Hanoi Diary by Bill Zimmerman

Good evening my fellow Americans. Let us go to the map again. The AA. And I'm sure you know when these protests will be mined United States forces have been directed to take appropriate measures within the internal and pro riders of North Vietnam to interdict the delivery of any supplies rope and or other communications will be cut off to the maximum extent possible air and the strikes against military targets in North Vietnam will continue and that as Ro my fellow Americans tonight I ask for your support of this decision a decision which has only one purpose not to expand the war not to escalate the war but to own this war and the room the kind of peace that will last. With God's help with your support we will accomplish that great goal.

George Orwell predicted that the leaders of major powers would come to wage war by machine and call it peace. But they would annihilate distant and unseen societies from the air even as they constantly reiterated their owner's desires for peace at home and when I told her we were already listing the targets that were to be used as well and we were there for a target. There was not a major city that was exempt how to shoot down an American plane with a rifle is simple when an enemy plane comes diving toward you. There's a split second moment when the plane's rudder and stabilizer become invisible and the whole plane looks like a big brown dot. This is the only chance you have to shoot down the plane and it is of course the most dangerous moment when you are exposed to the enemy attack. Don't shut your eyes. Pull the trigger.

North Vietnam is a country at war. It's a country whose leaders have been branded international outlaws by a president of the United States who's ordered its harbors mined and its cities bombed. It is a country whose people have been wielding war for independence and unification for more than 25 years against the Japanese. And then the French and the Americans. How do the Vietnamese manage to go on. How do they survive the heaviest aerial bombardment in the history of warfare. Bill Zimmerman a Boston area organizer for medical aid for Indochina a group raising money for medical needs in North Vietnam returned from Hanoi this week. He was part of a delegation of four Americans visiting North Vietnam the only group of Americans to go there since the mining of Haiphong was announced. WBC Women's Weekly prerecorded community report now presents some selections from his diary. As we take you this week to North Vietnam.

May 20th 2 pm and I were here. I must try to write a controlled description. A plane landed in Hanoi and we were met by two members of the Vietnamese committee for solidarity with the American people who apologized for the small size of the reception party by referring to the inconvenient conditions brought about by the bombing. Our driver moved fast. There was very little behavior traffic mostly bicycles and pedestrians. I had the distinct feeling they wanted to get us into town quickly because of the bombing especially when we speeded up while driving past a railroad switching yard. The famous Red River Bridge which according to the US press had been totally wiped out a few days ago was standing perfectly well except for one small section on the airport side of the river. We crossed over a pontoon bridge and just as we got into the city we heard loud speakers announcing something in Vietnamese. A few blocks past the bridge the ERD siren started up full blast. It was unbelievable. Going to the people on the streets around us started climbing into the one man shelters made from

CALM AND seconds the streets were undercover. Our driver was in a predicament that was obvious to us from shelters at the hotel or Stomper was this moment. No one seemed afraid on the streets they all knew what to do. The driver kept telling us in some way which of the planes were coming but he did it laughingly. I wasn't frightened but I did want to take cover. At one point the driver stopped near some empty individual shelters we had by this time driven a mile or so from the point where the sirens first went off and the streets were empty except for us. This is it let's go I said to Margie and reach for the door handle. Just as I did the driver changed his mind and sped off. We drove about another mile and once or twice more the driver slowed down looking for empty holes and we pulled up in front. This is incredible in the middle of July since the air raid siren went off again and I had to split for the shelter. It was hot and humid underground spirits were high everyone else appeared relaxed as we sat there alternately laughing over our little jokes and trying to digest the enormity of what was happening outside our relationship to it.

