Radical Blogs.org

Editor’s note: Robert Pardun was a co-founder of the influential University of Texas at Austin SDS chapter in 1964. Later that same year he became an SDS regional traveller. In 1967 he was elected SDS Internal Education Secretary and spent much of 1967-68 working at the National Office in Chicago. Robert has chronicled his experiences in Prairie Radical: A Journey Through the Sixties, published in 2001, and served as associate producer of the SDS documentary Rebels with a Cause.

Robert’s report on his recent Vietnam visit not only offers a look at social and cultural rebirth in the lingering aftermath of the war, but shows Robert’s lasting concern for the Vietnamese. Much can be carried forth from this legacy as older and younger generations alike grapple with the unfolding tragedy in Iraq.

We flew into Hanoi, the capitol of Vietnam, from Bangkok after a night layover. Hanoi is very large and is a mixture of styles reflecting the various regimes that have imposed themselves on the Vietnamese. The government buildings are mostly French colonial and the temples and shrines look to their origin in China, but most of the houses are of a type that may be uniquely Vietnamese. These houses are long and narrow, about ten feet wide and sixty or seventy feet deep. The ten foot wide room facing onto the street is quite often a small business where all manner of things are bought and sold; fresh fruit and vegetables, wedding photos, custom ironwork, plumbing supplies, to books that appear to be locally produced and cost a dollar or two. Businesses tend to spill out onto the sidewalk so there are always crowds of people walking about buying and selling. Most of the living quarters are toward the back and may be several stories high to provide space for the extended families that live in them. There are also lots of little shelters in the labyrinth of paths that take you from one neighborhood to another. While wandering through these pathways we came on a small lake with the tail of a B-52 bomber in it.

It is amazing that the electrical power system works at all in Hanoi. People are living in every available space and, in order to have light at night, they have tapped into the main electrical system, which is strung on poles along the streets. These poles and the wires on them look ancient. People have attached their wires into the junction boxes, but they don’t all fit so the doors are opened and new wiring is attached wherever it works best. Since the wires come in at random the result is they are hooked to whatever is accessible leaving a jumble of wires some of which are there is a jumble of wires that looks like a magpie’s nest. a jumble of hundreds of wires is made of everything from high-tension electrical wire to extension cord wire. It appears that each cord goes into some house or another. Someday that mess will be organized into a dependable electrical system. For now it seems to work.

In the streets thousands of people are on the move on bicycles, motor scooters and motor cycles, which are bigger and require a separate license as do private cars, which are hardly ever seen on the city streets. The traffic system is so different from anything most Westerners have ever imagined that renting a car is out of the question and is against the law. It is possible to rent a small van with a driver who has passed the required tests showing he is a good driver.

Our bus driver was really good at making turns without any major disruption of traffic. To make a left turn across many rows of oncoming two wheeled traffic, the driver would actually move toward the right to open a hole on the left side. He would then turn back to the left and slowly cut across all lanes going the opposite direction. As the bus slowly eased across the intersection the bikes and scooters simply went around him in the front and in the back

One car takes up roughly the space needed for six bikes but cars are not flexible like bikes. Two-wheeled vehicles can dodge around a truck or bus that is cutting across several lanes as it turns. It is like a barge turning across the current. It slowly turns and the water flows around it. There are very few traffic signals and there are times when getting across the street as a pedestrian is intimidating. Coming toward you is an unending stream of bicycles and scooters each jockeying for position and following its own individual path, which opens up before it as it moves along. There are no lanes and each driver follows the same rules: “Don’t run into anyone.” and “Go slow enough that the first rule is possible.”

