Last month on television, I watched red and yellow Vietnamese flags flicker like 30,000 flames outside a video store in Orange County's Little Saigon. Enraged Vietnamese immigrants were protesting a shop owner's display of Ho Chi Minh's portrait and Communist Vietnam's flag. I watched the scuffles and heard the screaming and thought about how long it takes people to heal from war. I drifted back to a humid night in 1968 when I fell asleep to the hum of a generator, the popping rotors of a Huey chopper lifting off near the hospital . . . . Even farther out in the night, artillery thundered and small-caliber weapons cracked against the background rhythm of Vietnam's crickets and geckos. At 2 in the morning, I awakened to the sound of a distant thump. "Incoming!" a soldier yelled. The air filled with a whistle and hiss as Soviet 122 mm rockets and mortars crashed in on us.
Enemy Journals
The Author Left Vietnam With Diaries Full of Poetry and Remembrances of Men From the North. Now He's Working to Return Them.
INSIDE STORY
I was with the 25th U.S. Infantry Division in Tay Ninh, Vietnam. It was my first time under fire. Metal fragments ripped into my arm and foot. As we waited for the attack to end, I wondered: What kind of men are out there in the darkness trying to kill us? Like most Americans, I saw the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong only as phantoms. They attacked and then disappeared. So I crouched in the bunker and wondered who these people really were--a riddle that would stick in my mind like shrapnel and spur me on a decades-long quest.
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During the final days that I was in Vietnam, a friend in military intelligence showed me a selection of enemy diaries that his unit had screened and was about to discard. He said they had been taken from dead NVA regulars or found on the ground after a battle. I rescued five diaries from the incinerator and studied them, mesmerized by the delicate calligraphy and watercolor paintings of flowers. It was my first intimate glimpse of the enemy.
As a photographer and correspondent for the American Red Cross and later for Newsweek magazine, I traveled more than 20,000 miles up and down the slender contour of South Vietnam. My credentials were a visa allowing me to photograph and document human suffering. By 1970, however, I had lost two photographer friends to North Vietnamese gunners. I was war- weary and exhausted and sensed my own death pending if I stayed on. I left Vietnam in April, carrying the five diaries home.
