- I'm Susan Thornton.

I'm going to read my poem called "I Met a Traveler."

I met a traveler from an antique land who said, "You guys just don't get it, do you?"

When he stumbled into our village high on heroin, on fear, on his own stupid ideas of manhood, I recognized him right away.

We had met at Verdun, and before that at Gettysburg, and before that on the Ohio border in the French and Indian wars.

He saw me.

But did he know?

I remembered that I was the Jerry who got him with a hand grenade in the clouds of poison gas on that Tuesday in May.

And I remembered, he was the yank who put a bayonet in my ribs on the second day of the battle for little round top.

And then I remembered his cabin on the Ohio River, and going for him with a tomahawk just after my Braves with their painted faces, stormed his wife and daughter, and on and on it went, back and back and back for generations yet untold.

And so that night, I didn't move as he stepped into the firelight where I was drying fish, the hearth where my father was teaching my little boy to read, the firelight were two nights before the Viet Cong had rested from their tunnel digging and enjoyed my cooking.

I was a woman at that time at home in my village, the able-bodied men all being away to fight the war of liberation against the American invaders.

I saw him and I knew I had my cooking knife and I could have put it in the hollow of his throat, but then it would've started all again, and I wanted off of that wheel.

And so, I just sat there staring into his eyes.

And the M16 came up and he and his men killed us all.

Later, they lied about it to the press.

It was one of the few occasions that got what is called press attention.

He was stoned and we were the enemy.

Although that night we had no weapons.

Our only weapon was the food we had fed to our neighbors when they asked.

But the Americans killed us all and the later they lied about it.

Sometimes I visit him in his sleep.

He lives in Hagerstown, Maryland and doesn't remember that the reason he likes to be by the river is that it resembles that part of the Ohio where he once had a homestead and grew potatoes and cabbages and put up his own sauerkraut by the barrel and planted 500 apple trees.

Now, he's a baker in an organic restaurant, obsessed by the purity of his ingredients with which he cooks.

He's 68, balding with a whiskey cough and a bum knee from a rugby injury he got when he returned to the states.

He works nights and weekends, shifting his weight to favor his bad leg, standing on the tile floor in his Adidas sneakers, slicing the peaches for pie, pounding and molding the sourdough, pushing himself with burning eyes because he's afraid of the dark, afraid of what he will dream.

In his nightmares, he never gets it right.

He recalls my face and then wakes himself shouting and sweating before the dream even gets to the part where he activates the incredible killing machine called an M16.

He's afraid of the look on my face.

He still doesn't understand it, even though he's revisited it often, often, often.

It wasn't fear, that look, it wasn't horror.

It wasn't even grief for the loss of my village, my father, my son, though we all died that night and I knew we were all going to die.

It was acceptance.

It was a prayer for peace.

It was, dare I say it, love.

Love of a kind he has not found since in this his life.

Search, though he can.

Forage, though he may.

Suffer, though he will.

("The Star-Spangled Banner")