Can you catch my words in time?

I've been sick the last couple of days, which has given me a little time to wade through the stack of books next to my bed. This is the book that I just finished, and I highly recommend it.

As a child growing up during the sixties, the war in Viet Nam permeated my life. I grew up a mile from campus in Madison, Wisconsin -- one of the "hotbeds" of war protest. We could smell the teargas at our house, and because they were medical personnel and active war resistors, my mom and dad often volunteered to patch up protesters after confrontations with the police or National Guard.

When the news of the massacre at My Lai broke with the full color photographs in Life Magazine, I pored over them endlessly.
Those images were etched onto my psyche -- where they remain to this day.

Nevertheless, I still know very little about Viet Nam. Lady Borton's book gives some background for what the Vietnamese people call "The American War", and is a testament to what a remarkably resilient and forgiving people the people of Viet Nam are. Lady Borton worked in Viet Nam throughout the war, and then was the first Westerner allowed to live in a Vietnamese village after the war ended. Through her writing the women, who provided much of the resistance throughout the war, tell their harrowing and tragic stories. Yet this book contains so much joy and affirmation.

My friend Mike Boehm, a veteran himself, who realized that his own psychological wounds from Viet Nam were slowly bleeding him to death, founded a project in the early nineties that set up a revolving micro-loan fund for women in the My Lai Province. Since then he has worked to establish a peace park in My Lai, raised money to build a school and clinic in the area, and facilitates art exchanges between students in the Madison area and their Vietnamese counterparts. He was featured in an award-winning Vietnamese documentary, The Sound of the Violin at My Lai. If you have a chance to see it, by all means do.

Mike goes back to Viet Nam once or twice each year. Every time he returns I say, "I wish I could go" and he says, "Anytime you want to go with me, let me know." One of these days ...

An afterthought: Every single woman that shared her story with Borton in After Sorrow suffered grievous losses at the hands of the Americans or the US supported puppet regime -- they lost children, husbands, parents, their homes, their livelihoods, and many of them spent time in prison where they were beaten and tortured. Yet they welcomed Borton with open arms; time and again, they would say "Give our greetings to your American brothers and sisters. They are our friends." I cannot help but compare that with the US response to the attacks of 9/11; 5 years down the road the self pity, the bigotry, the absolute inability or refusal to step into a different pair of shoes to view the world in a different way...