Anh Hai’s frequent talks with us were conversational in mood, but one-directional. For the most part he spoke, and we listened, made non-committal comments, or asked questions.
Hai’s tone was one of relating self-evident truth, which was exclusive and all-encompassing. It allowed for no alternative truth or even any objectivity that was not in its service. Hai was matter-of-fact rather than belligerent about it, but he clearly assumed that any intelligent and good person already did agree with him or would agree once he was enlightened. This assumption embraced us, but there was no attempt to make us state any assent. There was no brainwashing and no requirement of self-criticism on our part.
The talks themselves were very casual, just part of the normal coming and going in the houses we were living in. Hai would perhaps sit down in the partition doorway if we were in a separated area or—later, after we were all living in the same room—just bring some tea and begin chatting as we shared the glasses.
He might start by telling us some news (including such items as passage of the Cooper-Church amendment, demonstrations on U.S. campuses, or exaggerated claims of Front-inflicted casualties in Cambodia and Vietnam). Then he would move on to such topics as the necessity of treating villagers politely, the sacrifice required for the revolution, or the evils of imperialism. In general, he dealt less with ideological formulations than with broad concepts of nationalism and social justice.
Anh Hai’s outlook was what one would expect of a good cadre. There were no surprises. The interest of his exposition, therefore, lay less in content than in his assimilation of the Vietnamese Communist ideology and in his style of presentation. Hai’s face became animated when he talked. He spoke naturally, as if the ideology had long since become the prism of his own thinking rather than either the whiplash of the interrogators or the rote crutch of the nurse (whose every other phrase was “according to the revolution”). He often couched the ideas in epigrams and earthy analogies that would be easy for an Asian villager to grasp.
There was considerable repetition in the 51/2 weeks of our stay, so I have broken down Hai’s remarks into various categories for ease of reading—however Westernized and distorting such compartmentalization may be. To help fill out ideas I have included also relevant comments by others of our soldiers. For the most part, this means Anh Tu, who had the subordinate ideological role in our guardianship. I have preserved the phraseology of the original speaker as much as possible.
Revolution and Sacrifice
The Front soldiers expected the inevitable triumph of the revolution. The 24-year-old nurse put it the most bluntly: “We are part of the revolution, and there is no stopping the revolution. The revolution knows those who are its friends and those who aren’t. It helps its friends and rolls over its enemies.”
There was as much stress on the necessity of sacrifice as there was on inevitability, however.
Death was viewed with a certain fatalism—or perhaps purposefulness. Anh Tu spoke calmly of it: “To live without our freedom and independence is as good as being dead. To die for the revolution is nothing.” “We may get killed, but our nephews will carry on.” “Death doesn’t mean too much to you when it’s for the good of the many over the good of the few, and when we die, we know it’s for the good of the many. Then when you die, no one can say you were a bad man. You die for life, to give life.”
For our icebreaker conversation on Ho Chi Minh’s birthday Tu pulled his red booklet of Ho’s thoughts out of his breast pocket and chose sacrifice and determination as his text. “Uncle Ho says it here,” he started out. “There will be more hardships to endure, but our revolution will be victorious. There is no doubt. It is absolutely certain…when we have defeated American aggression, then we will go home…As long as there is a man of us left, we will fight on.”
The sacrifices the men talked about were apparent enough. One day in the woods we asked idly of Anh Ba how long it takes to make a good Front soldier. “One year,” he replied instantly, “long enough to find out if a man has the will to endure the battles and the hard life.”
Hai’s phrasing of it came one lazy afternoon while he was sitting cracking his toes on the section of floor usually reserved for the chessboard: “It’s not easy to be a revolutionary. Many people have sympathy for the revolution but when, for example, they are conscripted [by the South Vietnamese government] they go into the army. There are different influences in society. It is understandable that people are affected by their environments. That is why the revolutionary is a special person; he must have a high sense of sacrifice. That is why a revolutionary is so hard to make.”
Toward the end of our stay, we asked Anh Ba if he found it boring to be assigned to us rather than fighting. The occasion was the afternoon that American helicopters had maneuvered overhead for half an hour, firing once close-by experimentally. Ba had run to the other side of the woods we were in, shot his M-16 into the air, and drawn the helicopters away from us. He had then circled back and led us urgently to a third area in the woods. At the time we posed the question we were waiting for dusk and eating bitter wild oranges that the Cambodian escort had found for us.
