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Le Ly Hayslip

Le Ly Hayslip is born in Ky La outside in South 1949. She shares her time between Escondido California and Vietnam. Le Ly Hayslip is an award-winning author of two memoirs that later served as the basis for the film Heaven and Earth. She has founded two charitable organizations: East Meets West Foundation and Global Village Foundation for humanitarian and emergency assistance to the needy in Vietnam.

“In Vietnam - We call it The

American War ”

"In Vietnam - We call it The American War. When you say "The " to an American in the general public people think it's a - Hellhole. A killing field. A battle zone. A Hamburger Hill. A test of friendship. A red communist. Boatpeople. POW. MIA. Viet Cong. Charlie. Big bombs, little bombs, hand grenades, bullets. Condoms, Whiskey, cigarettes. There's is nothing good about my country. But the question is - How did it get that way? How did it become a Hamburger Hill? We don't know what hamburger is".

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As the government and Viet Cong fought in and around Ky La, both sides recruited children as spies and saboteurs. Le Ly was one of those children. The youngest of six children in close-knit Buddhist family, Le Ly was twelve years old when the U.S helicopters landed in Ky Ly, her small village in central Vietnam. Before the age of sixteen, she had suffered near starvation, imprisonment, torture and rape. Later she married an American twice her age left Vietnam to settle in the US.

THE WAR COMES TO MY VILLAGE

Le Ly Hayslip was a small child the first time she met american soldiers. "I know something was going on because my father went out to meetings every night and he came home and secretly talked to my mother about what was going on around the village. I didn't really know what they were talking about - until one day when I was out with my water buffalo - my pet. And this huge helicopter landed. It made a lot of noise and my water buffalo ran off and threw me off and I just stood there and looked at this machine. And in my mind I thought that perhaps it was something from heaven. Perhaps God or Buddha send this thing down for us to see. And these two giants human beings stepped out from the helicopter to survey the land. And I'm standing there and he completely ignores me and after a few moments he get back in his machine a went back to heaven".

A SEARCH AND DESTROY MISSION

In March 1965 the first Americans landed on China Beach right outside my village. They conducted a Search and Destroy mission. That meant that they came to the village and searched for the enemy. Either they found them - or not , they destroyed the village...

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On my fathers side we had seventeen relatives, cousins, uncles and aunts who went to North Vietnam. On my mother side all her nephews joined the South Vietnamese army. So the family was divided. That already put the family in danger. You shine the shoes for the South Vietnamese who come and eat your duck and take your rice, rapes your sister and tortures you father. And yet you still sing for them and dance for them. And then when the night comes they go home to wherever their base is. And then the Vietcong comes. Then you sing for them and you dance for them. You cook for them and you hide them underground. And for every bowl of rice you serve them they give you a bowl of pooh to dump. And you lie and you cheat to one side to save the other.

My sister Lan became a bargirl for the Americans and I followed her. I was so lucky I left when I was fifteen. But in those three years I was in torture camp, I was in and out of jail, I was raped... The villagers life is only safe when you lay in a coffin.

"Look at those awful people!" Erma would say when stories about "Viet Cong atrocities" filled the TV screen. To her and Larry, the enemy had one face. "Ed and Leatha, like me, just sat in silence, speaking only when Jimmy's playing got too loud or little Tommy began to cry. I understood the newscasters, and the pictures spoke for themselves. But where the Munros saw faceless Orientals fleeing burning villages, tied up as prisoners, or as rag dolls in a roadside trench, even innocent villagers were "VC" or "Charlie", I saw my brother Bon Nghe, who fought twenty-five years for the North; my mother's nephew, who was lieutenant for the South; my sister Lan, who hustled drinks to the Americans in Danang; and my sister Hai, who shared sleepless nights with my mother in our family bunker at Ky La. I saw floating on the smoke of battle the soul of my dead brother, Sau Ban, victim of an American land mine, and the spirit of my father, who drank acid to avoid involving me again with the Viet Cong terrorists. I saw in those tiny electronic lines, as I saw in my dreams, the ghosts of a hundred relatives, family friends, and playmates who died fighting for this side or that, or merely to survive."

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From Le Ly Hayslips book: When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace

Other books by Le Ly Hayslip: Child of War, Woman of Peace (Doubleday, 1993)

East Meets West Foundation and Global Village Foundation http://www.eastmeetswest.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Meets_West_Foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Village_Foundation

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