Vietnam [antikvár]

Indeed I remember the 16th of July 1972. 1 spent it in Nam Dinh. The heat was so suffocating it hurt. Not a cloud in the sk/.The U.S. Air Force made good use of the clear skies. I counted nine air-raid alarms in twenty-four hours. Three times in áll F4 'planes actually appeared and dropped their bombs on the badly-hit, long suffering industrial city. The severest raid was the one at 14.12 hours. At that time the summer heat is at its peak and men, women and children sleep.Six planes dropped sixteen one-ton bombs on a two hundred meter wide two kilometers long strip that stretched from the River Dai to the Bakery. The smoke had hardly risen and the dust settled when I went over to the lock on the River Dai which the bombs had damaged. There were small bamboo huts near the locks, some of them had been destroyed by the raid as well.Despite the intervening time, my throat still tightens when I think of what I saw.,Five children, brothers and sisters, deadthe ten year old girl still hugging her small brother as if to protect his life. Covered in blood, their bodies broken, they were still beautiful in death. I could almost see them chasing each other on the banks of the wide river, bare-foot and bare-headed. Their mother, Mrs Tien, lay there as well, dead, next to her children. I have felt since that the five were my very own. Writing is my trade, but I cannot give words to the pain the shame and the hatred I felt. I love my trade but there, for the first time in many years at it, I felt how weak a tool is the pen. I would have happily changed it for a missile and given the enemy the answer he deserved. That, I could not.All I could do was to take photographs, the photographs which are reproduced in this book. I will not allow you to say to your conscience: I did not know the Tien family, I wasn't in Nam Dinh, I know nothing. We all know about it.Turn the pages of this book: it is the work of war-correspondents, of journalists, of photographers. What I have tried to do was choose material that will allow you to understand not only the daily tragedies of Nam Dinh, but the martyrdom of the people of Vietnam. The Americans do not hush-up anything. We know about it as well, there is no excuse. I know these pictures are oppressive, but please do not put this book aside. It should make you cry out now. In the last third of the 20th century and in front of the whole world, America and her leaders have been able to practise genocide almost undisturbed.I attended a funeral in Hung Jen where they laid to rest the victims of an airraid. I was in the Haipong hospital after a raid; the surgeons operated on the wounded while others shielded them with their bodies since the Americans