Free Just As I Thought by Grace Paley Page B

that Ching, our driver, who looked like a tough Puerto Rican kid, drove hundreds of miles with his fist on the horn.
    “Humans out of the way, here come the Progressive American People, to view the insanity of their countrymen. Let them deal with this disgust and shame.”
    South—past the Ham Rong Bridge, near Thanh Hoa—another pilot said, “What? It’s still standing?” Yes, standing—trucks, cars, bikes move over it continuously. We note its twisted girders shot with holes.
    The Ham Rong Bridge, the pride of the defenders of Thanh Hoa, was the last bridge we saw that withstood the bombing. As we moved farther south along the road, the American intention was clear. The first order was to kill the bridges and destroy transportation. On the reconnaissance maps, a bridge was a bridge in some head, so for a couple of miles every river looked as though maniacs had been let loose by a fool. Hundreds and hundreds of bomb craters—whether the river (and bridge) was 2 feet wide or 1,000 feet wide. The next day, at whatever the small cost—$100 at most—a few planks restored traffic over the mountain streams. The craters—at a couple of thousand per bomb—cost the American taxpayer close to one million dollars.
    The larger bridges were more of a problem, but we saw the remains of half a dozen bridges at some rivers. And the repairs varied—on occasion, bound bamboo pontoons; often the riverbed was raised with stones and we drove hubcap-deep across the river. But all along the roads piles of stones were prepared for the next attack of the madmen. Gangs of young girls working and boys, too—all of them, for no good reason, cheery and unbelieving at the sight of us.
    Wherever we went, people said—greeting us hospitably, to put us at ease, guessing our shame—“We distinguish between the American imperialist war maker and the American people.” The child in the street believes this. “It’s not so hard to explain,” Dang Thai Mai, a writer, one of our hosts, said. “After all, General Giap and Diem come from Quangbinh—from the same district.”
    Okay. So. Trying to be a logical American, I or we think, Well, of course it’s a war and they are bombing communication, transportation. It’s true, they are overkilling the Vietnamese countryside and the little brooks, but that’s America for you, they have overkilled flies, bugs, beetles, trees, fish, rivers, the flowers of their own American fields. They’re like overgrown kids who lean on a buddy in kindergarten and kill him.
    Then we leave National Highway 1 and move into the villages to live for a few days in a guest house in a small field, which before we left was plowed, manured, and planted with groundnuts up to our door. I guess they expected no immediate guests. The villages. The village Trung Trach was in the Land of Fire. Mr. Tat said, “The Land of Fire for three reasons: first, the fire of the burning heat; second, the fire of continuous day and night American bombardment for three years, so that people never left their tunnels; and third, the fires of resistance that burned in the heart of the people.”
    In all of Quangbinh province, not one brick house stood. This is true of the cities on the main road, too. Hoxa, the beautiful city—there’s nothing there—grass—some doorsteps. People in Hanoi asked in nostalgic pride, “Did you see Hoxa?” Donghoi—a city of 30,000—something like pictures of Pompeii. A city shaped like New York with its nose in the water, a great outdoor theater whose terraced seats remain, a magnificent blasted Catholic church (the French, in their war, spared the churches). Nobody lives in Donghoi. These cities will not be rebuilt until the Americans leave Vietnam. In the hills a new Donghoi will be built.
    I return to the villages. The village Nien Trach Nuc Ninh, Trung Trach, and the village T and D in Vinh Linh Zone at the DMZ. It turned out that these villages far off the roads and highways were military targets,