There is a way across this river of traffic if you need to cross the street on foot. First of all you have to believe that the goal of every one of those bike riders is to avoid hitting you at all costs. This clashes with the American model where bicycles are supposed to get out of the way and if they don’t they shouldn’t complain. To cross you look for the first open spot that appears in the traffic and you step into it. From there you go at a steady pace across the stream of traffic making sure you don’t step directly in front of anyone. Everyone concerned knows you are there so, without looking back, you proceed forward at a predictable speed to the other side of the street. You respect the others and they respect you. Crossing the street is like following the Tao. You must always be mindful of the danger as you step into traffic and follow the safe path that always exists before you.

Many of the bicycles carry more than two people. On the scooters, two people are common and families of four are often seen with an adult driving, a small child in front of him, another behind and another adult at the back. But it isn’t only people that are being carried. We saw farmers heading to town with up to five pigs immobilized in bamboo cages and carefully balanced on the bicycle or scooter. These are not baby pigs and they aren’t the huge ones either. They’re just normal sized pink pigs. We laughed about getting a water buffalo on a bike and then we saw a farmer taking a young one to town balanced on his scooter. Bags of seed and containers of cement, twenty foot long steel bars, lumber, cabinets, geese, chickens, small trees to be replanted, spheres of baskets that totally hide both the vehicle and its driver all are moved using bicycles and scooters.

Uncle Ho, which is what most Vietnamese call Ho Chi Minh, died before the Vietnamese people finally won the right to control their own destiny. Against his own wishes he was preserved like Lenin had been and now lies in an illuminated coffin where people can walk by and see him. We went to the mausoleum and there were thousands of Vietnamese paying their respects. Uncle Ho didn’t want to be treated as a spectacle and it is a little strange to go past a body that glows as if there was a powerful fluorescent tube. At the mausoleum there were a few members of the army but in general in the cities that we visited I never noticed any army and only a few police. This was very much contrary to my experience in Mexico where there were members of the army, the police and several other unknown groups who carry automatic machine guns on the streets. I felt safer in Vietnam than I did in Mexico.

Many of the people, especially young women, wear dust masks or scarves over their faces and long gloves as they go about their daily business. We asked the guide, Anh, about this and he told us that he had heard this was to keep sunlight off of the face and arms because there is a preference for light skinned women. Women who work in the fields under the sun turn very brown. The same is true for many of the tribal women. In a village that we visited we were invited into a collapsing shelter to talk with an old man. There were a couple of young men in the courtyard outside who were dark skinned. They stared at us but no trace of a smile crossed their lips. I found it interesting that in discussing the preference for light skinned women the members of our group, who are all white, didn’t have a clue of where it came from. The fact that over a dozen people, all white, had just arrived by bus in their village to observe how poor village people lived didn’t register with them. White people have money therefore white people have power. White skin privilege means to the brown or black person that they will never have those things because of the color of their skin.

Vietnam is still rebounding from the devastation of the American war and of the French war before that. The Vietnamese peasants are part of the earth and revere their ancestors because of that earthly connection. Where ever we went there were women in conical hats and men working in the fields or in the water. This has been going on for centuries and probably much longer. The weeds become few and far between if you pick every one you see for a hundred years These enterprising people use the water to raise fish or use fish traps to catch wild fish. Being in the water is such a natural thing when all the fields are terraced so that the can hold water. The crops that they grow are all done with the intensive agriculture of raised beds made with a rim all around so that the crops are above the level of the paths between them which also serve as irrigation ditches.

Here and there we saw water buffalo laying in the mud and cooling off. I was amazed at how big these animals are. They reminded me of the Cape Buffalo of South Africa. Our guide told us that water buffalo were becoming less prevalent as machines replace them. There were a few old tractors that looked like they were being held together with bailing wire. Rice was being harvested while we were there and I recognized the motor powered machine that separates the grain from the stems and leaves. I had used one very much like that when I lived in the rural mountains of Arkansas. Until recently the farming people buried their dead in the fields because that is where they had the most time to be with them. That connection was severely stretched by the US, French and Japanese invaders who left the blown apart and napalm incinerated bodies of several million Vietnamese scattered across the country.

