And a Voice to Sing With by Joan Baez

Author:Joan Baez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

4

“WHERE ARE YOU NOW, MY SON?”

It rained when I was in Hanoi. It rained into the bomb craters and made brown swimming pools. The people were carrying their bicycles over the ruins, packing up with nowhere to go.

After the first few nights of bombing, most of the city was evacuated. During the seventh and eighth days of bombing, the city began to fill up again. The B-52’s were hitting the countryside at the edges of the city, and I suppose people felt they’d rather die at home. I didn’t want to die anywhere.

This is the story of my thirteen-day stay in Hanoi, eleven of them the days of the Christmas bombing, the result of the “most difficult decision” President Nixon had to make during his term in office. That Christmas bombing was, as it turned out, the heaviest bombing in the history of the world.

In December of 1972 I was on the road in the eastern United States when I received a telephone call from Cora Weiss. The group The Liaison Committee, which Cora headed, had been sending a steady flow of American visitors to North Vietnam to try to keep up some kind of friendly relations with the Vietnamese people even as our country continued to bomb the hell out of them, burn their villages, and napalm their children. Before Watergate, anyone who talked or wrote about the atrocities the U.S. military was performing in Vietnam was looked upon skeptically, or with great annoyance and anger, by a high percentage of the American population.

I would be the guest of a North Vietnamese group called the Committee for Solidarity with the American People. No serious fighting had taken place in the north for many months, and four Americans were being invited, among other things to deliver Christmas mail to the POW’s in Hanoi. Gabriel would be with his dad at the time. I could return home by Christmas day.

I sat alone in a motel room in Erie, Pennsylvania, chewing on my cuticles and wondering if I could haul myself and my truckload of neuroses halfway around the world to see things I was afraid of seeing, eat food I was afraid of eating, take night flights which are anathema to me, and travel with three other people I’d never met. I was practically paralyzed with fear, and disgusted with myself. At the same time, the prospect of the trip became more and more irresistible. Little did I know while sitting in that crummy motel room with the snow falling outside, my three-year-old child off at a coffee shop in the arms of his loving grandma, that I would come within eight blocks of never returning home.

I made a couple of hundred calls from a New York hotel room, telling everyone I knew that I was going to visit Hanoi.

I would be traveling with a conservative lawyer, ex-Brigadier General Telford Taylor; a liberal Episcopalian minister, Michael Allen; and Maoist Vietnam Veteran Against the War Barry Romo. We met for the first time a couple of hours before departure, in the SAS lounge at Kennedy airport.

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