American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity by Christian G. Appy Page B
Authors: Christian G. Appy
Ads: Link
lie on bare board beds, frequently two to a bed, on stretchers, in the corridors, anywhere.” Often there is only one meal a day. The floors are littered with garbage because the hospitals cannot afford to have them cleaned. Even so, these patients are fortunate; most wounded civilians cannot get to hospitals or die on the way.
In the children’s ward at the Qui Nhon hospital, Gellhorn met the victims of a U.S. napalm attack. A badly burned seven-year-old boy “moaned like a mourning dove. . . . His mother stood over his cot, fanning the little body, in a helpless effort to cool that wet, red skin . . . her eyes and her voice revealed how gladly she would have taken for herself the child’s suffering.”
Through an interpreter, Gellhorn interviewed the grandfather of another burned child from the same village. He told her that “Vietcong guerrillas had passed through their hamlet in April, but were long gone. Late in August, napalm bombs fell from the sky.” An American surgeon explained that the napalm rarely struck young men; most of them were away from the villages fighting for the Viet Cong or the South Vietnamese army. When U.S. bombs hit villages, he reported, they often “hit women and children almost exclusively, and a few old men.”
Then there was the awful testimony of a “housewife from New Jersey, the mother of six” who had adopted three Vietnamese children. She was visiting South Vietnam “to learn how Vietnamese children were living.”
Before I went to Saigon, I had heard and read that napalm melts the flesh, and I thought that’s nonsense, because I can put a roast in the oven and the fat will melt but the meat stays there. Well, I went and saw these children burned by napalm, and it is absolutely true. The chemical reaction of this napalm does melt the flesh, and the flesh runs right down their faces onto their chests and it sits there and it grows there. . . . These children can’t turn their heads, they were so thick with flesh. . . . And when gangrene sets in, they cut off their hands or fingers or their feet; the only thing they cannot cut off is their head.
Gellhorn’s reporting so enraged South Vietnamese authorities they never issued her another visa. She was effectively banned from the war zone. Her many appeals to U.S. authorities fell on deaf ears. “ I was told politely that after all the South Vietnamese ran their own affairs.”
The appearance of such a damning article in
Ladies’ Home Journal
exemplifies the dramatic transformations brought by the war and the political ferment of the 1960s. With a circulation of seven million,
LHJ
was one of the so-called Seven Sisters—the leading women’s magazines of the era, primarily aimed at married, middle-class homemakers with children. These magazines had rarely run
any
articles about the Vietnam War. Only one other appeared in
LHJ
during the two years before Gellhorn’s “Suffer the Little Children”—a brief piece about the supportive wife of an army helicopter pilot. “ If we don’t stop the Communists from taking over by force in Vietnam,” she said, “we’ll eventually have to stop them somewhere else and it could be worse. That’s the way Doug feels, and he’s over there.” The article closed with a letter from Doug about Vietnamese children: “These little babies are really cute, but they don’t have much of a chance in life.”
The Seven Sisters had typically ignored or criticized women activists. In 1965, for example,
LHJ
ran a piece about Viola Liuzzo, the Detroit mother of five who was murdered in Alabama by the Ku Klux Klan for marching in support of black civil rights. The article focused on a group of mothers who overwhelmingly believed Liuzzo had “ no right to leave her five children to risk her life for a social cause.” As one of them said, “It was a shame, but I feel she should have stayed home and minded her own business.”
Many women began to reject that idea. Outraged by the
In the children’s ward at the Qui Nhon hospital, Gellhorn met the victims of a U.S. napalm attack. A badly burned seven-year-old boy “moaned like a mourning dove. . . . His mother stood over his cot, fanning the little body, in a helpless effort to cool that wet, red skin . . . her eyes and her voice revealed how gladly she would have taken for herself the child’s suffering.”
Through an interpreter, Gellhorn interviewed the grandfather of another burned child from the same village. He told her that “Vietcong guerrillas had passed through their hamlet in April, but were long gone. Late in August, napalm bombs fell from the sky.” An American surgeon explained that the napalm rarely struck young men; most of them were away from the villages fighting for the Viet Cong or the South Vietnamese army. When U.S. bombs hit villages, he reported, they often “hit women and children almost exclusively, and a few old men.”
Then there was the awful testimony of a “housewife from New Jersey, the mother of six” who had adopted three Vietnamese children. She was visiting South Vietnam “to learn how Vietnamese children were living.”
Before I went to Saigon, I had heard and read that napalm melts the flesh, and I thought that’s nonsense, because I can put a roast in the oven and the fat will melt but the meat stays there. Well, I went and saw these children burned by napalm, and it is absolutely true. The chemical reaction of this napalm does melt the flesh, and the flesh runs right down their faces onto their chests and it sits there and it grows there. . . . These children can’t turn their heads, they were so thick with flesh. . . . And when gangrene sets in, they cut off their hands or fingers or their feet; the only thing they cannot cut off is their head.
Gellhorn’s reporting so enraged South Vietnamese authorities they never issued her another visa. She was effectively banned from the war zone. Her many appeals to U.S. authorities fell on deaf ears. “ I was told politely that after all the South Vietnamese ran their own affairs.”
The appearance of such a damning article in
Ladies’ Home Journal
exemplifies the dramatic transformations brought by the war and the political ferment of the 1960s. With a circulation of seven million,
LHJ
was one of the so-called Seven Sisters—the leading women’s magazines of the era, primarily aimed at married, middle-class homemakers with children. These magazines had rarely run
any
articles about the Vietnam War. Only one other appeared in
LHJ
during the two years before Gellhorn’s “Suffer the Little Children”—a brief piece about the supportive wife of an army helicopter pilot. “ If we don’t stop the Communists from taking over by force in Vietnam,” she said, “we’ll eventually have to stop them somewhere else and it could be worse. That’s the way Doug feels, and he’s over there.” The article closed with a letter from Doug about Vietnamese children: “These little babies are really cute, but they don’t have much of a chance in life.”
The Seven Sisters had typically ignored or criticized women activists. In 1965, for example,
LHJ
ran a piece about Viola Liuzzo, the Detroit mother of five who was murdered in Alabama by the Ku Klux Klan for marching in support of black civil rights. The article focused on a group of mothers who overwhelmingly believed Liuzzo had “ no right to leave her five children to risk her life for a social cause.” As one of them said, “It was a shame, but I feel she should have stayed home and minded her own business.”
Many women began to reject that idea. Outraged by the
Similar Books
