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| Acknowledgments | vii | ||||
| Introduction | xi | ||||
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| PART ONE: A WALK IN THE GARDEN OF HEAVEN: A Walk in the Garden of Heaven | |||||
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5 | (10) | |||
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15 | (10) | |||
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| PART TWO: THE HONORED DEAD: A Walk in the Garden of Heaven | |||||
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25 | (8) | |||
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33 | (18) | |||
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51 | (14) | |||
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65 | (8) | |||
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73 | (12) | |||
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| PART THREE: WOUNDS: A Walk in the Garden of Heaven | |||||
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85 | (10) | |||
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95 | (23) | |||
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118 | (4) | |||
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122 | (15) | |||
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137 | (18) | |||
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155 | (11) | |||
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166 | (6) | |||
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172 | (10) | |||
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182 | (7) | |||
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189 | (12) | |||
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| PART FOUR: HAUNTINGS: A Walk in the Garden of Heaven | |||||
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201 | (3) | |||
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204 | (6) | |||
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210 | (13) | |||
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223 | (12) | |||
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| PART FIVE: EXILES: A Walk in the Garden of Heaven | |||||
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235 | (10) | |||
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245 | (7) | |||
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252 | (6) | |||
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258 | (8) | |||
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266 | (13) | |||
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| PART SIX: LEGACIES: A Walk in the Garden of Heaven | |||||
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279 | (8) | |||
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287 | (7) | |||
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294 | (6) | |||
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300 | (8) | |||
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308 | (5) | |||
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313 | (9) | |||
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322 | (5) | |||
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327 | (13) | |||
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340 | (13) | |||
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353 | (26) | |||
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379 | (22) | |||
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| PART SEVEN: A Walk in the Garden of Heaven | |||||
| Epilogue | 401 | (3) | |||
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| Contributors/Translators | 404 |
The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
Chapter One
A Walk in the Garden of Heaven George Evans
A Letter to Vietnam for Huu Thinh, Le Minh Khue, and Nguyen Quang Thieu
They were talking when we entered the garden, two young people whispering with their hands, mist threads drifting from mountain tops on the raked gravel ocean. Islands afloat on the skin of infinity. The mind without its body.
"The moment I saw your face," he said, "was like walking into the Hall of A Thousand and One Bodhisattvas."
She had no idea what he meant, how it is to enter Sanjusangendo in Kyoto for even the fiftieth time and see row upon row of a thousand standing figures, carved, painted, and gold-leafed with a calm but stunned look of enlightenment, five hundred on each side of a larger, seated figure of their kind, miniature heads knotted to their scalps representing the fragments of a time when their heads exploded in dismay at the evil in this world, the way our heads exploded in the war, though we don't wear our histories where they can be seen.
Each statue has twenty pairs of arms to symbolize their actual 1,000 arms, these enlightened ones who choose to remain on earth and not end the cycle of death and rebirth some believe we go through until we get it right. They pause at the edge of nirvana to stay behind and help us all get through. It's easy to think they are foolish instead of holy.
But each hand holds twenty-five worlds it saves, and because each figure can multiply into thirty-three different figures, imagine the thirty-three thousand worlds they hold, how much distress there really is, then multiply that by a thousand and one and think of what it's like to stand in an ancient wooden temple with all that sparkling comparison, even for those of us who believe in almost nothing.
It is said, and it's true, that if you search the thousand faces, you will find the face of someone lost from your life.
But the young girl in the garden was bored and looked over her lover's shoulder at a twist of flowers. then so did he. The spell was broken.
We are older. There are so many wasted lives between us that only beauty makes sense. Yet we are like them. We are. They are the way it is between our countries. One talking, one looking away. Both talking, both looking away.
The American Blues
Ward Just
This is not a story of the war, except insofar as everything in my unsettled middle age seems to wind back to it. I know how much you dislike reading about it, all dissolution, failure, hackneyed ironies, and guilt, not to mention the facts themselves, regiments of them, armies. But I must risk being the bore at dinner for these few opening pages, for the life of the war is essential to the story I have to tell. And that is not about the war at all but about the peace that followed the war.
