Students on study trip confront ugliness of war

By YLAN Q. MUI of The Washington Post

Michelle Heard stares at the menu in front of her at the restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City and comes to a conclusion.

“No squid,” she says firmly, shaking her head. “And no chicken feet.”

Tung Bui, a tour guide whom the Americans call “Tom,” laughs and promises he won’t order that.

It is a typical sweltering night in Ho Chi Minh City at the start of the rainy season. Heard and the 15 other college students on this study-abroad trip have not gotten used to the heat. Even with the overhead fans at full speed, they are dripping with sweat, tired and dehydrated.

This is the farthest the 21-year-old Heard has ever been from her small home town of Richland, Miss., a crossroads seven miles outside Jackson. Until the grueling flight to Vietnam, which took more than a day, she had never even been on a plane before. Her best friend, Jessica Shows, 22, a history major at the University of Southern Mississippi, persuaded her to go on the three-week, $3,800 tour. They figured it would be an adventure.

“Everyone thinks we’re crazy, a couple of loons going to Vietnam,” says Heard, one of the few non-history majors on the trip. She’s studying medical technology at Southern Miss and knows little about Vietnam—or about war. But the use of U.S. military force in a hostile, faraway land is a subject that has become far more relevant to Heard than she’d like. Her fiance, Vincent Clay, is a medic in the Army National Guard, and his unit was activated just before Heard left for Vietnam. He’s headed for Iraq, although he doesn’t know when yet. His orders are to serve for 545 days. Heard won’t be surprised if it’s longer.

She tries not to dwell on what the future holds at this boisterous restaurant, dissolving into giggles as her Vietnamese companions futilely try to teach her to use chopsticks. Waitresses dressed in tight blue tops and miniskirts cart out bottles of the local Tiger beer. The students lift their beers for a toast, and a resounding chorus of “Vo!”—the Vietnamese equivalent of “Cheers!”—fills the restaurant.

The Southern Miss study-abroad program, which is open to students from any college, is designed to change that. Founded five years ago, the program bills itself as the only one in the United States that brings students and veterans to Vietnam together, giving students first-person perspectives of the war in the place where it happened. The lessons they learn here far surpass anything he could teach in a classroom, says the group’s leader, Brian O’Neil.

“The focus is on the war and its legacy,” he tells them after they arrive in Ho Chi Minh City. “But you’ll be learning a helluva lot about Vietnam and the culture today, and a lot about yourselves.” John Young—who lives in Mississippi and has three Bronze Stars, two Air Medals, a Purple Heart and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry—has been returning to Vietnam with the program since its inception.

Every year before they leave, Young, 59, listens as students debate the U.S. role in Vietnam. Every year, he comes to the same conclusion: “Everything that students think they know about the war at the beginning of the semester is wrong.”

It is May 19, birthday of the late North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, whom Vietnamese affectionately refer to as “Uncle Ho.” It is also Heard’s first day in Vietnam. She and the rest of the jet-lagged group board a tour bus for the Presidential Palace, which was South Vietnam’s version of the White House.

The students are ushered into a small, dark room with a television, where they watch the Vietnamese account of “the American War.” The film begins with images of dead Vietnamese bodies. Thousands of Vietnamese were killed, the narrator says in English, adding that “the Vietnamese people will never forget their bloody repression.”

The film accuses the United States of setting up a puppet government in South Vietnam and using a supposed attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 as an excuse to bomb the country “back to the Stone Age.” The film ends with the takeover of the Presidential Palace in 1975. A song swells in the background; the students can make out only the refrain: “Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh... Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh.”

After the video is over, the students head outside. Back in the bright sunshine, William Quinn, 21, and Jason Sokiera, 26, break into their own rendition of the chorus and pause for photos in front of the tank.

“I don’t know why, but I want to become a communist now,” Sokiera says jokingly.

Back at the hotel a few hours later, Quinn tries to sort out what he saw. He’s a military history major and knows that the film served up a healthy dose of propaganda.

“They put an interesting spin on it,” he says as he drags on a cigarette. The film didn’t explain the U.S. justification for the war: to prevent communism from spreading throughout Southeast Asia. It didn’t mention the U.S. planes shot down, the soldiers killed or the torture that took place in Vietnamese prison camps. But then, Quinn adds, “we like to put a smiley face on our side of the war, too.”

Take the war in Iraq, he continues. The U.S. government calls it “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” but Quinn thinks a better name would be “Operation American Imperialism.”

