Tell it to the Dead

Memories of a War

Donald Kirk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315285511
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This work reports on the Vietnam war as seen by the GI in the jungles. It discusses current attitudes, views from Saigon, Hanoi and Phnom Penh, and other locales in the countryside.

1
"We Must Accept"

Trang Bang, April 1995

The suffering never ends for Du Ngoc Anh, who lives with the memory of the napalming of her village as if it had happened yesterday. "My two little sons were killed on the spot," says Du, now 54. "My baby daughter died three months later in a hospital." Almost ritualistically, Du displays the napalm wounds she suffered as she fled the attack that morning of June 8, 1972. "In the cold weather my legs still ache," she says, showing the scarred, twisted flesh on her arms and legs. "It never goes away."

The horror endured by her family that day was never known outside her village. She and her husband have copies of the Associated Press photographs showing her uncle and grandmother screaming as they carried the bodies of the dead boys in their arms, but another photograph of another victim survives as a reminder of the war. That was the picture by the same AP photographer, Nick Ut, of the napalmed girl running naked from this village, her elder brother just ahead of her, also wounded and screaming, her baby brother tagging along behind, crying but barely wounded.

This reporter was on the road that day, too, just behind the AP photographer, and returned to this village, at a bend in the road about 40 miles northwest of Ho Chi Minh City, to talk to villagers about the tragedy—and the war. "The war was between the Americans and the Viet Cong," says Phan Thanh Tung, now 68, sitting in his newly built thatched roof house behind the Cao Dai temple where the napalm scorched the earth long after the VC had pulled out. "We were citizens. We were in the middle."

Phan's wife, Du Ngoc Nu, 63, sits beside him, reliving the terror she felt as the flames engulfed much of the village. "Sometimes I cannot sleep at night," she says. "I have nightmares, and I feel very tense." She and her husband, once farmers, now spend much of their time working in and around the temple, whose adherents follow a unique melange of Buddhism and Christianity. They say their daughter, Kim Phuoc, now 33 and living in Canada, never fully recovered from the napalming during years of medical treatment in Europe and Cuba but now is married to a Vietnamese whom she met in Cuba and has a year-old baby.

Their son, Phan Thanh Tam, probably suffered more. "He got some napalm in his eye," says the father. "He does the best he can. He works as a farmer and has three daughters, but he feels pain quite often, and he cannot always think clearly." Phan was so terrified during the attack that he can hardly remember all that happened, but he insists the planes that napalmed the village were American jets, A37s, not propeller-driven South Vietnamese A1 Skyraiders, as widely reported. This reporter, seeing black smoke billowing over the village that day, remembers seeing the jets wheeling and diving a few hundred yards away—and also recalls seeing the Skyraiders blamed for the attack. "I saw the American pilots," says Phan, but I forget what happened next."*

The battle was typical of many in the war. South Vietnamese troops had gone through the motions of clearing out civilians, warning them by loudspeaker that the planes were going to bomb. The Viet Cong, dug into a trench, had already left, and the civilians were picking up their belongings and fleeing when the both Skyraiders and A37s swooped over.

Phan avoids politics and name-calling. I think I was a victim of the war," he says. "I don't know who to blame. We must accept only that we were unlucky. We blame no one." He won't even speculate about who began the war—or was responsible for the attack. "I don't know who started it. At that time the Vietnamese from the forests come here and fight the Americans. They live here for five days before the attack. They do not talk to us. They only dig a tunnel to hide in."

Phan credits the government in Hanoi, however, with having made life somewhat easier for villagers in recent years. "For the first ten years after the war, they did not let us worship. But they decided that policy was a mistake. Now we are free to pray in the temple. Life is better for us. We talk about religion, though not about anything else."

Du Ngoc Ann, the woman who lost three of her children in the attack, adopts the same outlook. "I have nothing to think about the war," she says. "I try to think about nothing because the war has stopped, and we must accept the result. I was sad very much, but now I pray and try to think about my religion."

