Just As I Thought

by Grace Paley

  In reality, they were fliers shot down out of the North Vietnamese sky, where they had no business to be; out of that blueness they were dumping death on the people, the villages, the fields. And none of these men were forced into the job. They were not drafted, they volunteered. They were trained. Then, out of the American sanctuaries in Thailand, the carrier nests at sea, they rose, a covey of brilliant down-swoopers, high-fliers to do their work. Each one of these men may have accomplished half a dozen My Lais in any evening.

  The Vietnamese have a saying: The man in the sky is a killer, bring him down; but the man on the ground is a helpless human being. The men who were shot down, the human beings who fell alive into the shallow paddies, on beaches, into villages they’d just bombed, became POWs. Their Vietnamese captors were often half their size, half-starved, stiff with the grief of continuous loss of dear family, but survivors with a determination to win. They shared their squash and water spinach with these captured Americans whose great frames immediately (it’s been reported) suffered the lack of beefsteak.

  Nine prisoners of war have been returned to the United States, the last in 1969. I was a member of the peace movement delegation which escorted the last three from Hanoi to home. While in North Vietnam we talked to four other prisoners. I believe that the Vietnamese had great hopes for this program of POW return. With obvious logic, the Vietnamese had asked that the United States government not use these returned pilots against them again. But the United States was not ready then for any easing of war or righteousness.

  Therefore, at the present time, they are all in or associated with the armed forces. Some are training younger pilots to fly out again and again over that tortured country, that laboratory for American weapons engineers. Some are part of the propaganda mill that continues the air war and enlarged it to include Laos and Cambodia—that makes new POWs.

  I submit that the families of these men who, on the ground, are human beings, whose time of life is being used up in prison camps—these families must know that their men will not come home until the war ends. Removing American ground troops from South Vietnam will not end the Indochina air war. Automating the battlefields will not end the Indochina air war. Propaganda and punishing war will not bring those men home.

  I would like to add two recollections that are painful to me, but I want to share the recollections and the pain.

  At a festive dinner in a Hanoi hotel, a celebration of departure after arduous years of imprisonment, one of the pilots turned his ingenuous American boy’s face of about thirty to me. He said, “Gosh, Grace, to be truthful I really liked bombing.”

  One summer day before I left for North Vietnam, a woman called me at home. She was a pilot’s wife. She had not heard from her husband in two and a half years. She asked me to get information about him in Hanoi, if any existed. I tried. But no one had seen or heard of him, neither the Vietnamese nor the pilots we talked to. When I came home I had to call and tell her this. She asked me why the Vietnamese insisted on keeping the pilots.

  I explained that they were considered war criminals who had come 10,000 miles to attack a tiny country in an undeclared and brutal war.

  She said, “Well, they’re airmen. They’re American officers.”

  I told her about the villagers living in wet dark tunnels for years, shattered by pellets, seared by napalm—I told her only what my own eyes had seen, the miles of maniac craters—

  She said, “Oh, Mrs. Paley, villages and people! My husband wouldn’t do that.”

  I held the phone for a while in silence. I took a deep breath. Then I said, “Oh? Well, I guess it must have been someone else.”

  —1972

  Thieu Thi Tao: Case History of a Prisoner of Politics

  Thieu Thi Tao is twenty-three years old—the age of my own American children. That coincidence helps me to think about her. As I write about Tao, I call up the lives my children have led these past six years and hold those images in mind; then I reflect on the fragments of information we have about Thieu Thi Tao.

  Thieu Thi Tao has spent those six years as a prisoner. She was arrested in 1968, when she was seventeen, a student at Marie Curie High School in Saigon. We don’t know the exact day.

  The government of the Republic of Vietnam says it has no political prisoners. The United States ambassador says this must be true, since the government says it is true. But Thieu Thi Tao was arrested “for spreading Communist propaganda”; there is no other charge against her.

