For a population as large and diverse as ours, separated by oceans from most wars, war often seems a distant threat. War is something that happens over there. Our American insularity, however, may be a danger in itself. Our distance and lack of direct knowledge may actually lead us to stumble into war, as it did for us in Vietnam more than 50 years ago. Quite simply: if we had known more about Vietnamese historical struggles for independence, would we have entered the war the French left us? Could our war have been avoided?

I volunteered to go to Vietnam as a civilian conscientious objector, leaving my graduate fellowship at Harvard to teach linguistics at a university in the Mekong Delta. While I was against the war, I felt an obligation to go and not simply join the street marches of that time. My going was triggered by an encounter with Robert McNamara, then the secretary of defense.

Walking home to my apartment one day in April 1967, I ran into a crowd of students milling about in the narrow street behind Lowell House, where McNamara was visiting a small group of undergraduates. Outside, a Students for a Democratic Society member was haranguing the crowd with a bullhorn, but generally it seemed pleasant and amiable. McNamara’s car, surrounded by Secret Service agents, was parked outside. From up Mount Auburn Street, you could hear some of the words of “Mack the Knife” floating toward the crowd as McNamara emerged through a side exit onto the street. The crowd rushed over to him and surrounded his car as he got in. His Secret Service agents looked menaced and started pushing students out of the way. I thought it might get rough, so I stood behind an ABC camera team filming it all. I was close enough behind them to see McNamara as he sat in his car and leaned over the front seat to say something to the driver and then get out of the car. Agents quickly surrounded him. Then one agent helped him up onto the roof of the shiny Buick. The roof buckled with a crumpling sound that McNamara ignored. Standing there on the roof of the car—in his dark-blue suit, white shirt, dark tie, wire-rimmed glasses, strands of thinning hair brushed straight back—McNamara looked formidable. The crowd quieted as he began to speak.

He said, “I’ll give you four minutes; then I must leave.”

The crowd hushed.

“When I was a student in California,” he began, “I was as radical as you.”

The crowd groaned but kept its peace.

“But there was one difference . . .”

Dead silence.

“I was far more polite.”

It was as if he had clobbered an enormous cow. Huge boos and obscenities bellowed out from the students. Just in front of me, the ABC camera whirred to a stop. The cameraman shot a look at the sound man, who gave him an I got it wink. Then McNamara, his four minutes done, was helped down and driven off through the hooting youngsters.

The next day, Harvard apologized in the press.

That apology made me suddenly ashamed of my books, my university, and the safety of my student deferment. I was ashamed too of the impotence of the crowd outside Lowell House. But even the big anti-war demonstrations that were now marching in cities across the country (100,000 in New York on April 15; 20,000 in San Francisco that same day) seemed to have no effect on Lyndon Johnson or Congress. It occurred to me that the only place where one could learn to do anything actual about Vietnam was in Vietnam, where the U.S. buildup had then reached 400,000 troops. So, a week later, I began dickering with my Pennsylvania draft board about trading in my student deferment for a conscientious objector’s. The only thing they asked me was if I really intended to do alternative service in Vietnam. The hearing was about as long as McNamara’s baiting of the crowd outside Lowell House.

Once in Vietnam with the International Voluntary Services, I began to learn Vietnamese and started teaching at the University of Cần Thơ in the Mekong Delta. But that assignment ended abruptly with the nationwide Tết Offensive and my getting hit by a snippet of shrapnel from the aerial bombings around the city, including the university, causing my return to the U.S. for medical care.

Next, I went to work for the Committee of Responsibility to Save War-Injured Children, a public charity begun by a group of extraordinary American doctors who had volunteered to treat war-injured children at hospitals across the United States. Since COR needed a Vietnamese speaker to manage their Saigon office, after getting my shoulder patched up, I went back to Saigon to look after COR’s care of severely wounded, hospitalized children slated for treatment in the United States. My job now was also to visit Vietnamese province hospitals, obtain referrals from Vietnamese or American doctors, talk to each child’s parents for their approval, and then submit details of each case to a South Vietnamese Ministry of Health “medical examining commission” to establish that any children we were proposing for U.S. medical evacuation could not be treated adequately in Vietnam and that they would be returned to their families.

Some of the children we brought to U.S. hospitals were riddled by bullets, slashed by cluster-bomb fléchettes, blinded and deafened by tossed grenades, had their lips and jaws shot away, their spines severed. One boy had so many leaking bullet holes he was dying of malnutrition. Others had their limbs blown off, including one 12-year-old boy left limbless except for one arm after a road-mine blast of the bus he was on. Another boy had his chin glued to his chest by napalm. One girl had her eyelids burned off by a white phosphorus artillery explosion behind her house. One gun-shot toddler survived the massacre of her family in a ditch because she was protected by their dead bodies, including her mother’s.