Are we guilty of being associated somehow with the bomber pilots or should we have so many previous Hanoi visitors had told us be proud of the American anti-war people of the movement we represented. It was not easy that first time to resist the guilt. The second attack though made me very angry and I thought more of anti-aircraft guns than injured civilians. We were in the shelter for 45 minutes it was a no fooling around attack All right. We could hear the damn bombs exploding in the Vietnamese just a bit. Estimated they were about four miles away. Toward the end of the attack one bomb exploded which sounded twice as loud as those of four miles off. So they were certainly bombing in the city when it was over we emerged from the shelter and watched all those that acted as civil defense wardens metamorphosis eyes back into hotel waiters clerks drivers etc. in a way I would be when the means were relaxed calm and easy with their laughter. It created a climate of long familiarity with bombing and definite means of protection which did force us to see the bombing as they saw it as an inconvenience even though plenty of people were getting killed in North Vietnam and

that is right. Iran's support May 20 at 7:30 p.m.. Time to rock around her annoying after our first meeting. They said there was much less danger of bombing after four o'clock. We strolled through a large park on the edge of town with an outdoor restaurant and huge wake. There was a small zoo and circus under tents that had stopped performing since the resumption of bombing. The park had been built by the young people of Hanoi and was beautiful. There were many gardens and many flowering trees and even some think Bush is sculpted into half life size elephants. Later we saw a smaller park in the center of the city with a small lake in it. Swan is like a rocket exploded last week. One little episode was heart rending. As we walk down the street it began to rain and at one point a bolt of lightning struck very nearby. I saw it hit so I had the advantage of knowing that a loud noise was about to sound. There were two children walking along beside me a little girl about 8 and a boy six in the Thunderhead. They not expecting it jumped and ran directly for the nearest shelter holes. The adults around

laughingly reassured them but coming we know making a joke out of it. The children moved it as though it was a conditioned response. Bombs have flown for their entire coming just wants us has made it so familiar that these kids now react instinctively. It's like the G eyes who come home from Vietnam and sleep with a bayonet and under their pillows and wake up ready to fight at the slightest. The CIA did not believe that the bombing of Haiphong could effectively interdict supplies. A CIA analysis prepared for secret study of the royal commission by President Nixon made this clear. The study which was made public by Alaska Senator Mike rebel reads in part almost four years of North Vietnam that was shown as during the Korean War. But either air strikes will destroy transport facilities equipment and supplies they cannot successfully interdict the flow of supplies because of much of the damage can frequently be repaired within hours. Two principal rail lines connect and I would come into China with a combined capacity of over 9000 tons a day primarily highway routes cross the China border. Having a combined capacity of about 5000 tonnes per

day. In addition the Red River flows out of China and has a capacity averaging fifteen hundred tons per day May 22nd midnight. We left him only after dark. All travel must be at night because of the bombers. My phone after for a ride in a three car caravan full of interpreters Solidarity Committee people and security has dozens of camouflaged trucks tractors in railroad cars roads along top of dykes rice paddies below. The country looked gorgeous in the moonlight. Radiohead II playing beautiful Vietnamese music. Then a newscast reporting the Pentagon blockade the announcer described the HO HO HO Chih men chant and everyone cheered. Outskirts of a hint of Haiphong smashed every building wrecked a large and small. Incredible to see. We've learned in the eight years of this war to perceive everything in statistical terms or through the cooing eye of the TV screen in person the buildings make you think instantly of the people that died in them. Emotional distance and abstractions collapse into the hard realities and the feelings they evoke.

War innocence disappears quickly and I guess like any other kind it is never to be recovered. I say something about the Vietnamese people. I think I realized tonight while talking to all the men on the trip especially our translator Kwok what the secret of their appeal is. They are total and cynical about human relationships and friends. They always seem so sincere. A trait I find disgusting when carried to extremes by Westerners but with them the sincerity is always combined with humor in a relaxed style. I think perhaps they have only rarely experienced the avarice envy competition and false loyalty that characterizes so many of our friendships especially early ones so they lack that cynicism that we need as a protective shield that what you even look for in others to establish a sense of sameness that is the basis of our friendships. They can be friends and be sincere about it because they haven't experienced their disappointments their sincerity need not be forced and consequently it is very appealing. I'm sure this is the basis for my attraction to the women here. It's something that I was groping for in my earlier description. Imagine the power when that lack of cynicism with respect and friendship is combined

