Vietnam war: 'In a weird way, it’s with me every day'

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/30/vietnam-war-first-person-stories

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Ngoc Minh Ngo says her father was a colonel in the South Vietnamese army, ‘caught up in a complicated war’:

“The Vietnam War was far more complex from the Vietnamese perspective than anything portrayed in the Western media. My father [pictured above with his American advisor] was a colonel in the South Vietnamese Army. He was educated at the French Catholic school Ecole Pellerin. The Japanese invasion of Vietnam in 1940 galvanized his generation’s political consciousness. Like many of his peers, he left school to join the Viet Minh, seeking independence from French colonial rule. He became a guerrilla fighter, living and hiding in remote areas to avoid capture by the French. When the country was divided in two, he chose to remain in the south while his younger brother and many of his friends went north.

For two decades, they fought on opposite sides, but after the war, my father and his brother reconnected as soon as they could. The years of war did nothing to alter their bond.

“It was revealed after the war that my father’s driver for years was a Viet Minh sent to kill him, a mission that he failed to carry out several times because of his loyalty to my father. His previous driver had been killed in an assassination attempt on my father, which also took the lives of my uncle (my father’s youngest brother) and my cousin, while leaving him unscathed. This is just a small glimpse of the intricate web of human lives caught up in a complicated war, with conflicting familial and personal loyalties. The Vietnamese who fought on both sides of the war wanted the same thing for the country that they love, peace. It’s a picture that one never sees in the portrayal of the Vietnam War in the West.”

Jack V Sturiano describes his ‘Forrest Gump moment’:

“I was a US Navy Hospital Corpsman 3rd class stationed at the National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland. They asked some wounded vets to attend the signing of the New GI Bill on Aug 31. 1967. Corpsman always come with the Marines when they leave the hospital and I was pushing a wheelchair and wound up in the front row. I got one of the pens LBJ is handing out. One year later I was in Vietnam with the 2nd Bn ,1st Marines.”

David Hariman says his friend and fellow US marine, John Mooney, was his first experience of a war casualty:

“In early January 1967 John Mooney and I were US marines aboard the USS Iwo Jima, a helicopter carrier, off the coast of Vietnam near the Mekong Delta. The Iwo Jima, carrying remnants of the 1st Battalion Ninth Marine Regiment, was one ship of a naval flotilla participating in Operation Deckhouse V.

John was a gunner aboard a helicopter that picked up a marine in the Delta. As the marine jumped into the chopper, a fused grenade dropped from his belt suspender strap, exploded and killed him and my friend John, a corporal at the time.

John’s death was the first war casualty I experienced. On the night of January 7th I walked alone through the Iwo Jima’s hangar deck and stopped behind a parked helicopter. It was then that I cried.

John was 29 at his death. He was from Lakewood, California. His name is etched on Panel 13E, Line 123 on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.

I have always, and will always, cherish our friendship.”

Rob Bolvin describes the aftermath of the war for his cousin and US marine Connie:

“My cousin Connie, named for baseball manager Connie Mack, joined the marines in 1967. I last saw him at our grandmother’s funeral in 1970. He was very different from when I had seen him a few years before, he didn’t joke around with me and my brother like he used to, he kept to himself. He was only eight years older than me but it seemed the weight of the whole world was on him.

Before leaving my grandfather’s home my dad, a combat vet hugged him and told him to stay in touch, but nobody in the family has been able to find him since then. When we got home from the funeral Dad told me the Tet offensive at Hue had killed many of Connie’s friends during the heavy fighting but he came through uninjured.

Back then guys returning from the war were called baby-killers, nobody knew about PTSD or survivor’s guilt, and his mom and dad were heavy drinkers. I hate thinking he dealt with all of this alone. I hope wherever he is, he’s okay.”

Kirsty McFadden shares her story of the ‘chemical legacy’ of the war:

“More than 15 years after my father Paul returned from Vietnam, I was born. In this photo I’m about six weeks old. Dad was 38. Like any proud father he says I was perfect – alert, curious, in perfect health – but within a year my family knew that something wasn’t quite right. I was a little tiny doll, significantly smaller than other children my age, and while walking at 12 months, I had a limp.

It was 1984 and while investigations have since uncovered that the US government knew about the effects of exposure to dioxins like Agent Orange, in the eighties, in Aotearoa New Zealand, where our country’s involvement in Vietnam was not discussed or acknowledged by anyone, the truth was only beginning to reach the public.

By the age of two I had been diagnosed with two neurological conditions – spina bifida and diastematomyelia. At aged three, as nerve damage started to take hold I had my first surgery to release my spinal cord, tethered around three lower vertebrae. It was unsuccessful and I started a long process of rehabilitation and monitoring to stop further deterioration. At age six, I underwent brain surgery to release the spinal fluid building up in the base of my skull. I learnt to walk again. The following year there was a series of corrective surgeries to save my right foot and leg. At 13 I developed scoliosis on top of my underlying conditions and with increased strain on my already fragile spinal cord, with my heart and lungs affected, I had surgery to straighten my spine. Seven ribs were removed and I spent three months in a full body brace as they grew back over the summer holidays.

