SAIGON — This is one quiet word about the Christmas we are about to spend in Georgia. Value it, and thank the Lord for it. Especially for the life our children have, in warm houses, with clean clothes, and security from gunfire.
These people from Southeast Asia love their children too. You see the mother standing at the door of her rice straw house holding a baby to her breast as a supplication to the tramping troops — don’t shoot this house.
You walk the streets of Saigon and find father and mother sleeping on the sidewalk at midday, with the little ones cupped between them. Many of the little ones don’t have pants, much less diapers. The older children steal whatever they can pick from passing pockets, and smile.
Small sisters wash baby brothers in the muddy streams that pass their huts, bringing their drinking water and carrying their sewage.
In an isolated base at the foot of the mountains in the North, a U.S. colonel who drinks a great deal sits in his small room alone at night after a day of killing and plays Christmas carols on a tape recorder.
In the southern delta, a helicopter pilot, Capt. Tim Bisch, of Baraboo, Wis., opens a big bundle of letters that a courier plane has dropped in his barbed wire compound. His sister’s child has taken a letter of his to Saint Anthony’s sixth grade in Dubuque, Iowa, and Sister Gertrude Mary has sent back letters from the whole grade, written to soldiers of Capt. Bisch’s company, with the hope that “sixth grade enthusiasm (a special gift from God)” will help the soldiers to “enjoy the coming days of Christmas — not in splendor but with more of the true spirit of the feast — the poor and the peacemaker’s spirit of Christ.”
The letters serve the purpose. Half a dozen tough pilots sit drinking beer and swapping the children’s letters and they read every one, hungrily, and sometimes with a little fog in the eye.
“What the hell are you guys reading?” asked Capt. Al Iller, exec of the helicopter company, as he walked in on the preoccupied pilots.
A captain looked up at him distractedly from a sixth grader’s letter. “Did you know,” he asked, “that the Great Lakes are shrinking?”
In a quiet convent at the edge of their air strip at Vinh Long, five Irish sisters wash the filth of the streets from child prostitutes and feed them and pray with them as the birth date of the Redeemer approaches.
But here, and in most of the earth, babies die on the sidewalks and in the huts, and those who live to old age chew betel nut until their lips are red and their minds are drugged so that they do not have to look at the filth and hopelessness and death at their muddy doorsteps. Men with guns pass their dirt-floored houses at Christmas time. They would not take for granted what our children in Georgia are blessed with.”
