JOY SYLVESTER-JOHNSON: Today in Vietnam

Joy Sylvester Johnson

First,  I saw the memorial to all the Viet Cong who died in HoChiMinh City. Then I toured the War Museum where examples of all the captured or abandoned US equipment is carefully preserved. And finally, I took a tour of the Cu Chi Tunnel, an elaborate system of tunnels including a community kitchen, a hospital, a war room, sleeping places and workshops and enough space to accommodate six villages of men, women and children. During the war as many as 60,000 people lived, worked, fought, married, birthed children and survived in the tunnels.

The tunnel system is one of the reasons the US troops had such a difficult time locating the Viet Cong. It was all dug by hand using continuous labor and carrying the clay to the surface in baskets. Once there, the clay would be distributed in the fresh craters created by the bombs being dropped.

Water and breathing tubes were created and disguised. Captured or abandoned US military equipment was recycled and used to make more weapons and other items needed by those who lived in the tunnels. Food consisted of tapioca plants, frogs, insects and whatever could be scavenged at night under cover of darkness. One man said he lived in the tunnel for ten years never seeing daylight the entire time, only emerging at night.

There were many primitive boobytraps made that at first reminded me of things I had seen in old Tarzan movies (Johnny Weissmuller era). But this was no movie. The more I saw the more real it became. By the end of the tour I was both emotionally drained and physically sick as I considered the ability we humans have to destroy one another.

I chose to come to Vietnam because I wanted to see the place that played such a significant place in my formative years. It’s been fifty years since I went to my first protest of the war in Vietnam. I had friends who died there. I had friends who burned their draft cards and went to Canada. I had friends who served with honor and distinction.   I spent a good deal of my career as an adult trying to help those who came back, wounded inside and out.

I could not make sense of it fifty years ago and I still struggle to understand it today. I know I prayed then and I pray today that we as a civilization will not be so ready to use our “final option.”

I wrote recently that war would be very different if instead of drafting the youngest and brightest and most loyal Americans, we sent the richest and the oldest to do combat. I am sure if we made that one change, we would find another way.

Today, in Vietnam,  I am more convinced than ever that there are no victors in war—only survivors.

A Prayer for Peacemakers

(An expansion of Shane Claiborne’s words in “Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals”)

Lord remind us that peacemaking doesn’t mean passivity.

Help us to grasp that making peace is the act of interrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, and the act of finding a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the careful, arduous pursuit of reconciliation and justice.

We know this will be difficult, but not impossible, for in You all things are possible.

We ask this because our intention is to follow you. Help us to live into our good intentions.

Amen.

Joy Sylvester-Johnson

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