Growing up, the New Zealand government refused to acknowledge that birth deformities and conditions like mine were linked to exposure to dioxins in the war, despite successive studies in the US and Australia, acknowledging causal links with exposure to the dioxins used in the war and birth deformities in children. They tried to say that New Zealand troops were never sprayed but Dad speaks of living, working and eating in a chemical haze.

In 2007 another government inquiry finally acknowledged the truth: New Zealand troops were sprayed with Agent Orange; it had increased their risk of certain cancers and neurological conditions, and it had caused birth defects in their children. I was awarded a small amount of compensation for everything I’d been through, compensation that didn’t cover the costs of my final surgery.

Today, I’m 31, and a living echo of a war that my country should never have been a part of and even now, so many years later I’m still paying the price.”

ratherbehappy says their first view of Vietnamese people in the UK taught them compassion:

“I was very young. There was a family across the road. They were mostly young men in smart jackets and open-necked shirts as was fashionable then. They looked so bright and happy. I thought they were Chinese. My school pal said, no, they are from Vietnam. Refugees. I felt so happy that we could welcome them. It was a different place it seems to me, the UK then, we felt quiet pride in welcoming these lovely people from a terrible situation.”

Hannah Foster says the Vietnam war has shaped her and her family’s life. You can read more of her story on GuardianWitness.

“My dad served a full tour, 1970-1971, approximately half of which was in and out of the DMZ [demilitarised zone] as his unit rotated through Khe Sanh. He received his draft card when he was 19 or 20, shortly after he left university to take care of a new baby (chances of being drafted were much higher if you were not a student). His brother tried to volunteer in his stead because of the baby, but that was not permitted, so my dad enlisted hoping to avoid deployment. You see, draftees were sent to boot camp and then usually straight to combat, but career guys they would train.

My dad’s deployment happened the last year of his enlistment, his marriage did not survive his tour, and my uncle says he’s never been the same. I’m his first child by his second wife, I was born in 1976, and I’ve never met my older brother.

My dad has only recently started talking about his experiences over there ... diving out of a jeep down a 10-foot concrete stair well to avoid incoming RPG, fire fights, massive sleep deprivation, substance abuse.

But the one that still wakes him in a cold sweat is the memory of waking up over his M16 while on duty. He has no idea how long he was asleep (everything looked the same), says an enemy fighter easily could have crept to his position and killed him. Basically all the rumours you hear about that war he lived.

Like many veterans he struggled finding work when he came back and was chronically underemployed until his forced retirement from a construction trade in around 2008. He has PTSD and addiction issues, and was rarely at our house; my parents relationship was volatile and they’ve been separated/divorced as long as I can remember ... Our society did not (and does not) give returning soldiers and their families anything remotely like the kind of support they need, but some of this is his own fault too. I don’t think I pity him (not that he’d want it), but I do wonder sometimes what his life would have been like if he hadn’t gone. My uncle has said, “I wish you could have met your dad before he went,” and I sometimes do too. He competed in German nationals for swimming when he was in High School; I do think he must have been a very, very different person...

Randomly, I now live near Garden Grove, California, which has the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam (we have great food here); and I work with two individuals who left Vietnam as war refugees. One of these guys has impossible stories about being on a packed ship at around 8 years old with mom and baby sister ... This person is one of the nicest, gentlest people I know, and has been through the most harrowing things of anyone I’ve been acquainted with. So in a weird way, it’s with me every day, even still.”

Ivan Pope describes a snapshot of life in 1960s Vietnam:

“My grandfather, Roger Felix Pirard, was a French colonial businessman who ended up in Saigon in the sixties. He was part of a group of Frenchmen who were cozy with the South Vietnamese regime. He died of throat cancer and was buried in this ceremony. My father, a journalist, got a friend who was in Saigon, to take photos of the funeral. I’ve never visited, but it’s on my list.

“I was seven at the time. I remember it well. I came down to the kitchen and noticed something. I asked mum why she was crying and she said, ‘Because my daddy died’. I’m not even sure I knew she had a daddy, but that response always stuck with me and I always remember the day she heard.”

Andrew Pearson, a news and documentary maker, shares a story of working in Vietnam in 1969. You can read more of Andrew’s story on GuardianWitness:

“The American district advisor (like a county) was showing me the edge of ‘secure’ territory. This was a village in Central Vietnam in the province of Binh Dinh, where he was pretty certain he could go without being blown up or ambushed. But that was a decision his enemy would make - it was their option ... We got out of our jeep to look at the next village over, a few hundred yards across a rice field. There was nothing to see except coconut and banana trees beyond the rice. People’s thatch homes were a little farther off, concealed by the fruit trees.

