And it's one two three,
What are we fighting for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam.
And it's five six seven,
Open up the Pearly Gates;
There ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopie – we're all gonna die!
....I was very naive. I thought we were going to help free the Vietnamese from Communist aggression. I volunteered. I believed in it. My family was proud of me. The African American community was very divided about the war. There were some certainly who came out against the war like Dr. King, but there was also still a belief that we should go into the military to show the nation that African Americans could make an equal contribution to the cause of freedom and equality.
....Combat was horrible, but there was a beautiful side as well—the brotherhood between black soldiers and white soldiers and Hispanics and Native Americans. When we were in combat all that mattered was trying to survive together....I can honestly say I felt closer to some of the people I served with in combat—of all races—than my own family. Unfortunately, it is very hard to hang on to that communion off the battlefield....
There were very definitely some racial problems. There were guys who really did hate the other race. Some brothers just didn't want to be around white guys....
I wanted to be a medic to save lives and I didn't know if I could kill. I wasn't raised to kill. But when I was in combat I was tainted by this blood lust and I, too, became a combat soldier.
....there was a real incentivizing of death and it just f——ed with our value system. In our unit guys who got confirmed kills would get a three-day-in-country R and R....I think the kills mattered more to the officers than us. It was a way for them to get their ticked punched to get promoted. We had a captain who really pushed us hard for body counts and that pressure came right down the food chain....Ultimately this captain was awarded a silver star based on gallantry in the face of enemy fire. It was really for putting his men at unnecessary risk and exagerrating the number of people we killed....
When I reupped for another six months I got rotated out of combat and spent all my time going to the villages and treating the Vietnamese. I was proud of some of the work I did. Instead of forcing them into this war and telling them where to live and giving them weapons to kill off other Vietnamese, that was legitimate medicine.
Journalists and scholars all ask me the same question: “How did we win?”….We won the war because we would rather die than live in slavery. Our history proves this. Our deepest aspiration has always been self-determination. That spirit provided us with stamina, courage, and creativity in the face of a powerful enemy.
Militarily, the Americans were much more powerful than we were. But they made the same mistake as the French––they underestimated Vietnamese forces of resistance. When the Americans started their air raids, Uncle Ho said: ‘The Americans can send hundreds of thousands, even millions of soldiers; the war can last ten years, twenty years, maybe more, but our people will keep fighting until they win. Houses, villages, cities may be destroyed, but we won’t be intimidated. And after we’ve regained our independence, we will rebuild our country from the ground up, even more beautifully”....
All his life Uncle Ho devoted his love and energy to the country and the people. A few days before he died in 1969, he wanted to talk with me and other leaders....In his final days he was still thinking hard about how to win the American War. He asked many questions about the situation at the front…. I said, “Everything is okay. The army is fighting well. We will certainly win”....
I remember one meeting [with Ho]…in the 1940s. We were sitting near a fire at night and I said, “We talk about a general uprising, but we don’t even have any weapons.” Uncle Ho calmly replied, “Don’t worry, if we have the people, we have he weapons.” So we started mobilizing the people to help us.
Initially, we set up our hospital close to the place where the borders of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos meet. But it was too far from the front lines so after about six months we had to move closer. It was the first of many moves during the war. We always sought a location that was in triple-canopy jungle where there were three layers of leaves. Even in the middle of the day the sun couldn't shine through. But the Americans launched innumerable chemical spraying to defoliate the jungle. As soon as they sprayed nearby I'd give the order to being moving the hospital. Even so, we were sometimes spotted by U.S. helicopters or observation planes and then the B-52s would inevitably attack that very night.
There was a shortage of everything. Most of our equipment had been destroyed, lost, or damaged on our journey south. Probably only ten percent arrived and some of that was defective or incomplete. For example, the X-ray equipment arrived safely but we lost the protective lead apron. We didn't even have scalpels or other surgical instruments. We fashioned our own out of used scrap metal from unexploded American bombs and shell casings or pieces of aluminum from planes that had been shot down. We even made intravenous tubes from the rubber insulation we found around electrical wires on American aircraft. So the American provided us with many of our supplies.
