THE
FINAL CONCLUSION
By Ralph Schoenman .
What is a war crime? That question has been put to me many times over-recent years by fellow Americans and, I might say, by fellow Englishmen, ‘amongst whom I have lived for eight years. "Propaganda" is the instinctive response of those in the West confronted with the facts of the war waged by, the United States against the Vietnamese Revolution. It is a curious response.
I arrived in Vietnam on, February. 21, sent by Bertrand Russell, to acquire firsthand data.in: support of. David Mitchell's stand against the draft, in support of his. clear call for resistance by Americans to the use of -poison gas, . poison chemicals, torture and the bombings -of hospitals. Who, in.his heart, can say that these are not reakities..with which we have. lived for several -years? “The American mass media. themselves have: unsélf-consciously documented a war of atrocity and oppression, an experimental war. I traveled in five of the provinces.during bombardment and I saw the result of 650 sorties per week, south.of Thanh Hoa, in Ha Tay, Nam Ha, Ninh Binh and the:surrounds of Hanoi. We: traveled by night, a team of eight, including doctors and photographers. The radio carried the poems continually recited by Vietnamese in a living oral tradition, applying recitative to the experience of recent days. The poetry of Vietnam and its people. an
In village after village I listened to the accounts of the survivors. and surveyed the. results of napalm. One afternoon, rummaging in the rubble of a school.,.I picked out stained pages from the lesson book of a twelve-year-old Vietnamese child:
Page 2: "The Little Korean Child.--
a poem composed by a Vietnamese poet
at the time of the Korean War:
‘Where is your mother?
' There is nobody around to ask. Everywhere
there are but fire and smoke.
Page 9: "Memories |
| ‘I am losing my father. I am losing my
- mother..! (Excerpts from the story of a
young girl. )"
Page 15: "The last-.days of Huang Van Thu (executed
by the French in the early forties)"
Page 1: "Our hands can do everything.’
Page 5: "Land Reclamation Song"
-B- ©
Page 24: "How he faced the firing squad."
Page 19: "Grammar: subordinate clauses, auxiliary verbs"
. Page 10: "Human efforts can turn arid soil into rice. On this village and school were dropped thousand-pound bombs | and lazy dogs. At another part of the village I picked up a lazydog bomb. This was Van Dinh hamlet, Van Hon village, Thieu Hon dis- _ trict, February 26, 1966. A lazy dog contains 250 slivers of razor-: sharp steel. There are forty such bombs in a cylinder. 10,000 pieces of steel in a sudden storm of hail, lacerating anyone exposed Or © seeking shelter from the half-ton bombs. 10,000 cylinders of lazydog bombs have fallen:-on Thanh Hoa province since April, 1965. 1,281 rockets have been used. 37 guided missiles have been launched against villages in Thanh Hua province. 3,000 bombs alone were dropped on ~ Ham Rong bridge, which still stands. Roads, means of communication, schools, hospitals, the tuberculosis clinic, sanatoria and old-age rest houses have been bombed in’ Thanh Hua province. T visited all. "Usually, my friends go to school every day. We like to | sing 'Ha Tinh Quang Binh.' My friends are Nhung, Ky, Chau, Nguyen. They are thirteen, twelve, fourteen, twelve. They are all girls. I have a friend who is a '. boy, named Liem. He was thirteen. My friend Ky liked to play. She would say: "You go first. You go quickly, or I will step on your heel.'" (Rhymes in Vietnamese. 7 "When the bombs fell I saw Ky's bowel and intestine come out of her body. Her head: blew away..Her arm and leg blew away. Nhung was buried alive and was dug out. dead. Chau's teeth were broken by stones which shat- © tered them. Nguyen was buried alive. Liem was beheaded. My friend Phuong laughs sometimes; cries; speaks without knowing what she says; she screams; she is twelve. I have pains in my spine. Canh and Khoa had their chests crushed. "When I’ become a grown-up I would like to be a teacher. I would like to ask you, uncle, to convey my best wishes of good health to my American small friends."
