In the early years after the current Lao government took power, it was not possible for foreigners to live and work at the village level, so we concentrated some of our efforts on training schools for teachers and agricultural workers. Traveling to these schools, particularly in northern Laos, was both an adventure and an opportunity to support the development of Laos’ people resources. Enjoy this journey with me!

Xieng Khouang Province Trip Report: April 6-12, 1982:

The Junior High Teacher’s Training School in Xieng Khouang Province is tucked away on the eastern edge of Xieng Khouang Plain, just outside the district town of Muong Kham, or a 3-hour drive from Phonsavan. We trekked to the school from the site of the Ban Mo Dam, walking along the remains of an old irrigation ditch. The latter part of our little hike was the most adventurous, as we had to cross a wide knee-deep stream which was covered with very slippery rocks on the bottom. Our reward for a safe crossing was a dip in a natural hot springs which was soothing to our feet and tired muscles.

The school is a large collection of bamboo/thatch buildings. The entire community of students and teachers numbered well over 500 people. The curriculum, divided between social studies and the natural sciences is a three-year program.

Meeting the basic needs of this community of 500+ people is no small task. The Director reported that the students and teachers are organized into 50 different work groups. These groups plant gardens, raise animals, go fishing, gather wood, do the cooking and endless other tasks associated with living. He also reported that there is a good, cooperative spirit on campus.

There was actually some rationale for locating the school away from the town which could have provided more comfortable accommodation. Province officials feared that if students from the countryside went to the county centers for training, they wouldn’t be willing to return to the smaller district towns as teachers in the middle schools. In addition to learning their academic lessons, students learned life skills and cooperative work habits which would help them no matter where they were placed as teachers.

Attopeu Trip Report: February 12-10, 1983

Located several kilometers from the edge of town the Attopeu Primary Teacher’s Training School is situated on the bank of the Xe Don River. When our group arrived at the school for a visit, we found a group of a dozen students weaving a wall from long strips of bamboo which they had earlier retrieved from the surrounding woods. Using crude wooden hammers, the students pounded each strip of bamboo into place to ensure a snug fit.

Attopeu Primary Teacher’s Training School, Photo by Titus Peachey, 1983.

When I asked the director of the school how many hours a day the students studied, a wan smile crossed his face as he replied: “It’s not regular,” he said. “There is a lot of work which the students have to do. They have to carry rice, gather firewood, draw water from the river, repair the buildings and construct new ones. When there is not urgent work to be done, then they have time to study.”

Sayaboury Trip Report, April 1-6, 1985

Sayaboury is a place off the beaten path. It takes two days to reach the province capital by boat/road from Vientiane, and at least 3 days solely by road. It is a quiet little town…with a dirt runway visited by a single engine biplane from Vientiane twice weekly. Sayaboury Ag officials contributed to the image of Sayaboury as a place forgotten by the central government. According to them, Ministry of Ag officials rarely visit and Ag workers from Sayaboury are rarely sent abroad for study or exposure…A perusal of the 1983 UN summary of aid to Laos confirmed … that the province has received little international assistance.

While foreign aid agencies may be ignoring Sayaboury, the Vietnamese…are not. A team of 10-12 Vietnamese experts/advisors from the sister province of Thai Binh shared our guest house. It appeared that their mission was long-term, as many had been there for 6 months already and planned to stay for several years.

The local children at least were happy with their presence, as a brisk trade in lizards had developed. The Vietnamese experts paid 20 kip per large lizard. Gutted and dried, these lizards developed healing powers when soaked for several months in whiskey! A nip of this brew every day was reputedly an excellent cure for backaches. My traveling companion from the Ministry of Agriculture unfortunately developed a backache in Sayaboury and was coaxed by the Vietnamese into downing a shot of their potion. The back ache disappeared, but the resulting stomachache left him wondering if it had been worth it! Nonetheless the brisk trade in lizards went on. On the morning of our departure, 30 grotesque little carcasses mounted on slender bamboo frames dangled in the morning sun, preparing to serve their time in a Vietnamese whiskey jar!

The province School of Agriculture is located 6 kilometers northeast of town along the banks of the Huong River. In 1981, the current head of the Ag school was charged with the responsibility of turning 150 hectares of brush covered hills into an Ag school. He and two other men worked hard at clearing the area and preparing the site for the school. He confesses to nearly having given up once but is now quite proud of his achievements. On October 10, 1984, the school opened with a class of 60 students committed to studying for two years.

Conditions at the school are very basic, yet not unusual for newly opened schools in rural Laos. The students and teachers sleep in rows on mats on the floor. On the plywood wall above one of the sleeping mats, someone had written in perfect English: “Time and tide wait for no man.” How that got there remains a fascinating mystery! The cooking area is under a tin roof on four posts. Students stand outside along several high narrow tables to eat. Water (for drinking and bathing) is in the river below the school. Students tend their own vegetable gardens…Students have cleared and burned off three small knolls nearby to plant sesame. In the future, they also plan to plant pineapple, mangoes, papaya and oranges. Students have also built a long row of bamboo chicken pens surrounded by a fence. They plan to raise 5 chickens each, or 300 chickens. This will give them practical experience as well as meat for the pot. If successful, this school will become a like prosperous village with many practical lessons for the students.

Sayaboury Agriculture School dining area and kitchen. Photo by Titus Peachey, 1985

Oudomsai Province Trip Report: April 9-12, 1985:

It takes 20 hours over bumpy mountainous dirt roads to travel from Sayaboury to Luang Prabang, then to Oudomsai and back to Luang Prabang. Villages are few and far between. In 8 hours of driving from Oudomsai to Luang Prabang, we met just four on-coming vehicles.

We stopped along the road to purchase bamboo shoots from these villagers in Oudomsai Province. Photo by Titus Peachey, 1985.

This time of year is the season for burning off the hillsides in preparation for planting upland rice. The weather is tinder dry, and the earth looks parched and barren. Day after day farmers in the mountains send smoke billowing skyward as eager flames from their fires turn hillsides onto blackened mounds of smoldering stumps and ashes. The sky becomes a dense white fog which rises up from the ground and turns once majestic mountains into ghost-like apparitions. The atmosphere is eerie…bright, yet gloomy and oppressive. And ever so slowly, tiny specks of ash drift down out of the white fog, turning one’s sweaty skin into a gray grime. Once the ashen hillsides have cooled, farmers return to clear away the unburnt brush and prepare the soil for planting. Wearing black pajamas, they are barely discernable against the charred landscape which looms behind them. It is indeed a labor of hope, inspired by visions of the vibrant green rice shoots which will spring from the ashes after planting.

(Left) Slash and burn hillside farming in Luang Prabang Province, Laos. Photo by Titus Peachey, 1985. (Right) Imagery of smoke cover in Southeast Asia. Laos is in the right half of the photo. European Union Copernicus Sentinel-3 2026.

This is the phenomenon which is the focus of so much government attention. The government mourns the destruction of the forests and urges farmers to come down from the mountains and take up sedentary rice paddy farming. This, of course, requires the opening up of new land and irrigation, demands which cannot adequately be met by existing irrigation infrastructure.

Slash and burn agriculture is less productive than wet paddy-rice farming. Yet many villages do not have enough flat paddy land to provide rice the year round. Since the soil on the hillsides is less fertile, it can only sustain a rice crop for several seasons before the soil is depleted and crop yields are too low to make it worth the effort. And so villagers move to a new mountainside and start the cycle all over again.

The Jr. High Teacher’s Training School in Oudomsai is located 6 kilometers out of town. When the school director was given the responsibility of opening the school, he along with the teachers and students were confronted with a tract of forest-filled land. Undaunted, they moved into a nearby village and spent the next 7 months cutting down the forest and building temporary dormitory structures before the school could open. It first opened in October of 1977 with 116 students. The number of students increased dramatically to 201 in the 1978-79 academic year but then decreased to 166 students over the next two years. There were simply not enough students in the province with enough education to qualify for further training. Instead, these students filled low-level positions within the province administration.

When discussing strengths and difficulties at the school the director listed ethnic diversity under both points. Since many of the ethnic minorities lived in the mountains, they experienced great difficulty during the war. These wartime experiences…stood them in good stead when confronted with the difficult life at the school. They had a good spirit of cooperation and helpfulness. The primary problem posed by the various ethnic groups was one of language and poor educational background. To deal with this, the students were mixed together by their living arrangements. They must learn to speak to each other in Lao. In three months’ time most students improved their Lao language proficiency markedly.

MCC Assistance to Training Schools

Students gather around a globe at the Jr. High Teacher’s Training School in Xieng Khouang Province, Laos. Photo by Titus Peachey,

In these very rustic training school settings, our MCC assistance usually consisted of basic supplies such as mosquito nets, blankets, kitchen equipment, garden tools, seeds, piping for a clean drinking water system, lab equipment, maps, anatomical charts, musical instruments, sports equipment and the occasional pickup truck. This kind of aid, imported from Thailand, improved living conditions, boosted morale, allowed more time/energy for study and reduced the dropout rate. Indeed the Director of the Oudomsai Teacher Training School acknowledged that there had been years when 1/3 of the students dropped out.

Training school in places like Pakse and Savannakhet had much better amenities, with concrete buildings, electricity and plumbing. And conditions in present-day Laos are much improved. While our efforts during these early years were very basic, we saw them as significant for this stage in Laos’ development. In addition to preparing more teachers and agriculturalists, this aid may have helped at least some people decide to stay in Laos rather than leave as refugees. From our perspective, it was a worthwhile investment in Laos’ people resources and development potential.

Harvesting rice in the Houa Phan countryside. Photos by Titus Peachey, November, 1981.

We were in the town of Sam Neua in the northeastern Laotian province of Houa Phan. The scenery was gorgeous. There were wild sunflowers everywhere, adding a brilliant yellow to the panorama of green trees, gardens and hillsides. The deep blue skies, cold streams and brisk air created a stunning backdrop to the golden rice fields at harvesttime.

We were part of a large delegation composed of United Nations representatives, government officials, and Quakers/Mennonites making a visit to the province on the occasion of the International Year for Disabled Persons. The region had played a significant role in the long anti-colonial struggle against France and in the more recent war with the U.S. The revolutionary leaders (Pathet Lao) had endured the 9-year U.S. air war, hiding out in the scores of limestone cliffs just 30 kilometers away in Vieng Xai.

Limestone cliffs and caves of Vieng Xai where people gathered for safety during the U.S. air war. Photos by Titus Peachey, November, 1981.

During the air war, the people of Sam Neua town had endured great hardship. Pointing to a small building in the distance, one resident told us that it was the only building that had survived the bombing. “Everybody had to go into the forest or caves…schools were built just outside caves,” he told us. The caves provided a quick path to safety for the children during bomb strikes.

Sadly, as we had already discovered in other provinces, the impact of the past war was still a very present reality. Mr. Paseut from the military school in Vieng Xai noted that there were still a lot of cluster bomblets (bombies) lying around. “People working in gardens are still killed or injured by the bombies,” he told us. “I like to use shovels to dig up the soil. They dig up underneath the bombies and are safer than hoes,” he said.

Our visit in November of 1981 was at the height of the Cold War. Tensions between the communist world and western democracies were palpable. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979, the U.S. had joined 63 other nations in boycotting the 1980 Olympic Games which were held in Moscow. In addition, the U.S. delayed nuclear arms negotiations, cut off many cultural exchanges and reinstated registration with Selective Service for young men.

The decision on draft registration was announced by Jimmy Carter in an address to the nation on February 8, 1980: “The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan poses a serious threat ...Registration for the draft is needed to increase our preparedness and is a further demonstration of our resolve as a nation…Our objective is plain: to deter Soviet aggression.”[1]

When the new Lao Government took power in 1975, it aligned itself politically with North Vietnam and the Soviet Union. The once overwhelming presence of U.S. money, military might and influence left Laos, dwindling to a handful of U.S. diplomats at a much-reduced U.S. Embassy in Vientiane.

Sam Neua, the province capital of Houa Phan Province. The theater is the darker blue building in the center of the photo. Photo by Titus Peachey, September, 1983.

And so it was that my wife Linda and I stood on the stage before this crowd in the town theater. While the purpose of our trip was to learn more about the needs of disabled people in Laos, the political backdrop to our visit could not be ignored. And so we offered greetings and explained the meaning of our song in our halting Lao. We sang “Last night I had the strangest dream…I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war.”[2]

The response to our song was warm and enthusiastic. Mr. Chan Thi, head of the provincial agricultural committee exclaimed: “This is historic to have Americans come to the province and sing about peace! This has never happened before. During the 60’s and 70’s the people in the province just thought of Americans as people who wanted to make war.” Madam Chan Thon from the Women’s Union concurred, “The people didn’t know why they were being bombed. They just knew that there was a war, but they didn’t understand the reason.”

In contrast, the U.S. public did not even know that we were inflicting a devastating bombing campaign on Laos. I knew nothing of Laos in my teenage years, but I do remember cold war rhetoric that featured stereotypes of stern-faced, godless communists who had no regard for human life. On this trip, 8 years after the last bombs had fallen, it was baffling to stand in the bamboo/thatch villages of Laos and try to understand why they had become the focus of the world’s military superpower.

Village on the edge of Sam Neua Town. Photo by Titus Peachey, November, 1981.

The acting province chief later told us, “We’ve tried to tell the people of Houa Phan that it was not the American people who wanted to make war. Now that you have come, the people know that what the central government told them is true…the American people want peace!” This was a generous and oft-repeated explanation which we heard throughout our years in Laos.

During our visit to the province we sensed that the central government had had to put some pressure on local officials to allow our delegation to come. Mr. Chanthaly, who knew us from our work with the Social Welfare Committee in Vientiane told us: “We must go slowly and gently with these people. It’s okay if the people here know that you are Americans. They can distinguish between the American people and the American government.”

Our visit could in no way undo the brutality of the past war, and the vast majority of the citizens in the province knew nothing of our visit. Surely there was fear and suspicion still smoldering in people’s war-shattered lives which we did not touch. Yet perhaps the visit, initiated by the central government, represented a gesture of goodwill on which to build a more hopeful future.

Our delegation gathers around our helicopter at the Sam Neua airstrip in preparation for our trip home. Photo by Titus Peachey, November, 1981.

Our delegation was led by Mr. Meun Somvichit, Chair of the National Committee for Social Welfare and Veterans’ Affairs. He himself had lived in the caves of Vieng Xai during the war, and this was his first trip back to the province. His status as a high-ranking central government official turned every event into an occasion for protocol, including speeches, toasts and celebration. It was on these occasions that the cultural respect for formality always yielded to the irrepressible warmth of Lao hospitality.

As foreign guests, we were, of course, generously targeted by roving individuals whose role it was to make certain that everyone was properly “toasted” with potent Lao whiskey. Thus Wendy Batson (AFSC) and Linda Gehman Peachey (MCC) were frequently approached by members of the Lao Women’s Union to affirm the everlasting solidarity between Laotian and American women. How could they refuse?

It’s impossible to quantify the pain of war yet provincial authorities provided us with data related to the human and material losses experienced in their province. Here are a few of the numbers they provided to help us understand the destruction that they experienced.[3]

Villages destroyed: 1,093
Homes burned: 16,901
Temples destroyed 181
Buffalo killed 15,678
People who became refugees 19,647
Civilians killed 3,665
Lao soldiers killed 13,513
Planes shot down 258

The last number deserves our attention. The reference is to U.S. Air Force planes that were shot down while on missions over the province. I don’t know if this figure is accurate, but it is significant since it represents the pain and loss experienced by U.S. families.

It was during our visit to an artificial limbs workshop that Linda captured an image symbolizing the pathos of war for all. The workshop of 97 workers, most of whom were also missing a limb, used wood along with metal from downed U.S. airplanes to fashion artificial legs for Laotian villagers and soldiers who had suffered severe injuries during the war. The pain of war knows no borders.

Artificial limbs made from U.S. airplane metal at workshop in Houa Phan Province, Photo by Linda Gehman Peachey, November, 1981.

During our travels in Laos our interactions always went beyond the political realities that separated us to deeper reflections on the meaning of our humanity and responsibility toward one another. And given all the wars and tragic loss of life since then, we wonder:

· How do we move past the “enemy images” that we so readily construct of one another? How can we become more alert to the subtle ways that governments and media colonize our minds with these enemy constructs?

· In a time of war, when rubble piles upon rubble and atrocities cry to the heavens, enemy language does have some basis in reality and talk of peace or shared humanity can sound naïve. Yet there must always be a first step away from inflicting more violence and suffering. Where is the energy, the investment, the research, the training for a path away from violence in our society? What role might we have in strengthening it?

· During our time in Laos we wondered how we could translate the clear moral obligation for U.S. government assistance in the war’s aftermath, into the political will to make it happen. Indeed, after years of slow, incremental work, the major breakthrough did not happen until Obama’s visit in 2016, more than 40 years after the last bombs fell. Why did it take so long?

· Our biggest takeaway from the war in Laos is that prevention is so much better than the painstaking task of recovery. Our nation is overwhelmingly over-invested in the technology and preparedness for war, yet woefully under-invested in the arts of diplomacy and peace. Unless we change this perilous imbalance of energy and investments, our nation will remain in the grip of war and violence.

Midst all the warmth and hospitality of this historic visit, these deeper questions lingered with us as we pursued our work in the following years. We are grateful to the people of Houa Phan for prompting us to think more deeply about the meaning of our identity as U.S. citizens and the challenges before us to overcome the enmity of war.

[1] Jimmy Carter, Selective Service Revitalization Statement on the Registration of Americans for the Draft, February 8, 1980.

[2] Last Night I had the Strangest Dream was written by Ed McCurdy, but made popular by Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Simon & Garfunkel and many other artists.

[3] There is no way to verify the accuracy of these numbers, but they represent what the provincial authorities thought to be the losses experienced during the war.

[i] In addition to personal memories, the content of this reflection is based on an MCC trip report, titled: Trip to Sam Neua, Capital of Houa Phan Province, November 20-24, 1981, by Titus and Linda Peachey, as well as WINDOWS, a personal newsletter to friends and family, dated March, 1982 and titled Houa Phan, also by Titus and Linda Peachey.

A Carburetor Float, a Bullet and Lao Ingenuity[1]

I am not a mechanic. I don’t understand the wonder of an internal combustion engine. But I am quite sure that what I witnessed one evening on Xieng Khouang’s high, rolling plateau was a very clever mechanical innovation.

I was traveling with Mr. Bouavan, our provincial colleague, and several others to a small district outpost somewhere east of Phonsavan. It was nearly dark. There were no roads, just tire tracks that crisscrossed the rolling terrain, likely leading to villages. We were riding in a Russian van which had an engine situated between the driver and the passenger’s seat. Along the way, the engine began to run very rough, causing the van to alternately lurch forward or stall. After the driver had to repeatedly open the metal lid to probe and tinker with the engine, we decided to walk the rest of the way while the driver continued to fiddle with the stubborn engine.

After a 15-minute walk across a silent landscape, we arrived at our destination, a small collection of wooden houses, visible only as murky silhouettes in the rapidly approaching darkness. About 10 minutes later, the van arrived, coughing and sputtering the whole way. The driver had his head sticking out of the window to avoid the smoke and fumes that were filling up the inside of the van. I began to wonder if we would have to spend the night in this lonely spot.

While the driver had not repaired the problem, he had determined its source. The carburetor float had developed a hole and filled up with gas, which kept it from properly regulating the flow of gasoline into the engine. This caused the engine to flood and the van only moved forward under considerable protest.

We were welcomed into one of the houses where a cooking fire and lanterns provided lights and warmth. As our situation was explained, I listened in fascination as a solution to our problem emerged from the collective wisdom of the group. We were in a house with a dirt floor and few resources. There was no handy tool set to rely on, no engine manual and no electricity to work with. So the first step was to assemble a set of “alternative tools.” These included a pine branch, a knife, a safety pin, and a long wire. This collection was intriguing enough, but when they took a handgun from the wall and removed a bullet, I was totally bewildered.

The initial challenge was to get all of the gasoline out of the carburetor float. Using the safety pin, the hole was slightly enlarged. After 10-15 minutes of shaking, the float was finally empty. The next step was to attach the bullet to the end of a long wire. The bullet was then placed into the fire to heat up. We collected some low stools and all gathered around the fire to eat and keep watch over the bullet. As we ate, someone would periodically check on the bullet to see if it was hot enough, then place it back into the fire. Was this wise, I wondered, to sit around a fire with a bullet in it?

Houses in the Lao countryside typically create a fire pit on the floor or on a cement base and allow the smoke to filter out through the porous walls. Photo by Titus Peachey

When the bullet was finally deemed hot enough, the repair happened quickly. Someone placed the pine wood into the fire to generate a flow of sap, which they then dripped onto the hole in the carburetor float. Then someone took a knife to scrape a small amount of excess solder from another spot on the carburetor float and affixed it onto the sap, directly over the hole. They then removed the now red-hot bullet from the fire and touched the solder with the sharp tip of the bullet, causing it to melt. Voila! It sealed the hole!

Once the float was returned to its spot in the carburetor, the engine ran like a top and we found our way back to the province guest house for the night. These many years later, I am still amazed by the clever use of available tools and materials to repair a mechanical problem.

With the wonders of the internet now available, I did a little checking on what happens to bullets that are placed into a fire. Of course, the internet did not disappoint. It featured a couple guys with a campfire and a box of bullets. When thrown into a fire, the bullets do explode, but outside the confines of a gun barrel the force extends outward in all directions and dissipates quickly. The impact is minimal. But the question remains…why didn’t the bullet placed in our fire explode…or did we simply take it out before that could happen? That shall remain a mystery.

Xieng Luang Village Turns On the Charm[2]

A traditional foot-powered rice huyller found in every village during our time in Laos. This task of hulling the rice took several hours every day. Photos by Titus Peachey

Hulling rice is a laborious time-consuming task in Lao villages. This labor of love typically begins before dawn, marked by the dull rhythmic thud of a wooden foot-powered mortar and pestle. So during our village visits on behalf of MCC it was not unusual to receive requests for a rice mill that could hull the rice in a fraction of the time. One such request came from Xieng Luang Village in Houa Phan Province.

Xieng Luang’s abundant water supply . Photos by Titus Peachey

Xieng Luang’s rice paddies carpet the valley which stretches between limestone cliffs and forested mountains. Spring-born creeks tumble down from the foothills through winding ravines, and slow into gentle waterways as they filter through the lush green rice paddies. Even a quick drive along the paved road which passes through Xieng Luang, however, suggests that Xieng Luang’s recent past was anything but peaceful. Large water-filled bomb craters, like giant tear-filled eyes stare blankly at the sky from the rice fields. At least 15-20 craters are clearly visible from the road, confirming the local assertion that Xieng Luang was one of the most heavily bombed villages in the province.

These villagers had spent 9 years in the caves to escape the intense bombing during the war.[3] Their old village was completely destroyed and some of the villagers were killed.

Three of Xieng Luang’s residents who spent the 9-year U.S. air war living in caves. Photo by Titus Peachey

During a visit to the village in 1983, I met with village elders, seated on the floor of a large open room which comprised the main part of a traditional Lao house. A cooking fire near the end of the long rectangular room lent the smell of fresh wood smoke to the air before the smoke slowly filtered out through eaves under the thatched roof. A large jar of rice whisky sat on the floor with three long bamboo straws protruding from its murky depths. One villager made it his duty to round up all takers he could find for a five-minute swig of the liquid which tasted something akin to apple cider that’s fermented a little too long.

The earthen jar was filled to the brim. The task of the designated drinkers was to drink enough of the spiked liquid so that all the water from a hollowed-out buffalo horn could be emptied into the jar without causing it to overflow. There was always a lot of good-natured joking and teasing about which drinkers were slacking off and who was doing the lion’s share of the work. No one wanted to be pressed into doing a second round!

