Making peace with war

The last time Moses Mora was in Vietnam, it was a very different place than today.

“If you look at Vietnam, 1968 and 1969 were the years of the most U.S. casualties,” he says. “I was there in the heat of the war.”

Best known for his work as an artist in Ventura, Mora was drafted into the Army in May 1968 and, like many soldiers of his generation, was thrust into armed combat. The gunfire, the napalm, the air raids, the enemy snipers and those daily ground deployments along the Mekong Delta, fearing that each day might be his last, were almost too much for the young 19-year-old from Tortilla Flats to handle. (He and M.B. Hanrahan painted the Tortilla Flats mural on Figueroa Street in Ventura to commemorate the now nonexistent neighborhood.)

“It was not a joyful experience,” Mora remembers. “It was not a choice that I made. Nonetheless, it was something I did.”

Few veterans — of the ones who returned home alive — were unaffected by the horrors of the war. Most had no interest in returning to East Asia ever again and reliving those memories.

But Mora did, and when he travelled back to Vietnam last year, for the first time in four decades, he said he found the postwar country and its denizens “a place of peace, progress and development.”

“There are a lot of veterans who have no desire to go back to Vietnam,” Mora says. “I understand that and respect that, but once I came to an understanding of what Vietnam was about, and made peace in my own life with it, I looked very favorably on making the journey back.”

Those indelible images of Ho Chi Minh, Hanoi and Ha Long Bay compose the photographic document of the overseas journey Mora took with his daughter Rita Hayes-Mora in 2009. Titled “No War Stories — A Soldier Returns to Vietnam,” it is on display at the Bell Arts Factory until Feb. 26.

The gallery of roughly three dozen photos capturing the people and locations of today’s Vietnam, debuts during Ventura’s First Friday on Feb. 5, when Mora will talk about his visit to the formerly war-torn country, at 7 p.m.
Mora began devising plans to visit South Vietnam two years ago, forced into early retirement after the factory where he had worked in Camarillo since 1979 shut its doors.

“That’s when it all came together,” he said. “Almost immediately upon them announcing that, I made that decision, ‘I’m going to Vietnam.’ ”

Yet for Mora, now 60, it wasn’t an impulsive decision, nor was it intended to be a vacation. Journeying back to Vietnam, he says, was something the veteran had wanted to do for years; it would be a way of making peace with a country that Mora never viewed as an enemy to begin with. Even during his soldiering days, Mora was never comfortable fighting people he saw as essentially good and hard working — not very different from Americans back home.

“We were told that we were going in at the invitation of the Vietnamese people, and they were on our side,” he recalls. “I really believed they liked us, and I liked them. I liked their culture and I loved their country. The war was horrendous, but I held no animosity towards the Vietnamese people. That allowed me to free up a lot of other aspects of my consciousness to develop what I think is a healthy outlook towards Vietnam. That’s where a lot of other veterans differ from me.”

That outlook still took some time to achieve. For years, Mora struggled to reconcile with anything associated with that violent, militant year of his life when he was forced to “engage,” to shoot and kill.

“I couldn’t bring myself, for decades, to wear the color green,” he said. “But as an artist, I love the color green. I use the color green. Art is like therapy.”

If the trip back to Vietnam produced a photographic medium, so was it therapeutic for Mora, who wisely dashed all expectations to find a place very different from what he remembered. There were growth, development, commerce. The parallels to America showed themselves again.

“I didn’t even recognize it,” said Mora. The old Vietnam, he notes, is “not there anymore. So I’m glad that message came to me.”

Still, while his return to Vietnam closed the proverbial circle on the soldier within, Mora realized he couldn’t deny that it would always be a part of him. Before leaving Ben Luc, Mora gathered up some dry soil and brought it back home to Ventura in two small bags.

Mora’s main message during Friday night’s presentation will be clear: that to make peace with the foreign adversaries of a years-old war, we first need to make peace with ourselves.

“Those people in Vietnam are not holding any grudges,” he says. “Even the older ones hold no animosity towards the United States. It’s us, in this country, who have to get over it.”   

“No War Stories — A Soldier Returns to Vietnam,” a photo exhibit by Rita Hayes-Mora, is on display until Feb. 26 at the Bell Arts Factory, 432 N. Ventura Ave., Ventura. The talk by Mora is Friday Feb. 5 at 7 p.m. For more information, call 643-1960.

paul@vcreporter.com