Nguyen Thai Mao was recently twelve. She has been strafed frequently on the way to school. She spoke of a bombing attack on her village on February 9 of this year. Her: teacher, a young man of 24, named Thai Van Nham:
"Fragments of clothing, books and furniture flew so high that all in the vicinity knew the school was bombed. Students were blasted. Many were buried in the earth. I was among those buried alive. I was dug out later and was brought to consciousness. There © was nothing left but a bomb crater, 55 feet wide and 2l feet deep. Everything was levelled. Parts of the
-. ¢hildren were: protruding from the: earth. We found their iYheads twenty yards away. Their bowels and. intestines
“. were scattered everywhere. Two of my children were
spattered on a palm tree and hung from it. Children.
were pressed to the trench walls. Blood filled the
= trenches...Children clutched. their books tightly to
- ‘their chests. The books were smeared in blood and ink..
‘Some: of them could speak a little when dug out. Then
-~ “blood shot :from their mouths, due to their crushed
~~. organs’ and) they died.’ One little girl, Hoang Thai Nha,
“ twelve, could only be. recognised and identified by her
rubber shoes. Six:of:the children were too mutilated
to be recognisable to the parents.. One dug out became
conscious and asked how many of her friends died before
haemorrhaging. Little Hung's body was found on top of
unfinished poems: he -had written, along with a notebook
‘of paintings. He had-.aspired to be a poet, painter and
“composer. His poems, - paintings and songs are all. Signed:
‘Composer ; Dinh™ Hung. * He was thirteen.
The bombing of Huong Phuc “school on February 9 sis one.event: a daily event for the past fourteen:months in Vietnam. .For Vietnam, 650 sorties per week with tonnages :in excess :of: those used during the Second World War, with napalm and:fragmentation bombs, the targets and the victims are the population at large. There’ are no other targets. The. population knows ‘that the United States wishes to impose so ghastly a price in national suffering that the will. to resist will be broken. The will to resist is like ozone. after.a bombing storm in Vietnam. In every village, production ‘teams work | round the clock to increase food output: Militia-units, under the command of nineteen-year-old girls, -mount the most exposed positions to fire at diving jets with rifles and what amount to little more than muskets. Old machine guns are mounted on the very bridges ~— subject to attack. The militia do not take shelter. When American pkanes are at the climax of their dive, bullets fly from thousands of' rifles and machine guns and the whole population is in arms, and everyone who can hold a rifle is firing one. ,
The destruction of Thanh Hoa tuberculosis sanatorium’ isa study in horror: the patients strafed as they ran, many. haemorrhaging as they carried those too weak: to.escape. Red Cross flags.had been flying, but everything was destroyed. Patients, X-ray machines, medicines -- everything. Three successive waves of attacks on separate days were launched in case any survivors sheltered in the ruins. The old-age and invalid home in Thanh Hoa was leveled. It is a scene of vast craters, filled with water, and the shells of buildings. Mosaics litter the ground -- lovely pieces of the floor and walls in soft watercolour design. Out of one crater I picked the tattered pages of books which had once been part of the old-age. home library. Here, those Vietnamese who had lived through three. generations of struggle against the Japanese, the French and the Americans had retired in the ill health of old age to rest. Many of them were feeble through years of brutal labour before the victory of Dien Bien Phu released them from feudalism. Even in their
old age, the fruits of their struggle were denied them and, like the children of the schools, their soft bodies were smashed and splattered. One very famous hero of the resistance to France, recuperating from severe wounds, went insane in this final attack.
But the Vietnamese have endured more, for they have fought from the forests since 1940, and the Resistance was unable to enter the villages until the French were driven out. The population is locked together with that bond of profound self-esteem and mutual regard which a child of the West has never had, and cannot understand without encountering it. Their self-respect is based upon the dedication they see around them. All struggle, all sacrifice and what we understand by heroism comprise the minutiae of everyday existence.
