Fallen Leaves, Broken Lives

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There is one place, though, where these children are not dust: the Hong Ngoc Humanity Center in Sao Do, a town nestled in the verdant stretch of rice paddies midway between Ha Noi and the Gulf of Tonkin.

AS A PSYCHOTHERAPIST, I have been working with Viet Nam veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder since 1979. In May of 2000, I co-led, with Professor Steven Leibo, our first journey of reconciliation to Viet Nam. Now, annually, I escort groups of veterans, vets' wives, siblings, and children, Amerasian young adults, professors and teachers, protesters, activists, adventurers, and students through the battlefields, Buddhist shrines, cemeteries, schools, and healing centers of Viet Nam. We meet with Vietnamese veterans who fought the Japanese, French, Chinese, and Khmer Rouge Cambodians as well as the Americans. We seek to encounter the Vietnamese people and culture as they are, to discover what they feel about war and about us. We seek to discover what has become of them since what they call the American War ended. We seek to build a personal and lasting reconciliation, peace, and friendship within ourselves and between our people and countries that were once, wrongly and tragically, enemies.

On that first journey, north and south, both in cities and along the countryside, we met countless people without arms or legs, or whose bodies were deformed, or who had developed strange mushroom-shaped tumors on their scalps, faces, arms, and legs. We arrived at the Hong Ngoc Humanity Center just a month after the 25th anniversary of our war's end. At the time, the Humanity Center was a long warehouselike building containing a sheltered workshop for 270 disabled children, who made and sold silk needlework, hand-sewn garments, and intricate carvings out of stone and wood. Ranging in age from the early teens to mid-20s, these young Vietnamese were either deaf and mute or physically disabled or both. One girl had no legs below her mid-thighs and wobbled as she struggled to walk. A boy with only an upper torso pulled himself along the floor on a makeshift wooden platform.

I spent much time talking with Van, a young man with a strikingly handsome face, a beatific smile, and eyes blazing with intelligence. Instead of fingers and toes, though, he had twisted, craggy claws (and these only after surgical repair). Van told me he was born in the immediate area, as were all the residents at Hong Ngoc. No Agent Orange had been sprayed this far north. But his father, a soldier in the south, had fought in the white-powdered jungle. After Van was born disabled, his parents wished to have one normal child, because in Viet Nam adult sons not only carry on the family name and heritage, they care for parents in their old age. A second child was born with identical deformities. Then another. After a fourth similarly disabled child was born, Van's parents gave up. He was the only one lucky enough to find a place at the Humanity Center.

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