Volume 10, Number 12 · June 20, 1968
North Vietnam: The Countryside
By Mary McCarthy
'Go out into the field,' American officials last year, in blustery hectoring tones, were telling newcomers to Saigon, meaning get close to the fighting if you want to 'connect' with the war. In North Vietnam, officials do not stipulate a tour of the combat zones as a condition for climbing aboard, 'turning on,' or, as they would express it, 'participating in the struggle of the Vietnamese people.' Indeed, if I had wanted to be taken to the 17th parallel, they would surely have said no: too long and dangerous a trip for a fleeting guest of the Peace Committee. And too uncertain, given the uneven pace of travel by night, in convoy, to plan ahead for suitable lodging, meals, entertainment. A reporter on the road can trust to pot-luck and his interpreter, but for guests hospitality requires that everything be arranged in advance, on the province and district, even the hamlet level, with the local delegates and representatives—stage-managed, a hostile critic would say, though, if so, why the distinction between guests and correspondents? Anyway, that is how it is, and I do not feel it as a deprivation that I failed to see the front lines. The meaning of a war, if it has one, ought to be discernible in the rear, where the values being defended are situated; at the front, war itself appears senseless, a confused butchery that only the gods can understand; at least that is how Homer and Tolstoy saw the picture, in close-up, though the North Vietnamese film studios certainly would not agree.
Feature, 6464 words
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