WAR COMES TO THE CHILDREN

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31215, 12 November 1966, Page 5

WAR COMES TO THE CHILDREN

TN Vietnam for a long time now war A has been a fact. In war nobody is immune from it, —not even the children, and many of the Vietnamese children are learning about the grim facts of war before they are even aware of the facts of life.

War here is a fact of life.

The children’s ward at Qui Nhon hospital bears witness to this.

On a stretcher lies a little

boy. He is 10. Yesterday he had a mother, a father and two sisters. Today he has nobody. His family is dead, both his arms were broken by mortar fragments, and are now encased

in plaster. He is in pain and bewildered, but still does not‘

cry—he has accepted a fact of life.

In a bed lies a small girl. She is only seven. She will

be a long time here because her face and parts of her body are very badly burned by napalm. Occasionally she is fed some liquids by her grandfather. She likes this

because it soothes the hotness of her body. She will understand the

facts of life in about 10 years from now when all the pain will have been forgotten, and looking in the mirror, she searches for an answer in the image of her scarred face. At 11.30 a.m. each day in another ward, six-year-old Ho Ly Cong will go to a locker, take from it a battered aluminium bowl and proceed with it down a long, covered way towards the far end of the hospital. There the one and only meal for the day is dispensed to some 300 of the 600 patients at the hospital. ■jte will disappear between of the adult patients

clustered around the food dispensing point, reappearing a short while later happily grinning, his bowl filled with rice and topped with a few tiny fish. He takes this all the way back to the ward where his mother is lying. After depositing the bowl carefully on the floor, he takes hold of her hands and gently pulls her into a sitting position. Then they settle down and share the food. Afterwards he will help his mother to lie down, and, when she is again comfortable, will expertb exercise her paralysed (Igs.

In front of the door to the operating theatre squats a man. Before him, on a stretcher, neatly covered with a grey blanket lies his son. Yesterday his son was running and laughing and behaving like any other boy of nine. Today he lies very still. A few hours ago there was still hope—the New Zealand surgeons did everything. Removing bits of shrapnel and bullets from his frail body, giving blood-transfu-sions, massaging his exposed heart. But it was too late.

Pictures and story by GEORGE KOHLAP