April 2000

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Vietnam Remembered

Twenty-five years ago this month, United States military forces, in disarray, fled a Vietnam which was devastated but triumphnt after years of war, first against French colonialists and then against a puppet government and the US and its allies. Doug Hostetter, now international interfaith secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, took his camera with him when he went to Vietnam in the late 1960s to perform his alternative service to the draft. We publish here some images and notes from his journals of that dark time.

"It is impossible to capture the cruelty and folly of this war in a few pages," Hostetter writes. "The journal entries and photos were to have been a book, but marketing departments worried about sales, and editors were uncomfortable with what I had experienced, and I was unwilling to compromise; so only pieces have been published over the past couple of decades."

"I helped bury one of my students today. It was one of the saddest experiences I have ever had. His casket was a plain home-made wooden box covered with red paper and carried hanging from two bamboo poles. He was carried up on a hillside overlooking his home and the rice fields below, and there he was carefully lowered into a shallow grave. Candles and papers were burned for him and then we all threw some of the red dirt back into his grave. Thong was only 17, still in high school. He had been studying at a friend's house last Friday night. The VC had started to mortar and he had to run to the door to get into the bomb shelter. He was shot in the doorway, no one knows by whom. There were fresh bomb craters around his house and holes in the wall caused by shells that killed another child over Tet. The motto with the three traditional blessings of the Chinese cultures-happiness, prosperity, and long life-had been cracked in the blast and hung broken on the wall."

Vietnam marked a turning point in American history. It is not that that war was essentially different; all wars are an atrocity against humanity and the earth. But Vietnam was the first war to be televised. It was very hard to romanticize and idealize a conflict brought daily into the nation's living rooms. But even with all the war coverage, most of us never met the beautiful people and ancient culture our war was devastating.

I had become draft eligible after graduating from Eastern Mennonite College in Harrisonburg, VA in 1966 in the middle of the Vietnam war. Like my Swiss Mennonite ancestors before me, I was unwilling to kill for my country. I became a conscientious objector and volunteered for three years of alternative service with the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) in Vietnam. I was sent as the first MCC volunteer to Tam Ky, a central Vietnamese village in the middle of the war zone.

My first task was to discover how a pacifist could be relevant, perhaps even helpful, in the middle of a war. When I asked refugee families what they most wanted, they immediately replied, education for their children. Rural schools in Quang Tin Province had been destroyed by the fighting two years earlier, when the US and the Saigon government lost control of the countryside to the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF), or as Americans called them the Vietnamese Communists or VC. So I recruited Vietnamese high school students to teach unschooled refugee children. In the first two years of the program, more than 90 Vietnamese high schoolers taught some 3000 six- to eight-year-old children how to read and write their own language. I realized that education, unlike most gifts, enhances human dignity and will serve its recipient well regardless of who wins the war. Education is also the gift for survival--the one thing you can take with you, even when all else is lost.

National Liberation Front soldiers captured in Thang Binh by South Vietnamese forces, who marched them to a field at the edge of town and shot them. 1968

Lake of the Returned Sword, 1970, Hanoi. The children are standing on top of a bomb shelter built into the embankment around the lake.

"A few days ago I went out to Ky Phu to help Buu and his father rebuild their home. Their hamlet was about 98% destroyed, no homes unharmed, most completely destroyed with only brick floors and the bomb shelters remaining. Many of the trees had been cut down and those that remained standing were without any leaves due to defoliation. Buu said that there had been 800 families there before the 'pacification.' Only 170 were left to reclaim their hamlet." 1969

ALL the Vietnam photos were taken by Doug Hostetter.