Vietnamese War Child Sees Youths as Bridge to Close 2 Nations’ Gap

Ly Le Hayslip was a child of war. As a baby, she was carried in her mother’s basket through a field of rice. Straight ahead was the family home, swallowed in flames.

That’s how it started.

That time, the village was a victim of the French, who left Vietnam in 1954. Later, Hayslip saw herself as a victim of the Americans and the bloody militias of her own Vietnam.

Now 38, she feels like a woman who spent most of her life caught in the middle. At times, she uses stronger words to describe her past--words such as trapped and suffocated.

Only now does Hayslip feel the dawning of a new day. From the balcony of her hillside home in Escondido, she’s reminded of her Vietnamese city of Kyla--the scenery is eerily similar, she said--and the memory is pleasant. No guns can be heard in this memory. She dreams idealistic dreams and harbors hope for the life ahead.

Most of those dreams point to children. Hayslip is affiliated with Youth Ambassadors of America, an organization based in Bellingham, Wash., which makes periodic trips to the Soviet Union, bearing children as emissaries of peace. Hayslip has made one such trip and hopes to make others. She wants most of all to organize a Youth Ambassador caravan to Vietnam. She says the time for healing has come and that children are the world’s best healers.

“I think she’s very dedicated and if given the open door will make a real difference,” said Linda Leigh Johnson, director of Youth Ambassadors of America. Johnson is planning to take 85 U.S. children to Moscow for a “summit” with Soviet youths March 31. She met Hayslip about a year ago at a conference in San Diego.

“At first, I was skeptical of the idea of going to Vietnam,” Johnson said. “I felt more healing was necessary. But now, I agree with Ly that children are the world’s best healers--I’ve seen it work. As soon as we finish the summit, I hope to start planning such a trip.”

Jay Wurts is a San Francisco-based writer collaborating with Hayslip on a book about her Vietnam experience. Titled “Coming Back: A Woman’s Spiritual Journey from War to Peace and Beyond,” the book will be published by Doubleday next year, according to Sandra Dijkstra, Hayslip’s Del Mar literary agent.

Wurts said Americans are sometimes put off when hearing that Hayslip had anything at all to do with the Viet Cong. He said they need to look deeper.

‘Coming Back From War’

“Ly has found a way to come back from the war,” Wurts said. “And the first thing to remember is that when she was involved with the Viet Cong, she was a very little girl. Her entire village was very much leaning toward the North throughout the conflict, and that includes the war with the French. She grew up with those biases--and all of the conflict that war represents--around her.

“Her primary belief, and it’s one she resonates, is that the war is over and we shouldn’t try to maintain it in our hearts. It really is time to heal.”

Wurts, who flew missions into Vietnam as a pilot with the Air National Guard, calls Hayslip “an amazing woman, a very charismatic woman who’s led an incredible life. She is someone Americans can learn from. She saw the Vietnam War from both sides, and now, as a U.S. citizen, her perspective is unique.”

During her teen years, Hayslip fought on the side of the Viet Cong--but never by choice, she hastened to note. She said she killed only in self-defense. She blames it on the horror of an ugly war.

Hayslip said she was raped by Viet Cong soldiers. She was tortured by the South Vietnamese army. They bound and gagged her and let big ants crawl across her nude body. A poisonous water snake was let loose in her pants. She escaped the bite of the snake “by being still,” while ants nipped at her skin until she bled.

Beaten, Tortured

She said her sister was beaten and tortured by U.S. soldiers. She said her niece was stripped naked by Americans and tied to a tree for a GI picture-taking session. She said her cousin was “gang-raped” by Americans.

None of these incidents bring tears to Hayslip’s eyes except for one. In talking of how the Americans ravaged Kyla, burning it to the ground, she cried.

“In 1965, when I left, the village was filled with beautiful fruit trees,” she said. “Coconut trees, palm trees. In ‘67, when I returned (after having sought refuge in Saigon), it was barren--the Americans had made it a kind of bloody parking lot. I don’t see how men can take something so beautiful and make it so ugly. You can see how this touches me. It’s one thing to take a life to protect yourself. It’s quite another to ravage the beauty of nature.”

Hayslip hopes to start a foundation in memory of her father. Its purpose would be to aid Vietnamese children with education, relocation and a lessening in culture shock.

Pizza Can’t Replace Flowers

“That was the worst for me,” she said. “I remember when I first came to America, I was grieving the loss of a loved one. I had been taught you surrounded yourself with flowers for months on end. But I could find no flowers, since I had no car to go and buy some. A neighbor asked me out for pizza. I didn’t know what pizza was. Since I had told the neighbor of my loss, I decided pizza was a tool for mourning. I got to Pizza Hut and saw no one mourning and became quite confused. I then figured out there was much to learn.”

