In the Wake of War, Survivors Still Struggle
By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 26, 2008
"While this war is difficult," President Bush said this month, "it is not endless."
"Not endless." So odd-sounding. So counterintuitive. Some people who have survived wars in foreign lands are struck by the phrase. War, they say, never really ends. War keeps going long after bombs have stopped and troop levels are reduced. Long after refugees return and motherless children grow up.
War leaves survivors powerless against its memories, its futile silence. There's a father who won't speak of war. But his daughter can see it in him every day as this man educated in Vietnam goes to a factory job in Michigan, where people make fun of his English. A girl from Cambodia hides, terrified here in America, when she hears Fourth of July fireworks that remind her of bombs. It leaves a boy with no mother -- just the memory of her warning him that war would eventually come to his village in Sudan and the enemy would "pour fire" on them from the sky.
War, sanitized by distance, lives abstractly on television; you watch it from your brown corduroy sofa, in your cul-de-sac, flipping channels. You have the luxury of hitting the remote and turning the volume low as you hear another report of U.S. soldiers killed, Iraqis killed, insurgents, roadside bombs, corpses. Or change the channel, skip the carnage. Or watch, and listen, because something -- you don't know what -- draws you in.
You wonder what war feels like to those who have survived it in their homelands, have written about it, have made it their mission to always remember so that others will never forget.
* * *
"The soldiers walked around the neighborhood, knocking on all the doors, telling people to leave. Those who refused were shot dead right on their doorsteps," Loung Ung wrote in her book "First They Killed My Father."
Ung escaped Cambodia as a child when Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge stormed into Phnom Penh in April 1975. She fled with her family.
"Yesterday," she wrote, "I was playing hopscotch with my friends. Today we are running from soldiers with guns. . . . Pa whispers that from now on we are to give the soldiers anything they want or they will shoot us. We walk from the break of day until the dark of evening. When night comes, we rest by the roadside near a temple. We unpack the dried fish and rice and eat in silence. Gone is the air of mystery and excitement; now I am simply afraid."
Ung now lives in Cleveland, where she owns a Belgian beer bar and an Italian restaurant. So far from war, you say. But she says no. "When I hear politicians talk about war ending or not ending, my first thought is, it is really too bad so few of them have personally experienced war," Ung says. "We are ruled by a group of many armchair soldiers. War doesn't end."
The idea for a second book she wrote was prompted by Bush's 2003 "mission accomplished" announcement. At that moment she thought, " 'Oh my gosh, there are people who believe this and think this is true.' But I know 25 years after my war, it doesn't end just because the guns have fallen silent, doesn't end just because peace treaties have been signed. It doesn't end in my life. It is too bad so many people talk about it without having firsthand experience of it."
Her war goes on, living as if it were a close relative who remembers what you remember, someone who was there when the most horrible thing in your life happened, and knows all the details.
"The thing I still feel on my skin and in my heart is the experience of hiding in a bomb shelter," Ung says. "The fear that invades your body, that sets your mind ablaze even when the bomb doesn't hit. Fear. When I was hiding in a bomb shelter, everything is quiet except for the whizzing of cannons and rockets overhead. We are all counting under our breath, hiding from the bombs that were thrown by invisible people. They don't know you. You don't know them. You are counting and counting and waiting.
"When it doesn't hit, there is a moment of disappointment. You know it won't stop. . . . When you are in war, there is no relief."
* * *
In Sudan, the attack on Alephonsion Deng's village came without warning. "Explosions, horses and camels chasing people, shooting, screaming, crying: It was like the end of the world," he wrote with Benson Deng, Benjamin Ajak and Judy A. Bernstein in "They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys From Sudan."
"I watched as the invaders tied the arms and legs of their captives and put long ropes around their necks. They led them from the village on a line blindfolded so they didn't know the place they were going. 'Drowning them in the river,' a person cried. 'They don't want to waste bullets.' "
Alephonsion Deng ran and hid. He could not return to his village to look for his family. Someone told him there was no one left alive except for the enemy. So he and other boys -- tens of thousands of boys who fled massacres between 1987 and 1989 -- walked countless miles across Sudan, without parents, walking barefoot at night, with wounds on his feet.
Almost 20 years later, Deng lives in San Diego and works as a filing technician at a hospital. The memories of war reside with him, like a piece of him.
"The consequences of war? What can I tell you?" Deng asks. "The war experiences are not so much fun. I always tell people everybody hates war. You can't really benefit from it."
The war takes everybody equally.
"Our ancestors fought certain wars and nobody won," he says. "There is victory, but nobody won. There are wounds and sorrows and pains that remain in individual hearts that will never be healed until the individual dies."
Wars are eternal, he says. "Looking at the American war or any other war, it will not be easy. You cannot set a date: 'This will end.' What about the wounds created? What about people with vengeance? Who will repay? Who is responsible for those things? . . . Whether it be the Iraqi war or the war in Darfur or wars in the rest of the world, the experiences are the same. The pain the same. The same wounds."
* * *
Bich Minh Nguyen left Vietnam in the spring of 1975. Her sister was 2. She was 8 months old. Her father was trying to get out of Saigon before the communists came.
"Everyone in Saigon knew the war was lost, and to stay meant being sent to re-education camps, or worse. The neighbors spoke of executions and what the Communists would do to their children; they talked of people vanished and tortured," she wrote in her memoir, "Stealing Buddha's Dinner."
Her father received word that the Americans were airlifting children out of the country in Operation Babylift. Two thousand children were flown away. But the first flight crashed, she wrote. And her father decided there must be another way, though time was running out.
"All around us people were running, dropping suitcases and clothes, trying to flag down cars," she wrote. Desperation, repeated over and over in war. "A full panic had hit the city, the kind that sent people racing after airplanes on the runway, that made people offer their babies to departing American soldiers."
They escaped Saigon on a boat and sailed to the Philippines, then transferred to a U.S. ship heading for Guam. From there, they flew to Arkansas, then on to Grand Rapids, Mich. Landing in a foreign world.
All of Nguyen's thoughts of war are shaped through her father. "He talked about it very rarely," she says.
She sees war's wounds on him. "He fought in the South Vietnamese army. He had three brothers. One was killed," she says. "We had to leave my mother behind." Her father had to make a quick decision to get his family out of Saigon and her mother did not know that they had left. (Her mother survived.)
"It is a story I've seen and heard in so many other families: how it tears families apart and results in many years of separation. . . . Part of moving forward is not looking back."
Nguyen lives in Chicago and teaches at Purdue University. She speaks of "how privileged most of us are as Americans."
She is 33, the age of her father when he left Vietnam. But in her Americanness, she cannot fathom a war like the one she escaped.
"What if one day I had to get up and leave every single thing behind," she says. "And I had to leave this country by boat and find some way to get out because if I didn't I would go to a concentration camp. It is hard to imagine."
It is war.
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