We are All "Bui Doi"

No One was Really Invited to room 53 in the Hotel Continental except for two soldiers in armies at war with each other. One was an American, the other was North Vietnamese. I did not want people in that room. It was a place to take account, to listen to yourself.

The ceiling seemed more than 18 feet high and an old French fan hung from it. You could make those blades turn "vite" or "moins vite." I turned the fan on sometimes despite the sickly air conditioner with its rumbling cough. The walls of the room were green stucco that did not yield to any nail. I had brought the yellow seersucker bedspreads with me to Saigon and 11 books I never had time to read. (Once, waking, I lit a cigarette and then stubbed it out on Sainteny's Histoire d'une Paix Manquée. I don't know why.)

There was a palm tree in the room that I had bought in a Saigon market. I watered it too much.

On many mornings in Vietnam--I had 730 of them--I woke up in places far from Saigon and the trembling air conditioner and the shuttered high windows that were taped to prevent the glass from breaking in case of rockets or mortars. But when I was there, a room-boy brought me café au lait and two croissants. I ate breakfast like a woman with a wired jaw, so much did I dread having to leave that room and face it all.

I always sat in a huge green armchair --the furniture of the French colonials--by a window. There was a German down the hall who twice called me up very late at night, pleading to let him into my room because he needed to talk to someone, he said. I never saw him leaving his room in the mornings.

Once I came back to room 53 with a man's blood all over my shirt and skirt. The roomboys, lying on their mats in the hall, said nothing, for they had seen it all before: the correspondents rushing out in the mornings, thick necklaces of cameras and lenses over their chests, and coming back, much later, filthy and silent and spent.

The stains on me were the blood of Mr. Loan, a Vietnamese driver for a rented white car (an Oldsmobile?), who had been hurt on an April night when we were ambushed on Route One. It was not even eight P.M., but night in Vietnam began at five. It was I who had insisted he keep driving and he knew of no way to silence me. The big white car must have startled the Viet Cong who were mining the side of the road. They opened fire with B-40 rockets and AK-47s. We crawled out of the car--I was slow, fumbling for my bag--and hid in a slight gully by Route One. Mr. Loan and I lay very close together, so his blood wet pale-blue stuff of my dress. He was almost on top of me. Perhaps he could feel my tremors and hoped to comfort me. There had been no time earlier that day to put on blue jeans and sneakers and push back my hair with a scarf. The South Vietnamese had gone into Cambodia and we had followed them to Prasaut. Hours later I lay on the earth of Vietnam and let its insects explore and punish me. Sometimes when Mr. Loan lay too still, I thought the arm across my back belonged to a man who was dead.

The next morning I reached the hotel and, unable to bear those dark bloody blotches on me, I called the roomboys for salt, quick, salt. Sel. You always need it to wash out blood. A roomboy brought a bucket of ice instead. It was what the Americans always seemed to want.

Blood. Sometimes GIs in the field would talk about it. The enemy did not bleed enough and they almost complained about it.

"The dinks don't bleed--why, I see more blood when I cut myself shaving," a GI from North Carolina said. I did not correct him.

There were two yellowy plastic flowers on my desk in room 53. A Vietnamese woman had given them to me. I could not bear to throw them away. She was the wife of a middle-class retired civil servant named Ba. Their three sons were in the army.

Mr. Ba did not much like my questions. They were especially vexing for him in the evening when he wanted to watch The Fugitive or Bonanza on the AFVN (Armed Forces Vietnam Network) channel. His Japanese-made television set was put back into a large box when these programs were over.

Yes, yes, he said patiently, he and his wife were aware of protesters who demonstrated in America against the war.

"We think these must be worried mothers," Mr. Ba said.

I thought of him almost three years later, on Inauguration Day, when a crowd stood on Pennsylvania Avenue yelling, "Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!" as the girls on the floats and the bands marched by. No worried mothers there.

No one else ever slept in room 53 until I lent it to a GI named Dennis, whom I had found at Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon, where he was trying to sleep on a bench. There was a big rip in the canvas of one of his boots. He wanted a Coke, but you needed piasters in the airport restaurant. His flight was delayed for 36 hours. He was going home on leave and he wasn't sure he would ever want to live in the United States again, maybe Australia was the better place. I was quitting Saigon for a week, so I told him to use my room. I always felt like Mary Poppins among those huge, tired children in the U. S. Army and it was the country boys I liked the most. (But it did not always pay to be too nice, to show too much concern. I remember the GI who began to cry telling me why he wouldn't be sent on the line again, holding up the hand on which the tips of two fingers were gone. And even when they were much older, you had to be distant. There was the major who asked me to take off my scarf on a helicopter ride at night so my hair would blow.)

