(8 of 11)
Quoc isn't with me today, but another translator tells me that the soldiers want to sing me a song. He stands close and recites the words in English as the soldiers sing. It is a song about the day "Uncle Ho" declared their country's independence in Hanoi's Ba Dinh Square. I hear these words: "All men are created equal. They are given certain rights; among these are life, liberty and happiness." I begin to cry and clap. These young men should not be our enemy. They celebrate the same words Americans do. The song ends with a refrain about the soldiers vowing to keep the "blue skies above Ba Dinh" free from bombers.
The soldiers ask me to sing for them in return. I am prepared for just such a moment. Before leaving the U.S., I had memorized a song called Day Ma Di, written by students in South Vietnam who are against the war. I launch into it con gusto, feeling ridiculous but I don't care. Vietnamese is a difficult language for a foreigner to speak and I know I am slaughtering it, but everyone seems delighted that I am making the attempt. Everyone laughs and claps, including me. I am overcome on this, my last day.
What happens next is something I have turned over and over in my mind countless times since. Here is my best, honest recollection of what took place.
Someone (I don't remember who) leads me toward the gun, and I sit down, still laughing, still applauding. It all has nothing to do with where I am sitting. I hardly even think about where I am sitting. The cameras flash.
I get up, and as I start to walk back to the car with the translator, the implication of what has just happened hits me. Oh, my God. It's going to look like I was trying to shoot down U.S. planes! I plead with him, "You have to be sure those photographs are not published. Please, you can't let them be published." I am assured it will be taken care of. I don't know what else to do.
It is possible that the Vietnamese had it all planned.
I will never know. If they did, can I really blame them? The buck stops here. If I was used, I allowed it to happen. It was my mistake, and I have paid and continue to pay a heavy price for it. A traveling companion, someone with a cooler head, would have kept me from taking that terrible seat. I would have known two minutes before sitting down what I didn't realize until two minutes afterward. That two-minute lapse of sanity will haunt me until I die. But the gun was inactive, there were no planes overhead--I simply wasn't thinking about what I was doing, only about what I was feeling--innocent of what the photo implies. Yet the photo exists, delivering its message, regardless of what I was really doing or feeling.