with sexuality. Got to sleep now or getting up at 4:30 to begin inspecting damage before the bombers come on the role of women from the book the peasants of North Vietnam part of the male labor force has been called up. This is on the rise in the status of women. There used to be a saying in Vietnam that 100 girls aren't worth a single testicle set against polygamy. Compulsory marriages and it is giving girls the same educations Roys. But the pressures are probably greater advancement than all other years of peace time put together. With the parties encourage women to come and play a farmer important role in production. Younger women serve in the militia and have been fully trained for active service. The road repair teams are largely made up of young girls spending a few days away from their parents homes. The very attitude of the younger women. Their whole way of thinking and looking at life differs profoundly from the stand adopted by the previous generation. They are anxious to participate in everything they assert themselves

cluelessly they want fewer children and they want more responsibilities. Conscious or unconscious reluctance to appoint women to higher posts has now banished new regulations came into force in 1967 and industrial cooperative in which women make up 40 percent of the labor force must have a woman on its management committee. When the figure reaches 50 percent the assistant manager must be a woman. 70 percent or more. The manager must be a woman. As we toured bomb damage an iPhone or early the next morning two things became clear. One was that the civilian population is highly mobilized to combat the bombing and two is that the target of the bombing is the civilian population itself and not the supply lines. We were taken through the harbor Harbor very quickly but we were able to see small wooden boats moving in and out and the handling of massive amounts of cargo and huge wooden crates which were stacked all along the harbor. And then of April 16 1972 at 2am the American bombers came to Haiphong.

They bombed a half dozen housing projects in addition to a few targets around the harbor. The bombers returned at 10 a.m. the next morning and again at 4:00 p.m. in each of the three raids they hit the targets primarily residential areas in the city. At 10:00 a.m. the second raid they also hit several of the hospitals. We visited the Vietnamese Czechoslovakia friendship hospital and saw there that the operating room and the surgical ward had been struck by rocket and fragmentation bombs. I would say that without a major city that was examined we met one boy in the hospital who had been struck by a bomb while sleeping in his home at 2 AM and then hit again while on the operating table in the hospital at 10 am. The bombing of Haiphong under Nixon was significantly different and more serious than it was under Johnson because residential areas and civilian targets were no longer hit in a random fashion but systematically the same

targets are going to repeatedly on the same day so that people after the first attack are returned to recover their belongings from the wreckage of their homes or struck again. And then as in on April 16th again a second time. The cities themselves like my firm are taking apart neighborhood by neighborhood. It is the same targets being aired several times in one day or over the course of two or three days and then a week later two weeks later the bombers return to an entirely different set of targets again repeatedly. The city seems to be one of terrorizing the civilian population. However we saw no evidence of that policy working people and I foreigners as well as in non-doing and Hanoi the other cities we visited were determined to resist the escalation of bombing at any cost. May 23rd 10:30 a.m. I left my phone at 6:00 am in a three car

caravan with cameras in army helmets dangling for the 10 kilometer ride to the village of book lock. On the way we drove past many children riding on the backs of water buffalo. They were taking out to graze. One little girl read from her perch. A boy lay back flat in the sun with hands behind his head. We drove across the wide flat area of the Red River Delta past long straight canals and numberless rice paddies the villages in the middle of it absolutely agricultural and no economic or military targets of any significance within miles. It was small and primitive thatched roof adobe huts a village threshing floor full of rice dirt roads and so on slightly over 300 families live there. About a thousand souls organized into a cooperative. On the morning of April 16th at 2:30 a.m. It was carpet bombed by B-52. Some of the people had heard bombs falling 15 minutes earlier in the direction of Haiphong. Others did not. A few of those who heard the bombs sought shelter. Who would have imagined that the Americans seven miles above would want to destroy them. It is a square kilometer in area. The bomb pattern was a rectangular one kilometer long by a half a

