The campus's new essay initiative, My Personal Compass, is intended to encourage people of different beliefs to listen to one another. Following is an essay by Pam Houston, an award-winning author and the director of the English Department's creative writing program:

A few years ago I had the good fortune to go to the country of Laos, and while I was there, visiting the ancient temples of Luang Prabang, the chaotic city of Ventienne, the quieter reaches of the Mekong as it ambles toward the sea, I was taken to a place called Phonsovan, the Plain of Jars, the site of what we now call the Secret War, the years of unreported bombings that followed the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.

In Phonsovan, the cornerstones of the buildings are made from U.S. bomb casings. When you check into a hotel there, your key is attached to a small disabled grenade.

We dropped so much Agent Orange onto the Plain of Jars that what ought to be lush farm land has not yet even begun to recover, and the plain is pocked with bomb craters, as far as the eye can see. I was shown a pot, as big as a bathtub, that 200 families ate from as they hid from the bombers in a cave.

The pot cracked right down the middle when U.S. jets fired rockets straight into the cave and killed all the occupants, and now the pot sits in front of the National Museum, "to remember," my guide Lat said, quietly, as we stood in front of it.

"So, do the Laotians hate Americans?" I had asked this question many times during my weeks in Laos and had been responded to kindly in every case. They understood, the Laotians said, that I was barely an infant at the time of the bombings, how could they possibly hate me? And even the bombers, they were only acting on the orders of someone above them, how could they possibly hate them? Lat shook his head, pursed his lips. "We are Buddhists, here," he said. "For us, this life, it is nothing."

When he dropped me at my hotel, Lat told me not to let anybody in after the lights went off (the town was on a generator that was turned off between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.). I didn't point out that my "room" was made out of bomb casings and palm fronds and that anyone who wanted in could simply lift up the wall.

A guide named Mr. Oudoumong took me hiking out onto the Plain the next morning. On a five-mile walk we passed seven 30-year-old unexploded ordinances. He told me they still do 80 amputations a week there, most of them the limbs of children.

"So do the Laotians hate Americans?" I said.

"Of course we do," he said, his eyes steady.

I have always considered myself a patriot — though not a blind one. What I saw in Laos challenged and changed my faith in my country, a relationship I continually struggle to amend.

For more My Personal Compass Essays, visit mypersonalcompass.ucdavis.edu.