On the evening of November 2, 50 years ago, a 31-year-old American, the father of three little children, drove 64 km from Baltimore to the Pentagon in Washington. As the day turned to dusk and staff at the US department of defence began to make their way home, he positioned himself 12 metres from the window of defence secretary Robert McNamara, poured kerosene on himself and set himself alight. “He did it in Washington”, as the British poet Adrian Mitchell put it. “where everyone could see/because/people were being set on fire/in the dark corners of Vietnam where no one could see”.
The first American ground troops had been dispatched to Indochina just a few months earlier in 1965. There wasn’t, at that point, widespread alarm among Americans. Those who dissented were vilified as agents of communism. It would have been difficult, though, to press that charge against Norman Morrison, the human torch who hoped to sear America’s conscience on November 2, 1965.
Norman was a Quaker, a member of a Christian sect that took seriously the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”. Earlier that day, he had been discussing with his wife, Anne, an article that quoted a French Catholic priest whose church in Vietnam had been at the receiving end of US military “assistance”.
“I have seen my faithful burned up in napalm,” the priest was quoted as saying. Just a few hours later, on his way to the Pentagon, Norman stopped to mail a letter to Anne. “Know that I love thee,” he wrote, “but I must go to help the children of the priest’s village.” Norman was not alone. He had Emily with him. His daughter was just 11 months old. To his wife, he explained that “like Abraham, I dare not go without my child”. Emily was evidently still in his arms when he went up in flames. Eyewitn-esses recall hearing shouts of “Drop the baby!” from onlookers, but there is little consensus on how it came to be that Emily was, ultimately, completely unscathed.
Decades later, she noted: “By involving me, I feel he was asking the question, ‘How would you feel if this child were burnt too?” Morrison’s sacrifice made headlines locally, but most Americans were unmoved. One who wasn’t, it turned out 30 years later, was defence secretary McNamara himself. Devoting two pages to Morrison in his 1995 memoir In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lesson of Vietnam, he noted that Norman’s “death was a tragedy not only for his family but also for me and the country. It was an outcry against the killing that was destroying so many Vietnamese and American youth.”
Many other Americans, too, were disturbed by the flaming response to depredations being wrought by America, but Norman Morrison did not become a household name in the US. It did in Vietnam, though. Songs and poems were composed to honour what was seen as a selfless sacrifice, and within months his visage was imprinted on a North Vietnamese postage stamp. The innumerable condolences Anne Morrison received from Vietnam included one from Ho Chi Minh.
For a long time, though, she turned down invitations to visit Vietnam, partly because she saw her husband’s act as non-partisan, a cri de coeur against killing in general. She changed her mind in the late 1990s, after encountering a Vietnamese man who told her that long ago, like most Vietnamese children, he had learned by heart a poem dedicated to Norman by North Vietnam’s poet laureate.
Anne and her daughters Christina — who was five when her father died, and inclined in later years to question his dedication to the children of a distant land over his own — and Emily were completely overwhelmed by the love they encountered in Vietnam in 1999.
The many American interventions in the past 40 years, notwithstanding periodic breast-beating about the “Vietnam syndrome”, indicate that the lessons of the conflict in Indochina remain largely unlearned. And the likes of Norman Morrison generally remain subject to apathy and ridicule.
Back in 1965, though, at least the victims understood where he was coming from and were eternally grateful for his honesty, his solidarity and his searing self-sacrifice — when he, as Adrian Mitchell put it, “simply burned away his clothes/ his passport, his pink-tinted skin,/ put on a new skin of flame/ and became/ Vietnamese”.
By arrangement with Dawn
