Tran Van Hay with Miss New Jersey - (a clipping from Stars and Stripes, circa 1969)
The five-year-old boy in the photograph is Tran Van Hay. I did not know his name until a friend still in Vietnam sent me the newspaper clipping after I’d returned from the war. When I first saw Tran, his abdomen was ripped open and his intestines were exposed and dangling outside of his abdominal cavity. I didn’t think he would live.
Besides the severity of the boy’s wounds, I remember the unbelievable stoicism he exhibited. Fully conscious, he stared at me with large eyes as I treated his wounds with another medic. He did not cry out in pain or fear and uttered not a whimper. A dust-off flew him to the 29th Evacuation Hospital where he was received at the triage unit and taken into the field hospital’s operating room for surgery. The Army’s medical evacuation system got him there in time to save his life.
I remember a lot of the casualties I treated. Tran’s wounds, age and his stoicism made him more memorable. By that time in the war, I was weary with despair at the severity of the broken bodies impossible to put back together and make whole again. Part of the malevolence of war is how easy it is to trip a booby trap, fire a round of artillery, drop a 500 pound bomb from a B-52, pull the pin and throw a grenade, and squeeze the trigger on an automatic weapon from a gunship, M-16, or an M-60 machine gun.
I don’t know what caused Tran’s wound. A bullet or piece of shrapnel sliced his abdomen open and his intestines spilled out. This boy’s picture puts a human face to one of the great tragedies of war—civilian casualties.
***
Before beginning this blog, I asked myself: What is my purpose in writing this? I wanted the column to be more than just an expression of moral outrage. Any comments of mine would only add a miniscule amount to the volumes already written.
Those of you who have been reading these blogs will know that I view empathy as a key component of what it takes to move beyond the psychological consequences of war. Perhaps an expanded sense of empathy would help prevent many of our wars to begin with, a greater sensitivity to what we have in common as opposed to focusing on differences. I don’t believe war is inherent in man because vast amounts of humankind are capable of leading peaceful lives without the slightest compunction to participate in war. Speaking for myself, seeing innocents wounded and killed in Vietnam gave me a greater sense of how much more alike than different we are. The same life-and-death tragedies repeated themselves over and over again. I experienced it as a U.S. Army medic on my side, saw it in the enemy we fought, and witnessed it in the civilians caught in the crossfire. Everybody suffered the consequences of war.
So why do we fight them? My side found reasons for going to war on the other side of the world. Citing communist expansion in the world, the domino theory prevailed. When communism proved less monolithic than suspected, holes developed in the theory. The U.S. became the bully imposing its deadly will on Vietnam, a poor country.
My sense on the ground was that the rice farmers in the villages of the Mekong Delta wanted to be left alone to grow and tend their crops. For an insightful look at how one village took hit after hit from both sides read When Heaven and Earth Changed Places by Le Ly Hayslip. Her family endured many tragedies. Magnify that across the entire country where Vietnamese combatants on both sides lost a combined total of one million dead. Nobody knows the total of civilians killed. Estimates are placed at another one to two million. Our dead totaled over 58,000.
Most of the guys I was with were draftees who were miserable being in Vietnam. Even most of the soldiers who enlisted did so because they had the draft hanging over their heads. Yet, the war continued. Once shots are fired and casualties mount, differences, not our common humanity, become paramount. The war became a quagmire for the United States and a brutal national tragedy for the Vietnamese. The suffering was immense.
***
At the end of my blog titled “Vietnam’s Mekong Delta,” I posted a Bill Moyer’s interview with Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That Moves. Using many U.S. military documents as the basis for his work, Turse delineates a depressing story of excessive force, domination and war crimes perpetrated by American units in Vietnam.
The first half of my own tour, December of 1968 through May of 1969, coincided with a Ninth Infantry operation called “Speedy Express,” initiated by the division’s commanding general to improve the unit’s kill ratio. The Ninth’s area of operations was the Mekong Delta and it was a period of high body counts. It also explains the number of civilian war casualties I personally witnessed. Many of the soldiers I was with felt trapped in a nightmare of bloodshed in a war that never seemed to form a purpose other than to kill more and more of an enemy who proved elusive. I can only imagine what many of the Vietnamese endured. The Viet Cong seemed to vanish into the terrain and villages at will, and our firepower chased after them. Civilians became dead VC on the gruesome charts kept at headquarters. Turse’s documented work, published in 2013, established that the tragedy at My Lai was not an isolated event. Maybe the murderous scale was greater than most, but the civilian carnage from the war is something that has stuck with me.
