In September of 1968, the long range recon team that I was in quit the war. We couldn't go home, the military had us by the balls, but we no longer performed our part in the military pacification of Viet Nam. All our desires to be good little soldiers were blown away the day the orphanage was destroyed at Nam Trey.
Everyone likes babies, we were no exception, and the good Sisters at the orphanage had their share. The good Lord knows, they had the room. The French and the Church had been very generous to the nuns, and had provided them with the holdings of a bankrupt tea grower. The land may not have grown tea, but it sure grew orphans. War is pretty indiscriminate, it leaves a hell of a lot of motherless children hanging about, and the Sisters had been gathering them in. The orphanage housed fifty or more, with the nuns providing food, clothes, schooling, love and nurturing. They worked with many of the children, striving to draw deeply traumatized souls back from the abyss into which shock had sent them. It's bad for children to have bombs dropped on them, to see everyone die, and to have other indignities of body and soul heaped on them. Sometimes it is just too much for the young mind to hold and it withdraws, curling up somewhere deep inside, waiting for the hurt all to go away. The nuns, exuding a calm that comes from dedication and love, worked quietly with the children, bringing them back ever so gently. The other children helped by playing by the damaged ones and sharing laughter with them.
We had found the place purely by accident, by detouring down a side road while heading for our landing zone. We were already spooked, our team had taken its share of pounding, and we wanted no more contact with any unfriendly forces for a while. Every bush, clump of vegetation and brown spot was suspect, so we noticed immediately when the bush started to thin out. We spotted the cultivation right off, figured that it would support a large population of people, and got worried. We were in Indian country, and we knew of no villages close by. We slid off the trail into what we felt was relatively good concealment. As we stopped to review the situation, we were hailed by an elderly nun. She informed us that we were on the grounds of the St. Mary's Nam Trey Orphanage, and asked us if we would please leave, as we were frightening the children. I felt shameful as we left, somewhat dirty, and mildly resentful. Didn't she know that we were there for her benefit? Without us her orphanage wouldn't have a chance.
The next time that we traveled through there it was on purpose, with a bag of candy, some French comic books and gum for the kids, and a box of things from the pharmacy for the nuns. We also had orders from the C.I.A. boys to recon the plantation. They believed that the nuns were growing food for the enemy, and providing hiding whenever asked. We were ordered to find out what we could and check back.
The nuns smiled at us benignly when we asked if we could give out the goodies to the children and were overjoyed when we gave them the care- package from the pharmacy. They were more than happy to give us the Visiting Dignitary tour, showing us the hospital, school, children's quarters, gardens and very spacious fields. We were pretty convinced by the size of the fields that the nuns were feeding a lot of people, or believed in stockpiling for lean times. Then they showed us the children.
The children swarmed us, climbed on our backs, played with our hats, and treated us like visiting gods. I saw young Dillingers with thirty or more confirmed kills, laughing and playing the fool, handing out candy as if it were Christmas, with a glow replacing the thousand yard stare in their eyes, a glow that I had never seen before. As for me, I sat enthralled and listened to a miniature Madonna read me a Little Lulu comic with a voice that sang like a harp, in a language that I didn't understand. I fell in love with that thousand year old child in a ten year old child's body, a body that had been broken and ravished by the jaws of war. If I could have adopted her then, I would have-in a heart beat. If I could have adopted them all, I would have done that too.
The children of Nam Trey became our special project. It seemed to us that someone should feel that we owed these children something, and nobody else seemed to be doing shit. Inasmuch as it was mostly America's guns and bombs that broke them, we felt responsible. Anything that we could divert to the orphanage, through channels or not, became part of our good neighbor policy. What we told the C.I.A. was "altered with discretion" inasmuch as we felt that the nuns were making the best of a bad situation. The orphanage became one of the few places that I felt at peace, insulated by God and the nuns from the war, protected as it were. We took to stopping by as much as we could, watching the nuns teach the children and helping when we had something to offer. We started the boys' volley-ball team, played the nuns' girls' team and were resoundingly beaten. When umpires were needed for a baseball game, we took our licks and called them as we saw them. It's very impressive to be told off by a pint sized Babe Ruth, in a blur of French and Vietnamese with a bow at the end.
We became very aware of how the war affected the area around the orphanage, guarding it as best we could from Popular Front forces as well as Americans, sweeping through when we could, checking for sign of any intrusion. It was on one of these sweeps that we jumped one of Charlie's companies and drew fire. When one is in a Long Range Recon team, he's there with four or five other people, limited fire power, and a strong sense of self preservation.
We called in the Gun Ships.
Charlie ran for the orphanage.
We tried to call off the dogs, but they wouldn't stop. We fired at the choppers but were too far away. They chased Charlie to the orphanage and then blew him away. As we ran to help our babies, we listened to the open mikes of the choppers, and the door gunners screaming obscenities, counting their confirmed kills.
Then they called for the napalm.
When we got there it was over. Someone had realized the fuckup, had called off the war and were sending in Red Cross choppers. What were left of the "enemy" had vanished, taking their dead. The only dead remaining were children and nuns. The nunnery was still burning in places. The hospital had been gutted and was starting to fall in upon itself. The shattered remnants of the tall white walls were blackened and bullet pitted, with huge gaping holes where the rockets had hit. The dead were in front of the orphanage, covered with blankets, filling the road for fifty feet, and more were being carried out. The air was cloying with an acrid, sweet smell, caused from burnt bodies, napalm and cordite. As we stood there, numb and gutted, a younger nun, habit torn, disheveled, with a diagonal striped burn across her face as if struck by lightning, staggered forth from the ruins, clasping two grieving children to her sides. Our eyes met. Her eyes were flat black, radiating hate and loathing, rocking me back, filling me with the realization of what we had done.
"Please leave, you are terrifying the children."
As we left the destruction and anguish that we had caused, traveling the road from the orphanage for the last time, the first of the Red Cross choppers landed, its blades wafting the blankets from the dead.
My last memory of St. Mary's Nam Trey Orphanage is a small arm protruding from under a blanket, ending in a tiny hand, curved as if in supplication, praying for better treatment from us, the supposed benefactors.
I still dream about this.