After a meal of tasty Lao food the villagers turned on their unpretentious charm. An elderly man was summoned to come sit right in front of me and sing a traditional Lao song.[4] His spirited chant was certainly traditional in style, but many of the words were made up on the spot. With bright eyes and a broad toothy grin, he sang lustily about the wonders of irrigation and electricity that would come to the village as a result of MCC’s visit. He paused from time to time to clear his throat and think up new lyrics while others in the room shouted encouragement. It was rural Laos at its best…rustic, simple and full of spontaneity. I, of course, was asked to sing in response, so I sang “Home on the Range,” passing it off as an American farmer’s song…but embarrassed by my lack of originality. The villagers, however, were not finished. Next a grandmother was coaxed into the singer’s spot. She also made up a song, this one enumerating the benefits of a rice mill…most appropriate since the women traditionally do all the early morning rice pounding.

Finally, a third villager ran it all by again in yet another original song. This time everyone joined in with hoots, laughter and illuminating comments. Participating most enthusiastically was the Party Secretary who sat in the corner observing everything. His broad grins and spicy comments helped us all digest our food. I hadn’t realized that “development” could be so much fun!

As it turned out, the Xieng Luang “charm offensive” worked. We did indeed provide the Xieng Luang Co-op with a rice mill and a rice thresher. During a later visit the villagers and I engaged in a very interesting discussion on the effects of a rice mill on the nutritional value of rice. One young man said that he had heard that milled rice contained more vitamins than the rice which was pounded in the traditional manner. I offered the opposite opinion, citing MCC’s experience in Nepal to back up my case, noting that the polished rice from a mill removes most of the bran. I was relieved when an elderly man, the Party Secretary for the district supported me with a bit of Lao tradition. He said that the traditional way to cure people with swollen limbs and sores from Vitamin B deficiency was to give them roasted soft rice bran with salt. Mr. Phom Ma from the province Ag Section also said that the milled rice is often not as nutritious as pounded rice. Our little lesson even took on proper political overtones when I mentioned that the problem of milled rice in Nepal stemmed in part from the fact that the mills were privately owned. The private owners, of course, wished to keep as much of the bran as possible so they could sell it as animal feed and increase their profits. Everyone laughed and agreed that such a problem could not occur in Xieng Luang where the rice mill would be cooperatively owned and managed for the good of all concerned. Ah, how nice when good nutrition and political ideology align!

How Often Do You Make Cakes? Nong Khieu Village, Luang Prabang Province[5]

Sometimes the clash in worldviews between our development-minded western agencies and the patterns of village life is too funny for words…but I will try. On the occasion of a visit from Bert Lobe, our administrator from the MCC offices in Pennsylvania, we traveled to Nong Khieu in northern Luang Prabang Province.

Linda and I each participated in separate 3-day trips up the Ou River to Phong Saly Province. The river originates near the Lao-Chinese border and flows south 236 miles before it enters the Mekong River near Luang Prabang City. There is stunning beauty to soak in around every corner. Photos by Titus Peachey

Nong Khieu is situated along the Ou River, a beautiful waterway bordered by lush forests and majestic limestone cliffs. As Bert and I walked about the village early one morning we noticed a woman making small coconut pancakes over a fire which she appeared to be selling.[6] We were intrigued at what appeared to be some free-enterprise initiative in a world of cooperatives and socialist economic policies, so decided to ask some questions. We wanted to know how often she made the cakes, whether she made a profit and how it played into the family economy. However, our conversation was short-lived.

Early morning coconut cake production in Nong Khieu, Luang Prabang Province. Photo by Titus Peachey

Question: Excuse me. How often do you make these little pancakes to sell?

Answer: On the days that I make them, I make them. On the days that I don’t make them, I don’t make them.

We didn’t probe any further! Perhaps the woman didn’t want to be bothered by these nosy foreigners, or perhaps her “cake production” was simply a random activity when she happened to have the ingredients and the time to make them. In any case, our impulse to quantify, analyze and define the economic activity in her life was clearly not a priority for her. We had to chuckle at our overblown expectations for analysis which seemed so out of place in this spare rural setting.

Postscript: To experience Lao village life in the early 1980’s was to experience a people devastated by war with its long and painful reach yet filled with the capacity for resilience and joy in the midst of community life. I hope that during my many postings I have communicated both realities.

Note to Readers: I welcome your questions and feedback. Thanks for reading!

[1] Titus Peachey, Mennonite Central Committee Xieng Khouang Trip Report, March 7-12, 1983.

[2] Titus Peachey, Mennonite Central Committee Houa Phan trip reports, September 16-23, 1983, and July 28-August 15, 1984.

[3] See previous posts for a description of the U.S. Secret Air War in Laos.

[4] Traditional styles of singing varied from one region to another within Laos. I was always fascinated by the way traditional song patterns could be creatively adapted to fit a specific event. I was thoroughly amazed by the singer’s creativity and enjoyed the robust participation of all the listeners. Lao culture seemed to have a unique blend of formality and spontaneity that kept every occasion personable and warm, while honoring centuries’ old traditions.

[5] Titus Peachey, Luang Prabang Trip Report, Mennonite Central Committee, Marh 14-19, 1984.

[6] These coconut cakes are called Kanom Krok in Thailand. They are made from rice flour, sugar and coconut milk.

It was a very warm July morning in 1983 when Dr. Lam Ngeun (Ministry of Health) and I prepared to visit a district health clinic in Savannakhet Province, Laos. Our purpose was to explore opportunities for Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) assistance in the health sector. As there was no public transportation, everything about our travels had to be arranged in advance by local authorities.

After breakfast we went outside to get into the vehicle that was waiting for us. I took one look at our vehicle and my heart sank. Standing on the back of our pickup truck were 3-4 Lao soldiers, armed with AK-47 assault rifles and grenade launchers. This was unusual. It challenged my commitment to pacifism and nonviolence. What was I going to do?

Throughout our time in Laos, we noticed that an armed guard or policeman occasionally traveled with us when we went on excursions away from province capitals. They were a handy extra set of hands if a tree needed to be removed from the road or if our boat got hung up on rocks. But it never felt like there was any real concern about our security. Sometimes these guards actually took a nap during a long trip. While we were a bit troubled by this collaboration with armed escorts, it felt like a simple matter of protocol. We were foreign guests and the government felt a responsibility to ensure our safety. So we never raised the issue.

Linda and I took a boat trip up the Ou River with the Luang Prabang Province Social Welfare Committee. Note the two guards in the front of the boat. Photo by Titus Peachey, January, 1983.

But on this day in July, the situation felt very different. There were real security issues in Savannakhet Province. A Danish World Bank expert was ambushed and killed in 1981. This incident caused the World Bank to halt its preliminary study for improvements on Route 13, a major north/south route in Laos. Violations of security could have significant consequences beyond the tragic loss of life. As one local official remarked, “We learned our lesson then.” And just several months before my visit, a Lao irrigation team had been blown up during their travel to the same district that we were scheduled to visit.[1]

My Moral Dilemma

I was troubled inside. I had the sense that if I refused the armed guards, we would likely not make the visit. But if we traveled with the armed guards, I knew that I would be violating something deep within me. What if we were attacked and one of these soldiers died trying to protect us? How could I claim to be a person committed to peace and nonviolence?

The irony of this situation was that the insurgents who might threaten our travels that day were right-wing forces with murky ties to Thai and U.S. groups intent on destabilizing the Lao government. So soldiers from a communist government would be protecting me, a U.S. citizen, from insurgents sympathetic to the U.S. What a contradiction!

These many years later, I am still embarrassed to note that I said nothing that morning. I carried my weighty internal turmoil with me and got into the pickup truck with the soldiers standing on the back.

About half-way through the trip, I started to feel sick. My face was flushed and nausea began to rise in my stomach. After we arrived at the health clinic, my condition worsened. I began running a high fever. The doctors at the clinic wanted to give me a shot, but thankfully, Dr. Lam Ngeun wouldn’t let them. I had great confidence in Dr. Lam Ngeun’s expertise and common sense. He was not quick to intervene with lots of medicines and was also a supporter of Lao traditional medicine remedies. I once heard him declare that “we Lao would have all died a long time ago if it hadn’t been for traditional medicines.”[2] So instead of a shot, they swabbed me with wet cloths to bring down my high fever. During our entire visit at the clinic, which extended for several hours, I lay on a bed in the office. I was quite useless the whole day.

My illness persisted for the entire return trip but thankfully we did not encounter any security problems. After returning to our hotel, I lay down on the bed. Within half an hour, I felt much better and was able to eat a normal dinner without any complaints from my stomach. So, what was that all about? Had I contracted a weird 8-hour virus, or was I so stressed by the way I had violated my deeply held beliefs that it created a physical reaction? Or was it a perfect storm of sickness and spiritual tension that did me in?

I don’t think I will ever know with any certainty, but it did pique my interest in the way that our bodies react to tension or dissonance with our core beliefs. Years later I participated in a STAR (Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Recovery) Training at Eastern Mennonite University and learned that our bodies remember and store our emotional and spiritual trauma. True healing from trauma includes whole body and spirit work.

The next day I talked with Dr. Lam Nguen about my inner turmoil. I asked him if local officials would have sent armed guards along if he had made the trip by himself. He just laughed. “No,” he said, “they wouldn’t send armed guards to protect me. Those armed guards were there for you.” This only increased my inner turmoil.

Upon my return to Vientiane, Linda and I discussed whether we should raise our concerns about armed guards with the Lao government. Yet the more we discussed the issue, the more it seemed that our position would be viewed as absurd. It would have looked something like this: In areas that seem secure, where travel does not put us or our companions in danger, we don’t mind if an armed guard accompanies us. But if security is in doubt and travel is risky, we insist on traveling without any armed guards.

So we decided not to raise the issue. As it turned out, this one trip in Savannakhet Province was the only time during our entire 5 years that either of us felt any real concern about security during our travels. It was also the only trip that I took where I was incapacitated by sickness. Hmmm.

Iraq, 2004

But there was another shoe to drop, this time in Iraq. In 2004, about a year after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I traveled there with MCC colleagues. Our goal was to document the U.S. use of cluster munitions and explore whether MCC could offer any helpful response to the humanitarian problems these weapons cause. In preparation for the trip, I made contact with the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a humanitarian demining agency that was working in Kurdistan (northern Iraq), clearing mines and cluster bombs.[3] MAG kindly agreed to show us their work.

U.S. BLU-97 cluster bombs on agricultural land just south of the Green Line near Deebaga/Mahkmoor, Iraq, 2004. Photo by Titus Peachey

Knowing that their technical workers gained their expertise from their military service, I knew that armed escorts would be present during our travels. But I was determined not to repeat my anxiety-filled ride in Laos. So, I informed MAG that we would travel in our own vehicle and would not permit an armed escort to travel in ours. They, of course, could follow their normal safety protocols. MAG kindly agreed to this accommodation, and we had a good day of visits in the field as well as a briefing in their well-fortified office.

This arrangement helped me avoid the intense inner angst that I had experienced years earlier in Laos, yet in the context it also felt like a picky exercise in moral purity. There were guns, guard posts, armored personnel carriers and U.S. soldiers everywhere. The fact that there was no one with a gun in our vehicle felt increasingly like a moral fig leaf that failed to cover a much larger issue.

And so, the tortured pickup truck ride in Laos was no longer just a troubling moral problem from my past. Indeed, the combination of these experiences helped me realize that there is a real sense in which I am always riding in an armed pickup truck. As U.S. citizens, we live every day in a heavily fortified empire, with tanks, missiles, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons, military bases and armed guards that circle the globe. In war after war, we watch drone strikes and missile launches while the stories and images of human suffering appear on our TV screens.

These realities were well known to Linda and me, but the analogy to my ride on an armed pickup truck made them clearer and more personal. While we can never achieve perfect moral purity (and who could live with us if we tried!), I don’t regret the sincere attempt I made in Iraq to align my actions with my deepest values and beliefs. Acts of resistance to the systems of violence that surround us, however small, help us stay true to our deep inner longing for a peaceful world.

Yet we still wonder: How do we live disarmed lives in the middle of an empire bent on global dominance? How do we build support for policies and budgets that rely on diplomacy, collaboration and just economic relationships? How do we establish relationships of respect in our diverse human communities so that armed guards aren’t necessary? In the context of so much violence, these questions may seem naïve. But we can clearly see the dystopian future to which a militarized world bristling with weapons is taking us. Is it really naïve to try to walk another path? Our very survival depends on our answers.

Note to Readers: So what do you think, dear readers? Am I overthinking things? Would you have gotten onto the armed pickup truck that day in Laos? How have you struggled to align your life with your values and beliefs? As always, I welcome your questions and feedback.

[1] Titus Peachey, Savannakhet Trip Report, July 12-21, 1983.

[2] Ibid.

[3] The Mines Advisory Group became a technical partner of MCC in Laos in 1994 to help establish the humanitarian demining program there…something I will write about in the future.

Like other war survivors, he remembered digging holes in the hillside along paths between villages so that people could hide if US planes came into view. Villagers who had to walk a distance would carry a tree branch with them, so they could stand motionless and appear as a tree to an airplane flying above. Cooking fires were essential for survival, but even carrying red hot embers to another house after dark was dangerous, as the glow from the fire could attract an air strike. These survival techniques became second nature to Bouavan and all those who remained in the bombed areas.

Steady and methodical as they come, Bouavan couldn’t be hurried or flustered, which could be both reassuring and exasperating. I remember when I arrived in Xieng Khouang one Saturday. Bouavan met me at the airport as usual but didn’t show up again until Tuesday, mumbling about the difficulty of rounding up a vehicle and fuel. Despite his staff position, he was hampered by very limited resources.

As usual, I settled in at the Province Guesthouse, a humble facility with thin plywood walls separating the rooms. There was a bare light bulb hanging from a wire in each room which glowed for a couple hours each evening. There were no switches, the lights came on and went off with the town generator. There was a latrine out the back. Our showers were a couple barrels of water from which we could take a dip bath.

The Xieng Khouang Province Guesthouse, ca: 1983, Photo by Titus Peachey

There were no locks on the guesthouse doors and there was no one “on duty,” so we guests were on our own. One night in the middle of my sleep, I was awakened by footsteps in the large common area outside our rooms. It was pitch dark but I could hear each room door opening and closing as the footsteps shuffled in and out. Was someone lost or would my room be next? Sure enough, my doorway opened and two men shuffled in wielding a flashlight. They came straight to my bed, pulled back my mosquito net and shone the flashlight in my face. “Nope…it’s not him!” a voice exclaimed. Off they went, this time leaving the building entirely. I don’t know who these two men were, or who they were looking for, but I was very relieved that it wasn’t me! Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that sleeping in this rather open guesthouse may have put me in a vulnerable spot.

As part of his provincial staff role, Bouavan was our “bombie guy.” He was determined to figure out a way to rid the province of these deadly remnants of the past war. On many occasions Linda and I saw him carefully pick up an unexploded bombie and move it off a village path to a safer place. But his real desire was to destroy them…not just move them around…so he was up for any experimental work that MCC was ready to fund. Over shared meals or rides to villages we had many discussions about possible methods.

On several occasions we went “bombie hunting.” Bouavan seemed to have a mental map of bombie locations throughout the district. With connections to the Soviet Union’s aid work in Xieng Khouang, he had access to a bag of detonating material…a mysterious coarse yellow powder…that we could use for our bombie experiments. MCC had also supplied the province with a small portable generator. Bouavan was fearless, but careful. After finding a bomblet, he would dig a small hole, carefully place it at the bottom and fill the hole with the explosive powder. Then we would insert the end of a wire into the hole, walk a long distance away, start the MCC generator, and set off the explosion.

Bouavan prepares to blow up a bombie which we found in pastureland. I hesitate to show this photo, as I don’t want to normalize dangerous behavior. But this was the state of things in the 1980’s. There were no demining teams to call, so people moved bombies by hand if they were a danger to village life, especially unsuspecting children. Photo ca: 1983 by Titus Peachey

Concerned that explosive powder from the Soviets may not be available long-term, he wondered whether an electric charge directly onto the bombie might set off the explosion. So one afternoon (July, 1984) after a rainstorm, with the sunlight creating rainbows in the sky, we found a bombie on a hillside and set to work. Stripping the wire of its rubber coating, Bouavan carefully began to wrap the wire directly around the body of the bombie. Eager to photograph the event, I moved in close with my camera, but instinctively moved around behind Bouavan, so that his body was between me and the bombie. My colleague Mr. Cong Thong from the National Social Welfare Office laughed at me. “If the bombie blows up,” he exclaimed, “the shrapnel will go right through Bouavan and still hit you!” I was embarrassed. Perhaps I should have listened to the primal fear in my body and called off the experiment. I never got that photo.

Failed attempt to blow up a cluster bomb with a battery and cable, with Mr. Bouavan and Mr. Cong Thong, Photos by Titus Peachey.

In any case, the experiment failed. The mechanical fuse was not activated by the electrical charge, which was likely too weak anyway, as we had only used a 12-volt battery. But it may also have been a technical impossibility. More importantly, our clear lack of expertise didn’t hurt anybody that day.

These excursions with Bouavan and the earlier MCC tractor experiment (see March 3 post) were halting and uncertain threads of hope in a 20-year post-war quagmire of bombs, death and despair. Were we hopelessly ill-equipped for the task at hand? Yes. Would our dogged determination eventually result in a way to heal the landscape of its lethal horror? We didn’t know it at the time, but the answer to this question would eventually become “Yes.”

I believe Bouavan had a deep and genuine interest in making the land safe, so that the suffering from the past war would end. He, too, lived among the bombs. For him, his family and his neighbors, it was personal. As for us, the bombs came from our country. It was painful to be represented by this lethal technology which continued to cause so much harm. As a matter of personal integrity, we felt responsible to do something. And so our personal motivations and institutional roles merged in a collaborative quest with Bouavan to find a way forward even if we had no expertise.

During our many travels, our conversations often focused on the past war, but we also talked about our families, rural life and the challenges of development work in Xieng Khouang Province. Without fail, every time Bouavan mentioned the word America, the word “imperialist” came first: “Imperialist America.” These words were fused together on his tongue and in his brain. He said them without malice. This was simply his world view, forged in the cauldron of a life lived under U.S. bombs during the 9-year air war. And there were daily reminders of “imperialist America” everywhere in his world: U.S. bombs, bomb craters, bomb containers and new stories of trauma whenever people in his community were shattered by the deadly ordnance. What else was he to think?

U.S. cluster bomblet lodged in the trunk of a tree. Bombie container with the name of the U.S. company that produced the bomb: Lanson Industries. Photo by Titus Peachey, ca. 1981.

Yet there was never a hint of personal animosity in his interactions with us. At the end of one of my trips to the province, as I was about to get onto the Lao Aviation helicopter to return to Vientiane, Bouavan came rushing toward me. It was unusual to see Bouavan rushing! He carried a basket that contained a live duck. I had told him earlier during my trip that Linda was pregnant. “Give this to Linda,” he said. “It will help keep her strong and have a healthy baby.”

Lao people, including most of the government officials that we worked with, were like that… warm, personable, and concerned for our welfare. Professional roles and personal needs/interests all blended together during 1-3 week trips which often included days in a jeep or boat, shared sleeping quarters, common meals and an occasional bath in the river. So despite the vastly different political, religious and economic backgrounds that separated us, our shared humanity was always present in our relationships. In many ways these human connections felt completely normal. Yet in contrast to the fire and fury of nine long years of war, our collaborative efforts, carried out in a spirit of friendship, pointed to a more hopeful path. For this we are truly grateful.

Note to Readers: I welcome your questions and feedback!

Waiting to pour water on the monks in Luang Prabang, April, 1985, Photos by Titus Peachey

The Lao New Year is celebrated April 14-16, the hottest month of the year. In April,1985, I ended up in Luang Prabang over the New Year holiday. Luang Prabang is the old Royal Capital of Laos. A city filled with beautiful ancient temples, it is the place in Laos where the New Year holiday is celebrated with boundless gusto and pageantry.

Wat Xieng Thong, built under the rule of King Setthathirath between 1559-1560, remained under the patronage of the royal family until 1975. It is one of the most celebrated symbols of Lao religion, culture and traditional art. Photo by Titus Peachey, 2024

All government offices were shut down, so I had little choice but to join in the festivities which sprang to life all around me. My stay in the city also coincided with the first province-wide meeting of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party. As I shared hotel space with these “Party people” and their Vietnamese compatriots from the sister province of Ha Son Binh, there was good opportunity for interesting conversation.

The New Year’s festivities have their roots in a rather gruesome mythological tale from the world of the gods.[2] Suffice it to say that water symbolizes prosperity, fertility and the washing away of sins at the beginning of a new year. Water is incorporated into religious rituals, as people pour sacred water over the statues of the Buddha. Children can also honor and bless their elders in this way and seek forgiveness for any wrong they may have committed.

The Nang Sangkhan Procession in Luang Prabang, based on the New Years myth, was carried out with great pageantry in 1985. Photos by Titus Peachey

However, the popular expression of the holiday is a euphoric and public outburst of energy. During my stay in Luang Prabang the local Agriculture Committee kindly incorporated me into their activities. On the first day of the New Year, I joined hundreds of others in a dash across the Mekong River in long narrow boats. Armed with buckets, a shovel and a couple slender bamboo frames, we were on our way to build a giant sand stupa.[3] A way of gaining merit, these stupas are built by groups of people along the sandy edge of an island in the Mekong. Needless to say, this was not to be a solemn, task-oriented exercise. The atmosphere was playful and charged with mischief.

The celebration began the moment we stepped into the boat, Several men grabbed the oars and slapped the water with gusto as we crossed the river just to ensure that we didn’t arrive dry on the other side. This was further insured by “greeters” who stood knee-deep in the water as our boat pulled up to the island. Cupping their hands, they splashed us liberally as we all laughed and thanked them profusely.

As we prepared our sand stupa, general revelry erupted all around us. Under the shade of a simple bamboo shelter, there was music, dancing and Lao whiskey for all who dared enter. Some of the whiskey was even passed around from stranger to stranger along the river bank. Contained in little plastic bags, it was served piping hot under a blazing sun…as disgusting a potion as I ever hope to sample!

When friend met friend in this throng of people, the result was always the same. After some good-natured joking and backslapping, one would sense the advantage, seize the other by the arm, dash down the gently sloping bank, and fling their wide-eyed friend into the Mekong. No one escaped…or tried to!

One might surmise that all this foolishness was primarily the mischief of idle fun-loving youth. However, many of those who danced, drank or dipped their friends into the river were government officials, some of them communists at that. I was introduced to one man who still had portions of the Mekong flowing from his pockets. Sopping wet myself and splattered with sand, I offered a smile as we shook hands. He was the Secretary of the Party for the County of Luang Prabang. As we exchanged greetings, another man appeared at his side and quietly began rubbing lampblack on the secretary’s face!

Midst all this hub bub we did indeed set about the task of building a sand stupa. It ended up being a larger undertaking than I had anticipated, as a great deal of sand and water were required. We took turns shoveling while others carried and flung water. As the stupa began to take shape, some of us got down onto our hands and knees and began patting the sand so that it would pack and remain firm. This proved to be a temptation too great for the sand shovelers and water flingers. By making only a slight miscalculation, someone at the edge of the river could heave water just over the top of the stupa and onto our heads. This kept us cool, of course, and the flying sand which invariably got stuck between our teeth, gave us something to chew on.

It was while on my knees patting sand that I chanced to work beside Mr. Pheng, an Agriculture official from Oudomsai Province. An old Pathet Lao soldier, he had seen lots of action during the war. Stationed in Xieng Khouang, he had made numerous trips down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to deliver troops and supplies into South Vietnam. Stocky, muscular and full of life, he was obviously enjoying himself. Despite the frequent showers of water from the buckets of our frolicking friends along the river, we were serious about our sand patting. At least our side of the stupa would be firm! Midst all the patting, chewing of sand and general mayhem, Pheng stopped, looked at me and said with a big grin, “My but we’re going to a lot of trouble for the Lord Buddha aren’t we?” I roared with laughter. How, I wondered, did this American Mennonite boy from the hills of Western Maryland ever end up beside this old Pathet Lao soldier in Laos building sand stupas to gain merit from the Lord Buddha? Some things are too remarkable for words!

