Every day

Something that happened 52 years ago.

One step at a time. Put this foot in front of that foot, that foot in front of this foot. Forget about the heat. Ignore the pain that started five minutes after you moved out, the pain in the lower back, the pain that worked its way up your back, to your shoulders and you want to arch your back and transfer the pain somewhere else, except there is no other place, because every place hurts. The hurt is the same pain you put up with yesterday, the day before yesterday, the same pain you will put up with tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. You will put up with the pain until the day, the hour, the minute you climb the ramp and get on the plane that takes you home. And when you climb the stairs on the ramp, you will take the pain with you, a passenger on your back.

You put up with the pain because you don’t have a choice. You put up with the pain just as you put up with the cuts and scrapes and bruises, chipped fingernails and the dirt and grime beneath what’s left of your fingernails, the dirt and grime that won’t wash out maybe until you’re in a place where civilized people don’t have that dirt, that grime.

Every part of you hurts, places you didn’t think could hurt. Your feet and ankles and knees, sure. You walk for a living, don’t you? That’s your sole purpose, to go from here to there, and the only way to get there is to walk. Every part that supports your feet and ankles and knees -- those parts hurt. Your fingers hurt. Your ears hurt. And your eyes, when you haven’t had enough sleep, when you know you could sleep all day and most of the night.

Every part of you hurts, okay?

Ben Nunnery one day said, “My face hurts, Man. My face hurts.”

Vietnamese learn 1945-75 war not what they were told

“…Mr. Le Duan, the leader of the Communist Party who is now acknowledged by historians as the primary architect of the war effort within North Vietnam’s leadership, said in closed meetings that the ultimate goal of the war was to establish communism all over Vietnam. As recently declassified documents show, Mr. Duan repeatedly insisted that the war was fought not only in Vietnam’s interests but also for the Soviet bloc.

“Mr. Duan was no Soviet lackey. Recent studies by historians Lien-Hang Nguyen and Pierre Asselin show that he rejected the advice of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who supported peaceful coexistence between the two Vietnams. In fact, Mr. Duan ordered the arrests of many high-ranking Party members and hundreds of their supporters who opposed his risky military campaign known as the Tet Offensive. They spent years in prison, being accused of spying for the Soviets. This was the civil war in North Vietnam that was only recently revealed.”

…

“The civil war in this sense did not cease in 1975, but much later, in the late 1980s, when the Party abandoned collectivization, legalized private enterprises, loosened the ideological yoke on writers, and lifted restrictions on international travel for ordinary people.”

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/159046

Link at http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/

Former Army doctor returns former North Vietnamese soldier’s arm

(Creepy. Couldn't the doc have kept ears or something?)


MIKE IVES, Associated Press

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — An American doctor arrived in Vietnam carrying an unlikely piece of luggage: the bones of an arm he amputated in 1966.

Dr. Sam Axelrad brought the skeletal keepsake home to Texas as a reminder that when a badly injured North Vietnamese soldier was brought to him, he did the right thing and fixed him up. The bones sat in a closet for decades, and when the Houston urologist finally pulled them out two years ago, he wondered about their true owner, Nguyen Quang Hung.

The men were reunited Monday at Hung's home in central Vietnam. They met each other's children, and grandchildren, and joked about which of them had been better looking back when war had made them enemies. Hung was stunned that someone had kept his bones for so long, but happy that when the time comes, they will be buried with him.

"I'm very glad to see him again and have that part of my body back after nearly half a century," Hung said by telephone Monday after meeting Axelrad. "I'm proud to have shed my blood for my country's reunification, and I consider myself very lucky compared with many of my comrades who were killed or remain unaccounted for."

Hung, 73, said American troops shot him in the arm in October 1966 during an ambush about 75 kilometers (46 miles) from An Khe, the town where he now lives. After floating down a stream to escape a firefight and then sheltering in a rice warehouse for three days, he was evacuated by a U.S. helicopter to a no-frills military hospital in Phu Cat, in central Binh Dinh province.

"When I was captured by the American forces, I was like a fish on a chopping-board," Hung said last week. "They could have either killed or spared me."

When Hung got to Axelrad, then a 27-year-old military doctor, his right forearm was the color of an eggplant. To keep the infection from killing his patient, Axelrad amputated the arm above the elbow.

After the surgery, Hung spent eight months recovering and another six assisting American military doctors, Hung said. He spent the rest of the war offering private medical services in the town, and later served in local government for a decade before retiring on his rice farm.

"He probably thought we were going to put him in some prisoner-of-war camp," Axelrad said. "Surely he was totally surprised when we just took care of him."

As for the arm, Axelrad said his medic colleagues boiled off the flesh, reconstructed the arm bones and gave them to him. It was hardly common practice, but he said it was a reminder of a good deed performed.

The bones sat in a military bag in Axelrad's closet for decades, along with other things from the war that he didn't want look at because he didn't want to relive those experiences.

When he finally went through the mementos in 2011, "it just blew me away what was in there," Axelrad said at a hotel bar in Hanoi early Sunday, hours after arriving in Vietnam with his two sons and two grandchildren on Saturday evening. "That kind of triggered my thoughts of returning."

It had taken a little luck for Axelrad to reunite Hung with his amputated arm. He traveled to Vietnam last summer — partly for vacation, but also to try to find the man.

He said he wasn't sure Hung was still alive, or where to begin looking for him. Axelrad visited An Khe but didn't ask for him there because he assumed Hung would be living in northern Vietnam, where he grew up.

By chance, Axelrad toured the old Vietnam War bunker at the Metropole Hotel in downtown Hanoi. His tour guide was Tran Quynh Hoa, a Vietnamese journalist who took a keen interest in his war stories.
Hoa later wrote an article in a widely read Vietnamese newspaper about Axelrad's quest to return the bones to their owner. Hung said his brother-in-law in Ho Chi Minh City read the article and contacted the newspaper's editors.