kilometer wide of one hundred forty two bomb craters. Everyone was inside the village perimeter in the surrounding fields we didn't see a single demolition bomb crater. Only unexploded anti-personnel bombs. There is no question in my mind that the Air Force can bomb as accurately as it claims and no question about what they are trying to hit. Half the village had been razed to the ground. But today a month later much of it was being rebuilt by someone from a village come under who told us the history of that night. We met and spoke with two individuals. One was an oldman 70 years old. There had been 17 people in his family and 10 were killed seven seriously wounded. Of those killed only one body was sufficiently intact to identify He like all the others we've met spoke with great admiration about the progressive American people who support the Vietnamese. The other was a boy of 13 years old and his family were killed both parents two grandparents and aunt and three brothers. He spoke again and again of his desire to grow quickly so he could join the North Vietnamese Army and avenge the deaths of his parents and siblings. Our

interpreter who had relayed many such histories to us broke into tears while translating the young boy's story. They insisted on getting us back to the guest house in Haifa long before 8 a.m. at 10 a.m. The planes came. We heard them only seconds after the siren sounded. Anyhow I'm going to write country on my phone. May 23rd 11:00 PM earlier today we spoke to two young women who told us their stories from the night of April 16th. Both were factory workers who were in the district militia and assigned to anti-aircraft batteries. One had brought down an American plane the other began her story by telling us that as a woman she was not proud of her military exploits a desired peace as

she could live with her family and tranquility. On the night of the 16th the bombing began before she get before she could get to her going placement on the way she heard screams coming from under some building wreckage. There she on earth the dead bodies of two mothers of large families and some of their children. Later she discovered the body of one of her close friends. It was cut completely into imagine. I'm not in corrections country you know I was on May 24th midnight. We left the city of non-doing about 8 p.m. for the 60 kilometer ride back home to Hanoi.

Yes if they were going there for only three days it does feel like I owe it to him if I was lying in many places with shacks made from mud and wood slides. These are the temporary quarters of all the people evacuated from the cities. Typically the road runs parallel and about 20 feet from a canal two or three rooms shacks are built between the road and the Camaro. They are met by kerosene lanterns or candle. The population of the cities is strong out in winter fashion along the road so hurting them with bombs will be just as hard as bombing railroad tracks. Oh yes so a couple of trains rolling along tonight. My lack of trouble on the roads. The two trains and the hundreds of trucks that start moving after dark are measures of the DRDO and supply problems resulting from the escalation. At one point some villagers shouted something at our cars from the roadside and immediately all three sets of headlights went out. The people who'd heard American planes they can tell the difference between them in the mix by the sound. We stopped for a while. Didn't hear anything and then continued on without lights. Very strange. Three government cars shooting down a road for pedestrians bicycles trucks going in both

directions. No lights anywhere and no one hurt. Prisoners of war tonight they drove us somewhere in the city and took us into a large room in a building that must once have been a French mansion a diplomatic mission a rectangular table covered with white cloth and surrounded by two chairs in front of it was a teacup and saucer. Completely planned the spokesman what questions we would ask protocol etc.. At the beginning of buddy buddy with them the most of the prisoners and I had written a letter to Congress but too much of the suffering would cause them to think of them as anything but war criminals. I don't consider

the striped uniforms stripes of alternating white and dark maroon images of concentration camps flashed through my mind but the faces of the striped shirts were 200 percent American too well-fed and round and Middle Western but weren't. And I realized how much I had become used to the short Vietnamese Brogan to another recently been captured in just two months from us and nervously. We were nervous and exploring the moment. Reduced ourselves given rank captured as we had asked them two questions the first concerning their treatment. It was excellent in every way it was confirmed by their obvious good health. A series of several political questions each one geared to reveal one of Nixon's allies or the legitimacy of a massive anti-war work. Different person respond to each of the questions answers. What was happening came home to

