.
Obviously, Madame Binh will not give details about this difficult life: in how many places does she live; in what sort of places—a village house with thatched roof, a concrete-lined under- ground shelter; how does she travel; does she ever rest; is there any amusement in her days? She says of her husband only that he is a patriot too and constantly occupied; they are never able to visit their children together. Nor can one know her exact position in the N.L.F.—but clearly she must have risen to this great responsibility through intelligence, work and courage. All one can tell, for sure, by her voice and eyes, is that she loves and misses her husband and her children. A “difficult” life: she seemed little and lonely and not even very well.
A young man brought in tea and Vietnamese sweets; there was a pause in the story and a chance to examine this small salon in a small villa in an undistinguished Parisian suburb. Madame Binh's delegation is not rich. Large photographs hung on the shiny reddish brown walls. One showed a young American with fair hair and a quiet, gentle face, burning his draft card. Another showed five radiantly gay young Vietnamese, two boys with accordions, two girls and a boy with rifles. Madame Binh explained that the accordion players were a village entertainment team; in the “liberated zones,” all villages had them. The laughing youngsters with rifles were members of the militia who protected the village.
They cared a great deal about songs and music, as also about schools and hospitals. Sometimes the schools were underground, sometimes above ground, depending. Education was a hunger with the people, the schools continued despite bombing. Their medical teams were at least devoted in their care of the wounded and had learned more skill, improving their traditional medicine. They could do nothing for those burned by napalm or white phosphorus unless the burns were slight. Otherwise the people died. Which led us to the bombing. How did her children survive the rain of fire and steel?
“The little girl is more sensitive,” Madame Binh said, and smiled as if to excuse the child. “When she hears planes she runs quickly to the shelter. The boy is harder; he waits a minute and looks at the sky before he goes. But we tell our children that the bombs cannot kill everyone; they must not be afraid.” Her head was bowed, her voice very low.
“We know that our sacrifice is necessary. If the bombs do not fall on you, they fall on friends. We accept fate. We are calm. It is useless to be a pessimist. One day, we will win a beautiful life, if not for ourselves then for our children.”
But there will be a whole army of children in Vietnam who will never have a beautiful life: the amputees, the blind, the mutilated, the orphans, the tuberculous, the small ones who have gone insane.
Madame Binh continued, “They bomb even our work animals, the oxen. As they spray poison on the fields so the people will starve or become refugees in the cities, lb ravage the countryside is another form of pacification.”
I asked, would not her people hate Americans forever?
“No!” Madame Binh said. “No, you must not believe that. My people are touched by all the acts—the small as well as the large— that the American people make against this war. We are really moved. We do distinguish between people of goodwill everywhere and governments. We feel that the public opinion of the world has understood us. You see, I was imprisoned by a French government and yet I have French friends, best friends, and my people keep a good relationship with the French people to this day. We do not want hate and war. We want only peace and the right to be independent in our own land.”
In his Inaugural Address, President Nixon said: ‘The peace we seek to win is not victory over any other people, but the peace that comes ‘with healing in its wings';. . . with opportunity for all peoples of this earth to choose their own destiny.”
The Sixties
At this late date, I perceive a muddle. Newspapers are brisk and publish at once but magazines have their different delayed unpredictable schedules. Now in the sixties, I see that the time when I collected information and wrote the article is completely out of sync with the time of its publication. The way to surmount this muddle is to ignore it; I will stick to my personal timetable.
The second visit to Poland in the spring of 1960 was self-indulgence: hard life in Poland interested me more than comfortable life in London. The hard life, described in “Return to Poland,” continuing since the end of World War Two, with hiccoughs of improvement, led to Solidarity, martial law and whatever comes next. Apart from the pleasure of their company, I wanted to organize the Polish Fun Fellowship. I would give money—peanuts, but young Poles were used to living on less than peanuts—and the Professor of Art History at Krakow University would choose a Fellow each year. Said Fellow could then satisfy his heart's hunger in the museums of France and/or Italy as long as the money and his passport permitted.
I cannot imagine why I expected this private plan by a private foreigner to get past the rigid communist authorities but finally it did, and Julek was the first Fun Fellow. He had a whale of a time, sleeping under the bridges in Paris to save money, and no doubt bringing home from France and Italy a rucksack full of museum postcards and fascinating news for his friends. The second Fellow was something else; the State had moved in and chosen its own. My Polish chums advised that the Fun Fellowship cease. No point in subsidizing clots.
As soon as the Eichmann Trial was announced, I knew I would report it and might also use the journey to enquire into the unending Palestinian Problem, since as usual I mistrusted the clichés of politics and statistics: I wanted to find out about the people. The information for the articles on the Palestinians and the Eichmann Trial was collected in May and June 1961, and both were written before the end of that summer.
