"Escape from Saigon - a Novel"

The Worcester Sunday Telegram: 'Escape from Saigon’ captures War’s end."

“No one ever tells you when the last plane leaves,” ~ Escape from Saigon

Review by Ann Connery Frantz, Correspondent for The Worcester Sunday Telegram

Dick Pirozzolo and fellow Vietnam vet Michael Morris joined forces to write a novel about the final moments of the devastating war. Titled “Escape from Saigon,” it creates fictional characters in very real events — soldiers, civilians and news correspondents trying to cope with the crumbling of the last stronghold before the U.S. evacuated personnel, Americans and Vietnamese sympathizers and the Viet Cong took over the city and signaled the conflict’s end.

Though each of them moved into careers after their return in 1975 - Pirozzolo to journalism, working for the Telegram & Gazette’s Southbridge and Webster news bureaus, and then to public relations and writing, and Morris to writing and editing as a journalist - they met as writers and formed an idea. Pirozzolo, a captain in the Air Force, often worked with the press corps there. “Around the mid-’90s, a movement started to recognize Vietnam and to reconcile with Vietnam. I’ve returned there a number of times, writing about the current state of affairs.” Some of his articles appeared in the Boston Herald and on the op-ed pages of the Washington Times.

“I started working with Mike,” Pirozzolo said. “We wrote two books about home building together. We were both veterans, and we talked about maybe someday doing something about Vietnam.” They realized pretty quickly, though, that a definitive history would be better left to the historians. And, he said, “we would be 90 before that was done. So we settled on the very last 30 days of the war and structured the book day by day, with flashbacks to play with time a little, give readers a chance to see what it was like to live in Saigon before the war, to be a journalist there for 10 years.”

Younger Americans never experienced the first televised war, in which daily videos and newscasts brought slaughtered civilians and soldiers into American homes each evening, terrifying parents and changing many Americans’ minds about the ambiguous jungle war being fought thousands of miles away. It was a horrific, unwinnable war, killing 60,000 U.S. soldiers and countless more civilians and Vietnamese soldiers.

In April 1975, the war was finally collapsing as North Vietnamese troops moved into the last stronghold, Saigon. The city’s fall would end any hope for South Vietnam. As conquering troops moved in, thousands of U.S. personnel and civilians who had worked with them sought to flee rather than be slaughtered by the North Vietnamese. They flooded the U.S. embassy and other departure points, filling military planes and helicopters.

This is where “Escape from Saigon” is set.  

They tell the story through the lives of war correspondents Sam Esposito and Lisette Vo, sandwiched between a terse narrative about the final decline of opposition to the north. Sam returns to Vietnam as a Washington, D.C., newspaper correspondent after the Kennedy assassination, wanting to get away from the U.S. He’s remained there for 13 years. Lisette is half-French, half-Vietnamese, and American, working for a broadcast news company. “She portends the rise of women in the media,” Pirozzolo said. They remain until the bitter end because of their work. “They’re journalists,” Pirozzolo said. Read More

"Letting Go." Reflections on the 42nd anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War

The Rev. Sarah Robbins-Cole, Pastor of St. Michaels Episcopal Church in Holliston, Mass. and Protestant Chaplain of Wellesley College

Earlier last week, I was chatting with Sarah—my friend and neighbor—who is otherwise known as The Rev. Sarah Robbins Cole. She told me she was working on her sermon for Easter Sunday the theme was letting go. I suppose the idea is there cannot be rebirth without letting go of those things that tie us to the past.

"Any thoughts?" she inquired. 

An apt subject as April 30th approaches— the 42nd anniversary of the end of the Vietnam! This was also a chance to plug "Escape from Saigon - a Novel," so I mentioned how "letting go" is a theme running throughout the story.  The struggle with letting go is voiced by Billy Freda, the high school friend, who has to let go of the moment he scored the winning point in the championship game, US Ambassador Graham Martin who cannot let go of South Vietnam that had become intertwined with his identity, the reporters who devoted their youth to covering the war and have to find a new life elsewhere, and of course, the two Vietnam veterans who wrote the book—myself and Michael Morris, who saw combat in the Vietnam War as a young soldier in 1967.

Here is what The Rev. Sarah Robbins-Cole, Rector of St. Michael's Episcopal Church in Holliston, Massachusetts told her congregation about letting go on Easter Sunday Morning 2017.

