GOLDEN TORTOISE, THE

VI: River of Peace

VI: River of Peace 2004 This page intentionally left blank. 81 Edward Tick Le Loi freed his country, reshaped its laws and rebuilt its capital. With the aid of divine powers his homeland was secured and restored. Now the Japanese, French, American and Chinese troops are gone from their land. Next door they ousted the Khmer Rouge and halted Cambodia’s genocide. That country too is starting to rebuild. The wars are over, the sword sheathed—is that not our ultimate wish and vision? We have never for a single lifetime, never for a span of generations, known a sustained peace. Nor have many of us attained that state of inner peace we long for. We do not know what comes after the killing fields. We may not even know what peace is. War is always life gone wrong. I wonder, as do many survivors—will I ever cleanse my deep, accumulated pain and grief from old battles and their losses. Can we be free of the anguish at life having gone wrong? How do we meet and talk with others when it was war that first introduced us, war that drenched our minds, relationships, and countries in a poison as deadly to the soul as Agent Orange is to body and land? I yearn for a peace beyond the sheathing of swords. I return to Viet Nam to seek and learn of this peace. R I travel again with Tran Dinh Song. Exactly my age, Song was a university student in Sai Gon while I was one in America. He studied American history, culture and literature but protested our troops on his soil, just as I did. Song spent 7 years in the South Vietnamese air force and after the war another 2½ in a re-education camp. We stand before a large bomb crater made by a thousand pound bomb dropped during the war by an American B-52 to upend jungle and earth. The hole is 10 feet deep and 20 across in the young green jungle sprouting again over the tunnels of Cu Chi. ...