Vietnam Redemption...Full Circle

repaid!

Introduction

Why This Book

I returned to the People's Republic of Vietnam after forty-three years and experienced a near total, catastrophic collapse of my psychological defense mechanisms through flashbacks. I realized in the throes of my meltdown that just as necessary as breath is to my body, it was no less vital to my healing to write what you are about to read. In the beginning, this project was mostly about me and for me, and it did not need to be published; it was already working its remedial work in my soul. However, about halfway through the process of writing it, I realized that the message emerging as I wrote was far broader and hugely more applicable to a vast number of bleeding souls other than my own. These are the wounded souls of not only combat veterans, but also those of the hundreds and thousands of men and women, boys and girls whom I have counseled over the years. In other words, it dawned on me that I was writing about the human condition and how the events and circumstances of our lives often inflict wounds upon our souls. These wounds to our souls, or our psyches, if you prefer, largely go unidentified but not unfelt. In a sense, we are all walking-wounded as we journey through life. So this book is for all of us, the maimed survivors of this life.

There are any number of ways those injuries are incurred, so how it happens matters little in the overall scheme of things. What seems important to me, however, is that we recognize that it has happened to us, and that it has created the baggage, as it were, that we carry through life. Apart from this recognition, no healing can take place and healing is essential if we are to live a life of integrity and joy. It is not recognition, per se, that heals, but, recognition is a precursor to healing. Unfortunately, many people recognize that they have been damaged in some way or other and may even recognize who afflicted them, how and when it happened, but because they do not take steps to remediate the problem, all they can do is feel it. There is a better way and that is what I discuss in the closing chapters of Vietnam Redemption...Full circle.

Truth or Fiction

Some of my reviewers have asked me, if the war experiences in your story are real and the healing of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was real, why the fiction? The answer to that is quite simple. Since I have spent a good deal of time in Vietnam in the last three years, I have become personally acquainted with many Vietnamese. I have heard their stories from both the enemy, North Vietnamese perspective, as well as from the friendly, South Vietnamese perspective. The stories I have heard from these encounters exposed me to the detail of human tragedy, starvation, poverty, endless wars, family deprivation and horrific death amidst unimaginable conditions of the Vietnamese people. Although we’ll never know for certain the exact number, over two million Vietnamese civilians are said to have died in that conflict. Like US soldiers, from my conversations with many of them, I have learned that Vietnamese soldiers are still, to this day, struggling to overcome the wounds to their souls from their wartime experiences, as are most Vietnamese families. Therefore, the casualties are still mounting. Since I was made aware of the Vietnamese side of the narrative, I felt compelled to represent them and their war in the telling of my story. After all these years, I realize that the Vietnamese soldiers who tried to kill me were in the final analysis, men just like me. They were mostly honorable soldiers, doing their duty and even though some of them did dishonorable things in the name of war and in the form of atrocities, their story needs to be told and understood by their American counterparts.

In order to work that story line into my theme I had to introduce fictional characters whose stories I could tell from what I had seen, experienced, read and researched through personal interviews. I wanted to talk about some of the history of the Vietnamese people because without that context it is difficult, if not impossible, for Americans to grasp what would have motivated the Vietnamese people to fight the vastly superior armed, equipped and trained American forces. Only an understanding of their history could provide such needed insights to Western readers.

One other piece that is part truth and part fiction is the photograph that plays a prominent role throughout my story. The truth is that I did remove such a picture from the wallet of a dead North Vietnamese Army (NVA) soldier. That moment changed the war for me on a very deep and personal level, and I was never the same after that experience. The fiction part is that the picture and name of that soldier are not connected to the real person of Thuy, whom you will also meet and get to know throughout my story. Thuy did have an uncle killed in the war and he died where I was and when I was there; I could have been the one who killed him but I do not know that for certain. The Restaurant Confession chapter captures the detail of that conversation and is a factual encounter between Thuy and me.

The extended dialogues which are set on the train to and from Sapa are used as a literary devise to nudge the reader into an examination of his or her own injuries to the soul encountered during the normal, everyday course of life. As a psychotherapist and marriage and family counselor of many years, I realize that while most of us survive the experience of family life, most of us also carry wounds from the experience. There are no perfect parents and no perfect children. As a result, things happen in families of origin that create damage that most often goes undiagnosed. Even undiagnosed injuries hurt and they are mostly felt for a lifetime. While human beings are quite resilient and manage to get through life satisfactorily, we are at the same time, quite fragile and we are wounded easily. The dialogue in those chapters is meant not only to raise awareness of these issues but also to provide some limited insight into how they manifest and moreover, what can be done to facilitate healing from the injury.