When the American war ended the US government offered reparations for the damage that it caused but then, on the pretext of some act of non-cooperation, refused to send the promised money and set up an economic embargo to punish Vietnam instead. The US was so vindictive that it actually supported Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge as millions were killed in Cambodia. This genocidal regime on Vietnam’s border postponed the normalization of everyday life that the Vietnamese people needed so badly after having fought for the right to be independent for so many years. During the Second World War and the occupation of Vietnam by the Japanese, many Vietnamese starved because the rice they raised was confiscated to feed the Japanese army.

Then the French, with the US paying forty percent of the cost, reinvaded this former French colony in 1946. They soon encountered stiff resistance from the Vietnamese people and the Viet Minh, Ho Chi Minh’s guerilla army commanded by General Giap.

The French decided to cut off the Vietnamese supply lines by building a fort in the middle of the area called Dien Bien Phu. This supply line would be called the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the American War. The fort was completely surrounded by mountains and the French had not counted on the ability of the Vietnamese to surround the valley by building narrow paths on which they transported heavy artillery, one piece at a time. The French were supplied by airplanes but that stopped abruptly when the Vietnamese bombarded the runways

After being severely beaten at Dien Bien Phu the French pulled out in 1954. The peace agreement called for elections in 1956 to reunify the country. Instead of elections, which would have made Ho Chi Minh president of a unified Vietnam, the US began taking the place of the French and by 1965 the Vietnamese were fighting for their independence against the American military. Even though the US never lost a major battle they could never win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people who had already been through a hundred years of mistreatment from the French and the Japanese.

There were two Vietnam veterans in our group. One had spent his tour of duty trying to win the hearts and minds of the mountain people by teaching them how to grow more food. He reported guerrilla activity if he saw it but his job was to recruit the loyalty of the mountain tribes. He taught them how to raise rabbits but the project failed when he received the rabbits and they all turned out to be males. He now thinks that the War in Vietnam was a terrible mistake. The other had been in the Marines and saw heavy fighting in this area His opinion was that if we had gone in to win we could have done it.

The first night in Hanoi, our guide took us for a walk to see the neighborhood. One of the storefronts had tables and chairs and they were selling beer and soft drinks. We joined them and Anh began looking for someone who might be interesting to talk to. He came back to our table and told the two vets that there was a man who had been in the North Vietnamese Army. He invited the two veterans to meet him and Helen and I joined them. The North Vietnamese soldier maintained his distance from his old enemies. Helen took the opportunity to ask twith these vets and Helen asked Anh to tell him that we had been involved in the anti-war movement in the US. The man listened intently as Anh explained who we were then he turned around so that he was looking at me. He stretched out his hands and taking both my hands he squeezed them tight. “Thank you.” was all he said as he held my hands. “Thank you.” To the best of my memory this was the only positive response I ever received for doing what I did during the sixties.

We went to Vietnam with a tour group because we don’t speak Vietnamese and most Vietnamese don’t speak French or English. Our guide, Anh, is Vietnamese, speaks fluent English and has a way of just walking up to people and asking for their life stories. His father was in the US backed ARVN and after the war went through a year or so of political indoctrine. On our way to a village on the outskirts of Hanoi, Anh stopped the bus so that we could go into a military cemetery with hundreds of graves. Anh noticed that a woman was cleaning up several of the gravestones and lighting incense over the graves. He took us to meet her and asked what she was doing. She related that her husband had been killed in the war but that they had only recently found his remains. Anh asked if she had remarried and she laughed and said that getting remarried was out of the question as long as her husband was missing and that by the time they found his remains she was too old. This loyalty to family was manifest over and over again. We noticed that she had not only cleaned her husband’s grave and burned incense there but she had done the same for the graves around it as well. Anh told us that the Vietnamese people helped each other because it was part of the culture to help and receive help. Everyone is part of that community and that is the fabric that was torn by the mechanized might of the US military.