 Easter 2017

Marie Kondo of the book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing is perhaps one of the best known books that has come our way from the field of decluttering and home organization. If you have not read the book, the basic premise of the book is to get rid of things that do not spark joy. Marie Kondo recommends taking out every item you own, in a particular sequence, and touching each item, and if it does not spark joy – out it goes. She has other helpful hints such as not buying more specialized storage containers to hold yet more clutter, and folding your clothes, for example your shirts, in a way that finding a shirt is as easy as flicking through record albums – because they all are standing on end.

The desire to hold on and to accumulate is as old as time and man. Perhaps it’s because we falsely equate accumulation with security. If I just hang on to clothes, household items, food, photos, books, I will never be in want. Who knows? I might need one of these things later.

Or we mistakenly believe that if we throw things away or recycle them – somehow we won’t remember or value what that item represented.

Or sometimes what is harder is we hold on to emotions and memories - something that has hurt us deeply. Maybe you are holding onto a grudge, or an imaginary contract with someone (that is, unless they do x, I will not forgive, move on, or be nice, etc.,). And somehow letting go would be to admit defeat.

When people have asked me this week what I am preaching on this week – and I tell them that I am working on a sermon about letting go – it has been interesting to hear people’s response.

When I told my neighbor Dick Pirozzolo, who has just published the book, Escape from Saigon - a Novel this year, he said, “funny you should say that”. He is himself a Vietnam Vet, but he said in his research and during his book tour, while he has encountered many veterans who live full and rich lives, he also said that he has met a fair number of veterans who live and breathe their days in Vietnam every day—even though the end of this month will mark the 42nd anniversary of the ending of that war. “After all,” Dick commented, “you are 19 years old, your friends are all back home working in a shoe store, and you are in a strange country, surrounded by people speaking a foreign language, and you are getting shot at.”

But he said, the problem is that what happens to some of us is that we get stuck at 19. Our entire identity is formed around being a Vietnam Veteran and that does not allow a new identity to form. Our lives are dedicated to remembering that time – from the stories we share to the social media platforms we belong to and contribute to.

Another friend of mine, who works with students, said to me, “that is such an important message” because she finds that some of her students cling to ideas, ideologies, and identities in ways that are unhealthy because they perpetuate their sense of being powerless victims in a hostile world.

Or another friend talked about a woman she knew who was the team mom of a volleyball team – and she did everything – she organized uniforms, social events, coaches gifts, the booster club – but at the end of her son’s junior year, at the end of season party, when he was not elected captain by his peers for the following year, she was absolutely devastated. She refused to talk to anyone for the rest of the party and her son never played volleyball again – so attached was she to the idea of her son being captain.

I am sure we all have examples from our own lives - elderly parents who cling to the idea of unrealistic independence, or children who can’t seem to quite realize they have actually reached adulthood, a parent who cannot let go of their adult children, etc., etc.

The subject of letting go is not just a superficial self-help issue. They are deep spiritual concerns – which come to the very heart of our gospel lesson for this morning. Jesus tells Mary – do not hold on to me. Literally – do not cling to me as I am now. I am yet to ascend to the Father. Jesus is telling her that she must not cling to him because his time on earth is done. And why that is important is that first of all, after the crucifixion they can’t just go back to the way things were – and secondly, the ascension is necessary so that the work of Jesus will no longer be constrained to his little corner of Israel – but will spread to the four corners of the earth.

And it’s not just the idea of the physically present Jesus she is going to have to let go of. If she wants to share in that resurrected life of new life and rebirth – she is going to have to let go of everything that is holding her back – she may have to let go of her anger at the Romans for crucifying Jesus, she may have to have to let go of her feelings of resentment at the disciples for handing Jesus over, betraying Jesus, and falling asleep while Jesus was praying when he very clearly asked them to stay awake. She may have to let go of her bitterness toward a world that allows an innocent man to die. She may have to let go of her wrath toward her own people for their maleficent fickleness – who on Palm Sunday lauded Jesus as King – and then jeered Jesus just a few days later when he really needed them.

But let me be clear - there is a big difference between letting go and forgetting. Letting go – means having a willingness to move forward, to not be stuck in the muck and mire of past wrongs. Forgetting is pretty near impossible, and forgiving can be a very long process indeed.

What we celebrate today is the resurrection. We celebrate that when one thing ends – and when we let go and give it to God, and trust that God will do something good and meaningful and life-giving to that of which we let go – we too will live the resurrected life.

God invites us to new life each and every moment of our lives – not to cling to the past – but to be engaged in our lives right here and right now. It is just as Joseph Campbell, the preeminent expert in comparative mythology and religion who wrote: We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the life that is waiting for us.


