Elizabeth Jelinek Boardman

This book is more of a documentary than a drama. It is a bare fleshing out of the diary she kept on her jouney with a Quaker group to bring medical supplies to North Vietnam in 1967 during the war. But right near the beginning she quotes from Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories--I loved that!
I actually learned more about the people involved from another participant's brief account, which is included in the appendix. Betty herself usually assigned opinions to "most people" or "the crew"--when there are only 8 or 9 people. Who was she trying to protect? There seemed to be a lot of dissension among the group, & short tempers. But, as she puts it, "It's hard to work cooperatively with people who are essentially as stiff-necked, individualistic, stubborn, and righteous (how I hate to be called that) as I am" (p.59) "Here we were trying to stop a war while harboring within us all the elements needed to make a war." (p.120)
Betty must have been in the forefront of the feminist movement, and writes in a time when women were paying a lot of attention to the limitations placed on them. She writes of her awareness of not being taken seriously as a leader by the group, she does the cooking and typing--tho she does also take a turn at the wheel and negotiates with officials. She writes "The peace movement in the US was badly crippled by male chauvinism, so there is no reason to believe that the good men I was traveling with were not infected by it too." (p.76) She is impressed with the Vietnamese women she meets, one a mayor, others doing the manufacturing tasks, everyone pitching in to rebuild after bombings.
I'm impressed with the personal energy it took, sailing in a small boat with +/- 8 other people from Hawaii to Vietnam, negotiating with officials for permission, being a guest in a strange country, strange foods, unknown language.
Thru her experiences we learn some of the history of Vietnam, and learn that N Vietnam wasn't an impoverished 3rd world country that was in desperate need of the medicines they were bringing--N. Vietnam had its own pharmaceutical industry, and a high standard of medical care. "It seemed to me that the difference between those women and the often underpaid and underappreciated working women in America was remarkable...We must compete to eat. The Vietnamese cooperate to eat." (p.90) The children they meet were self-confident, happy. "The secret was in the word 'needed'. These kids had a job, a role, they were needed. American kids are an indulgence, an accident, a duty, a joy; but they are not needed." (p.110)
We don't really learn much about why she did this, perhaps she assumed her readers would all come from a Quaker or pacifist background and would know. I did highlight some passages which provided some meager insight into the mission. "we had to say to both the Americans and the Vietnamese ...that people are more important than war, that we Americans are brothers and sisters of the Vietnamese, that love will not be turned aside by American warmakers." (p.41) "We (Americans) were still unable to grasp the idea that the system itself bred this kind of world-wide imperialism for the good of a minute part of our society and to the detriment of the rest of us...the broad vision that the US system had to change in unimaginably drastic ways. 300 years ago we evolved a new concept of government which was better than anything then known, and we must, said Bob, do it again" (p.38-9) "We believed that in the Quaker way there is no real leader but the guidance of the inner light, that we would come to decisions by group consensus and discussions. If we had to have a spokesman at a particular moment we could appoint one. It didn't have to be the same person all the time." (p.75)… (mehr)