Around the cemetery were fields of rice as well as all kinds of vegetables. Down on their haunches with the peasant’s conical hats to keep off the sun, the local people were tending their gardens. They were pulling weeds out of the rice fields and out of the narrow terraces filled with cabbage or other vegetables. Others were planting, carrying the plants in the containers hung from the ends of the stick that goes over the shoulder. This method of carrying heavy or bulky things was everywhere. A young woman attached two large watering cans to the ends of her stick, filled them with water and took them to a dry area where she emptied them on the plants. . On one of our journeys we drove past a traffic island separating two streets. Spread out from one side of the divider to the other was a row of women, squatting and preparing the soil for planting by breaking up the clods with their hands. We passed it again about three hours later. The women were still there doing their work and had cultivated about ten feet of the bed so that it looked like a rototiller had been at work. This kind of quiet on-going work seems to be a characteristic of the Vietnamese people.

Almost everything is done by human power with the help of water buffalo, bicycles and more recently motorbikes and electricity. Everywhere we went, in big cities like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (the old Saigon) to little farm villages, people used bicycles and motor bikes to transport heavy material from one place to another. The Vietnamese used these same techniques to transport heavy artillery along narrow mountain paths in the mountains above the French stronghold of Dien Bien Phu. By moving their artillery into the mountains the Viet Minh had complete control of the valley. When the battle began it took only a few minutes to destroy all the runways making it impossible to fly into or out of the valley. In the end the French were unable to hold out and finally surrendered.

Under Vietnamese Communism land belongs to the people but it is possible to get a permit and build a house that will be passed down to the children when time comes. The houses in Vietnam are very narrow about ten feet wide but most are deep enough to expand the house in the rear and to build several stories high there. People begin with a tiny room at the front of the lot and then add on behind as they can afford it. Usually the small room on street level becomes a business where people gather to buy or sell what they need. In the evening family members gather there for tea or beer and later the space is filled with bicycles, motor scooters and sleeping adults and children. As the space fills the building goes up. It is hard to accumulate enough cash to start the process. For some families there is a connection to the USA that sends money back to the family still in Vietnam. In one village I saw a five-story house indicating money coming from somewhere. The state leases the farmland around each village to the people who live there. These families farm it to provide food for themselves and their neighbors. The land is divided by quality with everyone getting good land and more marginal land.

In Hanoi we went to hear renowned historian Huu Ngoc tell us the history of Vietnam. Most of the people on our trip don’t know that history like those of us in the anti-war movement knew it. This time they heard it from a gracious old historian who told the history of Vietnam from a thousand years ago to present in less than an hour. Helen and I brought posters from the anti-war movement in the United States to put into the Vietnamese archives. Although most Americans don’t know about it there was major antiwar activity all over the world. We decided to give one set of them to Huu Ngoc. He told us that he has a collection of such posters and graciously accepted the gift. The posters we have include one done by Jude Binder and a very large one that was printed in 1964 to go up in the New York subway system. It never went up because it was too “controversial” but was seen at lots of local demonstrations. We also gave a set of posters to the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. That museum contains the weapons of war–the tanks, rocket launchers, and fighter-bombers on down to the hand-held weapons. Along with the pictures of American atrocities are pictures of anti-war demonstrations.

From Hanoi we went to Halong Bay, in the Gulf of Tonkin, where we boarded a junk to explore the bay. This was one of those incredible sights that I had only seen through the work of artists who work in black ink. Scattered all through the bay are islands that jut out of the water at almost a right angle making them impossible to climb. Fishing boats and fishing villages are scattered about and there are small boats with only a person or two gathering mussels from the rocks where they meet the ocean. One island turned out to be hollow. Inside there was a cavern complete with stalagmites and stalactites. Late in the afternoon we came to an island with a narrow passage that can be navigated in a small boat. The ship we were on had several such boats and we slipped under the edge of the island and into a hidden bay. I heard that this was one of the places where Ho Chi Minh hid when the French were pursuing him. We spend the night on the junk. The next morning I was up before dawn to watch the sun rise. All around us were ships flying the flag of Vietnam –a red flag with a yellow star in the middle.