Xuan Dai, South Vietnam, November 1967*

Fires were still burning in the ruins of the brick-and-mud-walled homes. The sickening smell of burnt sugarcane hung in the air. Frightened baby chicks chirped frantically in search of their mothers. From the charred entry of one of the buildings, a middle-aged peasant woman, clinging to a plastic bag, tentatively poked her head, then emerged with a puzzled-looking little boy. Quickly another, much older woman followed her and then several more children, rubbing their eyes.

"Hey, you, get over there," a towheaded marine, barely 20, shouted at the women and children, pointing toward a cement floor bordered by crumbling walls, broken dishes, and blackened cooking pots. Slowly, they padded silently where he ordered.

The scene was part of the drama enacted here after American jet bombers demolished this village and its immediate neighbor, An Dong, with tons of bombs and napalm. As is so often the case in such attacks, the communist troops had stolen away before dawn, dragging with them the bodies of some of their comrades killed the day before in a fight with the American marines. Only the women and children were left, huddled in their bomb shelters, ten feet underground and reinforced by steel railway ties, as their ancestral homes crumbled over their heads.

"We should have killed them all," said the young marine, jabbing his Ml 6 rifle in the direction of the crowd of women and children, fast increasing as more of them came out of their shelters. "There's eight marine bodies lying on the landing zone across the rice paddies. We should have killed the whole village."

An old man with a dirty grey beard, clinging to a small boy with large burn blisters on the back of his neck, extended a tin can and pleaded for water, "Don't give him any," the marine shouted to his buddy. "Let them starve, let them die." Wordlessly, another marine extended his canteen and filled the man's cup.

The anger of the first marine reflected the failure and frustration of driving Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces from a trench and tunnel network surrounding this and the neighboring village, some 25 miles southwest of Danang. The marines, two battalions of them, left the two villages, satisfied they had temporarily driven out the enemy, including one main force Viet Cong and one North Vietnamese battalion, but not certain what else they had accomplished.

Communist troops, from fighting holes on the treeline in front of the village, had killed or wounded an entire marine platoon as it advanced 300 yards across the rice paddies. "My platoon got hit first," said First Lieutenant Wilbur Dishman, 24, of Raleigh, North Carolina. "Our whole company was pinned down for five hours." Marine spokesmen claim at least 30 enemy bodies were counted, but Dishman said this figure was based on individual reports of enemy soldiers seen falling or dragged away. Virtually no bodies were actually found later. It was not until right after the air strikes that marines dared enter the village—and then the only bodies they found were those of marines killed the day before and a woman who apparently had left her bomb shelter before the last strike.

Marines spent most of the day rounding up the women and children and cajoling them to go to a large bombed-out building, where they were questioned. "My husband was a farmer," one of the women told the marine intelligence sergeant in a voice that was calm but barely audible. "No, I don't know where he is. I think he was killed in the rice paddy. I can't find him." She stopped, then asked, "Where is my water buffalo?"

The marine grinned at his interpreter, then let out a hollow laugh. "Her husband's dead, and she's wondering where the hell her buffalo is. Let's talk to someone else." The next woman was equally uninformative. "My husband is a government soldier," she said. "Everybody here hates the Viet Cong." The interpreter found this response even more amusing. "That's what they always say," he said. "There's not a woman here who won't say her husband's in the government army—and chances are every damn one of them's Viet Cong."

Occasionally, in response to persistent questioning, a woman would admit she had seen some Viet Cong, maybe a day or so before. Some of the women pointed vaguely in the direction they claimed to have seen either Viet Cong or North Vietnamese, they didn't know which, either coming or going.

Across the rice paddies, at a temporary headquarters in an abandoned stone building, Colonel Robert Bohn, regimental commander, talked about the operation. "This is real Indian country down here," he said. "The enemy are all over. We wanted to go down because we had heard there were indications of a buildup." The colonel said that American troops occupied the areas to the north, around Danang, and to the south, but seldom entered the territory in between. "We think the enemy has come here either to get some rice or to set up base for rocket attacks. We hope by next year we'll have some men permanently stationed down here."

