• U.S.

The World: Indochina: A Generation of Refugees

11 minute read
TIME

THE abbreviated Teletype messages dribble endlessly into offices in Saigon, printing out the cold statistics of blood and violence. At times the tempo is feverish, at times sluggish:

22 APRIL 71 2300 HRS. TAN LONG HAMLET, NHON AN VILLAGE, AN NHON DISTRICT. UNKNOWN NO. VC (VIET CONG) INFILTRATED HAMLET,KILLED TWO CIV AND KIDNAPED THE HAMLET CHIEF AND HIS WIFE.

24 APRIL 71 0400 HRS. CAI SONAGROVILLE, PHONG PHU VILLAGE,BINH DINH DISTRICT. VC ATTACKEDRECEPTION CENTER OF REFUGEES FROM CAMBODIA. KILLING 3 CADRES. 4 ARVN. WOUNDING 3 CADRES AND 10 REFUGEES.

SAIGON, MAY 1 (AP)—US B-52 BOMBERS FLEW MISSIONS IN SOUTH VIET NAM’S NORTHERN SECTOR FOR THE THIRD STRAIGHT DAY, AIMING BOMB DROPS AT DIRT ROADS AND TRAILS USED BY THE ENEMY. FOUR FLIGHTS OF THE EIGHT-ENGINE JETS, A TOTAL OF 12 PLANES, UNLOADED 360 TONS OF EXPLOSIVES . . .

These relentless bulletins are part of a chronicle of immense human suffering caused, with a hammer-and-anvil effect, by both Viet Cong terrorism and U.S. firepower. The victim of that disaster is the civilian population, all too easily overlooked amid the concern for American and South Vietnamese military casualties. In the process, millions of civilians, the innocent and largely silent victims, have been killed, injured or rendered homeless. In South Viet Nam alone, there have been an estimated 1,050,000 civilian casualties, including 325,000 dead, since 1965. Reliable figures on civilian losses are not available for Cambodia, but it is estimated that 10,000 Laotian civilians have been killed and 20,000 injured since the heavy air war over Laos began in early 1969.

Of the survivors, vast numbers displaced by the terror and the bombs have moved to special camps or have taken refuge in the filthy shantytowns of cardboard and corrugated tin that embrace the outskirts of all the major cities. A few find ways to earn a little money, although jobs are harder to find now that the G.I.s are leaving Viet Nam. Most are merely waiting for the chance to go home.

The war’s most ubiquitous—and most poignant—victims are the children (see color pages). Some are orphaned, some maimed, some merely lost. Only 50% attend the first three grades in school. A professor at Saigon University remarks, “When I was growing up, the rice fields were full of herons and cranes. These are things I can never show my children.”Denied their traditional birthright, many of Viet Nam’s youngsters are spending their childhood cooped up in cities that have become seemingly permanent bomb shelters.

Rise of Urbanization. Nobody knows for certain how many refugees there are, but it is generally believed that about one-third of the 27 million people who live in Indochina have been driven from their homes.

> In South Viet Nam, according to Senator Edward Kennedy’s Judiciary Subcommittee on Refugees, which has been investigating the problem since 1965, the total number of refugees has reached 6,000,000.

> In Laos (pop. 3,000,000), some 700,000 people have been displaced since 1962. Many fled from their homes last year when North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao forces recaptured the Plain of Jars after ten days of fighting. Others have been driven from their villages by U.S. bombs. The terror of the Laotian bombings has been reflected in a series of refugees’ drawings collected by Fred Branfman, formerly of the International Voluntary Services (see page 25).

> In Cambodia, the refugee problem is less severe because the war there is scarcely a year old. The population of Phnom-Penh, the capital, has grown by 400,000, but the city has absorbed them gracefully. “The refugee problem hasn’t surfaced yet,” says a Western diplomat. “Give it another year.” Moreover, since far less land is owned by absentee landlords than in Viet Nam, the average Cambodian peasant is less apt to leave it in moments of stress, and more anxious to return to it when the fighting eases. Cambodia’s most serious refugee problem has been the plight of the ethnic Vietnamese, who became the target of war-inflamed hatred last year. About 200,000 have been repatriated to Viet Nam; tens of thousands of others remain in fetid camps in Cambodia.

The reasons for the massive displacement of civilians have been debated as heatedly as any of the basic tenets of the war. U.S. officials maintain that most of the problem in Viet Nam was created by the Jet offensive of 1968 and other Viet Cong harassment of innocent villagers. U.S. antiwar groups insist with equal fervor that the problem has been created solely by American policies and bombs. Both sides in the bitter struggle have played a role in turning a proud, independent rural people into a displaced urban population, and the process is far from over.

Free-Fire Zones. The nature of the guerrilla war precipitated the dislocation. Viet Cong tactics derived with bloody logic from the Maoist metaphor that compared the guerrilla to a fish in the sea of humanity. Viet Cong terrorists viewed village officials as legitimate targets and the murder of innocent peasants as ideologically justified. “It is better to kill ten innocent persons,” according to a Radio Hanoi slogan, “than to let one guilty person escape.” Countless peasants fled their homes to escape terrorism. U.S. military power accelcrated the process. In adapting traditional weaponry to guerrilla warfare, military strategists placed heavy reliance on body counts and too little emphasis on the lives of innocent civilians.

