Legacies

Journeys of Reconciliation

The Vietnam War haunts America. U.S. veterans and their families perhaps experience this in its greatest intensity. Nina Genera’s brother was serving in Vietnam when she attended the Indochinese Women’s Conference in Vancouver. After much effort, she and her husband secured his release from the military, eight months into his term. She recalled that he flew back to the States on a plane that carried “the dead, the injured . . . the tanks and all the other stuff that had to be repaired back home. . . . He, like, curled up. He said, ‘By that time, we had to learn how to curl up like the Vietnamese . . . into a little ball, you know, to hide.’ And that’s the way he made the, something like the eighteen- or twenty-two-hour trip back home.”1

When he called Nina to be picked up, he was still wearing his fatigues: “He hadn’t showered, like, in two weeks—[he] took this long shower in our . . . bathroom and when he got done, I mean, that thing was backed up because so much red dirt, you know, at the bottom . . . like two inches of red dirt.”2 But the experience of Vietnam could not just be washed off. Nina remembered, “His back was just horrible. . . . It looked like he had some kind of a rash on his back, which is all I could see but he said it was all over his body. And I guess it was from the Agent Orange.” Vietnam left traces not only on his body but on his mind. Speaking in 2007, more than thirty-five years after her brother’s return, Nina reflected:

It cost him his marriage. He’d get up in the middle of the night and grab his wife at the time and, you know, throw her underneath the bed. You know, that whole duck and cover thing. And . . . [he] would have nightmares where he thought that she was the enemy . . . so she just couldn’t put up with it. . . . He doesn’t talk much about it now. . . . Just every once in a while—this last time we were together he said something about Vietnam. But . . . you don’t want to, like, ask him questions because you don’t know if it’s gonna crack him or what.3

How do individuals, families, communities, and nations come to terms with the full “costs” of war?

Supporters of the U.S. war in Vietnam have expressed anger at those whom they feel are responsible for the “loss” of the war: the antiwar movement, the liberal media, “soft” politicians, and, of course, the sneaky Vietnamese opposition too cowardly to fight a “real” war. Like the North American antiwar activists at the Indochinese Women’s Conferences, war advocates continue to engage in a politics of blame.

But what does a “victory” in war mean? For the precious freedom to rule their own nation, Vietnamese anticolonial revolutionaries engaged in protracted wars against the French, the Americans, and the South Vietnamese government from 1945 to 1975. During this thirty-year period, millions of lives were lost, communities destroyed, survivors dislocated, and the landscape scarred. Vast amounts of unmarked and undetonated mines, an estimated 600,000 tons, continue to kill and injure Vietnamese people, long after the United States withdrew its troops.4 The biochemical weapons, which also left their mark on U.S. soldiers, have had long-lasting ecological and genetic effects on Vietnam and its people.

During the war, the Vietnamese attempted to face the widespread destruction of their society with determination, ingenuity, and optimism. As Elaine Brown recalled, “They were passionate, unabashedly weeping as they spoke of the horrors of the war, and able to laugh with equal vigor—even about the war. Every time the United States dropped bombs on them, they told us, a big crater was created. The most efficient thing to do with the deep holes the bombs made was fill them with water. Then they became ‘lakes.’ ‘We have many lakes in Vietnam,’ they laughed.”5 Following reunification, the Vietnamese government and nongovernment organizations have attempted to draw international attention and to solicit aid to address ongoing issues related to the war.

Unlike its actions following other conflicts, the U.S. government has refused to provide reconstruction aid, although President Nixon promised to do so. As demonstrated by the results of the William Calley trial, the American state denies responsibility for acts of war. In fact, even after the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, presidents Nixon and Ford continued to pledge military aid to South Vietnam until funds were finally cut off by Congress. To protest this military support as well as the lack of reconstruction aid, Ann Froines and other members of the Indochinese Peace Campaign persisted in their efforts to raise awareness among the American public about the ongoing U.S. hostility into the mid- and even late 1970s.6 Only in 1994 did the United States lift an economic embargo against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and only in 1997 did the two countries normalize political relations.