me. Their responses were perfect. We could not have written a better script for them. Everything they said was politically right on concise complete and hard hitting but it was not programmed. I spoke with obvious sincerity and emotionally genuine way. They were human beings victims too caught in a web of forces they did not understand and absolutely impotent in controlling their fate. They were men of the street back home in America. A complete spectrum of the faces in any American city. Only now they were sitting with us here in Asia in striped shirts. They were grabbing murderers of hundreds of innocent people and we would be going home while they stayed on here in their prison camp for years to come listen to maybe commander Hoffman. When the session ended more cars and drove back to the hotel on the way we could see the

two small pickup trucks in front of us that we knew must contain the prisoners. The bank part was completely covered in windowless and you could almost look through the side walls and see the four men sitting in the dark. Didn't want them to see the location of their camp and probably too they didn't want the people in the street to see who or what it was that rode in the back it was not a scene from a movie or a page out of history but a war and we were right in the middle of it. I don't describe it as I sit writing this in front of the open balcony doors with the sound of Vietnamese music streaming into my room from the loudspeakers that other times announce the positions of attacking planes alone melodious music that I've come to love so much experience with the WC would have looked so frightening menacing and their other uniforms with a pair of death hanging from them was saddening enough to add a dimension of tragedy suffering and victimisation to everything else we've seen in Vietnam.

I'm surprised that my empathy for those men. Surprised that I had a sense of being a countryman of theirs. I did shake their hands and some one speaker swore so. I'm flooded with such a confusing Russian feelings this frustration from the tortured bodies and twisted souls keep straight what the word means and so total so overwhelming I. Want peace I want peace. According to the report. Who made 27 6 a.m. Vietnam later

today this morning we made a bomb damage tour on the other side of the river. We had to walk both ways across the pontoon bridge with cars waiting for city each and no vehicles on the bridge because of the volume of pedestrian traffic. It was a wonderful wonderful walk. Warm rain in one direction and a clearing storm clouds going in the other. A literal wave of beautiful Asian humanity gorge the one lane bridge from a distance it looked like an army of ants or a river of blue white and chemically colored sand. I walked through it feeling their strength and determination and feeling very close to them. Many smiled at us or bowed their heads very slightly. They seemed to know who we were in their faces you could see an instant of curiosity and surprise and then a smile of recognition and a slight nod. I was smiling and happy for the whole walk which was a good three quarters of a mile in each direction. Despite everyone's occasional glance up at the sky and their ears obviously pricked up for the sound of the air raid siren trapped as they were on one of the city's prime targets I smiled broadly and nodded back to many especially the few children the speckled old scholar I remember particularly

well and a woman pushing a bicycle with a broad open smile in deep black eyes. This was Asian communism where the people had so little interest in being different from each other that their individual personalities could be set free of competition and envy and they could become true individuals. That's women for whom there stood the ultimate triumph of the Vietnamese people is assured by soon the Triumph they have already achieved. With. You've been listening to Bill Zimmerman Bastien anti-war organizer read from his diary of a visit to North Vietnam in the last week of May 1972. Zimmerman was part of the only American delegation to visit North Vietnam since the mining of the harbors of that country. Bill Zimmerman works with the medical aid for Indochina Committee a group collecting

money to aid the victims of American bombing. The committee has offices at 474 Center Street in Massachusetts. That's medical aid for China. 474 Center Street. Has 0 2 1 5 8. I'm Danny Schechter annoyed diary has been a presentation of the public affairs department of WBC and in Boston. And once they understand isn't When will the end of war and we will see it this year with me where I needed to do so. Madam bam bam. You know in some running continue to prolong the program. The only thing in our country.

We will continue our interest is turned on. I don't think I want and dependence and printer.