My Life So Far (49 page)

I arranged the trip’s logistics through the Vietnamese delegation at the Paris peace talks, bought myself a round-trip ticket, and stopped in New York. Since 1969 mail for the POWs had been brought in and out of North Vietnam every month by American visitors. This effort was coordinated by the Committee of Liaison with Families of Prisoners Detained in Vietnam. I picked up a packet of letters from families of POWs that I would deliver.

CHAPTER NINE

HANOI

—D
R.
M
ARTIN
L
UTHER
K
ING
J
R
.,
Riverside Church, New York City, 1967

Love thine enemies.

—M
ATTHEW
5:44

I
WENT ALONE.
I’m not sure why. It can’t be that we couldn’t afford a plane ticket for Tom. Obviously Tom didn’t think it was necessary for someone to accompany me to Hanoi. “They invited
you,
” he said recently when I put the question to him. “Besides,” he added, “at the time, we weren’t together publicly as a couple.”

I didn’t know how unusual it was for someone—especially a famous person, especially a woman—to go alone into a war zone. In spite of it, I do not regret that I went. My only regret about the trip was that I was photographed sitting in a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun site. What that image suggested had no relationship whatsoever to what I was doing or thinking or feeling at the time, as I hope this chapter will show.

Beginning in 1965, over two hundred American citizens had traveled to North Vietnam, mostly in groups, to bring back eyewitness reports. They represented American peace and religious groups, Vietnam veterans, teachers, lawyers, and poets. Doctors and biologists from Harvard, Yale, and MIT had gone to assess the medical needs of the North Vietnamese. Tom had been one of the first to make the trip, in 1965, with historian Staughton Lynd and organizer Herbert Aptheker. He went again in 1967 and brought back the first three American POWs to be released.

All the travelers had returned with reports about extensive bombing of civilian targets, including churches, hospitals, and schools; reports that the morale of the North seemed undiminished, that the bombing was not having and would not have the desired effect of getting the North Vietnamese government to retreat at the negotiating table, and that the North Vietnamese were prepared to negotiate when the United States stopped bombing and withdrew its troops.

I
am running full speed through Orly Airport in Paris. My flight from New York got in late and I am about to miss the plane to Moscow that will carry me to Vientiane, Laos, and on to Hanoi. As I round a corner, I slip on the polished floor and down I go. I know immediately that I have refractured the foot I broke the previous year. Bulimics have thin bones; I’ve had a lot of breaks. What to do? I have seconds to make up my mind: Should I use this as an excuse to turn around and go home, or should I keep going? For better or worse, I’m not the turnaround type. So I hobble to my plane, getting there just as the doors are about to close. I wrap some ice in a towel and strap it onto my foot, which the flight attendant kindly lets me elevate on the back of the passenger’s headrest in front of me—the seat is empty. I wish Tom were here.

By the time we land in Moscow my foot is swollen and blue, and I know I must get it tended to. I have a four-hour layover till the next lap of the journey, so airport officials get me a taxi and instruct the driver to take me to the closest hospital on the outskirts of Moscow. After X-raying my foot, the doctors confirm it is a fracture, apply a plaster cast, give me a pair of crutches, and send me back to the airport.

What will my Vietnamese hosts think when they see me get off the plane with crutches and a cast? They don’t need the burden of a disabled American descending on them—and how am I going to climb over the earthen dikes that I am coming to film?

I
decide to remain on board during the layover in Vientiane, in part because of my foot and in part because I am concerned that an American spook has been sent to nab me en route.

From my FBI files: A confidential cable from the American embassy in Vientiane to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger in Washington, the U.S. delegation at the Paris peace talks, the commander in chief of Pacific forces, and the U.S. embassy in Saigon said:

W
e finally take off for Hanoi after what has felt like an interminable layover. The plane is only partly filled, and I see that I am the sole woman among a burly assortment of what appear to be Russians and Eastern Europeans, with a Frenchman or two thrown in.

Soon we are over Vietnam. I begin to think of the country as a woman, her back nestled against Cambodia and Laos, her pregnant belly protruding into the South China Sea, so small and vulnerable that any superpower would feel certain it could call her bluff in no time flat. What a thin little slip of a country she is, much like the small, thin-boned people who inhabit her.

The flight is supposed to be short, but as we approach Hanoi, I look out my window and see the black silhouettes of eight American Phantom jet fighters circling above the city. I stiffen. Something about them tells my body what they are about even before my mind knows. In the journal I intend to keep of my trip, I write that they look like hawks circling their prey. An abrupt voice over the loudspeaker announces that the planes are bombing Hanoi and that we will have to turn around and go at least partway back to Vientiane (or all the way if we start to run low on gas) until the bombers finish their mission. (I have subsequently read that U.S. bombers took advantage of North Vietnam’s unwillingness to fire at them when civilian aircraft were in range.)

I watch the planes recede from sight, riveted. My country’s planes—bombing a city where I am about to be received as a welcomed guest. I hate the killing of and by American soldiers. I know that the way to support them is to end the war and get them home; that the people of this emerald country spread beneath me are fighting to defend their country from foreigners—and that we are now the foreigners.

