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When Heaven and

Earth Changed
Places: American
and Vietnamese
Attitudes During the
Vietnam War

Meg Masters
12-3-2014
1

When Heaven and Earth Changed Places details the experiences of Le Ly Hayslip (nee’

Phung Thi Le Ly) both as a child and young women in Vietnam during the war years, as well as

her return to Vietnam in 1986 after nearly 20 years away. The narrative is non-linear and

changes back and forth between her past and present to demonstrate the cyclical nature of her

life as a journey that leads her back to her beginning. As she progresses along her journey, she

invites readers (Americans in particular) to examine their own experiences or beliefs concerning

the war as she reveals the motivations and obligations of villagers caught between both sides of

an intractable conflict. Le Ly challenges the ethnocentric American view of the Vietnam War

where weary draftees fight off countless, faceless Asiatic hordes as she comments: “For you, it

was a simple thing: democracy against communism.”1 Instead, she deftly presents a nuanced

and bracingly human account of our former enemies, our Vietnamese allies and even ourselves

in a war that all too often demonstrated the very worst in humanity on all sides.

Born premature and underweight during the war between the Viet Minh and France, Le

Ly started life at a decided disadvantage. French forces sometimes attacked her village and

burned buildings, while French Moroccan “slash-faced” soldiers would assault and rape

villagers.2 Her mother and father would sing songs of the daily shelling and fighting, both to

comfort the frightened children and to instruct them how to hide when the French came.3 This

introduction to war as a daily companion reverberates through the narrative in a way that

American civilians could not have understood or experienced since the American Civil War.

1
Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (New York: Penguin, 1990), XV.
2
Ibid., 16.
3
Ibid., 3.
2

After the French surrender at Dien Bien Phu, the war takes a different turn as a strictly

Vietnamese affair between the Republican south and the Viet Cong forces supplied by the

communist north. The villagers around Le Ly for the most part had no idea what Communism

even was. Political and economic concepts of communism and capitalism simply had no

relevance to rural farm life that had subsisted on the same spot for centuries.

The children played war games based around their vague ideas of surly Republican

police and Viet Cong “gangsters”. “’How bad can this be?’ we asked ourselves during rests

between mock battles. ‘A family feud? A spate between brothers?’ We had seen plenty of

those in our own families.”4 Le Ly relates that while paying these war games as a child she

could not help but think of her brother, who had gone north to be a soldier; or her sister who

was marred to a Republican police officer. No matter which side she chose in play, she would

be aligned against one of her own siblings. This would come to have very real personal

consequences in a way that American soldiers would have difficulty understanding.

Soon, Republican soldiers began to frequent the village and inevitably, Viet Cong

soldiers began to show up after dark. They shoot the local school master as a traitor for

denouncing communist guerillas and Buddhists. This salutary lesson in terror and

consequences commences Le Ly’s education in trying to please all sides, and therefore pleasing

none at all. She, and the villagers at large, learn to cooperate with the Republican troops by

day while attending Viet Cong indoctrination sessions at night. Republican building materials

and weapons get purloined for Viet Cong use. In particular, Le Ly and other children (she is

4
Ibid., 36.
3

about 12 years old at this point) get used as sentries and thieves while being taught “patriotic

songs” and given makeshift medals for completing these tasks.5

The ability of the Viet Cong to infiltrate villages and dominate village life to such an

extent became a problem that American and Republican planners never fully understood (or

even if they did, could do little to combat). Moreover, cultural misunderstanding and brutality

widened the war by actively driving villagers to the Viet Cong for protection. Vietnamese

villagers soon learn that running from combat helicopters (a natural reaction born of fear)

would result in being fired upon and likely killed. Being seen once too often by Republican

security forces can get one assigned to a prison camp and torture, as Le Ly soon discovers when

she gets sent to My Thi camp.6

The impossibility of her situation becomes manifest. Tortured for days by guards before

she gets released, she also becomes suspect by the Viet Cong because of her (relatively) short

stay in the prison and an accidental encounter with Republican forces near a communist hiring

place. Under threat of death, she flees to Saigon after being raped by Viet Cong soldiers.7 This

problem is not restricted to her by any means, as she describes the lengths that the Viet Cong

go to in terrorizing the village and ensuring compliance. Suspected Republican collaborators

get shot after sundown and their homes burnt. Food is tallied and farm animals assayed while

the villagers food gets rationed.8 What had started as patriotic support for a unified country

5
Ibid., 45-47.
6
Ibid., 81.
7
Ibid., 93.
8
Ibid., 69.
4

quickly turns into terrorized submission while both sides kill parents, loot food and leave

orphans.

On the other side, American involvement for most soldiers was strictly a one year affair.

“The ‘Nam” was a destination best avoided. If one could not keep away from Vietnam, then

one did as little as possible to stay or understand the local culture. The entire focus of most

soldiers was surviving the tour of duty and “rotating back to the world”, which certainly

suggested that Vietnam was not considered part of the Earth as American soldiers understood

the concept. The lack of continuity in American forces guaranteed that people like Le Ly would

always come into contact with foreigners who either did not understand the culture or nature

of the war. Those who did were going to be leaving soon and take the institutional knowledge

with them.

Le Ly engages in a series of transactional relationships with American servicemen.9 The

relationships are often exploitive, echoing the larger problem of American involvement.

Instead of a war to end communism and “save” the Vietnamese from themselves, the

relationships on macro and micro scales become opportunistic, cynical and dehumanizing.

While Le Ly’s admonition that the war was a “simple thing” for Americans is correct, she is

mistaken in what that thing was: getting home. For her, home was the proverbial hell that

Americans were busy avoiding or escaping from (while they were also busy blowing it up).

Le Ly, and South Vietnam as a whole, are forced to engage in increasing desperate and

sordid measures to survive amidst rampant corruption, death and uncertainty. The Americans,

9
Ibid., 221.
5

clad in invincible, ignorant, arrogance and hailing from a land of unimaginable plenty, become

both despoiler and savior as they deal death and misery while handing out candy bars and

medical care. For Le Ly, this means an eventual ticket out of Vietnam as the war bride of an

American twice her age.10 For too many other Vietnamese, it often means begging for

handouts, hawking junk or selling sex while trying not to get killed by either side. The American

Leviathan does not care about communism in the end. It cares about getting what it can before

it rotates back to the world.

When Heaven and Earth Changed Places provides a unique perspective from the

Vietnamese point of view. Many memoirs of Vietnam exist, such as We Were Soldiers Once,

and Young, and A Rumor of War. These books focus on an American infantry perspective of

combat, and do little to illuminate the Vietnamese culture or motives for fighting in the first

place. Le Ly closes that circle, both in her narrative where she returns to Vietnam as a

naturalized American, and figuratively in examining American fighting from a Vietnamese

perspective.

Instead of the faceless, black pajama masses in a movie or manuscript, the reader can

finally see the real people who fought on the other side, both in cruelty and sincere patriotism.

Better still, she also shows American audiences a mirror in which to look. The disturbing,

disquieting images she produces of American servicemen provide valuable historical testimony

from a time and people almost swept away in a collective amnesia. As a matter of social

history, her work avoids combat hagiography or martyrology. We get a section of her life, warts

10
Ibid., 333.
6

and all, the good decisions and the bad, in social context. By extension, we see a larger picture

of Vietnamese interaction with America during a critical period for both countries. The

audience is richer for the experience.

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