 Along with being coauthor of "Escape from Saigon - a Novel" set during the final days of America's "first television war," Dick Pirozzolo is managing director of Pirozzolo Company Public Relations, an international communication firm based in Boston, Massachusetts.

 

"Escape from Saigon" Chronicles the Human Side of War says Consequence

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The Human Cost of War

Escape from Saigon by Michael Morris and Dick Pirozzolo

March 7, 2017 by Robert Earle

Reprinted with permission by Consequence Magazine: the international literary magazine focusing on the culture of war.

Escape from Saigon- a Novel (Skyhorse Publishing, New York), by Michael Morris and Dick Pirozzolo, explores the month of April, 1975, when North Vietnam achieved its multi-decade objective of conquering South Vietnam and giving Saigon a new name—Ho Chi Minh City.

This is a fast moving, day-by-day account told through the perspective of diplomats, journalists, CIA operatives, a bartender, numerous Vietnamese, military officers, and Washington officials, notably Henry Kissinger.

The central theme of Escape from Saigon is the human cost of war, especially collateral costs to noncombatants. As the French in the 1950s and then the Americans in the 1960s and 70s established and propped up South Vietnam as an independent republic, multitudes of individuals—not just soldiers—came to Saigon and made it a kind of home away from home.

There they spawned children of mixed nationalities, established businesses, careers, and reputations, and ran innumerable black and diplomatic operations in the shadows of war. These are the main characters in Escape from Saigon: Sam Esposito and Lisette Vo, young American journalists; Carwood, a ranking CIA officer; Jean Paul Pellerin, proprietor of Le P’tit Bistrot, a journalists’ watering hole; Tuan, Vo’s cameraman; Father André Dessault, archbishop of Saigon; Captain Trung, a South Vietnamese pilot and turncoat…and the list goes on. Let’s call this cast of characters a demimonde typical of embattled capitals: idealists, adventurers, drinkers, sharpsters, adrenalin-addicts, opportunists and lost souls.

The crucial military action is reported more or less as a tightening noose, with the North’s forces swiftly strangling Saigon and its inhabitants. Thus, Escape from Saigon’s opening pages make clear that defeat is near and coming on fast, but this narrative framework is somewhat deceptive. It’s true that Richard Nixon’s resignation stimulated the North Vietnamese to break the cease-fire negotiated in Paris 20 months earlier and strike swiftly with overwhelming force. A month or so was all it took. But it’s also true that this war had been going on for generations. Tragically, its outcome was a foregone conclusion all along. Vietnam never really was a two-state solution of North Vietnam and South Vietnam. At the beginning of the conflict, Vietnam was what it was at the end of the conflict, a single country, Vietnam.

So in April, 1975, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam would disintegrate. President Thieu, who has a cameo role in the novel, would bitterly resign and take flight. Saigon would fall like a rotted tree. And tens of thousands of Vietnamese associated with the US by virtue of employment or family connections would feel—did feel—that they must escape or be subjected to brutal treatment by the North Vietnamese conquerors.

In Escape from Saigon one central figure, US Ambassador Graham Martin, is shown making the evacuation of these endangered thousands worse by insisting that some political arrangement could be worked out between the North and South right up to the final days of the South’s total collapse. Martin’s reasoning is that if he indicates he is thinking of ordering an evacuation too soon, he will cause panic and scuttle last-minute negotiations. That is probably true with regard to panic; with regard to last-minute negotiations, the idea of some modus vivendi between North and South is the kind of fantasy that caused such carnage in Vietnam for decades.

The best account I have read of US misunderstanding of Vietnam is George Allen’s None So Blind, a study of US intelligence failures and frustrations from the early 1950s until the end. Allen makes clear that US policymakers were either incapable or unwilling to deal with the realities of Vietnam after the French departure. Bernard Fall’s extensive writing on Vietnam parallels Allen’s analysis from a journalistic standpoint and was just as available to anyone in authority who wanted to know something about a country and a people that was, to be fair, on the other side of the globe.

In a way, Ambassador Martin was the last man who thought Humpty Dumpty could be put together again, the last holdout against reality. In the novel, he is depicted as tight-lipped and stubborn, quite the ambassador. Kissinger, and then President Ford, have to tell him the game is up. Time to leave.

