Vietnam War

Searching for peace in war


Staring silently out the window on a chilly Sunday morning, Nguyen Van Le still hears the screams of children devastated by landmines and relives again, the sights of crying wives at the loss of their husbands. ’Like so many young boys, I was plagued with an absence of a father I never experienced or knew truly about’. The loss of his father in the hands of brutal Vietcong guerrillas caused immense emotional grief within the family and it was difficult to contemplate life without him. ‘I cried many nights and flashes of his bruised body infected my dreams constantly’, he remarks frankly, ‘there really is just a thin line between the living and the dead and it was never made more real than the human disaster that took place in Vietnam’.

‘It is always difficult to describe such atrocities that occurred in Vietnam, many wish to avoid such reflections’ Van Le would concede. Although he grew up as a democratic idealist, wishing his family a...