Two men, two legs and too much suffering
By Nick Turse
Nguyen Van Tu asks if I'm serious. Am I really willing to tell his story - to
tell the story of the Vietnamese who live in this rural corner of the Mekong
Delta? Almost 40 years after guerrilla fighters in his country threw the limits
of US military power into stark relief - during the 1968 Tet Offensive - we sit
in his rustic home, built of wood and thatch with an earthen floor, and speak
of two hallmarks of that power: ignorance and lack of accountability.
As awkward chicks scurry past my feet, I have the sickening feeling that, in
decades to come, far too many Iraqis and Afghans will have similar stories to
tell. Similar memories of American
troops. Similar accounts of air strikes and artillery bombardments. Nightmare
knowledge of what "America" means to far too many outside the United States.
"Do you really want to publicize this thing," Nguyen asks. "Do you really dare
tell everyone about all the losses and sufferings of the Vietnamese people
here?" I assure this well-weathered 60-year-old grandfather that that's just
why I've come to Vietnam for the third time in three years. I tell him I have
every intention of reporting what he's told me - decades-old memories of daily
artillery shelling, of nearly constant air attacks, of farming families forced
to live in their fields because of the constant bombardment of their homes, of
women and children killed by bombs, of going
hungry because US troops and allied South Vietnamese forces confiscated their
rice, lest it be used to feed guerrillas.
After hearing of the many horrors he endured, I hesitantly ask him about the
greatest hardship he lived through during what's appropriately known here as
the American War. I expect him to mention his brother, a simple farmer shot
dead by America's South Vietnamese allies in the early years of the war, when
the US was engaged primarily in an "advisory" role. Or his father who was
killed just after the war, while tending his garden, when an M-79 round - a
40mm shell fired from a single-shot grenade launcher - buried in the soil,
exploded. Or that afternoon in 1971 when he heard outgoing artillery being
fired and warned his family to scramble for their bunker by shouting,
"Shelling, shelling!" They made it to safety. He didn't. The 105mm artillery
shell that landed near him ripped off most of his right leg.
But he didn't name any of these tragedies.
"During the war, the greatest difficulty was a lack of freedom," he tells me.
"We had no freedom."
A Simple Request
Elsewhere in the Mekong Delta, Pham Van Chap, a solidly-built 52-year-old with
jet black hair, tells a similar story. His was a farming family, but the lands
they worked and lived on were regularly blasted by US ordnance. "During the 10
years of the war, there was serious bombing and shelling in this region - two
to three times a day," he recalls while sitting in front of his home, a
one-story house surrounded by animal pens in a bucolic setting
deep in the Delta countryside. "So many houses and trees were destroyed. There
were so many bomb craters around here."
In January 1973, the first month of the last year US troops fought in Vietnam,
Pham heard the ubiquitous sound of artillery and started to run to safety. It
was too late. A 105mm shell slammed into the earth four meters in front of him,
propelling razor-sharp shrapnel into both legs. When he awoke in the hospital,
one leg was gone from the thigh down. After 40 days in the hospital, he was
sent home, but he didn't get his first prosthetic leg until the 1990s.
His new replacement is now eight years old and a far cry from the advanced,
computerized prosthetics and carbon fiber and titanium artificial legs that
wounded US veterans of America's latest wars get. His wooden prosthetic instead
resembles a table leg with a hoof at the bottom. "It has not been easy for me
without my leg," he confides.
When I ask if there are any questions he'd like to ask me or anything he'd like
to say to Americans, he has a quick response. He doesn't ask for money for his
pain and suffering. Nor for compensation for living his adult life without a
leg. Nor vengeance, that all-American urge, in the words of George W Bush to
"kick some ass". Not even an apology. His request is entirely too reasonable.
He simply asks for a new leg. Nothing more.
Ignorance means never saying sorry
I ask Nguyen Van Tu the same thing. And it turns out he has a question of his
own: "Americans caused many losses and much suffering for the Vietnamese during
the war, do Americans now feel remorse?" I wish I could answer "yes". Instead,
I tell him that most Americans are totally ignorant of the pain of the
Vietnamese people, and then I think to myself, as I glance at the ample pile of
tiny, local potatoes on his floor, about widespread American indifference to
civilians killed, maimed, or suffering in other ways in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Even those Vietnamese who didn't lose a limb - or a loved one - carry memories
of years of anguish, grief, and terror from the American War. The fallout here
is still palpable. The elderly woman who tells me how her home was destroyed by
an incendiary bomb. The people who speak of utter devastation - of villages
laid waste by shelling and bombing, of gardens and orchards destroyed by
chemical defoliants.
The older woman who, with trepidation, peeks into a home where I'm interviewing
- she hasn't seen a Caucasian since the war - and is visibly unnerved by the
memories I conjure up. Another begins trembling on hearing that the Americans
have arrived again, fearing she might be taken away, as her son was almost 40
years earlier. The people with memories of heavily armed American patrols
disrupting their lives, searching their homes, killing their livestock. The
people for whom English was only one phrase, the one they all seem to remember:
"VC, VC" - slang for the pejorative term "Viet Cong"; and those who recall
model names and official designations of US weaponry of the era - from bombs to
rifles - as intimately as Americans today know their sports and celebrities.
I wish I could tell Nguyen Van Tu that most Americans know something of his
country's torture and torment during the war. I wish I could tell him that most
Americans care. I wish I could tell him that Americans feel true remorse for
the terror visited upon the Vietnamese in their name, or that an apology is
forthcoming and reparations on their way. But then I'd be lying.
Mercifully, he doesn't quiz me as I've quizzed him for the better part of an
hour. He doesn't ask how Americans can be so ignorant or hard-hearted, how they
could allow their country to repeatedly invade other nations and leave them
littered with corpses and filled with shattered families, lives, and dreams.
Instead he answers calmly and methodically:
I have two things to say.
First, there have been many consequences due to the war and even now the
Vietnamese people suffer greatly because of it, so I think that the American
government must do something in response - they caused all of these losses here
in Vietnam, so they must take responsibility for that. Secondly, this interview
should be an article in the press.
I sit there knowing that the
chances of the former are nil. The US government won't do it and the American
people don't know, let alone care, enough to make it happen. But for the
latter, I tell him I share his sentiments and I'll do my best.
Nguyen Van Tu grasps my hands in thanks as we end the interview. His story is
part of a hidden, if not forbidden, history that few in the US know. It's a
story that was written in blood in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos during the 1960s
and 1970s and now is being rewritten in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's a story to
which new episodes are added each day that US forces roll armored vehicles down
other people's streets, kick down other people's doors, carry out attacks in
other people's neighborhoods and occupy other people's countries.
It took nearly 40 years for word of Nguyen Van Tu's hardships at the hands of
the US to filter back to America. Perhaps a few more Americans will feel
remorse as a result. But who will come forward to take responsibility for all
this suffering? And who will give Pham Van Chap a new leg?
Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of
Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex, an exploration of the new
military-corporate complex in America, is due out in the American Empire Project
series by Metropolitan Books in March 2008.
Photographs by Tam Turse, a freelance photojournalist
working in New York City. Her photographs have appeared most recently in The
Progressive and at TomDispatch.com for which she is the official photographer.
More of her photos from these interviews can by viewed by clicking
here.
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hungry because US troops and allied South Vietnamese forces confiscated their
rice, lest it be used to feed guerrillas.
deep in the Delta countryside. "So many houses and trees were destroyed. There
were so many bomb craters around here."