Escape from Saigon quickens as its characters pursue all the strategies imaginable for getting out—“adopting” former employees, smuggling themselves through checkpoints, crawling over barbed-wire to get onto US embassy grounds in hopes of being ferried out to the 7th Fleet offshore, clutching at each other in dangerously overloaded helicopters.

Most of what is described is awful but probably falls short of the experience itself, the uncertainties, the impotence, the anxiety, the physical discomforts and injuries, the strange alliances made between odd couples on the run.

Truisms are tedious but true: those who decide to wage war generally do so in distant, comfortable circumstances for reasons of state, and those who experience war are brutalized and terrified in ghastly conditions. There is a connection between decision makers and pawns, but it is not direct or obvious in what the two groups go through. In fact, if the decision makers found themselves subjected to the immediate consequences of their decisions, they probably would think twice and three times about their decisions.
War makers produce war victims in wanton abundance. A war maker who does not understand this is a war maker who has read no history or refuses to take it seriously.

Escape from Saigon is largely accurate in historical terms. It is an events-driven narrative wherein the desperate efforts of people with little to no control over their circumstances are vividly presented. Its co-authors, Michael Morris and Dick Pirozzolo, have managed to write with a single voice. This is a compelling, well-researched novel. It’s worth reading.

War Without End

"Escape from Saigon - a Novel" takes place at the end of a protracted war that began a half century ago—America's First Television War it was called—and much of the story and its characters center around on the brave journalists who covered those events. Among the main characters in our story by Michael Morris and Dick Pirozzolo are Lisette Vo, the first Vietnamese-American woman to report on the war for a major US TV network and Sam Esposito, the ambivalent,  Yale 1962 graduate, whose relentless reporting for The Washington Legend won him praise from this editors, the generals and infuriated every president he wrote about, especially the vindictive Richard Nixon.

The names of some of the journalists of that era are well known: David Halberstam, Walter Cronkite, Frances Fitzgerald, George Esper, Peter Arnett, Dickie Chappell who lost her life to a landmine or Beverly Deepe who arrived in Vietnam in 1964 as a full-time correspondent.

But what of now—who will we be the war correspondents of today, whose deeds and passion for the truth will figure into future historical novels?  

One of them will surely be Carmen Gentile who has been covering Afghanistan and Iraq for over a decade and is the author of a forthcoming book  "Blindsided by the Taliban" that was inspired by his being wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade that nearly cost him his sight. 

Here is the latest dispatch from Carmen Gentile and written exclusively for the "Escape from Saigon" blog.

 War Without End By Carmen Gentile 

ISTANBUL March 8, 2017 --- Late last year I was on a reporting trip to Mosul, where Iraqi and Kurdish forces, along with the help of the various militias, were attempting to force the Islamic State (ISIS) from the country’s second-largest city. 

What I saw was an all-too-familiar horror. Rows of homes are pancaked by mortar fire. Along the road are charred shells of vehicles used in suicide bombings and the bodies of insurgent fighters, left in the streets of Mosul to decompose. 

The gruesome tableau in Mosul is an unfortunate continuation of the more than decade-long war US forces waged throughout Iraq. I covered that conflict periodically in the company of young soldiers tasked with not only fighting a largely invisible enemy, but trying to re-establish a military and police force that were dismantled and destroyed during the country’s invasion. Calling their task “no win” was an exercise in extreme optimism. Sisyphus has a better chance of getting his stone to remain at the top of the hill. 

There is no shortage of “no-win” wars, flares ups and skirmishes to cover these days. Though statistically there is far less armed violence now then during the just about any period of the 20th century, the killing and maiming seems ever more confounding and less reasoned, a dark echo of the lessons not learned in Vietnam.  

Since I started covering global conflict 13 years ago, I’ve seen the worst of humanity on display in the Middle East, South Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean. 

That first time was in Haiti was while covering the 2004 coup. 

The country’s president was facing mounting pressure from an armed opposition force to step down. Clashed between the president’s loyalists and the rebels resulted in a daily dose of gruesome killings. 

One morning, I came across a group of Haitians in the capital standing around the body of man who had been tortured and shot. His twisted corpse laid in a pool of his own blood. A group of curious children approached the body, looking it over with a mixture of tentativeness and fascination, then proceeded one at a time to jump over the mangled victim as if it were a game. 

Days later the U.S. Marines landed in Haiti in an effort to restore some semblance of order and curtail the killing. Months later, U.N. peacekeepers led by Brazilian forces arrived to take over. They’ve been there ever since. 

