Eyewitness Account
LIFE IN NORTH VIETNAM UNDER THE AMERICAN BOMBS
[The following account of a trip in north Vietnam in the area close to the seventeenth parallel appeared in the April 16-17 issue of the Paris daily Le Monde.
[The author, Dr. Jean-Michel Krivine, is head surgeon at the Lariboisiére hospital in Paris. He went to Vietnam as a member of the second investigation team of the International War Crimes Tribunal.
{A few statements made by Dr. Krivine upon his return to Paris have appeared in the daily American press but were evidently torn out of context and badly distorted.
[Le_ Monde states that the following is taken from the journal which Dr. Krivine kept of his trip. The translation is by World Outlook. ]
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"Bac-si (doctor) Krivine, do you know how to ride a bicycle?"
It was four p.m. Since last evening we have been in the province of Ha- Tinh, 350 kilometers south of Hanoi. Another 300 kilometers to go if we were to take the most direct route, RN 1.
This morning I was awakened by three simultaneous sounds -- gunfire from the Seventh Fleet (six shots, silence, another six shots, etc.), American jet planes passing very high overhead, finally children reciting their lesson in a kindergarten a dozen meters from our room. We are staying in a rambling hotel in the open countryside surrounded by rice paddies and straw-thatched huts.
In traveling, we have to wait for nightfall and utilize heavy, highcentered military vehicles with fourwheel drives -- like our command-car of Soviet manufacture which appears heavy enough to go anywhere. In the daytime, planes can spot the trucks and it is better then to go on foot or bicycle.
We left in a single file. There were a dozen of us, accompanied by Dr. Thien, assistant director of the province's health department. Along the paths we were regarded with curiosity -- few Westerners come here -- by peasants troting with heavily loaded shoulder poles, youths in "colonial hats" covered with leaves, children astride their buffaloes.
We stopped in front of a heap of bricks and tiles that had once been the Huong-Khe district hospital. A young girl approached my guide and whispered something in his ear. The guide laughed. "She asked me if you weren't an American pilot," he said. "If you were there were a couple of things she wanted to tell you!"
We straddled our bikes again and went to the province's hospital at Ha- Tinh. Everything had been razed to the ground. There were only craters, bricks and broken tiles at the foot of broken walls. This modern, 300-bed establishment was destroyed by bombs dropped in 1965 during eighteen attacks, I was told. Quite calmly, Dr. Thien said that all nine hospitals in the province had been destroyed. Nonetheless, they were continuing to function in the countryside, staffed with their regulation personnel in distant places. Moreover I will be given the opportunity to visit these establishments.
Here were other devastated buildings. A grade school, a big brick building designed for 1,500 pupils, was left with only its walls standing. To the right of it, a normal teachers school was in total ruins.
In the evening we left for the province of Quang-Binh. After rolling along for some hours, lights out, on unrepaired roads, our truck had to stop. Voices could be heard, an animated conversation... An official of the escort explained:
"Impossible to continue. We have to cross the Gianh and the ferry was damaged by_an explosion a couple of hours ago. An explosion, but not a plane. The comrades think it was a mine. It's 4 a.m. We'll have to stay nearby. We'll leave when the ferry is repaired."
After some inquiries, we ended up at a farm -- a floor of bare earth, brick walls, a tile roof. In the dim light of a Chinese oil lamp, I can make out a big clock, a sewing machine, a few chairs, a table and a green chest that must contain all the prized possessions of the family.
We were awakened at dawn by salvos from the Seventh Fleet, closer than usual. Helped by his wife, the head of the family had carried out "do-it-yourself" repairs. With earth, stones and galvanized iron, he had reinforced the roof. Interlaced bamboo poles strengthened two walls.
We started up a conversation. American planes had attacked this hamlet with fragmentation bombs and napalm in 1966. For several kilometers around, however, there were only rice paddies, fields and straw-thatched huts. A fragmentation
bomb fell within one meter of the home -the scars are visible on the walls of the house and a big branch on a nearby tree was cut in two. The couple and the three children had time to get inside. No one was injured.
A number of huts were set on fire by napalm, the traces are still visible in the fields.
We are to stay several days in the province of Quang-Binh, one of the most heavily attacked, since the seventeenth parallel is not far away. The planes come in regularly, shells from the Seventh Fleet, and, coming down toward Vinh-Linh shells from the ground artillery. But in all the places where I stopped (and some of them were unscheduled), I could see the peasants tending their fields, fishermen returning from the sea, children going to school, the sanitation service keeping up their work in an astonishingly efficient way, people smiling...