When I got back, Dennis' boots were there and a pile of his underwear and a copy of his travel orders. The roomboys had even washed his boots, not knowing that Americans were proud when their boots turned that reddish brown, for it showed, as nothing else could, what they had endured. He had not read the books by Giap or Bernard Fall or Jonathan Schell. There was a note on top of The Strawberry Statement and I kept it for a very long time. It was difficult to read. Punctuation confused Dennis.

I just want to thank you very much for helping me out. Also I like to say that just knowing theres people like you around to help the small guys has given me new faith in people. I still dont know how I feel about going back to the States. That book The Strawberry Statement. From what I read seem to be about the way most guys feel. I wish I was man enough to stand up and say what I feel. May be one of these days I will. Well I guess I better be going. Thank you. Dennis.

That was not all. On the book he had written in pencil. "Keep truckin'."

The roomboys could not say why he had left his boots behind and if he had left barefooted for the airport. They seemed eager to report that Dennis had brought a whore to room 53. But not a young and pretty one. It was that that made me flinch.

"Vieille. Pas bon," a roomboy, who was in his mid-50s. said. Old. No good.

In the last month of that endless year, nothing in the room spoke of any season at all, or of how many had died, or of anything I had seen. You knew it was Christmas because people sent you cards and there were fake Christmas trees selling in the streets for the foreigners to buy. There were always paintings of Jesus Christ on sale. But not as many of him as of women with preposterous breasts and shiny hair, because Americans liked these ladies very much.

It was surely the month of Christmas, because Archbishop Henri Lemaitre, apostolic delegate to Vietnam and Cambodia, visited the prisoner-of-war camp for the Vietnamese at Bien-Hoa, although nearly all the men cared nothing about the birth of Christ. They were Buddhists and Buddha's birthday was in May.

American reporters were allowed to witness his visit. I went there with Tom Fox, a young American who speaks fluent Vietnamese. A long time afterward I understood why it was a more sickening day for him than for me. It was his Church that shamed him.

There were large signs at the entrance to the Bein-Hoa camp. May the Charity of Christ be Everywhere (in French), Forever Maintain the High Honor of the Military (in Vietnamese) and Blessed is he who Comes in the Name of the Lord (in Latin).

We were warned.

Several hundred prisoners had been standing for more than two hours before a stage when the press corps arrived at midmorning. We stared at them, photographed and filmed them. Interviews were a violation of the Geneva Accords, which were carefully observed, the Vietnamese officials said again and again.

(continued on page 106)"Bui Doi"(continued from page 98)

The prisoners--you could not call them men, for there were children there, shifting from leg to leg in the hot sun --had been given new pajamas to wear, so new they had not been washed or creased. We gawked at them, those lines and lines of Viet Cong, but only the smallest turned their heads to gawk back. One boy with a scar on his neck could not help snickering at us. It made Fox and me feel a little better.

There were 4400 prisoners in the camp. Only the wounded or mutilated were North Vietnamese. One thousand nine hundred of the prisoners were 17 years old or younger. Major Ma Sanh Qui said the youngest were 13 but, perhaps remembering how sentimental some Americans can be about children, refused to say how many there were.

Twenty-seven women and ten men over the age of 60 were also prisoners. We were not allowed to see the women.

There were speeches. The prisoners did not look alert or interested or pleased when the archbishop spoke to them. But they solemnly followed instructions from officers. Applaud. Cheer. Bow. Salute. Applaud.

No prisoner who was handed a gift by the archbishop leaned over to kiss his ring. Perhaps they did not dare. Perhaps it was because there were only 133 Catholics in the camp. The prisoners received little plastic sacks--some cigarettes, a bit of soap, a cloth towel, a colored picture of the Pope and some loose crackers that had already crumbled.

Ah, what the archbishop and Fox and I saw that day. Two amputees, once men in the National Liberation Front, had been assigned to show off new wheelchairs that they had never used before that day. I watched one of them without legs and with a wrecked hand try to steer his wheelchair in small circles. He kept bumping into the other man, who had two hands. I could not watch for very long.