Years later, when I was in Haiti to covering the earthquake, I met young children that spoke reasonable Portuguese because they’d grown up in the shadow of armed foreigners.
 
As horrified as I was by the degradation of humanity in Haiti, no war has affected me more personally that Afghanistan. I’ve spent years chronicling NATO and Afghan force efforts to contain a persistent enemy with many named but the sake of simplicity I refer to under of the umbrella of “Taliban.”

I’ve ridden in convoys along IED-laced roads, heard the whizz and snap of Taliban gunshots, met young men injured in blasts and firefights robbing them of their youthful vigor and sometimes limbs. 

It’s where I came closest to losing my own life. A few years ago I was shot in the head with an rocket-propelled grenade that fortunately failed to detonate, an injury that in the annals of warfare is considered of the strangest on record.

 

 

 

Meanwhile it’s been nearly 16 years since the initial invasion of Afghanistan and the country is perpetually poised on the brink of full-scale collapse. The government propped up by Washington barely extends beyond the city limits of the capital Kabul. The rural hinterlands are largely lawless or under Taliban rule and other cities have been periodically taken over by the hardliners. 

Reports are now circulating that the Russians helping the Taliban in its fight against US-led forces, a historical “F.U.” for America’s covert assistance to the Mujahadeen that fought the Soviets whose sons and grandsons are today’s Taliban. 

It could be considered a tragicomedy worth a chuckle if countless civilians haven’t been killed amid this cycle violence that seemingly grows faster and more ludicrous with every passing year. 

Same story in Iraq, where I’m heading back later today to cover the continuing effort to retake Mosul, a fight whose progress is measured by each building seized from the Islamic State. As the generals congratulate themselves publicly for their progress, hundreds of thousands of innocents flee the city knowing that if they ever make it back they’ll finding little left of the life their were forced to leave behind amid the piles of rubble that were once their homes. 

  

 

 

 

 

Reporter Carmen Gentile is the author of the upcoming book “Blindsided by the Taliban,” a chronicle of his injury in Afghanistan.
  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Escape from Saigon" sets the historical stage for return of "Miss Saigon"

 

The Ambassador won’t leave till

Everyone’s out

The choppers are on their way

There’s room for you all

They’re climbing over the wall!

Get back!

Tell you, don’t shout!

The Ambassador won’t leave till

Everyone’s out

The Ambassador just sent an order to

Freeze

That’s it!

No more Vietnamese!

From “The Fall of Saigon,” Miss Saigon 

Planning to see the new and edgier production of Miss Saigon when it returns to Broadway after its New York debut 25 years ago? Then consider reading "Escape from Saigon - a Novel" and other currently popular books for historical context before you go.

"While all the action in Escape from Saigon takes place during April, 1975—the final 30 days of the Vietnam War—the novel relies on flashbacks, old news accounts and barroom ramblings to put the events portrayed in Miss Saigon into historical and political context. This makes the novel an excellent read for anyone planning to see the show opening on at The Broadway on March 23—especially younger people who know the Vietnam War only through history classes and stories of their parents and grandparents," says Dick Pirozzolo.

Through the novel's principal characters—NBS-TV's Lisette Vo, the network's first Vietnamese American war correspondent, and Sam Esposito the hard-hitting journalist with The  Washington Legend, who infuriated President Richard Nixon with his reporting, the reader learns of the political bungling, missteps and post World War II decisions that led to a war that cost the lives of 50,000 Americana and millions of Vietnamese on both sides of a once divided Southeast Asian nation.

 

  

When Miss Saigon returned to the London stage in 2014, Serena Davies writing for The Telegraph, quoted producer Cameron Mackintosh as saying that inconclusive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will give viewers a new empathy with Miss Saigon’s depiction of Vietnam as a conflict in which everyone was a victim.

"History has almost caught up with Miss Saigon," he says. "When the show opened it was only 14 or 15 years after the Vietnam War had finished. But now that kind of war and the tragedies that spill out of that kind of conflict… nearly every country in the world has been involved: Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq. We are seeing things develop in Ukraine as we speak. I know I’m biased but when I walk into rehearsals I think, “This musical could have been written this morning, not 25 years ago.” Continue Reading

The Sympathizer

"They call them bui doi, the dust of life" is a poignant aria in Miss Saigon that recalls an America of 1975 that rescued and welcomed mixed-race children who would otherwise have been outcasts in their homeland—a stark contrast to today's government refugee ban that rejects the most vulnerable victims of war.