Healing and Reconciliation

For Vietnam vets, it has been nearly fifty years since the catastrophic events of that war invaded our souls, and it is time for healing and reconciliation. The path leading to healing can only be accessed once one is aware of the need and then, only when that one is willing to embark on the journey. There are millions of people who are suffering from the trauma of war. Many, if not most, will never deal with the wounds of war; they are oblivious to the need. As I traveled in Vietnam and spoke with NVA veterans and former Viet Cong insurgents, they knew that damage was done but they had no clue that anything could possibly be done to ameliorate the effects of war upon their souls. The aim of this book is to help those clueless veterans understand, that indeed, it is possible to address the injury that has been done to your soul. Of course, as I record in the chapter entitled, The Dream, I realize that not everyone who reads this book will avail themselves of the help that can deliver them from their self-imposed prison. In a sense, they will remain the volitional prisoners of war, and there are many.

Recently, I had the occasion to talk with one such vet who volunteers his time at a small museum in California, established to memorialize the war in Vietnam. I’ll call him Mike which is not his real name. Mike spends many hours per week helping out in the museum. Everything that he touches reconnects him to the tragedy of his involvement in that war and it keeps the memory alive for him. But it does not help him heal; it only keeps the tragic memory alive. When I mentioned healing as a possibility, he rejected that notion in favor of his belief that he needed to relive the pain every day in order to honor the lives of those who had died in that war. While I understand that, such a position does not allow for the living to go on living, and Mike is proof of that assertion. He is in a hopeless and endless cycle of despair from which there is no deliverance.

To the rest, however, those who are not content to remain the prisoners of war, there is help and healing available. In the closing chapters of Vietnam Redemption...Full Circle, I present what I consider to be the ultimate full circle event, and it is in that connection that healing is made possible for all wounds to the soul. As you read this, I hope and pray that you will find the writing engaging and that the message will be healing to you as you travel your own full circle journey.

Chapter 1

Destination Hanoi

October 21, 2011. The first inkling I had that something was about to happen to me occurred when I stood in the departure area of the Hong Kong Airport preparing to board a 9:30 a.m. flight to Hanoi. As the Vietnam Airlines Airbus 320 taxied to the passenger boarding gate, something on the tail caught my eye. It was as if I had lost track of time and place for a moment. Something I saw in the logo on its tail stunned me. There it was: the yellow star against a red background...The flag of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

In an instant, in my mind’s eye, I was back in the Republic of South Vietnam in 1968 when I first saw that flag as the emblem of the enemy. This was an enemy, which had killed my friends and inflicted wounds upon my soul—wounds that were etched in my memories for a lifetime. The memories of war do not go away. But then again, it wasn't the enemy, as such, that had inflicted these injurious recollections. No, upon reflection, it was the war itself and in particular, my participation in it. For the moment, that flag symbolically represented everything I had experienced in the Vietnam War that I had worked hard, both consciously to suppress and unconsciously to repress.

As I stood at that window gasping, I had to remind myself that I was returning to Vietnam on a Christian mission. I was returning to the people and the land that I had once sought to destroy. Little did I realize that this short-term missionary trip would have more to do with my own Christian experience and understanding as a human being than I could possibly have imagined.

Over the next several moments, I regained my composure and orientation to time and place. As the rows inclusive of my seat assignment were called, I presented my passport and boarding pass to the smiling gate agent and found my seat. My seat for the short two-hour flight to Hanoi was on the left side of the aircraft. It was at a window just aft of the wing section so that I would have an unobstructed view when we made our descent into the Hanoi airport. Once buckled into my seat, I began to survey the aircraft’s interior, which appeared to be impeccably maintained. Everything looked new. The all-female cabin crew, each with flawless makeup and dressed in traditional Vietnamese ao dies, were charming and efficient as they prepared the cabin for departure. I was comforted when the voice of the captain came over the cabin speaker to give us his short welcome and preflight briefing. His noticeable accent revealed that he was an Australian national flying for Vietnam Air. I had this twinge of concern about who was flying because in the 1970’s, as a U.S. Army helicopter instructor pilot, I trained many South Vietnamese Air Force students to fly. And while some of them were capable airmen, many of them ought never to have been given their wings. Indeed, many were given their wings because of family connections or bribes paid to the right people in the high places. These sons of privilege could secure a pilot position in the Vietnamese Air Force because their parents could afford to pay. As a professional airline transport pilot myself, I shuddered to think of the prospects of a Vietnamese flight deck crew if their seats were filled in the same way. I slowly began to relax for the flight.

