Attempts at loving: Richard Luttrell
In this, the third of four excerpts from author and Fetzer Program Officer, Mark Nepo’s Facing the Lion, Being the Lion, he shares “Attempts at Loving.”
The second story comes from our own time. Richard Luttrell is a Vietnam vet, a gentle soul from the Midwest who thirty-nine years ago found himself as a young man in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Quickly, he fell into hand-to-hand combat with another young man. They didn’t speak the same language though they faced the same terror. Richard wound up killing his counterpart. It was his first kill. As his fellow soldiers were looting the body, Richard pulled a small photograph from the dead man’s wallet. It was of the young man and his little girl. “I remember holding the photo and actually squatting and getting close and actually looking in his face and looking at the photo and looking in his face.”
The quiet American soldier kept the photo. Through the years, it called to him and plagued him. He became obsessed with it, as it kept the humanity of the man he had killed alive in his heart. Finally, it depressed him. He tried to get rid of it. When the Vietnam Memorial was build in Washington, DC, Richard made a pilgrimage and left the small, unlabeled picture at the wall. But it was gathered into a book called Offerings from the Wall, and through a fellow vet, it made its way back to him.
So the improbable journey continued, wherein Richard Luttrell found the little girl in the snapshot. She is Lan Trong Ngoan, the daughter of the man he killed so many years ago. Compelled by a yearning to give the photo back, Richard and his wife flew to Vietnam where he gave the small photo to this forty-year-old woman, who had no picture of her father.
Through an interpreter, Richard introduced himself. “Tell her this is the photo I took from her father’s wallet the day I shot and killed him and the I’m returning it.” With a cracking voice, he then asked for her forgiveness. After an awkward moment, Lan burst into tears and fell into his arms, and there, the two held each other up against our century, sobbing and embracing.
We have so much to learn from Richard Luttrell and Lan Trong Ngoan. What sort of quiet courage kept Richard’s heart open, for all those years, to the pain of what he’d done? What made him listen to that pain and not seal it over? What enabled him to surrender to some journey he couldn’t understand? What led him with Gandhi-like love to seek out Lan and return to Vietnam? And what made Lan want to meet him? What gave her the courage to forgive him? To fall into the arms of the man who killed her father? Like the immense example of South Africa, how do we find the inner steps that allow us to knit our wounds together, so we might put down our allegiances to those wounds like rusty weapons?
Submitted by: admin
May 25th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
This experience you have lived, Mr. Luttrell, has a purpose, like all hardships, all heartbreak. You may never know the reasons for your pain, your suffering - generations from now, people will remember this story and it will help someone, somewhere. It is a powerful reminder that we are all connected - our human-ness if you will is something great, it can be terrifying and it can be mystifying as well. To see the way Lan crumbled in your arms, letting go of all her pain, her wondering, her anger , just surrendering to the fact that she cannot change the past. She knows you were the last to see her father alive and there is something profound about you giving back to her what you could. That humanity, that photo, that moment of surrender. God Bless you.