Highly decorated sand stupa in Luang Prabang. Ours wasn’t this elaborate! Photo credit: www.luangprabangculture.com

Indoor Celebrations!

The hotel in which we stayed was the setting for special receptions and dinners, as the province of Luang Prabang welcomed many guests during the Party Congress. During one of our meals, we were in a separate dining room from a large Vietnamese military delegation being hosted just across the hall from us. In our dining room was a large cultural/entertainment group of 35 people that had come to serve the Party Congress. They were seated at a long, narrow table with servers and attendants hovering about to meet their every need. Others in this dining room included a Party member from Oudomsai Province, several reporters from the Party newspaper, several technical experts from Czechoslavakia, and Mr. Aat (Ministry of Agriculture) and myself from MCC.

It seems that the Lao-Vietnamese reception across the hall had lapsed into frivolity, and like some lively bubbling potion, could no longer be contained behind the four walls of the dining room which had become its cooking pot. I began to sense this when the General Secretary of the Party for Luang Prabang province appeared at the door of our dining room. A portly old gentleman, he had a grin on his face, a look of mischief in his eyes, and a teapot in his hand. He had several cohorts in tow, each armed with a shiny teapot. Calmly, they marched to the long table of guests and took up positions at each end. What proceeded to happen next was as remarkable for its calm and solemn character as for its resemblance to a one-act farce about proper etiquette. With all due dignity and decorum, they moved down the line at the table, placed the slender spout of the teapot down the collar of each guest, and poured! To be sure, there were guffaws and chuckles, but always thanks for this generous outpouring of New Year’s blessing so kindly bestowed by the Party Secretary. The lonely Mennonite got his turn too. Someone explained to the Secretary that I was an American, albeit one who loved peace…apparently an exception to the rule.

Building Bridges

One of my more interesting conversations during these celebrations was with the Party member from Oudomsai Province. He was an assistant to the General Secretary of the Party in Oudomsai and responsible for economic affairs. A tall, soft-spoken Hmong man, he inquired a lot about American society, customs and politics during several walks around the hotel grounds. He wondered why the American military is spread so far around the world, causing so much trouble. When I attempted an explanation (not a defense), relating the U.S. military presence in other countries to the protection of U.S. economic interests, he appeared genuinely puzzled. He asked, “If the U.S. needs economic cooperation with other countries, why not just sign agreements like we Lao do?”[4] Another Party member reflected similar sentiments when he said, “Some American military officers are good people. They just want to defend America’s shores. We applaud them. But many American military officials want to extend American power and influence around the world and that just causes trouble!” I agreed with his comments, yet inwardly wondered if he had any similar thoughts about the Soviet Union.

The striking thing about these comments is that they were not polemical in tone or trying to make a political point. My Hmong friend’s life experiences makes his views understandable. This man had spent years in the caves of Vieng Xai (Party headquarters) during the war, an area heavily bombed by the U.S. Air Force. After some gentle probing he said, “A lot of my good friends were killed during the U.S. bombing.” He himself was nearly killed when a bomb caused mounds of dirt to fall on top of him. Fortunately, he was dug out in time.

Another Party official at the hotel was interested in a more polemical conversation. He probed my perceptions of Laos, the roots of MCC and our program here. When I declared a commitment to peace, he gave me a quick verbal test, asking me what I thought about Ronald Reagan. When I stated my great opposition to the president’s policies, he asked me to provide examples of what I was doing to work against the president. I cited MCC’s challenge to the U.S. government’s rejection of a license to ship school kits to Cambodia in 1983. MCC invited school children to send letters of protest to President Reagan. The license was then granted and the school kits were shipped.[5] He seemed somewhat mollified by this, but I felt as if I had just been given an ideological frisking!

While relaxed encounters with Party people are infrequent, the contacts that we have had are striking for their normalcy. We experienced these Party members as people just like everyone else.[6] Yet most U.S. citizens and most citizens of communist countries don’t have opportunity to encounter one another as such. In order for wars to be fought we have to create faceless enemies. And so we affix labels on one another such as “communist” or “imperialist.” That way the Mr. Phengs and Titus’s and Linda’s can be killed without reflecting on our shared humanity. Numbered as enemy or guerilla casualties, we would not have the opportunity to think about all the fun we could have had building sand stupas together or splashing each other with water. We wouldn’t be able to enjoy memories of pleasant walks together and we could certainly avoid any unpleasant encounters with ideologues. Indeed, all the venom and firepower of the U.S. Air force had been directed at many of the people that I encountered on this trip. Had the U.S. had its way, they would be dead and the sand stupa that I built with Mr. Pheng on the banks of the Mekong that day under the warm April sun would be but a pipedream.

Note to Readers: I welcome your questions and responses!

[1] Most of the information in this posting comes from: Luang Prabang Trip Report, April,1985, by Titus Peachey. The post reflects the attitudes of suspicion and mistrust during the cold war conflict between the Communist world and the West.

[2] See: Lao New Year History, Lao America.org

[3] Sand stupas are large, decorative mounds of sand linked to the ancient myth. Seen as a way to gain merit, they also symbolize the Buddha’s enlightenment.

[4] He raises an interesting point. In reality, Laos is surrounded by more powerful neighbors and doesn’t have the capacity to pressure anyone into agreements via its military power. Does the U.S. status as the world’s #1 military superpower lower the priority it places on diplomacy?

[5] See MCC Cambodia Facebook page. For more detail and pictures, see: https://www.charlesconklin.com/4cambodia/2019/school-kits-to-kampuchea/

[6] I don’t know their personal histories. This is not a defense of the communist system or the capitalist/imperial ways of the U.S. Rather, it is an acknowledgement that our ideologies and militarized approaches to problems prevent us from becoming human to one another.

Government guesthouses usually provided beds and food, but sometimes we had to stay in a village on short notice. There were times that we carried live chickens or a pig’s head with us. We would hand these to the village chief when we arrived and wait for our provisions to be turned into a tasty meal. The uncertainty of these arrangements bothered us during our first travel experiences, but we soon learned to trust our guides and go with the flow. The standing mantra of one of our government guides was, “hurry up and wait!”

A 3-week trip through Xieng Khouang and Houa Phan provinces in 1984 proved particularly interesting and challenging. I spent the first week working with the Committee for Social and Veteran’s Affairs in Xieng Khouang Province checking on past and potential future projects. We made a follow-up visit to the province’s teacher training college to check on our previous shipment of tools and educational materials. We visited villages interested in gravity-feed water systems and small irrigation dams.

We also checked on the mobile sawmill which supplied much needed lumber for construction and discovered an unexpected problem. The teeth on the sawblade kept getting chipped and broken when the blade ran into metal embedded in the logs from bombs and artillery shells that had exploded during the war. And of course there was the ever-present bombie problem. In our wrap-up meeting with Mr. Yong Yia, the Province Governor, he gave us a simple challenge. “Find a solution to the bomb problem and bring it from America as soon as you can!”

(Left) Teacher’s training school near Muong Kham,Xieng Khouang Province, (Middle) Meeting with Xieng Khouang Province officials. Province Governor, Mr. Yong Yia is in the dark blue shirt and Mr. Boua Van is in the white shirt behind me. (Right) Sawmill workers digging shrapnel out of logs before running them through the sawmill.

After a week in Xieng Khouang, I was scheduled to travel 240 km by road to Houa Phan Province, where I would work with the provincial Committee of Agriculture. Mr. Boua Van, my Xieng Khouang guide took me to Nam Neun, the tiny border outpost between the two provinces where I was supposed to meet my Houa Phan host. Boua Van joked that he should weigh me just as I was leaving Xieng Khouang and then weigh me again upon my return to make sure that I had been adequately fed by Houa Phan officials! That didn’t happen, of course, but my trip report indicates that I had sticky rice and meat three times a day for a couple weeks, so I think I managed to keep my weight up!

When we arrived at the border outpost, there were few people around, and my host from Houa Phan had not yet arrived. Mr. Boua Van found the local policeman and charged him to keep me safe and meet all my needs until the folks from Houa Phan arrived to pick me up. The policeman took the charge stoically, but sighed and said: “Where will the gentleman sleep?” I didn’t relish the thought of spending the night in this lonely spot, but it was late in the day, so I resigned myself to a long night on a hard rattan bed with no mosquito net. Shortly after dark, however, headlights appeared over the hilltop to the north, which proved to be my Houa Phan hosts. Relieved, I quickly packed up and we drove up the mountain to Houa Muong County, where we enjoyed a tasty late-night meal hosted by the County Chief. It was a clear night and since there was no electricity for many miles around, I was blessed with the most spectacular view of the night sky I have ever seen.

During our mealtime conversation I learned that the County (Muong) Chief had a keen sense of responsibility toward the people in his district. “If the villagers have a problem, they come to see me and expect to be heard,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if I am sleeping. They call out my name before they get to the door, so I have to get up and receive them. I must listen to their problems and serve them food. Otherwise, they would assume I don’t take them seriously and they wouldn’t come back again.” Houa Muong County was indeed a challenge to administer. The most distant villages were a 5-7 day walk away over mountainous terrain. There were few roads.

(Left) Most of the roads on which I traveled during this trip looked like the one in this photo. I spent many hours in these Soviet “jeeps” and was amazed by their capacity to navigate very rough terrain and mud. (Right) The town of Sam Neua, capital of Houa Phan Province, September, 1983. Photos by Titus Peachey

To travel by land in Houa Phan Province gives one a vivid memory of sturdy Soviet “jeeps,” steep and rocky roads, landslides, forested mountains and rain-swollen rivers. Indeed, my land journey of over 1000 kms could be billed as an exotic trip into the past on some glossy travel brochure in Bangkok.[2] It certainly had all the required ingredients: villages accessible only by river or on foot, the many different languages and clothing styles of tribal groups, life without electricity or machines and unspoiled nature. While this journey was indeed fascinating, the realities of travel in Laos soon peel away the shiny veneer of our imaginary travel brochure. The trip is only for those who have patience, a sense of humor, and a real appreciation for that which is simple. Indeed, the journey itself is bearable only if it is seen primarily as an opportunity for camaraderie, learning about village life and intensive language study.

The ride to the province capital, Sam Neua, was a challenge on rocky roads that took us through the occasional river. But it was the day trip across three mountain passes to Sam Tai near the Vietnamese border that provided the most adventure. We had to clear a fallen tree from the dirt road and on one occasion we all got out of the car to let the driver creep along a slippery ledge on his own. We may have reached our destination in one day, were it not for a big truck that had failed to properly negotiate a tight curve in the road. It got stuck with one wheel dangling off the edge of a ravine. Unable to get past, we returned to the nearest village to spend the night. Curious about how far off the beaten path we had come, I asked the people how many vehicles passed by their village each day. They laughed. “Maybe one or two vehicles a week,” they said.

Each time I sleep in one of Laos’ rural villages, I am surprised by the darkness. Like a black, billowing fog, the darkness rolls up out of the undergrowth and silently pierces the bamboo walls of the houses, creeping to within inches of every lamp. Indeed, it is in rural Laos where darkness is preserved in its purest form, with a potency that muffles sound and transforms even bright colors into muted half-tones. Were it not for places like Laos, our neon-splattered world would face a darkness shortage!

To sleep under a thatch roof during a soft drizzle is indeed deep repose…idyllic, one might conclude…until 4:15 a.m. Darkness still presses in, but the villagers wake up to pound rice, the daily task that consumes two hours of every family’s time. And there are other tasks: carrying water, building the cooking fire, releasing the cows and buffalo from their pens, and feeding the ducks, chickens and pigs. The early morning dampness disregards the thin bamboo walls, sending shivers down one’s back. The smoke from the open fires gives a pleasant rustic smell to the houses, but constantly breathed, can cause respiratory problems. On this particular morning, it seemed like the whole village was coughing…deep, loose coughs. There are few secrets in houses clustered close together with thin walls. Rural life is not utopia.

We made it to Sam Tai District the next day, much to the enthusiastic acclaim of the District Chief, Mr. Boon. “Many people start out for Sam Tai but never get here,” he said. He seemed happy for the company of new faces, likely a commentary on his remote location.

The ferry crossing at Sam Tai. Mr. Boon, Sam Tai Chief on my right. Mr. Oy, my provincial guide from the Committee of Agriculture on my left. On the far right is Mr. Peung in the green/blue plaid shirt from the Ministry of Agriculture in Vientiane.

I was intrigued by the spoken language in Sam Tai, which was pronounced Sam Teu in the local dialect. It was interesting to hear other words pronounced a bit differently, clearly influenced by the Vietnamese language which was spoken just across the border. This was just another confirmation that languages are not static but living/evolving tools of communication that adapt to local people and cultural environments.

This trip to Sam Tai was somewhat unique in that local officials assumed from the start that I could endure anything. On a trip to a village, no apologies were made for asking me to walk barefoot through ankle-deep mud during a heavy drizzle. No one thought it out of the ordinary to lurch down a rain swollen river in a dugout with water churning mere inches from the top of our boat. And after a meeting in the village and a hearty meal, it was of course assumed that we would walk the 7 kms walk back to the district headquarters and ford a waist-deep stream in the dark to return to our guesthouse. This was a sharp departure from the normal impulse of local officials to shield us from any strenuous physical activity.

Walking through a canal on our way to Phat Neua Village after our ride in the dugout boat.

I found it all exhilarating. Buoyed by the brisk walk and my success in “roughing it,” I managed to betray my roots in a privileged life with all the modern amenities. Walking in the middle of the rushing stream while hanging onto a sturdy steel cable to keep from being swept away, I blurted out: “My this is fun!” My Lao companions were not amused and were quick to point out that while it may be fun for me, it was sheer drudgery and weariness for them. This was their lot every day. While this was a delightful change of pace from my more sedentary life in Vientiane, they saw nothing romantic about this aspect of their lives. Understandably, they were indignant that I had the gall to pronounce it “fun!” Properly chastened, I realized once again that I was moving too quickly through this world of foot paths and lamp-lit villages to absorb its lessons. My several week excursion into rural village life was vastly different from living within the constraints and realities that Laotian villagers experience on a daily basis. Despite my embarrassment at being a slow learner, I am grateful that my Laotian companions pointed out the blurred vision and false assumptions that still clung to me.

Whenever Linda and I traveled, there was rarely a way for us to have any communication. Neither of us knew how long our trips would be, so working, parenting and waiting in Vientiane with no news from the traveler could be a bit stressful. This trip, which lasted 3 ½ weeks was longer than usual. Fortunately, I was able to send Linda a note about half-way through via someone who was returning to Vientiane. That way she knew that I was still alive!

I returned to Vientiane, skirting the mountains and flying through the clouds in a single-engine bi-plane. Compared to other Southeast Asian cities, Vientiane always seemed like a sleepy collection of villages strung along the Mekong River. But after this trip, Vientiane appeared like a giant city below…hot and noisy with too much traffic. How perceptions can change!

[1] All the stories, quotes and information in this posting come from two trip reports that I prepared for Mennonite Central Committee. Xieng Khoiuang Trip Report, July 21-28, 1984, and Houa Phan Trip Report, July 28-August 15, 1984, by Titus Peachey

[2] This journey included the trip from Phonsavan, Xieng Khouang Province to the town of Sam Neua in Houa Phan. From Sam Neua we went to Xieng Kho along the northern border with Vietnam. After returning to Sam Neua, we traveled southeast to Sam Tai and back. Then returned to Phonsavan for the flight back to Vientiane.

The villagers spoke softly to us of their pain and losses...their eyes often welling up with tears. These were hard stories for us to hear. The cloak of our U.S. identity took on meanings we weren’t eager to own. The question of responsibility…never spoken...always hung in the air between us. These lamp-lit villages became a mirror, bringing us face-to-face with our nation’s lethal footprint…repeatedly.

Remnants of cluster bomb containers could be found everywhere throughout the villages. The middle photo shows them used as posts for a section of a house. The photo on the right provides the identity of the manufacturer: Camden Mfg. Photos by Titus Peachey

Yet in village after village, we were welcomed with warmth and generosity. Steaming baskets of sticky rice, tasty Lao soups, and spices that enlivened our taste buds were set before us. As we shared meals there were stories to tell, spontaneous songs to sing and laughter...always laughter…that would erupt, generously aided by some potent homemade Lao whisky. The villagers’ resilient human spirit…the same spirit that enabled them to survive the fire and fury from the sky…always emerged.

Eating Utensils Made From Bombs

I don’t know when it first happened, but on one of these occasions, we realized that the eating utensils we were using and the platters on which our food was served, were made from melted down bomb containers and dispenser tubes. Returning to scenes of utter destruction after the war, Laotian villagers had used every available resource to put their lives back together. They had taken the weapons of war that still littered their fields and gardens, and refashioned them into instruments that would provide nourishment, life and well-being for their families. And these very instruments offered hospitality to us, representatives of the country which had dropped the bombs. Villagers offered these kind gestures, knowing full well that more bombs still lurked outside their door.

(Left) Bowls and rice steamer made from bomb containers (Right) Village meal with the MCC Peace Delegation in Xieng Khouang Province, November, 1985. Photos by Titus Peachey

So, the spoons that touched our lips and the bowls holding the warm soup broth during our shared meals had once formed the shell of a bomb made in the USA. The symbolism was powerful and called for deeper reflection.

During one of our visits to Xieng Khouang Province, one young Lao man who had lost his mother in the U.S. bombing reflected on the juxtaposition of his loss and our presence this way: We Lao say that there are long and short fingers on the same hand. In the same way there are good and bad people in the same country. So we don’t believe that all Americans are bad. It was only a few people in power who made the war in Laos. You as an American coming to Laos to help us should consider yourself at home.

How could this young man, whose mother was killed by U.S. bombs, be so gracious? What had he done with all his trauma and sorrow? And why, during our five years in Laos was it rare for us to hear expressions of anger about the war?

It would be easy to conclude that the pain and anger from the past war had dissipated or that anxieties no longer burdened these villagers as they sent their children off to tend their cattle in land where bombs still lurked. But, for us foreigners, there are cultural barriers that make it hard for us to understand the inner work of soul and spirit these villagers may have gone through in order to welcome us.

Phounsy Phasavaeng grew up in southern Laos, an area heavily bombed by the U.S. due to its location near the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In order to stay safe, Phounsy’s mother lived in a bunker for 9 years and lost two children during the war. Phounsy herself experienced deep trauma as a child when a cluster bomb exploded and killed her cousin as they played together. “If you had visited my family in 1981 you would not have been welcome,” she writes. “Neither my family nor I trusted Americans. We thought they were the enemy. But there is a strong emphasis in Lao culture to politely and respectfully receive guests. It would not have been appropriate for them to act unwelcoming in any way.”[1]

As an adult, Phounsy came to the United States to study peacemaking at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University. Upon hearing the news, her father laughed, incredulous that his daughter thought she could learn about peacemaking in the United States. “I changed a lot.” she writes. “When I came to America I became more open or exposed to outside views. I met many nice people.”[2] Today, Phounsy lives with her family in Laos and works for a development agency to improve economic stability for families and communities, as well as to support children so they are protected and have access to health care and education.

Yet for those who never left Laos, there were other factors influencing their reaction to the long-term pain of war. We routinely heard Lao people explain that it was the U.S. government that inflicted war on Laos, not the U.S. citizens themselves. And it may be that central government officials only took us to places where they knew people understood this distinction. Others have noted that in Lao culture, there is a strong sense of karma, of being part of a larger destiny or fate beyond individual control. These cultural understandings plus the hard work of survival may prevent people from dwelling on the reasons for their fate.

It is possible that as foreigners we were simply shielded from the real expressions of anger present among Lao people who still lived with the terror of bombs.

Whatever the reasons, we were deeply humbled by the welcome we received in Lao villages. Indeed, we wondered how we could honor the generosity offered to us. We wondered how the patterns of our own lives might change in response to our encounters with these courageous people who wrested life daily from bomb-infested land. Two events helped us to find our way.

A Family Visit, a Shattered Hoehead and War Tax Resistance

During a visit with a family in Xieng Khouang Province in April of 1981, Linda was taken to visit a family where the mother of 11 children had been killed just the day before (see previous post). The woman had struck a cluster bomb with a hoe while opening up new land for a garden. During the visit, the woman’s husband gave the shattered hoehead to Linda and said, “Take this back to your country. Please use it to tell our story so that it won’t happen again.” We have tried to keep faith with this man’s plea, and for the past 45 years have used the shattered hoehead to tell the story of the long-term impact of the U.S. air war in Laos.

But the clear connection between this family’s trauma and the U.S. weapons that had caused it, led us to reach for more than story-telling. Even as Lao villagers had transformed the weapons of war into useful items for their daily living, how might we transform the systems of violence in which we live to support life, well-being and peace?

Our experience in Laos only intensified our growing conviction that even as Mennonites resisted military conscription and the use of our bodies for war, we should also consider withholding a portion of our tax dollars that purchased weapons of war. In 1982, we included the following proposal in our official Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) program plans for Laos under the heading: promote reconciliation between the Lao and North American peoples.

Encourage constituents to deduct $10 from their income tax payment and use that money to buy a shovel for Lao farmers to help them till their bomb-littered fields more safely.

As you might imagine, this created some debate within MCC as it encouraged MCC supporters to do something illegal. Yet for us it was a way to acknowledge that the roots of the suffering caused by bombs in Lao soil lay embedded in the routines of our lives: the legal requirement to pay income taxes every April 15. If we didn’t address the problem at its root, we would continue to be implicated, as it happens again in other places. To our disappointment, the provision that encouraged Mennonites to withhold $10 from their income taxes to purchase shovels was removed from our plans. However, a Taxes for Peace fund had been created in 1972, which received withheld income tax dollars sent to MCC from constituents. MCC used $4,000 from this fund to help purchase 1,200 shovels for Laos.[3]

Unloading shovels to safely till the soil in Laos. Photo by Titus Peachey

Cluster Bomb Production in our Home Community

Much to our surprise, our direct connections to the suffering of Lao villagers only became more personal when we returned to our home community in the United States. Concerned about the production of cluster bombs, we began to research weapons-related contracts. While following up a reference to cluster munitions in Aviation Week and Space Technology, I turned the page to find a photo of a new type of cluster bomb, developed by ISC Technologies in Lancaster, PA, our home community.[4] I was stunned. We also discovered a second company, Bulova Technologies, located in the heart of Lancaster City, which made fuzes for cluster munitions.[5]

ISC Technologies and Bulova Technologies were once mainstays of the Lancaster business community. Both of them are now gone. Photos by Titus Peachey

These companies provided good jobs for hundreds of people and contributed to the local tax base. It was as if the prosperity of our home community was directly connected to these Laotian villages that were traumatized by war. We struggled with the personal implications of living in a community that helped to produce these dreadful weapons. Once again, this time far from the battlefield, we looked into the mirror of war and saw our own reflection.

And so we learned that to respond fully to what we had experienced in the villages of Laos required some deep inner work of our own. In a democracy, how are our personal lives connected to the wars of our nation? How do we transform our nation’s economic and political drive for military domination, into policies and budgets that prioritize diplomacy, cooperation, just economic relationships and international aid? How do we remove indiscriminate weapons such as cluster munitions from our country’s arsenal and industrial parks so that people no longer have to risk death while hoeing in their gardens? How do we tell our government not to use our tax dollars to bomb villages in faraway wars?

These questions have followed us for the past 45 years since our first encounters in the lamp-lit villages of Laos. But with these questions, we carry the warmth and hospitality of a courageous and resilient people. Their capacity to offer us welcome inspires us to walk the path of justice and peacemaking. It is a long and challenging walk without easy answers, but we are grateful and humbled by their companionship along the way.

Lamp made from a BLU 3/B defused cluster bomb. After the shell is hollowed out, it is filled with kerosene. A wick is inserted through a hole in the heavy metal cover. This is a dangerous way to create a lamp, but we found these lamps frequently in Lao villages. Photo by Titus Peachey

[1] Phounsy Phasavaeng emails to Titus Peachey, Feb. 13, 2022 and March 15, 2026.

[2] Ibid.