I could go on. And, indeed, the memory of such suffering would have been my sole, unadulterated sense of Vietnam had my job not sometimes taken me into the countryside to reassure parents on what we could realistically do (or not do) for their children at hospitals in the United States. But those visits in the countryside for parental approvals gave me a glimpse of another, more enduring Vietnam. Improbable as it might seem, these glimpses came on snatches of poetry and song that I heard in my travels and which led me into a realm of beauty and wisdom beyond the mayhem of the war: poems sung by country people that years later would bring me back to Vietnam not as the name of a war but as a living culture of sung, oral poetry.

At first, I had no clue of the cultural depth around me. I would be standing on a riverbank way out in the war zone as a little skiff motored by, and I would hear a bit of song float past me sometimes without ever even seeing the singer’s face under the conical leaf hat from where her song drifted up to disappear in the stutter of the boat’s two-cycle engine and in the wave wash sloshing the muddy bank at my feet. Or I would be stuck at a Mekong ferry crossing waiting for a boat to the other side, waiting there with farmers returning home from markets. Sometimes, by the river dock under big trees, there would be a blind singer with a 12-string guitar entertaining and panhandling. Back then, I didn’t have a clue what he was singing about.

Once, I found myself way out in the Delta, north of Cần Thơ, waiting in an orchard behind a family’s house as they came to a decision about sending their 13-year-old son to America in our care, his right arm shattered by artillery fire. COR had arranged surgery for him at University Hospital in Iowa. That day, off a dirt road, at their bamboo-thatched house under palm trees, I had come for their decision. While they conferred, I went out back to sit on a bench in their fruit orchard. Somewhere in the stands of bananas and papaya, a woman’s voice started up in song. I was in my mid-twenties and in what you might call a heightened state because of what was happening inside and because being out by myself in the countryside was itself a risk. But the singing was lovely, just a lone voice drifting through the leaves. I couldn’t see the woman but pictured her picking bananas or snagging papaya into one of those little wire baskets at the end of a long pole. Inside the simple house, a momentous decision was being made about the boy whose left upper arm had been severed by shrapnel but now was held together by a plaster-of-paris cast and fed by an underarm sliver of flesh that carried the critical arteries and nerves. He could still move his fingers, so there was hope. At the Cần Thơ regional hospital, weeks earlier, the family had refused the surgeon’s advice to have their son’s arm removed. Now the exposed splintered bone tips were starting to decay.

After what seemed like forever, his parents came out with some tea and a sliced mango. It was late in the afternoon, and everyone knew I had to get out of there before too long. Yes, they would send their son for surgery in America. They made me promise to bring him back when it was all over.

All during our talk, drifting in the background of this charged moment, oblivious to the drama in the home and yet calling from some other realm, was the woman’s song:

The Red Cloth
Sad, idle, I think of my old mother,
her mouth chewing rice, her tongue removing fish bones.
The Red Cloth drapes the mirror frame.
Men of one country should love one another.

Ngồi buồn nhớ mẹ ta xưa:
Miệng nhai cơm trắng lưỡi lừa cá xương.
Nhiễu điều phủ lấy giá gương.
Người trong một nước phải thương nhau cùng

(You can hear this poem sung at https://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/spring-2019/narrative-outloud/ca-dao-john-balaban. See my year’s collection Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2003. Revised edition. 74 pages).)

As part of my work for COR, when I could, I gathered statistics on civilian casualties. How many were being treated at provincial hospitals? Some Vietnamese hospital directors were extremely helpful; others would not even talk to me. It was of course a charged political topic. One Vietnamese hospital director warned me that my life might be endangered asking such questions. It was the same with American officials at USAID, where I received our U.S. mail. One USAID director even resented my getting U.S. mail at his office. But another director gave me hospital admission statistics, which I later used in my testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee to Investigate Problems Connected with Refugees and Escapees. Here is a summary description of the magnitude of civilian war casualties:

The number of civilian war casualties being treated as in-patients in the Provincial hospitals is estimated at about 68,000 a year. The number of outpatients and those treated at village or hamlet facilities the subcommittee believes to be running at approximately 100,000 additions per year. Taking Colonel Moncrief’s estimate of 24,000 civilians killed before reaching medical facilities, and adding a number of those being treated by the Vietcong or by private doctors or receiving no medical treatment at all, we must conclude that the number of civilian casualties was running at between 150,000 to 200,000 a year prior to Tet.

—May 9, 1968

In reporting from 1966 to 1967 in The New York Times, Medical World News, The AMA News, Roche Medical Image, The Saturday Review, and The Manchester Guardian, it is clear that the majority of civilian casualties—averaging 80 percent higher than enemy military deaths, province by province—were casualties caused largely by Americans.

The war went on for another seven years. Great, complex island nation that we Americans have, one wonders if our war would have gone on that long—or even begun—if we had only known more about the history and culture and aspirations of the nation that we nearly destroyed.

John Balaban is the author of a celebrated memoir of his years in Vietnam, Remembering Heaven’s Face: A Story of Rescue in Wartime Vietnam (Simon & Schuster, 1991; repr., University of Georgia Press, 2002) and a recent collection of poems, essays, and translations, Passing Through a Gate (Copper Canyon Press, 2024).