Ba acknowledged, if politely, that he was looking forward to getting back to more soldierly pursuits. “You know those battles?” he asked, referring to villages we had been in but had fled hastily in advance of impending attacks. We nodded, and he continued: “If I weren’t with you now, I would be in all of those fights until the last minute.” We believed him. He did not elaborate, but the normal life he chafed to get back to was one of foot soldiers with no control of the skies and with their own fire power usually limited to rifles and mortar (and booby traps) against artillery and bombs. This meant living in a spider hole a day or days at a time, perhaps, with only cold rice balls as food, sleeping little, waiting until enemy troops arrived, killing as many as possible, then banking on one’s own wits to slip away from a superior force. Our three senior guards, Hai, Ba, and Tu, had each been wounded three times.
Even apart from the punishment of battle, of course, everyday life for Front soldiers is an abstemious one. The sum total of their belongings, for all practical purposes, is carried everywhere in their backpacks. Three shirts and one pair of trousers are allotted to each soldier for a year’s wear, plus such essentials as a hammock and a nylon ground cloth. Luxuries like cigarettes, matches, and radios have to come as gifts from friends. Food is available but not abundant. For his own spending money, the Front soldier gets, we were told, 60 to 70 piasters per month, as contrasted to—according to our guards–1600 piasters for Cambodian government soldiers or 2000 piasters for South Vietnamese government soldiers. (But the money doesn’t matter, was the conclusion of this pocket of conversation. “What is important is the people’s consciousness. When you spend money, it’s finished; but when you give [ideological] enlightenment, that lasts)!
Perhaps the most difficult hardship that a Front soldier has to endure is the forfeiture of normal family life. In one way what the Front asks is compatible with tradition, merely an extension of the subordination of the individual to the Front, with the family group expanded to become the national and revolutionary group. Basically, however, the demand of family renunciation is still a severe one in a Confucian society where one’s duties and identity have been focused on the family for centuries. “We are the young generation,” Tu commented once. “We miss our families. But it is our obligation to oppose American aggression. When we have won, we will go home and live in peace.” Another time Tu spoke of missing his small daughter, whom he had entrusted to the care of friends since the death of his wife. He was sad not to be a father to her and raise her himself, but he would not be fulfilling his duty as a father unless he devoted himself to working for the revolution.
Hai and Ba had not been home, they said, since they joined the revolution. “To be a revolutionary you give up your family or you don’t have a family,” Hai said flatly. After victory you can go home and return to your family or have a family.”
Society
As expounded by Anh Hai and the other soldiers, the aim of the revolution is a good society, defined primarily in the negative as not capitalist, not imperialist-controlled, and not full of social injustice.
There are three happiness’s of the revolutionary, Rai told us: liberating the people, constructing a good and improving society, and seeing the working class taken care of. Contrariwise, the revolutionary’s two sadness’s are “seeing people poor and seeing them oppressed.” (The revolutionary’s happiness’s, he added, are just the opposite of the capitalist’s happiness’s, which are “Having many wives and children, exploiting people, and leading an easy life).”
Unselfishness was the criterion of the good society. Hai developed this at some length: “Why do brothers and sisters from the same family not live together? Because of selfishness. You should not think you have things just for yourself, but you should share things when others are in trouble. If you do things for other people, you will always be repaid. Or if not you, your son will be repaid.”
“Life is not all happiness and not all sadness. Perhaps you have a lot today and not very much tomorrow. Life is not a straight road. It consists of many ups and downs, many bends and twists. When you have things, you should give them to others.”
“If I have a shirt that I don’t want and give it to you, that is nothing,” Hai continued. “But if I have a shirt that I want but you need and I give it to you, that is something.”
Saigon, Hai concluded, is an example of the opposite kind of society, where nobody cares about anyone else. “For example, there are two sisters, one who is poor, with a sick child, whose life is very hard; one who is wealthy and has an easy life.” Here Hai expanded his analogy to cover not only individual relationships, but also relations between imperialism and poor countries. “It would be no hardship for the rich sister to take the child of the poor sister to make sure it got enough to eat and to relieve some of the burden of the mother. But she is selfish and she doesn’t do it. And the two end up leading very different lives, one very difficult and one very easy. It is the same with us. We are all in society. Imperialism is like a farmer who has a water buffalo. He uses the water buffalo all the time and doesn’t appreciate him until he has lost him. Or like a leg, you walk on all the time and don’t value until you lose it.”
