No one won, everyone lost...

I have had the privilege of meeting some pretty incredible people while I have been here. One such person, I will call him…Mark. Mark is Vietnamese and worked with the American troops during the war.

I knew that he was fairly well known around town, but I had no idea just how far that reached. Come to find out this week that he has had a book dedicated to him in North America and is known within the Vietnam war veterans' circles. He is a very humble man, so it has taken me 8 months to find all this out.

He was telling me today of a story that just about brought tears to my eyes. He is often sought after by veterans looking to come back to Vietnam. The story he told me was of a vet who wanted to come back to find the family of a man that he had seen killed. Apparently, the gruesome story goes that an old Vietnamese man was tied to a board-dropped down a well and shot at by American troops. The vet witnessed all of this from the tank that he was driving.

Decades later, the images still haunted him. He wanted to go back and see how that man’s family was doing. Mark was the literally the middle man between the two parties-translating…translating more than just words though. He recounted how the situation was so stressful that he went through 10 cigarettes in 30 minutes.

He told of how initially the Vietnamese family was very angry. The vet’s return conjured up all the emotions from their father’s death-though decades ago it was still painful. Mark stepped in the middle and lectured both sides. This was the point of the story that I had to fight back tears. He told me how he told both sides…in this war there were no winners, only losers. Everyone lost. He told the Vietnamese family, don’t be upset with this veteran…he lost many of his friends here and can’t you see that this has haunted him for decades? He told both sides, hey we can’t identify Vietnamese or American anymore, the war is over. The war is over.

Reconciliation. What hard work. What brutal work. What heart-wrenching work. Yet, what exquisitely beautiful work.

I told Mark that I thought what he did was incredible. He responded, in his modest way saying that all he wants to do is help “release” people. He said that he could see how much the war affected this vet and if he play a part in releasing him from that burden-that it was well worth it.

That is a picture that I will take with me.

Reconciliation.

Grace and peace and the third way,

Kait