Persuasion: The Third Side Way

In the midst of a firefight in the rice paddies between American soldiers and the Viet Cong early in the Vietnam War, six monks walked toward the line of fire.

“They didn’t look right, they didn’t look left. They walked straight through,” remembers David Busch, one of the American soldiers.

“It was really strange, because nobody shot at ’em. And after they walked over the berm, suddenly all the fight was out of me. It just didn’t feel like I wanted to do this anymore, at least not that day. It must have been that way for everybody, because everybody quit. We just stopped fighting.”

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