Vietnam during the war was a country gripped by a mind-numbing terror. That same numbness is the terrorist's ultimate weapon. The best antidote, recalls a Vietnamese writer who grew up in Vietnam, was his mother's Buddhist compassion. PNS editor Andrew Lam is a San Francisco reporter and short story writer. (One of three "takes" on terror. )

Growing up in Vietnam during the war I experienced terror intimately from an early age. Before my fifth birthday, I lived through the Tet offensive. It came during our New Year's celebrations, turning festivity into a blood bath. I remember holding onto my great uncle's hand as we counted the bodies that littered the sidewalks.

While I can recall vivid details of that event, I cannot remember how I felt. I am told that I did not cry, did not tremble in front of those dead bodies. The child's eyes remained open but the mind was somehow arrested. To live so close to the threat of violence is to live, in a way, with numbness.

In Cambodia last year, I interviewed a dozen women who had suffered the worst of the Khmer Rouge genocide. One woman in particular stood out in her suffering: she had gone blind. Yet her doctor said there was nothing physically wrong with her. She happened to have witnessed the slaughter of her entire family by the Khmer Rouge and just decided not to see. According to medical experts, it is a common phenomenon in a country where one out of six people was murdered.

Nations too can become numbed by terror. Colombians, for instance, have been terrorized by years of bombings and assassinations by drug cartels. Yet few protest when drug lords charged with offenses in the U.S. demand the right to serve their time at home in gilded cages. And now as politicians openly admit to having taken money from the drug lords, citizens just shrug their shoulders. The price of safety can be exorbitant: an entire nation casts its moral gaze to the ground.

The sarin gas released by the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday sect in the Tokyo subways has left an indelible mark on the Japanese collective psyche. Gas mask sales soared and psychologists worked overtime after the attacks. The Japanese sense of safety, carefully nurtured since the end of World War II, collapsed overnight.

Similarly, the Hamas suicide bombers who blew themselves up along with other Israelis on buses and in crowded shopping malls ushered in a more belligerent Israeli state that will likely perpetuate war in the Middle East -- as the bombers wanted.

"Life being what it is," the 19th century French poet Baudelaire observed, "one thinks of revenge." Along with numbness, a nation can also react with murderous rage. "Death to the bombers!" Clinton declared hours after the Atlanta pipe-bomb exploded. Politicians are in a frenzy to fine-tune the tools -- wire tapping, increased monitoring of fringe groups, the death penalty for terrorist acts, beefed-up security.

But to combat terror, as a person and as a nation, one must escape its paralyzing grip over the imagination. And that requires a willingness to reach out beyond the fear, numbness and paranoia to the root cause of human suffering. It requires compassion.

If terror arrests the mind, it is compassion that reawakens it. Once revived from numbness, the mind soon understands that all of us, perpetrators of violence and victims alike, are implicated in each other's lives.

My mother, a devout Buddhist, recognizes this point very well. It was she who, despite her neighbors' objections, fed captured Vietcong who begged for food. And yet, in one of my earliest memories, I recall my mother as a young, unarmed woman guarding the entrance of the bomb shelter where her children crouched through the night of Tet. "I would have died before letting anyone pass," she tells us now.

The cheerful housewife who always had the safety and welfare of others in mind turned into a special kind of heroine. Between life and the rain of bullets, she stood like a figure becalmed, far from the talons of terror and darkness.