“The two societies have different ideals,” Hai asserted, “But our ideals are higher. Under imperialism people act selfishly, for themselves and their families. In our society you do things to help social progress and reorganization. Americans say our allies are bad, but all the allies of imperialism are bad people. When they come, they steal and rape.”
Tu, who wanted to be a worker after the war was over, expressed the aims of the revolution more concretely: “Though they say many things about us, our goals are quite simple: to build factories for the people, to add more high schools, to improve the medicine, things like that. In an imperialist [“imperialist” at times being synonymous with “capitalist”] society education is for a profession. With us the people learn a profession, but they also learn the different kinds of people in society and the responsibilities of people toward society, to develop society and bring others to do it.”
One other positive aspect of the good society came out when Tu was asking about divorce and extramarital sex in the U.S. “With us,” he explained, “each person just has one wife or one husband. If your wife dies or you get a divorce, then you may have another wife, but that’s all. That gives stability to society.”
The nadir of a capitalist society was more often South Vietnam than the U.S. “Travel to socialist countries!” a visiting Vietnamese photographer counseled us at one point toward the end of our stay. “Compare them with capitalist countries. We have traveled on to Saigon, and we have seen the difference!”
The South Vietnamese comparison clearly underlay Hai’s thinking too when he told us what revolutionaries’ aims were not and were: “We want to live, but we don’t want to live for ourselves, to get a big house, a car, travel to America, etc. We will give help to the poor and oppressed elsewhere.”
As to the present make-up of society, the workers were the heroes, if highly abstract and infrequently mentioned ones. Businessmen tended to be the equally abstract villains. In an ambivalent position in-between were the intellectuals and—in one discussion—the monks.
“Writers and journalists have a most important role,” Hai instructed us, “in making people aware of their situation and the goals and aims of the revolution. A man with a job and harried by his economic situation doesn’t have time or inspiration to think about abstract things like making a revolution. So, writers and journalists can give them something to read, to make these things clear for them.”
“More often than not, however, Hai sounded wary of the intellectual. The intellectual was definitely inferior to the revolutionary in practical perceptions, knowledge, and stamina. “You intellectuals,” Hai said (addressing us), “have learned more theory. But we are more experienced; we work with reality. You have to look below the surface. For example, if you see a Thieu-Ky [South Vietnamese] and a Front soldier walking down the road with chickens, you might think they both stole the chickens, or you might think both chickens were given or bought. You have to know how to look at it. It isn’t true that they are the same. There is a difference, because the Thieu-Ky soldier stole his chicken and the Liberation Front soldier bought his chicken.”
Hai continued his contrast between the intellectual and the revolutionary. “A revolutionary may not know as many abstractions as an intellectual, but he has better practical knowledge and is better able to live with hardships. Uncle Ho once asked an intellectual an engineer, if he knew when to plant, water, and fertilize a vegetable [here Hai named a particular vegetable] in the morning, when to pull it out of the ground. He didn’t. Uncle Ho then told him the answer.”
Hai credited religious believers with honorable intentions, but he scorned their effectiveness. “The revolutionary is different from the man of the pagoda or imperialist. The revolutionary and the man of the pagoda both want good for the people, while the imperialist doesn’t want to help people. But the man of the pagoda just prays and doesn’t act, while the revolutionary fights and struggles.”
In answer to the question if many monks have joined the revolution in Cambodia—the countryside pagodas had been considered strong supporters of Prince Sihanouk during his tenure—Hai replied: “Some monks have left the saffron robes for the black of the revolution, but we don’t want all of them yet, because revolution takes a long time, and society has to have balance.”
To the question if a religious person could be in the revolution, Hai answered: “There is no contradiction at all between religion and revolution. You can have religion too if you want to. Both have the same purpose, bringing benefit to the people. Only when religion lets itself be used by foreigners and reactionaries to oppose the revolution does the revolution oppose it. For example, the Catholics in Saigon. Many Catholic leaders in Saigon are like that. But it is certain that the common religious people, once they understand what the revolution is about, can’t help but support it.”