From Hanoi we flew to Hue. Hue was largely destroyed during the Tet Offensive in 1968 and has been slowly rebuilt. We went to the citadel to see the sight where the National Liberation Front (NLF), often called the Viet Cong, raised its flag to show the world that the Vietnamese people were willing to fight for their freedom even against the most heavily armed military in human history. The decision to use the Tet offensive to turn world opinion against the US was a big gamble because it exposed the NLF to direct attack by the American military. In the process the NLF was severely damaged but the strategy worked- it changed American public opinion. It didn’t end the war immediately. The fact that the NLF was fighting in its own backyard and would never stop resisting sunk in slowly but in the end the US had nothing left but to pull out or to use nuclear weapons. The anti-war movement made that impossible and in 1975 the US pulled out of ed

At Nha Trang we visited a small fishing village where they use bowl shaped boats four to eight feet in diameter to move things around and to unload the boats. These small boats are woven from bamboo strips and sealed with tar. They each have a wooden ring around the opening so that there is a place to sit. These boats are remarkably easy to use. In the little town people were busy making things to sell. A middle aged woman and her mother-in-law were busy weaving black string into the kind of net used on tennis courts. Making nets is one more thing to do that brings in some money. The work ethic is alive and well in Vietnam. It is interesting how one of the basic Communist tenants has been modified over time. Marx said, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Stalin said, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” The Vietnamese put it this way, “No work, no food”.

One of the boats docked at the waterfront contained bags of sand that were being carried up the beach to a new building site. The bags must have weighed over a hundred and twenty pound each. I watched as a young man waded into the water up to his waist and stood next to the boat. On board two men picked up a bag of sand, put it over the side and onto the shoulder of the man standing there. This extra weight changed the center of mass and he struggled to get his feet comfortably under him and then walked up the shore to where two other men took his bag and added it to the sand pile.

Meanwhile the boat next to the cement boat was moving in and out alternately bringing the rope up tight or leaving it hanging by its own weight. A little boy of three or four years old was hanging upside down onto that mooring rope with his arms and legs wrapped around the rope. When the boat moved out the rope tightened up and the little boy was hanging on well above the water. When the boat moved in the line and the little boy went down until the little boy was under the water with just his nose sticking out. He was having a good time playing there and I thought again how much of Vietnamese daily life is spent in the water. Women are out in the garden or looking after the plants almost every day. Men check the fish traps and often get waist deep in the process. Farmers and small towns along the rivers take the fluctuation of the height of the water as part of the natural cycle. In one town there is an old building that long ago was associated with the Japanese who came to Vietnam to trade. The curator of the building pointed out how deep the water got in the temple during the last flood. These are people who can honestly be said to “go with the flow”.

From Hue we went into the Central Highlands to the city of Dalat. I had imagined a rather gradual climb from the ocean below into the highlands, but instead it turned out to be very steep. There were several landslides on our way up and it appeared that there was a full-time crew that took care of repairing them and keeping the road open. An arrangement had been made ahead of time that a few couples would spend the night with families in Dalat. Helen and I were picked up at the hotel by the father and one of his friends on motorcycles and taken to the home of a family whose teenaged daughter was learning English. Her father and mother were both teachers, but neither of them spoke English. Their house was in what could be called the suburbs. It rained that day and in the evening Helen and I with the two teachers and their daughter, all in rain gear walked all over Dalat stopping at the local coffee house for something warm before going on. This family seemed to be tuned into the electronic/computer revolution that is spreading all over the world. In much of the under-developed world all telephones are portable. They have jumped past the old telephone wires to satellites and repeaters. The house was small but very adequate. We visited several rural villages and the houses there were usually small and not very inviting. All the young people in the cities seem to be tuned into the modern age of instant messaging and e-mail.