At the time the People's Army commenced its final murderous assault on Saigon I was living safely in a remote district of New England, far from the anarchy of battle and outside the circulation zones of serious newspapers. this was several years after my wife and I had quit the city for the country, having decided to go back to basics in the woods. We wanted a natural environment, clean air, safe schools, wood stoves, and a preindustrial economy. In our fervor to simplify, we went to the northern edge of the nation, thinking of it as the frontier.
In fact, we were refugees from wartime Washington. Or perhaps the more accurate term is exiles, though no one forced us to leave. Our exile was voluntary: we abandoned Washington as good soldiers might desert a ravaging army. We believed that our home for many years had become diseased--poisoned with greed, ambition, and bloodlust. My wife saw this before I did, and saw also that we had become part of it, accomplices--against our will, she insisted, though of course as a journalist I had been a willing witness to the war's progress, drawn to it for no other reason than it was there, remaining because there seemed no other place to be. In Washington my wife and I feared for what we considered our special closeness and appetite for each other. Sexual passion withered in the heat of such megalomania. My wife thought of the capital as some monstrous contagion, hence our abrupt and bravura departure for the north country--from the vicious to the chaste, from the extraneous to the basic, from the heart of America to its margins. This was in 1973.
Without newspapers to read, I followed the end of the war on television, via a single network, because my house was so situated in the mountains that I could receive only one channel. I watched the collapse on that one network, my continuity. And it was different from yours. I knew the theater of operations, its geography and ambience,a nd many of the American officials present at the end and most of the journalists. I knew its history as well as I knew my own, having been there for two and half years, and indeed in some respects watching the war on television was like watching a home movie, a blurred 8mm film from childhood showing the house we no longer lived in and the father who was dead, a tiresome experience unless you had been there and remembered: then it was excruciating. this was a house in which some part of you would always dwell and a father who would be on guard forever. You saw yourself skylarking, innocent, and unafraid, though entirely aware of the Kodak whirring away, seizing the moment. I wanted to call out and stop the film: Don't Do That! But it would speed up, the images racing, faster and faster, and there was no stopping it, then or later. Of course at the time the future was unrevealed: I could not foresee the consequences. Later, I would understand that it was predictable--even by me, one who believed that history never repeated itself. What came later was no surprise, including my own broken nerves and trepidation. The shakes came much later, when images leached from my memory like shrapnel from flesh: so many human beings, multitudes. I had watched them, now they watched me; turn, and turn about. In 1975 it was my own memory on film, and this memory was crowded with fear and ardor, hot and bittersweet as an old blues,
You told me that you loved me but you told me a lie.
There were diabolical memories, hard to communicated and even harder to share. Yet my feet beat perfect time to the music, everyone said so. The war, the war, the war, the war; for a while, we thought it would go on forever, a running story. And how fascinating that it was an American responsibility, supervised by our best minds. Surely somewhere there as consolation.
So I leaned forward toward the small screen, connected to the war by the network, my looking glass. I was alert to the most obscure detail, often smiling, frequently near tears. It was all personal. I knew their facts, mannerism,a nd personal histories. A particular friend of mine was a senior diplomat in the American embassy who was routinely interviewed in the last days my old colleague Nicholson. The interviews were near parodies of the decades-old quarrel between officials and reporters. My friend was by then a very tired and distracted official, and he gave Nicholson no satisfaction. Of course Nick was polite and sympathetic, his bedside manner never more attractive than when tending a terminally ill patient. But my friend gave the least as good as he got, and his truculence amid the ruins showed him to good advantage. On the small screen he was a formidable character.
Nicholson asked him, "What do you think, now that it's almost over?"
My friend was shrewdly silent, knowing that television cannot abide silence. He was careful not to move his eyes or dip his head or otherwise display embarrassment or disarray.
Annoyed, Nicholson began again. "It's collapsing all along the line." He named the provincial that had fallen in the past twenty-four hours, even pretty little My Tho was under siege. "And now that its is, is there something we could have done differently? Or should have or might have? Or perhaps there was something we shouldn't've done at all?" NIcholson leaned over my friend's gunmetal desk, holding the microphone delicately with his thumb and forefinger, as he might a flute of champagne. He scented blood.
My friend said, "Yes," not needing to add "you son of a bitch," because it was plain in the tone of his voice. They had known and cordially dislike each other for years.
