It was a Sunday afternoon at the main Ban Me Thuot marketplace. As the major city in Dak Lak province, it was also the center of South Vietnam’s largest minority population, and a major center for coffee cultivation.
 
 Dak Lak was just south of and Kon Tum province, which had just weathered the most intense siege of the spring offensive of 1972. With the siege of Kon Tum lifting, and the North Vietnamese units being forced to retreat to their sanctuaries, I had been evacuated and safely returned to my security camp at Ban Me Thuot.
 
 I was a fortunate survivor of the siege of two months of troop attacks, tank assaults and heavy rocket bombardment by the Communist forces. My intercept intelligence unit had performed remarkably under those perilous conditions, and my language skills had helped to keep the enemy thrusts at bay, which enabled our B-52 drops to strike targets with surgical accuracy.
 
 On this sultry Sunday in the highlands, fortified with my camera and my M16, I embarked on a casual stroll into the downtown market. The marketplace was bustling with activity, enhanced with the melodious chatter of the highly tonal Vietnamese language. The vendors were nearly exclusively women. An aggressive street urchin brusquely demanded I give him cigarettes. This created a great opportunity for me, an avid runner, to give him a health lecture, all in his language.
 
 I purchased some bananas from one of the ladies, and to everyone’s surprise, I started conversing in Vietnamese. Soon, a congregation gathered, and we proceeded to talk about life concerns, their hopes and worries.
 
 One lady said, “Our husbands are all in the military, and we have little contact with them. We stay here and work in the market most of the time, take care of our children and live a simple life.”
 
 Our dialogue evolved more to a communion of like souls. I was gaining a sharper realization that we were universally sharing the same hopes and dreams and apprehensions, with the quantum exception: for these villagers, life was far more tenuous.
 
 Then a moment of transcendence occurred. I was no longer in the midst of those curious village folk amicably chatting on a sunny afternoon in South Vietnam’s Central Highlands; I was visiting heart-to-heart with a neighbor across the fence in hometown Iowa. In those moments, the ceiling of ethnic, cultural and linguistic differences simply flew away. Our hearts and minds became one.
 
 In our concluding interaction, a few of the ladies made a poignant apology.
 
 One said, “We wish we could invite you to our homes for a meal, but there are community people who will be suspicious and censor us.”
 
 This was understandable given the context of social disorganization and compromised social values that occur in the context of war.
 
 Three years beyond, when North Vietnamese forces were to attack and inflict severe damage and human casualties on the city with their heavy artillery, I often wondered about the fate of those friendly villagers.
 
 However, as surely as the Earth rolls on its wings in glory and Divinity rules in mercy and justice, we shall all meet again.