During the 1970s, most Americans showed little inclination to offer assistance to Vietnam, especially in the context of the stagflation economic crisis. Even the arrival of refugees from Southeast Asia aroused mixed reactions. The first wave of approximately 130,000 Vietnamese came in 1975, shortly after the fall of Saigon in April of that year. They tended to be educated, urban, and Christian, with economic and political ties to the French and the Americans.

In addition to these evacuees, over three thousand children were airlifted from orphanages and adopted by families around the world. This widely publicized “baby airlift,” designed to save these children from communism, proved controversial. Not all the children were in fact orphans. Some parents had placed their children in social service agencies and religious institutions because of the hardships of war. Pat Sumi enlisted legal support in the United States to protest the separation of these children from their parents and to restore their families. Nancy Stearns—one of the legal experts, a friend of Sumi’s, and a colleague of Cora Weiss’s husband, Peter—recalled:

What happened was adoption agencies just emptied themselves out and brought the kids here, but adoption agencies in Vietnam at that point were . . . functioning like day care centers. . . . So, you had a real mix of kids plus there were women who worked at the agencies who were terrified of what was gonna happen to their kids because of the fact that they were working with Americans. Some of them put their kids on the planes hoping to get them to relatives in the United States. Some of the Vietnamese women who worked for the agencies were going to try to follow and get their kids when they got here. . . . Some were what they called half orphans—you know, that had one parent alive and one parent not alive. . . . And some were kids who had American GI fathers and Vietnamese mothers and the mothers were afraid of what was gonna happen to their mixed-race kids.7

After a lengthy court battle, which lasted several years, the challenge to the orphan airlift was dismissed “in the best interest of the children.” Stearns recalled, “It was a very painful case to work on.”8

An additional wave of more than half a million Vietnamese refugees arrived in the late 1970s and onward. These individuals escaped on boats and suffered attacks by pirates off the coast of Thailand. A substantial portion were ethnic Chinese Vietnamese, like Bob Browne’s wife. They faced persecution because they had developed an economic niche within the retail trade in Vietnam and because of the outbreak of war with China in 1979. Compared to the first wave, the second wave had less contact with Western people and culture as well as fewer opportunities to transfer their assets to the United States. Consequently, they faced a more difficult time adjusting to American society.

These waves of Vietnamese were joined by approximately 140,000 from Laos and over 100,000 from Cambodia. They fled their respective countries as a result of the political and military dislocation connected to the war in Vietnam. They tended to come from rural areas and had less access to education than the Vietnamese. The Hmong, an ethnic group within Laos that had been recruited by the American CIA to fight against communists, came from a preliterate culture. They discovered that the United States is “another kind of jungle—a technological and bureaucratic jungle.”9 Previously engaged in farming and soldiering, they had limited economic skills to survive in the United States. Consequently, they initially relied on low-wage jobs, social services, and welfare to get by. Like other veterans and survivors of war, they also suffered psychologically, emotionally, and physically. While some Americans welcomed their former allies, others resented their presence. The Southeast Asian refugees constituted a racial other, now on American soil, making demands again on American resources.

They arrived as the political landscape was shifting from the radical internationalism of the “long” 1960s to the “Me Decade,” a phrase coined by writer Tom Wolfe to describe the 1970s.10 The contrast is perhaps overdrawn, since not all activists abandoned their political commitments and became focused on self-transformation. However, there were changes in the ways American radicals perceived decolonizing Asia.

Previously, Vietnam was the most visible and successful site of resistance to American military and political aggression. Whether represented by Buddhist leader Thich Nhat Hanh, National Liberation Front spokesperson Madame Binh, DRV president Ho Chi Minh, or the iconic peasant woman warrior, the Vietnamese were heroic underdogs, struggling for the right of self-determination. They captured the political imagination of American activists invested in peace, liberation, and sisterhood. Although North Korea had less recognition among U.S. political circles, the People’s Republic of China and Chairman Mao also stirred leftist, anticolonial, and Third World–identified activists. Disillusioned by their country’s inhumane acts of war and increasingly aware of racial and gender inequality, American radicals turned to decolonizing Asia for political inspiration during the 1960s and early 1970s.

This book brings attention to this radical orientalist imaginary to enhance the existing scholarship on the long 1960s. Seeking to go beyond a black-white and domestically bounded framework for understanding U.S. history, this work foregrounds instead the importance of global political dialogue between American nonstate actors of varying racial and ethnic backgrounds and Asian political leaders and spokespersons. In addition, this book underscores the significance of gender in framing these international dialogues and relationships.