[3] MCC U.S. Peace Section Minutes, April 23, 24, 1982, Mt. Joy, PA, MCC Executive Committee Meeting, September 16-18, 1982.

[4] Aviation Week and Space Technology, September 30, 1985.

[5] Bulova Technologies was located at the corner of Queen and Orange streets in Lancaster City. I confirmed its production of fuzes for cluster munitions in a phone call with the CEO, Stephen Gurba.

Rural Laos scenes in Xieng Khouang and Houa Phan provinces. These images and descriptions of village life reflect what we observed in the early 1980’s Photos by Titus Peachey

One Lao woman describes the village of her youth this way: Around that village of mine were green and beautiful mountains, and land and the fields my neighbors had sweated over and labored on since the time of my ancestors. My neighbors were all farmers, honest and hard-working. Our happiness was full and overflowing because we were content with our lives, even though we lived in the wilderness.[1]

Photos of village farm life near Muong Khun, Xieng Khouang Province, Laos, ca. 1983. Photos by Titus Peachey

One soon notices that there is little sound. No traffic. No machines. No electric lights. No concrete. Perhaps one can hear the rhythmic thud of a wooden mortar and pestle, the squeal of a pig or the soft thump of a weaving loom tucked in the shade under a house on stilts. But these pastoral scenes are deceptive. They hide the rigor and the strain of hard labor, the reality of poor health care and limited opportunities for education. They also hide a decade of soul-searing war that terrorized the population with losses and fears that still haunt their lives. A closer look helps to fill in the scene.

A view from a hilltop reveals deep craters splattered across the landscape from exploding bombs and artillery shells. Bomb casings, some still bearing the name of the U.S. corporations that produced them are found throughout the villages, serving as planters for herbs, posts for granaries or makeshift walkways across irrigation canals. Why would the remnants of America’s high-tech weaponry be found in these settings where farmers still plod behind water buffalo to guide the plow? No matter how many times I stand in these settings this question still challenges me. A very brief review of U.S. connections to the history of Laos helps us understand.

Craters from bombs and artillery shells still pock-marked the landscape of rural Laos in the early 1980’s. Bomb containers were frequently used for practical things like fence posts or, in this picture, as a planter for onions. Photos by Titus Peachey

Lao and U.S. History

Lao historian Khapkeo Thammavong traces the history of Lao people back 5,000 years to settlements in present day China.[2] After the Lao-Thai people groups moved south, they formed a loose collection of kingdoms that finally united under the leadership of King Fa Ngum in the 14^th century, known as the Land of a Million Elephants. Laos came under French colonial control in 1893 as part of Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia). The French were defeated at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam, in 1954. Worried about the spread of communism and rising Soviet influence, the U.S. seized this opportunity to extend its power into Southeast Asia.

Map of Laos showing the areas controlled by the revolutionary Lao forces (Pathet Lao) at President Kennedy’s news conference. Public Domain

On March 23, 1961, the entirety of President Kennedy’s opening statement in a news conference focused on Laos. He declared:

My fellow Americans, Laos is far away from America, but the world is small...The security of all Southeast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its neutral independence. Its own safety runs with the safety of us all.[i]

As the U.S. and the Soviet Union struggled for strategic advantage, anti-colonial and national liberation movements sprang to life around the world. Two separate Geneva conferences were held, one of them focused on protecting the neutrality of Laos. In 1962 the nations of the world agreed not to resort to the use or threat of force or any other measure which might impair the peace of the Kingdom of Laos.[ii]

But even this agreement could not restrain the superpowers. While maintaining the appearance of neutrality, both sides violated the agreement. Lao villagers soon began to hear the crackle of gunfire and feel the tug of larger forces and political ideologies on their loyalties. Two compelling, yet conflicting narratives fueled a devastating conflict. The U.S. and the Royal Lao Government sought to preserve free enterprise and protect Southeast Asia from what it described as the tyranny of Communist rule. At the same time, the Soviet Union, North Vietnam and the Lao revolutionary forces (Pathet Lao) viewed the conflict as a war of national liberation from oppressive colonial powers.

One of the intriguing aspects of this struggle within Laos was the strong leadership role that two princes (half-brothers) played in the political struggle. Prince Souvanna Phouma served as Prime Minister of Laos on 4 different occasions, including during the years of strong U.S. influence, 1962-1975. These were turbulent political years with coups, coalition governments and competing U.S. government agencies supporting rival factions in Laos. Souvanna Phouma’s half-brother, Prince Souphanouvong was a leader in the Lao revolutionary forces. He lived in the caves of Vieng Xai during much of the war and served as President of Laos when the communist government took control in 1975. Remarkably, these two princes served in the same coalition government on two occasions, in 1956 and 1974.[3]

The U.S. Air War in Laos

While the U.S. sent ground troops to Vietnam, the strategy in Laos was a secret U.S. air war. Over a 9-year period, from 1964-1973, the U.S. launched 580,000 bombing missions over Laos, equal to one planeload of bombs every 8 minutes around the clock for 9 years…totaling 2.2 million tons of ordnance.[4]

Villagers fled to the forests and caves or escaped to far off refugee camps, seeking safety from the daily assault on their lives. I personally spoke to many villagers who lived in caves for 9 years. One elderly woman told me: There was no place to hide…We had to move into the caves and we couldn’t come out to find food. Our children cried because we didn’t have food for them to eat…We lived like rats and mice. We had to crawl to the back of the cave to poop and pee.[5]

Of course, some villagers had to move about in the daytime to search for food, which put them in danger. Mr. Bounthavi told me: If we went out in the daytime, we’d carry a tree branch with us which would shade us. If we saw an airplane we would stand just like a tree…and the airplane wouldn’t see us…Along the road, every 15 meters we would dig a hole…where we could hide if an airplane came.[6]

In testimony collected by Fred Branfman and Ngeun Luangpraseuth in the late 1960’s, one villager said: There wasn’t a night when we thought we’d live until morning, never a morning we thought we’d survive until night...I just stayed in my cave. I didn’t see the sunlight for two years. What did I think about? Oh, I used to repeat, ‘please don’t let the planes come, please don’t let the planes come, please don’t let the planes come.’”[7]

Piou Cave in Xieng Khouang Province Laos where 374 Laotian villagers were killed by a U.S. missile strike on November 24, 1968. Photo by Titus Peachey

In addition to the relentless bomb strikes, there were battles on the ground between Royal Lao Government forces (including a CIA supported Hmong Army) and Pathet Lao forces supported by the North Vietnamese and the Soviet Union. Thousands died and were displaced from their homes.

Cluster bombs: weapons that never die

I saw my first cluster bomb in Laos in 1981. At the time I had no idea that these indiscriminate weapons would become a significant focus in my life for over 45 years. The first mass use of cluster munitions in warfare happened in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. Extensive research and development on cluster munitions occurred after the Korean War. Hailed as new, innovative technology, military officials were eager to use these new munitions on the battlefield. But the timing of their readiness for use in warfare occurred just in the aftermath of a contentious debate over the use of napalm in Vietnam which was not resolved until March of 1965. In order to avoid a similar debate over cluster munitions, the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not request authorization from any civilian authority. The message from the Directorate for Operations to the pilots was: As far as we know,…you’ve got ‘em, use ‘em when you want, and keep your mouth shut, or somebody will tell you that you can’t.[8]

(Left) Display of cluster bombs in their container at the 1st Meeting of States Parties to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, Vientiane, 2010, and (Right) Cluster munitions scattered on grazing land in Xieng Khouang Province, 1994, 20+ years after they were dropped. Photos by Titus Peachey

Cluster munitions are small...about the size of a baseball...and come in a large container or “mother bomb.” A typical strike by an F4 Phantom Jet carries eight cluster bomb cannisters but can carry more with special racks.[9] When the large bomb falls from the aircraft, it splits in half, and hundreds of these tiny bomblets are ejected covering an area up to 300 X 900 meters.[10] The individual bomblets contain a mechanical fuze which is designed to arm by spinning or via some other mechanism as it falls to the ground. Most cluster bomblets are designed to explode when they hit the ground.

Based on prior research done on “wound ballistics,” military officials discovered that even small fragments, traveling at high speed can create incapacitating wounds.[11] The heavy metal shell of the bomblet is designed to fragment and fill the air with sharp shards of flying metal, killing or wounding anyone within or near the footprint of the strike.

But what has plagued cluster bombs from their inception is their large footprint and their high failure rate. There is a long chain of events that must activate properly for the individual bomblets to explode. Bomblets are sometimes not released from their container properly, fail to fully arm as they drop, get caught in heavy vegetation or land in soft soil, causing them to remain intact and lethal. In Laos, we saw these unexploded bomblets frequently, hidden along a village path, tossed into a bomb crater, or on open pastureland, sometimes numbering in the dozens. In every pastoral village scene, these steel balls of death lurked unseen, beneath the soil.

According to U.S. Air Combat Data, 260 million of these cluster bomblets were dropped on Laos.[12] Clearance operators estimate that up to 1/3 of the bomblets failed to explode. So at the end of the war there were tens of millions...perhaps as high as 75-80 million of these deadly bomblets left on the ground in Laos.

When Lao villagers returned after the war to rebuild their homes, plant their gardens and repair their paddy dikes, they did not know that the very land on which they had relied for centuries to sustain and nourish life was now a place of great danger. And so Lao villagers lived and worked...and their children played...in a landscape filled with bombs. They lost limbs, they lost eyesight, and they lost one another...mothers, fathers, children, sisters and brothers. In the years that followed, children died who had not yet been born when the bombs fell.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, there were no humanitarian demining teams to call. There had been no release of U.S. bombing data. Lao and U.S. government relations were strained. Laotian villagers were left on their own for 20 years to somehow wrest life and nourishment from a land bristling with bombs.

It was during this time period that Linda and I lived and worked in Laos. This is when the failed MCC tractor experiment took place (see previous post). And this is when the window into the war in Laos turned into a mirror. We saw images of ourselves that were deeply troubling, including reflections of our home community in Pennsylvania. (To be continued)

[1] 26-year old nurse from the Plain of Jars, as quoted by Fred Branfman in Voices from the Plain of Jars, . Print run for the Convention on Cluster Munitions 1^st Meeting of States Parties, Vientiane, Lao PDR, 2010, p. 3.

[2] Khapkeo Thammavong, Lao: A History of 5,000 years, Vientiane, Lao PDR, 2020. Written only in Lao, this volume is over 950 pages long!

[3] Laos: Four Phases to Nonexistence, Time Magazine, June 8, 1962, and James M. Markham, Coalition Regime Installed In Laos, April 4, 1974.

[4] Linda and I did this calculation based on data from the Congressional Record, May 14, 1975.

[5] Titus Peachey interview with elderly woman in Muong Nga Village, Houa Phan Province, during production of Bombies Film, May, 2000.

[6] Titus Peachey interview with Mr. Bounthavi, Ton Neua Village, Xieng Khouang Province, during production of Bombies film, May, 2000.

[7] Fred Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars, p. 4. Print run for the Convention on Cluster Munitions 1^st Meeting of States Parties, Vientiane, Lao PDR, 2010

[8] Michael Krepon, Weapons Potentially Inhumane: The Case of Cluster bombs, Foreign Affairs Journal, April, 1974.

[9] Michael Krepon, Weapons Potentially Inhumane: The Case of Cluster Bombs, Foreign Affairs Journal, April, 1974.

[10] Ibid. The size of a cluster footprint depends on the type, the speed and angle of the aircraft, the height of release, and the terrain. In Kosovo bomb clearance technicians routinely referred to cluster bomb strikes covering a square kilometer.

[11] Eric Prokosch, The Technology of Killing: A Military and political history of Antipersonnel Weapons, Zed Books, London, 1994, p. 10.

[12] Circle of Impact: The Fatal Footprint of Cluster Munitions on People and Communities, Handicap International, 2006, p.36.

[i] From the JFK Library and Archives: https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-press-conferences/news-conference-8

[ii] Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos, Geneva, Switzerland, July 23, 1962: https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume%20456/volume-456-i-6564-english.pdf

Within 6 weeks of our arrival in Vientiane, we were already taking trips to other provinces, Linda to Xieng Khouang and I to Attopeu. Linda accompanied our predecessors Fred and Jan, to do further experimentation with Mennonite Central Committee’s (MCC) custom-made tractor that was designed to blow up the millions of unexploded bombs still embedded in the fields and villages of Laos.[1] The Xieng Khouang trip was initiated by the Lao Committee for Social and Veterans’ Affairs. As was usually the case, they sent a staff person along to work with local officials to make all the arrangements for lodging, food and travel to facilitate our work.

Xieng Khouang Province

Xieng Khouang Province is a place where war had scarred the land and wounded a courageous people, causing years of suffering from displacement and loss. During the war, control of the province was constantly in flux, shifting between the CIA-backed Hmong Army commanded by Vang Pao and the Pathet Lao forces supported by North Vietnam and the Soviet Union. Given its strategic location it was the frequent target of U.S. bombing runs.

(Left) Phonsavan, capital of Xieng Khouang Province, ca: 1981, (Right) Cratered fields from the U.S. air war in Xieng Khouang Province.

The area was first visited by MCC and Quaker workers in 1977 sparking MCC’s concerns about unexploded ordnance in Laos. MCC Vietnam workers Earl and Pat Martin had outfitted a tractor in 1975 to help farmers clear fields of M-79 grenades but were not able to sufficiently test it before the war’s chaotic ending led to their departure from Quang Ngai Province. However that experience quickly led to a discussion of a similar solution for Laos. The world’s first civilian humanitarian demining team (MAG) would not be formed for another 14 years. And so a small group of Mennonites, with no expertise on unexploded ordnance, embarked on a risky experiment…a bombie beating tractor for Laos.

The Bombie Beating Tractor Development

August, 1979: The Lao Government approved MCC’s project proposal for a custom-made tractor that would safely destroy cluster bombs. In a July 23,1979 meeting, Mr. Ma from the National Committee of Plan, indicated that Prime Minister Kaysone Phomvihane himself had approved the project.[2]

September, 1979: The tractor was ordered from a business in Thailand, complete with a shielded cab, a rotovator in the rear and a shielded chain flail in the front. The flail, comprised of nearly 200 kilos of chain in 2-foot lengths attached to a hydraulic-powered axle, was designed to beat the ground and blow up the bombies.[3]

The MCC Bombie Beating Tractor at the Vientiane Airport awaiting shipment to Xieng Khouang Province. MCC worker Fred Swartzendruber in the cab. Photo by Jan Swartzendruber

March, 1980: The tractor arrived in Vientiane. On March 25 1980, MCC’s Washington Office received an urgent call from the U.S. State Department’s Laos Desk Officer. The officer said he had received a telegram from the U.S. Embassy in Laos indicating that MCC was preparing to send the tractor to Xieng Khouang to clear fields of unexploded ordnance. He urged MCC to drop the project because it was dangerous and he was worried that Fred would blow himself up. Two congressional offices also called to warn MCC of the dangers of the mission.

While the U.S. government’s concerns were not unfounded, the ordnance was equally dangerous for Lao villagers who were routinely being injured and killed. Aware of the dangers and willing to accept the risk, MCC proceeded with the project.[4]

April 25, 1980: After numerous technical issues and difficulties, the tractor was loaded and flown to Phonsavan, the capital of Xieng Khouang, on a C-123 transport plane.[5]

Fred Swartzendruber tests the bombie beating tractor in Xieng Khouang, Photo by Jan Swartzendruber. Cluster bomb on pastureland in Xieng Khouang, Photo by Titus Peachey

April 29-May 1, 1980: Fred, Jan and a group of Lao technicians went to local fields surrounding Phonsavan to see if the tractor’s chain flail would destroy bombies. The bomb-littered fields were overgrown with tall weeds, making it a treacherous place to walk and move around with heavy equipment. Nevertheless, over the course of several days they attempted to blow up 11 bombies with the tractor’s chain flail. Of the 11 bombies, 4 blew up while 7 others failed to explode. At the end of one morning’s efforts, two unexploded bomblets lay exposed, presenting a danger to the innocent curiosity of children. Not knowing what else to do, Fred and Jan carefully wrapped the bombies in a flak jacket and deposited them in a ditch.[6]

February, 1981: MCC and the Quakers visited Xieng Khouang again and learned that the tractor had not been used since May of 1980. The province cited inadequate shielding and the fear that mines and larger bombs could blow up and endanger the driver.[7]

April 22-30, 1981: The tractor was tested again. Linda Peachey wrote in her trip report: “We went to a field just outside of Phonsavan and four bombies were soon located. One of the more daring (and careless) province officials moved two of them close together so that the flail could attack them both at the same time. After the flail proved unsuccessful, this same official picked up these bombies and tossed them, causing one of them to detonate. After another unsuccessful try, the flail finally did cause the fourth bombie to explode.”[8]

Given the inconsistent outcomes, local officials suggested engineering a weight under the shielding of the chain flail to drop down and crush the bombies. This, too, proved to be unsuccessful because the weight “stepped” on the bombies rather than crushing them.

January, 1982: In a letter to the Foreign Ministry, Titus and Linda Peachey wrote: “As you know, the tractor which Mennonite Central Committee sent to Xieng Khouang in 1980 has not been successful. Some ordnance experts have warned us that the use of a tractor is dangerous, due to mines and other heavy ordnance in the fields. We would like to suggest, therefore, that the tractor be used for agricultural purposes, such as plowing or discing fields which are considered safe. We feel it is better for the tractor to be put to good use than to wait idly for new solutions to the bombie problem.”[9]

April 24-28, 1984: And so the “bombie-beating tractor” became just a tractor. I (Titus) visited Ban Lek Village where the MCC tractor had been used to plow 1½ hectares of land the day before. Mr. Thong Dee informed me that the tractor had plowed up more than 20 bombies in the field. He had put 5 of them in a hole which he covered up with weeds. Noticing that I was about to take a picture, he quickly grabbed the bombies and to my dismay, plopped them on top of the ground for me to have a better view. We survived! He had thrown other bombies into a bomb crater or onto a nearby hillside. Some blew up and some didn’t. I came across 4 of the live bomblets as I was walking around the area, along with a mortar round and a 500-pound bomb protruding from the ground.[10]

Mr. Thong Dee by his plowed field in Ban Lek Village, Xieng Khouang, Laos. Five bombies that Mr. Thong Dee had placed in a hole beside the field, and a 500 lb bomb protruding from the soil. Photos by Titus Peachey (1984)

Reflections on a Visit to Moung Kham: During Linda’s Xieng Khouang visit (April, 1981) the group learned that a woman in Muong Kham had been killed by a bombie just the day before while she was hoeing in her garden. Local officials suggested that they all go and visit the family, which was about a 50 km drive to the northeast of Phonsavan. Linda writes: “Simply walking down the village’s main street one can count at least ten large bomb craters carved out by 500-1000 pound bombs…This woman was 45 years old, the mother of eleven children…I felt many things as I stood in that field looking at the small depression which the bombie had made in the ground and observing the sorrowful reddened eyes of the 10 yr-old daughter who was carrying her sleeping brother on her back…To say that one more person has been killed in Xieng Khouang doesn’t at all tell this woman’s story or this family’s sense of loss…This woman should not have had to die…The U.S. put those bombs there, but who of us would ever take responsibility for this woman’s death?[11]”

(Left)Turning the soil with a hoe is a common practice in Laos, but also a very dangerous activity. Photo by Linda Gehman Peachey. (Right) Two children of the woman in Muong Kham who was killed by a cluster bomb. Note the shattered hoehead at the young girl’s feet and the small crater made by the exploding bomb. Photo by Jan Swartzendruber

The woman’s husband gave Linda the hoehead which we have kept for 45 years, using it repeatedly to tell this tragic story.

This is the hoehead we have carried with us for 45 years, using it to tell the story of this Lao woman and her family. With it are two cluster bombs (safe) and spoons made from bomb containers and dispenser tubes.

Who Killed Somboon?[12]

Linda’s direct encounter with this family’s trauma caused by the U.S. air war, impacted us greatly. There could be no dispute about the woman’s innocence. The war was over. The last bombs had fallen 8 years earlier. The woman was opening up land for planting in advance of the upcoming rainy season. The very land on which she and her family depended for life and well-being had become a landscape harboring death and horror.

The questions of responsibility weighed heavily on us, just two U.S. citizens in a land awash with lethal U.S. ordnance. Were we somehow connected to this tragedy? I struggled with this question by writing a short drama called, Who Killed Somboon? It was a search for accountability somewhere in the murky systems of politics, economics, indiscriminate ordnance and religious faith that had comingled in the prosecution of the war. The drama portrayed God in heaven receiving news that a woman in Laos (Somboon) had been killed while hoeing in her garden. It was reportedly a “murder with no murderer.”

Throughout the play, God searches in vain for someone on earth who will repent of Somboon’s death. But as God speaks with the U.S. President, a defense contractor and a church pastor, they all offer reasons for why they are not responsible.

Responsibility for all the suffering and loss of war is a complex but burning moral issue. To be fair, no president, politician, defense contractor, airplane pilot or U.S. taxpayer intended for this innocent woman to be killed 8 years after the war was over. Yet her death was entirely predictable. But in the cold calculus of war the death of innocent civilians is routinely framed by governments as “collateral damage,” with no hint of liability in a court of law. Yet midst the shock wave of a family’s trauma, Somboon’s death is more rightly understood within the moral framework of murder, and the question of responsibility reverberates loudly in the silence.

The questions arising from this story are heavy, a reflection of my own inner angst about guilt and responsibility. In the ending scene of the drama, we find Somboon talking to God. Over a cup of tea she asks God, “Who killed me? Who will protect my children?” The drama does not resolve these questions, and forty-five years later they continue to haunt, probe and disturb my soul.

[1] We didn’t know it at the time, but the actual number of cluster bomblets dropped on Laos is now known to be 260-270 million. The 580,000 U.S. bomb strikes that took place over a 9-year period averages out to one bombing strike every 8 minutes around the clock for 9 years with the total bomb tonnage estimated at 2.2 million.

[2] Jan Swartzendruber, Draft MCC News Service article, May 19, 1980, and John Hess-Yoder, Report of meeting with Mr. Ma Khaykhamphithoune, President, National Committee of Plan, July 23, 1979.

[3] Jan Swartzendruber, Draft MCC News Service article, May 19, 1980. In Laos, these tennis-ball-sized submunitiions are called “bombies.”

[4] Murray Hiebert, MCC Washington Office, Letter to Fred and Jan Swartzendruber, April 1, 1980.

[5] Fred and Jan Swartzendruber, Xieng Khouang Trip Report, April 25-May 7, 1980.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Titus and Linda Peachey with comments by Jacqui Chagnon and roger Rumpf, Summary of MCC/AFSC Unexploded Ordnance Project in Laos, October, 1981.

[8] Linda Peachey, Trip Report, Xieng Khouang, April 22-30, 1981

[9] Titus and Linda Peachey, Letter to Somchit Philathivong, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, January 5, 1982.

[10] Titus Peachey Xieng Khouang trip report, April 24-28, 1984.

[11] Linda Peachey, Xieng Khouang trip report, April 22-30, 1981.

[12] “Who Killed Somboon?” is a drama written by Titus as a reflection on the death of the woman whose family Linda visited in 1981. Somboon is not her real name. The drama was used in MCC’s orientation of new workers for many years, presented as a reader’s theater.

At JFK Airport in New York City, pretending to be ready for our first 3 years in Laos with Mennonite Central Committee! (September, 1980)

Six months after boarding our flight in New York we would finally arrive in Vientiane, ready for 3 years of work, learning and engagement with the people of Laos. Bangkok’s noise, congestion and frenetic activity were in stark contrast to what we encountered at Vientiane’s Wattay Airport. As we descended the steps from the airplane onto the tarmac, we stepped back into the natural world, greeted by the sound of hundreds of frogs merrily chirping in the grass along the runways. This natural atmosphere was true throughout the capital city as described in a letter to my mother.

Vientiane

(Left) Kou Vieng Road was our daily path to the post office and morning market. (Middle) Phak Bong fields flourishing along Kou Vieng Road. (Right) Tree-lined street near the old Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vientiane.

