On Becoming Critical of the Vietnam War
When I was 17 and graduating high school, one of my best friends Jim Klein was a valedictorian at Mamaroneck High School in New York, and in his valedictory speech, Jim began speaking about the Vietnam War – this was the main focus of his talk — and he criticized the war and he made a statement – which I remember today, and I reminded him of a few years ago when I last met him— that we’ll remember that it was the United States that was bombing Vietnamese villages and civilians, not Vietnam who was bombing American citizens. I remember sitting in the audience as Jim gave this speech and the tension that was in the room, the auditorium, because I think almost all of our parents, the majority probably, this was June 1967, supported the Vietnam war in that they felt the US government was a government that they could believe in.
And this was the legacy of the World War II generation, what Studs Terkel called “The Good War” in his book, and here was this 17-year-old in front of them, condemning them. I remember getting my diploma and then crossing the stage, and Jimmy was standing up there as valedictorian, and going up to him and shaking his hand and just saying, “great speech.” And at that point I realized I was becoming critical of the war.
On Deciding to Go to Indochina:
I had been in India, I had lived with farmers and peasants, and I learned to speak their language, Hindi, very fluently. They were demystified to me. They became real people and friends, with great senses of humor, and not caricatures of starving people in photographs. They were my friends — I stayed nights in their homes, went to their weddings and their festivals and I could talk to them in their own language.
I became increasingly aware of protests going on in the United States. Richard Nixon, I think, makes a public statement where he says the students who are protesting the war are ignorant, they don’t know what they’re talking about, they’ve never been to Vietnam. The soldiers, they know more of what’s going on than the protesters.
And I decide, I’m nearing the end of my stay in India and I began talking to a French friend of mine in Calcutta — as I occasionally go down to Calcutta to get supplies and things like that for some of the project I’m working on— and Christian Landeau, a friend of mine working in the slums of Calcutta for a French organization called “Brothers to All Men”, he and I decided we want to take the trip to Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos. The objective is to experience firsthand what’s going on, and to educate ourselves.