At first I tried to set up a small hydroelectric system to provide power for the hospital but it got washed away during flooding. Our most reliable source of power was the bicycle-powered generator. Someone had to keep pedaling so I could have light for my operating table. Sometimes I operated all night while the staff took turns pedaling the bicycle.
…Believe it or not, our mortality rate for wounded patients was lower than it was hospitals in Hanoi. The only way to account for this is to assume that most of our severely wounded people died at the front before they could be carried to our field hospital. One of our biggest problems was postoperative infection. At first we closed all wounds after surgery, but we found they frequently got infected. We had better results leaving wounds open. The same for arterial wounds. When we tried to sew the artery it invariable got infected. We found it better to close both ends of the damaged artery and leave the wound open. Trying this led to a very interesting discovery. We found that our soldiers had done so much walking and gotten so much exercise they had developed new arteries known as "collaterals." So when we closed off a main artery these new arteries still provided enough blood to the wounded area to ward off infection…
The busiest place was the emergency room. The dust-offs [medical evacuation helicopters] would call on the radio to let us know what they were bringing in, like, "Three-Twelve, this is Medic 2, we have four litters two body bags, a head wound, and a belly." That meant they had two KIA [Killed in Action] and two wounded. When the chopper landed, the corpsmen would go out and bring 'em in through the double doors…Either a nurse or a doctor would decided who needed help first. You did triage all the time. The GIs had first priority, then the ARVN {southern Vietnamese soldiers}, then Vietnamese civilians, and finally the Viet Cong. You went from one litter to the next. You'd look at wounds, check for vital signs, and just make a decision he's a go or he can wait. We had to move fast but we worked on trying to keep a calm voice and always had some kind of physical contact with the patients. A lot of times, as soon as you touched them you could feel the tension drift away. It was a real important part of what we did. When you got a man who was too far gone, you didn't say anything and moved to the next litter. In the back your mind you’d say, I hope he's dead when I get back.
…When we had "pushes" we might have days and days of causalities coming in, but we weren’t busy every day. Sometimes it was quiet and we basically just sat around. Then you were like a sister, mother, grandmother, girlfriend. You had all kinds of roles. The men might start to talk about what they'd experienced and then you'd you see this little protective shield come down. I don’t know whether they didn't want to talk because they thought it would upset us or if it was just too painful for them. Mostly they'd talk about their girlfriends, or what they were going to do when they got home, what kind of car they were gonna buy. A lot of them talked about getting Dear John letters. Married men would ask you to write letters home. They had a genuine appreciation that American women were there…I've heard about sexual harassment in Vietnam, but that was never my experience. We were treated with the utmost regard. It was like being queen-for-a-day every day.
You'd work a twelve-hour shift, shower, and then go to the officers club at night. They'd be playing music and you'd be dancing and playing cards and having cheeseburgers. Then you'd go to bed, wake up, and go back to the insanity. One minute you're confronting death, and the next you're doing the watusi [a dance]. After a while you couldn't separate one from the other. Bear the end of my tour I was crying a lot and couldn't sleep. I wasn't able to function so I took the chief of surgery aside and said, "I'm falling apart here." He prescribed Librium. I didn't drink and I didn't use drugs, but I did take Librium for about three months. It gave me a kind of false calm. It was like watching a movie…
There was no real school. The older people just taught us informally at night underground by the light of a small oil lamp. A few times, for short periods, I went to school with other children, but we never gathered in large groups during the day. If you did, bombs would start falling in about fifteen minutes, and in the countryside there were no sirens to warn you or air strikes. We just ran as soon as we heard the airplanes. Sometimes the bombs fell just as people were starting to scatter for shelter. And if you were walking near a factory or the highway you always had to ware a long straw shield over your head and back to protect you from shrapnel. After bombing strikes we used to collect those little pieces of metal. They were still hot.
