Any Way You Can

In 1973, when I was a sophomore in college, my parents moved to Vietnam. My father was in the CIA and had been posted to Saigon as part of the U.S. mission to drive out the North Vietnamese forces threatening to overtake the South Vietnamese government. He and two other CIA officials were to create and oversee a “black ops” radio station designed to spread propaganda that would disillusion the North Vietnamese and convert them and the Viet Cong guerrillas to democracy. My mother, designated a U.S. embassy “trailing spouse,” was a physical therapist. She provided health care to napalm victims and others wounded in the war. She also spent her days coordinating the social service efforts of the embassy wives.

Vietnam, as I learned when I visited my parents, was a place of many sensations. It was the aromas of fish sauce, coconut, and freshly baked baguettes. It was the roar of motorbikes, the rumble of army trucks, the screeches of hurtling cars. It was grim-faced, beautiful women hurrying in silky, pastel áo dàis and grim-faced men clustered at sandbagged street corners in green khaki and carrying loaded guns. It was skin sweaty and sticky from the oppressive, unrelenting heat. And it was daily meals of rice and fresh fish eaten to a soundtrack of intermittent, belly-clutching blasts from Vietcong explosives and grenades. It was a place steeped in sorrow, where the hardened Vietnamese people did whatever was required to survive and forge viable lives.

My parents were trying to do good. As a clandestine CIA operative, my father aimed to help people under repressive regimes achieve democracy, per the American creed as a superpower of the era. (This whole dynamic and mythology, in some part nobly motivated, was, of course, soon to be disrobed as arrogant and vastly flawed in both conception and execution.) And my mother was trying to help the injured, the sick, the disabled, the displaced, the traumatized, and the impoverished.

I witnessed both of them in action when I visited Saigon for Christmas. At a party held at my father’s radio station, known as House Seven, I sensed a genuine affection and devotion between him and the station’s Vietnamese employees. My mother, meanwhile, took me to visit two houses where women were being taught embroidery and other skills so as to be able to earn a living in some way other than selling their bodies on the street. In tiny living quarters cluttered with sewing machines, cloth, and thread, the women eagerly showed off their latest creations: beautiful dresses and flowing blouses embroidered with orchids and jasmine blossoms. My parents’ house was often filled with orphans who sat on the laps of embassy women. The children, fathered and abandoned by American servicemen, were set to be adopted by American families and would experience the added trauma of being taken away from their home country. The idea was to acquaint them with motherly figures who would cuddle and play with them, and to offer them a little taste of English before their new lives in America began.

Then, as 1974 turned into 1975, the American project in South Vietnam began to collapse. The grand scheme, nearly 20 years in the making, of trying to establish a democratic regime in the country, was failing. The U.S. ambassador, Graham A. Martin, insistently denied this, but all the embassy staff knew the truth. The explosions aimed at the capital from the surrounding countryside grew louder and more frequent each day, and the intelligence corroborated what was now inevitable. Embassy staff developed plans to evacuate the Americans from the country, but the plans were vague regarding the thousands of Vietnamese people who worked for and with the Americans. The administration began floating the idea that it would be okay to leave the Vietnamese staff behind, even though, because of their American affiliations, they would likely suffer punishment, retribution, re-education camps, or much worse.

When my father and his colleagues learned of this possibility, they made a carefully calculated choice. Acquiescing, at least by all appearances, to the ambassador’s belief that the South Vietnamese still had a chance to prevail and insisting that the work of the Americans should just proceed as usual, they moved the entire House Seven staff and family members—a total of 1,300 people—to an abandoned army base on Phú Quô´c Island. The ostensible plan was to keep beaming the radio programs from this new location. And there, under cover, the staff could more easily be evacuated when the North Vietnamese forces inevitably took control of the country.

My mother remained in Saigon. Panicked by the sense of imminent disaster, she hastened to get orphans adopted and out of the country before the city fell. She, like my father, wanted to stand by the people to whom the United States had made promises, with whom she had forged a connection, whose faces and hearts she knew, and whom she had come to love.