America
The main enemy that prevents the ideal society from developing in Indochina, our soldiers indicated, was America—America and its “Thieu-Ky puppets.”
“With technology we could develop so we wouldn’t be poor,” Hai asserted, “but the Americans prevent this by their aggression.” “This is a rich country,” he said, speaking of Vietnam. “If it weren’t for the war, we could be exporting coal, cement, timber, foods, rice, and medicines.”
“We can have peace only when American aggression ends,” both Hai and Tu said repeatedly. “As long- as there is aggression, there can be no peace?” Two things need to be stopped” stated a Vietnamese visitor who joined us toward the end, “the oppression of class by class in the U.S. and the oppression of a little country by a big country in Indochina.”
The visiting photographer stated starkly, “There are two things that are necessary in order to succeed: hatred and idealism.”
He was seconded by the other visitor, who proclaimed with convincing vehemence, “No tolerance for enemies! None!”
The main object of hatred was—clearly—the U.S. Or, in more sophisticated circles, it was identified as bad Americans and the Nixon regime.
Our five guards never manifested toward us the hostility and anger showered on us by Cambodian villagers. Our escorts’ attitude toward Americans was always framed rather in terms of discriminating between “good Americans” (who opposed the Vietnam and Cambodian war) and “bad Americans” (who supported the war). This distinction quickly became a litany in its repetition. Thus, the first words spoken to us by higher officers were an apology for the rough treatment we had had from local troops and villagers in the hours immediately after our capture. The Cambodians, they said, were new at the war and did not yet distinguish between different Americans. And the surprise rally at the end of our stay had as one of its themes gratitude to those Americans who oppose Nixon’s policies in Indochina.
Certainly, our escorts were very conscious of the division in the U.S. over the Vietnam war. Accounts of Congressional and student opposition to the incursion of American troops into Cambodia formed a staple of Hai’s news reports to us.
Our soldiers’ concept of the division in America was a classical Marxist one. They thought—despite the beating up of peace demonstrators by hard hats—that the workers in the U.S. would be the vanguard of the anti-war movement. It would be like the French in Indochina, they told us. The economic squeeze would prove too great for the workers. American wives—like the wives of French officers during the resistance—would have to sell their jewelry in order to live.
In something of a departure from orthodox Leninism, however, not only workers, but also some capitalists, were included on the side of virtue. As Hai analyzed it, “There are three kinds of capitalists in America. There are those who are definitely making money off the war, the war manufacturers, those who want the war to go on because they make war goods which can be sold for war. The second kind are those who make no war goods and make no profit from the war. And the third kind are those who have the capacity for making goods either for war or for the private sector.”
“The first group,” Hai explained, “along with the American military, has always given strong support to the war. The second group has tended to oppose the war, because the war takes money from the people to pay for war goods, leaving less money available to buy their products. And the third group in the past has supported the war. But it is now shifting to an opposing position because it sees the general economic situation declining.”
At other times too Hai referred to the economic drain of the war on the U.S. in asides. “It is easy to fight the Americans here,” he commented once, “because they concentrate and we just go away, then come back when they leave. If they expend a lot of ammunition, we are happy, because ammunition is expensive.”
The economic factor always remained uppermost in the soldiers’ perception of anti-war sentiment in the U.S., but they did mention loss of lives too as a contributing factor. “A lot of sons of capitalists have been killed here,” Hai mused. He went on to consider the American soldiers’ attitudes as he saw them. “A lot of young Americans don’t want to fight. They want to go home, but they have to fight to protect themselves in order to go home. That’s war.”
“We don’t like to kill American soldiers,” Hai elaborated. “We know they do not understand our situation. If we capture someone, that is the end of our differences with him. We believe bad people are just misled. Everyone can be educated. War is not to kill people but to win a cause. If American soldiers promise not to fight, then we let them go home.” [As we questioned Hai further on this, however, it turned out that he was referring to deserters rather than to prisoners of war].
In answer to a query about differences in receptivity to the Front’s views on the part of white and black American soldiers, Hai stuck to classical economic analysis. The only difference, he said, was not between black and white, but between officers and enlisted men. Enlisted men were more responsive.
Hai’s conclusion from internal American opposition to the war was apparent: “The Americans have all the equipment, but we are stronger. They will withdraw.”