Hayslip is a mother of three boys, each with a different father. The eldest, a student at UC San Diego, was fathered by a Vietnamese man, whom Hayslip visited in Ho Chi Minh City on her return. She was astonished at how this once-wealthy man had been reduced--in finances and spirit--to a war-ravaged shadow of his former self.

Her second son was fathered by an American, whom Hayslip met in Saigon and followed to San Diego in 1970. Thirty-five years her senior, he died of emphysema. She said her third husband, Dennis Hayslip, was killed in a car wreck.

“Tragedy has stalked me my whole life,” she said. “I hope to take this tragedy and apply it to peaceful ends, merely by telling my story. If I cannot do that, if I go to my grave without releasing this tragedy so that others may learn, well, then, I have failed in my task. I cannot bear that burden.”

Hayslip’s task has not been undertaken without controversy. In 1985, she applied to the Vietnamese mission of the United Nations for a visa to visit her homeland. She was granted the visa but was told by U.S. authorities that they could be of no help if she was detained. She wasn’t--she returned to Escondido without complication--but representatives of the FBI later interrogated Hayslip and have done so again since her return from Moscow.

“I go to Vietnam, and my brother thinks I’m a spy for the Americans,” she said tearfully. “No one in my family (whom she hadn’t seen for more than a decade) could understand how I got there, that I just applied and flew there. Then, I get back and the Americans think I’m a spy working for the Vietnamese. I’m a woman of peace, but always, I’m surrounded by conflict, by the agents of war. They follow me like a hostile shadow.”

Her teen-age involvement with the Viet Cong consisted of cleaning weapons, digging tunnels, working as a nurse--but, she repeated, never by choice. Saying “no” meant torture or death. She and members of her family--she was the youngest of three children--performed similar roles for the South Vietnamese and the Americans, but again, she insisted, never by choice.

‘Pawns of War’

“We were pawns of war,” she said bitterly, “used by all sides, repeatedly and maliciously. I look back and don’t see how or why children have to endure that kind of suffering, that nervous, scary suffering. A life of no enjoyment. A hell.

“Everywhere we went, we saw funerals and burials, crying and screaming. Nothing you could call peace, no enjoyment of life, no sense of youth, no sense of freedom, nothing but darkness, never knowing who was enemy or who was friend.”

In 1965, Hayslip was apprehended by the South Vietnamese, who suspected she was working for the Viet Cong. She spent two weeks in a POW camp, where she was tortured (in the snakes-and-ants episode) and finally released.

After her release, she was captured by the Viet Cong, who suspected her of being a double agent. They interrogated her in a “courtroom-like setting” and then took her to her grave, which had just been dug.

With hands tied behind her back, she was made to kneel at her graveside. They, too, demanded to know what she knew of the enemy. She could only say that she had been tortured by the South Vietnamese, with ants and snakes and electroshock devices attached to her thumbs.

When her answers were unsatisfactory, two Viet Cong soldiers took turns raping her.

“They said, ‘If you tell anyone of this, we’ll murder your family.’ So I lived with my secret for years.”

Hayslip said she is “just now” beginning to assess the aftereffects of war. For years, she said she couldn’t cry.

Crying Was Impossible

“I could not cry because I could not feel,” she said. “I was numb--emotionally immobilized. I couldn’t let myself feel. I couldn’t succumb to feeling overwhelmed.”

After the rape, she went to Da Nang and then to Saigon, each time for refuge. She returned to Kyla twice, checking each time on a rumor involving her family. Both rumors proved to be true.

Once, her mother was questioned by the Viet Cong, who believed she had been used as a tool by the South Vietnamese. She was released but not before her defense was pleaded--successfully--in front of a firing squad. (The defense of four other women proved unsuccessful, and they were killed.) Later, Hayslip’s father was imprisoned and tortured until his ribs were broken.

A few years later, he came reluctantly to Saigon, bearing a message from the Viet Cong. He could neither read nor write but knew the essence of the message: Hayslip was being asked to bomb a building, one overflowing with Americans, and if she didn’t, her family would be killed in retaliation.

Her own kind of “Sophie’s Choice” had a predictably tragic ending. Her father, who told her, “You can’t do it, you mustn’t do it, this revenge and war must stop,” took his own life three days later.

“That’s why I’ve started a foundation for children in his honor,” his daughter said. “I want revenge and war to stop, all over the world. Maybe one person can’t make a difference, but at least I can try. And, I can hope.”