Part 2 in a series by Myra MacPherson adapted from an article published in Consortium News February 16, 2015
In the public domain.
We are in Quang Tri province in the DMZ, the former demilitarized zone that once separated South and North Vietnam. “You are standing in the most heavily bombed area in the history of warfare,” said Vietnam veteran Chuck Searcy, the American voice of Project RENEW [“Restoring the Environment and Neutralizing the Effects of the War”], a humanitarian organization he co-founded 15 years ago that helps victims of unexploded bombs the United States dropped during the war.
Today lush foliage belies the past. One has to look at war photos to understand such pulverizing devastation when this province was destroyed — gray, bomb-blasted fields and land, village huts incinerated, civilians racing for their lives as fighter jets screamed overhead and B-52s marauded silently from 30,000 feet, dropping bomb after bomb after bomb. Some15 million tons of bombs were dropped on Vietnam — more than all of World War II — much of it here. An estimated three million civilians were killed during the decade of war.
“To me the U.S. bombings were an ultimate mass torture delivering fear, trauma, injuries and death,” remarked Californian Sally Benson, who, along with her husband, Steve Nichols, funded the Mine Action Visitor Center here in Quang Tri to teach awareness of the 300,000 plus tons of unexploded ordnance remaining in the province. Nichols and Benson met in Vietnam as civilian teachers during the war, came back anti-war and maintain close ties with the five veterans, visiting Vietnam often.
How could anyone possibly survive, one wonders, imagining a daily hailstorm of bombs. We find out. We crawl deep into the Vinh Moc tunnels, moving slowly on slippery stones, hunching in the engulfing walls of earth, so close that one does not need to extend arms to feel them, cold to the touch. As we inch our way through the dark, tiny lights on our foreheads dimly pick out the winding narrow strip of earth as we go farther and farther down.
Suddenly a small space dug out of the wall is illuminated. We gasp. A body is lying there and another crouches next to her. But they are models; a woman lying down and a woman leaning over her, holding her baby. On the wall is an incongruous sign that reads,— “Maternity Ward.”
It is hard to imagine even one baby being born there, and yet 17 Vietnamese women had given birth deep in the soil during the years of “search and destroy” when millions of bombs pummeled their huts and land constantly. Villagers lived underground for months on end; children, babies, mothers, elderly parents, ancient aunts and uncles: eating, sleeping, enduring. From 1966 to 1972 when the bombing stopped, 300 Vietnamese people lived in their mole-like world, nearly 100 feet underground.
Myra MacPherson is the author of the Vietnam classic, Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation. She has continued to lecture and write about Vietnam and veterans.