Da Lat, the resort spot built by the French and still appreciated by the

There is a well-known and true story of Robert McNamara's difficulty with the Vietnamese language. He likes to make a small pleasantry to his audience--usually "Vietnam for 1000 years." Unfortunately, to the Vietnamese it came out sounding quite different--"The duck wants to lie down." The Viets would always howl at this and Mac thought he had really scored. Vietnamese, is their answer to Sun Valley, Palm Beach and White Sulphur Springs. Both sides regard it as one of the trophies in this war and consequently it sees little of the fighting. Saigon politicos and generals use it for their R & R and there are serious reports that VC higher-ups vacation here too. The unnatural quiet of this place almost becomes repugnant--all you have to do is read the Saigon Post or listen to the radio to know that Da Lat is leading a charmed life. IVS hired an excellent old gentleman to tutor us for six and a half hours a day, a Mr. Thanh, Paris-educated and clothed in a French suit, beret and scarf.

Learning Vietnamese is appropriately perplexing. With its six distinct tonal levels, it is as hard to master as the country's current politics and history. To sift through the grammar is easy enough but the tonal business is frustrating. One word may have two, three, or even four completely different meanings depending upon the pitch and stress you use. There is a well-known and true story of Robert McNamara's difficulty with the language on his frequent visits to Saigon. He likes to make a small pleasantry to his Vietnamese audience--usually "Vietnam for 1000 years." Unfortunately his aides never told him that the printed words for the phrase have to be pronounced quite precisely to convey the message. And every time Mac would wave his arms and give his little greeting, the audience would always hear something quite different: "the duck wants to lie down." The Viets would always howl at this time and Mac thought he had really scored. Maybe his French will get him by at the World Bank conferences.

My day usually starts with a couple of roosters ruining my sleep. Our cook brings in a nourishing, if unexciting, breakfast of hot Bulgar wheat with concentrated milk and sugar, coffee and/or Keen (Nestle's), a lemon-lime powder we use to give the filtered water some taste. The Bulgar is like Wheatina or pablum and comes out of a big sack with an American crest on it with the USAID handshake symbol over that, followed by the words, "given by the people of the United States of America"--this is as close to welfare living as I hope to get. USAID gives great quantities of the stuff to refugees but hasn't had much success in selling its tastiness. A lot of it ends up in hog troughs. So USAID people have printed little 'cookbooks' on 'good eating' with bulgar wheat. The refugees still don't like it and want their rice ration back.

My spirits really rise with the news from the Voice of America, which begins the day's transmissions with a two-minute beeping of "Columbia, Gem of the Ocean." A few bars of this serves as my daily patriotic pap and it elicits remarkable 'American' feelings and responses. At night we get a few laughs by listening to the English-language news reports from Peking--the announcers have a vocabulary range of about 35 words chief among them being 'lackey, stooge, reactionary, aggressor, imperialist, fascist, nazi, and Glorious Chairman."

In three weeks here I've gotten to know some worthwhile people. One is an ARVN officers who saw some of the early Dak To fighting. His family owns some hillside vegetable gardens and he took me through them. Pointing to an ancestor shrine (which looks like bird stations on post) standing in the middle of a field he told me how much he hoped he'd be somebody's ancestor.

I met several university (Dalat) students. Their own histories and views of life as lived in 25 years of war were an education for me. I think that the lack of commitment to a democratic Vietnam in these young people is understandable if still disappointing to me. They fail to see why they should make plans for their country or themselves as the people and things will indefinitely continue to be chewed up by war. I committed a major faux pas when I requested a forum/interview arrangement with some of the students, thinking the transcription might be of interest to an American newspaper. My suggestion was coldly ignored. Later I discovered that my interest in their views tagged me as a CIA man, not a popular American role in Vietnam.

A pretty young biology teacher from the French lycee (where I'm studying Vietnamese) took two of us to a Buddhist novitiates' encampment in a pine grove to meet some young monks at work on a new pagoda. The head man invited us in to his 'prayer house' for what turned into a proselytizing session. He gave me an autographed copy of an anthology of Buddhist wisdom which he had edited. I promised to read it once I knew enough Vietnamese.

His prayer house, about as big as one of those very large doll houses in an F.A.O. Schwartz catalogue was as bare as could be except for a mat, a teapot, a tooth brush, and, disconcertingly, a stack of American comic books. I haven't any idea what they were doing there nor did I ask.

Maybe I shouldn't let the pat statement "Dalat sees little of the war" stand without some qualifications. Every night there are 80 or 90 rounds-of 'H & I' (harassment and interdiction) artillery fired into a free strike zone outside of town. Our house is between the artillery mounting on a hill three miles from here and the free strike zones. It's not at all uncommon to hear shells whizzing high over the neighborhood. But if it weren't for the sake of a newsletter, I'd be completely oblivious to the noise (as, indeed, is everyone). H & I is fired mostly for psychological purposes. Free strike zones are areas the army is allowed to pummel day and night. Anything that moves in one of these zones--they are multiplying--is subject to all kinds of fire.

The war did come a little closer to Dalat last week when a dam and power station outside of town were sabotaged by the VC. The resulting flood wiped out a quarter mile of the Phan Rang/Nha Trang road (the coastal road). Gasoline and rice used to be brought into Dalat by this road. Speculation is that both commodities will be rationed until the road is repaired--and that could take months. That's too bad--just getting used to 'com' (rice) and the lack of buoyancy of landrovers, Vespas, and jeeps on the pot-holed and dirt roads