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War Letters: August 1973 to March 1975

By Claudia Krich

I was co-director of the American Friends Service Committee’s program in Vietnam from March1973 until July 1975. We ran a civilian physical rehabilitation center in Quang Ngai, near My Lai, in central Vietnam. We also reported on the war. These are excerpts from letters I sent to my parents and brother, that have never been published.

August 23, 1973
We've been having some hard weeks here. Several people have died; several are still sick. One little girl died probably of hemorrhagic fever—a terrible thing that strikes suddenly, and a child may be dead within two hours. This girl took four days. An eighteen-year-old woman died of burns when her hut caught fire from crossfire warfare. A 25-year-old man was burned over 90 percent of his body when he stepped on an unexploded napalm canister while working his field. He may live but will lose his right hand. Tonight the GVN (Government of [the Republic of] Vietnam), is firing a lot of artillery into the countryside, maybe an eighth or a quarter of a mile from us. The war is certainly not over. There's heavy fighting in many places.

We are now working on the hospital's prison ward, as our doctor has taken over responsibility for it. We talk to prisoners about how they got injured. A young woman in her twenties came in today. She's hemiplegic after being severely beaten during interrogation. A fifteen-year-old girl has serious kidney damage after being kicked in the stomach. And a fifteen-year-old boy has internal pains, for the same reason.

August 26, 1973
Today is Sunday and election day here. At four o'clock this morning, the Rural Development Cadres (a police force funded with USAID money) were out on the street banging on tin lids, making an incredible racket, and calling people through megaphones to come out and vote. At 4:00 a.m. I know there has been no enthusiasm about it at all.

On Friday, our short-term doctor and I (as interpreter) were asked to come to the emergency room of the actual hospital to help. They had no doctors at all, and the huge shelling in Binh Son that morning and the day before had produced a lot of casualties who were beginning to arrive. We couldn't figure out what they wanted of us, so they took us in to see two patients already on the operating tables. One was hit by a mine, with fragments entering the abdomen and other parts of his body. The other man was almost too much to look at. He had been hoeing and stepped on a mine. Usually those take off legs, but somehow he must have been bent over because it blew away his chin and lower face. He just had nothing there at all. Somehow he had already lived for 24 hours and was breathing, even though he had no mouth. They wanted our generalist doctor to somehow do surgery on him, but he couldn't. I'll never forget the man's eyes desperately pleading with me for help.

September 12, 1973
There was a new boy on the burn ward yesterday. He had been injured the day before. He's 11 years old, and his job is finding and collecting shell casings and reworking them into objects for use or beauty to sell. This boy found a White Phosphorus bomb shell casing and took it home. At home, he took his heavy cutting tool and whacked into it. Unfortunately, it was full, not empty, and exploded in his face. Now the only part of his face still visible is his mouth and part of his nose. I thought for sure he'd die, since White Phosphorus is even worse than napalm. But our physical therapist thinks he might live.

November 18, 1973
We had the biggest flood since 1964. Downtown, the water was over my head and swirling dangerously fast. At the hospital, it reached up to my hips and was moving fast. We spent the afternoon hauling children, families, and belongings from the pediatric ward to a nearby two-story ward. We carried sick, smelly, poopy little kids in our arms and on our backs. The drinking water was polluted beyond being saved by boiling; the electricity was out. Some of our workers were sitting in the rafters of their huts while water raced through their houses, ruining everything.

December 19, 1973
One of our newest patients at our Center is a five-year-old girl missing both legs below the knees. Her older sister, who brought her in, is recovering from an injury to her back. It seems an older sister had a soldier boyfriend she intended to marry, but she broke off the engagement, and the boyfriend was furious. He insisted she marry him, but she refused. So one day he came to their house, gathered them together for a "discussion," pulled a grenade off his belt and dropped it in the middle of the group, killing himself, his girlfriend, three other sisters, and injuring the two we met.

February 11, 1974
We have a patient who is a single leg above-knee amputee. While he has been getting treated here, his wife went home to work the rice fields, and she was blown up by another mine and lost both her legs above the knee. The rest of the family is scared to work the field, so they have no rice or money.

Some soldiers shot an 18-year-old young woman for fun and burned 29 houses. Apparently it was revenge for the killing of some local officials. She'll only lose one foot. I told her how lucky she was, then caught myself and started laughing. She completely understood what I meant: losing a foot is almost nothing. Losing a leg or two above the knee, or being a paraplegic— that's worth feeling sad about. Looking around our Center, you just start thinking that way. Missing just a foot, she won't have much trouble walking, but she'll have trouble getting married since some men think a woman missing a limb can't get pregnant, and if the Center closes someday, she'll have trouble getting a replacement leg.