We saw the archbishop say Mass in the chapel and we toured a compound where the most ruined men were kept. As the archbishop entered these rooms, an officer snapped: "Attention!" The men looked up. It was the most they could do. The archbishop spoke to some prisoners through an interpreter. Fox looked angry and ill. I tried to pity the archbishop, whose pallor was strange and whose eyes seemed too pale.

There was a blind man whose sockets seemed empty even of their lids.

Archbishop: How long have you been here?

Prisoner: Three years. I can only move when someone takes me about.

Archbishop: Where are you from?

Prisoner: Thanh Hoa.

Archbishop: Have courage.

An aide kept asking if there were any Catholics in these wards, but the Vietnamese did not know. The aide looked displeased.

The archbishop spoke to a boy whose body ended just below the hips. "Do you want to go home?"

Prisoner: Yes. But the situation in Vietnam does not permit it. I have had no news from my family in Quang Tri. I studied in North Vietnam. . . .

Archbishop: Have courage, my son.

The sickest men lay on wooden beds and some turned their heads away when a television crew filmed them.

There were cold Coca-Colas and little cakes for the press, a little party when the tour was ended, perhaps to remind us of what a pleasant performance we had just seen. Vietnamese officers spoke baby-talk English to Americans who spoke Vietnamese. I wondered if the man in the wheelchair had been told he could stop.

I took Fox to the office, where there was a bottle of Martell cognac from the PX. I had never drunk cognac before. It seemed time to start.

The room was dim and cool. Fox said he had pressed an officer at the camp to explain the presence of a large group of young Vietnamese girls who were wandering around, giggling and keyed up. They were members of a Catholic youth organization.

"The major said, 'The girls come here as a matter of freedom. They come for the fun of it,' " Fox told me. "For the fun of it."

The North Vietnamese soldier--who must have weighed no more than 115 pounds--came to my room that December, for we could not meet in the office. Twice he came to the room and sat in the green armchair. At first he was suspicious of its fat arms and high back and its deepness, for in all his life he had known only benches or straight-backed wooden chairs.

His name was Tien. A Vietnamese man told me in English what he was saying. Tien had been captured in a "liberated" village in Quang Nam Province a few months earlier while he was convalescing from malaria. His recovery meant working in the rice fields with the villagers. His face was so round, so unlike the beautifully boned, sharper faces of the Northerners, that it may have been swollen from his illness. His hair looked very dry and stood from his scalp like the bristles of a used-up brush. He could have been 16. He was 21.

So ill had Tien been that he could not walk quickly up the stairs of the Continental.

It was his legs that startled me, not the illness that had almost killed him. From his feet to his knees there were scars from the ulcers and sores no man could avoid moving down the Ho Chi Minh Trail through the jungles of Laos. For three months, in a company of 115 men, he had made the long march south.

"We walked eleven hours a day and the longer we walked the more bored and morose we became," Tien said. "There were many things I missed. First, I wanted a real cigarette. Then, I wanted to see my mother, to be close to her. And then, what I wanted badly was a whole day of rest."

After his capture, he had been flown to Tam Ky in a truc thang, the Vietnamese term for helicopter. The words mean up and straight. Tien had felt a fear he could hardly describe.

"The first Americans that I had ever seen were the two pilots. They looked unbelievably tall. So very huge. But they smiled down at me. I don't know why. Some of my panic went away."

I could not imagine chopper pilots smiling at any prisoner, but this is what he said. Then Tien asked if he could ever ride again in a truc thang. I said it was not likely.

He had dreaded being beaten by the Vietnamese who interrogated him at Tam Ky, but they were nonchalant. He was even allowed to contact rich relatives in Saigon who had left the North many years before and it was decided that he would declare himself a hoi chanh, an enemy soldier who defects under the Open Arms program and is not treated as a prisoner of war. Tien had not defected to anyone, of course, he had simply been too weak to run away from a South Vietnamese platoon.

The last time he had seen his parents was on a June day in 1968 in his village, all that he had ever known, which was 50 miles south of Hanoi.

"They gave a small feast for me the day I left home to go into the army. My father, who is farmer, was unable to speak. There were no words in his throat. My mother could not help weeping. And I wept, too. As I left, she said: 'You must go, I know that, but try to come back.' "

In his village, there were no men who had come back. There were no letters from any of them. Before 1968, men going south had been granted 15-day leaves, but these were canceled. No family knew, or wondered aloud, who had been wounded or killed.