March 16, 1981: “When you think of us now…think of quiet things like bicycles, footsteps on a red dirt road, trees and grass growing, people watering gardens, buffalo plodding down the streets or a game of badminton. Or you can think of little noises like roosters crowing in the morning, cows mooing, children playing…birds chirping and some evening drums and music at the neighborhood Buddhist Temple.”

“Vientiane has a central market and business area that is shaped like a banana, following the curve of the river. Behind the central area is a collection of villages all rather loosely tied together to form Vientiane…There are occasional rice fields, banana groves or vegetable gardens scattered through…these villages.”

There was, however, a darker side to the quiet calm that enveloped the city. It had its roots in the loss and trauma of war which led to the exodus of 350,000 people from the country, along with businesses, capital and most international aid groups. Several years of drought and the poorly planned collectivization of agriculture led to real economic hardship and a feeling of stagnation. In addition, many former military and high ranking government officials fled, fearing retribution.

The MCC house/office in Ban Sala Daeng, Vientiane Linda in our office with daughter Beth.

Our Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) house/office was a cement house with hardwood floors, running water and electricity supplied by a large hydroelectric dam located 90 kilometers north of the city. We were located in a quiet neighborhood on a dirt street about a 5-minute motorcycle ride from the post office and morning market.

Relationship to the Lao Government

Unlike most other countries where MCC works through local churches and faith-based agencies, our partner in Laos was the Lao Government. In these early years of communist administration, there were no Lao non-governmental organizations with which to partner. During the war the current Lao Government leaders had lived in the caves of Vieng Xai in northeastern Laos to escape 9 years of U.S. bombing (1964-1973). This MCC-Lao Government partnership was a most unusual partnership for both parties and given the differing political and religious foundations that we represented, one that stretched us both.

The cliffs and caves of Vieng Xai, Houa Phan Province Laos sheltered Lao leaders and villagers during the U.S. air war 1964-1973. Photos (1981) by Titus Peachey

Of the 3 Indochinese countries (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) that had recently emerged from wars with the U.S., Laos is the only country that did not sever diplomatic ties with the U.S. While the vast majority of U.S. government and voluntary agencies had left Laos in advance of the communist takeover, a small staff of 6-7 U.S. citizens was allowed to remain at the embassy. Not surprisingly, there were real political tensions between the U.S. and Lao governments. Perhaps the relationship could best be described as distant or cold. These 45+ years later, I still wonder what political calculations or connections on both sides allowed U.S. diplomats to remain after such a devastating war.

Very Small U.S./American Community

Remarkably, in addition to the small U.S. embassy staff, there were two Quakers (American Friends Service Committee) and two MCC workers resident in Laos in early 1981, comprising a total of 10-12 U.S. citizens in the entire country. During the first year in Laos, MCC’s relationship with the government was sometimes strained, but MCC’s identity as a peace organization that had opposed the war seemed to gain the government’s confidence in our presence.

Our immediate MCC predecessors (Fred and Jan) introduced us to a network of government officials and associates in the international community who would become our colleagues during our years in Laos. This included a small group of United Nations aid workers comprised mostly of European staff, a few import/export businesses, an Australian aid program and an assortment of western embassies. At dinners, receptions and national day celebrations we joined a community of people whose worldwide experiences made for fascinating conversations. However, the most visible foreign presence was likely from the Soviet Union. Indeed, as we rode around town on our motorcycle and bicycle the children would point and say, “Soviet! Soviet!” In this context we were a bit odd, and we had to get used to explaining our identity.

At one point during our time in Laos we met a Soviet journalist who was trying to figure out who we were. Realizing that we were private U.S. citizens working in Laos who spoke openly against the U.S. air war in Laos and, at that time, our government’s failure to clean up the unexploded bombs,[1] he was genuinely perplexed. “Very interesting,” he said. He had put his finger on something that would not be possible in the Soviet system. The contrast in our systems helped me to appreciate the right to oppose our government’s policy while at the same time valuing the constitution that protected our right to do so. In our current political climate this protection of free speech seems more and more tenuous. I was always glad, in Laos, to be able to say that our funding came from Mennonites in the U.S. and Canada, and not from the U.S. government. There is an important role for bilateral relationships between governments, but we wanted to keep our voice and identity clear, emphasizing the people-to-people character of our relationship with Laos.

Lao Friends

Family celebration at Somphane’s house with food and a colorful “tree” for the baci celebration of blessing. Photo by Titus Peachey

While we recognized our foreign status and the value of our connections to the international community, we were determined to become “rooted in Lao soil.” In this regard, we benefitted greatly from our relationships with Lao employees and their families. These included Somphane (1981-1985), our part-time housekeeper, Boun Nyu and Meo (1981-1983), our language tutors, and Hien (1984-1985), our program assistant. These dear people were not only a great help to us in our MCC role, but warmly welcomed us into their family events and holiday celebrations, giving us valuable insights into Lao culture and traditions. Somphane, Boun Nyu and Linda all gave birth during our time in Laos which allowed us to learn about Lao birthing traditions and the warm baci ceremonies of blessing that accompanied major life events. Somphane was an organized, efficient worker who blessed us with delicious food and answered our many questions about life in Vientiane.

Our language tutors Meo (left) and his wife Boun Nyu (right) with Linda (center) in our house.

Our language tutors, a husband/wife team of medical students helped us learn about traditional understandings of health in Laos and the challenges of the health care system. We often enjoyed an evening meal together and had fascinating conversations comparing stories of Buddha and Jesus, as well as our understanding of peace and nonviolence from our faith perspective. They introduced us to Lao folk tales, including the stories of Xieng Mieng, the Lao peasant who always outwitted the King. It was biting social commentary through humor.

Hien, our program assistant spoke Lao, Vietnamese, French and English and helped us greatly in our work. Her warm ability to relate to villagers and government officials alike helped us untie bureaucratic knots and keep the work moving forward. After our daughter Beth was born and Linda was able to travel again, Hien and Linda took numerous work trips to other provinces, sometimes several weeks in length.

Another set of informal relationships was with the Lao Evangelical Church, a small group of 40-50 worshippers who gathered each Sunday morning. We attended regularly, solely on a personal basis, rather than any official partnership. Indeed the first MCC workers in Laos were asked not to attend because the church leaders wanted the government to understand that the church was Lao and not a Western implant. Under the former regime, U.S. missionaries gave strong support to the Lao Evangelical Church and some of the missionaries had fully supported the U.S. military intervention in the country. This put the church in a precarious position after the change of government in 1975.

A meal at the Lao Evangelical Church during one of our last Sundays in Laos. Photo by Titus Peachey (1985).

By the time we arrived, tensions had relaxed to the point that church leaders encouraged us to attend. They were also pleased that we represented ourselves to the government as a Christian organization that provided aid to all people in Laos. They felt this helped to boost their own credibility with the government. One of the pastors had been studying at a Bible School in Thailand in 1975 when refugees were moving out of Laos in large numbers. During that very tumultuous time, he made the decision to return to Laos. We were inspired by his determination to “let his light shine” in Laos and by his ability to make biblical teaching relevant to the Lao context.

After saying goodbye to Fred and Jan, the Quakers became our go-to people for questions. Quaker reps Jacqui and Roger had been in Laos for several years, so we relied on their knowledge of how the aid relationship worked, particularly in those early months.

Connections by Mail and Phone

Communication with the MCC offices in Pennsylvania was by letter. Those exchanges could take weeks. On one occasion we received a letter from Washington D.C. that had taken a whole month to reach us. U.S. postal workers apparently didn’t know where Laos was, as we noticed a Dominican Republic postal mark on the envelope, along with the word “China” scrawled at another spot on the envelope! We recommended that our family write “via Bangkok” under our address to help guide our letters to us. Later in our time we received our mail, courtesy of a UN pouch delivered from Bangkok once a week. How we looked forward to mail day!

International phone service was non-existent. We could make calls within Vientiane City, and we could place a call to MCC in Bangkok via a telephone exchange. But when one of us went traveling to another province, there was no communication possible.

And so we settled into life and work in Laos, fully aware that we had much to learn. Within our first six weeks, we each took a trip to another province. These trips were language laboratories, history lessons, cultural explorations, political classes, studies in development aid and lessons in patience and trust all rolled into a 1-3 week excursion. These trips and the people we met along the way will be the subject of many future posts.

[1] Thankfully, as I will attest in future blog posts, this is no longer the case, The U.S. has become a major funder of bomb clearance and victim assistance in Laos.

In March of 1981, Linda and I first entered Laos in our role as representatives of Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). It was a time of great turmoil within Southeast Asia. While the brutal wars in Vietnam and Laos had officially ended in 1975, refugees were still leaving, braving the vast oceans in small, dangerously overcrowded boats or trekking through the jungle to swim across the Mekong River under cover of darkness. Cambodia was in even greater turmoil, having been traumatized by the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, which was not overthrown until the Vietnamese invasion in early 1979.

Mekong River near at Vientiane, Laos (left) and at Chaing Khong, Chaing Rai Province, Thailand (Right). Photos by Titus Peachey

Within MCC itself there was great tension and debate about how to respond to this cataclysm of human displacement and suffering. Should MCC throw its energy into helping refugees resettle in the U.S. and Canada, or should it focus primarily on improving the economic conditions within the three countries, thereby making it more possible for people to stay? The fact that the three countries were now firmly in the communist orbit only heightened the tension, as many Canadian Mennonites still had painful memories of their exodus from Russia in the aftermath of WWI.

This vexing question was impressed upon us with great intensity during an orientation interview with several MCC administrators just prior to our departure. In a small conference room in Akron, PA, one of the administrators leaned back in his chair, looked directly at me, and talked non-stop for an hour, detailing the personalities and conflicting perspectives among MCC administrators and workers in Southeast Asia. It felt like getting hit by a firehose of drama and institutional angst. And given the exclusive eye contact with me, Linda was left to wonder if she was really part of this assignment. Between the fire hose and the patriarchy, we almost lost sight of Laos. Ouch!

Studying Language

With these issues rattling around in our brains, we said our final goodbyes to our families. On September 25, 1980, we got on our plane in New York and headed for Asia on a 3-year assignment. But before actually going to Laos, we took some time in Thailand as planned, to focus on more practical things like language study. Since there were no Lao language schools in Laos where foreigners could study Lao we settled into Bangkok and studied Thai. The Thai and Lao languages are very similar in structure, with a lot of shared vocabulary. Spending 3 months just focused on language learning, with no other responsibilities, proved to be a real gift. Thank you MCC! Learning another language is always challenging, but we enjoyed the methodology. The teachers conducted our classes almost entirely in Thai. The classes were small, usually 7 or 8 people.

Excerpt from letter home, Nov. 7, 1980: “We have no books to study. We sit around a table for about four hours a morning. We have objects on the table such as plastic fruit, sticks of different colors, dolls, bowls, chopsticks, spoons and cups, forks, etc. Then…we learned to know the meaning of some simple sentence patterns such as: “I have the yellow stick. What color is this? Give me a stick. Who has the orange stick? What is this? The pineapple is sweet...etc…” We have marvelously laborious conversations regarding such profundities as:” Which cup is the dirtiest? Who is the tallest person in the class? Who is the thinnest person in the class?”

It was participatory learning at its best.

Thai and Lao are both tonal languages and use alphabets that are completely different from English. Learning to read and write the script requires our western brains to leap outside the box of neat linear thinking. Vowels in Thai and Lao may be made by a combination of letters appearing before, after, above or below a consonant. And then there are tonal markings to attend to as well. Happily, when the Lao government embarked on a literacy campaign after the war, it simplified the alphabet a bit to make it easier to learn. We learned to read Lao after arriving there, but trying to read Thai still gives us a headache.

ສປປ ລາວ ຖ້າຄິດໄລ່ຕໍ່ຫົວຄົນ, ແມ່ນເປັນປະເທດທີ່ຖືກຖິ້ມລະເບີດໃສ່ຫຼາຍທີ່ສຸດໃນໂລກ. ຕະຫຼອດສົງຄາມອິນດູຈີນຄັ້ງທີສອງ (ປີ 1964-1973) ມີຫຼາຍກວ່າ 580,000 ຖ້ຽວບີນຖິ້ມລະເບີດ (ຫລື ຖ້ຽວບິນຖິ້ມລະເບີດທຸກໆ 8 ນາທີ, 24 ຊົ່ວໂມງຕໍ່ມື້, ເປັນເວລາ 9 ປີ).

Lao language script from the National Regulatory Website (nra.gov.la) describing the U.S. bombing campaign in Laos which averaged one bomb strike every 8 minutes ‘round the clock for 9 years.

Our time in Thailand was greatly enriched by lots of conversation with Max Ediger, an old friend from my Vietnam days, who was now working in Thailand. In addition to Vietnam, Max had also worked for MCC in Rwanda. We discussed the broad themes of politics, economics, wars and refugees in Southeast Asia, as well as the challenges of development work. Max noted that development agencies often have too narrow a view of their work: “We view any response to a tragedy (such as war) as compassion, but view attempts to prevent the tragedy as “politics.”[1] We devoured books and articles about development and particularly enjoyed reading “Small is Beautiful,” by E.F. Schumacher.[2]

Relaxing with MCC friends at the Grand Palace in Bangkok, Thailand, ca. October, 1980. That’s Linda in the green top and blue slacks. Max is the one with sunglasses. Photo by Titus Peachey

Among the foreign Christian community in Bangkok, our MCC assignment in Laos was often met with skepticism. A Korean Christian missionary at our language school asked us repeatedly why we were going to Laos to “help the communists.” Others felt that it was naïve to think that we could work in Laos without being used by the “oppressive communist government.” Don’t we know that the real solution to people’s problems lies in the realm of the spirit, not in politics? We understood this skepticism, but we also knew that the people of Laos had suffered much loss and trauma from the years of U.S. bombing. Wasn’t it important for U.S. citizens to offer some assistance and help the U.S. public learn about what had happened there in our name?

We got the sense that what we were about to do was most unusual in the world of Christian churches and development agencies. Were we prepared? Probably not, but we drew some comfort from the fact that MCC had been working in Laos for 5 years, and we would be overlapping with our predecessors for about a month to help us get oriented. Perhaps it was also helpful that as Mennonites we were not invested in the patriotic theology embedded in much of U.S. American Christendom. We knew that there is tension between allegiance to God and allegiance to a nation or state. In that regard, Laos would not be a total surprise.

Laotian Refugee Camps

After studying Thai, we embarked on a trip to visit the many Lao refugee camps that were scattered along the eastern and northern Thai border. Despite our 3 months of language study, our Thai was still very limited. So when we successfully negotiated the trains, public buses and pickup trucks to arrive at the correct destination, we always felt like we had really accomplished something!

Over a 3-week period in February, 1981, we visited 6 Lao refugee camps. So, of course we produced a 33-page report summarizing what we had learned! We talked with camp administrators, United Nations staff, Thai officials, voluntary agency workers and dozens of camp residents. We felt that it was important for us to learn as much as we could about why people were leaving Laos before we actually began working there.

As I now read this report nearly 45 years later, I am struck by the complexity of the issues represented by the camps and the diversity of stories told by the refugees. The single word, “refugee” implies a single story, a uniformity of motivation and status. This does not match reality. During our visits we met:

• A former USAID employee in Laos who had spent 3 years doing forced labor in a reeducation camp before fleeing Laos with his wife and 7 children.

• A lonely 19-year-old with no relatives in camp or in a 3^rd country.

• A man who had been in camp for 6 years, waiting on his parents who were still in Laos.

• Two young men who operated a photography shop in camp and bribed the Thai authorities who gave them permission to leave the camp to get supplies for their photography business. They left Laos because “there is no freedom to do what you want.”[3]

  

  Photo shop in Nong Khai Camp. Photo by Titus Peachey

• Two families that complained about the imposition of agricultural cooperatives in Laos: “If a farmer has chickens he must request permission from the village chief before killing one to eat.”

• The director of a sewing school in camp who had refused reunification with her family in Belgium 3 years earlier because she was afraid that no one would look after the school. She stressed the importance of preserving Lao traditions and culture because refugees have no home or country.[4]

The porous nature of the camps was also a surprise to us. In some camps there were men who routinely returned to Laos to continue fighting against the government. In another camp we heard of Lao refugees who somehow managed to find jobs in the Thai economy. One administrator even acknowledged that there were Thai villagers who had come to live in the camp.

Voluntary agencies from the entire western world were providing much-needed services in the refugee camps including language classes, a variety of vocational training classes and medical care. One UNHCR official noted that there were so many services available in the camp that Lao people would be stupid not to come across the river. This bothered one Thai official from the Ministry of Interior who confessed that he didn’t like working in the camps. “I wish I were helping Thai people,” he said. “Most Thai people are very poor. Our government should be helping them instead of the refugees.”[5]

Ban Nam Yao Refugee Camp in Nan District, northern Thailand, Photo by Titus Peachey

However, not all refugee camps were awash in resources and services. Some were perched on remote, barren hillsides with few services. Some officials suggested that making the camps less attractive would help to stem the outflow from Laos.

While visiting the northern Thai city of Nong Khai, we strolled along the Mekong River, peering across to see what we could observe of Laos on the other side. Under normal circumstances the river was a natural transportation artery for people with a shared culture and language to engage in commerce, visit extended family and attend village festivals. But after the change of government in Vientiane, the river became a political barrier and travel was severely restricted. In just a few weeks we would cross the barrier. We wondered what we would experience.

At the Mekong River in Nong Khai, Thailand, looking across to Laos, February, 1981. Photo by Titus Peachey

Laos: A Secret Country?

Westerners who traveled to Laos, had to fly in from Bangkok on official business. There were no tourist visas for us. The Bangkok Airport experience gave the distinct impression that we were flying to a secret country.

After checking in at the Lao Aviation ticket counter, we were told the gate number where we should wait. After arriving at the gate, we checked the flight monitor to confirm our departure time, but there were no Lao flights listed on the monitor. When the time came to board the plane, there was no announcement over the PA system. Instead, an attendant came to the gate in person and quietly told us that the flight to Vientiane was ready.

We followed the attendant not to a boarding ramp, but to a bus. The bus took us to the far corner of the airport where a small Lao Aviation plane awaited us. It was an Antonov 24 Soviet plane that carried 44 passengers.

We remember this routine throughout our 5 years in Laos. It was one of many indicators of the estrangement in the Thai-Lao family and the political division between Laos and the western world. This saddened us greatly. But recent trips to Laos (2024-2025) have made it clear that a wide open door also has a cost. But I am getting way ahead of my story. First we must go to “Lan Xang,” the land of a million elephants.

[1] Personal Diary, October 3, 1980.

[2] E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, Harper, 1973.

[3] Titus and Linda Peachey trip report, March 13, 1981.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Titus and Linda Peachey trip report, March 13, 1981.

Bangkok is a multi-sensory experience with endless traffic, shops, high rises, noise, smog and great food! We learned to pack into the public buses, thankful to not have to do any driving ourselves.

Gardens were always a beautiful feature in the refugee camps. (Left) Nong Khai Camp (Right) Ban Vi Nai Camp. Photos by Titus Peachey

Remote camps do not have to mean poor organization. Note the drainage ditches along the pathway and the neatly stacked firewood under the awning of the house on the left (Chiang Khong Camp). Photo by Titus Peachey

Temple University Campus, Photo Credit: Imagineer JC, Public Domain

In the spring of 1975, I watched the tumultuous ending of the war in Vietnam, worried about my friends and fellow Mennonite workers who had decided to stay beyond the North Vietnamese takeover. While Vietnam tugged at my heart, I also agonized over my own future. I was at that stage in life where my future lay before me like a maze of tangled paths on a map. Where would each path lead? Each decision felt monumental.

A conversation with my sociology professor at Eastern Mennonite College, Bill Rushby, helped me decide on my next step. Sensing my frustration with the atmosphere at EMC, he suggested that I transfer to the Philadelphia campus of Messiah College and take the bulk of my classes at Temple University. I jumped on the idea immediately and arranged to go visit.

Letter to parents, May 5, 1975: I had a tremendous weekend. I spent Friday at Messiah-Temple in Philadelphia and got myself all excited about going there. Philadelphia is such a big place to explore…I went with a group of kids to the Italian market. It reminded me of the markets in Asia.

But before heading to Philadelphia in the Fall, there were other adventures, including a hitchhiking experience, something I did quite a bit in those days.

Letter to parents, June 1, 1975: Hitch-hiked from Plain City, OH to Lancaster, PA 7:30 a.m. to 12:00 midnight. At Cambridge I got a ride with a U.S. Marine who served as a helicopter door gunner in Vietnam. He says he hates to say it but he kinda wishes something would happen. Peace is getting to be a drag (boring). Oh my! What does one say?

Encountering worldviews vastly different from my own was both exhilarating and in the case of this Marine, deeply troubling. But as I would soon discover, it was to become a regular feature of my life. The choices that I made kept pushing me into unfamiliar territory. In the case of Philadelphia, it was exactly what I needed.

Messiah Campus at Broad and Diamond Streets, Philadelphia

The Messiah Philadelphia campus[1] was a small collection of rowhouses on N. Broad St., just across from Temple University. A group of 35-40 Messiah students lived on site, taking one class per semester from a Messiah professor, while taking the classes required for their majors at Temple. I quickly made arrangements to enroll in the Fall, and my letters home began to reflect a new energy for life and learning.

Letter to parents, September16, 1975: I mean, for once since I’m back from Vietnam I find myself getting excited about something! Imagine that!

The students at Temple were as diverse as the city, representing Black, Latino, Asian and White communities of various ethnicities. I found the variety of perspectives in my classes invigorating. It’s as if the dark cloud that had followed me around since my return from Vietnam had vanished and the sun was shining again.

None of my Temple professors were Mennonite, of course, but I discovered that they too could teach from a foundation of deeply held values. They also challenged us to examine our own values and commitments.

Letter to Parents, September 16, 1975: (Referring to my Introduction to Social Work class): We need to write an autobiography and answer the following questions: 1) What in your life process led you to this point of career choice? 2) What has led you to some of the explicit values with which you identify? 3) What are the elements of your own uniqueness?

Throughout my time at Temple, I enjoyed the challenge of articulating who I was in a way that students who had come from secular and other cultural environments could understand. My professors were universally supportive and affirming of my efforts to integrate my faith and values into my academic work.

One class that really got my attention was: Revolutionary Thinkers and Leaders of the Third World, taught by a Vietnamese professor, Tran van Dinh. I didn’t know it at the time, but Ho Chi Minh had appointed him as the Security Chief for the Viet Minh forces in Laos in 1945. He later served as South Vietnam’s ambassador to the U.S. In class we studied leaders such as Chairman Mao, N’krumah (Ghana), along with Dubois and Malcolm X from the U.S. Professor Tran practically begged us to share our opinions and reactions to our readings. He emphasized that if education is going to have integrity, it demands a response. According to him, it was immoral to study something and then not respond or act as a result of your study. “Knowledge is the beginning of action,” he would say, “and action is the completion of knowledge” (September 26, 1975 letter to parents).

This was in stark contrast to a class taught by Messiah professors (husband/wife) who asked us to read the works of Frances Schaeffer, an evangelical theologian/philosopher. Our task was not to respond to Schaeffer’s writing, but to simply rewrite his thoughts in our own words. According to our professors, Schaeffer’s brilliant mind offered us distilled knowledge--”pure digested honey”--which we could use to critique other ideas that we would encounter. Somehow the universe conspired to put this class back-to-back with Professor Dinh’s class in my schedule! I was not only skeptical of Schaeffer’s ideas, I was also greatly offended by the lack of integrity in the educational method. Where was the encouragement to question, the challenge to analyze and reflect? The professors were gracious in their response to a letter of critique that I wrote, but the format for the class did not change. Fortunately, my other Messiah College classes were much more intellectually invigorating.

