In January 1989, our flight from Bangkok to Saigon was uneventful. Well, if you don’t count the two truckloads of Vietnamese soldiers with AK-47s who stopped the plane at the end of the runway. They boarded the plane, walking the aisles to scare the daylights out of the many Vietnamese who were returning home to visit families.

After passport control and customs, we exited the airport and got a shuttle ride to our hotel. While our rooms made Motel 6 look like a Hilton, we stayed up as long as we could before crashing. The next day we explored Saigon. I wish Americans who think socialism is great could see what it eventually becomes: hardcore communism! Nothing works, no one is helped, and the victors rule.

Our first event was visiting a polio orphanage where 450 children with the disease lived and were cared for. If you wanted to see grown men cry, you would have loved watching our faces as these children surrounded us, wanting to be hugged, loved, and acknowledged. Our gifts of toys, balloons, and stickers were like treasures to them. American children, for the most part, don’t know what it’s like to have nothing. Tears flowed as we drove away from the waving kids on their homemade braces.

After repairing their therapy pool, we met with the government official in charge of Social Services for Saigon, now 11 million people. In a matter of minutes, I learned this man, a former North Vietnamese Army (NVA) colonel, had been the Regimental Commander of a unit that nearly wiped my company out during an intense three-day, hand-to-hand battle along the DMZ (demilitarized zone).

He asked why we would come to help his people. Other NGOs from America had come and said they would help, but never came back. He knew I had lost friends during the battle with his regiment. I told him: “Sir, Jesus Christ has healed all of the hurt I experienced in Vietnam. Because of that, I can say I love you and Jesus loves you!”

Suddenly, our translator began to weep. The nearly dozen former NVA soldiers across from the long conference table looked at her, then looked at us, wondering what we had done to upset her. We were having an “awkward” moment years before it was popular! Finally, she was able to stop crying and asked me again what I had said.

When she finished translating, the colonel looked at me from across the table, eyes opened wide. He got up and stood there for a moment. Then he came all the way around the table, stopped in front of me, then threw his arms around my waist (I’m 6’ 4"; he’s 5’ 2") and cried. When he regained his emotions — well, when all of us regained our emotions — he told our translator to tell me he had never had an enemy tell him he loved him.

“For we do not want you to be unaware, brethren, of our affliction in Asia, that we were burdened excessively, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life; indeed, we had the sentence of death within ourselves but in God who raises the dead; who delivered us from so great a peril of death, and will yet deliver us.” —II Corinthians 1:8

Stay tuned for the final “Dispatch From Vietnam” and what God is doing!