Free Just As I Thought by Grace Paley Page A

were greeted at the little hidden Hanoi airport by women and men, their arms full of flowers for us—Americans who amazingly hadn’t flown all the way to Vietnam, 12,000 miles, just to kill Vietnamese.
    The woman from the Women’s Solidarity Committee took my arm. She spoke enough English to be able to ask, after embraces and the delivery of the flowers, and the taking of my arm as we walked, loving the sight of one another, toward the car, Grace, from the air, tell me, did you see our city, how beautiful and green it is, did you see our green Hanoi?
     
    —1980

Two Villages
     
    I
     
    In Duc Ninh a village of 1,654 households
    Over 100 tons of rice and casava were burned
    18,138 cubic meters of dike were destroyed
    There were 1,077 air attacks
    There is a bomb crater that measures 150 feet across
    It is 50 feet deep
     
Mr. Tat said:
   
The land is more exhausted than the people
   
   
I mean to say that the poor earth
   
   
is tossed about
   
   
thrown into the air again and again
   
   
it knows no rest
   
   
   
whereas the people have dug tunnels
   
   
and trenches     they are able in this way
   
   
to lead normal family lives
     
    II
     
    In Trung Trach
    a village of 850 households
    a chart is hung in the House of Tradition
     
rockets
   
522
attacks
   
1201
big bombs
   
6998
napalm
   
1383
time bombs
   
267
shells
   
12291
pellet bombs
   
2213
     
    Mr. Tuong of the Fatherland Front
    has a little book
    in it he keeps the facts
    carefully added
     
    —1969

Report from North Vietnam
     
    Our interpreter Nhan said, “Grace, if you would stay another two weeks, I could teach you the tune of the language. Speaking is singing—a lot of up and down anyway. The word Hoa means flower, Hoa means harmony. The tune’s important. Okay.”
    Our twenty-one days in Vietnam happened in three parts. The first—Hanoi, the city, the officials, the organizations, useful information, making friends. All necessary to the second part, a seven-day, 1,100-kilometer journey to the Ben Hai River, which is the seventeenth parallel, the riverbank of American power. We washed our hands and feet there, a lot of symbolism. Reality too, almost—the roadway was shelled right after we left. American reconnaissance planes which we’d seen above us had noticed a jeep or a movement.
    A word about Hanoi. One of our hosts said, from the plane, “Did you see how green we are?” Yes. Old trees, parks, lakes, a beautiful city, old, much of it in bad shape, no new construction in the city. The suburbs had been built for the workers, and bombed flat by us. Hanoi was wildly defended—from the rooftops everywhere—one of seven pilots we talked to said, “Downtown Hanoi, the flak, you don’t know what it was like—the air was absolutely black.”
    As we started from Hanoi on fair roads, immediately the destruction of public buildings, hospitals, schools was apparent. The first city we came to—Phu Ly—totally destroyed. We were not military men, not even people who’d been to wars, we weren’t bored by the repetition; we didn’t even get used to it. So the destruction we saw happened first to our eyes: the mud and straw huts, and beyond them the cities, where a wall or two of small brick stucco-covered houses remained, and maybe one wall of the larger public buildings. And all the way on National Highway 1, the people—something like Fourteenth Street in Manhattan for about 650 kilometers—going back and forth, about their business of life and repair, carrying on their backs, on bamboo poles, balanced baskets of salt, water spinach, fertilizer, young shoots for transplanting, mud and stones for the roads, firewood for cooking. Bicycles doing the work of trucks. The children—little boys lounging on water buffalo, fishing with nets like sails in the rivers and ponds—and bomb craters. All this life moving on the road and alongside the road, so