Once established in cruise flight, I decided, out of curiosity, to thumb through the in-flight magazine. As I did, I chanced upon an article that intrigued me. It was a short article, which highlighted a mental health program located in the North of Vietnam that was especially tailored for the women who had fought bravely against the Americans. The article told the story of women who were so deeply scarred from their combat experience that they required a live-in retreat facility in order to affect their treatment. A few pictures accompanying the article revealed that this retreat was situated in the beautiful mountains to the north of Hanoi. The piece went on to describe how the women living within the program could only be ministered to by other women who had the experience of combat. I was fascinated by the obvious government respect for the women who endured frontline warfare. I took note of the fact that this communist government acknowledged the emotional scars carried by these veterans and had declared it a national health issue. I must admit that this created somewhat of a paradigm shift in my thinking about the Vietnamese communist government. This was not the same government that had prosecuted the war, I thought.

It seemed like no time at all, before the plane began its descent out of our cruising altitude, which was flight level 370. Descending through the scattered layer of white billowy clouds we were making a visual approach to the Hanoi Airport. In a few minutes, we leveled at what I guessed to be, from the type of clouds around us, about 12,000 feet. The aircraft bucked mildly in the light chop as we popped in and out of puffy cumulus clouds. The flight crew maneuvered the aircraft to the final approach segment for the Hanoi Airport, lowered the flaps, and put down the gear. With the gear down, and now well below the lowest layer of clouds, the ground came plainly into view. Even though it was just after noon, the misty sky, the industrial smoke, and the smoggy emissions of vehicles operating in and around the bustling city of Hanoi, all combined to create a significant restriction to flight visibility. As we made our approach for landing from the North, the rice fields appeared pockmarked, which suggested that this area had once been bombed extensively by US B52 bombers over 40 years ago. I was shocked that in the elapsed time interval, the land, which, for all appearances, seemed to be usable farmland, had not been reclaimed.

As we continued our descent, the approach lights of the instrument landing system of the airport came into view. The touchdown on the runway was about as smooth as any A320 landing I have ever experienced. Regardless of who performed it, the captain or the first officer, the landing was well done. As the aircraft rolled out on the runway, I saw a row of Quonset hut style hangers, a leftover of the World War II days, which were filled with old Chinese and Russian Mig fighter aircraft. The captain exited the runway on taxiway Charlie and continued toward the passenger terminal. As we taxied to the ramp area I was flabbergasted to see a United States Air Force C-17 cargo plane parked on the ramp. I thought, What a mind-bending experience that must've been for a US Air Force crew to fly into the Hanoi airport. Of course, as I now think about it, the flight crew on that Air Force flight was too young to have had any recollection or experience of the Vietnam conflict. That's preserved in memory for us old guys.

Unlike the Hong Kong Airport, which was spectacularly new and clean, and well organized, the Hanoi Airport was a relic of the 1950s, probably built by the French. Once through customs where our bags had been scanned, they were scanned a second time, in an effort to prevent contraband from being smuggled into the country. Afterwards, our group assembled outside the main terminal. There, we met Thuy, who would be our Vietnamese tour guide, and she was accompanied by our bus driver, a middle-aged man whose name was Son. While Thuy’s English was impeccable, Son spoke no English. I didn't know it then, but within two days of meeting Thuy, she would reveal something to me that utterly rocked my world and turned me inside out, transforming my life forever.

Thuy was 31 years old, 5'2" tall and probably weighed all of 90 pounds if she wore her daypack and carried some encyclopedias. Her shiny, jet black, shoulder length hair, cut in a Dutch Boy style gave her an air of authority. The smooth sculpted lines of her hair framed her attractive face and suggested that she had recently had it meticulously cut. Two things stood out to me about Thuy. If anyone could be described as having sparkling eyes, it was Thuy. There was something deep within those eyes that revealed the life of the person; a zest for living, an uncommon compassion and love for humanity, so rare and yet so precious. Secondly, she had a quick, easy, friendly smile. Apparently, she did not feel self-conscious about having an eyetooth on her left side uppers that had overgrown between her incisors and premolars, as evidenced by her ready, effervescent smile.

