From MARG NELSON: I recently received a mailing from Madison Quakers, Inc. which included a talk given by Phan van Do, their representative in Vietnam, in Kyoto, Japan, at a meeting on Peace Museums. Below some excerpts that Friends might like to read as Pat and I prepare to go to Tinh Khe.
War and Peace, Hatred and Reconciliation
People usually do not know the value of things like peace they possess or know how to protect it well until it is lost...
My native village is a fishing village by the sea [in Quang Ngai] where the fishermen used to sit on the beach in the late afternoon to enjoy the breeze from the ocean and to talk about their catch or look into the sky to forecast the weather of the following day while we, the children, used to be playing games on the sand and having a lot of fun. We only lived a simple life, a normal life full of love and care, as beautiful and tranquil as a picture. Nobody had the idea of war or peace.
Then one evening in 1963, from nowhere the war suddenly came over my village. The very first thing that a little 11-year-old boy like me saw is that well-armed soldiers came into my house and caught my father, tied his hands behind and pushed him away in the dark. I did not know why and where they took my father to, but by intuition, I saw his death. My father was shot after that without any court.
My family then including my three sisters, my brother, and I, after burying my father, had to move away... We had to move from place to place to avoid death. Then a year later, in 1964, my house was burned down, my brother, 20 years old then, was killed in a joint operation by the South Korean soldiers, Americans and the South Saigon army in my native village. His body is still missing. He is the third man in my family killed in war: my grandfather was tortured to death in the Saigon regime prison in the late 1930s during the French time, my father by the VC and my brother by the South Koreans. Each side of the war took away a life of my dearest.
My life was even worse then. My childhood was a wandering boy, playing with gun shells, grenades, bullets as toys...with other boys in the village imitating the real war we saw. We really had no idea of peace. ...my sisters and I lived in misery during that time after family was destroyed by the war. I hated all those who turned my family upside down. [However,] I did not know exactly who to hate because all the sides of the war too part in destroying my family.
...The war has ended but hatred, war wounds, losses, humiliation, and a silent call for revenge inside the survivors and the victims still live on and sometimes flare up too poignantly in one's heart to control everyday. How can you easily forget the painful past... How can you forgive your enemies...? There are still after-effect problems of the war... all are affected in different ways, physically, mentally, and morally ruined.
So how can you bring peace into our broken hearts and what can you do with hatred and reconciliation? Peace museums are a good idea... But I wonder if governments around the world are humble enough not to use their power to provoke hatred and revenge against the former enemies...by the displays in war crimes museums...
In my opinion, why don't we rely on and learn from each other, for example from this conference, to turn more and more war museums where hostility is nourished and passed down to young generations into peace museums or turn war statues into peace parks? Besides, why don't we try our efforts to bring relief to the victims both physically and mentally to reduce their pains right now? ...That is the real practice of reconciliation in dignity and that is my pursuit in the struggle for peace.
Thank you, Phan van Do Hanoi, August 28, 2008

Phan van Do is assisting us in our visits on behalf od Madison Quakers. I feel honored to meet him.