From Dalat we went to Ho Chi Minh city, a vast sprawling city with more cars and more people than Hanoi. We took a boat into the Mekong delta and went to a factory that makes coconut candy. This village on an island surrounded by the Mekong River is in a beautiful location. I understand it was very different before the war. There were huge areas of Mangrove swamp that were the home of all kinds of seafood that the people harvested. The population of the area was a thousand people per square mile. The US government used Agent Orange to defoliate the jungle so that they could kill the “Viet Cong” who lived there and then they precision carpet bombed the delta as if the words “precision’ and “carpet bombed” fit into the same language. I noticed a few people in the Mekong who had deformed or incorrectly attached arms and legs.

While in Ho Chi Minh city we went out into what the US called the “Iron Triangle.” When the US entered the war there were many small villages in the area that resisted the government. These villages were often bombed and the local people dug tunnels in their homes where they could hide. They connected these tunnels and dug more eventually having some 150 miles of tunnels. The US used tanks with anchor chain between them to clear the area of all life so that the National Liberation Front had nowhere to go. The main fighting force that attacked Saigon during Tet in January, 1968, came out of those tunnels–the tunnels of Cu Chi and then connected them together

The effects of spraying the countryside with chemicals to destroy the forests in the southern part of Vietnam left behind dioxin, which is a contaminant of Agent Orange. Dioxin causes birth defects many of which cause the child to die before birth. We went to a factory that made candy and another that did embroidery. They employed hundreds of young people many of who had been affected by dioxin. Many had missing hands or arms, others couldn’t walk because their legs were deformed. In the Mekong delta we ate at a small restaurant and I noticed that a higher than normal number of the local people had deformed or withered arms.

I know to some extent what it is like to have dioxin in the water supply. When I lived in Arkansas our neighbors were the local farmers who barely got by on the little money they earned by hard work. They were all very poor. Many of them raised cattle for income and needed more open land to raise them. The US government offered to provide the defoliant and the helicopters to spray it. After the spray was done the hard woods would die and the farmers could easily make the land into pasture. There were several meetings where the government made its pitch. The government spokesman assured the farmers that the spray wouldn’t affect the water supplies because it was very short lived and was easily anchored by the soil. We supplied information from The Atlantic Monthly that showed that dioxin readily entered the water supply and that the danger to unborn children was substantial. The farmers opted for the spray and our water supply was sprayed. There were three women pregnant. The twins were delivered in Texas and were severely deformed and dead at birth. One of the other children was miscarried and the fourth child was normal.

In all of the cities we visited it didn’t take the local people long to figure out that we were tourists. They offered books, hats, shirts, postcards and the like. I had heard, before we left the US that there was a memoir entitled The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh. I soon found that there were a number of books, printed by local printers, that were available in Vietnam for a couple of dollars. The Sorrow of War is not a blow-by-blow description of battles but the slow rise of sorrow as the destruction of the war goes on and on over eleven years of steady resistance.

A friend of mine once told me, “We are all Vietnam Vets.” He was right. The war was so overwhelming and what was done there so horrendous that it changed us all. I’m glad we went to Vietnam before the culture is forever changed by the pressure to “modernize.” Companies from around the world want to invest their money in Vietnam. I looked out over Camranh Bay which at this point is a beautiful unsettled area with a few fishing villages. It didn’t take much imagination to imagine it looking like Seattle surrounded by people, cars and high-rise resorts. It won’t be long before machinery replaces human energy to plant and harvest small plots of rice. Once that is done it is an obvious next step to replace the small plots with large ones and for the displaced farmers to move to the cities. The villages, some of which have been there for hundreds if not thousands of years, will go the way of small towns in America. The jump from bicycles to motor scooters and motorcycles was very quick and if a similar change happens with cars Saigon and probably Hanoi will be unlivable.

Original post by Robert Pardun and reposted by Radical Blogs