The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

  After my reports appeared in the Guardian, the South Vietnamese government marked my name with a black X and forever refused a visa to return. The last information that the South Vietnamese and American overlords wanted to have spread abroad was what I had written, the massacre of the innocents. There was no censorship of the media in Vietnam but excluding a reporter is the tightest censorship, nothing can beat it. I was cut off from the only useful work I could have done to discredit the war, a minor act yet any act however small had value if it helped to end the war. And it was the only work that had any value for me. I never doubted that the Vietnamese people would win, but every day of that vicious war meant more and worse of everything I had seen.

  I did not think that the stars would veer in their courses because I had lost a sense of purpose, felt shelved, redundant, as if I had lived too long. I was haunted by Vietnam even when I took care not to read about the war and lived out of reach of TV. My inner climate was overcast by shame and grief and rage with, as the British weather reports say, sunny intervals.

  In the spring of 1967, again in St. Louis, I filled time by studying the basement life from a different angle. The magazine Ave Maria is a mystery to me. The few copies I have seen look very waif-like, printed on cheap paper. Obviously it is Catholic from its name but what extraordinary Catholics they must be. They reprinted some of my Vietnam war reports, when Cardinal Spellman of New York was blessing the Vietnam war as a Christian crusade against communism. Probably I sent them “A Tale of Two Wars” thinking that they alone would want it.

  As sunny intervals go, another war seems bizarre, but Israel's Six Day War was in every way unlike the Vietnam War: necessary, brilliantly executed and unique in the Israelis’ resolution to spare civilians. Reporting what that war had really been, as opposed to what Arab propaganda said it had been, and writing three later articles on Israel kept me occupied from June until September 1967, and temporarily released from Vietnam. After that, nothing until January 1969.

  The London papers carried stereotype snippets about Madame Binh. I wanted to see her, I wanted to see someone from Vietnam, very queer, almost like homesickness. The Times gave me credentials readily enough; I was a discount price journalist and Madame Binh was enough of a rarity to be worth some space. Madame Binh was adorable. It sounds silly, and adorable is not an adjective that pops up every week in my vocabulary. I expected to admire her but not to feel instant devotion. In Vietnam I had been repelled by us, the big white Americans, an awkward crude people with unfinished faces, and moved by the elegance of form and bearing and the dignity of the Vietnamese. I towered over Madame Binh and felt all of us outsize Americans, with our accursed power and money, to be pygmies beside the strength of this tired tiny woman.

  The Paris Peace Talks smelled rotten from the beginning. Offhand, there were not two men living I would trust less than President Nixon and Dr. Kissinger. The Swedes must have been asleep at the wheel to award Dr. Kissinger half the Nobel Peace Prize. The man of peace who counseled the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, as soon as the 1972 U.S. Presidential election was safely won; who counseled the secret saturation bombing of Cambodia. The Paris Peace Talks, an on-and-off show from 1968 until 1973, were another American public relations job; lying, hypocrisy, window dressing. I never believed a word Nixon said except his remark that he did not mean to be the first American President to lose a war. No matter how many people died. The vanity of the man, the vanity of the whole stupid inhuman lot of them in Washington, from first to last.

  If I had been twenty years younger, I bet I would not have wasted almost a decade of my life in sterile torment of spirit. I would haw got myself to Vietnam somehow and joined the Vietcong, though handicapped by my height. Not much use digging tunnels. Vietnam for the Vietnamese. Afghanistan for the Afghans. El Salvador for the Salvadorans. Nicaragua for the Nicaraguans. The inherent right of all peoples to self-determination. If they need civil war to determine how they shall be governed, that is their business and nobody else's. Down with intruding bullies. How would Americans like it if a foreign power decided it wanted a U.S. government by Republicans only, or by Democrats only, and sent its armed might on American soil to enforce its choice, all the while spraying napalm and talking of freedom and democracy?