Thus we visited a fishing village attacked many times by a wide assortment of weapons of which I could see the Signs -- high-explosive bombs, fragmentation bombs, 20 mm. shells, napalm. Everything had been smashed and burned, but the inhabitants had built lower straw huts communicating directly with each through trenches and no one had left the area. Along the coast we saw a battleship of the Seventh Fleet. Overhead a reconnaissance plane circled. Separated into small groups, taking advantage of the protection of incompletely burned trees, we were able to reach the village.
Under a roof made of palm leaves, protected by a low wall, forty firstgrade pupils were listening to the teacher. When we entered, an eight-year-old girl gave the signal and the class began singing a patriotic song, clapping their hands in time. Then came games during the recess, the children conducting themselves in a disciplined way as is usual in a shelter.
To enter the community pharmacy, which is underground, it is necessary to get down on all fours. Inside, a young girl in a white smock was working. She had taken a preparatory course for six months and had been here since April 1966. She didn't want to leave her village. On three narrow shelves she had arranged her products, the variety of which was surprising -- antibiotics, analgesics, antidotes for diarrhea, traditional remedies based on plants. "We don't keep everything here," said the pharmacist. "My supplies are’ stored in several places. Besides that we have two pharmacies in the village with a dispenser in each one."
The community's infirmary is like- -449—
wise underground, but it is more spacious with its two wooden beds, its wardrobe, its table and chair. The twenty-year-old nurse, who received nine months training, likewise did not want to leave her village. She explained how she treated burns and shock. No one could deny her competence, her vivacity, and her sense of responsibility. She worked with three subordinate nurses under the guidance of an assistant physician. Altogether, in various shelters, the infirmary had eighteen beds. The case of this coastal village is not unique. In every community where we stopped, I found a center of this kind headed by one or two assistant doctors who had three years training and were helped by four or five nurses.
The road to Vinh-Linh is as muddy as you would want. Fortunately, the "shock brigades" responsible for keeping up communication routes had placed white sticks repainted each day when it rains. The young girls in charge of this work were with us -- they must keep each road open and utilizable all the time by a heavy truck moving with its lights out. During my trip we were never halted by an unrepaired road or blown up bridge. Sometimes it took us ten hours to travel 100 kilometers [62 miles]. The jolts might be impressive, but we got through.
Traveling to Vinh-Linh in this way is not exactly relaxing -- the command car looked like a ship plowing through a sea of mud. Imperturbably, the chauffeur drove through twelve hours of darkness, using a dim camouflaged headlamp. His hearing was as keen as his eyes —- despite the noise of his engine, he noted planes passing overhead. We finally came to deep trenches cut in the muddy ground. They led to a huge shelter of reassuring solidity.
The following day at noon, a truck took me to the Vinh-Linh provincial hospital for a visit. Ordinarily this is a "quiet" hour, but caution was called for just the same because the Americans often shift tactics. I could see the Ben-Hai River and the famous Hien-luong bridge. While he waited, the chauffeur patched up the truck's camouflage.
The hospital is totally destroyed. Great splashes of napalm frame the red crosses on the portico. I had already seen a spectacle of the same kind at Dong-Hoi in the province of Quang-Binh. According to a doctor, who accompanied me, the building, which had 250 beds and was completely isolated in the fields, was attacked eleven times in 1965. From this heap of ruins, I took a piece from the wall of the operating room on which napalm that had not burned was still sticking.
An extraordinary sight for the
foreign visitor -- the inhabitants appear ing more than four deaths when a hundred to go about their occupations tranquilly. homes in the village are burned, working Production is considered to be at least a centrifuge at 2,400 revolutions a minas important as the antiaircraft defense, ute through the friction of a bicycle and the cooperative, which had harvested wheel, taking heavy trucks across bamboo five tons of rice per hectare, was as bridges installed at night, to have alproud of this success as of its militia most completely wiped out malaria, cholwhich had brought down planes. The slogan era, trachoma...and illiteracy. "Hang on in the bomb craters and produce," has been taken so seriously that I saw old bomb craters in green slopes converted into ponds where the peasants raised fish. (The 43,000-pound bombs currently being used blast holes 28 meters in diaméter and eight to ten meters deep.) [About 90 feet wide and 36 to 33 feet deep.]
At the Viet-Duc hospital in Hanoi,
I watched an operation conducted by Dr.
Ton That Tung, a surgeon of worldwide
fame. He remained faithful to his old
French instruments. He told me the long
story of Vietnamese surgery, the diffi-
culties that were encountered. He said,
laughing: "They destroyed everything.
This calmness, this will to live Everything we built since 1954 is in ruins and to win, these treasures of ingenious- --_ hospitals, schools, factories, new ness...all this takes one's breath. Imag- homes, We don't have anything more to lose ine in Paris a "stomach" operation being except independence and freedom. But to performed without error in a bomb shelter keep that, believe me, we are ready to by the light. of a bicycle lamp, not hav- endure everything."
SARTRE