Hoa, now a communications officer for the International Labour Organization, arranged Monday's reunion in An Khe, near the coastal city of Qui Nhon, and served as an interpreter for the veterans.

"It's just time for closure," Axelrad said a day before the meeting.

Hung was surprised to be reunited with his lost limb, to say the least.

"I can't believe that an American doctor took my infected arm, got rid of the flesh, dried it, took it home and kept it for more than 40 years," he said by telephone last week from his home. "I don't think it's the kind of keepsake that most people would want to own. But I look forward to seeing him again and getting my arm bones back."

Hung served Axelrad and his family lunch, shared memories and reflected on all the time that had passed. Axelrad said he was pleased to learn where and how Hung had been living for so many years, and to meet his children and grandchildren.

"I'm so happy that he was able to make a life for himself," Axelrad said.

http://hosted2.ap.org/ARLID/Oddities/Article_2013-07-01-Vietnam-Missing%20Arm/id-dcab97d7bc8c4c939a5a29a6552974c7

The things that mattered

A long time later, I would think:

There was about the place a savagery that took all who entered, a tempestuous rage that clawed at the calm hearts of reasonable men. On some, the depravity fell as a light cloak, to be discarded when the sun of civilization again touched their shoulders. On others, the claws sank deep, darkening hearts and minds, freeing the barbarity that had so long drooled inside.

John held down the gook and said, "Kill him! Kill him, goddammit!" and I slid my knife beneath the gook’s ear and into his brain. It was an easy thing to do, a reasonable action of the time. That I threw up what was in my stomach made the event no less necessary. That John threw off the gook and fell to his hands and knees, cursing what we had done, made the killing no less reasonable. By then we had thrown up or thrown off all that was unnecessary. There were things that mattered and things that did not, and of those that did not matter, we gave little thought.

I cannot remember the things that did not matter. To live mattered, and all the words and pictures and reasons that made survival our only goal.

We thought of young women, daydreamed about girls we had known, and we put the thoughts into words, although the words did no justice to our dreams. Even those of us who in lives past, unnecessary lives, had the ability to speak our thoughts, now discovered our words lacked explanation.

We would say, "There was this girl . . . " and talk of eyes and breasts and legs, but even in our own minds we couldn't see her, not even a rational picture, only a dim, faceless figure that could have been any girl. We could speak of, say, a 1966 GTO convertible, baby blue, leather seats, 389-CID, four-in the-floor, and those to whom we talked knew. They had seen pictures of the car we described.

There were other pictures, other words. Experts of food never eaten, of whiskies and liquers never tasted, we described to each other restaurants never visited, of tables with white cloths and chairs padded soft. In those restaurants in Baltimore or Chicago or Dallas, the waiters and waitresses were mannered and sought only to please the customers.

We lied to each other, but those lied to knew the meaning of the words. In a sense, our tales transcended truth. We spoke in dreams, in hopes, of those things we wanted most, and when those dreams became, in our words, things we had once possessed, each of us understood.

Girls and women we talked of most. Our girls were tawny brown, ebony black, creamy white, with hair blonde or brown or auburn or black as midnight sky. Their eyes were green or blue or brown or black, their breasts perfect and carried high. All those girls were slim waisted. Their legs were long and their thighs round and soft to our touch.

Had those girls been there, in reality and not in our minds, we would have stared, afraid to touch. We would have stood outside their aura, basked in the smiles they gave us, sniffed the scent of purity. What we wanted was to have them near, to be near them.

To lie between their legs was, had we admitted truth to ourselves, secondary to simple nearness. What we would have done was hold their hands, touch our dirty scaled fingers to their clean skin.

Lust played no part in our dreams. There was passion, but that would have been eased had we the opportunity to only rest beside the girl in our dreams, feel her arms around us, know that when she stroked our temples and said, "It's okay," she spoke truth.

It all seems so easy now, so logical, because it was done. There was no thought to it, no conscious decision made; rather a reaction to an action. When I had the opportunity to think about what we had done and what was done to us, I remembered it in terms of that physics class in high school, one of Newton's laws, that for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. And that was the way things were. The gooks fired, we returned fire. On ambushes, we waited, and when the gooks sometimes came down the trails, we blew them away with Claymores and killed them with machine guns and rifles and grenade launchers, just as they killed our friends with mines and mortars and machine guns and rifles. In that, we all were equal.

It was easy and logical, easier now to think of than to do, but equally logical then and now.

Hey, there was a war going on

In the summer of 1967 the flight operations officer one day said, “Sgt. Merriman, a helicopter is going to Vung Tau today at 1400 and I don’t want to see you for three days.” Vung Tau was a former French resort city at Cape St. Jacque.

I spent my two-plus days enjoying the sight of the ocean, meals in a real restaurant and the low cost of beer.

On the third day I went to the airstrip and asked to use a phone to call base camp to find out when my ride would arrive. A Vietnamese woman showed me to an office.

Now, at base camp we were in the partly Stone Age in telephoning. A caller picked up the phone and waited and after a while someone at the main switchboard would plug in and say “Long Gaio” and the caller would say “Blackhorse Three-Zero,” or whatever.

So I was in the office at the airstrip. I picked up the phone. I waited for an operator. And waited. And waited.

The woman in the office walked over and gave me a “You dumba$$ Americans” look, stuck a finger in the O and slowwwly turned the dial, all the time giving me that look.

I felt like a dumba$$ American.

I mean, I had traveled all the way across the Pacific to save the Vietnamese from the perils of Communism, but I didn’t know how to dial a freaking telephone.