To understand the life of a young Vietnamese War refugee who was living in Orange County, California, look to Viet Nguyen’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, “The Sympathizer,” that examines conflicted foreign allegiances and an America-centric view of foreign conflicts. The “Sympathizer” is an allegory for today’s hyper nationalism and fear of the other.  Nguyen’s companion book of 2015,  “The Refugees” shines a light on the subtle complexities and conflicts of leaving ones native country for a new home in America.

In addition, Lana Noone’s new play, “Children of the April Rain” about Operation Babylift, the ill-fated first flight of mixed heritage children during the last days of the Vietnam War is opening around the country. Rory Kennedy’s film "Last Days in Vietnam" and Ken Burns latest PBS-TV documentary "The Vietnam War" add to the contemporary offerings on the subject.

When I first saw Miss Saigon, I went with a group of eight Vietnamese. All men. None of us left with a dry eye. Going back, and knowing the decisions and misunderstandings that contributed to the tragedy of Vietnam, might just prevent future generations from making the same mistakes. 

“Escape from Saigon - a Novel” by Michael Morris and Dick Pirozzolo was published in January of 2017 by Skyhorse Publishing, New York, NY, 264 pages and lists at $24.95. Further information and an excerpt are available at: www.escsapefromsaigon.com

 

When War Ends

 

Dan Blum blogs at: https://rottingpost.com

I met Dan Blum the other day at Peet’s Coffee Shop in Wellesley, Massachusetts, a small commuter town west of Boston where we both live.

On any given day Peet’s is populated with Wellesley College students, laptops agape, looking like they’ve been pressed into studying for their next exam, folks in flannel vests and sensible Birkenstocks wander in trying to look unstudied, and then the bicycle crowd arrives on two- wheeled, carbon-fiber machines that cost more than my car and weigh less than a box of Dunkin Donuts. You don’t have to look up to know they are there. Their pedal cleats clomp whenever they amble up to the counter, ordering foamy green chai lattés.

Dan and I ordered black coffee, dark roast in China mugs and sat at one of the small round wooden tables along the wall where we talked about our lives as authors—the usual banter: advances (how much did you get?), agents (an untrustworthy lot), publishers, book promoters (useless), but mostly we talked about how we had both written novels about what it is like when war comes to an end.

 “Escape from Saigon” takes place in 1975, during the final days of the Vietnam War, Dan’s novel, “The Feet Say Run” is about the way World War II ended in 1945 for an ordinary German soldier who, by fate, wound up on the wrong side of history. Strip away the place names, the dates, the nationalities and cut to the core of human emotion—the despair and fear of what’s to come next and our stories are not much different at all. In both “The Feet Say Run” and “Escape from Saigon” a soldier strips off his uniform to hide among the hordes of refugees wherein lies the most heartbreaking and overwhelming sense of loneliness..

“The Feet Say Run” opens with our German soldier Hans Jaeger stranded with a small band of survivors on Illyria, the last island not mapped by modern GPS. This is where he begins the tale of his life in Nazi Germany, the Jewish girl he loved, and his years fighting with the Wehrmacht. It’s the story of all the madness, irony and horror of the modern world—and the story of one man who finds redemption only when there's nowhere left to run.

 

Here is an excerpt from Dan Blum’s, “The Feet Say Run”

I started moving West at dusk, stopped in more farmhouses and scavenged bits of food and eventually came to a house with some civilian clothes that fit me tolerably. I changed into them. Then I realized my pack would still give me away as a soldier, and I found a little duffle I could sling over my shoulder, and moved everything from the pack into it. Best look like a civilian if the Russians saw me. I would find a uniform to change back into if I made it back across the line.

I walked for days like that.

Finally, I reached a main road, and again, there were civilians streaming along it, and I did my best to melt in with them. I was shocked when a group of Russian soldiers pulled up alongside us, letting us pass. Soon a Russian tank rumbled by. Reinforcements. Supply trucks. Even horse-drawn wagons. Sometimes the Russians seemed on edge, suspicious, and then I kept a distance from them. Other times I affected a limp to better blend in with the sea of refugees. Only where were they all coming from? This never-ending train. Just as I had seen before.  I struck up conversations with some of my fellow travelers and learned a little.

They were from all over Eastern Europe. They were German Poles. German Czechs. German Slovaks. German Hungarians. Some barely considered themselves German. Did not even know the German language. Only they had German last names. And all through Europe there was a rage, an uprising against anything German. And so they were expelled from their countries. Fleeing reprisals in the wake of the great German defeat.  Driven off their land, and leaving their homes with only what they could carry.