The radical orientalist sensibilities of American activists, which peaked during the U.S. war in Vietnam, declined during the mid- to late 1970s. The realpolitik of nation formation and international diplomacy increasingly challenged heroic perceptions of Asian nations. The Cold War détente between the United States and China that occurred in the early 1970s, the denunciation of the excesses of the Chinese Cultural Revolution that emerged in the mid- to late 1970s, the process of political consolidation in Vietnam following reunification in 1975, and the continued obscurity and isolation of North Korea throughout that period combined to lessen the romantic appeal of these socialist powers. As one of Cora Weiss’s peace activist colleagues said to her after the U.S. war in Vietnam ended: Vietnam is now a country, not a cause.

James Meriwether, in his study of African American relationships to Africa during the middle decades of the twentieth century, noted a similar phenomenon. Blacks in the United States tended to “focus on countries embroiled in national liberation struggles, as opposed to countries that already had gained independence.”11 Doing so “enabled African Americans to continue building transatlantic bridges while finessing the task of addressing the complexities of contemporary Africa.”12 By the late 1970s, the Vietnamese were no longer heroically resisting Western imperialism. Instead, the DRV, PRC, and North Korea faced the challenges of running their governments and economies while negotiating complex domestic and international conflicts. There were no clear-cut revolutionary champions and capitalist villains.

In this context, some activists of the long 1960s generation, like Eldridge Cleaver, renounced their former politics. Other radicals, like Pat Sumi, continued to embrace idealistic beliefs about the egalitarian promise of socialism, regardless of the actual conduct of socialist states. As she said, twenty-seven years after the Anti-Imperialist Delegation, “I believe in our naiveté.”13 In fact, a leftist movement among Third World people in the United States persisted and even found organizational form in the mid- to late 1970s. The League of Revolutionary Struggle, a Marxist-Leninist organization, was created in 1978 out of a merger between I Wor Kuen (the predominantly Asian American organization of which Alex Hing was a member), the August 29th Movement (an organization named after the Chicano Moratorium and that worked with Betita Martinez), and the Revolutionary Communist League (formerly a black nationalist organization led by artist Amiri Baraka). Still others recognized the profound impact of antiwar politics on their lives and identities, without necessarily subscribing to a particular political ideology. Maria Ramirez, writing in 2011, reflected that she and her friend Nina “were forever changed by our involvement against that unjust war. . . . It has made us want to be better human beings.”14

As diverse individuals processed the meaning of their activism in light of changing political developments, some channeled their radical orientalist sensibilities to become academic orientalists. During the 1960s and early 1970s, travelers to socialist Asia constructed knowledge about these societies for the West through movement writings, drawings, and speeches. They did so with the assistance of Asian and European partners. For example, Pham Van Chuong, the National Liberation Front correspondent based in Eastern Europe, published a weekly four-page newsletter in English for Western audiences.15 He had limited resources to accomplish his tasks. He shared the facilities, equipment, and distribution network of the Czech News Agency in Prague. His routine included receiving news from a teleprinter provided by the office. Using a typewriter on stencil paper, he typically worked through the night to produce the newsletter. While he could send approximately five hundred copies to various individuals and organizations in North America, he relied upon his supporters in Prague to make all of the copies and disseminate newsletters among their circulation networks in Europe. Chuong developed the mailing list in North America by meeting with U.S. antiwar activists who visited him in Prague. These individuals, in turn, communicated what they learned from Chuong to their constituencies through interviews, essays, and articles published occasionally in the U.S. mainstream press but most often in alternative newspapers affiliated with their respective organizations.

After the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam, activists like Ann Froines and Charlotte Bunch continued their role as interpreters of Asia for Western audiences. Along with other radicals who became academics, they offered some of the first university classes and also authored articles and books on women, peasants, and revolution in Asia. In fact, Bunch became a leading activist-scholar of international and transnational feminism.