Several feet away, marines counted the spoils of the day's work—two malaria-ridden men, blindfolded and shaking, held on suspicion of Viet Cong sympathies, and several "captured" weapons, all of them rusted and probably not used for years, certainly not in the past two or three days. As night fell on the hootch where the women and children waited, some of them started crying. The intelligence sergeant asked what was wrong, and the interpreter reported they were "starving." "Won't anyone feed these people?" the sergeant asked.

An officer, assigned to both calling in air strikes and directing civil affairs, said he'd see what he could do. "First I annihilate them and then I rehabilitate them," he said, laughing at his own joke. Another officer, standing beside him, wasn't that amused. "This is the part of the war I hate the most," he said. "I hate to see ten-year-old kids walking around wounded."

Memot Rubber Plantation, Cambodia, May 1970

"Permission denied, damn it." The words crackled out over the radio in the armored personnel carrier, and the young captain bit his lip and shouted, "Don't shoot, damn it, don't shoot!" While he was yelling, the APC thundered down the rows of evenly planted rubber trees on this French-owned plantation 15 miles inside the Cambodia-South Vietnam border.

Running among the trees, skittering across the road in the patterns of sunlight cut through the branches, we could see tiny, dark figures of people carrying bags, suitcases, sticks—anything they could pick up before the Americans could catch up with them in their tanks and armored personnel carriers. We were sure at first we were chasing down some elusive North Vietnamese troops who had chosen to run rather than fight. At any moment we were expecting to hear the twang of bullets whistling through the air, the explosion of B40 rockets fired from the camouflaged bunkers. The troops clutched their Ml 6s and machine guns and were ready to shoot at anything in sight. A couple of reporters—Bill Currie of the Chicago Tribune and I—also grabbed rifles.

All that was needed before we could fire was the formality of permission from the squadron commander, a gold-bespectacled, curly-haired lieutenant colonel named Grail Brookshire. The officer on the APC, Captain Sewell Menzel, a lanky 28-year-old who'd gone through airborne and ranger training, radioed, "Request permission to recon by fire, sir." The colonel's immediate, unqualified refusal not only was a rebuke but, in the tension of the chase, seemed to be a senseless mistake by an officer who evidently was not aware of the immediate danger.

Moments later, it became clear the colonel had known what he was doing. As we approached the fleeing figures, some of them began to stop, and we discovered that half of them were women and children. When they saw they could not escape the galloping personnel carriers and tanks, they stood petrified, hands over their heads, expecting immediate death or at least detention and imprisonment. "We are Vietnamese refugees," some of them explained to an interpreter. "We are running away from Cambodian officials. We stayed in the rubber plantation overnight and are returning to our homes in Vietnam."

Not all the fleeing figures, however, could possibly have been refugees. Some of them were too young and healthy. Some were wearing bits and pieces of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong uniforms. They attempted to conceal themselves among the refugees in an effort to shield themselves from the Americans who had pushed across the Cambodian frontier. "I'd rather let a few enemy troopers get by than kill innocent civilians," explained Brookshire, sitting on his personnel carrier and chewing a cigar. "Our mission here is only to shoot at the enemy when we're sure they're the enemy. We fire only when fired upon or when we have some other means of positive identification."

Despite Brookshire's scrupulous adherence to the carefully drawn-up rules of engagement of the American campaign in "neutral" Cambodia, it was almost inevitable that civilians would somehow be caught in the crossfire of the campaign. After we had raced through the rubber plantations for 20 minutes, searching piles of clothing and other belongings, occasionally finding a pistol or rifle but no substantial evidence of enemy presence, we saw a woman and several children weeping uncontrollably beside a mound of earth. Captain Menzel ordered the vehicle to stop and told the interpreter to "interrogate these people."

