Enemy Journals

Last month on television, I watched red and yellow Vietnamese flags flicker like 30,000 flames outside a video store in Orange County’s Little Saigon. Enraged Vietnamese immigrants were protesting a shop owner’s display of Ho Chi Minh’s portrait and Communist Vietnam’s flag. I watched the scuffles and heard the screaming and thought about how long it takes people to heal from war. I drifted back to a humid night in 1968 when I fell asleep to the hum of a generator, the popping rotors of a Huey chopper lifting off near the hospital . . . . Even farther out in the night, artillery thundered and small-caliber weapons cracked against the background rhythm of Vietnam’s crickets and geckos. At 2 in the morning, I awakened to the sound of a distant thump. “Incoming!” a soldier yelled. The air filled with a whistle and hiss as Soviet 122 mm rockets and mortars crashed in on us.

I was with the 25th U.S. Infantry Division in Tay Ninh, Vietnam. It was my first time under fire. Metal fragments ripped into my arm and foot. As we waited for the attack to end, I wondered: What kind of men are out there in the darkness trying to kill us? Like most Americans, I saw the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong only as phantoms. They attacked and then disappeared. So I crouched in the bunker and wondered who these people really were--a riddle that would stick in my mind like shrapnel and spur me on a decades-long quest.

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During the final days that I was in Vietnam, a friend in military intelligence showed me a selection of enemy diaries that his unit had screened and was about to discard. He said they had been taken from dead NVA regulars or found on the ground after a battle. I rescued five diaries from the incinerator and studied them, mesmerized by the delicate calligraphy and watercolor paintings of flowers. It was my first intimate glimpse of the enemy.

As a photographer and correspondent for the American Red Cross and later for Newsweek magazine, I traveled more than 20,000 miles up and down the slender contour of South Vietnam. My credentials were a visa allowing me to photograph and document human suffering. By 1970, however, I had lost two photographer friends to North Vietnamese gunners. I was war- weary and exhausted and sensed my own death pending if I stayed on. I left Vietnam in April, carrying the five diaries home.

I settled in Los Angeles. As an instructor at the Art Center College of Design, I developed a bond with Charlie Potts, the school’s photo department chairman. He had seen heavy action during WWII on Edward Steichen’s U.S. Navy Pacific photo team, so I showed him the North Vietnamese diaries. With a faraway look he said that this wasn’t the first time he had seen the “hopes and dreams of young men.”

“You know, Jim,” he continued in his deliberate manner, “you will have to return these some day.” He paused and looked through me, then looked back at the journals and said: “These are the souls of men.” Only later would his widow tell me that Potts had come back from the war with a chest full of souvenirs from Japanese soldiers. Unable to return them to their owners, one day he rowed into Santa Monica Bay and, in a quiet, personal ceremony, returned them to the sea.

At night when I would awaken from poignant dreams (usually about deceased friends), I would study the diaries. Whose were they? What were the authors like? Were they dead? How did they die? What was the message written in them? Was it hope? Fear? Love? Anger? One of the diaries had small photos of a group of young Vietnamese, including two beautiful young women. What was their fate? So many questions. Yet, for some reason, looking at the diaries with their delicate handwriting and exotic watercolors calmed me. I felt more of a kinship with these unknown authors--my former enemy--than my own countrymen who knew nothing of the war.

In 1975, South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese Army. The war was over. America had lost 58,471 sons and eight daughters (nurses). More than 1,500 were missing. The Vietnamese on both sides suffered 4 million civilian dead. North Vietnamese military casualties were 1.1 million dead, 6 million wounded and 300,000 missing. Of the South Vietnamese, 223,748 had been killed. I lost 13 friends from the U.S. France, Japan, Great Britian, Germany and South Vietnam.

And the diaries? Were the authors among the North Vietnamese casualties? I had often thought about returning to Vietnam. Now Vietnam came to us in a rush of refugees--thousands of them. Most of my South Vietnamese friends who arrived in the U.S. wanted nothing to do with these writings of the enemy, but eventually I found a Vietnamese woman willing to translate two of them. The one with the photos, she said, belonged to a young soldier named Tran Ke Dat, the other to a young man named Hoang Le Sao, who had written his wife and mother’s name and address on the back of the book. It asked that if the diary was found, it be returned to them in Cao Bang, a village north of Hanoi. I decided that one day I would do just that.

Through the translations, I learned that these volumes were notebooks in which friends and fellow soldiers wrote poetry and remembrances, much like our high school yearbooks. But where our yearbook entries reek of adolescent braggadocio, these were serious writings--young men and women made old by war, ruminating on a life of sacrifice and devotion to one another.

One poem in Hoang Le Sao’s diary was about a Vietnamese woman being comforted by a fellow soldier:

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“Today, on a spring afternoon/I am sitting next to you,

As you confide in me/With your rifle resting on your lap.

I was looking at you with a loving smile/As you smile at me with

much affection/My darling, you tell me about your thoughts

Your feelings and your family/And your parents who are

no longer living/And there is now only you alone.