Thuy appeared to be comfortable in her skin. While we, as a group, were her clients, she made no effort to maintain any sense of formality, nor did she give off any air of pretention. It was as if each and every one of us in our group, thirteen in all, were her lifelong best friends. Dressed in Levi's and wearing a T-shirt, as she was, it was clear that Thuy was not interested in making any fashion statement. When we spoke to Thuy or when she spoke to us, she made eye contact--careful, studying, eye contact. It was evident by this mannerism that she cared to understand what we said or what we asked of her. As I began to fill in my gaps of knowledge about our guide, I learned that she was the younger of two daughters and was a university graduate with a degree in tourism, granted by the University of Hanoi. She still lived with her parents in a modest rather typical middle-class Vietnamese house located a few miles North of Hanoi, in what we would call the suburbs. She did not own a car or a motorbike and relied on public transportation to deliver her wherever she needed to go. She was always on time.

I learned in a short time that Thuy had another side, one that was not suggested by her diminutive stature or by her quick, easy smile. When it came to protecting and directing her charges, she was like a free ranging, barnyard mother hen with a brood of chicks. Any street vendor who approached us—and there were many, any beggar that approached us—and they were ubiquitous, any traffic situation that needed to be superintended, Thuy was, without a doubt, in charge.

Crossing almost any Hanoi Street, between the hours of 5 a.m. and midnight is a matter of luck, if you believe in that, or divine intervention, if you prefer. The first time I saw Thuy’s exhibition of raw courage and utter hutzpah in the face of certain death, happened when we left the terminal and attempted to cross the street to our waiting bus. The traffic was non-stop; mostly motorbikes and a few taxis in a continuous stream, four or five abreast like spawning salmon in an Alaskan stream. With nerves of steel, she stretched out her left arm, as if that would stop anything, motioned all of us to stay close and to follow her lead. She then stepped right out, directly in the path of oncoming motorbikes and taxis, causing them to either yield to her and her charges, or to run her down. Some of the traffic slowed a bit, some stopped, but most just veered around. Miraculously, the strategy worked because nobody was killed or injured while crossing the street.

I also discovered that our guide, whose family members were varying shades of Buddhists and ancestor worshippers, had converted to Christianity while in college. As a student, Thuy fell under the influence and teaching of an underground Christian fellowship. She said, When I read in the Bible how Jesus paid my sin debt by dying on the cross for me, I just cried. She was one of those persons whose Christian faith was more a matter of practice than either doctrine or theology. I saw that quality in the way she responded to human needs. Vietnam is a poor country and the needs of the people we encountered in our day-to-day travels were staggering to us as Americans. While she exercised a certifiable degree of judgment and possessed an inner sense of discernment far beyond her years, she handled the requests of beggars with aplomb. This she did by giving a little to some, more to others, and absolutely nothing to the volitionally dispossessed. Somehow she knew the difference in each case. Thuy possessed a special sensitivity for the Hmong people, a despised and persecuted minority in Vietnam. Living in very remote, rugged mountain villages in utter destitution; the Hmong are barely able to eke out a subsistence living from the poor land they occupy. As we visited some of these villages, Thuy excused herself from the group and allowed us to wander about. While we were occupied, she went to meet privately with village elders, mothers with infants, and schoolteachers to determine how she could supply basic needs for the neediest households. These were needs that apparently no one else on earth would care to know about. But to these people, Thuy brought medicines, combs, toothbrushes, blankets and food to the villages she frequented. All of the mountain people we met knew Thuy and loved her. The Hmong people responded to Thuy like a Vietnamese Mother Teresa and they looked forward to meeting the tourists that she brought to their villages. As the visiting friends of Thuy, the Hmong villagers opened their hearts to us, invited us into their homes, and revealed their lives and lifestyles to us in ways that are not common experiences for most tourists.