For many years I had a lot of nightmares, but they’ve disappeared. The most beautiful things still stay in my memory. You know, children always look for something mystical or romantic. I’m very thankful I had a chance to live the countryside. The peasants were extremely kind and honest. They taught me a lot about Buddhism and traditional Vietnamese culture. If I’d grown up entirely in the city, I would have missed a priceless experience…
For all the pain I saw in the countryside, I wasn’t terribly frightened. Adults were worried and scared, but for children wartime could be fun. When we saw American pilots floating down from the sky, we ran after their colored parachutes. We could recognize how high they were from the way the light changed as it shone through the parachute. I don’t remember exactly how we did it, but we could say “Ah, that man is very high.” But the wind usually carried the parachutes far away. I ran and ran but I never got there in time to capture an American pilot…
We scheduled the (antiwar) demonstration for April 17, 1965 in Washington D.C., but nobody thought it would be very large. SDS was still a tiny organization with maybe two thousand members and Vietnam was not very much on anybody’s horizon…
So when I got on a bus in Ann Arbor on April 16, I felt I would be happy to see five thousand people. When we rolled in Washington I remember seeing great flocks of buses parked along the mall, scores of them. It was a sunrise experience and it was staggering. I thought, we’re in business, we’re rolling. The antiwar movement is going to be really substantial. It will be a real contest. We had maybe twenty-five thousand people and everything about it felt good.
It was a beautiful day and if you look at pictures of the crowds you’d probably be surprised by how straight everyone looks. People are sitting on the grass around the Washington Monument wearing sports jackets and dresses. It looked like a prom. We had music by Joan Baez, the Freedom Singers, and Phil Ochs. Most people thought the best speech was given by Paul Potter, then the president of SDS. His argument was that the brutality manifested in Vietnam was connected to the brutality of American society and that in order to stop the war we had to change the system. That was the key phrase. Some people thought it was huge mistake, a radical deepening of what was at stake, but it was a momentous speech and what most resonated with people was the very clear call to fortitude and commitment….
At the same time that polls showed a majority had turned against the war in 1968, a survey asked people to rank by popularity a variety of national organizations or forces. The most unpopular entity in America was the antiwar movement. That to me encapsulates the fundamental tragedy. We were hated. We were seen, not inaccurately, as part of a radical ensemble that really wanted to turn a great deal upside down
I grew up in Ben Tre in the Mekong Delta, which was reputed to be a stronghold of Communist sympathizers. The French controlled big towns while the Viet Minh controlled the countryside. When the French tried to occupy Ben Tre with their legionnaires and Moroccans and Nigerans they were brutal. But so were the Viet Minh. If they found civil servants or "progovernment elements" they took them away and we never heard from them again….
About half the students in my high school were pro-Viet Minh. They organized demonstrations and strikes which constantly closed down the school. My mother worried about our education and decided to send me, along with my twin brothers, to France….
When I returned in 1959 I worked for the Ministry of Information….I worked there for three years but I wasn't happy and wanted to get out….I strongly believed in freedom and suddenly we were ordered to wear uniforms to work and go to political meetings. It sounded to me more like Communism than democracy….
After the coup against Diem, the military generals competed with one another to take power and there was one coup after another. These Vietnamese generals had no experience in administration. They were even more corrupt than Diem…It wasn't good to have generals as presidents. They gave me no hope. But the American buildup also left me skeptical. If the French who colonized our country for a century could not win our support, how could the Americans, the newcomers with a different culture and language, hope to win the war against the Communists? We seemed to return to the situation in the fifties in which the government controlled the cities and the Viet Cong controlled the countryside. Corruption and police harassment made people distrust the government and sympathize more with the Viet Cong. But still I didn't think the Viet Cong would win. I just thought that the war would go on forever.