The questions of how diverse women might engage in meaningful dialogue and form political coalitions, topics raised by the 1971 Indochinese Women’s Conferences, continue to be debated in feminist conferences, movements, and intellectual circles today. In particular, the controversies about whether and how to address sexuality would recur as women from the global North met with those from the global South.16 Despite the difficulties of forming international alliances, women who became politically active during the Vietnam era recognize the importance of building these bridges. Even though leftist decolonizing movements conceived of women’s liberation as integrally linked to national liberation and socialism, achieving independence did not eliminate gendered forms of inequality. In some cases, gender disparities have worsened due to globalization, a form of economic imperialism. Today, the Vietnam Women’s Union continues to function. It helps to document the important contributions that Vietnamese women made to their country’s liberation. In addition, the union seeks to address contemporary women’s needs and partners with feminist organizations around the world to do so.17

As the political cachet of Third World socialism both waxed and waned, and as the investment in global sisterhood endured, the Western fascination with Asian culture and religion has fermented. The career of Thich Nhat Hanh provides insight into this phenomenon. Following his successful 1966 world tour, Hanh used Paris as his political base to continue his efforts to bring peace to his home country. While Bob Browne began to reduce his involvement in the antiwar movement in order to devote himself to black power causes, the Fellowship of Reconciliation continued its collaboration with Hanh well into the 1970s. Linda Forrest, whose husband, Jim, was assigned to travel with the Buddhist monk in 1968 on behalf of FOR, described their relationship in a memo to the FOR staff: “I’ve accumulated enough interesting bits and pieces from Jim’s letters to give you all some brief comments about the tour. . . . A typical quote from Jim’s letters: ‘Nhat Hanh is now watching TV without the sound, something he greatly enjoys. . . .’ From the tone of the letters, I should say that Jim is becoming something of a Buddhist, and Nhat Hanh something of a hippie. They’re a hard act to follow.”18 Hanh began his public career in the West as an “authentic” spokesperson for the cause of peace in Vietnam. As the quote foreshadows, he would emerge as a leading figure in the New Age movement, someone who could distill and translate the insights of Eastern religion for a Western audience seeking peace and reconciliation. To this day, Thich Nhat Hanh promotes engaged Buddhism through meditation retreats, speaking tours, and publications. He continues to travel, engage in dialogue, and encourage self-reflection in the hopes that the values of nonviolence and compassion might speak beyond human-made barriers and transform individuals as well as their governments.

As the “Me Decade” came to an end, Cora Weiss and Bob Browne made their final trip to Vietnam in the name of international humanitarianism. In 1978, Weiss organized a private mission on behalf of Church World Service (CWS). This Protestant organization began working in Vietnam as early as 1954, providing refugee assistance at the end of the First Indochina War against France. During the U.S. war in Vietnam, CWS offered food, medicine, and educational resources to ameliorate the sufferings of war.19 After the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 and after the reunification of Vietnam in 1975, the organization raised funds to rebuild bombed hospitals and reconstruct schools. It also sent food, a necessity for an ecologically devastated country attempting to rebuild its economic infrastructure. In 1978, as Vietnamese refugees fled on boats, Weiss organized a delegation to deliver a shipment of wheat, to be consumed and planted for future crops. Because the U.S. government refused to help, Weiss continued her service as a citizen diplomat and stepped in to provide aid.

Even though CWS was a Protestant organization, it had a history of practicing interfaith cooperation. And Weiss, although Jewish, had a long history of working with humanitarian activists of varying religious backgrounds. In 1967, she had been part of an interfaith team that strategized to convince Martin Luther King Jr. to speak out about the Vietnam War. She gathered with the group at the apartment of John and Anne Bennett. John was the president of the Union Theological Seminary in New York City at the time. He and his wife, a member of WILPF, had visited Saigon in 1965 on a delegation with Bob Browne. At the 1967 meeting, the others present included Catholic priest Dick Fernandez, who served as the executive director of the Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam, Rabbi Abraham Heschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Reverend William Sloane Coffin of the Riverside Church in New York. Coffin would eventually travel with Weiss to North Vietnam in 1972 to bring back three American POWs, released to them as a gesture of goodwill. The interfaith group in 1967 discussed various ways to persuade King that now was the time to publicly declare his opposition to the war. They telephoned him and offered the venue of Riverside Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. eventually gave his famous antiwar speech.20