Tien spoke often of his mother, as no young American soldiers had ever done with me. They mentioned their parents and I remember the doctor who told me of the words of a GI who had lost both of his legs and part of an arm, who lay on a litter and asked: "Will my parents treat me the same?"

Tien was telling us how he had dreamed on the Ho Chi Minh Trail of being a small boy again, back in his village, talking to his mother, when a roomboy came in with my laundry. Saigon was a city of informers, so I spoke to (continued on page 182)"Bui Doi"(continued from page 106) him harshly in the pidgin Vietnamese of GIs. Di di mau. Get out. The roomboy scuttled away, not looking at any of us.

Tien and a friend had walked two miles from their village to the district town to report for duty. After four months of basic training in Hoa Binh Province--the words mean peace in Vietnamese--the young soldiers were restless to start their war, nervous that it would be over too soon.

It took ten days for battalion 1071 to cross the Annamite mountain range to reach the border of Laos. They passed by tree trunks on which thousands of men before them had stopped to carve their names, their villages and the dates of going south. Even battalion and company commanders had carved their names. Tien said, and the sight of those trees warmed him and made him feel less alone. I tried to smile to show him, yes. I could understand that.

It was six A.M. when they finally reached the frontier. The soldiers crossed a rope bridge over a ravine. Go quickly, quickly, they were told, for the Americans often strafed and bombed here. Do not look back.

But Tien did look back, he had to, and all he could see of his Vietnam was a blurred mountain range in the mist. He was told to move faster.

It surprised Tien that the Ho Chi Minh Trail did not start as a wide road. It began as just a small lane winding through a bamboo forest in Laos. He had only two personal possessions: a diary and a walking stick made of North Vietnamese bamboo.

"That stick was precious to me." Tien said. "We all had one. It eased my exhaustion when I was walking and it helped me keep my balance. You could use it to measure the depth of a spring we had to cross. If you wanted to rest, you propped the stick up under your pack so it made the weight lighter. We called it our 'third leg.' There was even a song. I sang these lines many times."

And he did once more, in a high, small voice.

"It trains the legs for the long march without letting them get away.

It trains the spirit to go forward only, never backward. . . ."

When Tien was tired of talking, and when we could hear no more, I showed him my Phillips cassette player and we listened to Country Joe & the Fish.

"Come on all of you big strong men

Uncle Sam needs your help again

He's got himself in a terrible jam

Way down yonder in Vietnam

So put down your books, pick up a gun

We're gonna have a whole lot of fun."

I had a friend, a reporter named Sterba, who said that song was always running through his head in all the months he covered the war. But it is not a song you can explain to a North Vietnamese infantryman. Tien liked the cassette player, though. He found it a marvel.

On the tenth day his company was moving down the trail, the B-52s came. Other soldiers, stationed by the trail, had described them to the men.

"One man told me. 'You will never hear the approach of the B-52s, for suddenly there will be great undreamed-of noises around you but still you never see the planes and if you are in the middle of where the bomb lands you will die, and if you are close then you will be deaf for the rest of your life.' " Tien told us. "But this man also told me that the mountains and forests were so wide it was very hard for B-52s to hit men."

Tien's company survived three raids. He wished they could go into combat. Once, they passed a group of wounded Southerners--soldiers in the National Liberation Front--who teased them.

"Some of them told us. 'Go fast or the liberation will be finished before you get there,' and this worried us very much. One man told me that it was easy to fight the Americans. 'They have very weak eyes.' he said. 'If it is sunny they cannot see well.' "

Tien never did find out if the Americans were made helpless by the sun. He never fired an AK-17. His malarial attacks, which lasted two to three hours, were so intense that two men were assigned to hold him up as the company kept moving. When they entered South Vietnam, the sickest were separated and left behind.

In Saigon, for the first time in his life, he owned a wrist watch and a pen. He wore white shirts. What Tien really wanted was to have his diary and his walking stick again, and to talk with soldiers Hong and Ngoan, who had been with him on the trail.

Once he said wistfully he would like to find out where his unit was and rejoin it. But he knew it was not possible, he knew it very well. His relatives sent him to be an apprentice in a Honda repair shop, but he stayed listless and sad, a man of longing and few words.