A child in Can Tho, Vietnam (1969)
I personally never witnessed a soldier take aim at a civilian and murder them. I did see the Cobra gunships unleash their deadly arsenal on a populated countryside. It is difficult to describe their firepower. At night, their tracers lit the sky with a solid red streak from the gunship, unseen in the dark, to the ground. Only every sixth round was a tracer. Even the nicknames of these killing machines were ugly—"Puff the Magic Dragon,” “Death Angel,” and “Spooky.”
During a four month stretch of “Speedy Express,” from January through April, 311,000 artillery rounds were fired in the Mekong Delta. The intense shelling had its own macabre description, “spray and slay.”
***
Ugly pressures mounted when body counts and kill ratios were used as measurements of success in Vietnam. Career officers at every level in the chain of command demanded tallied results in the form of dead bodies. Promotions depended on them, and this contributed to widespread abuses from inflated counts to listing civilian war casualties as dead and wounded VC.
It also established a serious “disconnect” between the goals of the average draftee wanting to survive his tour and go home, and career officers seeking promotions at any human costs, including soldiers under their command. I think most Vietnam veterans can relate to the differences between good and competent commanders and those who were obsessed with their own careers.
I remember an unusually candid conversation with a captain, a West Point graduate. I was on a field operation with Regional Forces and I sensed the officer appreciated the fact I exhibited a concern as a medic for the Vietnamese troops he was assigned to as an adviser. He seemed to have a good working relationship with the Vietnamese soldiers.
After discussing the medical issues he needed to know, the conversation turned more reflective. I was not used to having this kind of talk with an officer of that rank, but deep in the field, informal discussions were more likely to occur. The captain had given five years of active service to the army after having attended West Point for four. He’d had enough of Vietnam and the military. He was getting out when his tour ended. He looked forward to returning to his family and becoming a civilian. I sensed a wistfulness to his words, a thinly veiled regret at sacrificing a normal life with his wife and young children for a war effort that he no longer believed in. He didn’t say so directly, but I sensed things had gotten too crazy for him. Without any career ambitions remaining, and no longer believing in his country’s efforts in Vietnam, he faced a moral dilemma in commanding troops in the field. I think a lot of us felt the same, whether we could articulate it as young men or not.
***
My disconnect with the war began with the civilian war casualties. Our firepower, combined with the depraved leadership of some unscrupulous commanders, made it obvious we were maiming and killing the very people my government told us we were there to help. The way the real war was being conducted on the ground was being spun in absurd ways for public consumption by government officials. Dubbed the “Five O’clock Follies,” the daily news briefings in Washington were full of spin and misinformation.
I turned twenty in the war zone three months after arriving in Vietnam, not that far removed from the civics class on American government I was required to pass in order to receive my high school diploma. The teacher, a good one, stressed the importance of keeping the country’s democracy healthy by staying informed, difficult when the government and the military misled the public about the war and participated in cover-up after cover-up. Both institutions hid their own findings about the numbers of civilian war casualties. The military’s own records are full of “incidents” which were buried from public view.
So, what is the point of writing this column on civilian war casualties? Put a human face on the dead and wounded when numbers and statistics are bandied about. Each and every casualty, on all sides, is someone’s son, daughter, brother, or sister. Aunts and uncles, cousins, friends and neighbors all grieve each death. Whole communities feel the loss.
I hesitated to use the photo in the newspaper clipping from the Stars and Stripes where Miss New Jersey is posing with Tran Van Hay, the boy I first saw with his intestines ripped out of his abdomen. The caption is more spin. I find it embarrassing that the military had Miss New Jersey on a tour of Vietnam. Nothing was too crazy for the Nam.
I found Vietnamese children to be delightful. Smiles came easily to them even when poor and in a war zone. Sure, there were exceptions and much despair, kids filthy in their poverty and begging. I also witnessed twelve-year-old pimps jaded at a young age, haggling with soldiers over the price of laying with a prostitute.
Tran Van Hay would be fifty-five now if he is still alive. His memory has stayed with me for fifty years, my most memorable of many civilian war casualties. I hope he is well and having a good life.
Children in Providence Orphanage, Can Tho, Vietnam (1969)