For the 1978 visit, Weiss, one of two women on the delegation, invited her longtime friend and antiwar colleague, Bob Browne, the only African American in the group. It would be his first visit to Hanoi and his first opportunity to revisit Saigon, now named Ho Chi Minh City, since his travels there eleven years earlier. As an economist, Browne was eager to observe the new policies being introduced by the DRV. Even after reunification of the country, the government had moved cautiously to consolidate the economies of the North and the South. However, in 1978, a new national currency was introduced and efforts were made to bring the previously “free wheeling, consumer-oriented economy of the South into some sense of equilibrium with the austere, government-controlled economy of the North.”21 As Browne noted, because Chinese Vietnamese “were disproportionately involved in commerce in Vietnam, many were economically squeezed in this process, giving rise to a new wave of refugees.”22 These economic reforms would be reversed eight years later, as Vietnam adopted doi moi, or a socialist version of a free-market economy.

In 1978, Browne recognized that consolidating a new nation meant hardships for those who had previously benefited under the Republic of Vietnam. The “re-education centers,” where obstructionists of the new state were sent, were reputedly closed by 1978. Even so, Browne found “it difficult to locate his pre-war and war time Vietnamese friends,” concluding “that such persons have been removed from positions of influence (if they did not flee to exile).”23

Among the dislocated, Browne found two of Huoi’s brothers, who had moved to Vietnam from Cambodia due to the political turmoil in that country. Both nations suffered from food shortages. Browne recalled that his “two brothers-in-law in Vietnam . . . begged [him], with tears in their eyes, to help them get out of Vietnam—not because of political ideology but simply because they couldn’t get enough food to feed their families.”24 Browne attempted to sponsor their migration, but was unsuccessful, perhaps because they were economic and not political refugees. He did write to the U.S. mainstream media, including the New York Times, to demand that America pay its “Overdue Debt to Indochina”:

My God, when is America going to overcome its adolescent pique at losing the Vietnam War and begin to display some common sense and genuine compassion for the beleaguered Indochinese people rather than a transparent posturing over the plight of the boat people? . . . What I did see was a Vietnam unable to feed itself and which clearly but with dignity was asking the U.S. to help to rebuild at least the food-producing potential which the U.S. military had quite effectively destroyed. Having spent $100 billion to deliver unconscionable terror and destruction to these two little nations [Vietnam and Cambodia], we certainly should be honest enough with ourselves to swallow our pride and send them at least $100 million worth of food.25

On his 1978 trip to deliver wheat to Vietnam, Browne traveled with religious, cultural, and economic leaders. His companions included a man from Kansas, representing American farmers who were donating their crops. When the ship left the dock in Texas, a church spokesperson from Houston expressed their goals for the journey: “We sail this ship as a sign of hope for peace and unity, and for the day when people will beat their swords into ploughshares, and we will create a world community with each sharing as equals.”26 Thirteen-year-old Susan Ross of Houston expressed a similar sentiment more simply, when she said, “I give this wheat because the children of the world are friends.”27

Prime Minister Pham Van Dong met the delegation upon their arrival. In 1970, Eldridge Cleaver recalled the eloquence and empathy of this political leader, whose life spanned almost the entirety of the twentieth century. Born in 1906, Pham Van Dong cofounded the Indochinese Communist Party and served as the prime minister of North Vietnam through both the first and second Indochinese wars. He frequently met with American antiwar activists during the U.S. war in Vietnam, treating them as dignitaries. In the spring of 1978, Dong demonstrated once again his poetic command of language. He welcomed the Ship of Wheat and his American guests by saying, “You are the swallows who bring the spring.”28 The analogy is a moving one. Like swallows, internationalists such as Weiss and Browne find ways to move beyond human-made borders. Arriving at a time of rebirth and renewal, they brought seeds for food and hopes for peace.

Figure 18. Premier Pham Van Dong greets Cora Weiss and other members of the Ship of Wheat delegation in Hanoi, May 1978. Tranh Minh Quoc, who hosted the 1970 Anti-Imperialist Delegation, is second from the left. Bob Browne is third from the left. Donated to author’s personal collection by Cora Weiss.

Figure 19. The Ship of Wheat delegation with Cora Weiss (middle of the front row) and Bob Browne (third from the left in the back). Photo taken in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), 28 May 1978. Personal collection of Cora Weiss.