After the tour of the Presidential Palace, Heard calls her fiancé. He tells her there’s still no word on when his unit is scheduled to depart for Iraq.

“Every time you read (the newspaper), it’s somebody else dying,” Heard says. “If the war is over, and we’re just keeping peace or whatever it’s supposed to be, why are people dying?”

And, of course, there is Spc. Vincent Clay, Company C of the 106th Support Battalion. They have been engaged since February but haven’t set a wedding date. Heard wonders if they should wait until Clay returns from Iraq. Leaving him to come on this trip was hard for Heard. She knows that it will be even harder when he leaves her to go overseas. They’ve been together since high school. When Clay, now 26, asked her to marry him, all her friends said: Finally.

A few days after Heard’s arrival in Vietnam, Clay receives an order to report to Mississippi’s Camp Shelby to begin training. In another hurried phone call, he finally gives voice to their biggest fear: “What if, God forbid, I don’t come home?”

Her answer is immediate: It would be unbearable to lose him without ever exchanging wedding vows.

“I would hate to have that kind of regret laying on me, that I had the opportunity to be your wife, and you died,” she says she told him. His tour of duty will begin nine weeks after she gets back. They decide to get married before he leaves. Heard had already planned to buy her wedding dress in Vietnam. She’ll just wear it sooner than she thought.


John Young was married once, too. Twice, actually. Neither union lasted very long.
The Army veteran had tried to open himself up to other people, wanted someone in his life. But he simply couldn’t do it, he says. His memories of the war—and the scars he bears from them—are his lifelong companions. There is no room for anything, or anyone, else.
“Nobody is going to stay around you very long,” he explains. “You ruin everyone.”

It was June 19, 1967. The soldiers traveled by boat to the edge of a rice paddy. But when they arrived, they were hit by a barrage of .50-caliber machine-gun fire. The gunfire triggered something primal in Young, he says: raw self-preservation. He can remember the things that happened, but he is unsure of their sequence. He remembers learning that the soldiers in three of the boats going up the canal beside the rice paddy were all killed. Twice, helicopters tried to ferry away the dead bodies in the canal and in the field. Twice, they were shot down. No one on the helicopters survived.

“I thought we were all going to die that afternoon,” Young says.

As the smoke cleared, Young realized that there was fire coming from behind him, from a small straw hooch. A Navy boat fired a white phosphorus round into the hooch to smoke out whoever was inside, Young says. Vietnamese women and children began pouring out, mothers dragging their children by their arms, screaming.

He can’t remember how many there were. Maybe 30. All running for their lives.

These are the people who have been killing us, Young remembers thinking. That’s them. “And I started to shoot.” The other soldier did, too. They fired until every last one of the women and children went down. Then they walked away. Afterward, what was left of the company crossed the canal to clear out any remaining Vietnamese with an infantry assault, which Young describes as “fire all you can as fast as you can.”

There is one week left on the trip when Heard gets her wedding dress made.

She had picked out the gown in a bridal magazine and then taken a picture of it at a dress shop before leaving for Vietnam, she explains after her return home.

The dress, which costs $600 in the United States, has a halter top with an empire waist and elaborate beading on the front. She is in love with it.

The first afternoon in Hoi An, Heard, Shows and another student, Lauren McKee, 22, set off with a tour guide in search of the Lan Chi tailor shop that Young recommended.

Inside the tiny shop, bolts of shiny fabric are piled to the ceiling.

A shy woman appears and asks them in halting English if they need help.

Heard shows the woman the picture of the wedding dress and asks how much it would cost.

The woman thinks for a moment.

Eighty dollars, she offers. Heard is sold.

But when the tailors bring Heard’s wedding dress out for the first fitting, the bride-to-be is crestfallen.

The beads sewn onto the front look like Mardi Gras trinkets, Heard says, though she can’t bring herself to complain to the tailors. She’ll just have to have the beading removed back in Mississippi.

The night before she returns to Ho Chi Minh City, she fingers the dress, taking in its sheen, the fullness of the skirt, even the awful beading, before packing it away with all her other things.

This is my wedding dress, she remembers thinking.

I am getting married.

Nothing she’s seen or heard in Vietnam has weakened her desire to marry Clay before he leaves for Iraq.
Yet she thinks about John Young’s nightmares and about some of the other students, a generation removed from the war but still grappling with the effects it has had on their fathers’ lives and their own.
“You think, ‘Oh, the war in Iraq.’ It’s just four words. And that’s all it is to some people, just those four words,” Heard says. She knows it won’t be for her. Not anymore.