Vietnam veteran meets his past.

When he performed his regimental chaplain's duties at the Washington, DC, Vietnam War Memorial on Memorial Day (26 May) this year, the Rev John Plummer was for the first time since that war much freer `to think about the other names who are represented on the Wall than my own concerns'.

Six months earlier on Veteran's Day a Vietnamese woman, Pham Thi Kim Phuc, laid a wreath at the same memorial. She was the child whose image had been emblazoned on the world's consciousness 25 years before when a Pulitzer Prize winning photo showed her running naked and terrified away from American napalm bombing of her village of Trang Bang.

`Sometimes I thought I could not live but God saved my life and gave me faith and hope,' she told the crowd. `If I could talk face-to-face with the pilot who dropped the bombs, I would tell him we cannot change history but we should try to do good things for the present and for the future to promote peace.'

Unknown to her, the officer who ordered the air strike on her village was in the crowd. It was John Plummer.

The American officer had believed that there were no civilians in Trang Bang at the time. When he had seen the photo in the army paper, Stars and Stripes, next morning he had, he says, been knocked to his knees. The image had haunted his dreams ever since. He had been able to cope with the death of 23 of his friends in Vietnam but had not been able to reconcile himself to the suffering of the child.

On Veteran's Day, Plummer felt she was speaking directly to him. He wrote a note, `Kim, I am that man,' and gave it to a policeman to deliver to her. A few minutes later they met. `No news photographer took this picture,' writes AP reporter Anne Gearan, `but in the lee of the Vietnam War memorial, the soldier, now 49, and the child, now 33, embraced.'

`She just opened her arms to me,' Plummer said. `All I could say is, "I'm so sorry. I'm just so sorry."' She patted Plummer's back. `It's all right,' she told him. `I forgive, I forgive.'

Now the two are regularly in touch with each other, Plummer's nightmares have ceased and, responding to calls from around the country, the United Methodist minister feels he has a new ministry to those who have not found the closure, as he puts it, that he has.

Plummer was reluctant at first to have the story told, not being particularly proud of it. But, he tells me, `Now she has forgiven me, I am happy to talk about it.'

Can Plummer's experience be valid for other veterans? Can nations, like individuals, move beyond the cycle of blame? And is forgiveness the key?

For a long time concepts such as forgiveness, repentance, apology and the like have been relegated, particularly by policy makers, to the personal or religious domain. But there are indications that even hard-nosed practitioners of politics and diplomacy are beginning to recognize that these concepts, sometimes derided as `soft and squishy', have more of a part than they realized.

Indeed, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has in her in-tray a letter from a number of experienced men and women who have served US diplomacy urging her to set up a task force where the State Department can work more closely with and draw on experience of Non-Governmental Organizations with track records in reconciliation and forgiveness.