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| The Mekong River |
In the early 70’s, an American acquaintance invited me to visit him in the Vietnamese village where he worked for a different relief agency from the one that employed me. I was eager to go, because his work was way up in the mountains, while the Quaker efforts I directed were in the thickly populated coastal plain. His village was entirely surrounded by territory controlled by the “other side,” existing in a circle only a couple of miles across, defended by American soldiers.
I couldn‘t drive or take a bus, so I booked a flight on the CIA airline, Air America. In the contemporary US, we know the CIA mostly as a mythical beast: you read about it in paperbacks or see sleek agents dong impossible things in movies. Outside of the US, in an active war, the CIA wasn’t all that hard to find. It was ordinary to meet a guy in a short-sleeved sport shirt in a bar who would have no trouble saying he worked for “The Agency,” “The Company,” or just the CIA. Those of us who worked for the Quakers tried hard to dress in ways that would distinguish us from the spooks – frequently the only other Americans around who weren’t in uniform. My beard dates from those days.
So the CIA had an airline, with tickets and schedules. You could book a seat like on any other airline. On the day of my trip I got a ride from the coastal city of Quang Ngai north 50 miles to the huge US airbase at Da Nang, to catch my flight.
The flight was – conspiracy buffs rejoice – in a black helicopter. The crew of three were dressed identically, in black flight suits, tall black leather boots, even black gloves and black helmets with one-way bubble face plates and throat mikes. The only skin showing were two patches of pink cheek. These guys looked like giant insects. Each wore a big Ka-Bar knife around his leg, a side arm holstered at his belt, and the pilot and co-pilot had automatic rifles clamped between their seats. I was able to intuit that this was not TWA.
The third member of the crew helped me onto the aircraft as the engines were speeding up. Trying to be friendly, I asked him how long he had been a stewardess. In what seemed like a split second, his helmet was inches from my face, his thick knife pressing against the front of my throat. In the silence, all I could see was my own distorted reflection in his face bubble. Finally I said, “My mistake.” After a pause, he backed away, exchanged a look with his colleagues, and we took off.
Flying low and slow over a war like the one in Viet Nam gives an idea of what years of bombing will do. Bomb craters are round; rice paddies tend to be rectangular. In contested areas the two are juxtaposed, the countryside looks crazy, like it can’t make up its mind. The tip-off to bombed buildings is that they have no roof. Roads are cratered, and there are few bridges, since both sides target that kind of infrastructure from the very start.
Cruising over the war feels abstract. The Quaker rehab center attached to the provincial hospital in Quang Ngai immersed us in the suffering of individual people who had been blown up, shot, burned, paralyzed. At the retail scale, the war is indelible, whereas the extensive laying waste of countryside is awful to see, but kind of theoretical: suffering summarized.
At one point there was an exchange in their mics between my steward friend and the flight crew. The chopper plunged low over a little village in the hills, the crewman slid the side door open, kicked a cardboard box towards the edge and began tossing handfuls of pamphlets into the air. I was witnessing psychological warfare.
My friend met our flight once we landed in a little cleared area way up in the chilly, misty mountains. He said since the village was under the control of the US military, we should check in with the commanding officer first. The man I met – I don’t recall his rank – was right out of central casting, a handsome, younger John Wayne in fatigues. Evidently he had been told that I worked for the Quakers, since after I said hello, he sat coolly staring at me for a moment, and then said,
“I’d rather have a daughter who was a whore than a son who was a pacifist.”
There was another silence, then my friend motioned me to the door.
As we stepped outside, a line of artillery started up – I imagine it had been stopped for the chopper’s arrival. While I was well accustomed to small artillery like mortars, this was my first close-up exposure to long-range howitzers. These were really big guns, some 75 mm, a few the 105’s that throw 35 pound shells for miles. The sound they made was like nothing I have experienced – as much a feeling under the skin as a sound heard in the ears. The displacement of the air caused by the exit of the shells was a slap in the face and a push in the chest. The ground seemed to jump up with each outgoing shell, then the air pressed at me – I walked like a drunk.
My guide spaced his tour narration to fall between the explosions of outgoing fire, but with my fingers in my ears and the ringing in between blasts, I didn’t understand most of what he said. I was amazed at little kids playing calmly in front of shabby houses, as if the world wasn’t exploding every minute or two.
Finally we walked over a little hill right up to the edge of Army control, and waited along the side of the red dirt road. My friend was in the village mostly to “work with Montagnards,” the colonial name for native people of the region. The natives were the only people able to pass from one side of the war to the other. They lived on the side controlled by the communist insurgency, and walked over the US-controlled side to sell stove pipe-sized rolls of cinnamon bark.
In retrospect, my host must have been in some relationship with the CIA. He was probably sharing intelligence, if not doing much more. I don’t remember even thinking about this until much later.
Except for soldiers and a relative handful of others, most Americans don’t directly experience war. Our isolation probably makes it easier for politicians to sell us on foolish ventures. While I wasn’t in fact a pacifist, I hated the war in Viet Nam. I had lots of exposure to maimed children and unimaginable suffering on a wide scale, and in that trip I was able to witness the futility of applying enormous amounts of power to relatively helpless people who are defending their families and their land. I’ll never forget the cosmic-scale power of those guns, and the grim, dusty men who fired them.
Subsequent to my visit, the village was overrun. My friend survived and moved to another town. The remaining American soldiers were airlifted out, but not the commander I had met. He was found dead, his throat slit.
