Cabot Orton: Eyes Open

Vietnam is staggering. We're immediately confronted by a landscape of astonishing beauty, a history freighted with strife and suffering and preternatural hardship, a people who sublimely embody grace and perseverance. Listen to me: yank yourself out of comfort and relative ease and see this place, meet these people, see where they've been and where they are going. In doing so you will give yourself a tremendous gift that will endure, never to be forgotten.

My hosts are James and Martha Hathaway, good friends and tireless champions of a cause that's mercifully begun to receive global attention. Every amputation, smashed limb, scarred face, mangled body is a signpost suggesting weapons that were, mournfully, built to last. James and Martha are fortunate to have a wonderful, talented staff that lives daily with this ruinous legacy, tending to victims of the mines and bombs that continue to shatter families and destroy lives.

There's so much more to Vietnam than tragedy- that's the lovely surprise. Midnight street vendors in Saigon, water buffalo grazing on rice paddies pockmarked by bomb craters, hundreds of delighted children tearing around a schoolyard, verdant green hills that humble a Vermonter, smiles upon smiles from the warmest, most gracious people you will ever have the fortune to come across. Bob, Sarah and I have been here three days and can't remember arriving; the level of constant emotional and sensory impact we're experiencing tends to capture awareness, trapping sense of time like a bug in amber. I've never felt more present and more alive.

If you're out there reading this, please know there will be more and better in days to come.