Behind enemy lives

For many Americans who fought in the Vietnam War, the enemy was a faceless symbol of Communist aggression — and a target.

The North Vietnamese soldiers, or NVA, and Viet Cong guerrillas generally were respected for their courage and toughness, but hated nonetheless. One of the tragedies of war is that peace doesn’t necessarily cure the disease of hate.

Although it has been 35 years since the fall of Saigon, countless American veterans of that war still bear its festering scars on their psyches. Veteran James G. Zumwalt knows well the inner agonies of loss and despair caused by that war.

His father, Adm. Elmo Zumwalt Jr., had served as the Naval commander in Vietnam. It was by his order that the chemical defoliant Agent Orange was sprayed along riverbanks near Saigon to clear jungle areas.

The admiral’s son, Lt. j.g. Elmo Zumwalt III —James Zumwalt’s brother — commanded one of the “swift boats” that conducted combat operations along those waterways. On Aug. 13, 1988, after a five-year fight with Agent Orange-related cancers, the son died at age 42.

The tragic death led the surviving son to confront the hatred he felt toward the VC and NVA he had fought. Ultimately, James Zumwalt found that once he looked beyond the obscuring mask of hate, he saw his former enemy was no less human than he was.

Zumwalt tells the story in the recently released book “Bare Feet, Iron Will: Stories from the Other Side of Vietnam’s Battlefields.” The author will be discussing his book and signing copies at New Dominion Bookshop at 12:15 p.m. Wednesday.

“After my brother’s death, my father became very actively involved in fighting for benefits for Vietnam veterans,” said Zumwalt, a retired Marine infantry officer who currently heads a security consulting firm. “In 1994, he decided to take a trip to Vietnam to meet with the president to see if he could get him to agree to a joint study on Agent Orange.

“He asked me if I wanted to go with him, and initially I was reluctant, because I was harboring quite a bit of animosity toward the enemy after the loss of my brother. But I decided to go, and about the third day there I had a one-on-one meeting with a general who was a medical doctor.

“He started the meeting by extending his condolences for the loss of my brother. We started talking about the war and its impact, and as we did, I noticed he got a little teary-eyed.”

Zumwalt subsequently learned that the physician also had lost a brother in the war. It was at that moment that an epiphany of realization came to the embittered Marine.

“It was kind of like a light went on, and I asked myself if the loss of a loved one was any less significant just because it had occurred on the other side of the battlefield,” said Zumwalt, who served with the Navy on board a destroyer off the coast of Vietnam and also with a Marine reaction force.

“The answer was, obviously, no. The loss of our brothers was something that had impacted both of us heavily. It was that meeting that made me think that what I should do was meet with more of their veterans, and get a better understanding of what the war was like on their side of the battlefield.

“There’s a lot of Vietnam veterans I have spoken with over the years who still seem to harbor quite a bit of animosity toward the war and the enemy. I think it’s easy to hold onto resentment when you’ve never met the enemy face to face.”

During more than 50 trips to Vietnam, Zumwalt met and interviewed several hundred Vietnamese who had fought against South Vietnam forces and their allies. For the most part, neither their voices nor motivations had reached Western ears before.

One of Zumwalt’s hopes for the book is that it will serve as a healing balm for Vietnam veterans, by perhaps showing them a side of their former enemies they hadn’t seen before.

“I think my biggest critics have been Vietnam veterans who have had trouble looking at the enemy with a human face,” Zumwalt said. “By no means do I mean to preach to them, but I would like them to understand that there’s two sides to the war.

“My hope is that, maybe, by reading this book, it will at least give them a little insight into what the other side did go through, and maybe that will be a seed that will sprout and will allow them to let go of some of the animosities they have toward the enemy.

“I saw my book as an opportunity not to glamorize, but humanize the enemy. As I say in the book, I feel suffering and tragedy in war is universal to combatants on both sides of the battlefield.”

That the Vietnamese people, north and south, suffered terribly during the war is undeniable. Zumwalt reveals in the book that more than 1,400 Vietnamese mothers lost three or more sons in the war.

One mother he interviewed lost nine sons in the conflict. When the war ended, the United States had about 2,200 military personnel missing in action. The Vietnamese had more than 300,000.

According to Zumwalt, such egregious losses haven’t turned the Vietnamese against Americans. On the contrary, he says, for the most part Vietnamese embrace and love Americans and hold no animosities toward them because of the war.

As an avid student of Vietnamese history, Zumwalt said this forgive-and-forget quality is a part of their national character. Since declaring independence from China in the 10th century, the Vietnamese have had to expel foreign invaders every century or so — often the Chinese.

After successfully defeating the Chinese, the Vietnamese would send a letter of apology to the Chinese emperor for having won, Zumwalt said.

Few young Americans fighting in Vietnam knew much about Vietnam’s long history and fierce resolve to remain independent. If asked at the time, most of them would have said they were there to help an ally stand up to Communist aggression.

But time and again during Zumwalt’s interviews, his subjects would claim to be nationalists, rather than Communists. And their goal was unifying their country.

“One of the veterans I met with, who considered himself a nationalist, said Ho Chi Minh [North Vietnam’s leader] had to wave the Communist banner to get help from the Chinese and the Soviets,” Zumwalt said.

“Then he kind of leaned toward me and said, ‘Now, we fight the Communists.’ The sense I have is that these are people who really yearn for a better life, and knew that Communism wasn’t going to give it to them.

“Three years after the war was over, Gen. Dong Si Nguyen, who had been the commander in chief of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, was given responsibility for the rice industry, because they were having to import 2 million tons of rice a year.

“He basically implemented a free-market economy. He told rice growers that anything above a certain level they could have to sell on their own. He recognized the fact that they would have to return to capitalism to motivate the people.”

Today, Vietnam is one of the top exporters of rice in the world, and the No. 1 exporter of coffee. Zumwalt says the Vietnamese are a people who know what Communism is about and what capitalism is about, and they’re motivated by capitalism.

Perhaps the highest hurdle many American veterans of Vietnam have with making peace with their enemies has to do with the atrocities they committed on the South Vietnamese people. The systematic slaughter by the VC and NVA of at least 2,800 civilians and prisoners of war in Hue during the Tet Offensive in 1968 is one example.

The willful killing of civilians, or POWs, is no less a case of murder because it happens in a war zone. Neither is the specter of My Lai, where American soldiers slaughtered hundreds of Vietnamese civilians, any less a crime because the numbers were in the hundreds and not thousands.

“I really do not believe that what happened there [Hue], just as what happened at My Lai, is representative of the majority of the fighting forces on both sides of the battlefield,” Zumwalt said. “You’re talking about anomalies that happen during war when bad leaders make bad decisions.

“Unfortunately, good soldiers sometimes carry out those orders without stopping to think about what they’re doing. The fact remains that it was done on both sides of the battlefield, and both sides were aware that it was being done and both sides had animosities as a result.

“I went through My Lai on one of my trips, and was amazed at how there was very little animosity toward Americans despite what happened there.”

History shows that one-time fierce enemies can, and often do, become friends and staunch allies. And some of the closest friendships are between those who fought the battles, because they are often the ones who suffered most.

“What I have found is that the feeling former VC and NVA have toward us today is very warm,” Zumwalt said. “If you go over there and they learn that you served in the Vietnam War, they want to know what capacity you served in, where you were and things like that.

“And they share where they were and so forth. The next thing you know, you’re buying each other drinks.”

James G. Zumwalt will discuss his new book, “Bare Feet, Iron Will: Stories from the Other Side of Vietnam’s Battlefields,” at 12:15 p.m. Wednesday at New Dominion Bookshop.