My memoir of Vietnam and a return almost half a century later continues.
March 6, 2015 Tokyo…Day 2
"My daughter, Grace, and cousins Jim and Karen Holliman, flew over
Siberia last night, crossing the International Date line and entering
Russia. A bit different than in 1969
when the Cold War was on. This flight was
late leaving Chicago, and we were late landing in Norita, the airport 25 miles from
Tokyo. So we missed our connection to Hanoi.
Just as well.
After 13 hours, time to stretch, shower and have a good Chinese meal
courtesy of American Airlines.
Grace in a Japanese garden.
The room is,
well, early airport, hot water but Asian low beds and no temperature control. But free wi fi, the way we connect in the 21st
Century! Last time I was here, I mailed
the family post cards!
Japanese last
night at American Airlines very sweet, well organized.
We have a bare glimpse at the Japanese traffic congestion and culture from the shuttle bus.
Woke at 3:15 am
after six hours sleep (napped often on the flight over) so body clock trying to
right itself. Grace was ready to get up, and doing exercises. She is a
physical fitness guru. A bit different
traveling with family this time, no forbidding thoughts of homesickness and
war.
So time for
breakfast.
The adventure continues with blue toast and black coffee.
Breakfast was
wonderful…excellent coffee, with western or Asian choices of food…squid pickled
(skipped second helping), brown rice drenched with peanut oil and tiny slender
mushrooms.
Later a walk in
a neighboring chapel garden and a photo of pansies. I am wearing my yellow
'bumble bee' water proof jacket.
My grand daughter, Holly's traveling whimsy chicken posed in a tree.Shuttle to airport and check in on Viet Nam airlines….a 320 Airbus. Service and food excellent; free wine in economy. Amazing service; so unlike U.S. cattle cars.
Already this trip is ‘freeing’ me from some frozen feelings, a thaw I suspect. The world has moved on dramatically since 1969 but some of me has stayed locked in a time vault. A new generation has grown up, and the American war is ancient history. So be it, but so sad for those who died for so little. Generations born since 1965 have no memory of how bitterly divided the nation was over the Vietnam War.
Handed a copy of
the Viet Nam News upon boarding; all in English! And read like a normal newspaper; lots of
western news, mainly US foreign policies and economic reports. This was our former enemy, turned capitalist? Irony of ironies."
Flash back to late
1968, barracks mate Neil Norton at Ft. Hamilton, New York where I was
stationed after a month at Ft. Dix from November 1968 to late January
1969.
Below: the then U.S. Army Chaplain's school at Ft. Hamilton, New York where I trained as a chaplain's assistant, located near the then new Verrazano Bridge connecting Brooklyn to Staten Island. As senior citizens, my wife and I have sailed under the Bridge on the Queen Mary 2, and I always gaze to the west viewing the fort and think of those days.
Left, Felix Greene's 1966 book, Vietnam in Photographs and Text which I have had for almost half a century. It was probably the first major publication to carry photographs of the effects of U.S. military action in Vietnam. It was in March 1965, President Lyndon Johnson ordered Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing of North Vietnam. Later that spring the first Marines landed, and shortly there after the U.S. Army including my future division, the First Infantry.
Greene's work was the first to question and oppose the effort that would continue until 1973. The photographs captured the early destructiveness and ugliness of the conflict and began to produce a narrative very different than the Administration was conveying to the public.
Next post of my trip back in time, Hanoi, our enemy capital in the 1960s.
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