Spending Veterans Day in Vietnam
EDITOR’S NOTE: Columnist John Ostwald will submit daily columns for the two weeks prior to Veterans Day. The columns cover a variety of armed forces issues. The information in the columns comes from interviews with veterans and family members, research and John’s perspective as an educator and veteran.
Steven Gunn, a combat veteran, describes two of his trips back to Vietnam.
“I went on a Soldier’s Heart Journey of Healing and reconciliation to Vietnam in 2016 because I was feeling strong resentment and anger. I spoke to a psychologist about it and he suggested that I look into something called moral injury. When I looked into it, I found nothing I could work with, but then I remembered reading Ed Tick’s book War and the Soul. I found one of Ed’s Soldier’s Hearts retreats and attended it.
I found that retreat so powerful and inspiring and healing that I decided to go to Vietnam with Soldier’s Heart in order to go deeper with the work we did at the retreat. After the first few days of the Vietnam Journey I felt a strong sense of peace and joy. This was for several reasons but primarily for two reasons. Ed and Kate (his co-leader) provide a powerful healing environment and the Vietnamese people that we encountered were consistently loving and forgiving. My feelings of joy, long since buried, began to re-surface. This has continued over the past year, as I have taken action to reach out to my fellow veterans. I also completed a “TED Talk” on moral injury. That has given me the opportunity to serve my fellow veteran brothers by spreading the word that there is hope for healing and happiness by approaching our wounds from a soul perspective, as opposed to “treating a medical disorder” through drugs and coping therapy.”
Co-founders, Dr. Edward Tick and Kate Dahlstedt are currently leading Soldier’s Heart’s 17th annual reconciliation and healing journey to Vietnam. These are their comments about the trip. “We believe this will be the first ever International Veterans Day Reconciliation event between our two countries.
Even now, 50 years after the American-Vietnam War, Kate and I have just arrived in Ho Chi Minh City with veterans and family members or survivors, and indeed Americans from all walks of life, including those too young to remember the war, seek to travel to this distant land for many reasons shaped by soul and history.
Veterans and their loved ones achieve more healing in a few weeks back in Viet Nam than at home in the half century since the war. PTSD is in part frozen combat imagery and consciousness. Traveling to Viet Nam, receiving the love and compassion of the Vietnamese people, learning that you are honored not hated, being called Uncle or Grandpa by beautiful children you help, all penetrate the heart and replace old war poisons with new love and respect.
There is no chronic PTSD among the Vietnamese as we have it in the U.S. There are innumerable reasons for this – self-defensive, a collectivist culture, everyone in the war, a moral cause, Buddhism and others. We can learn from the Vietnamese about how to build resiliency and morality into our personal and collective actions that protect against traumatic breakdown or heal it collectively after it occurs.
Our Vietnam vets are aging and dying off sooner than much of the generation. We still owe them everything we can give for their service in hell. And we can learn from them what it is like to age with traumatic wounding and what it is like to face the end of life carrying these wounds. Vietnam vets are still a source of both concern and wisdom and they must be tended through the entire life cycle.
Vietnam is changing as well. It is galloping into the modern world with an enthusiasm and success that is breath taking. We realize that the Communism we once feared has become something very different.
Finally, for this brief note, we seek to introduce all Americans not to “The Nam” that was the war zone of horror and pain, but to the real people and country of Viet Nam, a deep, ancient culture rich in love and wisdom. Those here during the war were not here. Now they are welcomed, honored, blessed and enter communion with a people they once opposed. Peace occurs within and without. As the Vietnamese say, “Do happiness.”