The Agony of Going Home

For most of South Viet Nam's displaced population, rehabilitation is years away, but a few have gone home already under the government's "return to village" project. TIME Correspondent Jonathan Larsen visited two settlements in Quang Nam province last week. His report:

THE narrow northern end of South Viet Nam once had the ethereal beauty of a Chinese scroll. The Annamese mountain chain sloped and plunged from the Laotian border eastward into the tight flatiron plains that hugged the coast, generating white water rivers and misty waterfalls. Woodcutters prowled the thick jungle at will looking for hardwood cinnamon; hunters tracked boar and rabbit, and farmers tilled neat, geometric rice paddies in the rich lap of the foothills.

Now that idyllic landscape has become one of the major battlefields of the longest war in American history. The mountain jungles have been cratered and burned and sprayed; the woodcutters and hunters have fled. The farmers have been driven east, their villages leveled and their fields scorched and abandoned. The people of Quang Nam province, once scattered like seed across the land, are now huddled together along the shoulders of new cement roads in huts made from U.S. artillery crates.

At Thanh Tay, 7,000 refugees are crowded into an area hardly big enough for a dozen water buffalo. Thanh Tay is known as a "temporary resettlement camp," but it has been in use since 1965, when the fishing village of Cam Hai was overrun by the Viet Cong. Its people now live in four long, tin-roofed sheds, in cubicles divided off like horse stalls; six to ten people occupy each stall. Ironically, peace has already returned to their former village, but their houses are occupied by the 2nd Korean Brigade, so the refugees will not be able to go home until the soldiers leave.

In stark contrast to Thanh Tay, Phu Loc is a model return-to-village project. Its 200 families came back last April after spending several years as unregistered refugees. In earlier times, Phu Loc was a prosperous hamlet of brick houses on some of Quang Nam's richest river land. Besides raising rice and corn, the farmers had their lucrative silk industry.

The new houses of Phu Loc are made of artillery crates laid out in rigidly straight lines and bunched together for security. In 1965, the area was completely burned by American bombs because the land was too rich to leave to the Communists. Today not a single tree or bamboo shoot grows there. Asked what he missed most from earlier times, the village chief replied: "The jackfruit trees and the bamboo. They gave us wood, fruit and shade. Now it will take at least five years for the trees to grow back."

The area is only marginally secure. The village is fortified like a cavalry compound in the old American West. Women and children venture beyond the village perimeters only by day, and then with care. "When the Americans were still here, the government cadre could go all the way to the river," the chief recalled. "Now they can go only halfway." Future security, he said, would depend on regular government-troop operations. "If they have enough troops to make those operations, we will be safe. If they do not, we will be in trouble."

Nonetheless, the people of Phu Loc are better off than most of their former neighbors; it will take years and perhaps decades to bring back all of Quang Nam's refugees. Even then, one wonders about the people. Squatting in their refugee camps with little gainful employment, thrown into an urban environment they can hardly understand or cope with, many have lost their grip on their traditions and values. The land will mend, but what of the social fabric? In some places it is already tattered beyond repair, and the longer those millions of refugees stay cooped up in their tin sheds, the more the fabric will unravel.

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