Dec 30, 2012

By Doug Hostetter

Forty years ago, as a conscientious objector, I worked for the Mennonite Central Committee in Tam Ky, Vietnam, organizing literacy classes for Vietnamese children whose schools had been destroyed by theU.S. Air Force. As a Mennonite, I had a strong personal commitment to biblical nonviolence, but also a naïve belief in the honorable intentions of my government’s military efforts in Indochina.

My Mennonite faith did not permit me to participate in the U.S. war in Vietnam, but as a U.S. citizen, I felt I could understand why my government stated that we needed to defend our nation against the rising tide of atheistic, godless communism. Communism had started in Russia, spread to China, and was now sweeping through Vietnam. It was like falling dominos, we were told: the first domino strikes the second, which falls against the third, and so on, until the entire world becomes communist.

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