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This long day began like all the rest - hot and humid. During the nightly drinking scene in our officers' club made
of sandbags, we decided that the telegram sent home should have
been modified. It should have read: "We regret to inform
you that your son died needlessly in a conflict that should not
have happened, at the hands of a person under the influence of
a powerful drug taken to anesthetize the pain of separation from
his family and confusion for his participation in this stupid
war."
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about recollections of his tour of duty in Vietnam. |
| Children are always the losers when nations go to war! |
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The many troops trucked to the orphanage on those Sunday afternoons returned to the war with pieces of their souls repaired. I soon learned that the nuns were not without their political skills. They had the older children make sure that at least one of their number latched on to a GI each afternoon to encourage our continued support. I fell in love with the eight-year-old who regularly attached herself to me over those 10 months. Tears came one day when she greeted me wearing a T-shirt with "Bowdoin, Class of 19??" printed on it. The shirt came in a "CARE" package sent by my parents' church in Belmont, Mass. who became involved in the clothing component of this mercy mission. I'd graduated from Bowdoin. These orphans may have differed from those wandering Europe, however, in that many were the issue of unions of American soldiers with Vietnamese women. You can imagine, then, how outraged I became at the American colonel in Saigon who ordered me to leave the kids unsupported and unprotected when my unit, the 9th Infantry Division, was redeployed to Hawaii and Ft. Lewis as part of President Nixon's first troop removal. This event capped my transition from a defender of U.S. policy in Asia to ardent critic. The cultural bias toward mixed-race children combined with the hatred of anything touched by Americans, spelled doom for those children, including the young girl whose affection kept me at least partially sane those long 10 months of incessant combat conditions. Thanh Tran, who arrived at Salem State College via Andover Academy, Everett High School, and a virtual child slave camp in Hong Kong, personifies the second kind of causality. Tran is a so-called boat child, exiled to Hong Kong and later to the U.S. because his father fought on the side of the United States during the war. As an officer in the South Vietnamese army, his father was taken prisoner following the removal of U.S. troops and later died in a "re-education" camp. This story is particularly moving to me as his father served with the 9th ARVA division alongside my unit in the delta region of South Vietnam. Through Tran, I have learned a good deal about how new immigrants experience our citizenship process. Angered by the inexcusable delays in processing his application, I asked Senator Ted Kennedy for his help at an event in Salem last March. But even the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Immigration of the Senate Judiciary Committee cannot expedite the interminable process to which applicants are subjected by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Thus the offspring of our deceased former allies must wait with all citizenship wannabes while our country decides whether or not to hang a "no vacancy" sign around the Statue of Liberty's neck. A mother's pain is a mother's pain whether we win or lose the war. As we celebrate Speilberg's triumph in his film about the invasion of Normandy a half-century ago, let's not lose its meaning. The damage war inflicts continues long after the bullets stop flying. Wayne
M. Burton is the President of
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 Site Map rwalsh@salemstate.edu bporemba@salemstate.edu |