Piecework

I’m never surprised when I meet once-young men who want to go back. For a day, a month, an hour. They want to see Vietnam when its beauty does not hold the potential of death. They want to know if the con men and hustlers still deal on Lam Son Square. And what about the whore named Ly, whose husband died fighting for the VC, the woman who lived in the blue room and never smiled? Are all those women now graduates of re-education camps? What do they remember about all those clumsy young Americans who arrived to throw seed into flesh before rising to hurl metal at hills and hootches and people? How many Vietnamese listen now to Aretha and the Doors and the Stones? Who lives in Soul Alley, out by Tan Son Nhut, where black soldiers danced to Marvin Gaye, where deserters lived with their Vietnamese women? Have the Communists sealed the tunnels of Cholon? Does anyone live on Hamburger Hill? Who sits by the pool of the Cercle Sportif, or drowses on the veranda of the Continental Hotel, drinking “33” beer? What has become of the old French cemetery in Da Nang, where in 1966 you could see the gravestones sinking into the dark earth? Do children laugh in My Lai 4? The ghosts whisper.

Vietnam, they say.

Vietnam, Vietnam.

VANITY FAIR,

April 1985

IRELAND

I.

BELFAST

We spent the first night high up on Finaghy Road North in streets completely devoid of light. IRA guerrillas waited in the darkness behind barricades made of sheet-iron and paving stones. The Falls Road, the main street of the Catholic district, was sealed off. There was heavy fighting in the White Rock Road. Finaghy was deadly quiet. There was no moon and occasionally the stillness would be punctuated by a distant burst from an automatic rifle.

The lads want the Army, an old friend said, they want to have a go.

Now, finally, everyone seems to want to have a go. The men of the IRA are fighting a civil war against 12,000 heavily armed British troops. In addition to the British troops there is the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) built on the remnants of the old discredited B-Special militia. Since Saturday at least 25 people have died in the fighting, hundreds have been injured. Almost 4000 refugees have traveled across the border into the Irish Republic. Factories have been demolished, homes put to the torch. More than 300 men have been arrested and held without arraignment under provisions of the Special Powers Act, a law that the Greek or South African government would love to have for themselves. The city is in a shambles and still the fighting goes on.

Yesterday the fighting was sporadic. A light drizzle fell through the day. There was shooting from the Divis Street flats, a brief battle made more complicated by the presence of UVF snipers. Most of all it was a day in which all sides caught their breath. The English Prime Minister Edward Heath had finally finished the yacht race he had been on while his subjects died and was back in London. There had been a call from Dublin for a three-party conference and some wanted to see what would develop. But nobody had any real hope.

In the light of day the signs of the bitterness and blood were everywhere on the Whiterock Road which leads to the largely pro-IRA housing estate of Ballymurphy. The walls of the city cemetery had been torn out in big gaping piles for use as barricades. Along the wall of the cemetery one of the “lads” (frequently a euphemism for the IRA) had painted in two-foot-high letters the ultimate question of an oppressed people: “Is There A Life Before Death?” It stood there in the gray morning light at once very Catholic and very revolutionary while children played in the rubble which had been pushed aside by the British bulldozers. Is there a life before death?

The night before, sitting in someone’s parlor on Finaghy Road talking to the women, who were fearful for their men, one middle-aged woman burst out, “If I was a man I’d get a gun myself. I was never bitter before. I thought you could take this life here and hope for the best. Well, there’s a lot of us here now just won’t wait. The men on this street are all unemployed, every last one of them and they’ve got nothing to lose. They feel disgraced in front of their women and children. Now they’re fighting. They’re goin’ after something and even if it’s all bloody hopeless, at least they’ll go like men.”

The women have been extraordinary. In the afternoon on the Falls Road at the corner of Broadway about 300 women and a few dozen children gathered around a Saracen tank and battered away on it with the metal tops of garbage cans until it left. Across the street a knot of men gathered in front of the Beehive, an ornate saloon full of brass and wood. They wore the sullen masks of men who had been too long unemployed. But the women were firebrands, led by a red-haired, tight-lipped young woman who gripped a stick in her hand.