We were introduced to Ho Chi Minh. He sat very still in brilliant sunlight in a jungle.
Thin, with white and black hair, bare torso and black pants, cross-legged. With red and black beetles moving along the fronds of the trees, it seemed a hallowed place. Someone called it ―the glade‖.
He said he had a terrible headache, myalgia. I offered him a Bufferin from a little tin I had with me. I said, ―Take two.‖
He refused them. He said, ―I‘d rather have mushrooms.‖ He said a medic was coming to bring him some bean soup that would revive him.
Somehow I got separated from the group. It was night. A bomb burst in front of me. I had crawled up a sandy bluff and peered through some bushes and trees, over the edge. I saw a white ambulance marked with a red cross be hit by a bomb. It exploded in yellow flames. My forehead and eyebrows got singed. I ran down a red hanging rope ladder that was attached to the top of the bluff. Someone called, ―Are you all right?‖ A railroad track moved along the sand. I followed the track. It was wooden and mouldy.
A train roared off to my right out of a roundhouse in a hill, along another track.
The bomb burst in front of me. I could hear a piece of the shell land to my right.
I went straight up in the air.
I felt myself come down on my left knee.
―Are you all right?‘ a man called again.
6
He reached out his arm to me. ―You should never have gotten separated from the group.‖
He drew me over. People were eating bowls of rice and fish in circle.
Bomb fragments had gotten into the skin of my stomach.
We ate and then we walked over the gray wet sand to the plane.
Two tanks had rolled in at an angle behind me. The sand was pink, many colored. They shot screaming flame into the air. ―Howitzers,‖ someone said. The tanks had shot a yellow plane. It exploded and men parachuted down, landed. ―The loss was ours,‖ a voice said.
A sort of crater appeared in the sand.
Someone said, ―I wish this terrible war were over. I wish they would stop bombing.
Death to the invaders!‖
I saw yellow flames coming in many directions I was terrified. My skirt and blouse were burned black. Someone said. ―You should have used flame retardant on your clothes.
You got caught in the crossfire.‖
Our plane was hit by a shell on the way home. I thought I just didn‘t care.
When I got back to Cambridge it was raining. I went to my mother‘s apartment and wept and wept and wept.
―You should have told me you were going, ― she said.
She set the alarm and I took a nap. It was Sunday afternoon. Then I got up and went back to Radcliffe.
―Don‘t tell anybody,‖ the SDS people had said. I didn‘t tell anyone but my parents and my closest friend for a long time.