On March 1, my husband Ron and I will leave for 3 weeks in Vietnam, plus a week in Malaysia. I decided to do a blog during this trip to share experiences and reflections. This first post is quite long, I realize, but I want to share a bit about why I am making this trip. Future posts will be shorter - I promise! If you would like to receive notification of new posts, please subscribe with your email address. I will also include a link in each
post to a DropBox picture album.
Several people have asked me - “Why Vietnam?”
It is true Vietnam has become a tourist destination especially for low budget travelers looking for good food, beautiful scenery, warm weather and friendly people. That might be reason
enough for us to go but there are places closer to home like that.
Because of our age, some have asked, “Are you or your husband vets?” or “Did you lose someone in the war?”
Neither Ron or I served in the US military or had a close family member who did, but I guess we are vets in another sense. We are peace movement vets, people whose lives were deeply shaped
by the war we call the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese call the American War. My husband worked on the national staff of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and then the American Friends Service Committee during the years 1965-75,
and went to Vietnam 3 times during the war, including carrying mail between U.S. POW’s in the Hanoi and their families. He also went again in 1995 for the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam-U.S. Friendship Society
.
I’ve not been to Vietnam but am aware how much my experiences in the anti-war movement of the 60’s and 70’s shaped my adult life. My political understandings, my commitments
to social justice and peace, and my life’s work over the past 50 years have their roots in my experiences of those years. And so, I have thought for decades than one day I would go to Vietnam - to experience this country
and its people first hand, to honor their resilence and tenacity, to ponder complexities that may have eluded me in the past.
A little bit about my own anti-war history:
I attended the University of Washington from1966 to 70 and was very active in Lutheran Campus Ministry. At a campus ministry-organized urban plunge in December 1967 in the San Francisco
Bay Area, our group attended an anti-draft protest at the Oakland Induction Center. When I came back to the UW in January 1968 I began to learn more about the war and participate in anti-war activities. Our campus pastor
also happened to be the Seattle staff for Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam (CALCAV, later CALC), an interfaith, anti-Vietnam war organization. After graduating in 1970 I joined the Seattle chapter of CALCAV. A group
of us went to a national strategy meeting in January 1972 and came back to Seattle with a commitment to show the new Automated Air War slide show in 50 congregations - and we did it!
That fall, when I moved to Berkeley so my former husband could attend seminary, I started working with the Ecumenical Peace Institute, the local chapter of CALCAV, organizing faith-based opposition to the U.S. role in the war. We became part of a national campaign to pressure the Honeywell Corporation to stop producing anti-personnel weapons - buying individual shares of Honeywell stock and
attending the shareholders meeting in Minnepolis in 1973. We hosted speaking tours for Vietnamese opposed to U.S. involvement in the war and celebrated Vietnamese culture.
From the perspective of a 20-something year-old, it seemed to me like the war in Vietnam would never end. But it did, on April 30, 1975. I joined others in celebration, first in Berkeley
at the Starry Plough Bar and then the next month in Central Park at the War Is Over rally
For many of my generation, what we had learned and experienced during the Vietnam War years profoundly changed our understanding about our nation and its role in the world from wide-eyed
idealism of the Kennedy years to seeing the U.S. as a neo-colonial power, motivated by the Cold War to advance its global agenda at the expense of liberation movements around the globe.
As I remember it, that was my analysis in the 1970’s. My thinking about the U.S. role in the world has continued to evolve, and spending 3 years living in the Middle East in the early
1980’s meeting with Arabs and Israelis did a lot to give me a more nuanced understanding, seeing the positive’s of the U.S. impact as well as negatives.
Nonetheless, the Vietnam era was seminal for me.
And so I want to go to Vietnam, in part to remember and honor the past and sacrifices of many - including our U.S. soldiers, but also to learn, to connect and to enjoy the place and its
people today.
When we are in Vietnam we will be meeting with some people who continue to address the ways the war is not yet over including unexploded land mines and the effects of Agent Orange, and
others involved in human rights work. We will also be seeing many sites along the way.
The last week in Southeast Asia we will travel to Malaysia, a Muslim-majority country where we will visit the International Islamic Uninversity in Kuala Lumpur meet some people we have been
in touch with through Muslim colleagues here in the U.S.