Our guards’ vision of the U.S. was as certain to them as their knowledge of Indochina. Once Tu did ask Mike a question about America if the Communist Party was strong there. And once Mike did explain complete with a sketched map—the locations of Harvard, Dartmouth, and a few other places. But for the most part the soldiers expressed no curiosity about the U.S. (The only other time any question came up about the rest of the world outside Indochina, it concerned the population of Israel. Our escorts have no outward reaction to our answer of three million, but we inferred that they were mentally pitting this small number against the tens of millions in the Arab world and trying to figure it out).
Nationalism
The strongest weapon against the Americans was always the will to win of nationalism. And the personification of nationalism was Ho Chi Minh. (At one time nationalism might mean Indochina for the Indochinese, at another time Vietnam for the Vietnamese. There was no embarrassment in talking about Vietnamese nationalism in Cambodia).
On Ho Chi Minh’s birthday—by the light of the full moon and under a steady stream of little black beetles that were raining down on us from the rafters—Anh Tu showed Mike, Dick, and me his booklet of some of Ho’s writings. He spoke reverently of Uncle Ho as a leader of youth and as a poet. “He could have been the leader [of international communism] after Lenin, but he chose instead to stay with his people until independence.” “Uncle Ho wrote three kinds of poetry,” Hai added: “patriotic poetry, poetry to teach the people, and poetry that expressed theories.”
Mike asked Tu if he had ever been to Hanoi. Tu hadn’t, but he said he would like to go to pay his respects to the remains of Uncle Ho. He would have liked to have gone to Hanoi while Uncle Ho was still alive, but he hadn’t made it. “It was the ambition of us Liberation soldiers,” he continued, “to bring Uncle Ho to Sai-on, but we were unable to do it. Because we failed, and even though he is dead, we will fight on with greater spirit to memorialize Uncle Ho.”
Apart from specific homage to Ho Chi Minh, the soldiers did not dwell as much on the Viet Minh victory over the French as might have been expected. It was referred to for peripheral analogies with the Americans today. And Hai’s lack of regard for the French army was fully evident in a casual remark that the Lon Nol [Cambodian government] army was worthless because it was trained by the French. But there was no particular eulogizing of the French defeat.
Interestingly, in references to more ancient history, the Chinese received their due mention. “We aren’t afraid of any invaders,” Tu explained once, “because of our history. We beat back the Chinese invaders five times, the Mongols once, and the French once.” In the present day the soldiers pointedly claimed their monopoly of Vietnamese nationalism in contrasting the absence of foreigners fighting on their side with the presence of many Americans fighting on Saigon’s side.
There was pride too in Vietnam’s struggle [i.e., the Front’s revolution] not only for its own sake but for its universal example. “This is a decisive historical period,” Hai said at one point, and explained, “Vietnam is very important because it is the first small country to stand up against a major imperialist power, and all the small countries appreciate and learn from it.” After the Vietnam war was over, he indicated, Vietnamese would help other countries in their struggles.
The People
Nationalism was assumed to infuse the common people, and to make them support the revolution naturally. And the people were decisive.
The relationship of the revolutionary to the villager was therefore highly important—and formed the largest single leitmotiv in Hai’s discourses. What the soldiers described was always the classical fish-sea relationship of Mao Tse-tung, though it was not labeled as such.
Over and over there would be variations on the theme of helping and not abusing the people, living the life of the simple villager and showing mutual love and concern. “If the people are with you, you live. If not, you die. Our view is different from the Americans’; weapons are important, but not as important as the people.” “If the people are with you, they will support you.” “We will be left as long as any people are left.” “If the people have only rice, we eat only rice. If they have other things, we eat other things.” “If you are good people, you will meet with goodness. If you are cruel and barbaric, you will meet with cruelty and barbarity.” “We and the people are one. When the people have rice, we have rice.” “The people are our mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters.”
The soldiers were constantly contrasting benevolent treatment of villagers by Front soldiers with maltreatment of them by the Thieu-Ky [South Vietnamese] and Lon Nol [Cambodian government] soldiers. “We treat the people better. If they give us food, if they have it, we accept it. Otherwise, we don’t.” Or, another time, “You can tell who we are by our approach to the villagers. Thieu-Ky or Lon Nol soldiers begin by looking for valuables. We always ask permission to stay in houses. We always do our own cooking. We accept whatever the people have in the way of food. When the Thieu-Ky soldiers come they force people to cook for them. They must have chicken and pork. They steal things.”
