The five-year-old boy in the photograph is Tran Van Hay. I did not know his name until a friend still in Vietnam sent me the newspaper clipping after I’d returned from the war. When I first saw Tran, his abdomen was ripped open and his intestines were exposed and dangling outside of his abdominal cavity. I didn’t think he would live.
Reflections on a Poisoned Jungle
In my view, the war was unwinnable. The Vietnamese had been there before with foreign invaders. That’s what we were to many Vietnamese. To this day I hear talk of tactics among the revisionists. If only the war had been fought better strategically, we could have won. In reality, we made many of the same mistakes as the French. We failed to learn from their miscues or our own. The Vietnamese were steadfast and patient in their resistance.
Vietnam’s Mekong Delta
Due to the intensity of the agriculture practiced throughout the region, the Mekong Delta is both rural and densely populated. This led to a great tragedy of the Vietnam War—the number of civilian war casualties. The mix of American firepower in the highly populated Delta caused the wounds and deaths of many Vietnamese civilians, children and aged among them. Nothing impacted my own tour more than the numbers of civilian war casualties I saw and treated. Nothing has stayed with me like the scenes of our firepower landing on innocents caught in situations beyond their control. None of the excuses and euphemisms used to explain the numbers of civilian casualties ring true to me. Three-year-old children did not harbor grenades waiting to blow us up. Five-year-old girls were not waiting with rifles to ambush us.
Providence Orphanage
George Mizo and the Friendship Village
George Mizo founded the Friendship Village near Hanoi in 1992. His life is worth remembering. This blog is a tribute to a Vietnam Veteran who grappled with his own guilt about his role in the war. He achieved some degree of reconciliation with former enemies by joining with them to alleviate the suffering of innocents exposed to Agent Orange. Together they have sought to bring awareness to the ongoing problems of Vietnamese exposed to dioxins and the country’s continued problems with birth defects attributed to the widespread spraying during the war.