We brought our cash and the message of Christ to these Hmong villagers. With our cash we bought their handicraft items, souvenirs, food items and other odds and ends, which they sold. Most were street vendors, but many worked from stalls at the front of their living quarters. Most of these stalls had dirt floors. They were so pathetically barren, dark, smoky, and damp that it was inconceivable that a life could be lived in such quarters. Beyond being places of commerce, they were also homes; homes where children were birthed, suckled and raised. To our western eyes and sensibilities this was abject poverty in the extreme. The sights and smells of this deep abiding poverty etched its way into our consciousness. While we boarded our comfortable bus, the villagers and the poverty we left behind remained a living memory, even as the bus bounced on down the dirt road to our next destination. For those who were born to it, this was their past, their present and their future. This was Thuy’s world, her work, and her life into which she invited us so our eyes might be opened. She hoped that we would see and understand a world that existed beyond our borders. She hoped that we would remember what we had experienced far away from our comfortable houses and our comparative effortless wealth. I was taking all of this into my mind and heart; unconsciously I was creating a new database from which a new perspective might form. This was not a guilt trip Thuy intended to lay on us, but a reality check for each of us. While I saw these remote villages and their destitute inhabitants as an important takeaway, it was not the seminal moment for me, or even the most significant insight I gained in my travels the next few days with Thuy. There was more, much more.

On the long bus ride from the airport to our hotel, the sights, sounds, and smells of North Vietnam, began to lift the veil which obscured my conscience. It was as though I saw with a new set of eyes and perceived with a new set of senses. My mind and senses seemed to process all this with a type of hypersensitivity. While I had seen these scenes many years before, it was as if I saw for the first time and understood something I had never understood before. Driving past people working in rice paddies, old images began to emerge, of the not so favorable sort. These were images that reminded me in vivid detail of the death and destruction that I had been a part of four decades earlier. Seeing the ramshackle huts of the Vietnamese peasants brought forth the recollection of villages that I had had a part in destroying. I began to ponder my complicity in making so many peasants homeless. As trite as it may sound, even seeing a water buffalo grazing by the side of the road overwhelmed me. Those sights called to mind the missions I had flown in which I was called upon to destroy dozens of water buffalo. Though I thought nothing of it then, now I recognized that the buffalo I slaughtered belonged to peasants who were utterly dependent upon them for the production of rice. The mere act of riding on this bus and seeing these things began to make me feel a bit overwhelmed.

As we traveled, I looked around at my twelve mission’s team cohorts and thought about the fact that what they saw, and what I saw, were worlds apart. What they saw was the quaint and novel sights of peasants working in their fields. Objectively, they saw rice farmers using water buffalo as their tractors in the picturesque countryside. They saw the simple lifestyles of the people. What I saw, on the other hand, was images of smoking villages; dead, maggot infested bodies floating in rice paddies. I remembered the swarms of flies around those bodies, and I vividly recalled the bloated, dead water buffalo. My teammates were euphoric with these visions while I sat there bleeding from them. The stark, perceptual differences between my companions and me were more than worlds apart; they were spiritual dimensions apart.

Unbeknownst to me in that moment, what I saw was the desperation of my own soul. What I felt for the first time was how deeply scarred my soul was from my war time experience. I was so profoundly affected, that only an omniscient God could possibly bring to light the things that were hidden for so long. Bumping along, on that lousy road between the Hanoi Airport and our downtown hotel, I was in the initial stages of having surgery performed on my conscience. I bore the weight of personal guilt for things I had done as a soldier at war. From the depths of my conscience flowed a sense of remorse so deep that it almost choked me. These were things I had repressed. Now, they were crystal clear and brutally evident to me as I rode speechless, into my day of reckoning.

When we arrived at the hotel, we were instructed to be back in the lobby within thirty minutes so we might board a municipal bus, which would deliver us to a museum about twenty minutes from where we were staying. At an unconscious level, the ride from the airport had done its preparatory work on me, and I felt like a heart surgery patient. Within a few moments I would be wheeled into the operating room where the actual work would take place. I couldn't begin to imagine the extent or detail of what was about to occur.

Once in my room, as instructed, I quickly conducted a survey of the amenities and accoutrements of the place and decided that unpacking could wait. I then made my way down to the hotel lobby within the thirty minute guideline we were given by Thuy. What happened next was every bit as serious as having valves replaced on my heart, or having my liver transplanted.

Our group walked the few blocks from the hotel to a point where we could catch the appropriate municipal bus, which would take us within a five minute walk of our destination, the cultural museum. Once on the bus, suddenly