New Roles for an Old Cast

By Robert T. Zintl

Some actors were so prominent in the Viet Nam tragedy that they became permanently identified with their roles: Robert McNamara was the whiz-kid president of Ford Motor Co. beforehand and head of the World Bank afterward, but he is still remembered as the Secretary of Defense who calibrated America's growing involvement. Others were caught in the national spotlight for an awkward instant and have been trying to live it down ever since. Mary Ann Vecchio was a 14-year-old runaway from Florida captured by a photographer as she knelt in anguish over a dead student on the Kent State campus in 1970. For years her wanderings and missteps made news. Now married, she works as a bus girl in a Las Vegas casino.

The best-known Viet Nam figures still rate headlines. General William Westmoreland fought his war against CBS for 18 weeks in federal court, emerging with a stalemate at best; Henry Kissinger's voice remains influential in Washington; former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, a law professor at the University of Georgia, was feted in the capital last year. Some of the home front's angriest protesters have reached a separate peace with society: Weather Undergrounders William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, fugitives until December 1980, are married and live in New York; last year Dohrn passed her bar exam. Other veterans of the era have gone about building new lives, less turbulent but often still inspired by the idealism or commitment of the war years. Here is an update on some of them.

WILLIAM S. CARPENTER JR.

During a 1966 battle on the Kontum plateau in the Central Highlands, Captain Carpenter and his infantry company were pinned down by North Vietnamese. With no retreat possible, Carpenter called down an air strike on his own position. "We might as well take some of them with us," he radioed to his battalion command post. The napalm attack injured seven of Carpenter's men, yet enabled the unit to consolidate and later withdraw. Already well known as the "Lonesome End" and captain of Army's 1959 football team, "Napalm Bill" Carpenter won a Distinguished Service Cross for his actions. Carpenter, 47, stayed in the Army; last December he was promoted to major general and put in command of a newly organized light infantry division at Fort Drum, N.Y.

WILLIAM CALLEY JR.

Convicted of murdering 22 Vietnamese civilians in the 1968 My Lai massacre, Lieut. Calley was released from house arrest in Fort Benning, Ga., in 1974 after serving one-third of a ten-year sentence. Calley, 41, settled in nearby Columbus, Ga., where he is a sales manager in his father-in-law's V.V. Vick jewelry store.

GRAHAM MARTIN

As the last U.S. Ambassador to Saigon, Martin had just eleven minutes to pack and evacuate the embassy as South Viet Nam neared its final collapse. Martin left behind family portraits and mementos of more than two decades in the Foreign Service, but he did manage to salvage top-secret documents from the embassy. In 1978 the FBI investigated his handling of the files, but the Justice Department later decided not to prosecute. Martin, 72, has retired to Winston-Salem, N.C. He does not believe the war had to end in such a disastrous manner. "Had President Nixon served out his term," he says, "South Viet Nam would today be an independent, viable nation."

MCGEORGE BUNDY

While National Security Adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Bundy was an early, forceful advocate for U.S. military assistance to South Viet Nam. Now he is closer to the antiwar activists who fought him. Along with McNamara, former Ambassador to Moscow George F. Kennan and Gerard Smith, chief negotiator of the SALT I treaty, Bundy recently urged the U.S. and NATO to adopt a no-first-strike policy toward nuclear weapons, and has said that President Reagan's Star Wars proposal does not "respect reality." Head of the Ford Foundation from 1966 to 1979, Bundy, 66, is now a history professor at New York University. His conclusions about Viet Nam are the opposite of Martin's. "It was not Watergate that made Saigon's survival impossible," he has written. "It was the fatal . . . imbalance between what (South Viet Nam) would have needed from us and what our own society would let us provide. The basic error was not in any one failure, but in the attempt itself."

NGUYEN VAN THIEU

Former South Vietnamese President Thieu remains "disillusioned," as a former government colleague puts it, over the U.S. refusal to rescue his collapsing government. Thieu, 62, lives quietly somewhere near London, but his seclusion has fostered resentment among Britain's 15,000 Vietnamese emigres. Says Tong Van Tran, head of London's Vietnamese Refugee Committee: "Thieu transferred a lot of money from South Viet Nam. But he hasn't helped, even one pence."

NGUYEN CAO KY

Outfitted in a tailored black flying suit and pearl-handled revolver, Ky was the flamboyant commander of South Viet Nam's air force and for a time the country's Premier and Vice President. As the Communists pressed on Saigon, he commandeered a helicopter and personally flew it to the deck of a U.S. ship. Ky, 54, who has owned several successful liquor stores in California, is planning to join a partnership that will develop Vietnamese fast-food outlets. He has been accused of leading a crime ring involving former South Vietnamese army officers, but is not the target of any investigations. "I'm not a Mafia chieftain," he insists. "I'm a poor man." Ky's view on U.S. conduct of the war: "With a 'no win' policy, you have no chance of winning."

