'A Trip I Once Went On'

A Harvard summer school student who earlier this year sailed a boat full of medical supplies to North Vietnam will tell bout his voyage tomorrow night at a meeting sponsored by the Harvard Draft Project.

John Braxton, who will be a junior at Swarthmore, was a member of the eight man crew of the 50 foot ketch Phoenix which sailed last winter from Hong Kong to Haiphong, defying a State Department ban and government statute, to deliver several thousands dollars worth of vital surgical and x-ray equipment to the North Vietnamese Red Cross.

The trip, sponsored by "A Quaker Action Group," turned to North Vietnam, after the government of South Vietnam had refused to allow Phoenix to unload its material in Danang and again at Saigon. In both ports, what Brazton called "mysterious accidental collisions" with South Vietnamese patrol boats resulted in damage to the Quaker ship.

The Phoenix, which under an earlier pacifist owner had sailed pre-test voyages into American and Russian A-bomb testing zones in the Pacific, also sailed to North Vietnam in March of 1967.

The Quakers had planned a second voyage with medical supplies last fall, but when Ho Cho Minh protested that such a voyage would be too dangerous, Phoenix headed for South Vietnam on its humanitarian mission. After the incidents with the South Vietnamese government and a layover just off Cambodia (to avoid provoking Cambodian-American relation), Ho sent word to the crew to come to Haiphong during the Tet truce at the end of January.

Braxton and the others spent two and a half days in Haiphong, during which time they toured the city and met with local officials.

Accompanying his talk, scheduled for 8 p.m. Wednesday in Emerson 210, will be two films, "Life under the Bombs," filmed in North Vietnam by Frenchmen and a Stat Department production, "Why Vietnam?"