Word: vietnamize
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...awkward getting down the plane's steps, because I am juggling the crutches and a purse, a camera and a packet of letters from the families of POWs. I look up to see five Vietnamese walking toward me carrying flowers. They are the welcoming committee of the Vietnam Committee for Solidarity with the American People. The name sounds propagandistic to me, but the fullness of its meaning will soon be made clear in unusual, very human terms. As I'd anticipated, they look shocked and want to hand me the bouquet, but I can't hold it and the crutches...
...just dawn as we drive through the city to the Vietnam-- Soviet Union Friendship Hospital, where I am to have my foot examined. I can see camouflaged vehicles coming and going, their lights off. At the hospital, two male Vietnamese doctors who have been briefed about my arrival lay me on a table to take an X-ray of my foot--or at least they try to. No sooner have I lain down than the air raid sirens blare and I have to be helped into the hospital's bomb shelter, now filling rapidly with doctors and those patients...
...last full day in North Vietnam. In spite of having made it clear to my hosts that I was not interested in visiting a military installation, I am going--and today...
...unusual for Americans who visit North Vietnam to be taken to see Vietnamese military installations, and when they do they are always required to wear a helmet like the kind I have been given to wear during the air raids. I am driven to the site of the antiaircraft installation, somewhere on the outskirts of the city. There is a group of about a dozen young Vietnamese soldiers in uniform who greet me. There is also a horde of photographers and journalists--many more than I have seen all in one place in Hanoi. (I later learn some of them...
...soldiers ask me to sing for them in return. I am prepared for just such a moment. Before leaving the U.S., I had memorized a song called Day Ma Di, written by students in South Vietnam who are against the war. I launch into it con gusto, feeling ridiculous but I don't care. Vietnamese is a difficult language for a foreigner to speak and I know I am slaughtering it, but everyone seems delighted that I am making the attempt. Everyone laughs and claps, including me. I am overcome on this, my last...