Vietnam and Gender Issues

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One of my favorite jokes is about the Vietnam War. A young American soldier is patroling the roads in Binh Duong Province when he comes across a farmer walking down the road. The farmer knows some English, and they begin conversing. After awhile he notices that there is a Vietnamese woman following them, with two dogs, about 100 meters to the rear. The American soldier asks, "Who's that?" and the farmer answers, "Oh, that is my wife!"

That the wife must always walk in the rear upsets the soldier, and he gives a lecture to the farmer on how to treat women, The farmer smiles condescendingly as he listens.

The soldier left Vietnam a few years later, with the end of the war, there, but he returns to Vietnam 20 years later, as so many Vietnam vets have done, and catches a bus to Binh Duong Province.

He is glad to see that the roads which he used to patrol had not changed much. Suddenly, ahead of him, he sees the same farmer he had talked with that day 20 years before. This time, however, the wife is walking 50 meters ahead of the farmer.

Delighted to see such a change, the American runs up to the farmer, greets him in the Vietnamese tongue, and then he begins to compliment the farmer for having grown so much, emotionally and philosophically, that he had begun to let his wife walk in front of him.

The farmer smiles and says, "Land mines."


As I came to know the Vietnamese over the years, I saw that this joke parodying the Vietnamese attitude toward women is not wide of the mark.

My first encounter with that attitude occurred as follows.

One blistering hot day, I was invited by my Vietnamese neighbors to an afternoon of cold drinks in their air conditioned living room. When I got there, I saw that about 10 Vietnamese men were in attendance. I said to the husband, "Thanh, where's Trang and little Nhu?"

"It's okay, Peter," he answered. "Trang is shopping. She took Nhu with her." I thought to myself, "Well, at least she is doing something she would like to do, in an air conditioned mall."

About 10 minutes later, the front door exploded open. There was Trang, soaked with sweat, with a heavy bag of groceries in her left arm, a baby of one of the other men in her right arm. The baby's diaper was soiled, and feces was overflowing out of the diaper onto Trang's right arm. Little Nhu, hot and tired and cranky, was pulling on Trang's left arm, crying, making demands, despite the groceries. None of the men even looked Trang's way. They continued drinking, laughing and talking.

I watched Trang put the groceries on the table, lay the baby on a towel on the kitchen floor. I heard her wash off her arm in the kitchen sink. Then, with little Nhu still pulling on her arm and crying and begging in Vietnamese, Trang rushed out the door to get more groceries.

My foolish American conscience was too big for all of this. When Trang came back in, this time carrying two bags of groceries, and Nhu still pulling on her arm, crying, and the men continued ignoring her, I stood up and loudly said, "TRANG!"

Trang stopped dead in her tracks and the room fell silent and all turned toward me. I said, "Trang, there's an empty seat here in the air conditioned living rom. I know, because I just got out of it. I will take Nhu and find out what she wants and make her happy. Thanh will fix you a cold drink while you sit in my seat here in the air conditioned living rom. The baby's father will clean the baby and change his diaper. The other men here will bring in the rest of the groceries and put them away."

All stood frozen, for about 10 seconds. Finally, Trang said, "Mr. Peter, I know what you are trying to do, but it will do no good."

Receiving these words as affirmation that Trang had reassumed her low place vis-a-vis men, and forgiving me for being a stupid foreigner, the Vietnamese men suddenly went back to laughing and talking and ignoring Trang. Figuring that I had caused enough revolution for the day, I self-consciously went back to bonding with the men.

That's Vietnam.

Happy Mother's Day!

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A Vietnam War Sniper Makes a Morally Difficult Decision

I happen to love the Vietnamese people. That little girl who I love like a daughter, who I mention in this blog every so often, is a Vietnamese American. I love her entire extended family. I love the Vietnamese people they introduced me to, some of whom are my clients, now.

Additionally, I believe that the Vietnamese War was a mistake. Do you know what the those "terrible," "atheist" Communist Vietnamese taught to their children in their public schools after we lost?

1950s American values.

If you don't believe me, befriend some Vietnamese immigrants, and you will see that this is essentially true.

When we were fighting in Vietnam, to a respectable extent we were fighting "mom and apple pie." No joke.

But, by the Vietnam War, our Vietnam vets did a great thing: They bankrupted the Communist government of Soviet Russia, and brought the Cold War to an end.

And, irony of ironies, the Vietnamese and the Americans have found friendship. Except for some terrible heartbreak, in my particulasr circumstances, it was a great and wonderful peivilege and pleasure to get to know my Vietnamese friends, and I continue to feel that way, up to this minute.

All of that being said, I want to describe the moral dilemma faced by Marine Sgt. Carlos Norman Hathcock, in the hilly part of the village of Duc Pho in Quang Ngai Province in South Vietnam in 1967.