  In prison, Thieu Thi Tao was beaten on the head with truncheons. Her head was locked between two steel bars. Water was forced down her throat. She was suspended above the ground.

  Then, on November 20, 1968, she was transferred to national police headquarters. The Vietnamese Catholic priest Father Chan Tin, in a plea for international concern about her case, wrote that she was “further beaten and subjected to electric shock.”

  “She’s become insane,” Father Tin wrote, “unable to sleep for fifteen days, believing herself to be a pampered dog that could only eat bread and milk. Not being given these, she refused to eat and became so weak she couldn’t talk. When the wind blew she wanted to fly.”

  Nothing like that has happened to my children.

  Late in 1969, Thieu Thi Tao was transferred to the island prison of Con Son, along with her sister, Tan, who has since been released. We heard nothing for nearly a year, until July 2, 1970—an extraordinary day, when Don Luce managed to lead two United States congressmen into a forbidden section of Con Son, where prisoners were held in tiger cages.

  There is a picture of the congressmen, William Anderson and Augustus Hawkins, looking down with Don Luce into the cages where some prisoners had lived for years, shackled, some to the point of being permanently deformed. On that day Thieu Thi Tao, who speaks English, described for the congressmen exactly what was happening to her and the other women.

  She was one of five women in her cage. A bucket of lime stood above each cell. At different times, the women were doused with lime or sprayed with tear gas. During their menstrual periods, they were given no means to keep themselves clean.

  Anderson and Hawkins reported what they had seen and heard; photographs and interviews were published; there was a great uproar, and it was assumed that the publicity would destroy the cages. But on January 17, 1971, the U.S. Navy gave a $400,000 contract to Raymount, Morrison, Knudson, Brown, Root and Jones to build 384 new “isolation cells”—two square feet smaller than the old ones.

  Thieu Thi Tao lived three years in these cages. She had been sentenced to two years by the military court. But it was said of her, in 1971: “She is still obstinate.”

  Tao’s mother was in Thu Duc Prison for Women at that time; she wrote this poem for her two daughters:

  Dearest Children,

  My heart is torn!

  How I suffer in this lonely prison

  How our love is severed.

  I care nothing for myself

  But for you, you at Con Son

  A place with no rest

  A place with no trust

  How could you know

  Our family was ripped apart

  At the whim of a crushing regime

  Here I waste at Thu Duc

  You at Con Son

  Your youngest brother, abandoned

  Waits alone

  O God

  Why does such cruelty rule

  Casting me into prison

  Leaving my children alone and astray?

  But no matter, our love will conquer!

  At some point—we don’t know exactly when—Thieu Thi Tao was transferred once more, this time to the Bien Hoa insane asylum. From there she managed to smuggle out a letter to Don Luce. On that day at Con Son she had not spoken directly to him—because she speaks English she addressed herself directly to the congressmen and to their aide, Tom Harkin. But Luce had stayed in touch with her mother. The letter:

  Dear Nguyen Van Don Luce,

  Nothing but your name give me af
fection. What a pity that I couldn’t meet you on your coming to the tiger cages, but I’ve made acquaintance with you through my mother, your letters to her, and the newspapers. I still remember the gentleman who spoke with me. I don’t know his name, but he seemed very nice. If you happen to meet him, please remember me kindly to him. [The gentleman was Tom Harkin, who was himself elected to Congress in 1974 as a representative from Iowa.]

  I think that you are well informed about my conditions of living. Like more than a hundred of thousands of political prisoners in South Vietnam, I’m suffering a hell on earth. For six years in prison, I have lost health, knowledge, intelligence, memory. I’m ashamed to admit that you know Vietnamese better than I know English. Six years constantly seeking for affronting torments and repressions, seeking for the way to be able to live in peace, but not a minute serene!

  And in the result, I’ve been sent to the Bien-Hoa lunatic asylum. Here I read you and write to you. It’s really a great comfort for me, but a strain too. I can’t concentrate for a long time.

