I saw a picture again today on Facebook that really bugs me. It’s a picture of an American soldier crawling through a Vietnamese tunnel in search of people to kill. He’s holding a flashlight in one hand an a pistol in the other. The picture was meant to inspire Americans about bravery of our troops who would crawl through such little spaces at such great risk.

Having visited Vietnam multiple times now that I’m just a few hundred miles away from the country, the picture seems more absurd than ever. Why were we crawling around in their tunnels looking for people to kill? They didn’t come to our country to do the same. When I posted that on Facebook, somebody responded “he’s looking for enemy combatants.” I thought about saying “you mean he’s looking for people who are willing to die to rid their land of invaders.”

I’ve been living…