Chapter Reading: September 1974
"Americans didn’t walk often in the city due to a 'small element of fear'”
Greetings,
This week I present you with another Chapter reading from my 2023 book, For the Love of Vietnam: a war, a family, a CIA official, and the best evacuation story never heard.
For those of you who might be new to the book, it is formatted this way:
Part 1: James E. Welch, Man on a Mission | Universal third person.
In this section, I write about my father as if I’m reporting for a news periodical; just the facts, ma’am: who, what, when, where, and why.
Part 2: A Family Adventure | First person + historical documentation.
In this section, I blended childhood memories with family history gleaned from my mother’s letters as well as historical information gleaned from a variety of sources. Click here to see my partial annotated bibliography.
Part 3: The Final Days | Creative nonfiction.
This section is written in close third person, meaning I put you right there at my father’s shoulder. I use a technique known as creative nonfiction which I studied extensively while working on my MFA. As I explain in the introduction to this section:
I was not on my father’s evacuation and never heard a cohesive tale of events. However, I’ve read widely, visited the locations in Vietnam, and conducted numerous interviews . . . With all these resources, I have—in what I hope is the best storytelling fashion—written a creative nonfiction narrative of the evacuation.
This chapter excerpt is from Part Two—so a blend of the personal and the historical. I did my very best to be accurate. If you see any discrepancies, join the conversation and let me know.
Enjoy!
Chapter from “For the Love of Vietnam:” September 1974
On a hot clear Sunday early in September 1974, my mother took the older siblings—Michelle, Chris, Mike, and John—on a city walk to tour the ships docked along the Saigon River, enjoy a Coke on the terrace of the Continental Hotel (where author Graham Greene penned much of his book The Quiet American), and to enjoy the cool interior of the stately Notre Dame Cathedral. It was an enjoyable outing of several hours despite the heat but one, she feared, that would not be repeated. Americans didn’t walk often in the city due to a “small element of fear” caused by rogue elements. One of these was the presence of moped robbers, or “cowboys,” who would snatch purses, jewelry, or any other valuables an unsuspecting pedestrian might forget to hold close. Their strikes were most often simple hit-and-run thefts, with no intention of personal injury, but they could still be disconcerting.
Michelle had an up-close-and-personal encounter one day when she was on a shopping trip alone, before the awareness of the need for caution began to seriously limit our movements. She had stepped out of the American PX (the Army general store), and was about to get into a waiting cab, when a young man jumped off the back of a motorcycle, grabbed the paper bags from her arms and drove off.
“I didn’t even have a second to think, or to be startled,” she said. “He didn’t threaten me or anything, he just wanted my groceries.”
She turned to the cab driver, “Let’s get him, let’s go.”
The driver barely looked at her and just shook his head. He wasn’t going to go up against any Saigon cowboys, no way. And that was that.
Though we were ultimately never victims, the threat infiltrated our daily lives. One day, when we were expecting company, my mother put on a heavy gold chain that hung like a small rope down her fashionable silk shirt. I admired it, reaching out one small finger to touch its glittering weight.
“I’d never wear this out on the streets,” she said. “If one of those cowboys drove by on his moped and grabbed it, it would rip one’s head right off.”
I tried not to think about that and filed it away with other untenable ideas, like the possibility of being shot after curfew or peppered by bombs.
Fortunately at the time, I didn’t see the letter she wrote home about that walk, which concluded with an additional description of why walking tours were not to be de rigueur. “It is also a known fact that VC are in the city and people periodically do burn themselves up. We are always to avoid any large crowd of people milling about. So riding seems to be the order of the day. Such a shame.”
Her reference to people who “do burn themselves up,” is curious as there are no recorded incidents of self-immolation in the ’70s, though it was carried on as a political act throughout the sixties. The most notable incident was on June 11, 1963, when Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc had his body set aflame on a crowded Saigon street.
When I began to study the Vietnam Era, I initially assumed that the monk was protesting U.S. military build-up in Vietnam, just as Americans were beginning to do in the States. I was shocked to realize, then, that the reason this devout monk, whose religion included reverence for all life—including, one must suppose, his own—set himself on fire was not to call attention to the fighting between the North and the South, but to the mistreatment of the Buddhists by the government that we, the United States of America, were supporting!
Quang Duc was protesting the autocratic rule of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. His last words, which he wrote down for publication after his death, were a “respectful” plea to Diem to choose “clarity and compassion” for all religions. No response was forthcoming and four more monks and a nun used the same tactic before Diem was finally killed by his own generals in a coup in November of that year.