There were times when, pretending that friendships were possible. I thought of inviting Vietnamese to my room, not just to ask them what were their losses and how deep was their pain but to try to have a nice time together. They would not have come. There was a painter named Ha Cam Tam, who taught drawing to children in five elementary schools for a monthly salary worth about S-10. He made money by selling paintings to Americans. One of them showed three gaunt, tormented Vietnamese posing like the three monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. He called the painting Nothing About Anything.

"Perhaps Americans buy my paintings because they are troubled." Tam said. "But if it was a war only between Vietnamese, as it should be, it would be different. We would not feel guilty, as you do, for both sides have their causes.

"The Vietnamese people must be deaf, dumb and blind to what goes on around them," Tam added. "It is required of us."

But sometimes they refused to be and could stand it no longer. When the United States Air Force handed over its helicopter base in Soc Trang to the South Vietnamese air force. Americans removed the pews, altar and altar rails from the chapel. They left behind a fluorescent-lit cross and piles of litter, including a handbook on survival and a sign that read: Think Think Think.

Angry Vietnamese soldiers painted a sign of their own: U. S. Army--Don't Take God Away.

Sometimes in room 53 the telephone rang very late at night or before dawn with a message from the Times's foreign desk in New York. It would be read, with patience and valor, by a Vietnamese named Mr. Lee, who worked at the Reuter's office and did not speak English. It was Mr. Lee who called on a summer morning to read a cable that said my father had died. His accent was so distracting that I had to have him read it three times. I went back to sleep in relief. There was no problem with a story, no inserts, no new facts needed. It was only another death, and not an unfair one, not a Vietnamese ending.

And as I moved from interview to interview, questioning the victims and those they made victims, always asking. "How much does it hurt?" or "How great is your fear?" the men who made up the fat and lumpy perimeter around the war went on with their daily lives. It was as though they could not see the graves and were never told of the dead.

There was Richard Funkhouser, for example, who tried to organize a 1971 decathlon in Chinese chess and wine-tasting to make Vietnam a cozier, more cheerful combat zone. (U. S. dead in 1970: 6065. U. S. wounded: 30.613.)

The fatuity of Funkhouser was concentrated in a memorandum he wrote on December 2, 1970. The subject: "Esprit de CORDS." It was a pun on the name of the agency. Civil Operations and Rural Development Support, which directed a network of pacification programs. One of them was called Brighter Life for War Victims. Few Americans who worked for CORDS took it well if you told them a brighter life for war victims meant ending the war. It was that kind of comment that made them uneasy with reporters.

Funkhouser, whose greater glory had been in Gabon, where he was U. S. ambassador, headed CORDS in the third military region (Vietnam had four). I pasted his memorandum on the wall of the tiny, sick-smelling bathroom of room 53. It was where it belonged.

"It has been suggested that there should be more interplay between the CORDS headquarters in the four regions," he wrote.

"It sounds like a great idea to us," he burbled, "and therefore we challenge representatives of other military regions to a 1971 decathlon comprising, for example, bridge, tennis, gin rummy, volleyball, nautical sports. Chinese chess, winetasting, close harmony, etc."

Nautical sports. Close harmony.

Each of the teams would be made up of six men and two women, with "one ringer of general rank" and one Vietnamese expert.

"It is always open house here at Bienhoa for competitors." Funkhouser wrote, in that playful spirit so many of us in Vietnam really lacked.

In the second year the room could no longer comfort or calm me. In no other place where I have ever lived did I grow so ugly or feel so finished. It was a malignant city, Saigon, and you could never quite sort out the horrors fast enough.

There was only a street to cross and a few hundred yards to walk between the New York Times office on Tu-Do and the Continental, but even that little strip provided surprises after curfew, when you might have thought it would be calm.

Alvin Shuster, the bureau chief, and I were walking to the hotel one night when we saw a big American, in civilian clothes, arguing with a Vietnamese woman and looking through her handbag as she pleaded with him. You often saw her on the terrace of the Continental.

She was a hooker, an old one, with a PX wig, and I hoped that Dennis had done better. The American was being very rough.

"Don't get involved," Alvin said. I told the man to stop it, leave her alone, because--the words came out wrong--that was no way to treat a lady. His answer was very odd. It upset Alvin and me.

"That's no lady," the American said. "It's a man." He added that he had been robbed. Perhaps she was. Sometimes I would see her on the terrace--she would always smile and nod at me after that night--and worry that a young man like Dennis might not understand and take her for just another whore, and ruin his life. Stop worrying, Alvin said, don't get involved. She tells them.