My Social Work classes at Temple, coupled with my Vietnam experience, helped me look at the world through the lens of the systems and structures that shape our human experience. This was in contrast to my upbringing which focused much more exclusively on the vibrancy of one’s individual spiritual life and personal values. Both of these approaches are important and they are not mutually exclusive. At Temple, I began to understand that realities like poverty cannot simply be attributed to poor life choices, values or personal failure. Government policy, systemic racism and corporate interests play a significant role. This systemic lens has stuck with me these past 50 years. I look for it in my reading, in biblical study and in conversations about life at the community and national level.

During my senior year at Temple, my social work practicum took me to the Nationalities Service Center in downtown Philadelphia. There I taught English classes to newly arrived refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and linked them to other services that would help them get established. I loved this connection back to Southeast Asia and enjoyed the occasional use of my Vietnamese language skills.

It was during my senior year that I was particularly blessed by the support of family. My sister Naomi and her husband Freeman had moved to Philadelphia in 1975, as Freeman was appointed to be the pastor of the Diamond St. Mennonite Church. I arranged to live with them during my senior year and enjoyed participating in their family life. I also enjoyed the vibrancy of the inter-racial church at Diamond St.

Baking cookies with my 3 nieces, Gwen, Janelle and Rhonda on E. York St. in Kensington, Philadelphia, ca.1976-1977.

For the next three years after graduation, I remained in Philadelphia.

· I worked at the Meetinghouse, a Mennonite book and craft shop in New Market Square that began in 1976. The initial goal was to provide a pacifist perspective on the American Revolution during the bicentennial.

· I was Student and Young Adult Services coordinator for the Mennonite Church, offering community and assistance with housing for Mennonite students who had come to the city for university studies.

· In 1979 I got full-time employment at the Nationalities Service Center, this time as a job counselor for refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. I loved the association with these remarkable people but found that job placements were difficult due to language barriers and lack of experience to meet the demands of the job market.

(Left) At Nationalities Service Center with refugee resettlement staff. (Right) In my office fashioned out of a storage closet. Philadelphia, 1979-1980.

Marriage

In August of 1977, Linda Gehman moved to Philadelphia to begin a voluntary service assignment through a church service program. She was assigned to work at the Meetinghouse where I worked, and we were often paired together to staff the store. While the Christmas season kept us busy with customers, the cold, snowy months of winter were really slow, giving us lots of time for conversation.

As we worked together, we discovered that we had a lot in common. I was impressed by her commitment to live responsibly in a world of great inequities. A famine in Ethiopia (1973-1975) sparked a lot of news and concern about world hunger. The publication of the More with Less Cookbook (1976) by Doris Janzen Longacre challenged Mennonites to live simply and responsibly in the way we eat and prepare our food. Given my experience in Vietnam, I resonated with these concerns and was pleased to learn that Linda did too.

During her last year of college, she participated in a daylong seminar on world hunger but thought it incongruous that donuts were served during a morning break. She had the courage to call out the inconsistency during a speech she gave at commencement, while acknowledging that she too was one of those who ate the donuts. When EMC celebrated its 60^th birthday in 1978, pictures of its enormous birthday cake appeared repeatedly in church publications. Linda wrote a letter to the college Bulletin questioning whether the emphasis on using “50 pounds of flour, 98 pounds of sugar and 560 egg whites” was the most appropriate way to celebrate in a world filled with so much hunger and poverty.[2] She feared that this perpetuated the myth that the world is basically safe and comfortable, and betrayed the very values she learned at EMU. How could I not be attracted to someone who had the hutzpah to do that!

Linda was also concerned about the restrictions of women’s voices in church. Having majored in nursing in college, because that was one of the few roles available to Mennonite women at the time, she had the courage to change direction during her last semester and follow her true interests in Bible and theology. The more I learned about Linda, the more the attraction grew.

Wedding at “Our Barn,” New Danville, Lancaster, County, PA, October 21, 1978

In summary, we began dating in February of 1978, became engaged in April, and got married in October. We got married in a barn that had been fixed up for youth activities, using corn shocks, pumpkins and flowers for decorations. The Diamond St. church choir sang. We wrote and read our own vows, making promises that went on and on. We enjoyed the advice and teasing of friends during an open mic session. My sister and her husband offered a meditation, and my father officially married us. We were young, earnest and full of wonder about where our lives would lead us. We celebrated our 47^th anniversary in 2025.

Wedding day at Linda’s parent’s house and with our Fall decorations at “Our Barn.”

My Father

In the Spring of 1976, my parents moved to Louisville, KY where my father pastored a small church. My mother managed a bookstore on a busy street where she interacted with the public on a daily basis. They both seemed energized by the richness of a diverse urban environment. But in September, 1977, my father was diagnosed with myelofibrosis, a disease of the bone marrow that disrupts the production of red blood cells. He died in February of 1979.

My father was only 61 years old when he became ill. As leader of our conference’s missions and service program, he had traveled extensively in the U.S. and overseas to support and encourage the workers. Now engaged in the challenges of work in the city, his illness was an abrupt and jarring interruption of his dreams and visions for life and work. While he longed and prayed for healing, he was also courageous in facing and learning to accept his mortality. He read about the emotional and spiritual dimensions of letting go of the life that he cherished. He wept openly. And then he began to write, synthesizing his thinking and learning into words on a page. It became a book, Facing Terminal Illness.[3]

The more he reflected on his faith in God and the pain of his illness, the more he acknowledged that some things belong to mystery. “I’d have been better off a long time ago,” he said, “if I had known you can’t always figure things out.”[4] As a family, we began to realize that even as his body weakened, he was a healthy man by all standards that are important.

On a personal level, watching my father’s struggle released something inside of me that had been bottled up for years. In a letter to my parents written just a month before my father’s death, I wrote: “For the first time in 9 or 10 years…I have been able to cry occasionally.” I wonder if my time in Vietnam had produced an emotional numbness as a shield against all the suffering and pain that surrounded me.

About a year after my father’s death, we helped my mother move back to her home in Rosedale, Ohio. There she was surrounded by a community of long-time friends. With my mother settled and my father released from his illness, Linda and I were free to pursue our interest in working in an overseas setting. That’s how Laos entered our lives, to which this blog will turn next.

[1] The Messiah-Temple campus was a great experience for many students, including me. This innovative campus opened in 1968 and sadly, closed in 2014.

[2] Linda M. Gehman, Letter to the Editor, Eastern Mennonite College Bulletin, February 1978, p.16.

[3] Mark Peachey, Facing Terminal Illness, Herald Press, Scottdale, PA, 1981.

[4] Ibid., p. 67

Home: Rosedale, Ohio: Photo by Titus Peachey

When home is a place of nurture, growth and love, returning to it after a long absence is an event filled with childlike wonder. There are hugs to give, stories to tell, favorite foods to eat and oh so many things to talk about. I was filled with anticipation as we crossed the Atlantic, but I was still determined to make my entrance into my parents’ house a total surprise. My sister Naomi and her husband Freeman met me after I arrived in Pennsylvania. They took me to their home in Harrisonburg, VA. Given their 3-year term with Mennonite Central Committee in Nigeria that had ended just before my departure for Vietnam, we had barely seen each other for six years. It was a delight to be reunited with them and take a few days to reorient myself.

After arranging a couple rides, I arrived home to Rosedale, OH on the afternoon of November 6, 1973. Remarkably, not a word of my arrival had leaked to my parents. When I walked into the house, my mother was in the kitchen taking freshly-baked cookies out of the oven. What a way to come home! She looked at me with great surprise and said, “Titus, what are you doing?!!” When my father came home just a few minutes later, I met him at the door. He was dumbfounded and hardly knew what to say. But he got over that soon enough!

My parents (Mark and Fannie) at our mailbox. My father and I with our garden’s potato crop.

Coming home after being gone for a number of years is a hard thing to do. As this post will detail, I had a hard time. But my homecoming was made so much easier than it might have been by my loving family. Because of my father’s work, he had traveled abroad extensively and knew that immersion in other places and cultures changes people. My family was curious and eager to hear what I had experienced and learned. We spent endless hours talking, listening and catching up. For that I am immensely grateful.

But within the first week of my return, my diary already began to record a pattern of reactions that would stick with me for nearly two years. It’s as if my brain was on steroids and totally independent of my ability to control it. It became a frenetic network of flashing red lights reacting to everything that I saw. It was relentless. Intense. There was no off switch.

From my diary: November 4 (while I was still in Virginia with my sister) I’m still reacting, my mind doesn’t stop. I’m always comparing things to Vietnam or wondering about the room everybody has and the comfort and clothes and money and busyness and I wonder where I’m gonna fit into it all.

November 7 (the day after I arrived home): I’ve got all kinds of clothes upstairs…and there’s so much stuff here. Not that Mama and Papa have suddenly become rich or anything, but since I left: a new car, a new rug, a new bed, new paneling in a bedroom and a new couch in the living room. And of course the upstairs and the downstairs and the basement (all the space).

On and on it went every day. It was exhausting.

Reverse Culture Shock

Reverse culture shock is a real phenomenon, likely experienced by many of you. In a nutshell, this is the setup. The person who leaves home is not the same person who is returning. And the home that was left behind is not the same as the home to which one is returning. The whole experience can leave one feeling restless, rootless, bored, depressed, uncertain, confused and isolated.[1] The U.S. State Department website has a helpful description of the reverse culture shock experience, noting that the initial return is often a “honeymoon phase” which eventually passes.[2] In my case, it seems that my family was always present as my “honeymoon,” while the harder reality of my return set in immediately and existed alongside the “honeymoon” with my family.

(Left) Plain City, Ohio. Photo by Nheyob, Creative Commons License 3.0,
(Right) Rosedale, Ohio, Photo by Dan Ziegler

More than 50 years later, I can describe some of the factors that contributed to my disorientation. I had returned to Rosedale, OH, a very small village of several hundred people surrounded by productive farmland that produced corn, soybeans and wheat. The nearest towns for shopping for groceries and other household needs were 6 and 12 miles away. It was Fall, the weather was turning cold, and in contrast to Asia, everyone was indoors. The place felt like it was hibernating.

Rosedale itself was home to several conservative Mennonite institutions, including a missions office where my father worked and a Bible institute which I had attended the winter after I graduated from high school.

After living in Saigon for 3 years, this was an enormous change. While I had been part of a very small group of Mennonite workers in Vietnam, I had constant interactions and contacts with Vietnamese students, the majority of whom were Buddhist in religious practice or cultural orientation. To suddenly be immersed in a homogenous Swiss-German Mennonite subculture was a shock to my system.

From my diary: November 13: It’s just too comfortable. A heavy atmosphere of complete peace and contentment…routine…nothing gripping anybody. Sleepy.

I really have to get a job outside the Mennonite context here. The atmosphere here is really heavy. It lays around like Saigon smog.

At some point after my return I have a distinct memory of being a guest in someone’s living room. Once again, my brain, unprompted, began whispering to me: “The carpet is soft, the couch is soft, the chairs are soft, the drapes on the windows are soft. How could awareness of any pain in the world ever enter this house?”

The comfort of the homes in the community, coupled with the vast expanses of farmland that surrounded them, seemed to create a giant buffer between my home community and the rest of the world. But the rest of the world was in my head and went with me wherever I went. The dissonance was loud.

An entry in my diary from the time we were still traveling in Africa is relevant here.

From my diary: September 25, 1973: I can see one of my big problems when I get back to the States is that I’m going to be too judgmental. I’m scared that the stuff I want to say, and maybe even if it’s stuff that desperately needs to be said, won’t be heard because my attitude will shout louder.

In the same entry, I recorded a comment by a veteran Mennonite Mission worker from Somalia whom we met in Nairobi: There are plenty of people at home who are willing to listen to us if we don’t act like we know it all and have all the answers.

Was I being too judgmental? Of course I was. And just to be clear, the people in the Rosedale community were kind-hearted, hard-working people living in modest homes. Within U.S. society, there was nothing ostentatious or extravagant about their lives. I hope I poured all of my reactions into my diary and kept my outbursts within my family!

While my brain eventually did slow down, my feelings of displacement and struggle to find my identity in the U.S. persisted at a high level for at least two years. The U.S. State Department website on reverse culture shock describes two significant factors that I think contributed to my inner angst.

Materialism: The materialism, abundance and waste present in U.S. American life can be a real shock after living in settings of scarcity, as clearly borne out in my diary entries. And since U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War contributed greatly to the suffering and scarcity experienced by many in Vietnam, I was quick to assign blame. We are indeed a connected global family. There was truth to be understood in my observations. But there was also a simplicity and harshness that needed more nuance.

In recent years, one of our daughters, after an extended time in Central America, had a similar struggle. When she returned home, she walked into a Linens N Things store to look for something she needed. After a brief look around, she promptly burst into tears. The variety and abundance of options, in contrast to the realities she had experienced abroad, felt unfair and overwhelming.

Shopping mall in San Antonio, TX. Photos by Yinan Chen, public domain

High-speed pace of life: A second disorienting factor is the fast pace and busyness of many U.S. Americans.[3] This, too had a long-term impact on my sense of well-being. Life was too busy. If there wasn’t time for a meaningful conversation with someone every couple days, I could feel the pressure and tension build up in my chest. I needed to talk about the inequities in the world, the impact of war on human communities and the banality of life in the U.S. So when a conversation got below the surface and dealt with something significant, I could immediately feel the tension leave my body. This cycle of tension and release happened repeatedly. In retrospect, I wonder if people dreaded talking to me!

The larger picture is that in many respects, the U.S. had “moved on” from Vietnam. U.S. soldiers were no longer fighting and dying in Vietnam. Anti-war songs no longer played on the radio. The Vietnam War protest movement had largely vanished. This was highly disorienting to me. While I was glad U.S. soldiers were no longer fighting and dying, the war was not over for the Vietnamese.

Added to my difficulties in readjusting to U.S. American life was the fact that there were aspects of life here that I didn’t want to embrace. I didn’t want to fit into the materialism, consumerism, individualism and militarism of U.S. American life. I didn’t want to adapt to the things about our culture that are inhumane and harmful. I didn’t want to live as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. I felt the need to stay connected to the world’s pain. How could I do that in a comfortable U.S. community? In a conversation with my mother one day, she observed: “It seems like you aren’t comfortable unless you are uncomfortable!” My mother had a way with words!

In the Fall of 1974, my parents and I both moved to Harrisonburg, VA. My father took classes at the seminary along with my brother-in-law Freeman. I dipped my toe into college life at Eastern Mennonite College as a part-time student. It was great to continue to have close connections to family, but the culture and spirit of life at the college didn’t work for me. Instead of ferment and activism against the Vietnam War and social injustice, there was a much stronger emphasis on individual spirituality. It felt stifling. As news about the impending fall of the Saigon government hit the airwaves in April of 1975, I would sit, glued to the TV, watching events unfold…all by myself. Would I catch a glimpse of anyone I knew? What was happening to my friends? Would this be the end of South Vietnam as we knew it? Were my fellow college students not concerned about this? I was miserable.

The intensity of all these struggles has softened over the years but the issues still stir in my bones. When we experience deeply troubling things for the first time, we are sometimes gripped by a zeal that gives us unrealistic visions of shaking the world. Nonetheless, my reactions to the world’s violence and inequities, too intense to sustain over time, were valid and warranted. I want to honor what I learned between the ages of 20-25, and I want to honor the urgency in the voices of today’s 20-year-olds. Listening to one another, and to ourselves, across the generations can make us all more whole.

Midst all of these experiences, I had friends (connection), worked at a juvenile detention center (stress), sang in a choir at college (inspiration) and performed with a summertime drama troupe (fun). I managed to keep my equilibrium. Unknown to me in that spring of 1975, I was about to emerge from my misery.

[1] Marquette University, Reverse Culture Shock

[2] U.S. Department of State, Reverse Culture Shock

[3] Ibid.

Landing in England was a dramatic shift in identity. Suddenly, for the first time in 3 years, I could walk around without immediately being seen as a foreigner. At least until I opened my mouth! Additionally, I could casually eavesdrop on perfect strangers and understand their conversations! How fascinating that everyone around me was “doing life” in English! Even though I was still a foreigner, I began to have that strange feeling of “belonging.” While my years in Vietnam and travels through Asia and Africa expanded my world to embrace other cultures, a return to an entire nation using the English language reminded me of my own cultural rootedness. I welcomed it.

Our plan was to purchase a car, take it across the English Channel and tour Europe. We went to an auto auction, but to our dismay, we could not understand anything the auctioneer was saying. Maynard said, “He may have been talking English, I just don’t know!” That made it very risky to venture a bid!

As we left the auction we saw a car for sale. A man from Greece had purchased a truck at the auction but needed some more cash to pay for it. The car was a Mini-Morris and he wanted $250. We checked it out, and while it had a few problems, we decided to buy it. I had faith in Maynard’s mechanical abilities!

Our car survived a trip through England, France, Switzerland, Austria, Yugoslavia, Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium…with just a few repairs. Photos by Titus/Maynard.

We went to the British version of AAA to get the title transferred and purchase insurance. To our amazement, this was all accomplished efficiently by a young woman who provided the correct forms and stamps…and we were on our way. This could have taken weeks in Vietnam!

What followed was a couple months of wandering through Europe, including visits with Mennonite contacts, friends from our Vietnam experience and a several week homestay on a German farm. We made it up as we went, looking at maps and often deciding each morning where we would go next. According to my diary, we ate a lot of cornflakes, applesauce and bread. We even bought canned beans and ravioli and tried to heat them up by placing them near the car’s radiator while we drove up a mountain to maximize the car’s temperature. Note to my readers: it doesn’t work! We also ate in restaurants or were hosted for meals by friends. We stayed at Bed and Breakfasts but spent some nights sleeping in the car.

Fine dining always at reasonable prices! Photos by Titus and Maynard

One of the unique aspects of our travel was the fact that we were driving a British car which has the steering wheel on the right because in the United Kingdom, cars drive on the left. However, the rest of Europe drives on the right side of the road. I happily let Maynard do all the driving. So, if we got stuck behind a slow truck and wanted to pass, I had to stick my head out my window to tell Maynard if there was any oncoming traffic. This provided a funny moment in Yugoslavia when we got stopped by a policeman after dark. The policeman automatically came to my side of the car and asked for my driver’s license. I simply pointed to Maynard. Only then did he realize that we were driving a British car and Maynard, not I, was the driver!

It was as carefree and privileged a travel experience as I will ever have. We were soon awash in pastoral scenes of beauty and order as we drove through France and into Switzerland: old wooden houses decorated with cascading flower boxes, forested hillsides, green pastures with well-fed cattle and farmers’ fields ready for harvest. The images were serene, lush and bountiful. These were admittedly first impressions that didn’t acknowledge Europe’s painfully fractured history. But there was no war or foreign occupation to mar the physical and social landscape. My diary records that my mind was spinning.

Contrasting these beautiful images from Austria/Switzerland with a wartime image of Vietnam is unfair. There was also much beauty in Vietnam that I had left behind. But the images do fairly reflect the turmoil that was stirring in my mind…as reflected in the diary excerpts below. Photos by Titus Peachey

September 19, 1973: It’s all so mind boggling…the variety of people and cultures on this earth. I mean, how can you even begin to compare Saigon, Plei Alei, India, Bangkok, Lamu, Garissa, Rusinga Island, Shirati[1] and Switzerland with each other and come out with anything like a common denominator? I just can’t believe how vastly different man[2] lives, how vastly different his environment, and the effect it has on his personality, his world view, his music, his entire set of beliefs.

Some seem destined to suffer forever while others like myself seem to have everything so easy. Why? And how can we begin to understand each other?...I am still very much boggled by all the differences and I can’t really find the answer to the mess….

September 25, 1973: The world just doesn’t seem like one thing. It seems like hundreds and hundreds of little worlds, each made up of entirely different suppositions and givens…It just doesn’t seem like we live with any consciousness of our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world…Doesn’t the fact that some people in this world have been robbed of everything, including their dignity speak to me…to the rich?

We were surprised by the signs of militarism in Switzerland. At the time of our visit in 1973, all Swiss men had to shoot a specified amount of ammunition each year in target practice. We drove up a mountain one morning to see the sunrise only to find it completely fogged in and taken over by a Swiss Army unit on exercises. We asked an elderly Swiss Mennonite farmer if Mennonites in Switzerland take military training. He said, “Of course! It has to be this way.” In my diary, I contrast this with the context of war in Vietnam where many young Vietnamese students of mine tried desperately to avoid military service so that they would not have to fight and die.

In so many respects, our trip was pure wonder and joy. But it was also an intensive course in world cultures, economic systems, politics, justice and faith.

Connections to People and History

During a visit with Liz, a Swiss friend in Zurich whom we had learned to know in Vietnam, we took some time to visit several historic sites significant for our Mennonite history: the Grossmunster Church and the Limmat River.

Mennonite history is a radical and intense story involving courage, martyrdom and social-political turmoil. The roots of my faith community go back to the early 1500’s when a combined civil and religious authority governed the lives and belief systems of the people. The baptismal records of infants in the church became the foundation for taxation and military conscription. This monolithic authority structure began to crack when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany (1517), challenging the sale of indulgences and other church practices.

Luther’s act opened the door to a time of widespread social/religious ferment. In Switzerland the reform was led by Ulrich Zwingli, the priest of the Grossmunster church in Zurich. But on the night of January 21,1525, some of Zwingli’s followers broke with Zwingli and centuries of tradition by gathering in a local home where they baptized one another as adults. They believed that baptism should symbolize a deeply-held commitment to follow in the way of Jesus that only an adult could make. The practice began to spread and they became known as Anabaptists or “rebaptizers.” Anabaptists also refused military service, believing that Jesus called his followers to lives of peace. These acts sparked outrage among the authorities who denounced the Anabaptists and viewed them as seditious heretics.

On January 5, 1527, Felix Manz, one of the men who had been baptized as an adult two years earlier, was publicly executed by drowning in the Limmat River which flows through the heart of Zurich.[3] These Anabaptists believed in the freedom of religion and the separation of the church from state authority, a concept now embedded in our U.S. constitution. In the decades that followed, Anabaptists were hunted, exiled, imprisoned, tortured and put to death throughout Europe.[4]

Maynard and I visited the site of Manz’s drowning along the Limmat River in Zurich. Today there is a plaque commemorating Manz and other Anabaptists.

Here, Felix Manz and five other Anabaptists were drowned off a fishing platform in the middle of the River Limmat during the 1527-1532 Reformation. Hans Landis was the final Anabaptist executed (1614)." Memorial Plaque, Schipfe Quater, Zürich, CH. Both images by Roland zh Creative Commons License 3.0. No alterations were made.

Through my life-long participation in Mennonite churches and through the experiences of my own Swiss-German ancestors, I feel a close connection to this history. Indeed, this 500-year history has shaped the arc of my life including my decision to work in Vietnam as a conscientious objector during the war (see earlier posts). I offer two reflections that I could not have had during my visit in 1973.

1. Today’s white Christian Nationalist movement in the U.S., which seeks the control of government institutions by Christians, would turn the clock back to the dreadful years of intolerance before the Reformation when government and religious authority were one power structure. Our nation’s vision of a pluralistic democracy with religious freedom, racial and gender equality for all is still fragile and not fully realized. My faith community has also struggled to live out this vision in our institutions. I pray that we will retain a vision of religion free from government control and not return to the authoritarian structures of pre-Reformation times.

2. The 500-year anniversary of the Anabaptist movement was celebrated in May, 2025 at the Grossmunster Church in Zurich, with participation from both the Catholic and Reformed churches. A statement read on behalf of Pope Leo at the gathering begins: As you gather to commemorate 500 years of the Anabaptist movement, I cordially greet all of you, dear friends, in the first words spoken by the risen Jesus: “Peace be with you!” (Jn 20:19).[5] Years of dialogue between Anabaptist, Reformed and Catholic traditions made this possible.

Acting on a tip from one of the Mennonite mission workers in Germany, we went to visit Harley Wagler in Yugoslavia. He was living in Zagreb, studying Slavic languages at the university and connecting to churches. I was fascinated by Harley’s capacity to reflect on his Christian faith in a communist context, noting both its challenges and the mirror it provided for churches in the capitalist context of the West. During our several days with Harley, we visited a WWII concentration camp, one of many locations where the horrific genocide of Jews took place. My diary’s reflection on this visit was that the thread common to all people and cultures was violence. Grim.

