Manus J Campbell was drafted into the infantry in 1967, when he was 19 years old. He went willingly to Vietnam because he believed the propaganda - he was performing his duty, defending his country from the enemy. Then Manus found himself in hell.
"You are not prepared in any way for what you are going to see or experience," he says now. Standing in a stream in the pristine jungle that is filled with dead and dying Marines crying out. Arms and legs missing. The stream red with blood. A piece of land stripped of all vegetation. The smell of death. Manus describes his feelings: "I am alive, but I am dead inside."
To help deal with the guilt and the grief, Manus made a decision four years ago to journey back to Vietnam. Though he did not quite know what he was looking for at the time, his trip brought him to the city of Hue, not far from where he had been stationed during the war. In Hue he found a school for disabled children. The children attending the facility suffer from many physical, mental and emotional problems, ranging from Down Syndrome to muteness/deafness to deformed limbs. Many of the problems were caused by the US Army's use of Agent Orange, a toxin that was sprayed to kill the foliage, so "the enemy" could not hide.
Manus spent a few hours at the school, just hanging out with the kids, sharing chips and cookies. Even after he went back home, Manus never forgot them. He visited them often, and when he couldn't visit, he thought of their needs, the crowded rooms, the limited resources, the way a simple bag of chips could bring such joy to a kid who spends hours just lying motionless on the floor. "Take their photos and give them a copy," Manus says, "and it's like I have given them an ipod!"
Today, Manus is a Buddhist and a pacifist. "War does not solve anything and destroys the lives of so many people who fight or who are living in the war zone," he says. "They end up getting caught between US and their own fighters and being abused by both." He is now working to raise money for HIVOW (Helping Invisible Victims of War), an international organization he created that focuses on those we don't hear much about when we talk about wars: the people caught in the middle, the disabled, the kids.
With the donations he collects, Manus and his friend Jaikishan Balakumaris, a resident of London, will build a newer, better facility to house more disabled orphans. The building is scheduled to commence in January. And Manus is getting ready to go back. Vietnam was a place he once thought of as hell. Now, it has become another kind of home.