EMERSON : Winners and losers (előszó)
AUTHOR'S NOTE
James Greenfield, the foreign editor of The New York Times, assigned me to Vietnam in 1970. I had long wanted to go back there to write about the Vietnamese, been refused by other editors, and at last was able to do it. I had been to Vietnam, to the south only, in 1956, wanting to know how to be a journalist. For fifteen years it was a country that haunted and held me. It still does; I do not expect to recover. During the nineteen-sixties I lived in France, where I had Vietnamese friends of different political persuasions who taught me so much. As a foreign correspondent for the Times, I saw something of armies and weapons in 1968 during the civil war in Nigeria and again in Northern Ireland in 1969. It was not so unusual to be a woman war correspondent in Vietnam; the great Martha Gellhorn was there before me and so was the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. During my two years there, Kate Webb of United Press International and Elizabeth Pond of the Christian Science Monitor were both captured and released.
In the writing of this book, and now even when it is over, I have thought often of Nguyen Ngoc Luong, a Vietnamese born in Hanoi who went to Saigon before 1956. I miss him very much. He was an interpreter, guide, friend. There were cruel days for us both, but none more dreadful than the day in 1970 when Luong had to probe, then translate, what the villagers of My Lai told us about the massacre. With us was the former GI Ron Ridenhour, whose letters to officials and legislators in Washington, D.C., eventually led to the investigation of the slaughter. He had come back that year, wanting to be a journalist. Now Vietnam is united, and on the March 16 anniversary this spring of the deaths of more than five hundred people there, the names have been put on the graves and honor done to them.
Ron Ridenhour had never walked on that ground, never seen those faces. He had flown over the site after the killings. I interviewed him at length for this book, on how his life had changed, but it is he who someday will write his own story. No one must tell it for him.
For the very same reason, I have omitted long interviews with two Vietnam veterans, both black. They are Gussie L. Davis, Jr., who is in prison, and Thomas Aiken, who was badly wounded when the 1st Air Cavalry was sent to Khe Sanh to relieve the Marines. Because of his wounds, his fear of blindness in the injured eye and his immense agitation, Mr. Aiken could not behave as the Army required. He was punished with a bad discharge. It disqualified him from any benefits, including free medical treatment at a New York V.A. hospital. He was unemployed and also declared ineligible for any assistance. He did lose the eye: it was taken out in a Queens hospital for no fee. Thanks to David Addlestone of the Military Lawyers Defense Committee in Washington, D.C., and the efforts of a few others, Mr. Aiken's discharge was changed and the benefits are now his. I think he would rather have his eye. Both these men have shown me what I might never have seen, or really believed, or fully understood.
I went to Cambodia to cover the war there, but there is no mention of it in these pages because an account of the war in that once lovely country is being written by a man who knows it better than anyone. If, years from now, Americans are willing to read any books about the war being so quickly forgotten, let them be The Village of Ben Suc and The Military Half by Jonathan Schell. They tell everything. In March 1974 a silly book review – at least it made a few of us laugh over its naiveté – in the Times by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt began: "Quick – before your mind fogs up at the prospect of yet another report on Vietnam..." But Mr. Lehmann-Haupt can be ignored. Let the books be written so when all of us are dead a long record will exist, at least in a few libraries.
Nearly all the interviews I did were taped for accuracy. I wanted to hear the perceptions of people. If some have made mistakes about the history in their own lives, so be it. Some people rambled; sometimes I have let them.
I am grateful to Robert Fink of Washington, D.C., for his help and no less so to Dawn Stewart and Adrienne Dolgin. Patrick Flood drove me thousands of miles to do interviews and never complained about it all taking so long. Once in Gould, Arkansas, when I was interviewing blacks and whites, the suspicions of some of the local whites were more than apparent. It made him a little nervous and he said he did not want to spend the night there. I told him he had the heart of a mouse. "Well, they'll ask you to sit down and rest while they take me off somewhere and break my legs," Mr. Flood, aged twenty-one, said. I had no answer.
Gloria Emerson
New York City
September, 1976
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