| March/April 2000
Vietnam:
An Intimate View of a People in the Midst of War
by
Doug Hostetter
VIETNAM marked a turning point in American
history. It is not that that war was essentially different- all wars
are an atrocity against humanity and the earth - but Vietnam was the first
war to be televised. It was very hard to romanticize and idealize a conflict
whose blood and gore were brought daily into the nation's living rooms.
But even with all the war coverage, most of us never encountered the beautiful
people and the ancient culture our war was devastating.
I became draft eligible after graduating from Eastern
Mennonite College in Harrisonburg, Virginia in 1966, in the middle of the
war. Like my Swiss Mennonite ancestors before me, I was unwilling to kill
for my country. I became a conscientious objector and volunteered for three
years of alternative service with the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC)
in Vietnam.I was sent as the first MCC volunteer to Tam Ky, a Central Vietnamese
village in the -middle of the war zone. My first task was to discover how
a pacifist could be relevant, perhaps even helpful, in the middle of a war.
When I asked refugee families
what they most wanted, they immediately replied: education for their children.
Rural schools in Quang Tin Province had been destroyed by the fightmg
two years earlier, when the US and the Saigon government lost control
of the countryside to the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF)--or
as the Americans called them, the Vietnamese Communists or VC. I realized
that education, unlike most gifts, enhances human dignity, and will. serve
its recipient well regardless of who wins the war. Education is also the
gift for survival-the one thing you can take with you, even when all else
is lost.
| ... Children at both
ends of the town And on all of the small paths Greet you like a
friend,
You have come here from a strange horizon You have suffered with
my suffering country You have wept blood because bombs and bullets
have clawed my
country.
"Ambassador
of Love"
(written to a close friend)
by Doan Tuyen Chou
Journal entry, Tam Ky, August 8,1968
Doug Hostetter is Interfaith/International secretary for the Fellowship
of Reconciliation.
Special thanks to Dolores Gunter for her photo research and coordination. |
I recruited Vietnamese high school students to teach
unschooled refugee children how to read and write Vietnamese. We started
using empty government schools during the three summer months. Later we
expanded to any village (on either side) which would supply space for
study, and room and board for the high
school student who came to teach. In the first two years of the
program, more than ninety Vietnamese high school students taught over
3,000 six- to eight-year-old children how to read and write their own
language.
The photos and journal entries in this essay (with the
exception of one picture from a later trip to Hanoi) are all from my three
years in Tam Ky. They are an intimate glimpse of my friends and neighbors,
on both sides, during the painful war years of 1966-1969.
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I
helped to bury one of my students today. It was one of the saddest
experiences I have ever had.... I had been to his house to visit
him and his family over a year ago, this was the first time I had
been back .... His father pointed to the holes in the wall ....
The motto with the three traditional blessings of the Chinese cultures-happiness,
prosperity, and long life-had been cracked in the blast and still
hung broken on the wall.
Journal
entry: "Another Goodbye"
Tam Ky, August 26,1968
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Years
ago, still small, I lost my mother.
Everyone wept around me, but I grieved in silence,
Ignorant that to relieve sorrow,
A flood of tears must fall.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Vietnamese poet
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I
stopped in at the reception center today and there were out 200
new refugees from Hiep Duc. They told how 11 of their rice had been
killed by airplanes that dropped poison from the sky and how their
homes had been destroyed by bombs and artillery. One old man with
a wispy beard got all excited when he heard me talking in Vietnamese.
He said "I wish the Americans on operations were like him, they
come up and say 'You V.C?, You V.C.?' and I don't know what they
are saying and they don't understand me. Mr. American, what is V.C.?
Journal
entry: Tam Ky, Novemebr 24, 1968
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The
scholar comes first and the farmer, second.
But when the rice bag is empty, The farmer is first and the scholar
comes second.
-Vietnamese
proverb |
In
wartime human lives are so cheap,
With sword and fire sowing death.
Nguyen Du
19th century Vietnamese poet
As
long as the grass grows, here will be those who resist.
Nguyen Trung Truc
19th century Vietnamese poet
Saigon Government (ARVN) soldiers on parade, Tam Ky.
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