This is one of the tougher pic­tures to digest from our recent South-​East-​Asia trip. Nor­mally I ask people before I take a pho­to­graph of them. That can be by actu­ally talk­ing to them if pos­sible, or just by ges­tic­u­la­tion, point­ing at the cam­era and smil­ing with a ques­tion mark in my face.

In this situ­ation here thought — Steffi and I were wait­ing for a bus in one of the busier areas of the Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh, Ho Chi Minh City or just Sai­gon — I didn’t work up the cour­age to ask the man. And I still feel ashamed for not hav­ing done that. Sure, I shouldn’t be show­ing this pic­utre, but I have other motives for doing that.

I would like to share my dis­gust for the atro­cit­ies of war. Although I don’t know the story behind this sorry soul, I’m cer­tain it is one of utmost pain, be it phys­ical, emo­tional or social. The prob­lem with war and try­ing to achieve usu­ally unachiev­able object­ives (when people shouldn’t have got­ten involved in the first place) is that the war is not over when it’s over. Deep rifts in the pop­u­la­tion remain, the cata­strophic psy­cho­lo­gical dam­age car­ries over and affects many gen­er­a­tions, and apart from unex­ploded ordin­ance or mines that bear lethal sur­prises for many years to come, there was Agent Orange…

There, in that street, sit­ting on the steps of a travel agent, wait­ing for the bus, was just one of those moments (and there were sev­eral on that trip) where you just froze and where a ter­rible, bot­tom­less sad­ness hit you. Add a good dose of anger to that, and hope that you’ll never meet the people respons­ible for all those count­less tragedies.