Loon - Jack McLean [36]
I made the long dusty walk back to the tent that served as our barracks. The sun was just setting. Before me lay a hundred glowing lightbulbs, each shining over the entrance to the ever increasing number of tents that stretched up the hillside. The marines inside my tent were reading, playing poker, and writing letters. Every several minutes, one would head off to or return from the pay phones for his last call home. There was little of our customary bravado or horseplay. In brief hours, we would begin our trek into the deadly serious business of war.
Early the following morning the buses arrived. The idling engines cut the predawn silence and brought me back to my arrival at Parris Island as Staff Sergeant Hilton rudely herded us into the musty South Carolina night. This scene, by contrast, was calm and orderly. One by one, we stowed our gear and filed aboard. We all looked exactly the same, dressed in green utilities with boots shined, heads shorn, and a faraway look in our eyes as our feet left American soil.
The moment was upon us. With a slow grinding sound, the buses shifted into first gear and began to roll forward into the predawn mist.
We were on our way to Vietnam.
14
DURING THE 1950s, MY FATHER WORKED FOR JOHN D. Rockefeller III as an executor of Rockefeller’s philanthropic vision for Asia. This included creating nonprofit organizations that would respond to the anticipated challenges in population growth and food production. During my youth, my father was often gone several times a year for weeks at a time. One such trip was in February 1957 when he was accompanied by my mother, John Rockefeller, and Rockefeller’s wife, Blanchette. Mom kept a journal of the trip in the form of detailed letters home to us. A week of this particular trip was spent in South Vietnam—ten years before my arrival there.
Her letter gives a prescient look at a country that, although seemingly composed to her pampered eyes, was wired to blow.
Vietnam
February 4, 1957
Letter from Martha McLean to her children
I am sitting at the desk in our hotel room—my hands are already sticky hot and the sun is burning down on the Saigon River outside our window. We leave at noon for Cambodia.
Along the river, people are hurrying back and forth, mostly wearing straw hats and carrying bamboo poles across their shoulders with baskets full of market things on either end. The women are the real sight in Saigon. They are tiny and beautiful. All of them wear very thin white silk trousers with a long tunic in every sort of color over it—high neck, long sleeves, and split up each side to the waist. They have sandals on their feet, and really stride along, their heads back, long black hair tied low in back and the tunics floating out around them.
Saigon is an elegant city. Wide streets, tall beautiful trees, and lovely buildings, mostly with high walls and gardens around them, and all painted a sort of biscuit color with red tile roofs, and flowering vines climbing around. When the French built here, they first laid out the streets, and then they planted the trees and last of all they built their houses. Now the French have gone—or most of them have—and the Vietnamese are running their own country. The President lives in a great palace that used to be the King’s, and his picture is high on the front of most of the government buildings. Right now it’s Tet, the Chinese New Year, and all the public buildings are strung around with lights. They call Saigon the “Paris of the Orient” and not only does it look French, but everyone speaks French too.
Because it’s a new Republic (just two years since the revolution) and because it’s the Rockefellers’ first visit, everyone wanted us to see everything, and we have been escorted through hospitals, the University, the Museum, etc. with the people in charge anxious for us to get a good impression.
Last night was the final great event—a dinner party at the Palace. I found myself at the long dinner table seated on the left of the President with