Homestay

Near the end of our time in Europe we asked one of the Mennonite mission workers if there were any German Mennonite farmers who might need help with the Fall harvest. We were very quickly connected to the Horsch family about an hour northeast of Munich, who warmly welcomed us and put us to work. Of course, that also meant we received free room and board which was a huge plus for us. We were not aware when we arrived that we would also be offered some pay for our work. The family had 8 children who connected with us immediately. Each evening at dinner one of the boys would always watch me take my first bite of food, and then say: “Schmeckts?” “Does it taste good?” I would always smile and say “Ja, es schmeckt!” and we would laugh.

I loved the chance to work outside in the Fall air. I drove tractor to mow the corn stubble after the harvest and also did some plowing. Maynard also drove tractors and repaired farm machinery. It was a delightful way to connect with a German family, do something useful and dig a little deeper into language and cultural lessons. After about two weeks we prepared to leave, but we had one important piece of business to do first. Maynard and I had long dreamed of sneaking home and walking into the houses of our beloved families unannounced. So I wrote a letter to my parents, letting them know that we were being very useful on the farm, and that Mr. Horsch would really like us to stay another month. When Mrs. Horsch heard that I planned to simply show up at home without warning she said, “Won’t your mother have a heart attack?”

So after a few more days we returned to England and sold the car to a dealer for only $62.00…quite a bit less than we had paid for it.

On November 1, after 3 years in Vietnam and 5 months of travel, we boarded a plane for the U.S. A whole new epic journey was about to begin.

[1] See previous Windows and Mirrors posts

[2] In 2026, I cringe as I read this use of male language in my 1973 diary. intending to be inclusive of everyone. Thankfully we can grow and change.

[3] Regula Boschler, “The Anabaptist Felix Manz meets a terrible end, Swissinfo.ch, September 3, 2017.

[4] Hundreds of books have been written on Anabaptist history and theology. These short paragraphs do not include the variety of belief and practice among Anabaptists. There was a small group within the larger movement that sought to create its own “City of God,” and defended itself with violence. The German Peasant’s War which occurred as the Anabaptist movement began, was part of a more widespread challenge to the authority of the lords and princes. It was a fluid social/political context and people identified as Anabaptists in a variety of ways. Estimates are that 4,000-5000 Anabaptists were executed by state authorities in the 1500-1600’s.

[5] The Holy See, Message of the Holy Father, Leo XIV to the participants in the commemoration of 500 years of the Anabaptist movement, 29, May, 2025

East Africa brought a new dimension to our travel experience. We had Mennonite connections to lean on. Nate, an old friend from Ohio was in Nairobi and there were Mennonite Central Committee and Mennonite Mission workers in Kenya and Tanzania we could visit. We were in that uncomfortable “tourist” role again, but spending time with people who had long-term relationships in the region helped us feel more connected.

We began in Nairobi. My Nairobi diary entries foreshadowed what was to be a difficult two-year struggle of heart and soul. Unknown to me at the time, I was to discover that “coming home” was going to be much harder than leaving. While Nairobi was not home, the affluence and lifestyles among the expat population were a bit of a shock to my system. Clearly, I had forgotten what it was like to live in a society of relative comfort, consumerism and abundance of options. That may be an unfair characterization, but it was how I experienced it after 3 years in Vietnam and a brief visit to India.

These diary entries, written in stream of consciousness style, hint at what was to come when I returned to Ohio.

July 12, 1973

The lifestyle in Nairobi is something to get used to. Movies in English you just up and go to...several to choose from. Dairy Queens…just dropping in on people. All kinds of clothes to wear. Telephone calls to make. People working in media, films, drama. [There were] vacuums to sweep the house with, water to drink out of the faucets, cold cereal and milk, ranch style homes with hardwood floors, cars to ride in, streets with traffic lines, hot baths…but maybe it’s alright, I don’t know. It just seems like such a headlong rush.

July 30, 1973

One of the women at the Mennonite Guesthouse just mentioned something in passing about the more relaxed pace of life here in Nairobi. Maynard and I just stood and gaped.

July 19, 1973

[My diary entry from this day reflects back on a Vietnamese man I met who had been displaced by the war, had to flee his home with the clothes on his back, lived in refugee camps, depended on handouts, and watched his child die. With this as background, it appears I was projecting forward how I might feel once I arrived back home in the US. More about this in future entries.]

He’s far away now, but he still sort of lays in the back of my mind. And when I go shopping and try and decide which color shirt to buy or drop in at the Dairy Queen after a movie on a weekend, and my family needs two cars to go to church in because we’re not going to the same place afterwards, and my house has 2 or 3 rooms for every person, I feel sick inside because deep down I know there’s a connection between that man and me.

My Vietnam experience had become the lens through which I viewed life.

I soon discovered that traveling with Maynard was like having a superpower. Maynard could fix things. A highly skilled mechanic, Maynard’s ability to work with his hands gave us instant welcome wherever we showed up. And so we made ourselves useful in places like Rusinga Island on Lake Victoria, the Samburu National Reserve and Shirati, Tanzania.

Maynard on the beach on Lamu Island, off the eastern coast of Kenya, 1973. Photo by Titus Peachey

Rusinga Island

Rusinga Island in Lake Victoria was the site of a Mennonite-sponsored health clinic, staffed by 3 nurses, Canadian, German and Dutch. While there, Maynard and I did some plumbing, and also erected a couple long metal pipes which would serve as poles for a radio wire. This would give the staff the capacity to call Nairobi.

Canadian Mennonite nurse, Elsie Cressman inspects our efforts to construct a radio tower on Rusinga Island, 1973. Photo by Titus Peachey

Getting to the island by car was a challenge. The island was separated from the mainland by a mere 300-400 feet of water, but there was no bridge. There was a ferry, but the ferry had no engine. Instead, it was connected to a chain which stretched across the water, and the job of the passengers was to move the ferry across by pulling on the chain! That was hard work!

There was no electricity on the island. This, coupled with its somewhat remote location, gave it a calm, peaceful vibe which I thoroughly enjoyed. While likely not truly representative of the rest of Kenya, it felt like the one place where I engaged more with Kenyans and touched some of the country’s recent history.

Inhabited primarily by members of the Luo Tribe, Rusinga Island had been the home of Tom Mboya, who featured prominently in the life and rule of Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s anti-colonial activist who became Prime Minister and then President when Kenya gained independence (1963). Sadly, Mboya was assassinated in 1969, or he may well have become a successor to Kenyatta. We visited his memorial on the island and met his parents.

I was amazed by the international connections in this quiet enclave. We met a Kenyan journalist who had studied in the U.S. We, along with international clinic staff were invited to dinner at his parents’ house one night along with many of his relatives and friends. Included in the group was a Kenyan professor at Duke University who had returned to Kenya for the first time in 12 years to reunite with family and friends. Also present was a professor of African Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, who had just returned to Kenya after 8 years.

It was a magical evening, extending from 7:00 o’clock until midnight. We enjoyed delicious food and conversation outdoors under the light of a rising moon. Except for our voices and laughter, it was a quiet evening surrounded by the beauty of the natural world at night. I felt the warmth of Luo culture. Everyone, including elderly women with whom I did not share a common language, offered handshakes and smiles of welcome to everyone present. It was a real gift to be included in this event as a total stranger who would soon move on. To be clear, it was a one-time social event. We didn’t explore the issues of power, colonialism, economic and racial privilege that were surely present among us. And Africa has had its own sometimes violent struggles with tribalism. Nonetheless the evening was a powerful sign of what our world could be like if grace, respect and peace were extended across culture, language, race and nation.

As I write this in early 2026, entire nations of color are routinely vilified by our President,[1] being called “garbage” and other despicable names. I want to weep. This abuse of power and the normalization of racist rhetoric is not okay. It is possible to love one’s country, one’s people, one’s culture, and still offer respect, welcome and hospitality to others. That night in Tanzania, along with countless other encounters on this trip were a witness to the strength and beauty present in all cultures and people groups. Thanks to the Luo people of Rusinga island, Kenya for creating a warm and hospitable space midst a diversity of cultures, races and nationalities…a sign of the “beloved community” championed by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Hunting Trip

I am not a hunter. My father’s side of the family had no tradition of hunting. However, throughout my growing up years, many on my mother’s side of the family lived on the land in the wooded hills of western Maryland, raising cattle, pigs and poultry. Deer hunting was their way to relax, enjoy the outdoors and stock their freezers with some meat. During my boyhood visits to the houses of my uncles and cousins, I heard hunting stories, prompted by the ever-present mounted deer heads that always protruded from living room walls. Sometimes the venison found its way onto our dinner tables.

One quick Facebook request to my Beitzel cousins and I received an immediate influx of pictures. From left to right thanks to: Ruth Beitzel/Linda Kling, Micah Beitzel and Marian Diehl. The picture on the left is of my cousin Olen Beitzel’s elk mounted in his grandaughter’s house.

But the hunting that I was to experience in Africa was nothing like the stories I had heard from my relatives who lived in the Allegheny Mountains. The hunting trip happened while Maynard and I visited the Shirati Hospital, a Mennonite Mission outpost near the shores of Lake Victoria in the northwestern corner of Tanzania.

Mennonite missionaries first arrived in Shirati in 1934, and soon realized that malaria, dysentery and other tropical diseases were endemic to the area. They began providing medical services, constructing the 1^st permanent hospital building in 1954 and a nursing school in 1960.[2]

Maynard and I were warmly welcomed when we arrived and were soon put to work making various repairs. After a few days, Dr. Weaver decided to round up a group to go hunting, and we readily agreed to join the excursion. Dr. Weaver had a hunting license and made arrangements for us to spend the night at a school near the Mara savanna where we would do our hunting.

Our drive to the savanna revealed vast open grasslands with few villages. The villages that we saw were comprised of houses made from mud and thatch which blended seamlessly into the landscape. Whether by intention or necessity, it appeared that rural Tanzanians lived in harmony with the natural world. Indeed, the entire country of Tanzania had only 15 million people in 1973, scattered across 365,000 sq. miles, or roughly 7 times the area of Pennsylvania.

We arrived at our destination just before nightfall and managed to shoot a Topi, a type of antelope. We quickly dressed the meat, placed it in tin foil along with potatoes and carrots, and threw it into our campfire for our first tasty meal.

The next day was unlike anything I had ever experienced. Vast herds of antelope, wildebeest, zebras, gazelles and the occasional warthog grazed lazily as we drove across the savanna in our pickup truck.

A herd of Wildebeest on the move as we drive by. Photo by Titus Peachey

In most cases, it was really no contest. As the herds stood and looked at us, we stood on the back of our pickup truck and picked out an animal to shoot. Each time our gun roared, an animal fell to the ground and the rest of the herd scattered. After disemboweling the animal we threw the carcass on the truck. The vultures circled as we drove away. The hunting my Beitzel relatives did in the Pennsylvania/Maryland woods seemed much more fair by comparison.

To be clear, all the meat that we collected was taken back to the hospital compound and distributed among the Tanzanian hospital staff. This was not a trip for trophy hunting.

The last unchecked animal box on our license was the zebra, and it was my turn to shoot. Looking through the powerful scope on the gun, I saw the zebra up close. What I was about to do felt intimate and unfair. It took a long time for me to pull the trigger. What would my peers think of me if I didn’t follow through? My diary reflects the ambivalence that I felt.

What do we have against these animals? Nothing. It seems cruel to kill anything. Animals struggle, and you can see the fear in their eyes when death comes. I’m not a vegetarian. Maybe if I had to kill all the meat that I ate I would become one.[3]

Despite this somewhat disconcerting encounter with hunting, 50 years later I have not adjusted my lifestyle to a meatless diet. I wonder why. Am I too old to change such a deeply entrenched pattern?

Moving On

We enjoyed other side trips in Africa including: the Samburu Natural Reserve, Lamu Island off the northeast coast of Kenya, and the dry desert-like clime of Garissa. After two months in Africa, it was time to move on to Europe. We did so via a Nairobi to London charter flight.

Me in front of our tent at the Samburu Nature Preserve in central Kenya. We weren’t the right kind of clientele for the expensive lodge, so the manager kindly allowed us to sleep in a tent outside. We heard lions grunting and growling all night long!

[1] Kate Bartlett, Trump’s garbage comment met with disappointment in Somalia, OPB, Dec. 6, 2025

[2] Karibu Shirati KMT Hospital, See also, Kim O’Brien, Local group working hard to support hospital in remote Tanzania, LNP, September 11, 2013.

[3] Titus Peachey diary entry, August 21, 1973.

My good friend Maynard Shirk and I began dreaming of a trip home long before it was time. Since we were already halfway around the world, it seemed a shame to just fly over all the incredible places and people on our planet without stopping to learn and explore. So we began considering a more interesting path.

A reminder that this was long before the internet! We had to look at physical maps of the world and write letters on paper to friends that were scattered in Africa, the Middle East and Europe to see what connections we could make. We calculated that 5-6 months of travel and $1,500 should get us home in time for Thanksgiving.

It was a time of great privilege. We had resources, time, good health, U.S. passports, white skin and enough experience navigating our way through nearly 3 years in Vietnam, that we felt nothing but optimism and confidence as we set out on our trip. While we had a general idea of our intended route, we made many adjustments along the way which were all part of the adventure.

We traveled light. Maynard and I each bought a U.S. Army backpack in the Saigon black market, and for some reason, I insisted on carrying my guitar (without a case) the whole way home.

I soon discovered that being a tourist felt very strange, compared to living in a country for several years where I had studied the history, had a network of friends, could speak the language and understood some of the nuances of culture. In contrast, being a tourist felt a bit like staying in the shallow end of a pool on a hot day. Nice…but not the fully satisfying immersion experience!

We began by spending around 10 days in Laos. I had no idea at the time that Laos would become a major focus in my life. I was amazed that Laos had a coalition government which included the Pathet Lao movement, a faction supported by North Vietnam and the Soviet Union. How did Laos manage to do that, I wondered, when this would have seemed preposterous in Vietnam?

India

After transiting through Thailand and spending some time in Nepal, we moved on to India. We had already spent several weeks in India in 1971 when we attended the Asian Mennonite Reconciliation Workcamp near Calcutta and the Asian Mennonite Conference in Dhamtari.

It was at the conference in Dhamtari that I had experienced an amazing language translation event. The speaker one evening was a Mennonite pastor from Taiwan who spoke in English. He told a long and very humorous story in short segments to allow for translation. With each pause, all the English speakers erupted into laughter. When the same segment was translated into Hindi, all the Hindi speakers laughed. As the story segments became shorter and shorter, the laughter became longer and longer. Finally, the waves of laughter cascaded on top of one another and the laughter itself became the focus of our amusement. The translator, overcome by laughter, gave up. The speaker’s story came to an abrupt stop but it didn’t matter. The story was no longer the point. The entire crowd of over 500 people just sat and laughed together for a time, enjoying our shared humanity and the challenge of communication across language barriers. It was a spontaneous experience of unity and joy midst a diversity of cultures and languages. It was, admittedly a fleeting moment, but a positive vision, nonetheless, of the way our human family can be together.

Given these earlier experiences in India, we didn’t feel the need to do so much exploration on our trip home. Traveling from Nepal, we arrived at a major rail hub in the city of Lucknow. We decided to catch the train to Bombay, and from there either fly or take a cargo ship to East Africa.

My diary’s recounting of the train ride to Bombay is filled with descriptions of packed cars, cramped standing room, hot sweaty bodies, luggage everywhere, hard wooden seats, people in the wrong seats, babies crying and hot tempers. I was reminded once again how the movement of crowds and social spacing are specific to each culture. This is not something we are verbally taught. Rather we learn how to move about in crowds through unwritten cultural rules. For a Westerner used to orderly lines, and a bubble of individual space, the India train experience felt chaotic and overwhelming.

Being on a frugal budget, we purchased the cheapest tickets of course…3^rd class, no reservations. Part way through the journey we had to change trains and get on the Bombay express. It arrived late and try as we might, we simply couldn’t squeeze our way onto the train. We opted to get a hotel for the night, shower, rest and try again the next day.

Passengers on Commuter Train in Mumbai, India. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Photo was not modified

The next day looked like it could be a repeat experience. A huge crowd on the platform awaited the train as it rolled in, jam-packed with passengers hanging out the doors. Standing near us was a large contingent of Indian Army soldiers who quickly took over one car. All the cars on the train filled quickly with many of us still stranded on the platform. Would we be left behind again? At one point, one of the soldiers guarding the doorway made eye contact with us and gave a slight nod. Sure enough, just before the train pulled away, he allowed us to get onto the car. This was most likely a clear case of white privilege, but once we got onto the car, it became clear that the privilege had ended!

There were no seats, so we stood awkwardly for a bit. Then one of the soldiers pointed to the small cubby hole between the two cars. This is the space where there is a metal platform that covers the hitch between the cars. It expands slightly when the train picks up speed and gets a bit smaller when the train slows down. There was a heavy accordion-like cloth that enclosed the space, but it was torn in many places, which turned out to be somewhat of a blessing as it provided some air. The downside was that the train had a steam engine which emitted billows of smoke that came drifting down over top of us, covering us with soot which turned to a dark, gritty grime on our sweaty bodies. My memory is that only Maynard and I were in this space, but my diary notes that there were four of us who took turns sitting and standing in this cramped space. My diary also notes that this segment of the train trip took 19 hours!

Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.0, Photo Credit: Dennis G. Jarvis. Photo was not modified

There were many times in Vietnam that I reflected on poverty and the privilege of my own modest economic class. This will become clearer when I talk about my reentry into the U.S. But in India, the grind of poverty felt even more oppressive and was present everywhere.

One morning in Bombay, as Maynard and I walked the streets calculating what we would need to pay for flights or a cargo ship to East Africa, a young boy followed us for nearly a mile asking for money. Thinking the coins I happened to have at the time were too much to give, and fearing that I would attract more children if I yielded, I refused. Even after we got into a taxi, he ran alongside, hand outstretched. After a few days, we decided to fly to Nairobi, Kenya. In the airplane, the young boy was still on my mind as I reflected on the irony of refusing to give a few cents to a child while we pondered the hundreds of dollars for the next leg of our journey. In my diary I wrote, “Now I am in an airplane. The boy is on the streets of Bombay. His arms don’t reach this high…Is it really right to go flying so high above the earth and use up so much money?”

The encounter with this young child has stuck with me for years. The fact that he is no longer following me, hand outstretched, does not mean that he and millions of others like him, are not there. But the issue is much larger than my encounter with this one child. Any number of images in our world today come from the same disparities of wealth and power that haunted the life of this young boy in Bombay. Gaza, Afghanistan, Sudan and areas of poverty in our own country are among them. Our geographic location, race, gender and class determine a lot of what we encounter each day and how consistently the realities of economic oppression stay in our consciousness.

I wonder how we can move beyond responding to poverty with charity. Can we advocate for policies to ensure that housing, food, health care and jobs with a livable wage are available to everyone? The vision of the ancient prophet Micah says it well: And everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid (Micah 4:4). It is not a vision of extravagant wealth and grinding poverty. It is not a vision that papers over the oppression of hunger and poverty with words about our spiritual unity. Rather, it is a practical vision of enough for everyone.

With this vision embedded in the foundations of my faith, how should I live in a world where children beg on the streets?

To be continued…

Small Joys/Big Reward

My English classes for high school and university students were generally held in the afternoon and evening, so I would use the mornings for prep time and further Vietnamese language study on my own. After an evening class at the student center in Saigon, I would often play basketball in the courtyard with fellow Mennonite Mission worker Don Sensenig who lived in the house at the center. It was always an energetic game. Don’s small stature did not prevent him from making the game competitive, sometimes pulling on my shirttail to prevent my leap for a rebound! After the rigor of a couple games we would walk across the street to enjoy a late evening drink of fresh tropical fruit, yogurt and ice from a vendor’s cart, an absolute delight that could be found almost anywhere in Saigon.

The basketball hoop at the Mennonite Student Center in Saigon. Two of the Sensenig girls Lynne in blue and Anne in red are enjoying the court when it is not filled up with students’ motorcycles. Photo by Titus Peachey

After a refreshing drink I would hop onto my motor scooter and take a quick 10-minute ride back to my house in Gia Dinh before the 10:00 o’clock curfew. The evening air rushing over me was a welcome tonic for my body and soul. My closing ritual was a bucket bath on the flat rooftop of our house using water from the cement tank, which cooled me off even more. After pulling my light metal bed out of my small 3^rd floor room, I would sleep in the open air and be awakened by the morning sun. There was enough sadness in the news and stories of my students to burden my soul every day, but these happy routines helped to buoy my spirits.

Drinking Tea

One of my first cultural lessons was on how to drink tea. Tea is a ritual of hospitality and welcome. I am not a big fan of hot drinks, particularly in hot weather, so I had some learning to do. One of the 1^st times that I was served tea in the home of a friend, I thought I would quickly drink it, get it over with, and enjoy the rest of the visit. Well, it only took a few seconds before the cup was filled again. This pattern went on for several rounds before I finally got the message. I learned that when invited to drink tea, one usually waits for a 2^nd or 3^rd invitation before drinking. And it is always polite to leave some tea in the cup or some food on the plate to assure the host of their generosity. This also relieves the host of the need to constantly fill and refill your cup!

I became so accustomed to refusing a 1^st invitation to drink that when I returned to the U.S. and was offered a soft drink by a friend, I naturally declined. Well, my friend didn’t ask again, and I was left without a nice cold drink on a hot day! Indeed, there are ways in which returning to one’s cultural roots is harder than venturing into a new culture. But that’s a story for a later post.

I also learned that tea has a helpful side effect in a hot tropical environment. Each Sunday I attended the Vietnamese Mennonite Church in Gia Dinh. The church was usually packed with people, and often ended around noon when the sun was high in the sky and blazing hot. As we would stand conversing with friends after church, elderly Vietnamese ladies with gray hair and wrinkled smiles would approach us with steaming hot cups of tea on a tray. “Drink it!” they would say. “It will cool you off!” There is science for this, of course. The hot tea makes you sweat, which cools your skin as it evaporates. Despite the scientific evidence, I always yearned, instead, for a glass of ice water!

Mennonite Church in Gia Dinh on a Sunday morning. Ladies visiting outside after the service. In front is Ma Cua, behind in the dark ao dai is Le Thi Thom, in the white ao dai is Ba Bay, and on the right is Le Thi Van. In April of 1975, when the war was at a climax and many people were fleeing, Ba Bay told the Mennonite missionaries, “Continue believing in God and stay here with us.” Photo by Titus Peachey

Wear what shows respect!

It was at church that I learned a lesson about clothing and social relationships. On one Sunday I showed up at church wearing open sandals. This was both an attempt to stay cool and an expression of my casual persona. The pastor’s wife, upon seeing this, took me aside to explain that I should wear shoes. I could afford shoes, and it would be a sign of respect for the occasion and the people. As a child of the 60’s, I was thinking much more about self-expression, being casual and “blending in” with the Vietnamese attenders who did not have Sunday shoes. But I was not Vietnamese, and I had shoes. I should wear them! This was another lesson about the importance of social harmony and the need for individuals to show respect to their community.

Spicy Soup and Beer

During my teaching days in Saigon, I was befriended by Mr. Ham, a progressive member of the national legislature who came from the central Vietnamese city of Quang Ngai. He enjoyed talking and I welcomed speaking with someone of influence who was somewhat critical of the U.S. military role in Vietnam. Our conversations usually took place at a soup shop which his wife operated in Saigon.

But there was a problem. The soup was much too hot and spicy for my constitution. After about 5 minutes of digging into the soup, my entire digestive system was on fire and my body reacted with convulsive hiccups and a runny nose. The longer I ate, the worse it got. Fortunately, we always had beer with the soup which could help counterbalance the hot spices. Unfortunately, as a young Mennonite who had never had any beer, and for whom beer had been forbidden for religious reasons, my body was not used to absorbing the alcohol either! So while I welcomed the conversations, getting my body through the spicy soup and alcohol, and safely home again, was quite an ordeal!

