Tea at the War Crimes Museum

Except for the fact that she is 55 years old and a woman, Novelist Mary McCarthy would be an Angry Young Man. Last year she reported from South Viet Nam, turning her fierce, polemic prose on everything she saw, particularly the Americanization of Saigon ("a gigantic PX") and the moral corruption that, in her view, followed. Now it is North Viet Nam's turn. Last week the New York Review of Books published the first installment of her account of a recent 18-day visit. She was a special guest of North Viet Nam, and it shows. Her report reads like the journal of a house guest in the home of an extremely touchy host: "I felt that it would be somehow impolite to express my curiosity in the form of a point-blank question; there are many questions one does not want to ask in Hanoi."

As a result, her impressions offer neither hard news nor political insight but some sharp feminine glimpses of enemy territory--and of Mary McCarthy herself. She likes her little comforts. "To my stupefaction," she writes, "there was hot water, plenty of it. . . At the Continental in Saigon, there was only cold water." Amid "other luxuries I found at the Thong Nhat Hotel were sheets of toilet paper laid out on a box in a fan-pattern." Since she was served "little cups of tea" almost everywhere she went, she wondered why she got tea at the War Crimes Museum but beer at the War Crimes Commission. "Perhaps I should have asked, but the Vietnamese are sensitive."

Grandma's Duster. What she did instead was speculate and compare her experiences with experiences in her past. "Jouncing along a highway deeply pitted by pellets from cluster bombs made me think of my childhood: bumpy trips in northern Minnesota; Grandma in a motoring hat and duster; and how each time we struck a pothole her immense white head, preceded by the hat, would bounce up and hit the car's canvas top." And "Meos, Muongs and Thais, in the mountains of the wild west, though they do not wear feathers, recall American Indians."

Miss McCarthy arrived in Hanoi two weeks before President Johnson restricted the bombing, and was nettled by the fact that she was hustled off to air-raid shelters up to six times a day because of the approach of U.S. warplanes. Still, some good resulted from the raids of the "air pirates." In one provincial town, for example, "you eat a fresh-caught carp under a red and white nylon canopy" that had been fashioned from a parachute from a shot-down U.S. warplane.

She reports cheerfully that "an alert was a social event: you saw new faces and welcomed back old friends. One day in the shelter I met the Danish ambassador to Peking, and another time a whole diplomatic dinner party." Of course, she admits, the hotel shelter was a pretty exclusive affair. No "ordinary Vietnamese," not even the hotel staff, ever showed up in it. As for the famed concrete-pipe shelters buried alongside roadways for the man in the street, they seemed to be "more a symbol of determination than places to scuttle to when the planes approached. 'There are toads in them,' a pretty girl said, making a face."

In a second installment, to be published June 6, she describes Hanoi "in glaring contrast to Saigon" as a clean, very clean city. "The sidewalks are swept, there is no refuse piled up, and a matinal sprinkler truck comes through, washing down the streets." In fact, she writes, "sanitation is almost a fetish, imbued with political fervor: wiping the slate clean." Still, Hanoi is a drab place where life is austere and strenuous; there is virtually nothing to buy in the stores; the central market is closed and few people eat in the restaurants; and as far as she could see, the only construction activity was repairing bomb damage.

Again and again, she returns to the bombing. The fiercer animals of Hanoi's zoo -- the lions and tigers -- have been set free in mountain forests, she was told, for fear that a U.S. air strike might turn them loose in the streets. "Nor -- excuse me -- is it unthinkable that the U.S. Navy or Air Force would consider bombing a zoo." After all, writes McCarthy, her hosts informed her that the U.S. had hit the model leper colony at Quyn Lap "not just once --which might have been an accident--but 39 times." She apologizes "for using North Vietnamese statistics, but the Americans have not supplied any."

Here and there, McCarthy could not help noticing "an awesome lot of military traffic," especially at dusk, the "headlights blinked on, the big trucks using only one, like the Cyclops." That did not disturb her. "I never asked exactly what was in the trucks or where the convoys were going. I did not want to feel like a spy." What did disturb her considerably, though, was a souvenir presented to her by the War Crimes Museum: a ring fashioned of metal scavenged from wreckage of a U.S. plane. Inscribed on the inside of the ring was the date the plane had been shot down. She could not throw it away; still she could not wear it. She had, she explains, a "physical aversion, evidently subliminal, to being touched by this metal."

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