Nicholson said, "Looking back on it--"
"Looking back on it is something we'll do for a very long time," my friend said. "It'll become an industry. There are so many of us who've been here."
"Yes," Nick said. the camera moved in tight on him. "And the lessons? What will the lessons be?"
"In order to sleep soundly, Americans will believe anything. Do you know who said that?"
Nicholson, thrown on the defensive, shook his head.
"Stalin," my friend said.
"Well--"
"According to Shostakovich." Nick said nothing, wary now and alert to diplomatic nuance. But my friend only added mildly, "The composer. In his memoirs, I think."
Nick pounced: "But what will they be, the lessons?"
The diplomat's voice was soft, almost hushed. "They will be whatever makes us think well of ourselves. So that our sleep will be untroubled. But it's too early to tell, isn't it? We must wait for the after-action reports. The conferences and symposia. The publication of classified documents." I watched my friend thrust and parry, his face perfectly expressionless, though drawn. I though he was getting the better of it.
"You've been here as long as anyone," Nicholson said, smiling as if he intended a compliment. "And now you seem to be saying that the war's ended at last." Nick wanted a confession and this was by way of reading the subject his rights. He moved the microphone in the direction of the window and cocked his head, smiling wanly. Boom boom. Gunfire, or what sounded like gunfire.
"It is lost, yes."
"That's not the same thing," Nicholson said.
"No," my friend agreed.
"Well!" Nicholson said, smiling again. I noticed that he had had his teeth capped. He looked fit, though tired. Probably it was only a hangover. "Surely you would not contend--"
"I am not contending anything," my friend said. "It's only a word. Pick the word you want. Your word isn't accurate, as a matter of fact. The war will not end when the americans leave. One part of the war will end but the war has more than one part. However, this it not our happiest or our proudest or our most honorable hour. If that is what you want me to say, I am saying it." He opened his mouth as if to continue, then didn't. He probably figured he had said too much. there was a moment of silence. Nicholson let it run, knowing now that the advantage was his. My friend said, "One can choose his own word. That word or some other word. It depends on where one sits."
Lame, I thought. dour, obscure, and unconvincing. But dead accurate.
"Right now," Nick said smoothly, "we're sitting in the American embassy, third floor." He smiled again and gestured at the American flag behind the big desk. It hung from a standard crowned with a fierce golden American eagle. There were framed documents on the walls, and a lithograph that I remembered from other occasions. My friend took it with him wherever he went, one of Picasso's melancholy musicians. The camera lingered on it.
"Exactly," my friend said. His voice was like flint, and now he moved to gather some papers on his desk. He ignored the microphone Nick held only inches from the end of his nose. "At least you've got that exactly right, where we are now."
I remembered his tone of voice from another occasion, early in the war. He had taken me to lunch to explain a particularly subtle turn in American war diplomacy. It was too subtle for me, I didn't get any of it, but I did not let on and let him talk himself out, thinking that sooner or later I would pick it up, understand what it was he was trying to tell me, and then I would have a story. He wound down at last and looked at me with a frigid smile. Then he said, "It's convenient for you, isn't it? Being here, listening to me, waiting for a crumb of information. Some fact, any fact at all will do, so long as it's fresh. Facts and flesh stink after a day in this heat. Isn't that right?" I protested. It was his lunch, undertaken at his invitation--Yes, he said wearily, that was true. Then he laughed, and when I asked him what was funny, he replied that his situation was too droll; now he was conducting diplomacy through the newspapers, and they were American newspapers. He explained that he was trying to reach a certain circle in Washington, and he though he could do it through my newspaper, through me. They never read the cables, and when they did they carped and complained....Too droll, he said again, ordering cognacs for us both; it wasn't diplomacy at all, it was public relations.
There was a brief fade to black and then the camera went in tight on Nicholson. Now he was standing in the embassy driveway. He delivered a few portentous sentences, a kind of fatigued now-you-see-it-now-you-don't commentary on the interview. Artillery crashed in the background. Then he identified himself, "outside the American embassy on Thong Nhat Avenue, Saigon."