  I’m longing for hearing from you soon.

  Cordially yours,

  Thieu Thi Tao

  That letter is sane if anything is sane. But it is nevertheless a letter about insanity.

  Thieu Thi Tao is the age of my children, and a thousand years older. She has suffered paralysis. She has felt her mind slip away. Her sister contracted tuberculosis.

  And the money that trained the men who tortured her, the dollars that kept her in a cage, came from my country. They were American tax dollars. The brand name proudly printed on her shackles is Smith & Wesson. The cage she lived in was very likely made in America.

  Thieu Thi Tao is one of thousands, tens of thousands, who are subjected to this brutality.

  She is a political prisoner. A prisoner of politics. The politics of the United States of America, which supports this most corrupt and most cruel regime. There lies the real insanity.

  Thieu Thi Tao modestly asks to be remembered kindly to her American friend. I ask that you remember her and that in your kindness you demand of your representatives in Congress an end to her confinement, an end of support for the government that has made her life a hell on earth, an end of our insanity.

  —1974

  I had a letter from Don Luce the other day (January 1997). He had new information about Thieu Thi Tao. His ’97 letter reads: “She is now an agricultural scientist/botanist. She is married and has one daughter. She still has to wear a neck brace because of being hung from a hook as ‘punishment’ 25 years ago … The people who were in the cages have a club of former prisoners and meet regularly (and often challenge present policies)…”

  Conversations in Moscow

  As I live my talky, asking, and answering life in the United States, I often remember the First Amendment, how pleasant it’s been to me and how useful to my country. I was taught to love it and wonder at its beauty by my parents, prisoners once of the Czar. And I do love it, though I also love literature, and it has made our literature one of the most lively and useless in the world. Of course, it’s been good to write letters to the newspapers. Some are published. It has been pleasing to stand on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue and hand out informational pamphlets, leaflets of protest, to assemble in rage a couple of times a year with tens of thousands of others.

  The elected or appointed leaders of our country have often applauded our enactment of these freedoms. They were then able (with clear consciences) to undertake and sustain the awful wars we spoke and assembled against for ten years.

  In October, as a delegate to the World Peace Congress from the War Resisters League, I visited the Soviet Union, where a different situation exists. Literature is taken very seriously. Poets and storytellers are dealt with as though their work had an important political life. But a Russian cannot distribute a dissenting leaflet to other Russians. (In fact, it’s considered seditious.) And there is a concerned citizenry standing here and there, sometimes wearing a red armband, but often just going ahead with working life. Part of that life is the satisfaction of informing on neighbors.

  Still, as an anarchist, a believer in no state, I have felt like a patriot in several. In this way, I considered myself a Russian patriot. In fact, if the entire World Peace Congress had been spoken in Russian and remained untranslated into the English Marxese of the daily bulletins, I could have been bought and sold a dozen times, because Russian is the conversation of my childhood. My nose somewhat stuffed by sentimental remembrance of those dead speakers, I stood in the Moscow hotel hearing Russian orders given and carried out in regard to rooms and luggage. Later I took a bus up Kalinin Prospekt, and one lady, looking like my mother, said of another lady, who looked like my aunt, “Listen to that one, she knows nothing; still, she teaches…” Then despite the hour, which was often suppertime, I wanted to walk around the streets of the city of Moscow and cry out (with exclamation points to explode each phrase), Oh, Mother Russia! Oh, country of my mother’s and father’s childhood! Oh, beloved land of my uncle Russya killed in 1904 while carrying the workers’ flag! Oh, country my own of storytellers translated in my ear! of mystics and idealists who sharpened my English tongue. Three times a day in the dining room my bones nearly melted. “Please,” I said, starting the days listening and answering, “one egg only, but coffee now.” “Oh, of course, my darling, my little one, only wait.”