Camp is an emotive misnomer, applied to the Palestinian refugees, but camp people are the poor Palestinians and doomed because they will never be treated as people. For almost twenty years, they served as a war-cry, a slogan for Arab governments. Since 1967 they have been wickedly misled by their self-appointed leader, that squat ugly little man, with his cultivated two-day stubble, his spooky smile and theatrical guerilla clothes, Yassir Arafat. Nobody elected Arafat and no Palestinians dare defy his PLO; you get murdered for dissent.
&nbs
p; Arafat has had enough protection money from the oil Arabs to finance the education of two generations of young Palestinians, a chance to rise beyond the poverty of the camps into a good self-reliant life. Instead he has recruited two generations for training only in the use of guns and plastique, and insisted on a futile goal: Palestine for the Palestinians. Israel is not going to commit suicide and will not be conquered by force. Terrorism has been the PLO's contribution to history. The PLO might be considered the Harvard Business School of terrorism, with an international student enrollment. The camp Palestinians are worse off now than they were twenty-six years ago. Under Arafat's leadership, Palestinians roused the civil war that has finished Lebanon. No Arab government wants to give house room to Palestinian gunmen whose sole trade is creating chaos.
I pity the Palestinian women, the only people in the camps who seemed to me sane and admirable. The Muslim Arab attitude toward women is one of the reasons that Arabs remain so drearily retarded. The chief reason is hate. These people really love to hate, as I observed long ago, and as everyone must have observed by now. Hate diseases the mind.
By the time I reached the icy air-conditioned courtroom in Jerusalem, the world's press had departed. I was waiting for that; I wanted to hear the Eichmann Trial with Israelis who were now the audience. At night, I listened to Israelis. The trial was more intimate than the Nuremberg Trials; the witnesses knew Eichmann and were telling their own life stories. I could not describe then or now the feeling in Israel. Something like anguished mourning at a family death-bed; something like nervous breakdown from the news of a cruel family death. Israel cannot be understood without fully understanding the Holocaust, a collective memory that will never be erased. The ceaseless ratbites of the PLO, the stubborn hostility of Arab countries, augmented now by non-Arab Iran, strengthen that memory and lock Israel into its harsh military self-protection. No other country has been forced to live in a permanent state of siege for two generations. This puts iron in the soul and it is a great pity. Israel desperately needs what it cannot get: acceptance by the Muslim world, and peace. Israel needs to rest.
I was so grateful to the Danes for preserving some honor in the gentile world that I went to Denmark, after the Eichmann Trial, to lay a wreath on the grave of King Christian X. And could not find it. Nobody seemed to know where this noble man had been buried, but I hunted it down; as I remember it was an inconspicuous plaque on a wall between two inconspicuous buildings. I laid a wreath alongside a bunch of dried flowers. The janitor at the Synagogue gave me the address of a Theresienstadt survivor, a respected woman writer who was still in weak health. I asked her why the Danes alone, as a nation, had behaved so beautifully when Eichmann was at the height of his power. She thought that the Danes were naturally good but also, “They are not very Christian.” Why? They did not have figures of the bleeding dying Christ nailed to crosses in their churches. My loving respect for the Danes has been renewed by their acts over the years. The Danes are not haters, they are saviors.
Perhaps the Eichmann Trial gave me the idea, in the winter of 1962, that it would be interesting to meet young Germans, a guiltless generation. The Germans (West) were by then the darlings of the U.S. government, favorite allies in the Cold War. I think my trouble with the young Germans was that they bored me, even those few that I liked. The absence of jokes and jolly laughter was painful. The Green Party and the mammoth anti-war and anti-nuclear weapons demos in Germany indicate a far livelier lot of young Germans nowadays. The students whom I met are now the elite class, in their mid-forties; I wonder if the present young Germans approve of them.
I was ready for a new love affair with a foreign country and had found the love object, at the end of a dotty journey across Africa along the equator from the west to the east coast. I left Kenya in March 1962, besotted by the land, the sky, the animals, the birds, the reef fish and the weather. I thought this impractical infatuation would wear itself out but the lure of a rugged untried thrilling African future was too strong. I imagined myself as a pioneer woman in Kenya though prudently keeping a toehold in London, a flat slightly larger than a broom cupboard.
“Monkeys on the Roof” is a sample of journalism-for-money, light cheerful stuff, and an accurate account of the start of my Africa era, in September 1963. That house was not your everyday suburban residence since you don't usually find a black mamba entering through the rear French doors, gliding along the wall under the bookshelves and out the front French doors. Milagro was standing at the bookshelves, fiddling with the useless radio, and luckily too paralyzed by fear to move as the snake slid past her feet. It curled up on a big cement flower pot on the verandah, where I was trying to grow vines as cover for the verandah's lamentable pipe pillars. The gardener and I, armed with sticks, then began an eerie ballet, leaping in to strike the snake, leaping back. I was as terrified as the Spaniards but dared not show it, for the sake of morale. Nor is it every suburban house which requires you to kill a huge tarantula under the dining table with a rolled up magazine. The house offered plenty of pioneer-woman type activity.