There was a nice garden at the Continental with round wooden tables under big umbrellas where you could have breakfast or tea and remember Graham Greene and his Rue Catinat. But no nice corner of Saigon could ever keep its early promise, so the war came into the little garden as it had come to all places.

It was there that I tried to save Madame Ngo Ba Thanh from being arrested, but they took her away.

She was tiny and silly, brave and brilliant. I could never quote her in a story, for she rushed so, in any of four languages, that no sentence was ever finished. A lawyer, she had studied at the University of Paris and in Barcelona. Her master's degree in comparative law was from Columbia University. Madame Thanh knew all about prisons: She had spent 25 months in them during 1966 and 1967.

There was nothing left to be afraid of, she would say. But there was: prison again and for longer. Be careful. I would say, watching her demonstrate time and time again against the government of Nguyen Van Thieu and running from the police on Tu-Do in her high heels.

So, I, who stood 11 inches taller than she, could not save her at all. There had been a demonstration--a bitter, mocking once--in front of the National Assembly by a handful of deputies opposed to the one-man presidential election in October 1971. The only candidate was President Thien seeking re-election. The police used canisters of tear gas, made in Harrisburg. Pennsylvania, as the protesters stood grouped on the steps, holding high their banners in Vietnamese. Madame Thanh was there, of course. She was always everywhere.

I ran behind her when the police charged and we ran into the little garden. There were two American officers sitting at a table and I said quick, quick, sit with them and the police cannot interfere. What is shaming, you see, is that I still believed that American officers would protect her. This, after all I had learned and seen and been told.

Sit down, sit down. I hissed at her in schoolgirl French. One of the men--a colonel--spoke to us in beautiful, serious French, offering to share his café au lait if the waiter did not soon appear. The other man, his brother, said he was a pilot on a Cobra gunship based at Tuy Hoa. Madame Thanh--who knew as well as I did what Cobra gunships can do to a village and its people--received this information calmly. Neither officer seemed to sense that something unusual had just taken place. Both of us had been crying from the tear gas. Her hair was disheveled. My nose was running. She was breathing in hoarse little gulps. It was her asthma again.

The officers seemed gallant and correct, those two, as though they had once learned a good deal of poetry, and taken sea voyages, and knew more about life than the Army wishes a man ever to know. Then the pilot began to speak of the war, why we had not won it and how he would be the last man to leave, because he wanted it won.

She chewed a piece of croissant and kept looking at the entrance. The deputies who had been in the demonstration rushed in, so she rose to join them. It was no longer possible to stay where she was. Now, at a much later time, I remember her rising and thanking the colonel, who bowed slightly and said in French:

"Perhaps we shall meet in times that are less turbulent, madame."

The police came and the officers rose and left. I joined the deputies and Madame Thanh at their table while a policeman stood in front of us, taking our pictures on an American video tape to be used as evidence. Treason. Traitors. The Vietnamese sat there, not turning away their faces, looking solemnly at the American machine, as though they no longer cared what their punishment might be.

The deputies had diplomatic immunity and Madame Thanh did not. I tried to hold on to her when the police surrounded her.

But they won, tugging and pushing and circling her. We were told that the police threw her into the back of a jeep. It is much more than a year now since she was sent to prison and there is nothing I can do. I saw a picture of her once--long after I had left Saigon. She was in court, lying on a stretcher and looking, suddenly, quite old and helpless.

There is one more thing to tell: It is about the children. Living in that huge, solemn room, where there were sheets and hot water at times, I often thought I could easily share it with a child. There were so many of them, working the streets, living in the markets, so small and so frail that the Vietnamese called them the bui doi, or dust of life. It seemed inhuman to refuse them help. Sometimes I would invite them into the office, where they could use the shower and, if we were lucky, there were new clothes they could wear. The mothers of friends sent bundles of them to me.

The child I wanted to help most was a very thin, trembling 11-year-old girl named Pham Thi Hoa. I met her in a prison compound in Danang, where the Vietnamese police chief let me interview two children so I could see how the Viet Cong recruited the very young and exposed them to risks. She had been arrested as a messenger for the Viet Cong; there was a letter in her pocket. She had been in the detention center for children for five months.

"I have no father. My mother lived in Saigon," the child said. The interpreter could barely hear her.