My Daily Pho

Across the street from the student center where I taught English was a Pho shop. Pho is a tasty rice noodle soup made from chicken or beef broth and served with spring onions, cilantro, bean sprouts and other greens. It was my daily lunch. Healthy and nutritious, it was nonetheless “fast food,” often arriving at my table within 60 seconds of when I had ordered it.

I was always fascinated by the choreography and muscle memory of the soup lady’s movements. In addition to steaming pots of broth, there was a basket of noodles and bowls of spring onions, cilantro and other greens that were all ingredients to the soup. Ordering the soup was almost like pressing a button on a robot. The lady’s arms would spring into motion, always moving in the same pattern and sequence to create the soup.

As I ate my soup, several chickens, likely ingredients for the next day’s soup, would peck at the food scraps under my table, roaming freely around the shop. After the soup, I would usually have a French pastry from the glass case. At times, this lunch seemed mundane. In retrospect, it was a tasty work of art.

My good friend Maynard enjoying a bowl of Pho at the Pho shop across the street from the Mennonite Student Center in Saigon. Photo by Titus Peachey

The Saigon Police

During my three years of riding around Saigon’s congested streets on a scooter, I only had one difficult encounter with the Saigon police. It happened on my way to teach an English class. A policeman on the corner whistled me down and demanded to see my ID and scooter papers. I asked repeatedly why he had stopped me, but he always deflected the question and did not give an answer. Time was ticking away and I feared that I would be late for class. Then came the dreaded phrase: “Well, if you sympathize with me, I will sympathize with you.” What could I do? So, finally I said: “Fine…what do you need?” As it happened, what he needed was not a money bribe, but a break for coffee and cigarettes. So he along with two other policemen and I went off to a nearby coffee shop where I purchased the coffee and cigarettes that they “needed.” We had a pleasant conversation during which time my papers were magically returned across the table. With the policemen properly compensated for their “service,” I went off to teach my class…arriving a bit late.

Police post at a busy intersection in Saigon. Photo by Titus Peachey

The Post Office

When navigating another culture, it’s amazing how things one assumes would be simple can be absolutely baffling. Such was the case when I went to the Saigon post office to mail a letter. Since the first step was to purchase the correct stamps to put onto the envelope, I went to the counter served by the “stamp lady.” That’s where I suddenly had no idea what to do. At the counter was a large clump of people. I had assumed that there would be an orderly line, with each person taking their turn to purchase their stamps. I was baffled by the clump of people! Where was the order or logic in this chaos? It slowly dawned on me that the order was in the lineup of envelopes in front of the “stamp lady” on the counter. The envelopes were lined up from left to right, with the newest person’s envelope on the far left. As the stamp lady took the envelope directly in front of her, each person reached in to move their envelope along the line in turn. When one’s envelope arrived in front of the lady, you paid for your stamps and retrieved your envelope. You then went to the glue table where you would find a couple containers of glue and a short stick with which to apply the glue. Then you could mail your letter! Simple, once you understood the process.

Going to the post office was a distinct pleasure, particularly on a day when I received mail. The entrance to the room with mailboxes was on a shaded side street. When I received a letter from home or from a good friend, I would sit in the shade on my motor scooter and eagerly begin reading. I was instantly transported to familiar people and places half a world away, enveloped in a wave of love and connection. The streets and sounds of Saigon faded away. As my reading came to an end, I would slowly emerge from my reverie, sometimes feeling renewed energy and support and sometimes longing for home.

Saving Face/Losing Face

Interpersonal conflict takes place in Vietnamese culture just as it does everywhere, but it is usually important to preserve harmony on the surface…or to “save face.” I once got a stern lesson in this from one of my English students.

There was a group of high-school-age women who requested their own separate class, as they were shy and uncomfortable speaking up in a larger class where young men were present. The class was held in one of the rooms at the student center. When the room was not in use for a class, anyone could use it as a place to study.

One day when I walked into the room to prepare for class, there was a male student studying there. I told him that the room would now be used for a class. He heard me, but made no effort to leave, continuing his study. Rather than press the issue, I allowed him to stay, thinking it would be okay. The young women soon arrived and we began the class.

About 5 minutes into the class, one of the young women stood up, interrupted the class, and asked the young man to leave. This time he complied and we continued with the class.

The next day outside the student center, the young woman angrily approached me. In rapid fire Vietnamese she declared that I had caused her to “lose face,” and in a final parting shot, said, “I hate you!”

This was an unusually direct accusation, particularly from a student to a teacher in a relationship usually characterized by a great deal of respect and deference. She clearly felt that I had not properly taken control. This meant that she had had to step out of her student role and take charge of a situation that should have been mine to handle. She clearly felt that I had put her into a very uncomfortable spot.

My class of young women at the Mennonite Student Center in Saigon. Photo by Titus Peachey

Vietnam: Final Thoughts

Among my foreign friends in Vietnam, we had a saying that went something like this:

If you have been in Vietnam for a couple days, you could write a book. If you have been in Vietnam for a month or two, perhaps you could write an article. Once you have been in Vietnam for a couple years, you have no idea what to say!

Fifty plus years after leaving Vietnam, I have now offered 10 different posts, reflecting on my experiences there. While the wait was not intentional, it did allow me to consider my Vietnam experience in the broader sweep of my life journey.

My earlier posts noted that my conservative Mennonite upbringing prevented me from fully accepting my identity as a U.S. citizen in the context of the dominant U.S. military intervention that surrounded me in Vietnam.

Yet I believe my Mennonite identity was also a blessing. It gave me another frame of reference from which to view the war. My spiritual Anabaptist ancestors, whose stories I cherish, taught me that neither God nor humanity can be restricted to the ideology and narrative of a nation. And so my faith and experience in a conservative Mennonite subculture protected me from the excesses of U.S. nationalism. It provided a platform from which to evaluate and critique the U.S. policies that had caused years of suffering and trauma in Vietnam.

One of my English students, Miss Hanh, expressed a similar sentiment in a letter that she wrote to me:[i] If only our people had thought of stop fighting, it would have been wonderful to be together. Just forget all about the nationalism, ideology between democracy and communism and think of peace, of humanity. That time, we’ll start all over again, healing physical and mental wounded. If only, teacher…

Yes, Miss Hanh. Your words of longing are just as relevant today as they were 50+ years ago. If only…!

[i] Letter from Miss Hanh, May 12, 1972, explaining that she had missed class to help distribute supplies to people who had fled the fighting and were displaced by the war.

In July of 1971, I was traveling in the Cua Valley of South Vietnam. The Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Vietnam was just to our North, with the Lao border to the West. Vietnam Christian Service colleagues and I were spending the day at a Bru refugee village where there was a school run by several Catholic priests and a group of nuns. Our goal for the day: building a see-saw for the children made from steel pipes obtained from one of the U.S. military bases.

This region was insecure and often subject to attack. The area served as one of many entry points for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which moved soldiers and supplies from North Vietnam into South Vietnam through eastern Laos. The U.S. had begun its intense bombing of the Trail in early 1965, which added to the instability and disruption of life in the region.

This group of Bru tribespeople had lived near Khe Sanh, a former US base close to the Lao border that had endured a long and costly siege in 1968. Now living on “borrowed land,” the village remained exposed to the powerful political/military interests that lurked all around them. Yet there were signs of normalcy. One of the village men took us on a brief tour which included picking through rolls of barbed wire to admire several vegetable plots, a tender sign of hope in a landscape of uncertainty and increasingly bleak prospects.

It appeared that these villagers may have “picked a side.” Many Bru tribesmen fought alongside U.S. special forces during the war. The Catholic School and the presence of a U.S. military advisor during our visit were other indicators that the village had cast its lot with the South Vietnamese Government side.

After a very tasty lunch of rice, fish and soup, a Vietnamese priest at the school prepared to go to Quang Tri, the province capital. A young man, he had studied theology and philosophy in Rome for 6 years. Now he lived and worked at this lonely outpost among a people besieged by existential threats to their security and well-being. Before leaving on his motorcycle, he took the time to put on his priestly robes. He told us, “If the VC (Viet Cong) stop me, I want them to know that they are stopping a priest. Then if they want to shoot me, I will say, ‘Please do.’ But I don’t want to be shot because I was mistaken for someone else.” With that, off he rode on his Honda, his robes flapping in the wind.

During the war, I had lived a relatively secure life. Unlike some of the other Mennonite and Vietnam Christian Service workers with whom I associated, I had never had to run to a bunker while rockets rained down, watch U.S. planes strafe a nearby neighborhood, or hide as Viet Cong soldiers took over the town where I lived. Unlike millions of Vietnamese, I didn’t have to navigate competing claims on my loyalty by government powers that controlled the day vs. revolutionary forces that arrived at nightfall.

So the confidence of the priest in his identity and role, regardless of the cost, drew me in. I could critique the entire Catholic mission in this village as a colonial imposition that served both U.S. and South Vietnamese government interests. But to be fair, our presence that day likely fit that framing as well. The priest and I both had our own individual narratives and motivations, but in the midst of a bigger story of conquest and revolution, these narratives could take on meanings we didn’t intend. This many years later, I wish I had learned more about this priest. How did he engage the dilemmas presented by the political/revolutionary currents that swirled around him? How did his faith guide him?

All over Vietnam, people made choices about how to navigate the perilous realities of life in a war zone where competing loyalties pressed in on every side. Like other tribal groups, the Bru not only fought to survive a war, but struggled to retain their identity in the midst of a dominant Vietnamese culture and power structure. Perhaps it made sense to link their prospects to the South Vietnamese Government side, which after all, was backed by the strongest military force in the world.

In many areas of the country people’s loyalties shifted with the fortunes of the different forces during the war. They were known as “soi dau” areas, named after a Vietnamese delicacy featuring white rice and black beans.[i] Villagers in these areas were often caught between opposing forces and pressured into difficult decisions…which brings me to an experience in Pleiku.

Pleiku Province and Plei Alei Village

Located on a high rolling plateau in central Vietnam, Pleiku was a provincial capital, and site of a Mennonite Central Committee/Vietnam Christian Service-supported hospital. The hospital was located on the western edge of town, one of the last sets of buildings along a road that headed off toward Cambodia. Just across the road from the hospital was a South Vietnamese Army base. For some reason, the South Vietnamese Army would occasionally move their largest tanks to the hill just above the hospital. There they would fire off round after round of artillery into the distance, shaking the house and making sleep impossible.

Pleiku Hospital ca 1973, Photo by Titus Peachey

I visited Pleiku for over a week in January of 1973, then spent my last two months (April-May) in Vietnam there, helping out with a public health project in the village of Plei Alei. It was a welcome change of pace from Saigon. I enjoyed the fresh air, cooler temperatures and natural beauty of the rolling hills.

The Village of Plei Alei was 20-30 minutes east of Pleiku and several kilometers south of the main road. It was a tribal village. Like the Bru village in Quang Tri Province, these people had been resettled from their traditional location in the mountains. The story of their resettlement went something like this.

The people of Plei Alei had lived in the mountains where their village was at times under control of the National Liberation Front. About three years earlier, their village came under attack. In the midst of the fighting, U.S. helicopters arrived and moved many of the villagers to a more “secure area” near Pleiku. However, I learned that only about half of the villagers accepted this move. A sizable portion of the village hid in the forest and refused to board the helicopters.

The people of Plei Alei, perhaps only 20 households in total, did not have an easy life. Their rice fields were far away and there was no easy access to markets where they could purchase the food and supplies that they needed. The Vietnam Christian Service worker with whom I worked initiated a vegetable garden, a hand dug well, and the construction of a small school.

The children of Plei Alei enjoying the sliding board with the newly constructed school in the background. Photo by Titus Peachey, 1973.

The wood and tin for the construction of the school came from a nearby U.S. Army base. This was during the withdrawal period for U.S. troops, so the U.S. bases were a handy source of second-hand material. We dug the nails out of the lumber, straightened and reused them.

One day I learned that a young man from the village had been shot and killed by a military helicopter at night while walking some distance from the village. As it was the tribal practice to build a small shelter of lumber and tin above burial plots, I took this young man’s father to the U.S. Army base to collect materials that he could use to properly bury his son. Without a common language, I could not speak to the father about his feelings. But surely this story had layer upon layer of irony, pain and trauma. The helicopter, the gun, the bullets and perhaps even the door gunner who had shot the young man, all came from the U.S. Now through a connection which I as a U.S. citizen offered, the materials to properly mark his burial plot also came from the U.S.

The villagers of Plei Alei kept in contact with their friends and relatives who had remained in the mountains. On one of their visits back to their old village, now under the control of the National Liberation Front, the North Vietnamese troops told them that if the people of Plei Alei didn’t return, all the men in Plei Alei would be killed. Caught in such a trap, the people of Plei Alei sold their possessions and prepared to return. But when the South Vietnamese government learned of their plan, they were forbidden to leave.

Celebrating the construction of the school with the men of Plei Alei, 1973.

I passed in and out of this village, having minimal contact with the residents, except for a young man who was my companion in building the school. I lament that I learned little about their lives, save for the brief narrative above. My time in Vietnam had come to an end and I never found out how these people resolved the dilemma which threatened their very lives. Midst all the uncertainty, did these people manage to choose a path that allowed them to survive?

Reflections

Behind the statistics of injuries, deaths, refugees and displaced people that are tallied during a time of war, are the agonizing dilemmas about how to stay safe and who can be trusted. For some, this is a clear choice based on political ideology or historical experiences. For others, war brings an endless cascade of agonizing decisions that must be made midst uncertainty, fear and trauma. Surely this is the case in Gaza, Palestine, Israel, Syria, Ukraine and Russia to name just a few places in our daily news feed.

But for the circumstances of my birth these dilemmas of war could have haunted my life. Born into a country that has often imposed the heart wrenching dilemmas of war on others, I long for a national movement to prioritize serious investments in diplomacy, international aid, and nonviolent peacemaking efforts at the grassroots level. War breaks people, communities, and physical infrastructure that supports life. Let’s put our heart, soul, training and national resources into prevention.

[i] There were other places in Vietnam where the population had a long history of resistance to the French, which was easily transferred to the U.S. when it arrived. Indeed, resistance to foreign power and control was part of some communities’ collective identity. A recently published book: The Saigon Sisters: Privileged Women in the Resistance by Patricia Norland, gives a fascinating account of young women who left Saigon to support the resistance in the liberated areas.

Perched at the northern edge of South Vietnam is the town of Dong Ha, just 10 kilometers south of the Demilitarized Zone that separated North and South Vietnam from 1954 to 1976. A highly fortified strip of land, the DMZ was 4-6 miles wide, roughly following the 17^th parallel. I visited the area in July of 1971.

Map of the DMZ area. Photo Credit: Captain Moyars S. Shore II, USMC

Having flown to the coastal city of Danang from Saigon, my friend Martin and I took a heavily loaded French Citreon car—14 people in all—to Hue. The ride out of Danang led us up into the mountains around hairpin curves, providing beautiful views of the deep blue South China Sea to the east. From Hue, two bus rides got us to our final destination of Dong Ha, where there was a Vietnam Christian Service Unit (VNCS). We spent the next couple days following VNCS workers Tom and Gunnar around, a welcome change from our Saigon routines.

The VNCS house seemed to be a place where the community felt welcome. Monks, pastors, staff at the VNCS sponsored technical school and other community members came and went all day. Around 10:00 p.m. that first evening, Tom and I took a walk around the town. Children in the neighborhood were still out and about, calling out to Tom as we walked along. The atmosphere was calm. This was not always the case. VNCS workers from previous years recounted numerous nighttime dashes to their bunker as they awoke to the sound of incoming rockets. Indeed the unit was evacuated and shutdown for awhile after the 1968 Tet Offensive.

Eventually we went to bed. Some of us slept on the flat roof to enjoy the ever-present wind and the starry night sky. There was a B-52 strike somewhere not so distant, which shook the earth like loud claps of thunder, a reminder that we had moved closer to the war’s horror and devastation.

The village of Dong Ha, as seen through the barbed wire of a U.S. base. U.S. Marine Corps Photo, Creative Commons License 2.0 (no alterations)

By 6:30 a.m. there was already a lot of movement in the town. As I sat up, I looked directly out onto Highway 9 which runs from Vietnam’s eastern coast all the way across Laos to Savannakhet. Just next to Tom’s house, a large group of Vietnamese women gathered to wait for a U.S. Army truck which would take them to work on the army base for the day. When the truck arrived, they all climbed onto the open truck bed, filling it, standing shoulder to shoulder and clutching the side rails as they could to stay upright.

Seeing the women treated in this way gave me an uneasy feeling, as this is how we used to haul cattle during my boyhood days on the farm. As I watched this daily ritual unfold, I had to wonder what these women experienced, moving in and out of the white male American military culture day after day. Knowing what I know now about rape and sexualized violence as a tool of war, I was disturbed to learn that it was only after the My Lai massacre (March, 1968), that the Pentagon established the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group. This group discovered numerous cases of rape, torture and abuse of Vietnamese women by U.S. troops, many of which had never been prosecuted.[2] While I’m sure many of the day-to-day interactions with the Vietnamese women on the base near Dong Ha were civil, the power imbalance between the women and the U.S. military placed the women in an extremely vulnerable position. Who would be the women’s advocate? How would the dominant U.S. military system respond to any claims of abuse arising from these women?

We started our day by running a few errands, then stopped in at the U.S. army base for a breakfast of bacon, eggs, pancakes, potatoes, tomato juice, milk and cereal…all for 35 cents! That was a shock to my system, as I had not eaten a hearty American breakfast since arriving in Vietnam nearly a year earlier! Surely the logistics and costs involved in providing a constant supply of American food to soldiers half-way around the world must have been challenging. So there I was, likely benefitting from the labor of some of the women whom I had seen getting onto the army truck earlier that morning. The irony is not lost on me.

Next on our agenda was a stop at the pagoda in Quang Tri where Tom needed to talk with one of the Buddhist Youth for Social Service (BYSS) workers.[3] While there, the head monk insisted that we join him for tea. He teased me about my moustache, saying that only old people wear moustaches.

Our next stop was the VNCS-sponsored technical school. One of the realities here is that the U.S. Army is preparing to withdraw and is giving away a lot of its “hootches,” the living quarters for the soldiers. So Tom and Gunnar are helping some of their Vietnamese friends get tin and lumber from the base. The VNCS technical school itself is equipped with a lot of material from the Army’s largesse, which was also being shared with other parts of the community. Indeed, after lunch, Gunnar and Martin went to the army base to pick up some steel pipes which Gunnar was planning to use to make seesaws at the Bru Refugee Camp which we planned to visit the next day.

On the way back we stopped at another army base where Gunnar discussed a problem that many Vietnamese villagers in the area were having. There were so many mines and unexploded artillery rounds buried in their fields that they are afraid to plow their land. The soldier we spoke with said that they had once sent out nearly 20 tractors to cultivate fields, and 12 of them had been damaged by these weapons. This was clearly more than a safety issue, as it meant agricultural production would be significantly restricted.

Around 3:30 in the afternoon Gunnar, Martin and I took a trip to the DMZ. After driving on a long, bumpy dirt road we passed the northern-most village in South Vietnam. Just up the hill was a small army base, with 30 U.S. soldiers and a number of Vietnamese soldiers. To the east was the ocean, and straight ahead was North Vietnam. We climbed up a watch tower and looked through some high-tech binoculars used to sight enemy movement across the DMZ. The base is routinely rocketed, with an average of 12-15 rockets a week. The soldiers live in sandbag bunkers for their protection. A day before we were there, a rocket just missed the observation tower and made a hole in the dirt nearby. When the base is rocketed, a soldier looks through the binoculars to determine the location of the rocket launch, then sends the coordinates to a firebase farther to the rear. The firebase then fires artillery shells at the target to try and destroy the rocket launcher. A couple nights before our visit, a North Vietnamese rocket had overshot the base and hit the village down the hill, badly injuring a young girl.

Reflections

I was impressed by the ease with which Tom and Gunnar moved between the many different groups in their network; Buddhist monks, Catholics, evangelicals, government officials, students, U.S. military personnel and people in their immediate neighborhood. They had clearly established a strong sense of connection and belonging in this small community.

Yet it felt odd to so easily engage with the U.S. Army. Reflecting both my pacifism and my attempt to identify with the Vietnamese cultural world that surrounded me, it was unsettling to be welcomed into U.S. military spaces by soldiers who were clearly eager to help our humanitarian causes. From my perspective, the military system in Vietnam was causing great harm. So why were these individual soldiers, caught up in this harmful system, so ready to help us? And why did we so readily welcome their help?

In reality, I had faced similar issues in Saigon. The Mennonite Mission, in cooperation with the Mennonite Church in Gia Dinh operated a health clinic for people in the area.[4] Ruth Yoder, a Mennonite Central Committee nurse often encountered Vietnamese patients at the clinic whose medical needs were well beyond the capacity of the clinic to serve. But the VNCS doctor (Joanne) who also staffed the clinic, had good connections with some of the U.S. Army doctors at the 3^rd Field U.S. Army Hospital in Saigon. As described by Ruth, all Joanne had to do is give the patient a note that said something like, “Dear Bob, I think this boy needs a ‘valve job.’ What do you think?” With that note, Ruth could take the patient to the army hospital where he could get the best medical and surgical care available in Vietnam…all for free.[5]

3rd Field Army Hospital, Saigon, February, 1973, Public Domain

Ruth wondered if it was wise to associate so closely with a military system that we all strongly opposed. The hospital, after all, was part of the dominating system of military violence that caused immense suffering in Vietnam and here at home. Dr. Martin Luther King’s indictment of the U.S.’s role in the Vietnam War was perceptive and scathing.

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows…cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.[6]

Knowing Ruth well, I’m sure she would have agreed with King’s analysis. However, she decided that her personal purity was not the point, and that she should use her access to the hospital to benefit her Vietnamese patients. I readily joined this effort, driving the Vietnamese patients to the Army hospital and translating during their visits with the U.S. Army doctors. To my surprise, I found the doctors to be helpful, kind and eager to use their skills to enable the healing and recovery of their patients. One of the doctors told Ruth that they were only too happy to do some good midst all the damage caused by the U.S. intervention.[7]

I was learning about oppressive systems and the agency of individuals within these systems. As noted in earlier posts, Vietnam taught me about my own connections to the enormous U.S. war system via my U.S. citizenship. In Vietnam I also began to learn about naming and resisting oppressive systems while acknowledging the humanity of the individuals within them. I learned that these military doctors had agency. Over the years I have learned that some soldiers yield their agency to the military system. Some soldiers use their agency to try and humanize the war system. Others use their agency to leave a system they can no longer abide.

Whether we wish it so or not, we are all enmeshed in systems that are oppressive, violent or unjust. Learning to see and resist these systems, while nurturing the divine light in ourselves and in others, has been a life-long journey, filled with complexity and nuance.

Did we get it right in Vietnam? How about now? What are we naming? What are we resisting? What must we leave because it diminishes our humanity? These challenges remain with us.

[1] These vignettes of my visit to the Demilitarized Zone are based on a detailed report of my trip that I sent home to my parents, July 18-July 26, 1971.

[2] Madison P. Bingle (2023) "The Forgotten Sexual and Gender-Based Violence of the Vietnam-American War: Is Justice too Late for Vietnamese Victims and Survivors?," Human Rights Brief: Vol. 26: Iss. 2, Article 1. Available at: https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/hrbrief/vol26/iss2/1

[3] Buddhist Youth for Social Service was a school begun by Thich Nhat Hanh in the early 1960’s before his exile in the west. See previous post.

[4] Gia Dinh was part of the larger Saigon metropolitan area

[5] Peachey and Peachey, Seeking Peace, “Getting a Valve Job from the U.S. Military,” Good Books, Intercourse, PA, 1991, p. 91.

[6] Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence, Riverside Church, NYC, April 4, 1967

[7] Peachey and Peachey, p. 93