I had a marvelous time in Africa, those first years, free of newspapers, radio, television, out of touch with the man-made world. I wrote a novel and put it in a drawer, unseen by any other eye, my second stillborn novel; I traveled all over East Africa in my heroic yellow VW beetle; I wrote a few serious articles about Africa; and I snorkeled to my heart's content in the cool clear silky water of the Indian Ocean. My mother was by then too old for the strenuous plane trip from St. Louis to Mombasa. Instead I went to St. Louis every year.
By intention, I lived remote from news. But in St. Louis, in the autumn of 1965, the Vietnam war—nightly on TV—overwhelmed me with its horror and its wrongness. I had been slow to become aware but immediate in becoming opposed. War was not new to me. This war was altogether new. Napalm. My country was dumping napalm on thin poor people who lived in thatched huts? My country was sending young inexperienced boys to South East Asia and obliging them to act like mindless heartless oppressors, and get killed doing it? I loathed the men in Washington, safe in their elegant offices, making war on paper, intoning geopolitical rubbish, giving the orders, taking none of the pain.
The months in St. Louis were longer and harder each year: hometown claustrophobia, watching the last of my magnificent mother's life, and now the unbearable pictures from Vietnam. From October 1965 to February 1966, the Vietnam news was disturbing the balance of my mind. “Travail, opium unique.” At the age of eighteen, I tacked that quotation from Mauriac on the wall of my college room. A certain daftness attaches to an eighteen-year-old who felt she needed the opium solace of work, but it has served me ever since. I took refuge in the St. Louis Criminal Courts and was saved by work. Journalism is education for me; the readers, if any, may get some education too but the big profit is mine. Writing is payment for the chance to look and learn.
The weeks spent in the basement life of St. Louis were a valuable education. It was surely no worse than in any other American city and may have been better, due to the placidity of St. Louis. The basement life was pitifully sad, not frightening. Any rational person can see that the freedom to buy and own guns in America is irrational, not to say insane. The gun lobby is sacrosanct; Americans have the God-given right of free men to own weapons. And to shoot each other more freely and crazily than any other people. Twenty years on, there is more poverty, more and more violent crime, hard drugs have been added as a special catastrophe for the workless hopeless young; the cities are dangerous and the basement of society is a dungeon.
In the common tradition, the St. Louis cops were racists, niggers being their version of commies. A detective, who was a new pal, a likeable fellow, told me about the cops arresting two Black Liberators, two young men identified as belonging to a group of some thirteen rebels, hauling them into the station house because of a faulty rear light on their car, and beating them up so that they had broken hands, stitches on their heads and internal injuries. The two young blacks wer
e arraigned for assaulting the police and convicted. When I observed with heat that the police were fools as well as bastards, he asked pleasantly, “Whose side are you on, Martha?” On the side of the downtrodden. Even, risking pomposity, on the side of justice.
America disgusted me, killing poor people called commies in Vietnam, maltreating poor people called niggers at home. I wrote to a friend that I felt like a displaced person and all I wanted to do was get out. In February 1966, I fled the U.S. and landed on the Dutch island of Bonaire, in the Caribbean. This was my usual form of expeditionary travel; I had read that Bonaire was frequented by flamingoes which sounded strange and attractive. I wrote “Spiral to a Gun” then put on a mask, clamped my teeth on a snorkel and washed off the world's wrongs in the turquoise sea.
I could escape from the world by moving from one unspoiled off-the-track Caribbean island to another but could only escape my Vietnam obsession by replacing it with another obsession. I withdrew in my mind to memories of Mexico and in five solitary months wrote a happy novel, living entirely in an invented village among enjoyably odd characters. As always, “travail, opium unique” worked. It was the only fiction I wrote for the next nine years. When the novel was finished, I was back at square one, obsessed by the distant war.
All I really wanted to do was get to Vietnam. Where were the unmentioned people of South Vietnam, our luckless allies, while being saved from communism by bombs? Newspapers had their staffs of young war correspondents on site, reporting as if Vietnam were a sports event; I was overage for active service and without connections. I flopped around, not knowing what to do, until I persuaded the Guardian in London that Vietnamese civilians were valid news. The Guardian accepted my proposal to give me credentials and pay my airfare, the heaviest expense, if I paid everything else with the writing thrown in. That brief stay in Vietnam, in August-September 1966, churned up my life until April 30, 1975, when the war finally ended.
The View from the Ground Page 33
