A View from the Villages

THE WAR A View from the Villages Binh Thoi, not far from Saigon, was once a prosperous farm village with red-tiled roofs, gas lamps and fertile coconut and orange groves that stretched as far as the eye could see. U.S. troops and Viet Cong guerrillas left it a wasteland. Chu Thao, a teacher from nearby Bien Hoa, describes what happened: "Not a blade of grass survived. The surface of the earth was as flat as the forehead of a bald man. Here and there the trunks of fallen coconut palms lay on the edge of the ditches, and the dead bamboo stood with its naked stalks pointing up to the sky. The dull yellow and the ash-gray covered the earth and stretched like a mourning shawl toward the horizon."

Twice the farmers of Binh Thoi tried to raise earthworms in their scorched, chemically defoliated fields to see if anything could still grow there. Twice the creatures died--as had corn seeds, and even sturdy coconut shoots. Stubbornly convinced that the earth would revive, the farmers tried a third time. Early one morning, as soon as Regional Force troops had cleared the mines and booby traps set by the Viet Cong the night before, the village elders made their way to the small plot where the earthworms were waging their struggle to survive. Writes Chu Thao:

"Tu Lau asked in an anxious voice, 'What about them? Still alive?' The white-haired man replied, 'Yesterday they were.' Arriving at a piece of low, damp land near a stream, Nam Khom stooped and called to the others: 'You see? You see?' The crippled farmer let his crutches drop and sat down for a better look. On the surface of the damp earth, he saw traces of earthworms. He uttered a low cry: 'They are alive! Alive! This earth is not to be abandoned.'" The farmers' faith is described in one of 500 war vignettes recently submitted in an essay contest on nationalism sponsored by the Saigon daily Tieng Not Dan Toe (Voice of the People). The competition was the idea of the paper's 29-year-old publisher, Ly Quy Chung, a member of the National Assembly's lower house and a leading supporter of a neutralist "third force" settlement of the war. The winning essays, like Chung's editorial policies, tended to be antiwar and implicitly critical of the U.S. presence. But they are not primarily political documents. Many were written by teachers; but students, soldiers and workers, almost all from rural areas, contributed too. In language that often teeters between hope and resignation, they provide intensely human glimpses of the war as seen by the people who have known nothing else for three decades.

The Binh Thoi episode, entitled "Resuscitation of the Dead Earth," was suffused, as were several of the essays, with a reverence for the land. It won second prize in the competition. First prize (a tape recorder and encyclopedia set) went to Mrs. Tran Thi Huong, a 42-year-old schoolteacher in the Mekong Delta, for her account of a tragic refugee family. The family had moved to the author's village from a Viet Cong-infested hamlet across the river that had finally been declared a "free-fire zone" by the allies. The father, who stayed behind to tend coconut groves, was killed by a stray bullet. To support themselves, his widow and six children often crossed the river by boat to gather firewood and coconuts that could be traded for rice. On one such trip, their twelve-year-old daughter was struck by a shell fragment and lost a leg.

Just before returning from another forage, the widow noticed a stalk of bananas hanging from a tree. "Remembering how much her children liked cooked bananas, she waded into the ditch toward the tree," wrote Tran Thi Huong. "As soon as she hit the stem with her knife, a grenade at her feet exploded. The others in the group found her lying face-down on a death-warning board [a sign placed there by the Viet Cong warning civilians of booby traps]. It had fallen down under the grass so she did not see it."

Respecting the Rights. The strange, often unhappy relations between Vietnamese peasants and their defenders are described in an essay entitled "When the Americans Came to My Village," by a schoolteacher and part-time journalist in Long An province. The Americans who occupied the village for two months, says the author, were not very different from French troops who had been there in the '50s; both included blacks and whites, and "all of them were tall and very big." The Americans, however, were richer: "At their base they had incredible numbers of radios, tape recorders, cameras, cigarettes, etc." When pilfering by children and ne'er-do-wells became a problem, the author relates, U.S. military men ordered a house-by-house search to recover some of the goods. "The searchers were both Vietnamese and Americans, but in the eyes of the villagers, it was the fault of the Americans. This incident confirmed their belief that the foreigners had never respected the rights of the Vietnamese." When the Americans left, many of the villagers who had worked for them, usually by washing clothes, fled; they feared Viet Cong reprisals.

Another sort of fear--that of abandoning the scene of one's whole life --is described by an ex-South Vietnamese soldier in "The Old Man in the Free-Fire Zone." In a village near Danang that was being evacuated by the author's company, one old man, "as thin as a dry branch," refused to leave. He was determined to guard his tiny garden, the last remnant of the property handed down by his ancestors, and to wait for the return of his grandson, a soldier who had been missing for two years. His home would be his small underground bunker, a "living grave." Fourteen months later, the author returned on another operation. He writes: "The living grave had turned into a real one. Its entrance was covered with earth, and grass had begun to grow."

Top Essays. With the financial help of political friends, including General Duong Van ("Big") Minh, Publisher Chung awarded modest cash prizes to runners-up and ran the top 75 essays in his paper. Neither his pals nor his prose won him much favor with the regime of President Nguyen Van Thieu. Two weeks ago, on a charge of "promoting neutralism," Thieu's censors closed down the Voice of the People indefinitely. That action in itself is an eloquent essay on the war in Viet Nam.

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