"My mother gave me to Mrs. Xuan when I was very small. When Uncle Xuan died. I lived with Uncle Chi. When Uncle Chi died, I lived with Uncle Hien."

She had said it so many times before to her interrogators. Dang Von Song, head of the Special Police Branch, said the "uncles"--a respectful term in Vietnamese--were high-ranking Viet Cong cadre, in Quang Nam Province.

Pham Thi Hoa looked at no one as she spoke. She could not keep her hands still. They quivered and moved in strange, urgent ways. Mr. Song smiled as she spoke.

"Only Uncle Hien loves me. My mother does not love me. She gave me to Mrs. Xuan. Uncle Hien asked me whether I wanted to go to school and I said no, and he said: 'You decide. If you want, I will send you to school. If you don't, stay here with me.' Uncle Hien and the other uncles loved me. I lived in a bunker under a bamboo bush with Uncle Hien and Uncle Vinh. There was only one girl of my age living nearby. That was Thoai, but she and her mother went to Danang and her mother let her work as a servant for somebody.

"In the evening Uncle Hien hung up a hammock for me to sleep in."

It tired her to tell us this and her little hands did not stop their twitching. While the police were out of the room, she whispered to my interpreter that she had been beaten in the interrogation center. There was no time to ask her questions, for they came back.

Dang Von Song complained that Pham Thi Hoa had not been at all cooperative.

"This girl is very stubborn. Very, But we have found her weak point. She is very afraid of having her hair cut off." Mr. Song said. "So we say we will cut her hair if she is not more helpful."

The little girl showed that she feared this very much. She drew back as I tried to comfort her.

Another police official shook his head.

"I have offered to adopt her and take her home with me," he said. He repeated the offer, smiling at Pham Thi Hoa.

"I prefer to be in prison." she said. "I like to be in prison." She was taken away.

Perhaps because I looked queer or because my eyes were not dry, Mr. Song gave me some advice.

"Now, don't write an antiwar story, write how the Viet Cong exploit children," he said, wagging his finger at me.

There are other stories I could tell, about the living and the dead, much more than I have told here, but so very much has already been written, and none of it ever made any difference at all.

Vietnam: A Preliminary Tally

early returns on the recent american adventure overseas

The Following Figures Indicate, as accurately as possible, the number of Americans and Vietnamese killed or wounded as a result of the war in Vietnam:

U. S. military personnel killed ........................................ 45,948

U. S. military personnel wounded ....................................... 303,640

Americans killed as the result of noncombat incidents .................. 10,303

South Vietnamese military personnel killed ............................. 184,000

South Vietnamese military personnel wounded ............................ 450,000

South Vietnamese civilians killed ...................................... 413,000

South Vietnamese civilians wounded ..................................... 935,000

Estimated North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers killed ............... 925,000

Estimated North Vietnamese civilians killed ............................ 185,000

According to NBC news sources, the United States dropped more than 14 billion pounds of bombs on North and South Vietnam. The years of bombing turned some areas of both countries into what has been widely described as a "moonscape." It is estimated that in South Vietnam, a geographical area about the size of Georgia, there are now 24,500,000 craters.

America's Food for Peace program, a plan to feed hungry Vietnamese, was ill-conceived, poorly administered and finally abandoned in 1972. The mass shipment of bulgur (parched wheat) provided just one example of the program's mismanagement. Bulgur was sent because a Food for Peace official reasoned that Indonesians like it--so Vietnamese would, too. But the Vietnamese refused to eat bulgur and instead fed it to livestock. Columnist Jack Anderson has stated that the Food for Peace program cost $18,000,000 per year.

Throughout the war, American propaganda leaflets were dropped on Vietnam in such quantities that eventually they were found littering the floors of triple-canopy jungles. U. S. Army catalogs describe propaganda leaflets as "one of the most persuasive mediums of psychological operations." Vietnamese used them to wrap food, patch holes in hut walls and as toilet paper. The New York Times calculates that the number dropped on Vietnam exceeded 6,245.2 billion leaflets.

The United States sprayed chemicals on Vietnamese trees and crops to eliminate enemy ground cover. At the end of the war, NBC News estimated that the defoliated territory totaled 6,400,000 acres.

Anheuser-Busch, Inc., records indicate that the consumption of Budweiser beer in Vietnam during the last five years of the war totaled 47,150,000 gallons.

