Vietnam, Afghanistan: War, Karma, and Peace

[unhappycamper]

http://www.alternet.org/world/vietnam-afghanistan-war-karma-and-peace?paging=off




Vietnam, Afghanistan: War, Karma, and Peace
New America Media / By Andrew Lam
October 30, 2012


Trying to Google news of my homeland, Vietnam, over the last few weeks has not been easy. The headlines that often showed up were about another country, not Vietnam.

~snip~

After the Vietnam War, Americans were caught in the past, haunted by unanswerable questions, confronted with an unhappy ending. So much so that my uncle who fought in the Vietnam War as a pilot for the South Vietnamese army, once observed that, "When Americans talk about Vietnam they really are talking about America." "Americans don't take defeat and bad memories very well. They try to escape them," he said in his funny but bitter way. "They make a habit of blaming small countries for things that happen to the United States. AIDS from Haiti, flu from Hong Kong or Mexico, drugs from Columbia, hurricanes from the Caribbean."

~snip~

Years ago, the poet Robert Bly argued that Americans have yet to perform an ablution over past atrocities. "We're engaged in a vast forgetting mechanism and from the point of view of psychology, we're refusing to eat our grief, refusing to really eat our dark side," Bly told Bill Moyers on public television. "And therefore what Jung says is really terrifying: if you do not absorb the things you have done in your life...then you will have to repeat them."

It may very well be that the tragedy of Vietnam cannot simply be overcome with some supposed military victory but with another tragedy of equal if not greater proportion. It may very well be that a few years from now, when it's all over, the new American tourists can visit the heavily bombed mountains and caves of Tora Bora, where we once thought Osama bin Laden was hiding, to weep at some hole in the ground, thinking about the futility of it all.