  There is no way that I will ever forgive the American governments—from Eisenhower through Nixon—who led America, first sneakily then arrogantly, into the Vietnam war. They are responsible for disgracing America in history. Changes in the fashion of judging the Vietnam war, now, are irrelevant. History keeps the record.

  THE SEVENTIES

  Beautiful Day of Dissent

  May 1970

  They move like migrations of birds and like a nation of gypsies, roaming. They are always walking and unencumbered. Where do they sleep, where do they eat? How did they arrive? Suddenly the young were in Washington, convoked as mysteriously and swiftly as birds, only four days after four of them, protesting the Cambodia attack, had been shot dead by Authority in the uniform of the National Guard. They began to gather in tens of thousands on Friday, a warm spring day, the horse chestnuts and azaleas blooming, tulips ranked on all official lawns, the grass blindingly emerald. The young floated and drifted through the spring and on into the great stony office buildings of the Senate and the House, which had never before seen such an invasion, quiet, unimpressed by the pomp of the State, mostly wearing blue jeans and lots of exuberant hair.

  The young were calling on their elected representatives, who received them with marked attention and courtesy. The marble corridors of the Senate Office Building and the luxurious committee rooms were full of them, an entirely new constituency armed with persistent questions and demands for congressional action. On the steps of the Senate Building, in the noonday sun, there was an astounding rally: Federal Employees Against the Vietnam War, servants of the government protesting their government's action, all of them young. The youngest was a baby in a small pram, whose sides bore hand-painted signs: SPEAK FOR THE PEOPLE. On the steps of the Capitol, an overflow crowd of the young listened to Senator Kennedy and applauded him warmly. Not the words but the special sound of the Kennedy voice carried across the lawn where more young were talking little, as seems their style, but resting with that delightful ease of body they have, unselfconscious, barefooted if that's best and no possessions to mar their look of freedom.

  By late afternoon, the migration appeared to flow toward the Washington Monument, a huge stone spear on a hill top. Kids, this time real kids, small ones, accompanied by nuns who now wear habits like old-fashioned English nannies, walked round and round the Monument. They gave the impression of making a vigil. Broad lawns sloped down to a small stage on which a rock band was performing electronically. The young sprawled, sat, sauntered on the hillside: the music beat against l'heure bleue sky. There were announcements. A clear assured male voice over the microphone, “Hey, the sun is going down.” And it was, a huge burning orange ball. “This may be the last day the sun goes down on this kind of world. Tomorrow it will rise on a new one!” Warm, friendly cheers, laughter, applause. Then the same voice, “Now something serious. People, please don't step over the fence to come up here. All the wires are on the ground, about a foot over the ground, for the lights and stuff. All right?” More music. Then “When it gets dark, people will be collecting bail money. Give whatever you can, anything, whatever you can. The money you give may be used to free you.” And presently, as the lights went on in the park and the city, long-haired girls wandered through the crowd with brown paper bags, calling softly “Bail Money! Bail Money!”

  On the street corners, young people had been giving out cheaply printed handbills all day. Kent State Memorial Service. Nixon sends GI's into Cambodia, Mass Meeting, Rip Off Armed Forces Day, Manpower Makes War Power, Repeal the Draft. Now, in the cool evening light, the young made paper airplanes of these sheets. Having read them, they became useful for fun. Like large butterflies, the air was full of paper planes sailing from group t
o group.

  Next to me on the grass, sat a very young mother, perhaps nineteen or twenty years old, pale, serious, tired, dressed as the young are, in clothes which would be the very uniform of poverty and hardship in America, were it not that all the young choose these clothes; the ragged jeans, the shapeless faded top, bare feet with sandals carelessly to the side. Her baby was a silent cheerful busy creature of about fourteen months, spotlessly clean, with the Peace logo sewn to the arm of a tiny yellow windbreaker. The baby was living a happy life in this throng, in this wildly loud music, crawling, trying to chew Mummy's sandals, pulling over a collapsible pram. Without fuss, Mummy spread an underground newspaper on the grass and changed diapers and gave the baby a plastic bottle of orange juice which it gulped at speed. A young black, saying, “Hiyah baby,” danced down the hillside, feet light, shoulders loose; three young men, bare to the waist, clumped past. These people never step on each other nor on babies. Two girls appeared from nowhere, long haired, blue jeaned, and took over the baby, playing with it, chatting to the mother: instant comradeship between members of the same tribe.