Vast areas of Indochina beyond the urban centers are “free-fire zones,” where any moving person can be fail-game. In the late 1960s, brigade-size units regularly crunched through the countryside on search-and-destroy missions; during the same period, artillery laced patterns of “H & I” (harassment and interdiction) fire from dusk until dawn, throwing tons of shells at village crossroads that might—or might not —be used as routes for infiltration. Bombs still fall from unseen planes without warning; some inevitably land in the wrong place, others in the right place but on the wrong people. Bureaucratic demands for a show of allied progress on the basis of “hamlet-evaluation systems” have sometimes encouraged officials to evacuate villages unnecessarily. In early April, 650 people were removed from a Viet Cong-controlled valley south of Quang Ngai city. A U.S. senior adviser subsequently charged that the real motive behind the exercise was not a military need but a desire to eliminate the “V”-rated (Viet Cong-controlled) hamlets and thus improve the overall rating of Quang Ngai province.

Children of War. The streets of Saigon contain an incredible panoply of Hieronymus Bosch figures—limbless veterans stumping about in camouflaged fatigues, hideously napalmed women nursing children on the sidewalks, deaf-mute prostitutes selling their wares in sign language, and lepers holding hats in gnarled, swollen hands. But few are more poignant than the ever-present “street children.”

By day, these Asian Oliver Twists scratch out a living by pimping and peddling drugs to American G.I.s, stealing the watches and shining the shoes of American civilians, and always trying —but not always succeeding—in keeping a footfall ahead of the police. By night, they make a bed out of a door stoop, windowsill or car seat, with a discarded magazine under their heads and an army poncho for cover.

Most of their parents are dead, the victims of bullets and bombs. Some of the street kids are the illegitimate offspring of American G.I.s (unlike the French government, the U.S. has never provided aid for such children or their mothers). The street kids are among the most innocent of the war’s victims, and the most neglected. One of the few people who have tried to give them a roof and a purpose is Richard Hughes, an ex-actor from Boston, who has created five “project homes” for them.

How Many Tears? Each boy’s life story is a vignette of the war. Hua Ket, 12, survived an attack on his village by U.S. planes because he was playing in a distant field; an old woman sent him to Saigon, and for three years he shined shoes and slept on the streets until he moved to Hughes’ “Hope 5” hostel. After his father was killed by the Viet Cong, Nguyen Van Thanh. 12, ran away from his village and met a bar girl who brought him to Saigon; there he ran away again and moved to the streets. When Son (“Mountain”) was eight, his mother left him in an orphanage and disappeared to the U.S. with his father. He disliked the orphanage, partly because of the harsh treatment and partly because of an air strike by U.S. planes that were trying to bomb a Viet Cong stronghold. Finally Son ran away and collected enough money by begging to buy a bus ticket to Saigon.

Hughes has succeeded in helping many of his young charges, but failed with others. One boy, after attempting suicide at the age of 13, was killed in an accident two years later. In his pocket his friends found a one-piaster note on which he had written “How many tears, how many drops of sweat?” Of the 200 kids to whom Hughes has given refuge in the past year, no fewer than 15 have committed suicide.

The war has had an equally brutalizing effect on the young girls of Viet Nam. For them, marriage is an increasingly unattainable goal; families and clans have been scattered, eligible young men have been killed or are away at war. In the chaos of war and relocation, tens of thousands of girls have gone to the cities to become prostitutes, often lured by newspaper ads promising money. English-language lessons and good times to those who become bar “hostesses.” An astonishing number of Viet Nam’s 300,000 whores tell the same story: they live in fear that their family will find out the truth about the “city job” that pays far more than their parents ever earned.

The effect of war on Viet Nam’s preadolescents is just as devastating. The records of Saigon’s Center for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery are full of case histories of childhood gone awry. A 13-year-old named True was running in the fields outside Nha Trang when he stumbled upon a fountain pen. Shouting to his friends, he placed the pen in his mouth and bit into it; it turned out to be a Chinese-made plastique bomb that destroyed half his face. Similarly, a 15-year-old named An was raiding a garbage heap at the U.S. airbase at Tuy Hoa when he set off a mine that blew off both his legs.

The center has operated on some 3,000 children burned by napalm, white phosphorus (“Willie Pete” to the G.I.s) or the highly flammable JP4 jet fuel that sometimes finds its way to the local black market as cooking fuel. Earlier this year, its doctors treated a 15-year-old girl whose hands had been cruelly burned by an incendiary bomb years before. “I’m convinced,” says the hospital’s Dr. John Champlin, “that out in the bushes there are many people who’ll come in after the war. We haven’t hit 20% of the injuries yet.”

Beginning of Debate. There is also the question of how many may have suffered genetic damage from the herbicides used in defoliation. A cause-and-effect relationship has not been proved. But, says Champlin, “I do not know a doctor in this country who doesn’t think there is a higher incidence of birth defects in this generation than the last and who doesn’t attribute it to the use of herbicides.”

The U.S. experience in Viet Nam has proved that, if guerrilla wars are to be fought at all, new ways must be devised to protect the innocent. The subject has not attracted noticeable attention in any of the Communist countries that sponsor terrorism (see page 28), but it is causing considerable concern in a U.S. shaken by the disclosures of My Lai and the general effect of the war on the Vietnamese populace. As a first step, Senator Kennedy recommended last week that the President create a military-practices review board that would advise the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Said Kennedy: “There continues to be a vast gap between the official policy of our Government and the performance in the field. We must resolve that what has been done in Indochina in America’s name will never happen again.” The subcommittee’s hearings may well represent the beginning of a national debate that will last as long as U.S. soldiers are fighting in Indochina and until the last refugee has been resettled.

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