Special to The MinaretThe man and the little girl enjoyed the starlit sky from a lawnchair at the end of the driveway. They had both finished their supper, but the heat remained unbearable. The midnight rain became a welcomed sign for the farm.
The girl sat on the man’s lap, and they lost themselves in the spectacle that illuminated the sky. The flashes momentarily erased the darkness. But the sky wasn’t lit up by fireworks or heat lightening. B-52 bombers were destroying the surrounding area of Da Nang. Robert Sullivan found it surreal.
“You could actually feel the ground rumbling from the B-52 strikes, even though the bombings were 10 to 15 miles away,” he said.
The road that led Sullivan to this place began after high school graduation. Sullivan had a strong desire to go to Asia. The works of one of his favorite writers made the continent intriguing.
“I had read Rudyard Kipling stories and poetry since I was about 7 or 8 years old. I was fascinated by the descriptions of life in the Orient and I wanted to go there to see if it was still like that,” Sullivan said. “I felt the Army was my best way to get there.”
A year into his training, he was deployed to Thailand on highly classified missions that he still won’t discuss, The trip opened his eyes as well as those of the Thai people.
“Most of the people assumed America and Americans were exactly like what they would see in the movies,” he said. “I think they were surprised to learn that we were not what they expected and that Americans could work closely with the Thai troops and civilians.”
After two years, Sullivan was discharged from the Army following a serious motorcycle accident. He still felt compelled to return to Asia. This time, he wanted to make a different kind of impact. Sullivan began contacting agencies to teach, but he found the process difficult.
“Everyone I contacted was reluctant to employ me because of my previous military activities,” he said. “They thought that I might be a mole and was seeking employment as a cover for infiltrating the groups and reporting on their activities.”
Sullivan was offered a job as a high school teacher in Vietnam. The solider was now a civilian in a country at war with the U.S. His time there was not an easy transition. He battled with the notion of serving his country as a solider and the desire to engross himself in a culture as a civilian. This led him to see the war in a different light than most.
“I was able to see the war from the perspective of a Vietnamese civilian,” he said. “I lived as a Vietnamese, lived in a Vietnamese neighborhood, ate Vietnamese food and did everything that was so different from all that I had experienced in the past.”
Sullivan said one moment in particular encapsulated the craziness of war.
“I remember when I came upon a Marine pointing his gun at this little boy and yelling at him to pick up some timber that had fallen off a truck,” Sullivan said. “The boy didn’t understand, and it was very obvious that the Marine had lost it entirely. I approached the boy so that the Marine would see that I was an American. I did my best to tell the Marine to calm down. Then I told the boy to leave, and I threw the lumber up into the back of the truck.”
To this day, Sullivan remembers the Marine and sympathizes with him.
“I think it was not uncommon for some Americans to feel that same sense of loneliness and fear,’ he said. “It was how you dealt with it that made things bearable.”
The impact Sullivan had on the Vietnamese as a civilian was similar to the impact he had on the Thai people as a solider. A lot of peoples’ lives were made better because of his hard work. Just like the life of that little girl in Da Nang.
“I think that some of the things I did improved the life of the Vietnamese,” he said. “I taught the children and tried to represent my country to the best of my ability.”