Nicholson had a reputation as television's most adroit interviewer, but that was the closest he came to cracking my friend. And he kept at it, night after night. Their little sparring match would end Nick's report, until more violent events in the streets made interviews superfluous, or perhaps they both tired of the charade. I admired my friend's tenacity but I was distressed at his appearance, his eyes tired and his hair graying and longer than I remembered it, his window's peak pronounced and causing him to look older than he was. His shaggy hair gave him an untidy appearance. Normally he was a fatidious man and a model diplomat, the son of one ambassador and the nephew of another, the grandson of an army general and the great grandson of a secretary of the treasury. One way and another his family had been in government for a hundred years, and this fact was never very far from my friend's thoughts, certainly not then, in the last days of the war. Despite his ancestry, or because of it, he was the most "European" of the American officials I knew. His was a layered, mordant personality, the past and the present always in subtle play. He had married and divorced a Parisian and was now married to an Italian woman, a Venetian who was my wife's closest friend; my wife and the Venetian has studied history together. He had a special affection for his wife's family who had survived, by the family palazzo on the Grand Canal--and how had they survived? Indolence, he said.
I pulled for the diplomat in his struggle with Nicholson, and not only because of my friendship with him and my wife's with his languid Venetian lady. I wanted to see him come away with something. There was no equity in an agony where only the observers profited. The more bad news the better, the deeper the quagmire the more the correspondents flourished. Connoisseurs of bad news, Nicholson and I had been the most celebrated o the virtuosos, Nick with his camera and deft interrogation and I with my pencil and notebook and clear sight. We were scrupulous in our search for delusion, error, and falsehood. We worked close to the fire, give us that; and we were entranced by its light, smitten, infatuated. And it was not a schoolboy's crush but a grand passion, a coup de foudre that often strikes men of a certain age. However, my mordant friend was not smitten, and he distrusted romantic metaphors. He believed simply that the United States had gotten itself into a war that it could not win. It could not win against the Vietnamese Communists any more than Bonaparte could win against the Russian winter. Americans had begun the war with an excess of optimism, but what country did not? The Italians always had. Now there would be consequences and to avoid them would only make matters worse, perhaps a good deal worse. Of course he hated being a part of it, there had been so many blunders and so many dead and so much waste. And unlike the Italians, we had tried so hard.
In front of the camera my friend was still and contained and vaguely contemptuous. He approved of journalism in the abstract but dislike the kind of man who seemed attracted to it. Journalists seemed to him to be naive utopians, and they were never worse than when covering wars. They routinely violated the physicist's great rule, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." And Nicholson and I? We tried hard, too; no one could fault our zeal. Our enthusiasm for the fall--its blood and dark rhythms, its delusion, the inexorability of the descent, the fulfillment of all the worst prophecies--was almost religious in its intensity, and at home our dispatches were followed with the devotion that Gypsies give tarots. Of course we wanted no wider war, Nicholson and I--though I was obsessed with my friend's prediction, it seemed almost to be a curse: "Now there will be consequences and to avoid them would only make things worse, perhaps a good deal worse."
That was my own situation, appallingly real in the north country as I watched my friend on the small screen. He was a good man and an able diplomat and I felt sorry for him, distressed at his appearance and uncomfortable in his company, though we were twelve thousand miles apart; and of course disappointed that he never looked the camera in the eye, though that may have been the strategy of the cameraman, who had been with Nicholson for many years. Nick was a professional, no more but no less either.
That last week of the war I watched television every day, beginning with the morning news and ending with wrap-up at eleven. Of course I was most attentive in the evening, my own day done; and knowing that in the Zone it was early morning. Their day was just beginning. Each day was worse than the day before, and the suspense was in wondering how much worse. How bad could it get? My wife refused to watch with me, being opposed both to the war and to television news on principle. We had always been great newspaper readers. In the evenings my son, aged seven, agreed to keep me company. That last week there was combat footage from the countryside and film also of the various landmarks in the capital, the Street of Flowers, the old JUSPAO building, Aterbea's Restaurant, the National Assembly, and the two white hotels, the Caravelle and the Continental, all places I knew well from the previous decade.
Don't you want to see this? I called to my wife.
Not especially, she said from the kitchen.
Look, I said, there's Jessel. This was another old friend, a newspaperman. A hand-held camera caught him standing in Lam Son Square at the corner of the rue Catinat, making notes. He was wearing a sort of bush suit and a side arm in a holster and a steel helmet. He was thick around the middle.
I don't know him, she said.