A few villagers came out of their homes on our side of things, curious about who we were and what we were doing. A single military jeep with two Americans in it and one enlisted man with a portable radio and a rifle, riding ‘shotgun’ ... I greeted them in Vietnamese, but there was an uncertainty among the villagers, a reserve, and they stood just outside their homes, silent. There were no young adults around, just the elderly and some children. In places like this, the young adults are all on the other side in armed units, or hidden from us right now, in tunnels.

An older woman held out what I presumed was her grandchild, for me to see. The child was limp and very thin. “Do something,” the grandmother meant, with her gesture. Dysentery, I thought.

When I first started making films in villages near here, for ABC News, I always took some basic medicine with me ... There was a dispensary very close to the village where I was filming, built with US aid funds, after the area had been re-taken by US and Korean ground forces in 1965, but villagers told me it was empty. When I stopped there to look at it, no one was there and no medicines were on its shelves. The usual story in a case like this was that the supplies had been sold somewhere along the supply chain for private profit, even to their enemy.

The closest doctor was in the provincial city, but for local villagers, it might as well have been in another country because it was too far to walk, they didn’t have money to hire transportation and they knew that if they managed to overcome these obstacles, the medical staff wouldn’t treat them unless they paid for care, and they couldn’t pay.

I once got an Australian nurse from a medical aid mission based in the provincial capitol to come out to the village to treat a very sick child whose scalp was terribly infected from scabies. Rural women believe it’s wrong to wash the soft part of a baby’s scalp- anyway, they don’t have soap, so the tiny insects borough in to the child’s skin.

I returned to the village about four months later and asked how the child was doing. She died, they told me. One nurse’s visit hadn’t been enough. That’s what I was remembering, standing there in front of the old woman’s sick grandchild.

... Twenty years later, I had a chance to make up for my neglect. I was with rural guerillas in the Philippines, the New People’s Army, when I noticed another very sick child. He had an open sore at the base of his throat about an inch long. Tuberculosis, they told me. All they had for treatment was herbs. I asked the mother if she would bring her child when we left and I would take them to the hospital in the city. She agreed.

We had a long walk out of the hills along a mountain pathway but were then picked up by a truck and driven in to town. We went to the hospital where I arranged for the little boy, about five years old, to be taken care of ... By the third day, there was light in his eyes already. But I can’t tell you if he lived. I had to return to Manila. I was always on New York time but at least I had learned something: to care for people no matter what.

It’s a lesson my country still needs to pay attention to. Care first about ordinary people in countries where some national interest seems to be critical. Not the geopolitics, not the natural resources. Know and care about people and their basic needs. And know their culture and history. Go easy on the ground troops and the killing.”

Blifil48 shares a view of the protest movement:

“In Harvard Square, 1972. Across the street, an SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) poster promoted a confrontational march on Washington on April 29. This sign in front of the Coop (Harvard Cooperative Society) promoted a ‘Peace Day’ march in New York City on 22 April, a week sooner. It was sponsored by the Greater Boston Peace Action Committee. This activist was collecting donations for the 400-mile round-trip bus ride from Cambridge to Manhattan.”

SpiritOfTheEel describes being an ‘accidental ‘Nam demonstrator’:

“The years blur it now, but sometime in the early 1970s I was in London for some reason, probably the Boat Show. It was, I think, in Hyde Park that I came across an anti-Vietnam war demonstration setting off. I joined them.

Just behind me was a group of University Students - from Bristol I think - who sang, to the tune of Glory, Glory Hallelujah: ‘Listen, listen Mr. Nixon, why’re you dropping napalm on the children...’ I forget the rest.

I didn’t stay in the demonstration for very long. I was afraid of being arrested ... I was sure that the police would close in at any minute. And to my discredit I have to admit that I was actually rather more interested in boats than the Vietnam War, which by then seemed to have gone on endlessly on our TV screens each evening.

Still, for about half an hour I was, perhaps, part of history, a genuine, if somewhat accidental, anti-Vietnam war demonstrator.”

Bastiaan Rosendaal, a protester, on being on the right side:

“It came even faster than we expected. For 10 years we demonstrated in the streets of Amsterdam, walked with banners and shouted slogans against Lyndon B Johnson and Nixon. The protest movement had grown from a small group of young radicals to a broad front of people from all over society. They included social democrats, intellectuals, troubled believers and long haired youth that wanted to take a distance from their inveterate conservative parents. The objection that the Americans liberated us, silenced gradually. The Domino theory lost its persuasiveness.

And suddenly, March 1975, the end was there. Small Vietnamese men with kalashnikovs took over Saigon. The images we saw on the TV news, were unbelievable. Americans in panic who tried to get away with their large helicopters. And even with that they failed. The last helicopter was thrown by American soldiers from the roof of the American embassy.

And now, so many years after, we can say that we were right in our protests. The feared domination of communism did not take place. The domino stones even fell to the other side.”