  Higher up the hill, near the Monument, oblivious to the rock music, four young Americans, dressed in what I take to be the robes of Tibetan priests (this guess based on the hair arrangement of the men) chanted and slowly danced around a small mound of incense. People stopped to watch: the words were a language unknown to us. Just stopped, listened, watched: without comment. There was a very great sense, all the time, that everyone did his thing, and the tolerance this implies is wonderful.

  The White House is the only beautiful official building in Washington, and in the sudden spring, its gardens were a lovely flowering softness. The gates were all closed with signs saying NO VISITORS ALLOWED. There were few police about. On the street side, on Pennsylvania Avenue, four silvery white coffins stood upended against the White House fence. Each one bore a single large black-lettered word: “THOU SHALT NOT KILL.” Close to the coffins, wearing skull caps, a group of young Jews intoned what sounded like a prayer. People again stopped to look and listen. A boy handed out paper armbands: KSU (for Kent State University where the four young people were killed) / Peace. But he didn't know who the praying people were, nor who put up the coffins, he was from another university, giving out armbands to those who wanted them.

  Then there was the President on television, no longer that beaming man who always seemed radiant with delight to be at last where he had so long and tirelessly struggled to be. He looked nervous tonight; his smile was a mechanical twitch. The papers described him next day as “conciliatory.” Too late, I think, for these young: he will never understand them; they will never trust him or forgive him. The TV face everyone remembers and believes is that of the father, himself so young, of a nineteen-year-old girl killed at Kent State University. He stood before his home in bright sunlight, he looked like the image of decent Middle America, he was fighting against tears and no one could forget that voice saying slowly, with anguish and anger, “She resented being called a bum because she disagreed with someone else's opinion. She felt the war in Cambodia was wrong. Is this dissent a crime? Is this a reason for killing her? Have we come to such a state in this country that a young girl has to be shot because she disagrees deeply with the government?”

  The sun did not rise on a new world as the rock singer predicted, but rose on a day unlike any other seen before in the American capital. Only eight days ago, the President had stunned the nation by announcing that troops were moving into Cambodia. Protests exploded throughout the country. A few days later, four students were killed on an American campus. National Guard and tear gas and fighting cops seemed to be on campuses everywhere. That same morning, though we did not know it, construction workers, faced by almost no police, were brutally beating student war protesters and bystanders in Wall Street, the while singing the Star Spangled Banner and forcing the flag to be raised from half mast mourning for the student dead. Hundreds of colleges and universities were on strike. Every sort and kind of organization in the country was condemning murder of students at home and murder in Indochina. The country felt polarized, a new favorite word, meaning simply that America is dividing fiercely and dangerously into two camps. The President and his administration are anathema to one side, Defenders of the Flag to another.

  It was an electric day and the sun shone mercilessly. This reporter, trying in vain to affix the paper armband, asked for help from an old Negro maid in the hotel corridor.

  “You be careful, honey,” she said, “Don't get yourself hurt. You seen the father of that girl got killed on TV? I'm black, you white, but we's the same ain't we, that don't make no difference. What they trying to do honey, what they trying to do?”

  “I'll protest for you too.”

  “God bless you,” she said, moving on with the clean towels.

  This demonstration was never organized; it was the most giant happening yet seen. People came who had never protested before, and they came from everywhere. It is useless to estimate crowds; this reporter has not seen so many people at once since VE Day in Paris, but they say that the Moratorium Days collected greater crowds. The wonder of this was how fast it happened, and how instantly the young took over responsibility: they provided medics and their own marshals, in one day. Again, by their mysterious system of vibrations or emanations, they got to each other the tone they wanted for this day, they understood each other.

