How serious is the refugee problem?

Vietnam has probably suffered most through its civilian population. At the moment it is estimated that something close to one quarter of the total population are refugees. This number has probably gone up in recent weeks, after the atacks. The problem of refugees is an enormous one because most of the refugees come from the farm. They are peasants who made their living by tilling the land. What they've done was to flee to the cities, where they live in squatters villages surrounding the cities. Many of them in squalor, even the best of them providing nothing but a single room in a mud walled hut, the best perhaps with tin roofs. The others are in much worse shape. There is very little in the way of sanitary facilities, and there is no room whatsoever for these men to provide the livelihood the one way they know how, through raising the food which they would eat.

A visit to the refugee camps, and we visited them around Saigon, in Hue, most intensively in the city of Quang Ngai, a visit to these camps brought out one thing which I had not quite been prepared for. As you walked through the camp, looking around, smiling at people, greeting people, children run around your legs as children will anyplace in the world, having great fun. Even the women might smile back when you greet them. However, from the men, regardless what their age was, we got a very sullen stare in response.

In talking to the refugees, the answer was found very simply. They'd been driven from their homes, and they'd most often been driven out by airplanes which came and strafed and bombed their villages, and they'd fled to the cities. They'd lost their means of livelihood. In a sense they'd almost lost their manlihood. Their indigation at the government of South Vietnam and at the Americans was very pointed and direct. They pointed the finger at us as having driven them from their land.

How adequate were facilities for civilian wounded?

When we turn to the question of wounded, again the civilians seem to suffer most. This comes about really through the same process that has made the refugees. Something close to two thirds of the land area of South Vietnam is today declared a free fire zone. This means that anything in that area can be bombed, can be machine gunned, at the will of the spotters flying over in planes.

What was interesting to recognize, though, is that these free fire zones started just a few kilometers down the road from the major cities. The free fire zone outside Quang Ngai was just eight or ten kilometers from the city center. What this meant is that peasants working out in the field were regularly subjected to firing, to bombing, to harrassment. All night long as we lay in our beds at Quang Ngai, we could hear the mortars and artillery and the helicopters raining down their terror on different parts of the countryside. And in the morning the results were quite clear. The litters carrying people in from the countryside with the gaping holes in their bodies, the wounded limbs, and the broken bones.

We visited the hospital at Quang Ngai and went through it in some detail with a doctor working with the Quaker unit. There was a standard medical ward which perhaps had an increase in the standard diseases of the area, malaria, diphtheria, cholera, plague had broken out in the region. And the other things that you are wont to find in this part of the world. But when we went beyond the medical ward into the severe injury ward, you saw the full horror of the war itself.

The hospital that we visited had first been built by the French, and it was a small hospital. During the last four years it has been enlarged to a hospital of some four hundred beds. In the week just prior to our visit the daily patient population of the hospital was over 750, meaning that there were two patients to many beds. The hospital itself, judged to be one of the best of the province hospitals in South Vietnam, had very little in the way of sanitary facilities. Walking through it, one had to take care to avoid stepping in human defication. There were no screens in the windows, and open wounds were festering with maggots in them.

The most common operation carried out in South Vietnam today is amputation. The difficulty, however, is that the amputations are not always good. The sanitary facilities are not generally good enough and there is a lack of antiseptic procedures. What this means is that often a leg must be amputed two or three times before the amputation heals successfully.

There has been a lot of controversy as to whether napalm victims are to be found in Vietnam. As I recall, Dr. Howard Rusk, the New York Times medical correspondent found only six or seven in the whole of Vietnam. I often wonder, having visited the hospital at Quang Ngai, just where he had his eyes as he walked through this hospital. There were over seventy people in the burn ward at Quang Ngai when we visited there. Some forty of them had burns traceable to napalm.

The record was always the same in the hospital wards as to how these people were injured, whether the broken bones or the burns. In nine out of ten cases they were tending their animals, they were cultivating the fields, they were alseep in their huts, when things came from the air. Bombers or helicopters came over, loosing rockets, machine guns, or bombs. They knew that the only people in the country who were using bombers and planes were their own government and the United States.

Every now and then, one in ten or or so of the injuries as we looked over the hospital's records, were recorded as coming from ground fire. Here it is impossible to tell whether the ground fire was Viet Cong or that of the ARVN or American troops.

Did you speak with civilians who oppose the war?

In talking to one group of South Vietnamese businessmen, lawyers, professionals, men who were parts of former governments, we began asking them about how the prospect of reaching agreements with the National Liberation Front struck them. Was it possible? What might come from it? The response of one man was typical. He pointed out that the men of the National Liberation Front and in the government of North Vietnam were people he'd known. They were not just faceless opponents. These were men who had lived down the street from him when he was a young man. One of the leaders of the National Liberation Front had been to college with him in Paris. Another had been married to a distant cousin. Another had been in a law office of his. Some of these men he trusted; some of them he distrusted. Some of them he had liked; some of them he had disliked.