Some had even fought against the Germans, fought for their own countries, and were now expelled for being German. Just as Sylvia had been persecuted for her father’s Jewishness, even though he had fought for the Germans. Is there any other moral, in history, but that the world is completely mad?

In Czechoslovakia they were massacring German women and children by the tens of thousands. Rounding them into camps. Torturing in ways that showed how ably they had learned from their enemy.  Committing their own counter-atrocities against people who had done nothing, to avenge other atrocities against people who had done nothing.    

This is why I say I have no politics – even if, perhaps, it is not entirely true. People are animals. Let them do what they will to one another. Fuck all of them.

I caught glimpses of the first days of Russian occupation, passing from town to town. It was all just chaos. Sometimes the Russians pillaged and massacred. Sometimes they gave little

A Red Army soldier with a captured German soldier

bits of food to German children. They arrested German males of fighting age, questioned them, shot them or sent them off to slave labor camps, or, sometimes, apparently depending on their mood, just ignored them. They drank and raped at night, and then in the morning, in a wave of sobriety and guilt, they gathered wildflowers and candies to offer to their victims. And then they raped again the next night.

The women hid in attics and under beds. They cut their hair and covered their faces with ash to look old and ugly. They painted on rashes and blemishes to imitate diseases, much as a harmless animal may evolve to look like the poisonous one, in hopes of being mistaken for something toxic. And, at least according to the rumors, they committed suicide.

I slept in barns, or sometimes on the bare ground. I fell ill and lost track of time. I would awaken covered in sweat, disoriented. And then I was asleep again. Chilled. Looking for more hay to cover myself with. Was it three days that had passed, or four? How long had I been in this one spot? As though fastened to this same bit of earth until I came to know each separate clump of grass. How long since I had eaten? I came out of my fever to see the mass of humanity heading West was still flowing. And when I was well enough, wobbly still, faint, but able to put one foot in front of another, I rejoined it.  

Signs on the road began to name familiar places. Places close to home. Arrows pointing to Leipzig! Had Edelburg fallen already? Would anyone be left there when I got there?  

There were stories of the concentration camps that had been opened, clothes and shoes and human hair piled up by the ton, emaciated bodies stacked like cordwood. Was one of those piled bodies you, Sylvia? Were you one of the nameless corpses, buried somewhere in the middle? Or were you, just possibly, one of the survivors who were also whispered of, living skeletons, grown men and women weighing sixty pounds, too weak to walk, yet, somehow, still alive? 

And then one day there was a different kind of rumor. Shocking and unbelievable in a different kind of way.

Hitler ist tot!  

“What?”

“Hitler is dead. That’s what I just heard.”

There had been such a rumor once before. But this time it seemed like there were details. It was on the wireless. Everyone was saying it. Confirming it. The piece of garbage had killed himself!

We would not even have the pleasure of hanging him from a tree. Why, O Fuhrer, if you were going to kill yourself, could you not have done it fifteen years before? What would the world look like now, had you just taken that one life instead of all the others?

But that was it. It was over. Done.

Every German male of combat age was to surrender to a Russian unit. That was the next message that went up and down the road. But what did the Russians want? Were they just looking for Nazis? SS? Or were they dumping everyone in prison camps? I decided it would be best to walk the rest of my journey – wherever it would take me – at night. I was not surrendering. I knew by the road signs I saw that it was just two day’s walk to Edelburg now, and the thought of it made my heart beat faster, focused me toward that one objective. There was no way I was surrendering now. I needed to make it home.

Refugee Ban, Middle East Wars Have Americans Looking to Vietnam War For Answers

Americans—many of whom know the Vietnam War only through stories told by their parents  and grandparents—are looking back at that painful conflict to understand our contemporary foreign entanglements, veterans issues, the media, and especially the refugee ban as a painful shift in how our nation now treats the most vulnerable victims of war.

The wave of interest in a 40-year-old war that divided our nation and defined a generation accounts for the popularity of current literary offerings on Vietnam—among them “The Sympathizer,” “Tribe,” and the just published, “Escape from Saigon  - a Novel."  In addition these and other books, there has been a recent spate of films, TV documentaries and theatrical productions over the past year that shed light on a war that ended abruptly on April 30, 1975.