  Day and night I received this tender, somehow ironic address, full of diminutives, of words hardened by fierce consonants, from which the restrained vowel always managed to escape. This Moscow speech, like all urban speech, like New York speech, is extended by out-of-towners and foreign émigrés, then toughened to defend itself against transients and enemies.

  I need to make some observations that have probably been made time and again and with more distinction by traveling reporters. It isn’t that I don’t pay attention, but I don’t think the wide world is to be judged by America consuming or compared to its shopping crowds. I feel the witness’s obligation to say: Yes, the streets of Moscow were roaring with people moving at top speed through mush and slush during morning, lunch, and evening rush hours. Yes, they were all warmly dressed in heavy coats and boots or galoshes, the children in magnificent fur-lapped hats. No, there were not a lot of red or blazing blue scarves, those colors together with greens and yellows and marigold orange were scrolled around the domes and turrets of the churches. Yes, GUM, the department store, was crowded with buyers, looking mostly for more hats and galoshes. Inside the hotel the young girls were not sizzling in Western high style, but did tend to rosiness of countenance, and yes, late in the Moscow evening, 11:00 or 12:00 p.m., we saw people walking about, returning, arm in arm, from visits to friends and family. And as happens in Chicago, New York, Santiago, San Francisco, and Rome, the cabs go flying by even though their green “free” light is lit.

  Maris Cakars and I were the War Resisters League delegates to the World Peace Congress. Father Paul Mayer was one of many delegates from PCPJ (People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice). He was a member of the preparatory committee, which had worked in Moscow in April organizing this enormous event. At a delegate meeting, the first or second day of the congress, though he was not present, he was elected co-chairman of the American delegation.

  About this World Congress of Peace Forces, the press has been rather lazy; or perhaps it has edited itself too strictly. Most of its news stories were about the statement Paul Mayer read to the Human Rights Commission, which had been signed by a number of antiwar activists, including myself, and distributed by us to interested people. However, there were 3,500 other delegates. And many of those had suffered their country’s oppression and were famous fighters against the colonial uses of their people. They traveled in exhaustion from commission to commission calling out their histories. I suppose journalists on foreign beats are familiar with the beauty and passions of the women and men of this world, but I am not. For me, they were astonishing to see. They came from Africa, As
ia, continents, countries, and villages where occasion still allows golden magnificence or delicacy in dress and demeanor, instead of dour formality. Familiarity is no excuse for ignoring beauty.

  On the last day of commission meetings, Paul Mayer read a statement signed by Noam Chomsky, Dave Dellinger, Daniel Berrigan, Paul Mayer, David McReynolds, Sidney Peck, and me. In it, the signers identify themselves as American dissenters. They establish that they are not cold warriors. They condemn the Soviet government for its persecution of dissidents, but call upon the dissidents themselves to join in protest against political murder in Chile and the continued imprisonment of hundreds of thousands in South Vietnam. I distributed this statement to fifty or sixty people who requested it (mostly Russians), but also to members of other delegations and the press.

  We were corrected in a fairly sensible Russian tone by the next speaker and excoriated by several others (Asian, African, American, European). At supper that night I offered copies to the American delegates and explained our position. In this way, we found that many people shared our views but had not yet spoken. A steering committee meeting was called that night. Paul, who had been co-chairman of the delegation, was called a liar, an agent, a deceiver. They feared that it would be assumed that he spoke for the entire delegation, a legitimate fear—still, we met no one who assumed it after speaking to us and the steering committee. Paul was censured and resigned in order to maintain some unity. I have been told this is why people resign. In this case unity was not maintained. I was more contemptuously dealt with as a woman and a mere leaflet carrier. At all times the Russians were calmer than the Americans. For instance, the Russians never said we should be shot. A couple of American women said that I ought to be shot. Then they thought it over during the night. In the morning, they said I should not be shot but “something … something terrible should be done.” It has been suggested to me that the Russians depended on some sort of strong American statement to prevent the burial of the Peace Congress by the American press.