July 26, 1974
We have a patient from Saigon, a 26-year-old woman who was arrested and jailed for 10 months, during which time she was severely tortured with pipes, clubs, and electricity. Upon release, she could no longer walk and had lost feeling in her legs due to beatings to the back and torture with electricity. She had been arrested for demonstrating in Saigon. What exactly does that mean? Well, for instance, after the "election" held in South Vietnam last week, right in Quang Ngai City, amazingly enough, there was an anti-government demonstration. Eight people sat down in the street and several hundred gathered around them. A large number of armed police appeared and hauled away the participants. I was surprised that anyone even had the nerve to demonstrate.

February, 1974
We had a tear-gassing the other night, with some soldiers on a truck playing games. They just tear-gassed us and everyone else on the street—horrid stuff. The PRG (Viet Cong) use lemon and peanut oil to counter its effects. It works, too.

One very old man patient told us he was drunk and went out walking at 5 in the morning in his village. Both sides occupy his village, so a local GVN policeman on duty was quite jumpy. He saw the man and shot him with his pistol. The old man had to have one leg amputated. Well, he did break the curfew.

A more typical story is of children, old people, and teenagers whose legs are blown off by ARVN mines planted helter-skelter all over rice fields and pastures. They never warn local people, and they don't deactivate the mines when they leave an area. These mines are both old, unexploded ones and brand-new ones.

One man was a Special Forces soldier who was sleeping in a villager's house. He didn't know that another group of Special Forces soldiers was sleeping in a house next door. He didn't mine the area around the house he was sleeping in, but the others did. In the morning, he got up early, stepped outside, and stepped on one of their mines. He lost both legs. But being a soldier, he went to the military rehab center, not ours.

May 12, 1974
Yesterday I almost got blown up. Not really, though, probably. Nhuan, our social worker, and I were coming back from visiting a patient in Duc Pho in our old little old Honda car. We came to a bad spot in the road and had to slow down. There was a huge explosion to our left, and Nhuan told me to floor the gas pedal and get out of there. I did. An M79 grenade had been shot toward us, either trying to hit us or just scare us, probably the latter, since they missed. These were GVN soldiers shooting toward their own road, just for fun. Happens all the time. After the initial explosion, we weren't particularly scared. After all, a huge bus that barreled toward us ten minutes later could as easily have killed us. Nhuan's older sister was killed three months ago when she was gathering wood and stepped on an M79 grenade.

August 31, 1974
The prison ward at the hospital is very empty, maybe three patients at a time. When I asked the guard why there were so few patients, he said it was because there were fewer prisoners. At the time, I laughed, but I recently asked a friend who was released from prison six weeks ago how many prisoners are in the Interrogation Center. She said only 400. Several months ago she told me there were 900. Included, however, in this 400 figure are 50 young students from Saigon who were arrested in 1971 and brought to Quang Ngai in April, 1973 to help empty the Saigon jails. She said these young men are almost all paralyzed in the legs from being constantly shackled and not allowed out of their tight cell area. The other prisoners can see these young men but cannot talk with them.

March 16, 1975
We just came back from a funeral. Our Quaker staff member died Friday night, shot by PRG forces. He was an amputee but still a member of the "Self-Defense Forces." On Friday around 8:30 p.m., we heard two explosions. Then people on the street were firing guns and running, shouting, "The Communists are coming in." Everyone is scared because Ban Me Thuot was just taken over by the PRG, or maybe by local angry tribal people.

Anyway, the PRG did come in and threw two grenades into a police post 150 yards from our house, injuring several people and killing two. A few minutes later they shot into a group of Self Defense Forces, killing three, including our staff member. One PRG soldier died too, and his body was left on display by the GVN. A week ago, some PRGers shot into a police station at the other end of town. They're just showing everyone that, in fact, they can come into the city whenever they like.

The ARVN are now massively bombing Ban Me Thuot to "save" it, just like Quang Tri.

March 25, 1975
We're in Saigon now. Vietnam is about to change hands. A city called Tam Ky, on Highway 1 just North of Quang Ngai, just became PRG-controlled this morning. We're trying to get back to Quang Ngai to see the final events, but so far we haven't been able to get there. We're told there are still foreigners in various newly PRG-controlled cities. It's unbelievable how cities, whole provinces, are becoming PRG—places that never have been before. And with very little violence. The ARVN are just running away as fast as they can.