Vietnam War refugee Viet Nguyen’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, “The Sympathizer,” shines a harsh light on conflicted foreign allegiances and an America-centric view of foreign conflicts. The “Sympathizer” stands up as an allegory for today’s new hyper nationalism and fear of the other.  Nguyen’s companion book of 2015,  “The Refugees” further examines the subtle complexities and conflicts of leaving ones native country for a new home in America.

Though not strictly a Vietnam War book, “Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging,” by Sebastian Junger, examines the plight of returning combat veterans by likening the military to tribal societies where individuals share loyalty, a common purpose and depend on one another for survival. Junger argues that post traumatic stress may stem partly from the loss of community veterans face as they try to adjust to civilian life. When a 22-year-old Army sergeant, who has made life-and-death decisions as leader of a four man-squad in combat, comes home to be surrounded by people who know nothing of his experience the loneliness sets in and becomes overwhelming.

Published in January of 2017, “Escape from Saigon - a Novel” by Michael Morris and Dick Pirozzolo looks at how the Vietnam War shaped contemporary American attitudes in a fast-paced fictional account that compresses the action into the final 30 days of that three-decades-long conflict and put the endgame in context through flashbacks, old news accounts and barroom ramblings about political decisions made in the 1950s that set the stage for war.

The novel recounts the events of April 1975 through the lives of ordinary people most affected by the fighting and political bungling of the powerful they encounter. In addition to Vietnamese and American civilians there are journalists, French expatriates, US Embassy staffers and CIA operatives, all seeking escape by any means possible as the North Vietnamese Army tightens its stranglehold on Saigon—a city once known as the Paris of the Orient. Indeed, the final scenes of “Escape” recount the courage of hordes of Vietnamese refugees and the aviators and sailors who helped them in the biggest air-sea rescue in history, and an America that welcomed them with open arms.

The story is as much about the war as it is about the evolution of media, with much of the plot being about the journalists who covered what was dubbed America’s first television war.  Correspondents back then devoted their youth to covering Vietnam, often for a decade or more and shaped public opinion through vivid, nearly simultaneous TV pictures of battles and newspaper exposés on the Pentagon Papers and My Lai Massacre. “Escape’s” Lisette Vo, NBS-TV’s first Vietnamese-American war correspondent, foreshadows the rise of women in journalism and the advent of 24/7 cable news, while the hard hitting Sam Esposito of The Washington Legend rips into three presidents—especially Dick Nixon—with investigative reports that changed the course of history.

Access to news and information was fairly limited in 1975. There were only three networks. Their anchors were trusted, larger-than-life figures Americans invited into their living rooms. The evening news was appointment TV and we all watched and read essentially the same news—a far cry from today’s media environment with fragmented cable TV audiences and fake Internet news outlets. The technology has improved, but with it Americans lost its sense of community.

In addition to the several books on the Vietnam War, Miss Saigon will be reprised at The Broadway in March and simulcast to local movie theaters in HD to reach a large nationwide audience. Lana Noone’s new play, “Children of the April Rain” about Operation Babylift, the ill-fated evacuation of mixed heritage children during the last days of the Vietnam War is opening around the country. Rory Kennedy’s film "Last Days in Vietnam" and Ken Burns latest PBS-TV documentary "The Vietnam War" add to the contemporary offerings on the subject.

 “Escape from Saigon - a Novel” by Michael Morris and Dick Pirozzolo was published in January of 2017 by Skyhorse Publishing, New York, NY, 264 pages and lists at $24.95. Further information and an excerpt are available at: www.escsapefromsaigon.com 

 

BoomerCafe features "Escape from Saigon"

BoomerCafe just published an excerpt from "Escape from Saigon - a Novel" by Michael Morris and Dick Pirozzolo.

The novel takes place during the last 30 days of a war that divided a nation and defined a generation. Of the many things that shaped our baby boomer generation, the war in Vietnam is principal. Which makes it worth some reflection, which is what Dick Pirozzolo of Wellesley, Massachusetts, and Michael Morris of Savannah, Georgia, have done in the new novel they have co-authored.

It is “Escape from Saigon,” the story of April, 1975, the final month of the war. They tell their story through the lives of those caught in the besieged city.

In this BoomerCafe excerpt we meet Lisette Vo an American television network’s first Vietnamese-American correspondent. Lisette has entered the war correspondents' unofficial headquarters—L'Petit Bistrot—after covering an Operation Babylift plane crash that killed 78 orphans when she meets Sam Esposito, the hard-hitting reporter from The Washington Legend.

“You look like crap,” Sam exclaimed the minute he turned toward Lisette, who had taken the bar stool next to him...Continue Reading