NGUYEN NGOC LOAN

The Viet Cong prisoner stood with his hands tied behind his back. General Loan, director of South Viet Nam's national police, coldly raised a revolver to the man's head and fired. The picture of that summary execution during the 1968 Tet offensive (see page 22) horrified Western audiences. The photographer, Eddie Adams, learned later that the prisoner had slaughtered a police major who was a friend of Loan's, as well as the officer's wife and their six children. "I just took the picture. And all of a sudden I destroy a guy's life," Adams said in a recent interview. Loan, who moved to the U.S. after the war, was stuck with a reputation for brutality and was nearly deported in 1978. Reprieved by the Carter Administration, he operates a restaurant in Burke, Va.

PHAN THI KIM PHUC

She tore off her clothes and ran down the road screaming in pain, the victim of a misplaced napalm strike by the South Vietnamese air force. The 1972 picture of nine-year-old Kim Phuc (page 26) became a symbol for all the innocent victims of Viet Nam. Last summer, at 21, Kim Phuc traveled to Ludwigshafen, West Germany, for skin grafts on her neck and arms. Back in * Viet Nam she studies at Ho Chi Minh University, but she is still said to be in pain and often too sick to attend classes.

PRINCE NORODOM SIHANOUK

The Khmer Rouge still refers to him by the royal honorific Samdech (which means Lord), and he remains the nominal leader of the U.N.-recognized Kampuchean coalition government-in-exile. Although Sihanouk, 62, has outlasted the Lon Nol and Pol Pot governments that replaced him, he is not sanguine about prevailing over the Vietnamese invaders who control his country. Says he: "The Vietnamese will never withdraw. In one or two generations, my people and their children will not know what they are." The prince resides in mansions maintained for him by friendly governments in China, North Korea and Thailand, and often visits Cambodian refugee communities in France and the U.S. He plays his part energetically, but sees himself as a 20th century King Lear, shuttling helplessly between his households. Says he: "If Shakespeare were alive, he would be interested in my destiny."

VO NGUYEN GIAP

General Giap, 72, one of the most successful military tacticians of the past 40 years, orchestrated the victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Tet in 1968 and the conquest of the South. But he was replaced as Defense Minister in 1980 and dropped from the Politburo in 1982, possibly because he was too outspokenly pro-Soviet. That was heresy to Hanoi's xenophobic leaders, despite their alliance with Moscow. Giap remains on the party's Central Committee, however, and last May met with reporters at the 30th anniversary of Dien Bien Phu.

DANIEL ELLSBERG

Ellsberg is also concerned with the antinuclear movement and Central America. The onetime Rand Corp. analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg, 54, lives in Kensington, Calif., near Berkeley. He was a founder of the Mobilization for Survival, a coalition of antinuke groups, and in 1978 joined a sit-in to blockade the Rocky Flats nuclear installation in Colorado. Ellsberg is a traveling college lecturer, telling audiences that the undeclared war syndrome is recurring. "The time for a new Viet Nam seems certainly at hand," he says. "In Central America we are at about the 1961 stage of involvement."

PHILIP BERRIGAN

It is a history linked to numbers: the Catonsville Nine, who that destroyed draft records in 1968; the Harrisburg Seven, charged in 1971 with plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger; the Plowshares Eight, who attacked nuclear missiles with hammers in 1980. Berrigan, 61, is still an outrider of the Roman Catholic peace movement, which has shifted its protests from Viet Nam to the arms race. Berrigan, a former Josephite priest, was excommunicated after marrying a Sacred Heart nun, Elizabeth McAlister, in 1973; she is serving a three-year prison sentence for vandalizing a B-52 bomber. The couple try to alternate prison terms to care for their three children at Jonah House, a communal residence in Baltimore. Brother Daniel Berrigan, 63, a Jesuit, works with a New York City peace group and counsels AIDS and cancer victims at a Manhattan hospice.

DAVID DELLINGER

At its apex, the antiwar movement had a certain faddishness to it, acknowledges Dellinger. "It was like going to a football game--you went down to Washington for a demonstration," he says. Dellinger was a defendant in the uproarious Chicago Seven conspiracy trial, charged with trying to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. But his pacifism began long before Viet Nam: he was an ambulance driver with the Quakers in the Spanish Civil War, and he went to prison as a draft resister during World War II. He is still at it, planning a demonstration in front of the White House on April 22 to protest Reagan's policy in Central America. Dellinger, 69, also teaches history, politics and writing at Vermont College in Montpelier. One of the lessons of the '60s, he says, was that "it's a long struggle; you have to regenerate yourself and not just be on the barricades every moment."

BOBBY SEALE

Seale wore a beret and a scowl when he and Huey Newton formed the Black Panthers in Oakland in 1966. His disruptions aroused combative Judge Julius Hoffman to have him shackled to a chair and gagged during the Chicago Seven trial. Today he lives in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, attends Temple University and directs a youth training program. "I want to contribute to social change by being the last word behind a nonprofit organization," says Seale, 48. Where would the money come from? Believe it or not, from a cookbook, Barbecuing with Bobby, and possibly a barbecue video. "If Jane Fonda can drop 250,000 how-to exercise videos, why can't Bobby Seale drop a halfmillion of these things every barbecue season?"

With reporting by Joseph J. Kane/Los Angeles and Edwin M. Reingold/Peking, with other bureaus