JOHN BA LA BA N

Saying Goodbye to General Giap

When General Vo Nguyen Giap died in October, 2013, at the age of 103, I was working on a project to digitize ancient texts at a 1000-year old Buddhist temple outside Hanoi, a temple for Vietnamese kings who had won independence from China. I had recently been interviewed by Vietnamese television about that work and was back in Hanoi as the nation went into mourning. General Giap was not only the military strategist who defeated Japanese, French, and American armies but—along with Ho Chi Minh and Pham Van Dong—was part of the “Iron Triangle” that governed North Vietnam throughout the war with the United States. Before his military career, he was a trained historian who taught high school and engaged in anti-colonial agitation. He played the piano and loved poetry. I have a photograph from many years ago of his holding up my book of translations of the poetry of Ho Xuan Huong, and smiling his famous broad smile. During and after the Vietnam War, he was often at odds with the hardliners in the Communist regime that he had helped establish.

A few days after General Giap’s death, I got a late-night call at my hotel from VTV4, the Vietnamese national television channel that reaches an international audience. A producer asked if I could write a poem for the legendary general. I was a bit stunned. He was, whatever one’s viewpoint, one of the major figures of the 20th century. In Vietnam, he was sometimes compared to guardian warrior saints, or thanh, like Marshal Tran Hung Dao of the 13th century who raised armies to drive out Chinese invaders. The General’s official photograph in newspapers always carried the caption “A General For the People.” I told the producer I did not know if I could do anything, but would try.

As I struggled to write something, I remembered a passage in Chapter 31 of the Tao Te Ching, which says “the sword is a cursed thing, which the wise man uses only when he must.” Also I recalled a folk poem I had recorded during the war, the war in which I myself had been wounded in the mayhem of General Giap’s 1968 Tet Offensive. The challenge would be to write something genuine that would speak to Vietnamese as thousands lined up in front of the Giap family home wanting to pay their respects. The poem is at the end of this account. Its last lines are from the folk poem which translate: The Lô waterfalls are clear and high. We shake off the jacket of the dust of life. For the next day I was in the hands of the TV crew which wanted to film me presenting the poem at the Giap family altar. I was picked up at my hotel and driven to General Giap’s house which lies at a corner of Dien Bien Phu Street. For about a half-mile before even reaching the house, one could see thousands of people standing five-deep on the sidewalks. The crowd was kept from spilling onto the street by police and military of all sorts and a youth brigade in blue pants and red kerchiefs summoned for crowd control. It was a kind of controlled chaos. The traffic was snarled, bumper to bumper, and some on motorcycles were driving by just to see the spectacle. On October 8, I was the only Westerner on the street.

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The Giap children had opened their house to the public for the entire week and as word spread, it seemed like all of Hanoi was coming to pay respects: old soldiers in old uniforms wearing their medals, school children, Buddhist monks and nuns, families and workers in their everyday clothes, many holding bunches of yellow chrysanthemums, some just a single flower. The ones who showed up by themselves, and not in a group, seemed to be older and of the generation that had endured the most from the war. But there were also young parents with their young children. It seemed unscripted, the way I remember the crowds standing on the streets when President Kennedy was buried at Arlington. At the General’s wishes, he was to be buried not in some state mausoleum, embalmed like Ho Chi Minh, but in his country village far from Hanoi, and on an island. I was escorted into the crowd by the VTV4 crew that had bought me a proper drab brown necktie to go with my black suit. The crew had pinned a traditional black ribbon over my heart. I was given a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums. My poem for the General was now framed, and I was completely ill-at-ease as they proceeded to film me again and again standing in various parts of the line of mourners. I hadn’t foreseen the production aspect of what I was asked to do and these people—some of them quite old—had been standing there since dawn and would stand there a lot longer before they got in and here I was being put in and pulled out of several lines just for television and a program that would loop continuously all week, while all the entertainment channels were shut down or playing classical music.



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But everywhere I was inserted (with some of the crowd shots taken by a young camera man from high up on an electric pole so that the enormous size of the crowd could be shown) people were incredibly welcoming—especially when they heard I was an American, an “American poet” as my handlers told them as I was pushed forward. At one point I was jammed in with some old generals bedecked with medals. One noted the framed poem in my hands. So I read the poem out loud as I stood packed in with them and when I spoke the last two lines in Vietnamese, a sort of tremor went through the crowd around me. People started touching me and smiling. I had hands all over me. Someone—actually one of the generals with medals from his epaulets down to his belt buckle—was stroking my back as I struggled to speak in Vietnamese and my poor speech was re-said by those next to me so others could know what I said. It was bewildering and moving, especially since we were a ten-minute walk from the Hoa Lo prison, known as the Hanoi Hilton by American pilots kept captive there. When the TV crew tried to pull me out of the line, I was pulled back by a three-star general and a couple of others in uniform. I turned around and put out my hand to thank them and they all put their hands on top of mine and turned towards the TV camera for a group handshake. I had become part of their moment in the history of this moment.

Finally the TV crew and I were called inside the Giap compound (where I was afraid we would anger people for jumping the queue) but like the people outside

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those already inside seemed pleased to see that an American was going in, that he was dressed presentably, and that Vietnam television was filming it. I was grabbed by my arm by a young female crowd-controller who ordered people out of the way, leading me on a fast walk along a path filled mostly by ordinary people in ordinary clothes who had simply come because the Giap family had welcomed them in the press, opening the home to the public. In his doing that I suspect that the General had intended to make his last statement about himself.

I was led up the stone steps into the Giap mansion and taken to the family altar. At the direction of one of the General’s son’s I put my chrysanthemum bouquet on the altar next to a large color photograph of General Giap in his cap and uniform. Then I put my poem there too, stepped back and made a deep bow. The room—already startling quiet after the hubbub outside—went quieter. As camera lights flicked on, I was asked to read the poem out loud. After that, I shook hands with the middleaged Giap children in the receiving line. I thanked them for letting me come, and, in English, they thanked me for coming. A few days later, following his state funeral, a truck encased in funeral wreaths and filled with soldiers standing at attention carried General Giap’s flag-draped coffin along the main avenues of Hanoi on a cassion trailing a piece of field artillery. I joined the crowd gathering on the street corner outside my hotel near downtown Hoan Kiem Lake, the “Lake of the Returned Sword,” where an old temple on a



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little island commemorates General Le Loi’s 1427 defeat of an invading Chinese army and the restoration of Vietnamese independence that lasted into the 1800s when foreigners came again. Later that day, Giap would be flown south to be laid to rest on an island near his home village where his extraordinary endeavors in the “dust of life” had begun.

John Balaban’s books have received two nominations for the National Book Award. His Locusts at the Edge of Summer won the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His Words for My Daughter was a National Poetry Series Selection.  Balaban is the editor and translator of Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong. In 2009, he delivered the annual David L. Jannetta Distinguished Lecture on War on War, Literature, and the Arts at the U.S. Air Force Academy. His memoir, Remembering Heaven’s Face, remains one of the most powerful accounts of the Vietnam War. Recently he was awarded a medal from Vietnam’s Ministry of Culture for his work in translation and preservation of ancient texts. Balaban is Professor of English, Emeritus, at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

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