"She say children under the ground," said the interpreter. "They buried over there when APC roll over them." Two GIs hopped off the personnel carrier and began to dig into the ground with their shovels. Soon a pallid little arm appeared in the dirt and then the rest of a small form hunched over just as a child would have attempted to do in hiding from the roaring monster bearing down on top of it. A GI medic felt the girl's pulse and attempted to apply artificial respiration. The GIs—including the captain—stood around nervously, uncertainly. "Sir, the mother say one more down there, too," said the interpreter. The GIs dug again. In a few minutes they picked up the smaller form of a little boy.

The child's father yanked it from their arms, vehemently recovering it from those who were responsible for its death. The medic felt the boy's pulse, just as he had the girl's, and shook his head. Slowly, Captain Menzel pulled himself—and the troops—together. After all, a war was on. "Okay, you guys, get back on the APC," Menzel shouted. "We gotta get moving. We gotta finish reconning this place. Get three cases of C-rations and give them to the family." The interpreter was left to offer formal apologies and regrets. "We are very sorry," he said in Vietnamese. "We did not see them. We did not come here to kill you. We only come here to kill VC. We are sorry. We are sorry."

The adventure of the chase through the plantation was over. Everything else was anti-climax, operations as usual. "Cambodia, Vietnam, who gives a damn where the hell we are," said one of the GIs manning a .50-caliber machine gun, not at all impressed by the importance of the American operation in Cambodia. "It's all the same wherever we are," he went on, slouching down behind his gun. "You get shot at by gooks in Vietnam. You come to Cambodia, and you get shot at by more gooks. Hell, no, I don't like being in Cambodia. I don't like being in Vietnam either."

The philosophy behind the GIs' outlook was based not on politics but on survival. "I don't like getting shot at, that's all," he offered when asked why he objected to the war. "This business is strictly for lifers." Among the "lifers" was Captain Menzel. As far as he was concerned, the Cambodian campaign was "the best thing since we went to the Yalu River in Korea." The only difficulty, he noted, was that it may have been a case of too little, too late. "We should have done this thing three years ago," he said, echoing the opinion perhaps most often heard from American officers and sergeants. "We should have invaded North Vietnam. If we'd done that, we could have wrapped this thing all up by now."

Menzel ventured this opinion in a brief stop before our entry into the rubber plantation. We were in a village where North Vietnamese troops had been holing up for years as a base for operations in South Vietnam. The stench of death still hung over the village—a cluster of closed doors and darkened windows, of overturned and burned-up motorcycles, of twisted bicycle hulks. "There's still some bodies laying around in there," said one of the GIs. "The ARVN had a helluva fight in there two days ago." ARVN—Army of the Republic of (South) Vietnam—troops were still patrolling, sticking their rifles into doors, peering around the vegetable gardens where the VC had grown what they needed to live.

As we rolled through the jungle toward the plantation, we saw countless trails and tracks, large enough for small trucks, motor scooters, and bicycles—all of which the communists had used in Vietnam. The trails were barely large enough for our tanks and APCs, which often had to stop or slow down while GIs cleared away the undergrowth. Eventually we hit a smooth dirt road on which we rolled toward the plantation.

The smell of death also rose from the vacant buildings of the plantation headquarters, surrounded by manicured green lawns, flower gardens, and soaring trees. Most of the buildings were vacant. South Vietnamese plantation workers—on whom the communists had relied for food and labor—were scurrying among them, picking up their belongings, preparing to run away in the face of the American armored Goliaths. "The communists were here last night," our interpreter reported to Captain Menzel after talking to some of the Vietnamese. "A hundred of them were in here and then left. Some of them walk...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Map
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. "We Must Accept"
• 2. "Too Dangerous to Talk"
• 3. Seat of Revolution
• 4. Cities Between
• 5. "Kill One ... Kill Them All"
• 6. "Peace Is at Hand"
• 7. "We're Here to Win"
• 8. "The Whole Thing's Pointless"
• 9. "John Wayne Would Have Dug It"
• 10. "Such a Nice Man"
• 11. A Prince's "Oasis"
• 12. La Guerre Populaire
• 13. "Now the VC Can Go Anywhere"
• 14. "Just Observers"
• 15. "Back in the World"
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• Index
• About the Author