Sgt. Hathcock would ultimately become one of the world's great snipers. Though he had 93 confirmed kills, he probably actually ended the lives of about 400 enemy fighters.

Probably at Hathcock's insistence, Charles Henderson's biography of Hathcock, "Marine Sniper," describes, at the very beginning of his work, the most morally difficult decision Hathcock had to make as a sniper.

One February day, as Hathcock peered through the sniper scope of his M-2 .50 caliber machine gun, he saw a Vietnamese boy, no more than 12 years of age, walking a bicycle loaded with 7 heavy Chinese rifles and a large bag of ammunition down Route 1 toward some Viet Cong hideout.

Experience told Hathcock that such boys generally had fighting experience, and that shortly these guns would be used to kill South Vietnamese and Americans.

Hathcock carefully aimed his M-2, set for single shot, at the bike's frame, and when it closed in to within 2000 yards, he fired a single round. The bullet struck about 5 seconds before the gunshot reached the boy's ear. FOOM! The bike was knocked down, as though by a giant fist, and the guns and ammnunition splattered.

Hathcock hoped that the little one would turn and run.

Unfortunately, the boy was tough. He ran to one of the rifles, picked it up, found one of the splattered magazines, rammed it into the rifle, cocked one into the rifle's firing chamber, aimed in Hathcock's generaql direction, pulled the trigger, POPPOPPOPPOPPOP, and then FOOM!, a second bullet from Hathcock's M-2 killed the little boy before he got too many shots off.

Moral, or immoral?

Smells Like Hell, Tastes Like Heaven

Supposedly Mark Twain said, "If one person calls you an ass, ignore him. If two people call you an ass, check for tracks. If three people call you an ass, buy a saddle."

Well, two families of people from Vietnam speak to me with words of hate, and so implicitly are calling me an "ass." And so, I guess that I should go and buy a saddle.

But I still love those people very much -- a little girl named Nhu more than any of them. They enriched my life so much, and I miss them all.

One of the things I learned about during my relationship with little Nhu's family, before I began to be ostracized, is the strange fruit of the Vietnamese people called sau rieng, or durian fruit, in English.

Sau rieng grows wild and on farms in Southeast Asia. The fruits are big and covered with large, nasty thorns. If, when ripe, they fall upon a passerby, they can inflict quite an injury.

The sau rieng is is an extremely sweet fruit filled with sulfur. The sulfur content is so high that sau rieng fruit can give off quite a pungent odor -- so strong an odor that the Vietnamese smile and say, "It smells like hell, but it tastes like heaven!"

Once I was invited to a birthday party for one of little Nhu's cousins. As I sat at the dining room table, someone in the kitchen unpacked the cake made in part of sau rieng fruit, and cut herself a slice.

A minute later I smelled a very bad smell, and I thought with alarm, "Most of these people are immigrants! They may not realize that the gas company mixes an odor into natural gas, so that gas leaks can be detected!" So I jumped up and said, "I think that the oven here has a leak -- and it smells like a big one! I think that we have to take care of this, friends!"

My Vietnamese hosts all burst out laughing, because they knew the source of the problem.

"No! Really!," I persisted, "I think that you have a gas leak!" That made them laugh even harder.

Nhu's great aunt, a beautiful lady with perpetually sad eyes with the American name Sandy, took me aside and gave me a piece of the cake responsible for my reaction, and told me about sau rieng.

Was That Dinner, or the Holy Spirit?

Once when I was sitting in my yard, reading a book, a large, beautiful, white dove landed in the yard of the family from Vietnam living next door.

Later I told the wife from Vietnam about the dove. I said, “In the Catholic Church, the dove is the symbol of the piece of God we call the Holy Spirit!”

The wife from Vietnam answered, “Peter, when you see a white dove flying, you say, ‘There goes the Holy Spirit!’ In Vietnam, when people there see a white dove flying they say, ‘There goes dinner!’”

One of the very interesting stories in the Catholic Church concerns how a man referred to as “Fabian the Manure Shoveler” became Pope.

In the year 236, the Pope named Anterus had just been killed by the soldiers of the government of Rome. The Christians of Rome gathered to elect a new Pope.

A short distance away, Fabian, the slave of a Roman prince, was buying cow manure for his master’s gardens, and shoveling the manure into his wagon.

As the Christians of Rome prayed for a sign from God which would tell them who to elect to the position of Pope, they saw a large white dove fly from the roof of a building, down the street and land on the head of Fabian, as he shoveled manure!

The crowd took this as a sign from the Holy Spirit. They ran down the street and grabbed the slave Fabian and elected him Pope!

Perhaps the dove was the Holy Spirit, and not dinner. Fabian was one of the great Popes of the Church.