The Return - an online diary of one Vets return to Nam

[Dover]

2004 Trip - http://www.vietnamveteranministers.org/chaplain/today.htm

Here is another Vet's online diary from a trip to Nam in 2002:
http://www.pauahtun.org/Exile/

[democrank]

1. Thanks for posting this.

Some members of Veterans for Peace have also made the trip back. Hope it helped all of them heal.

[AbsoluteArmorer]

2. split decision

I can understand how some Nam Vets would find peace with the Vietnamese from such a trip, but to somehow forgive Washington for it's lies and deceptions that caused such carnage to all of those involved is just incomprehensible for me to grasp no matter how many times I'd travel to Vietnam today. Especially with what's going on in Vietnam II in Iraq.

I am glad for those few Vets who feels that they have found peace.

[Dover]

3. Fallen Leaves, Broken Lives

January / February 2005
By Edward Tick,
Utne magazine


...excerpt:

AS A PSYCHOTHERAPIST, I have been working with Viet Nam veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder since 1979. In May of 2000, I co-led, with Professor Steven Leibo, our first journey of reconciliation to Viet Nam. Now, annually, I escort groups of veterans, vets' wives, siblings, and children, Amerasian young adults, professors and teachers, protesters, activists, adventurers, and students through the battlefields, Buddhist shrines, cemeteries, schools, and healing centers of Viet Nam. We meet with Vietnamese veterans who fought the Japanese, French, Chinese, and Khmer Rouge Cambodians as well as the Americans. We seek to encounter the Vietnamese people and culture as they are, to discover what they feel about war and about us. We seek to discover what has become of them since what they call the American War ended. We seek to build a personal and lasting reconciliation, peace, and friendship within ourselves and between our people and countries that were once, wrongly and tragically, enemies.

On that first journey, north and south, both in cities and along the countryside, we met countless people without arms or legs, or whose bodies were deformed, or who had developed strange mushroom-shaped tumors on their scalps, faces, arms, and legs. We arrived at the Hong Ngoc Humanity Center just a month after the 25th anniversary of our war's end. At the time, the Humanity Center was a long warehouselike building containing a sheltered workshop for 270 disabled children, who made and sold silk needlework, hand-sewn garments, and intricate carvings out of stone and wood. Ranging in age from the early teens to mid-20s, these young Vietnamese were either deaf and mute or physically disabled or both. One girl had no legs below her mid-thighs and wobbled as she struggled to walk. A boy with only an upper torso pulled himself along the floor on a makeshift wooden platform.

I spent much time talking with Van, a young man with a strikingly handsome face, a beatific smile, and eyes blazing with intelligence. Instead of fingers and toes, though, he had twisted, craggy claws (and these only after surgical repair). Van told me he was born in the immediate area, as were all the residents at Hong Ngoc. No Agent Orange had been sprayed this far north. But his father, a soldier in the south, had fought in the white-powdered jungle. After Van was born disabled, his parents wished to have one normal child, because in Viet Nam adult sons not only carry on the family name and heritage, they care for parents in their old age. A second child was born with identical deformities. Then another. After a fourth similarly disabled child was born, Van's parents gave up. He was the only one lucky enough to find a place at the Humanity Center.

Shocked by what I was hearing, I turned to my guide, assistant director Nguyen Thanh Diep. "Don't worry," he said. "There are not so many children like this in Viet Nam. Now only about 35,000 children like this are born every year."

Cont'd

http://www.utne.com/cgi-bin/udt/im.display.printable?client.id=utne&story.id=11508

[Dover]

4. "The tears of our world are repaired with tears".

...One day during a reconciliation visit to Viet Nam, our group arrived at a Cao Dai temple in Tay Nynh. With us was Bob C., the vet who was haunted by the memory of the fourteen year old Viet Cong boy he had killed. Bob waited while the others disembarked from the bus and disappeared into the temple, and I waited for him. Immediately off the bus, he grabbed me while tears exploded from his eyes.

"I saw them all,", he cried, "as we drove through the rice paddies. All those ghosts of the people I lost and the people I killed."

"I've seen them for years," he continued. "In my nightmares. In my day dreams. When I'm supposed to be working or with my family. There they are, behind the living, staring at me, wanting something from me. I know where their souls are! But I don't know where mine is!"

I held Bob's face. I made him look into my eyes.

"My soul," he repeated, "It's gone. I've been without a soul since the war. I killed innocent people. I killed a boy. I did wrong. I can't feel anything."

I took Bob's hand and raised it to his face. I made his fingers touch and wipe his own tears. "What are these?" I asked.

"Tears", he said.

"And what do tears mean?"

"Feelings," he said. "My God! I'm feeling and don't even know it."

"And which part of us feels?" I asked.

He stumbled over the words, but answered, "My heart and soul".

"And who sees the souls of the dead? Which part of us sees souls?"

"Only the soul", he said. Then his tears burst forth again.

We hugged beneath a simple tree in the dusty hot parking lot of a Cao Dai temple. Bob cried tears that had been awaiting release for decades. I cried with him. Finally he laughed and said, "I guess I do still have a soul. Now it's time to make friends with it again."

Later that afternoon, our group climbed to the Buddhist temple atop Nui Ba Den, Lady Black Mountain, a scene of terrible fighting during the war but today a place of beauty and peace crowned with a Buddhist pagoda. There, with the help of the resident priest, Bob conducted prayers for the soul of the boy he had slain. His grief continued washing through him as he poured out prayers for this boy.
He cried and prayed, cried and prayed, as the monk chanted prayers for the dead. Finally, after decades of nightmares, Bob saw the boy's spirit smile at him. The soul of the boy, who would forever be fourteen years old in Bob's mind, offered the aging American veteran peace and the promise that from now on he would be Bob's spiritual ally, his helper and friend.

..snip..

Bob's nightmares are no more. Where once the war dominated his consciousness, now he carries it in peace. Now he says, "It's just my story."
______________________________________________

From the book, War And The Soul (p. 286)