Guilt trips: war vets return to Vietnam
Haunted by their past, veterans of the Vietnam war are returning to former battlefields to make peace with the ghosts of the conflict and help those who are still picking up the pieces, writes Eric San Juan
David Waters had read about the atrocities American forces committed while fighting in Vietnam. He knew about the three million Vietnamese who had been deformed and disabled by the dioxin contained in defoliants such as Agent Orange. He was aware that hitherto unexploded ordnance had killed and maimed thousands after the war. He didn't need any more data to know that the American involvement in Vietnam had been a terrible mistake.
And yet, after a short visit to the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, the old soldier is overwhelmed.
"When you look at the things we did, it's impossible not to feel guilty," says the 67-year-old former Green Beret, who fought along the coast of southern Vietnam in 1968 and 1969. "We are not really responsible, we were just 20, and we were following orders, we barely knew anything about life, but it's terrible.
"When I visited that museum I thought some Vietnamese would point at me and say, 'Look, he is one of the guys who did all this,'" he says. In the event, all he encountered were smiles.
Waters was one of 17 war veterans and peace activists from the United States who in April took part in a two-week tour of Vietnam organised by Veterans for Peace. He had returned as a tourist last year, but wanted to come back again, to find out more about the victims of war.
"Sometimes the veterans who come back are taken off guard because people are very friendly. And sometimes they break down and weep in gratitude because they're helping them ease their burden of remorse and confusion, after what we did here," says Chuck Searcy, a member of Veterans for Peace who has been living in Hanoi for 20 years. "Veterans are astonished when the Vietnamese welcome us. They say, 'We are brothers', and they mean it."