Two men, two legs and too much suffering - the suffering of the common people in war which the U.S. citizens don't see or hear.

Two men, two legs and too much suffering
By Nick Turse
http://atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/JA26Ae06.html
Nguyen Van Tu asks if I'm serious. Am I really willing to tell his
story - to tell the story of the Vietnamese who live in this rural
corner of the Mekong Delta? Almost 40 years after guerrilla fighters
in his country threw the limits of US military power into stark relief
- during the 1968 Tet Offensive - we sit in his rustic home, built of
wood and thatch with an earthen floor, and speak of two hallmarks of
that power: ignorance and lack of accountability.

As awkward chicks scurry past my feet, I have the sickening feeling
that, in decades to come, far too many Iraqis and Afghans will have
similar stories to tell. Similar memories of American
troops. Similar accounts of air strikes and artillery bombardments.
Nightmare knowledge of what "America" means to far too many outside
the United States.

"Do you really want to publicize this thing," Nguyen asks. "Do you
really dare tell everyone about all the losses and sufferings of the
Vietnamese people here?" I assure this well-weathered 60-year-old
grandfather that that's just why I've come to Vietnam for the third
time in three years. I tell him I have every intention of reporting
what he's told me - decades-old memories of daily artillery shelling,
of nearly constant air attacks, of farming families forced to live in
their fields because of the constant bombardment of their homes, of
women and children killed by bombs, of going hungry because US troops
and allied South Vietnamese forces confiscated their rice, lest it be
used to feed guerrillas.

After hearing of the many horrors he endured, I hesitantly ask him
about the greatest hardship he lived through during what's
appropriately known here as the American War. I expect him to mention
his brother, a simple farmer shot dead by America's South Vietnamese
allies in the early years of the war, when the US was engaged
primarily in an "advisory" role. Or his father who was killed just
after the war, while tending his garden, when an M-79 round - a 40mm
shell fired from a single-shot grenade launcher - buried in the soil,
exploded. Or that afternoon in 1971 when he heard outgoing artillery
being fired and warned his family to scramble for their bunker by
shouting, "Shelling, shelling!" They made it to safety. He didn't. The
105mm artillery shell that landed near him ripped off most of his
right leg.

But he didn't name any of these tragedies.

"During the war, the greatest difficulty was a lack of freedom," he
tells me. "We had no freedom."

A Simple Request
Elsewhere in the Mekong Delta, Pham Van Chap, a solidly-built 52-year-
old with jet black hair, tells a similar story. His was a farming
family, but the lands they worked and lived on were regularly blasted
by US ordnance. "During the 10 years of the war, there was serious
bombing and shelling in this region - two to three times a day," he
recalls while sitting in front of his home, a one-story house
surrounded by animal pens in a bucolic setting deep in the Delta
countryside. "So many houses and trees were destroyed. There were so
many bomb craters around here."

In January 1973, the first month of the last year US troops fought in
Vietnam, Pham heard the ubiquitous sound of artillery and started to
run to safety. It was too late. A 105mm shell slammed into the earth
four meters in front of him, propelling razor-sharp shrapnel into both
legs. When he awoke in the hospital, one leg was gone from the thigh
down. After 40 days in the hospital, he was sent home, but he didn't
get his first prosthetic leg until the 1990s.

His new replacement is now eight years old and a far cry from the
advanced, computerized prosthetics and carbon fiber and titanium
artificial legs that wounded US veterans of America's latest wars get.
His wooden prosthetic instead resembles a table leg with a hoof at the
bottom. "It has not been easy for me without my leg," he confides.

When I ask if there are any questions he'd like to ask me or anything
he'd like to say to Americans, he has a quick response. He doesn't ask
for money for his pain and suffering. Nor for compensation for living
his adult life without a leg. Nor vengeance, that all-American urge,
in the words of George W Bush to "kick some ass". Not even an apology.
His request is entirely too reasonable. He simply asks for a new leg.
Nothing more.

Ignorance means never saying sorry
I ask Nguyen Van Tu the same thing. And it turns out he has a question
of his own: "Americans caused many losses and much suffering for the
Vietnamese during the war, do Americans now feel remorse?" I wish I
could answer "yes". Instead, I tell him that most Americans are
totally ignorant of the pain of the Vietnamese people, and then I
think to myself, as I glance at the ample pile of tiny, local potatoes
on his floor, about widespread American indifference to civilians
killed, maimed, or suffering in other ways in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even those Vietnamese who didn't lose a limb - or a loved one - carry
memories of years of anguish, grief, and terror from the American War.
The fallout here is still palpable. The elderly woman who tells me how
her home was destroyed by an incendiary bomb. The people who speak of
utter devastation - of villages laid waste by shelling and bombing, of
gardens and orchards destroyed by chemical defoliants.

The older woman who, with trepidation, peeks into a home where I'm
interviewing - she hasn't seen a Caucasian since the war - and is
visibly unnerved by the memories I conjure up. Another begins
trembling on hearing that the Americans have arrived again, fearing
she might be taken away, as her son was almost 40 years earlier. The
people with memories of heavily armed American patrols disrupting
their lives, searching their homes, killing their livestock. The
people for whom English was only one phrase, the one they all seem to
remember: "VC, VC" - slang for the pejorative term "Viet Cong"; and
those who recall model names and official designations of US weaponry
of the era - from bombs to rifles - as intimately as Americans today
know their sports and celebrities.

I wish I could tell Nguyen Van Tu that most Americans know something
of his country's torture and torment during the war. I wish I could
tell him that most Americans care. I wish I could tell him that
Americans feel true remorse for the terror visited upon the Vietnamese
in their name, or that an apology is forthcoming and reparations on
their way. But then I'd be lying.

Mercifully, he doesn't quiz me as I've quizzed him for the better part
of an hour. He doesn't ask how Americans can be so ignorant or hard-
hearted, how they could allow their country to repeatedly invade other
nations and leave them littered with corpses and filled with shattered
families, lives, and dreams. Instead he answers calmly and
methodically:
I have two things to say. First, there have been many consequences due
to the war and even now the Vietnamese people suffer greatly because
of it, so I think that the American government must do something in
response - they caused all of these losses here in Vietnam, so they
must take responsibility for that. Secondly, this interview should be
an article in the press.
I sit there knowing that the chances of the former are nil. The US
government won't do it and the American people don't know, let alone
care, enough to make it happen. But for the latter, I tell him I share
his sentiments and I'll do my best.

Nguyen Van Tu grasps my hands in thanks as we end the interview. His
story is part of a hidden, if not forbidden, history that few in the
US know. It's a story that was written in blood in Vietnam, Cambodia,
and Laos during the 1960s and 1970s and now is being rewritten in
Afghanistan and Iraq. It's a story to which new episodes are added
each day that US forces roll armored vehicles down other people's
streets, kick down other people's doors, carry out attacks in other
people's neighborhoods and occupy other people's countries.

It took nearly 40 years for word of Nguyen Van Tu's hardships at the
hands of the US to filter back to America. Perhaps a few more
Americans will feel remorse as a result. But who will come forward to
take responsibility for all this suffering? And who will give Pham Van
Chap a new leg?

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of
Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex, an exploration of the
new military-corporate complex in America, is due out in the American
Empire Project series by Metropolitan Books in March 2008.

Photographs by Tam Turse, a freelance photojournalist working in New
York City. Her photographs have appeared most recently in The
Progressive and at TomDispatch.com for which she is the official
photographer. More of her photos from these interviews can by viewed
by clicking here.

(Copyright 2008 Nick Turse.)

(Used by permission Tomdispatch)
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