(Everything that Mike, Dick, and I could observe during our stay indicated that the Front soldiers were practicing what they preached in eastern Cambodia. Certainly, there was every political reason for them to do so. Cambodia is unlike Vietnam, where the course of the grueling war appears to have brought the majority of the population to consider the Front—at present—the worse of two evils. There the Front, hard pressed for recruits, has resorted to heavy rice levies and increasingly indiscriminate terror. In Cambodia, by contrast, the North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front main-force units had remained aloof from villagers prior to the March 1970 coup against Sihanouk and so had not offended them. The South Vietnamese troops, on the other hand, at least in the undisciplined first month or two of their entry into Cambodia, were pillaging the countryside. American and South Vietnamese artillery and bombs were hitting houses and, in some cases, leveling whole villages or sections of towns. Under the circumstances all the Front had to do to look good in the eyes of the villagers was to refrain from harassing them).
Tactics
Even with all the emphasis on being nice to the people, our escorts did not altogether neglect the barrel of the gun. Tactics were not discussed with us by design, but they were, quite simply, a part of everyday life.
The moves we made and the troop movements we saw—in a general area where some of the heaviest fighting of the period was going on—gave ample evidence of good tactical intelligence, mobility of small unit foot soldiers, even in quite open country with enemy control of the skies, and a capacity for decentralized command on the part of the Front.
There was never any embarrassment at our fleeing—or seeing columns of troops fleeing—impending attacks. Traditional guerrilla fluidity was understood—and occasionally stated. Hai summed up the essence of guerrilla tactics when he said, “where they [the enemy] aren’t, we are. Any little space we fill. If they aren’t anywhere, we are everywhere.” At another Point Hai discounted an advance by South Vietnamese soldiers. “That doesn’t mean anything, because our tactics aren’t to hold an area at all costs but to retreat and strike where the other side is weak, to surround them. If they want us to retreat, we retreat, and just fight where it’s most advantageous.”
Still another tine Hai cited the maxim, “A small number fight a large number. By inference, this appeared to mean that a few Front soldiers would dig in in a village and draw American or South Vietnamese firepower onto the whole village. Tu referred to civilian destruction by American firepower also in saying, “We don’t shoot unless there is a target. The Americans shoot where there are no Liberation soldiers but where people are, so there is a lot of destruction.”
Mao was quoted once on tactics (by Hai), in an image of a tiger on a mountaintop that Mike, Dick, and I didn’t quite manage to translate into any tactical applicability. Curiously, the victor of Dien Bien Phu, General Vo Nguyen Giap, was not cited.
One important source of intelligence that did crop up in conversations was aircraft patterns, from A-1 spotters and helicopter reconnaissance to bombing missions and helicopter troop landings. Mike, Dick, and I never learned how to read these patterns, but occasionally Hai would make a specific interpretation, usually to allay our fear that we would be caught in an attack. One day when we were listening to the boom of artillery and to a repeated flight path of one jet overhead, Hai told us, “You are safe here, even though there are planes around and 20,000 [American and South Vietnamese troops] in this part of Cambodia. There aren’t enough troops to come to small places like this. They just stay on the -main roads.”
The day we hid in the woods all day Hai smiled at the three Westerners huddled as far under the foliage as we could every time a plane went overhead. He merely advised us to keep our glasses covered, but dismissed any danger from the planes. “Don’t worry,” he assured us, “most of the planes have fixed objectives; they are just flying overhead. And those that are looking can’t see that much anyway. They are blind.”
Valedictory
The summation of our Cambodian sojourn with the Front was voiced, oddly enough, by Anh Ba. In its simplicity it was anti-climactic. There were to be some final exhortations before we departed, but Ba just said:
“You have had a good experience. You have hidden in the forest. You have eaten the food of the people. You have drunk hot water, cold water, water that made you sick. You have hidden from planes, walked a long distance, run from planes.”
He finished by leaving the future open: “But you will go back, and it will fade. In a few months you will want a more intense experience.”
Received in New York on September 29, 1970.
©1970 Elizabeth Pond
Miss Pond is an Alicia Patterson Fund award winner on leave from the Christian Science Monitor. This article may be published with credit to Miss Pond, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Alicia Patterson Fund
