Those Who Stayed (i)

from Claudia Krich and the American Friends Service Committee

I lost the pregnancy at six months, in late December 1974.

Nothing made me special. Nothing protected me.

While I was pregnant we had a patient named Ly who had lost her leg to a landmine. […S]he was there with only her three-year-old daughter, Lan.

I quickly learned that Lan was very sick with a rash and a high fever.

The next day that beautiful little girl’s fever was higher.

She became delirious, and then she died. A few days after I visited them at the hospital, I was sick with a rash and fever myself.

After fifty hours of futile labor,

The next day they brought him to us in large glass jar.

The doctors asked where we would bury him.

But there, somehow, they lost him.

Claudia was a friend of Paul and of Timothy. Not my older and next younger brother but the apostle and the saint.

I am Daniel. I read the writing on this wall.

A krich is a kirk, not the starship commander but a church or the Church, Krich in the German language we speak at Berlin and Kirk in the one we speak at Edinburgh. Claudia Krich and her husband directed the American Friends Service Committee clinic at Quang Ngai at the center of the ground war between two cities for one country over the bodies of the people, from early 1973 until the Republic of Viet Nam disbanded in 1975.

The clinic rehabilitated wounded refugees. The American Friends are of the Society of Friends, the church who owned and governed Pennsylvania, Christians who have led in business and government there and nationally ever since.

To visit the sick is the fifth of the first 7 works of mercy which the Krich broadly speaking, the body of Christ, has enumerated from his stories of virgins, sheep, and goats at Matthew 25, the word of god. To shelter the homeless is number 4.

Just after my fifteenth birthday, aged 27, the week she would have given birth to her son, 3 months after losing him, Claudia moved office to the capital in the chaos and panic as the People’s Army took the Republic. In Saigon, she kept her head while so many set each other’s hair on fire and fled into the sea.

She instead remained past the fall of the government and the liberation of the city on April 30 through the first week of July. She kept a diary.

Now she has gathered those entries together into a book, what bible means, a new testament. Claudia Krich is instructing the ignorant.

That is the first of the second 7 works of mercy, of spiritual mercy. She begins by grabbing your humanity in the story above, about the last of the first 7 works, of corporal mercy, to bury the dead.

We have got a witness. For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful and keep us always mindful of the needs of others.

This is the 250th Viet Nam letter since February 9, 2022. Every letter draws attention to literature in the sense of things to read occasioned by the nation of Viet Nam. Read all about it.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.