From: v-nguyen@cis.ohio-state.edu (Viet-Anh V Nguyen)
Subject: [BOOK] This Time, He Came in Peace
Originator: v-nguyen@retina.cis.ohio-state.edu
Organization: The Ohio State University, Department of Computer and Information Science
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 16:31:53 GMT

Excerpted without permission from the NYT Book Review, January 26, 1992:

Book Reviewed: NO LONGER ENEMIES, NOT YET FRIENDS
               An American Soldier Returns to Vietnam
               By Frederick Downs
               Illustrated. 352 pp. New York:
               W.W.Norton & Company. $22.95

Book Reviewer: Michael Norman, who served in Vietnam with the Marine Corps,
               teaches journalism at New York University and is the author
               of "These Good Men," a book about war and friendship.


  Perhaps, at last, it is over. If a man like Frederick Downs - a former US
  Army officer who lost his left arm to a Vietcong land mine in 1968, a man
  who until four years ago still hated his old enemy, a self-proclaimed patriot
  ever willing to fight for the flag - if such a man can hand his colicky young
  daughter to a former North Vietnamese battlefield surgeon, then watch with
  wonder while this Communist rocks the child and soothes her with Vietnamese
  lullabies, then the war that never seems to end surely must be over.

  A number of veterans of the war in Vietnam have taken up the pen in the last
  few years, but none seem to have come as far morally - and perhaps political-
  ly - as Frederick Downs. Make no mistake, he is still a Republican with war
  trophies on his walls, but now he is a man committed to a humanitarian role.
  And the sweet irony is that it was his old enemy that gave him back his 
  humanity.

  "No Longer Enemies, Not Yet Friends" is an account of the five trips Mr.Downs
  made to Vietnam in 1987 and 1988 as part of the Reagan Administration's 
  effort to prod the Vietnamese Government into helping to account for the
  roughly 2,400 American servicemen still missing in action in Indochina. Under
  the direction of a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John W.
  Vessey Jr., Mr. Downs, who is the director of prosthetics for the Veterans
  Administration, was assigned to a team whose mission it was to assess Viet-
  nam's medical needs - everything from artificial limbs to aid for blind 
  children.

  It is unfortunate that Mr. Downs is not a better writer. His prose can be 
  wooden, his reporting perfunctory, his vision too often shallow. This is his
  third book, and he should have been made to shape his material. But matters
  of language and structure aside, this is a remarkable story because in its
  approach and its unaffected voice, it illustrates the capacity of a man who
  had been savaged by battle to renew himself. And the venue in which this 
  takes place is in the very heart of what to Mr. Downs is hostile territory:
  Hanoi, the enemy capital.

  Almost from his first moments in the city, Mr. Downs began to discover that
  it was not faceless ciphers he faced and has been harboring a bitter hatred
  for all these years. Soon, he started to connect with people: his opposite
  numbers at the negotiating table, minor officials, doctors, patients, shop-
  keepers, drivers and so on. He watches them exercise in the park or play with
  their children or nurse a warm beer over a long conversation late into the
  night.

  As we follows Mr. Downs through his sessions in the diplomatic hall or his
  strolls through the city or his visits to country clinics or hospitals, we
  watch him slowly surrender his old intractable notions and prejudices until
  at last he comes to see his enemy - a foe that took his arm and with it some
  of his dignity - not just as three-dimensional, but, in fact, as an extension
  of himself.

  Along the way, we also get a picture of the desperate state of Hanoi, the
  capital of our old nemesis. Mr. Downs tells us it is a place so poor that
  cosmetics are sold by the smear from doorways and ball-point pens are refill-
  ed rather than thrown away. Maids in the Goverment guest house shave soap 
  bars when they clean the rooms and pinch the shavings to wash their family's
  laundry. Vietnam, he tells us, is a place of rampant polio and high infant 
  and maternal mortality. Twenty percent of children's deaths are attributable
  to diarrhea; their mothers believe the cure is to starve them or feed them
  crushed dried grasshoppers. Nothing works - not electrical plants, not cars,
  not machinery to make artificial limbs. A California eye bank donated 15 eyes
  to a Hanoi clinic for cornea transplants, but the operations were a disaster
  because the Vietnamese doctors did not have surgical gloves, and the infect-
  ions that resulted left 12 of the patients as blind as before.

  Near the end of the book, one of the Vietnamese negotiators, Dr. Bui Tung, is
  invited to the United States to attend a meeting of military orthopedic sur-
  geons. During his visit, this former army surgeon spends a good deal of time
  in the Downs home in Maryland. And it is during one of these visits that he
  gently walks the kitchen floor with Mr. Downs's crying daughter, Abigail, in
  his arms.

  "I watch this tableau from the doorway, measuring it against scenes from my
  past," Mr. Downs writes. "I knew that if our countries went to war the next
  day, both Tung and I would dutifully become enemies again ... The difference
  would be, now that I knew him, I would not take any joy in his death, only
  sorrow at the ways of man."

  This is the way with enemies, this is the way with friends.


                  -------------------------------------------

An excerpt from the book itself:

   
  The trip through the Vietnamese countryside was something I never tired of.
  People were working everywhere: in the fields, along the road, hoeing, chop-
  ping wood, fishing, herding ducks, planting, making bricks, herding buffalo
  and cows.

  The villages we drove by on these back roads always reminded me of the war.
  Villages had always meant Vietnam to me. During the war, my platoon and I
  lived next to villages and patrolled through them. In contested territory
  I had burned villages as part of search-and-destroy operations, searched
  through the "hootches" looking for contraband, made prisoners of anyone in 
  the villages I suspected of being a bad guy, destroyed the stored rice we
  found if we thought it was being used to support the enemy. There were times
  we had fired in the villages because the enemy was there among the people.
  All of these actions were part of our job and we were rewarded for doing it
  well.

  In fact, in those days I never thought of the villages as anything other than
  a cluster of meaningless primitive straw and mud huts. I knew people lived in
  the "hootches," but I never thought of them as homes. I never thought of my-
  self as destroying someone's home.

  I did not realize or care that the villages were the history, the guts and
  the backbone of Vietnam.


  From "No Longer Enemies, Not Yet Friends."


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