I said, Sure you do, don't your remember? We met him and his wife, his then-wife, in New York that time. That time we had so much fun in the bar at the algonquin. She was very young. You like his wife, remember?
She said, Yes. It was at some bar. And they're divorced now. And I didn't like her.
I said, I wish to hell they didn't wear those bush suits. They didn't wear them in my day, at least the newspapermen didn't. And, Christ, he's packing heat. He thinks he's Ernest Hemingway, liberating the bar of the Caravelle. Except he's not going in, he's going out.
My son squirmed on the couch next to me.
I think it's a violation of the Geneva Convention, I continued. The rules are very clear. Correspondents are not combatants, and they are not authorized to bear arms. And you have the rank of major, so if you're captured a fieldgrade officer and entitled to respect--
Your dinner's ready, she said.
In a minute, I replied. I was watching Jessel, so tubby and complacent. In the old days Jessel had never worn bush suits. The war was not a safari. He had never carried a handgun, either.
I'll go ahead then, she said.
A rooftop shot from the Caravelle restaurant provoked a cascade of reminiscence, much of it overwrought, perhaps bogus. This lunch, that dinner; who was present and what we ate and the details of the winelist, and the horror stories, the changing estimate of the situtation, and the waiter whom we believed to be a VC agent. A glimpse of the adjoining building made me laugh out loud. It was the apartment window of the Indian money changer, the "mahatman"; the window was ablaze with light, and I imagined the transactions within, tortuous now no doubt. I described the look of the flares over the Mekong, the river bright as a carnival in the light of burning phosphorus, and the thump of artillery on the opposite shore. I was being cheerful for the benefit of my wife, who had convinced herself that we had all had a fine time in South Vietnam.
I though again of Jessel. At that time he was living with a Vietnamese woman with whom he had no common language. His American girlfriend, the young woman he later married, had gone home. The Vietnamese was a well-educated woman who spoke excellent French, but Jessel had no French, so they communicated by high sign and in pigeon.
Jessel, I said. A funny son of a bitch.
Then a radio jingle came back to me, a choir:
Don't you get a little lonely All by yourself Out on that limb? Without Him?
The last word was drawn out, in barbershop harmony, Himmmmmmm. Sponsored by the Army chaplain corps, it ran a dozen times a day on the Armed Forces Radio Network, inserted between the Supremes and Jimi Hendrix and exhortations to Stay Alert, Stay Alive. I sang the jingle to my son, who did not understand it. I remembered smiling every time I heard it. It was so--chaste. And the chaplains were so demoralized and broken up. They were from another world altogether, and now, thinking about them and their jingle, I moved to the other end of the couch. Tears jumped to my eyes. My wife gathered up our son and took him to bed. But I did not stop telling anecdotes, which were coming in a rush. I recited them out loud, to myself. An American official--a new man, I didn't know him--appeared on screen and gave an account in a gruff voice. He looked frightened, listening to explosions in the distance.
I waited for my friend the diplomat. I had come to depend on him. But he was not interviewed that evening, nor was Nicholson anywhere in sight. Nick had probably gone up-country. The news shifted to Washington, a correspondent standing in the great circular driveway; in the background, figures moved on the porch of the mansion. Of course, it was dusk in Washington. The correspondent had information from confidential sources, non of whom were prepared to appear on camera or permit the use of their names. But the situation in the Zone was...very grave, desperate, in fact, and they in the White House seemed courageously prepared for the inevitable. The reliable sources described the atmosphere as tense but calm. The correspondent leaned into the camera, I knew him as a bon vivant; now he was selling gravity as he would sell soap or automobiles. He despised his metier, but the camera was kind to him.
The news ended and another program replaced it. I refilled my glass but did not move to turn off the set. I had arranged a drinks tray, so everything was within easy reach. I watched a game show, noisy with hysterical contestants and a frantic master of ceremonies. My time in the Zone came back to me in bits and pieces--an exotic tapestry. It was with me part of every day in any event, but now, concentrating, I discovered forgotten material. The patterns changed according to the distance you were from it, one of Escher's devilish constructions. It was like reading a well loved novel years later and finding fresh turns of plot and character to admire. I remembered a friend saying once that if you were lucky enough to discover Trollope in middle age you'd never do without, because you could never live long enough to read all he wrote. I felt that way about the war, so remarkably dense an experience, with such treasure still buried. My Trollope war, so rich with incident and the friendships were forever. The diplomat and I had many escapades.
