GOLDEN TORTOISE, THE

Return to Sacred Mountain

3 Return to Sacred Mountain I did not go to Viet Nam during the war. Instead, I protested it with all my youthful passion. In 1979, a mere four years after the war’s end and while still a young man, I began working as a psychotherapist with combat and non-combat veterans. In the cauldron of the mind, the horrors of war can boil and rage for a lifetime. In the intimacy and privacy of the healing relationship, those horrors are invited to parade in full panoply before a single witness. It was there that I served, there that I went to war. During a quarter century of work with veterans, first of Viet Nam and later of World War II, Korea, El Salvador, Lebanon, the first Gulf and present Iraqi Wars, Northern Ireland, and survivors of Nazi and Serbian concentration camps, war’s ghoulish spirit came alive in my mind, heart and imagination. Even to those of us who were not in the combat zone, war’s imagery burns like psychic napalm, frying its way through layers of psyche and culture to hit the soul. War and its legacy disturbed my life so much that its healing became a primary calling. Through hundreds of veteran clients and thousands of therapy hours, I became intimate with the Viet Nam War and the ravaged country of Viet Nam. It became inevitable that I would need to travel to Viet Nam myself. I needed to complete a journey begun long ago as both protestor and healer on the home front. I needed to make the country and people of Viet Nam my own too, to formulate my personal answer to the questions people inevitably ask in America, “Were you in Viet Nam?” or in southeast Asia, “Were you here before ’75?” I needed to learn first hand about this people and land we married forever through our war with them. From my accumulated years with veterans, I carried more war stories than any score of them together. Like a veteran, I needed to replace my own war imagery with new mental pictures of healing from the Viet Nam that lives on. In May and June 2000, just weeks after the 25th anniversary of the end of the war, Prof. Steven Leibo, Chair of International Studies at The Sage Colleges, and I co-led our first journey of education and reconciliation to Viet Nam. Now, annually, I escort groups of veterans, vets’ wives, siblings and children, Amerasian young adults, professors and teachers, protestors, activists, adventurers and students throughout contemporary Viet Nam. We visit old battlefields, Buddhist shrines, cemeteries, schools and healing centers . We travel through large cities and remote villages, museums of art, war, and culture in both the south and north. We meet with Vietnamese veterans who fought Japanese, French, Chinese, and Khmer Rouge Cambodians as 4 The Golden Tortoise well as 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. The Golden Tortoise takes you through Viet Nam today. We visit its sites to replace images of suffering with images of healing from the contemporary people and landscape, replicating the way such images are replaced in the minds of contemporary veteran and civilian travelers.It explores the land,culture , people, history, spirituality and mythology of Viet Nam. It demonstrates how immersion in this land and culture can bring healing and transformation to those still suffering the inner ravages of war. And it records the fascinating , rapid, hopeful and troubling changes now taking place in Viet Nam as it heals its war legacy and struggles with the transition from a society that was isolated, closed, controlled, rural, agrarian and tradition-bound toward one that is open and becoming world market, consumer and technology-driven. These changes, says Ha Noi scholar and writer Dr. Huu Ngoc, represent “Viet Nam’s most difficult war, a war to save our soul, a war in our heads.” The GoldenTortoise demonstrates the possibilities of transforming and ending the “war in our heads” for Vietnamese and Americans alike. The guiding image of my earlier prose and poetry collections on the war in Viet Nam was the Sacred Mountain, or...