The Montaguards, a primitive tribal culture, had lived undisturbed in the Vietnam highlands for hundreds of years. As the war expanded, they were driven from their lands, their hunting grounds were overrun with Vietnamese refugees and their culture was destroyed. One longtime observer of the war, scholar and advisor Gerald C. Hickey, says the percentage of uprooted Montagnard villages is at least 85 percent.

The South Vietnamese have done little to commemorate the United States military presence in their country. A statue of a soldier that the 25th Infantry Division raised in its own honor in Cu Chi first had its head blown off, later disappeared altogether. In late March of this year, as the last U. S. military units left the country. President Nguyen Van Thieu laid a cornerstone for three memorials in Saigon commemorating allied participation in the war. One is dedicated to the Vietnamese people, one to the other non-U. S. allies and one--a giant steel arch--to the United States effort. American taxpayers are looting the entire $1,000,000 bill for the triple memorial.

Final expense figures in Southeast Asia from Pentagon officials show that the war (excluding veterans' benefits and other miscellaneous items) cost the United States at least 125 billion dollars.

At least 1.8 billion dollars of that amount was spent on the physical construction of U. S. military and paramilitary facilities in South Vietnam. Through our years of involvement, we upgraded and maintained some 2300 miles of roads in the country, built four major support and logistics complexes, gouged out six deep-water ports and created eight jet-capable air bases, which included 15 runways of 10,000 feet or more. The vast, now nearly deserted base/airfield/port facility at Cam Ranh Bay cost more than $133,000,000.

American medical aid to Vietnam has been insufficient since the first fighting. From a peak of $25,000,000 in 1968, it fell consistently through the end of 1972, at a time when--according to medical officers in Vietnam--it should have risen to meet increased civilian casualty rates. New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg says that while the U. S. was sending one billion dollars to counter the North Vietnamese offensive at the end of the war the amount of medical aid reflected in that figure was less than one percent.

While United States medical aid and training was woefully lacking, we poured money into pilot instruction and air supply, so that South Vietnam presently has the world's third-largest air force.

South Vietnam's city streets are clogged with Hondas, Suzukis and Lambrettas as a result of the U. S. Government's commodity-import program, an economic-aid device that served several purposes: It soaked up the money the Vietnamese were making from the Americans, and so held down inflation: it created a few Vietnamese millionaires; and it promoted the transformation of the South Vietnamese society from a rural one to a city-based, consumption-oriented one. In 1971, one Saigon businessman was selling Hondas at the rate of 7000 per month.

The State Department keeps no figures on the number of illegitimate children fathered by American Servicemen in Vietnam, saying there is no accurate way to get such information. Private estimates vary widely, with one expert, Thomas C. Fox. co-author of The Children of Vietnam, claiming there are presently 75,000 to 100,000 of these children. Taking the most conservative and speculative figures, there are presently in Vietnam 15,000 to 100,000 half-American illegitimate children.

Including these American-sired children, the total number of war orphans in South Vietnam, according to Senator Edward Kennedy's Subcommittee on Refugees, is 826,000 children.

As part of the same report, Senator Kennedy's subcommittee issued figures indicating that there are 103,000 South Vietnamese war widows.

The peak war years, 1964 through 1972, produced 7,310,000 refugees in South Vietnam (more than one of every three inhabitants), according to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). However, even that large number may be too low, because USAID has reported no new refugees since January 1, 1973. Senator Kennedy's Subcommittee on Refugees, on the other hand, says that since the peace signing there are at least 213,000 new South Vietnamese refugees.

At the end of April 1972, when only 70,000 GIs remained in Vietnam, construction of a new indoor theater at the Long Binh Army base was completed. Construction had begun only four months earlier, in the midst of heavy troop withdrawals, and the facility almost immediately became useless, since inexperienced South Vietnamese were incapable of maintaining it. Army figures for the theater project are much lower than those reported by The Wall Street Journal, but we know that the nonfunctional Long Binh theater cost between $305,000 and $445,000.

Many Americans are staying in Vietnam. "It's like 1961 or 1965 all over again," says one Western official. "The Americans are full of optimism again and proceeding as if the Vietnamese aren't even around." It is hard to say how many there are, because military spokesmen believe. "It's just not in the national interest to have these things known." But The New York Times's Fox Butterfield believes that, after all the troops have gone, there will remain approximately 100 employees of the United States Agency for International Development; several hundred military attachés; 10,000 civilian advisors and technicians.