Briefing from the Killing Fields

It has been an intense few days, kinda like camping, just a bit more serious and contemplative. In the last week I have visited a number of monuments and museums that commemorate some of the most horrendous acts carried out by mankind in the last 50 years. It has been quite an experience seeing reactions to the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia from the other side. I have learned a lot and been thinking a lot and been angry at times, and have been wondering how to mourn for these all of these slaughtered neighbors of mine as I walk between their mass graves. And how do I go forward, how do I follow Jesus' call to be a peace-maker in this world?

In Ho Chi Minh City, we went to the American War Museum and saw a lot of photo displays depicting the effects of the war: agent orange, the bombing of civilians in Hanoi, the burning of villages, and the slaughter of villagers. It was definitely a bit one sided in it's portrayal of the war, but it is I side that I needed to see. Looking back at my history classes, every required one ended at WWII or before. Only my elective class, contemporary world history, covered the Vietnam war at all (thank you Tito Craige!), and that by a teacher who was arrested multiple times for protesting during it. So I had a bit of exposure to the Vietnamese perspective, but nothing compares to being here for a bit and seeing some of the scars of the war, the scars that were left by my countrymen, every time I walk down the street and am approached by the deformed beggars still affected by Agent Orange.

This morning, we went to the Killing Fields outside of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. In 1975, as the result of a spillover war from Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge forced US troops out of Cambodia and started a bloody reign of terror. In the end over a million people were slaughtered to achieve their dream of a perfect, communist, agrarian society. It failed miserably to achieve any results except for starvation, broken families and a decimated country. At the memorial in Choeung Ek, we saw a pagoda full of hundreds of skulls from the victims of the Khmer Rouge's Killing Fields and then walked around the now empty mass graves. How does something like that happen? How can 1 million people be killed for an ideology? How does hell so easily come to earth? And yet we escalated the violence in order to prevent dominoes falling. We bombed the country side and in effect raised the troops for the very enemy we were fighting. Have we learned from our mistakes? Does Afghanistan or Iraq look any different? Or is it just another game of dominoes that we are playing and loosing and will eventually give up once we have mixed them all up sufficiently.

It was pretty powerful watching the movie, The Killing Fields, last night before our trip this morning. A bit like watching Hotel Rwandi while staying in Kigali. Check it out, it's a good movie, but not for the faint of heart. I have a lot of questions that have been raised by this trip, a lot of reading to do, and a lot of discussions that I hope to have especially searching to answers as to how something like this can be avoided in the future. There is no reason for genocide, it is all confusion and madness, but yet it continues, and the madness spreads. Life is made a living hell, but as a follow of Jesus I am called to pray for the kingdom to come, and for God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. So may our mission be to somehow bring some part of heaven to this earth. May it come to pass.