I think of my childhood, when I would go with my mother to see Dad off at the air base in Burbank, California, during World War II. How beautiful the planes had looked all lined up under the camouflaged netting! How proud I had felt that they were there to protect us! Now our planes represent not protection from another mighty military power, but destruction of a peasant people who pose no threat to us.

W
e are flying into Hanoi. Has it been an hour? A day? As in a dream, time has lost its meaning. As we begin our descent to Gia Lam, the small, civilian airport, I see bomb craters dotting the surrounding landscape. A recent summer downpour has turned the craters into shimmering pink-and-blue pools reflecting the rose-tinted sky at dusk. Death and beauty, joined.

It is awkward getting down the plane’s steps, because I am juggling the crutches and a purse, a camera, and a packet of letters from the families of POWs. I look up to see five Vietnamese walking toward me carrying flowers. They are the welcoming committee of the Vietnam Committee for Solidarity with the American People. The name sounds propagandistic to me, but the fullness of its meaning will soon be made clear in unusual, very human terms. As I’d anticipated, they look shocked and want to hand me the bouquet, but I can’t hold it and the crutches at the same time. Standing on the tarmac, they hold a quick conference in Vietnamese with numerous glances at my cast. I understand their concern: These are the people who will be responsible for my well-being over the next two weeks. Clearly my condition is worrisome. I wonder whether this is a group of seasoned cadres whose job it is to manipulate me.

S
ome sort of a decision is reached: Suddenly they are all smiles. I am led into a reception room inside the airport, where we all sit on upholstered chairs and I am offered tea, bottles of carbonated water (which tastes rusty), and hard candy. I notice that the airport is very dilapidated: Paint is chipping, water from a roof leak has left stains on the walls. It is breathtakingly hot and humid. I hand over the packet of letters, then tryto assure my hosts that my injury will not deter me from going into the countryside and photographing the dikes. I show them my small 8-millimeter film camera and my still camera and remind them that I was very clear in my pretrip letter that I am here primarily to photograph the damage to the dikes. Privately I am not certain how I will manage out in the countryside, especially if there is a bombing raid, as running for cover doesn’t seem to be in the cards; but I say I don’t want to change our plans, and everyone nods. Later I will discover that they tend to nod whether or not they agree with me. I suddenly feel very vulnerable.

In retrospect I wonder about my insistence at continuing despite the danger. Yes, I was numb with exhaustion and pain. But more to the point is my character: To turn away out of fear is just about unthinkable.

My main interpreter, Quoc, briefly goes over the schedule for my visit. I notice that the trip to an antiaircraft installation is still on the agenda for the last day, despite my message from Los Angeles saying I was
not
interested in military installations. I tell them that I don’t want to keep that visit on the agenda. Altering the plans appears to cause consternation. Decisions have been made. I am too tired to protest.

This is a lapse that I will live to regret.

I am relieved when Quoc suggests that they take me to my hotel. I am assured that I will soon get a good meal and that, after a night’s sleep, I will be taken to a hospital to have my foot examined. (My head should have been examined as well!)

The hour-long drive into Hanoi is a shock. I was expecting desperation. Instead I see people, a lot of people, bustling about their business despite the fact that only an hour ago the city has been bombed. Battered old military jeeps and trucks pass us, covered with leafy camouflage. I see countless soldiers of both sexes in khaki uniforms, also with leaves on their helmets, and civilians, walking, riding, or pushing dilapidated bicycles through the mud and ruts of this much attacked highway. The civilians all wear conical straw hats, loose white tops, and black pajama-type pants, the traditional Vietnamese peasant attire. Many have rolled up their pajama pants to keep them out of the mud and the bicycle gears, exposing universally sinewy legs and black rubber sandals like Tom’s. Here and there I can see piles of rubble, houses without roofs, and more bomb craters.

In speeches back home I have said how outrageous it is that we are pounding this backward country with our unprecedented modern technology. Now that I am here, seeing how primitive it really is, it all becomes even more reprehensible. Were it not for the insights that Tom’s slide show has given me—can it have only been three months earlier?—I could not comprehend how they are resisting.

T
he Long Binh Bridge, which crossed the Red River, has been destroyed, but next to it is a floating bamboo pontoon bridge permitting an uninterrupted flow of people, military jeeps, and trucks filled with soldiers to move in and out of the city. I have heard about the Vietnamese’s ability to put up a bamboo bridge, take it down, and hide it away, all in a matter of minutes. Because the pontoon is narrow, all the traffic going in one direction is allowed to pass; then the traffic going the other way can proceed. We move slowly, with frequent stops, and I can feel the bridge swaying. It is so crowded I fear it will collapse. I am also acutely aware that should the bombers return, we are sitting ducks.

Sitting in the car, I cannot speak. I am too filled with emotions—sorrow and guilt at what my government is doing, admiration at the way these people are getting on with their lives, and disbelief:
This is not a dream, I am actually here—alone.
The enormity of it is washing over me. I feel that my hosts understand what is happening to me, since they remain quiet as well. I just sit and look out the car window, the lovely bouquet of fresh flowers lying in my lap, in ironic contrast to the reality outside.