War’s loss healed in mothers’ embrace

Dan Cheney headed off to war with freshly-earned pilot’s wings and the lieutenant’s insignia his mother had pinned on his shoulders.

He had grown into a young man, she thought then.

In fact he was “just a little boy, really... But they all were,” his mother Rae Cheney says now, 41 years after Dan died during combat in Vietnam.

His death in 1969 at the age of 21 began a four-decade journey of pain, resentment and healing that culminated this month when Rae Cheney embraced a Vietnamese mother whose son also died during the Vietnam War. US and Vietnamese officials say that encounter symbolises the reconciliation which their two nations have undergone 15 years after restoring diplomatic relations following the end of the war in 1975.

At the age of 90, Cheney travelled to Vietnam for the first time to attend the opening ceremony of a kindergarten named for her son. Beside it, a new library has been built honouring her, and dedicated to all mothers who lost children during the war.

“I want to know and be able to reach out to the mothers on this land because that’s where Dan lost his life and they’re in the same pain I am,” she told AFP in Hanoi before the ceremony.

Both buildings were funded by American veterans and other donors who support Peace Trees Vietnam, founded in 1995 by Dan Cheney’s sister Jerilyn Brusseau and her late husband Danaan Parry.

The group, which aims to “turn sorrow into service”, was the first foreign non-governmental organisation allowed to help clear unexploded ordnance (UXOs) in post-war Vietnam.

It works in Quang Tri, the province most contaminated by leftover bombs and other munitions. Along the former Demilitarized Zone that divided then North Vietnam from the US-backed South, the area was heavily bombed and fought over.

Peace Trees removes the ordnance, educates people about the danger, assists victims, plants trees on the cleared land, and builds kindergartens and schools.

Over the past 15 years Brusseau estimates she has made about 30 trips to Quang Tri and it has become “like my home.”

Soon after her younger brother’s death, she had vowed to someday go to Vietnam and make a difference, her mother recalls.

“Sure enough, that’s what she did,” says Rae Cheney who, like her daughter, projects a warmth and intensity of spirit. “Her relationship with the Vietnamese people is beyond words.”

For Rae, though, the thought of walking on the land where her son died was unbearable.

Dan had shown early on that he had a personality of leadership, and after a year in college he decided to join the military, she recalls.

“I pinned his lieutenant bars on his shoulder, and his flight wings, and put flowers on his grave — in one year.”

Assigned to a Cobra helicopter gunship — exactly what he had wanted — Cheney died in January 1969 when his aircraft was shot down near Saigon.

Engaged to be married, Cheney had been in the country for just 16 days.

Dan Cheney was one of 58,000 American troops and at least three million Vietnamese who died.

The pain of his loss only began to ease years later, Rae Cheney says, when she started to write thank you notes to Peace Trees donors.

AFP