Quang Duc’s sacrifice was photographed by Malcolm Browne, who won a Pulitzer Prize for it, and that single image is credited as the “match” that struck a flame to the question of Vietnam around the world, and was perhaps even the catalyst that cemented the American public’s interest in helping the far-off country.
“No news picture in history,” said John F. Kennedy, “has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”
Again, ironically, it is worth noting that he was protesting the government we were supporting. When another American-supported leader, Nguyen Van Thieu, took power in 1963, his human-rights policies were not much better. In fact, we supported him because he was not a communist more than any other factor. He did not believe in religious or intellectual freedom any more than the communists, and continued the persecution of the Buddhists.
Fortunately, we never ran into any burning bodies in the streets. The Viet Cong, however, were another story. While I don’t recall any direct contact, there was the sense that they were always there, ever present. The “VC in the city” were part of a loosely organized, yet firmly committed, communist guerrilla network. The term “VC” or “Viet Cong” is a disrespectful contraction of Vietnam Cong San or Vietnamese Communists.
The American political and military agenda stemmed from a communist vs. non-communist world view, but the Vietnamese did not come from a tradition of distinct social and governmental building blocks in the same way that Western countries operate. Their long national heritage was one of a system of life that was based on the close-knit structure of familiarity: family, village, community. Therefore, any interloper was a threat, no matter the philosophy behind the intrusion. The U.S., with its ideology of anti-Communism, meant nothing to the Vietnamese people in general and the Viet Cong were acting not for communism or against democracy, but for Vietnam and their right to self-rule.
It is no small coincidence that this impulse is an echo of the calls for independence that informed the very beginnings of our country. The North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh (literally the Bringer of Light), had no greater desire than to create an independent Vietnam. He chose his words carefully when, on September 2, 1945, in front of a crowd of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, he declared Vietnam an autonomous nation, free from foreign rule. The United States had been supporting him and his troop of fighters, the Vietminh, during World War II, against the Japanese incursion into their country, and he wanted to both thank America, and to make an appeal for further support. He began his speech boldly:
“All men are created equal. The Creator has given us certain inviolable Rights; the right to Life, the right to be Free, and the right to achieve Happiness.”
In a “quiet and clear, warm and friendly” voice he continued, giving clear attribution to Thomas Jefferson and the founding principles of the U.S.:
“These immortal statements are taken from the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a larger sense, this means: All the people on the earth are born equal, all the people have a right to live, to be happy and free.”
Ho subsequently wrote to President Harry S. Truman, requesting support for their fight for independence against France, which had been colonizing Vietnam since the mid-1800s. But France was a long-time ally of America. Additionally, Ho Chi Minh had long since adopted the communist philosophy as his conduit for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” an approach that Truman could not synthesize into his world-view. Therefore, he simply did not respond and Ho Chi Minh felt he had no choice but to turn to Communist China and the Soviet Union for support. While his fundamental philosophy was vastly different from the two traditionally communist governments, the liaisons cemented the image that the North Vietnamese politicians were cut from the same totalitarian cloth as the two superpowers, paving the way for the war against them.
But, of course, in 1974 as a family welcomed into the “safe” city of Saigon, we only knew the Vietnamese communists and Viet Cong as a bewildering threat to our lives and livelihoods. Over the coming months we would become more familiar with their presence than we ever cared to be.
Photo caption: Another fun family activity was visiting the Zoo. As my mother wrote home on September 30, “I took the kids and a couple of others to the Zoo not long ago and it was such a pleasant surprise. It is a much larger and prettier Zoo than the one in Taipei or Korea. The animals were very clean and the grounds are spacious . . .”
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Thank you for sharing this fifty-year-old walk down memory lane with me. To follow me through until the ultimate end—the Fall of Saigon in April 1975—subscribe to “Stories of Vietnam.”
Until next time,
Kat
Excerpt taken from the 2023 publication of For the Love of Vietnam: a war, a family, a CIA official, and the best evacuation story never heard.
If you already have a copy, consider buying one for a local library or high school teacher! The more people who are thinking about the 50 year anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, the better.
"The U.S., with its ideology of anti-Communism, meant nothing to the Vietnamese people in general and the Viet Cong were acting not for communism or against democracy, but for Vietnam and their right to self-rule." Had the US public ever learned this at the time, the American war in Vietnam would have been much, much shorter. Domino Theory, my a$$.