There are hundreds of new foreign press people in Saigon, all waiting for The Event. The murder of Agent France Press correspondent Leandri has infuriated the press. It's pretty sure he was murdered during interrogation in the police station in Saigon, though police say he was accidentally shot while they meant to shoot his car wheels. Three shots in the side of the head.

There's a 10:00 p.m. curfew, 3,000 arrests a day in Saigon, things polarizing fast. It can't last long. Local soldiers just set up a roadblock at the end of our alley, catching 17-year-old young men for the draft, and checking everyone's papers. They're also searching house to house for Communists, as if they'd ever recognize them.

The GVN reports hundreds of thousands of refugees, but we don't believe it. For example, the number they give for Quang Ngai—refugees—would double the current population. It's impossible. Seems to be propaganda aimed at getting the US Congress to provide more funding.

March 31, 1975
The speed at which panic spreads and creates chaos is far greater than that of any military offensive. This situation cannot fairly be called a military offensive. Over and over again, in place after place, the PRG are hard-pressed to keep up with the retreating GVN. Da Nang fell into chaos through panic.

We're told the PRG came in earlier than they planned to, simply to help by establishing some sort of government to end the looting and killing. The American Embassy, along with everyone else, has been amazed at the panic among soldiers and refugees. In Da Nang, we understand that the local civilians were not the people panicking, but rather mostly the military retreating from Hue and Quang Ngai, and refugees from Hue.

Refugees ruined their own "escape" routes by overrunning the airport and causing it to shut down. The harbor was the same scene. Thousands of refugees overran boats, pushing and shoving and killing a few people.

We predicted a week ago that Saigon would begin to panic just about now, and certainly with the fall of Da Nang. Our prediction is earlier than most Vietnamese, but I think it's correct. Panic is an incredible weapon. Food prices are beginning to reflect the fact that Saigon is being choked from its food sources. We are told that luxuries are cheaper, though a typewriter we priced today wasn't. Tonight I'm beginning to feel the uneasiness that eventually took us out of Quang Ngai. Foreigners: targets.

I think if the process were slower, there would be fewer refugees, because the panicking people might be able to stop and realize that the retaliation they fear—the bombing and artillery of the GVN on its own territory when it's taken over—is becoming less and less of a danger as they retreat farther and farther South. And North.

The situation in Saigon is the most important one, since it will be the final stage. There are different views on what could and should happen, but I have yet to meet anyone who wants to salvage Thieu and his friends.

If Thieu manages to stick it out to the end, the last fight will surely be bloody, not so much because anyone will fight for Thieu but because of panic, like Da Nang but worse. What people say about Thieu is that if he tries to leave, he'll be killed, and if he stays, he'll also be killed. Second, Thieu may resign or be killed. Then the liberal opposition may take over, strengthen the government, include the Third Force people, and honestly implement the Peace Agreement and help bring peace. From what we've heard, this solution is fine with the PRG, though it's not the total victory of the first possibility. It's presumably a much less bloody last stand, perhaps even bloodless. Third, Thieu may resign or be killed, and then a rightist coup may take over. This would be difficult in various ways. One, it might be just the same and create further confusion and panic. If it's a slight improvement, the PRG may lose some of the energy being generated by fast victories so far, by losing their war enemy, Thieu. Or, a new regime might get support from the United States, which might resume funding.

No one doubts that this is the end of the Thieu regime. People only wonder how it will go and if they'll survive it. The race is on. Can the opposition Third Force groups get rid of Thieu before the whole situation falls apart?

Marshall Ky seems to be after the job. General Minh is also most interested. General Minh, according to one source, would hope to strengthen what's left of the military, increase its morale (how?), and then negotiate with the PRG, keeping separate territories but giving everyone the freedom to travel. I think the PRG would like to see this happen, since it would, among other things, give them greater protection against attacks from the US. But the people's panic may not allow such a solution.

To be continued in the Spring 2027 issue of The Veteran.

Claudia Krich is the author of the book "Those Who Stayed: A Vietnam Diary," which was released in April, 2025. She directed a medical relief program based in Quang Ngai, Vietnam from 1973 to 1975.

Girl double leg above knee amputee.

Young man one leg below knee one leg above amputee being pushed by younger child.

Woman suffering seizure after being tortured with electricity in Quang Ngai Interrogation Center.