Rising from the Rubble in Vietnam
ABRAMS, ARNOLD
IN THE WAKE OF THE VIETCONG Rising from the Rubble in Vietnam BY ARNOLD ABRAMS Phu Thanh The most striking thing about life in this village is that it goes on. A torrent of death and destruction...
...A torrent of death and destruction hit Phu Thanh last month, generating shock and sorrow seemingly so deep as to stop time...
...It was worst with the women and children...
...Now he was bantering with a visitor...
...The idea is alien to him...
...You ask good questions," he said with a chuckle after being asked if his vote had been prompted less by a sense of civic duty than fear of being put on an official blacklist...
...Those days ended for Phu Thanh in the dark early-morning hours of June 11, when a North Vietnamese and Vietcong sapper unit struck this small community...
...including those of his parents and nine brothers, sisters and relatives...
...His family owned one of Phu Thanh's finest homes, as well as the village's most spacious bunker...
...The pamphlet refers to heroic action by local militiamen, blatant nonsense that implicitly calls attention to the inability of South Vietnamese home guards to protect the people...
...Amid stark skeletons of homes where people once lived, above burned-out bunkers where they died, children now laugh and women scold and men joke as they did in the old days...
...Through an interpreter, he offered this explanation of what those elections meant to him: "They are to have a good representative to help you when the vc come and burn down your house...
...Terror tactics could have the opposite results...
...Yet these same traditions led 21-year-old Nguyen Thanh Son...
...I cannot move away...
...a handsome-faced dwarf who sweeps the marketplace for a living, had stunned a group of newsmen on June 11 when he emerged from a smashed bunker carrying two severed hands wrapped in paper????part of the remains of a son dismembered by an enemy grenade...
...It is a way of helping the government...
...They bombarded the village with phosphorus shells for nearly an hour, capping the onslaught by systematically hurling grenades and satchel charges into, homes or underground bunkers where frightened inhabitants huddled...
...It is our civic duty to vote...
...The attackers slipped past slumbering South Vietnamese sentries, pinned down local forces and a U.S...
...Most of them either say what they think Americans want to hear, or don't really respond at all...
...In the youth's case, Pentecoste notes, it conceivably could harden his commitment to the other side...
...One of them is a 15-year-old boy, who spoke with great equanimity about how the vc had killed his mother and seriously wounded his father and two brothers...
...There is little point in trying to determine Phu Thanh's ultimate direction by plying its inhabitants with touchy questions...
...Local territorial forces are supposed to provide security for pacification...
...he said...
...other times it can be attributed to the communication gap between cultures...
...That is why so many American troops have never understood how anyone besides an enemy supporter could linger in a free-fire zone...
...Some American advisers are not so sure about the wisdom of this tactic...
...They are now distributing throughout the northern I Corps countryside a picture-filled pamphlet detailing the massacre...
...Almost all eligible adults among the village's approximately 3,000 population took time out from daily chores recently to vote in South ViArnold Abrams regularly reports in these pages jrom Southeast Asia...
...The bodies of 36 persons were pulled from that bunker on June 11...
...While their aplomb leads to the common Western notion that life has little value for these people, those who witnessed the initial surge of grief and despair here say otherwise...
...In fact, puzzled U.S...
...He believes that the enemy's increasing return to terrorist tactics could prove effective...
...But, he adds, "that may be too pat a prediction...
...Perhaps, after the first shock," suggests one witness, "it is a matter of them being better able to cope with death...
...Pentecoste, 41, has had 12 years' service in Asia and possesses considerable insight into Vietnamese ways...
...Since returning, he has never considered moving somewhere else...
...His answer reflected the primordial customs of ancestor worship and familial obligations binding him to his birthplace...
...To him the concept is so basic and unerringly simple as to defy articulation: to Westerners it verges on the incomprehensible...
...Glancing at a pile of debris covering the mouth of the destroyed bunker, Son remarked almost whimsically, "I don't know why they [the vc] did it...
...He confined his remarks to platitudes about the evil enemy and the good government...
...a neighbor, to start building a new home on the charred foundations of his family's old one...
...The best thing," says one high-ranking adviser, "might be to forget the whole incident...
...Son's seemingly casual response to the horrendous happening, moreover, was not atypical...
...Where else could I go...
...ives...
...He would not answer that question directly even when it was posted in an impersonal, theoretical framework...
...Throughout Phu Thanh inhabitants discussed the loss of loved ones the way we relate a bout with Asian flu...
...etnam's provincial council elections...
...But things do not work that way in Vietnam...
...he did not want to deal with it...
...Sometimes this is deliberate...
...The sight of them lying here the following morning, some burned beyond recognition, left hardened American soldiers weak and seasoned correspondents struggling for adequate words...
...authorities confide, the village harbors several suspected enemy supporters...
...Of course we voted," explained 39-year-old Luu Quan...
...Then he shrugged and turned back to the task of sawing lumber...
...Propagandists, however, had no trouble...
...As with the larger war itself, U.S...
...But it is yielding to the job of getting on with life, at which the Vietnamese are proven masters...
...In a question-mark community like Phu Thanh, it could serve to dissolve whatever anti-vc potential existed...
...He seemed puzzled when asked why he is rebuilding his home here instead of moving to a safer area...
...Marine detachment, then proceeded to slaughter the civilian population for reasons that remain unclear...
...They are rebuilding homes and returning to their fields, their marketing, their normal tasks...
...Although devastation fills Phu Thanh, its people are stirring in the ashes...
...officials simply will have to let this village get on with life and watch which way it goes...
...Quan has three other children, all unmistakably his...
...Quan...
...My home is in Phu Thanh," he said...
...He alone survived because he was visiting a friend in another village on the fateful night...
...The immensity of Son's loss boggles an outsider's mind, yet judging from his tone and outward attitude he might have been talking about some small setback...
...He understood the point...
...Then he had been speechless with grief...
...American advisers are concerned about the effect of the enemy attack on villagers' attitudes...
...Phu Thanh, in the southeastern part of traditionally troublesome Quang Nam Province, has never demonstrated pro-government sentiment...
...Unfathomable sadness still endures in the village itself, a three-hamlet complex about 18 miles south of Danang...
...It is not the Vietnamese way to do that...
...He grew visibly agitated, though, once talk turned to a suspected vc cell in his high school, where antigovern-ment propaganda leaflets have been appearing...
...Before being driven off, they destroyed about 300 homes, killed more than 130 persons and wounded another 150...
...Nevertheless...
...If this boy was a cell member, how did he feel about the vc now...
...The first expectation was that the attack would turn such people against the vc," says Major Thomas Pentecoste, a senior American adviser in Quang Nam with 24 years' experience in the Marine Corps...
Vol. 53 • July 1970 • No. 15