Upstairs, I heard my wife reading to our son.
Come on down! I shouted.
The door opened. What do you want? my wife asked.
I want to tell you about the war! On television, the master of ceremonies gestured grandly at the balcony and yelled, Come on down!
She said something I didn't hear and closed the door.
I didn't notice. I was too drunk to notice. I had been drunk for a month, since well before the final offensive of the People's Army and the collapse of the Free World Forces. So the offensive was not a cause of my drinking, or an excuse or justification for it. But it was not reason to stop, either.
The year 1975 was turbulent and even now I have difficulty sorting it out. Public affairs seemed to loom over us, darkening the prospect. Of course Nixon was already gone. Ford was soon to go. Each day brought weird revelations. The attorney general went to jail. The disgraced vice-president was frequently photographed at Las Vegas and was said to be making a killing as a corporate consultant, import-export. There was a picture in the newspaper of him shaking hands with Joe Louis, his fingers on the Brown Bomber's should as if they were friends. The vice-president's tan was so deep, he could have been the champion's brother; he was smiling, obviously enjoying himself in Vegas. Joe wore a plastic golf cap, looking old and ruined. I went on the wagon for a month.
There were changes in the north country as well. A Venezuelan bought the dairy farm down the road from my house, the purchase conducted through nominees. An article in a business paper asserted that for the rich in nations of social and political unrest, New England farmland was a desirable as Krugerrands or Old Masters. The Venezuelan was followed by an industrialist from Peru, who bought a horse farm. The columnist in the local paper complained that the lingua franca in the valley would soon be Spanish. He took to describing our selectmen as "the junta" and predicting revolution. Then he announced that he himself was emigrating to Maine, at least the Abenaki spoke English and were indisputably North American. My wife and I briefly discussed putting out house on the market, then thought better of it; we were in the north country to stay, she said. There were other confusing portents. A large New York bank failed and nearly brought down the valley bank with it. The chairman explained at a party one night that his bank had gone heavily into Eurodollars on the expert advice of the president of the New York bank, a close personal friend who owned a condominium in the ski area nearby. The president facilitated these purchases, one banker lending his expertise to another. That was the reason there was no mortgage money in the valley: it was all in Europe and disappearing fast.
The news from Indochina after the fall of Saigon was fragmentary, and weeks would pass with no reports on the evening news. No news was not good news. I though of it as a dark and threatening silence, as unpropitious in its way as the deep restless fastness of the woods surrounding my house. When, later, the Chinese invaded north Vietnam the dominoes trembled, but held; so fathead Dulles had been at once right and wrong about the course of events in Southeast Asia.
I was writing a history of the war. I completed the book in good time, all but the final chapter. For my description of the end of the war I was obliged to depend on the recollections of others. I decided to write a simple reconstruction of the final battle. Six times I went to Washington to interview civilians from the State Department and CIA and the Pentagon, and military officers everywhere in the city. Many were friends from the previous decade and were generous with their time; we knew many of the same stories. I obtained classified documents, but these did not clarify the situation; they were secret but no very interesting, and often false or misleading. Facts piled up, but I could not fit them together in any plausible way. What had seemed so clear in front of the television set now seemed erratic and unfocused, drunken events reeling from day to day with no logic or plan. And what was the consequence, other than the obvious thing? I was unable to interview my friend the diplomat, who had been posted to another, very remote embassy; there was a rumor he was on the outs with the Department. We corresponded for a time but his letters were perfunctory, and he declined to volunteer any fresh facts or fresh interpretations of the known facts. I was disappointed but not surprised. He had always been a very discreet official.
I knew that a simple reconstruction of the final battle was not enough. Through friends who had been active in the antiwar movement I applied for a visa to Vietnam, but was put off; perhaps later, when the situation stabilized. No one was getting in then.
I told my wife, I can't end this book.
You have got to let it go, she said.
The book? I asked incredulously. She couldn't know what she was asking.
The war, she said furiously.
Copyright © 1995 Wayne Karlin, Le Minh Khue and Truong Vu. All rights reserved.
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