| I met this young boy during my my wanderings in Vietnam in the summer of 2000. I was visiting the grandmother of one of my students in Hoi An in the central region of Vietnam. After lunch everyone took a nap to avoid the hot afternoon sun. I love to explore so I went for a walk down a small dusty dirt road and that is where I met Vinh. He lives this small grass hut with a brick floor. The wall to our right is completely open and looks out onto a swamp. That wooden thing Vinh is sitting on is his bed. I can only imagine that it's not very comfortable to sleep on. In Vietnam they do not have matresses of any kind. Instead there is something made from long grass reeds but it doesn't provide much cushioning.. Vinh looks pretty sad in this picture because he doesn't have any future. His parents can't afford school for him. His mother, Kim is the bread winner in the family. She earns an income by paddling a canoe through the swamp to find coconut trees. She climbs the trees, cuts down coconuts, loads them in the canoe, and paddles back to the market where she sells them for about 20 cents a piece. Vinh's father can't help out the family much. During the Vietnam war, American forces shot off his legs. When I met him he was crawling around his small house on the floor with two home made wooden slats as shoes for the studs where his feet used to be.
I was curious about why he faught against the Americans in the war. From my point of view the US was in Vietnam to help out. We were the good guys right? What he told me changed my view of war forever. He and his compatriots fought against the US to prevent the United States from taking over and controlling the country he loved. They fought to protect the land of their ancesters from the United States of America! Wow! What I have come to learn is that the people who fought and died in that war didn't really understand what they were fighting for. They were lied to by their government! That's true on the American side too. Those that suffered on both sides never really knew why!
How noble was our cause? To answer that question you must ask yourself what value you place on human life. Think about how much you would suffer to lose someone you love deeply. Did you know that in that war over 1,000,000 Vietnamese people lost their lives? That's allot of husbands, brothers, fathers, sisters, aunts, uncles, lovers, children, and friends. Can any cause justify just horric loss of life?
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