Just as a peace mission from Mussolini would have been absurd to any Englishman in 1940, and just as negotiations ‘with Hitler while the bombs fell-on London and Coventry would have: been treated as an insult to the self-respect and intelligence of every Englishman, so to the Vietnamese the suggestion that they must negotiate with the United States, while American troops are in occupation of their country, is but another expression of Western arrogance and racism. It does not matter whether the. Communist party, U.S.A., the Soviet Union or President Johnson request them to betray their struggle, the response will be much the same. They have negotiated once in 1954 when they abandoned half of their country, having liberated it, for the sake of international considerations which proved to be illusory and which led to twelve years of horror. When Ho Chi Minh says: We will’ go on another five, ten, fifteen or twenty years, if necessary, he is not indulging in rhetoric. The Vietnamese resistance will not be ended. The Vietnamese war will be-ended when the American resistance has made it impossible for it to: go on.
In my’ talks with Ho Chi Minh and Pham Van Dong, we discussed mainly the state of awareness in the West and the quality and level of understanding of Western resistance to American imperialism. I saw the prime minister at seven in the morning following the night of my arrival. The warmth and the comradeship which were shown me moved me, because I retained the terrible feeling that I was an American, moving amongst the victims of the crimes of my government and obliging them to repeat for me their everyday. experience, so I might write it down. Pham Van Dong knows the West, our culture and our history. Ho Chi Minh is’ ‘at home in the streets of London New York and Paris.
In 1940, England was under the Blitz. To the English, this was their finest hour, because, after a few months of bombing of a few cities the expectation on the part of others that the great power of Germany would intimidate the British was not fulfilled. The English were proud and indignant at the expectation that they would yield. They had not fought for 25 years against three vast and powerful invaders. The English countryside was not razed with . chemicals and gas. The cities had not been saturated with jelly- . gasoline. An occupying army had not placed 59 percent of the rural
-l1-
population in forced: labour ¢amps. One hundred million pieces of razor-sharp steel had not rained on heavily populated East Anglia. No, only a few cities were bombed for a few months, but Churchill said::. "We will fight them on the beaches. We will fight them in the streets..-We will fight them with curbStones. We ‘will fight them with our. bare. hands . We will never surrender. ' a
. President Ho Chi Minh and Prime Minister Pham Van Dong are > life- Tong revolutionary leaders, internationalists, literally men of the world. They know our history. What is it that makes such resistance. and such sentiménts permissible for Englishmen after a few months of bombing, but impermissible for an agrarian people withstanding the invasion and atrocity of the United States of America? The answer is a simple answer. I feel it passionately. Since my return to the West. The answer is racism. The racism of imperialism, which is in the air we breathe.
More Vietnamese died between 1954 and 1959, the years of "peace," than in the years 1960 to 1966, the years of popular resistance in the south and American bombardments in the north. But thé® Vietnamese, from the president and prime minister to the villagers” who spoke to me of their sufferings, are patient and exceedingly” a gentle. Nothing was so harrowing as their gentleness. :
They know that our people have been corrupted. Americans’ and Europeans have been the beneficiaries of the exploitation against which the people of Vietnam struggle. Even while they expect~little from us, they are moved and grateful for the little they receive, for they see the birth of an American resistance as one of the rewards for their sacrifice. An American emergence and an American . consciousness of our place in the world and our relationship to our: rulers will be the gift of the people of Vietnam to the people of the United States.
It would be a mistake to think that we do them any favour, and the pity..of the, horror which has béén borne by Vietnam is not. a pity deserved. by the Vietnamese. There is nothing pitiful about.’ them. .In their very suffering they are heroic, because it is not" passivity - which marks them, but sacrifice and resistance.
The pity lies in the cruel historic reality which renders the American people apathetic and acquiescent as this horror is perpetrated in their name.
I feel certain that the American emergence of the next generation, and the generation after that, will trace its origins to the quarter-century Revolution in Vietnam: that great and liberating event to which we owe more than solidarity.
“ALEXANDER DEFENSE COMMITTEE