I comfort you in reply.

As you lean against me and weep/I caress your long pretty hair,

And tell you not to cry.

You look up at me now/And smile happily.”

signed, Nam Hong, 17 Jan 1970

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Another poem was about a young soldier leaving home.

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“The day I left was on December 14th, 1969/I left to go to the front

I left with my mother’s love in my heart/Which will always be with me.

I sat on the train going from Thai Nguyen to Vinh.

I see my home village slipping farther and farther away.

Then I heard someone call me.

I turn and look behind me/I see a Youth Volunteer girl

She was looking at me with a loving smile

As if she wanted to tell me something,

But then she turned away, still smiling.”

*

My growing obsession to return the diaries was reinforced the moment I read the translations. I was certain the authors were dead or missing, and these notebooks would be priceless to their families.

In March 1992 I returned to Vietnam for the first time since the war. As I entered Vietnamese airspace, even the clouds looked eerily familiar as they swirled like translucent dragons, rising to guide me safely to Saigon. As the dragons parted, I saw the brilliantly fresh green of Vietnam at peace.

The next day I visited the Vietnam Red Cross in Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City. I learned that one child I had photographed during the war, a double amputee, had gone on to become a civil engineer. Later, I told Red Cross officials about the diaries and my dream of returning them to their owners’ families. That would prove more difficult than I had anticipated.

I returned to Vietnam as a Red Cross volunteer in 1994 and 1995 to document problems associated with the chemical defoliant Agent Orange. There was still no news on the diaries. Then, in September 1996, as I readied for my next trip to Vietnam, I received word that the Red Cross had located the family of Hoang Le Sao in Cao Bang village north of Hanoi. Hoang Le Sao was still alive.

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In Hanoi, I was taken to the Vietnam Red Cross headquarters by Pham Thanh Thuy of the Vietnam Courier newspaper. We had met while she studied journalism at USC. She was to be my interpreter with the man who had haunted me all these years.

At Red Cross headquarters I was introduced to a thin man with thick glasses, dressed in a Vietnamese military shirt and slacks with no rank or insignia. Hidden beneath the flap of Hoang Le Sao’s left pocket was his “Anti-American Campaign” ribbon. I told him I was not offended by his military service decoration and gave him a pin with an American and Red Cross flag. Sao smiled broadly as we spoke.

We were escorted to a conference room to face about 15 people, including a Vietnamese TV crew. It all happened quickly. I took the blue, plastic-covered diary out of a manila envelope and presented it to Sao as we both bowed. He immediately recognized one of the poems and confirmed it was indeed the diary he had lost in Tay Ninh province 26 years earlier. He tried to speak, but tears welled in his eyes and he excused himself momentarily, saying he was overwhelmed. Throughout the room other Vietnamese reached for tissues.

My own throat tightened with emotion as said I had never forgotten the suffering I witnessed during the war and explained my dream to return this diary to its owner. I said I had protected it for years as if it were the repository of someone’s soul and that I hoped its return would help Sao remember his lost friends and so bring him comfort. “We are,” I said, “all bonded by the common experience of war and the loss of our loved ones.”

Sao, now composed, said he could not find the words to thank me enough for what I had done for his people and his country. He invited me to visit him and his family in Cao Bang and made an emotional appeal to his countrymen to assist in the search for the remains of U.S. servicemen still missing in action.

Later, we chatted privately through my friend, Pham Thuy. Sao told me that he had joined the Army in 1968 and spent three months plodding down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, marching at night and hiding from American bombers in the daytime. He said he had been a lieutenant in an infantry unit of the 7th NVA Division in Tay Ninh Province. He said he was wounded three times. When I told him I was wounded in the same province by a Soviet-made 122-mm rocket, he avoided my eyes and laughed nervously. He said his rifle unit didn’t use such weapons.

Sao would not speak much about the contents of the diary or the fate of the poets. He said he would talk later when he was home with his family--which I took as an indication that many of the diary contributors died in the war. But he did remember the day he lost the diary. He said it was in a knapsack he left behind during a battle with Saigon troops in Tay Ninh. An air strike forced his platoon to flee, taking only their weapons.

Sao was married before he joined the army and has three daughters, 31, 20 and 16. The age gap between the first and middle daughters reflects the years he spent at the front. He mustered out of the North Vietnamese army in 1976, and, despite wounds in his legs, back and head, found work doing construction. With children to bring up, he had little time for reminiscing, he said. “The memories come back at night when I see my old comrades and relive old battles in my dreams.”

Sao said he looked forward to sharing the joy of the returned diary with surviving soldiers and hoped we could work together to trace our lost past.

In November 1997, I met with the American Red Cross in Washington to explore ways to assist in returning the countless other Vietnamese diaries that were brought back by GIs as war souvenirs. This effort may strike some as aiding the enemy. To me, the diaries’ gentle poems and peaceful paintings, created in war-racked jungles by men whose mission was to kill, suggest a struggle between opposing instincts. Now, as then and always, the tug-of-war goes on.