The Empire 342

'Two men, two legs and too much suffering
By Nick Turse

Nguyen Van Tu asks if I'm serious. Am I really willing to tell his story - to tell the story of the Vietnamese who live in this rural corner of the Mekong Delta? Almost 40 years after guerrilla fighters in his country threw the limits of US military power into stark relief - during the 1968 Tet Offensive - we sit in his rustic home, built of wood and thatch with an earthen floor, and speak of two hallmarks of that power: ignorance and lack of accountability.

As awkward chicks scurry past my feet, I have the sickening feeling that, in decades to come, far too many Iraqis and Afghans will have similar stories to tell. Similar memories of American troops. Similar accounts of air strikes and artillery bombardments. Nightmare knowledge of what "America" means to far too many outside the United States.

"Do you really want to publicize this thing," Nguyen asks. "Do you really dare tell everyone about all the losses and sufferings of the Vietnamese people here?" I assure this well-weathered 60-year-old grandfather that that's just why I've come to Vietnam for the third time in three years. I tell him I have every intention of reporting what he's told me - decades-old memories of daily artillery shelling, of nearly constant air attacks, of farming families forced to live in their fields because of the constant bombardment of their homes, of women and children killed by bombs, of going hungry because US troops and allied South Vietnamese forces confiscated their rice, lest it be used to feed guerrillas.

After hearing of the many horrors he endured, I hesitantly ask him about the greatest hardship he lived through during what's appropriately known here as the American War. I expect him to mention his brother, a simple farmer shot dead by America's South Vietnamese allies in the early years of the war, when the US was engaged primarily in an "advisory" role. Or his father who was killed just after the war, while tending his garden, when an M-79 round - a 40mm shell fired from a single-shot grenade launcher - buried in the soil, exploded. Or that afternoon in 1971 when he heard outgoing artillery being fired and warned his family to scramble for their bunker by shouting, "Shelling, shelling!" They made it to safety. He didn't. The 105mm artillery shell that landed near him ripped off most of his right leg.

But he didn't name any of these tragedies.

"During the war, the greatest difficulty was a lack of freedom," he tells me. "We had no freedom."

A Simple Request
Elsewhere in the Mekong Delta, Pham Van Chap, a solidly-built 52-year-old with jet black hair, tells a similar story. His was a farming family, but the lands they worked and lived on were regularly blasted by US ordnance. "During the 10 years of the war, there was serious bombing and shelling in this region - two to three times a day," he recalls while sitting in front of his home, a one-story house surrounded by animal pens in a bucolic setting deep in the Delta countryside. "So many houses and trees were destroyed. There were so many bomb craters around here."

In January 1973, the first month of the last year US troops fought in Vietnam, Pham heard the ubiquitous sound of artillery and started to run to safety. It was too late. A 105mm shell slammed into the earth four meters in front of him, propelling razor-sharp shrapnel into both legs. When he awoke in the hospital, one leg was gone from the thigh down. After 40 days in the hospital, he was sent home, but he didn't get his first prosthetic leg until the 1990s.'

Les verder: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/JA26Ae06.html