CHAPTER 15

The Killing of the Children (1973)

Again and again during my brief time in jail in Washington, moments and people in Hanoi rushed up before me in full clarity.1 They do as I say these words—the children at the turn in the road from Gia Lam Airport to Hanoi, the boy accepting the long stalk of flowers, the people swarming over the bombed bridge across the River Rouge to mend it, the children at my window in the hotel street. Eyes, filled with life, and a strong sanity. Did it come from that rushing to repair the bridge as soon as it was bombed, from the tones in which they said, “We have resisted for a thousand years. We can do this for a thousand more,” and from the look with which they answered my question after I saw the shattered young boys at Bạch Mai Hospital—“How do you speak to these mothers?”—the look with which my host answered, “We have a saying, ‘A good doctor is also a good mother’”—?

In jail they were before my thoughts. When I heard the crying of the prisoners in that big room which is sickbay of the Detention Center—crying as they spoke of missing their children. When I saw the young cat “hidden” very openly. He was a cream-colored and cinnamon cat named Contraband, and he made a flash of another life in that place. He did not know he was locked in.

My situation was different from that of the others. I was in as a matter of choice, and could have paid a fine instead. The trial and conviction following the peace action of Redress on June 27, 1972, in the Senate building was a matter of choice for all of us, too.2 We had presented a citizens’ petition calling for a redress of grievances, asking the Senate to suspend all its other business and devote itself to the most urgent question of stopping the war in Indochina—we called it “Vietnam” then, long ago last summer.

We presented our petition, being greeted by Senator Gravel and meeting with Senators Javits and Kennedy.3 Then came our first choice: whether we would wait outside the Senate chamber, in the corridor, for an answer or not; and then, whether we would wait standing, or leave if we were asked to, or in a gesture of grief and protest, lie down on that cool mosaic floor.

In the back-and-forth of Hanoi and Washington, the coolness of that floor and the friends around me came back to me in the moist warmth of Hanoi, and on that evening when we were told that in two hours we would go to visit the prisoners of war in their camp.

Scene superimposed over scene. The sense of deep peace in the parks of Hanoi, those still lakes and the pagodas, the boy learning to fish while his father threaded his line, the lovers walking in the evening. And overhead the dread, as it had come from the moment we stepped from the plane, of the skies in which flew invisible the American planes. Our planes, and the fliers I had loved long ago, when I went to flying school and wrote my first book of poems—it is called Theory of Flight.4

And now another evening, the park, and our interpreter saying to us as the sound of a plane came high over our heads, “It’s all right. It’s one of ours.” The smiting realization that they are all “ours”—and that at home that must be sorted out every day. As it had to be sorted out new that evening, when we faced the prisoners across the table—men looking at us, taking our hands, speaking of their life from the moment their planes were shot down. The bombers, the pilots of those invisible high planes. For, five miles up, these men say, they do not feel the realities of ground below them, people down there, the explosion they give to earth. They do not see the bomb hit. They only do their job, they say, and turn and go. But here they are, made visible again, shot down, captured. And to their surprise, given first aid, given cigarettes, now their hands unbound, treated “decently,” they say.

I face them, very conscious that in two weeks I will be going to jail. It is a brief sentence, thirty days, but there hangs over me the possibility that if I am not in court on the next day, it may turn out to have a penalty of five years. I look into the eyes of the prisoners.

But on that day, they ask me to speak in Hanoi on American writing and literature, and a large audience of writers comes to hear. For I have come with an errand, and a letter of authorization from PEN, the writers’ organization.5 The letter asks our hosts to set up with us, the American writers, a translation exchange program by which we will translate their writings and they will translate ours. And that is set up, happily and at once, with great warmth and cooperation from the writers in Hanoi.

And during my talk, a cable is brought that says I may have two weeks delay in beginning my sentence.

And when I come to surrender myself in Washington, the term is cut to four days.6 Now in the Detention Center, the lights are turned off for the first night. In the night, you begin to know the other prisoners and the life of the jail.

There are eleven cots in this room. My paper bag of a few objects is on the floor beside the cot. The books, the table, the TV. Now a girl comes over to talk to me. She is nineteen, she is black, she is here on the charge of killing her child, and has been waiting five months for trial. She crosses to my cot.

“What do ‘free’ mean?” she asks.

I look at her.

“You don’t understand English!” she says.

“Yeah, I understand English.”

“All right, what do ‘free’ mean?”

All our talk goes on from there.

And is still going on. I was able to work with her lawyers when I got out; and when she was moved to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and put in the section for the criminally insane, I was able to see her; and next week, I will testify at her trial.7

The young of Hanoi! Bombed, killed, mutilated, suffering, shattered in the hospital, evacuated to the villages. “We sent our younger children out,” the father said to me. “At random, to the villages, to people we had never seen.”

On Sunday evening, the bicycles. People on bicycles streaming into Hanoi, slowly, not biking aggressively; they are returning from the country, where they have been visiting their children on their one day off.

The woman doctor at Bạch Mai, who every Sunday visited her child fifty kilometers outside of the city.

And here, Lorraine, waiting for her hearing. She was pregnant at thirteen, and treated as retarded by her family, and she grieves for the child and the past. A young child she had, beaten to death.

But she too is the beaten child. And she needs the work and understanding that any of us can give.

And those other children? When I spoke to the writers about America, I expected to speak to them as my brothers and sisters. But I found myself saying, “You are my children, to whom my father has become a monster.”

And my thought ran to those other young men and women, the Americans who were the only ones to support the Geneva Agreement—until now, after the ceasefire, when the rest of America is beginning.8 Those war-resisters and war-refusers of all kinds—open refusers, evaders, “deserters,” those who stood by the principles we were brought up on. How do they come back? Now that the prisoners of the war are beginning to return, how do the ones who would not kill come home?9

There must be a better word than “amnesty.” Amnesty is a forgetting, and we do not forget. These men and the women who resisted with them are to be remembered. And established deep in American life, as a center and new beginning, as a chance to make our people again, to rebuild the spirit. I wish the war resisters could be put up for a Nobel Peace Prize.

I know that there is a defensive cry from the war-people saying that soldiers were killed in the place of the war-resisters who did not go to Vietnam.

And I think of a family that went south to Egypt at a time of fatality. It is like calling Joseph and Mary—and Jesus—to account for the slaughter of the Innocents.10

(Unpublished, 1973)