  For once, Authority used its head and kept the troops out of sight and evidently gave orders to the police to play it cool. Buses were parked, end to end, a solid barrier, around blocks of the city, closing off the White House, the park before it, the Treasury and State Department; an enormous barrier of aluminum. The police stood two feet apart along the streets to channel the migration but none came onto the Ellipse, a great oval like a giant cricket field, below and in sight of the White House.

  Now the morning streets were filled with drifting troops of the young, strangers to this city. One keeps wondering how on earth they travel and how they live. No girl carries so much as a shoulder bag. One girl was funny and odd because, nearly concealed under a battered floppy brown felt hat, she trailed a flowered quilt. Some people had army canteens; some veterans of college battles wore crash helmet and gas masks, some carried paper bags with food. But mostly, in tens and tens of thousands, this vast tribe of the young floated together, empty-handed, easy with each other, down the streets of Washington to the Ellipse.

  “Hey, where we going?” a boy asked.

  “Follow the people,” a girl said.

  That is how they talk of themselves and to themselves: the people. We, the old, call them the kids: I did not hear any of them using that word, but they are in every way remarkable, and one of their unusual aspects is how little they talk. The symbol of this day was a stenciled closed fist: the Strike fist. On the backs of sweatshirts and sweaters and shirts, on buttons and stickers, the stenciled fist was new and impressive. They tied strips of red rags or black rags around their thighs, over the jeans; many wore the names of their colleges and universities which are now like regimental badges. Most of the girls are without bras or make-up, with long straight hair; the boys are often bearded and hair length varies: all hair was too hot. The sun blazed on the now naked torsos of boys, the girls with shirts rolled up into improvised bikinis, shoes and sandals came off. There were few blacks and they seemed melded with the white young, part of integrated groups.

  A priest lay on the grass on the Ellipse, already filling at ten- thirty in the morning; very white bare feet below his clerical black, a large red button beneath his dog collar: STOP REPRESSION/STOP GENOCIDE. There were nuns, only to be recognized by a brown veil like a nursing sister, and priests in brown robes. White-haired men wore the blue overseas cap of the American Legion, but with the riveting sign: VETS AGAINST THE VIETNAM WAR.

  Another group of middle-aged people bore a home-made sign declaring “We are All Bums.” But the old, the over-forties, were few and far betw
een; and though solidly with the young they were outsiders. There should have been more of us and grouped together, simply to show the young that the generation gap, which one feels sadly as if one belonged to an outdated species, need not mean alienation of the spirit.

  Meanwhile the crowd flowed and moved, and everywhere on the ground were bare hands and feet, and it was startling to see the extreme care and politeness of these young, who are often presented to us as mad hooligans. I cannot imagine how they wove, like Mignon amongst the eggs, through their seated and sprawling peers, without trampling on each other, but they did, and the words “Excuse me” were constantly heard. That is not a phrase you hear much in America. Their voices are quiet. In that huge gathering, all day and everywhere, people could talk to each other in low conversational tones. Nearer the unseen speaker's platform, a young man with beard and long hair held back in a rubber band, announced to two girls with earnest faces and eyeglasses, “I'm trying to free myself of the shackles the Establishment has forced on me, get it?”

  Farther along in a group reading one of the innumerable student papers and handbills, given and sold all day, a girl said, “You think Nixon wants us to use violence, I don't, I don't agree.”

  A girl clapped a shapeless man's felt hat on her head: a sign on the back said, FIRST AID. Young men in white with Red Cross armbands were everywhere. There were MOBE stands, selling black buttons for mourning and blue buttons saying PEACE NOW and stickers saying STRIKE THE WAR MACHINE, STRIKE OUT NIXON, and a girl calling “People, we need your money, give us whatever you can, buy stuff, we're $12,000 in debt. Money to free the Panthers.” For steadily, joined to the protest against the war and the killing of students, there was always the cry “Free Bobby Seale,” and the Panthers are linked in the young collective mind with the Vietnamese as oppressed people.