Former LI social worker on a peacekeeping mission in war-torn Sri Lanka holds hope reconstruction will outlast disaster's impact

BY BART JONES | STAFF WRITER

December 30, 2004

For three decades, longtime Islip resident Thomas Brinson was haunted by his experience as a soldier in Vietnam. He had raised money for an orphanage there and befriended some orphans who were later killed or maimed during crossfire amid the Tet Offensive.

To atone for what he viewed as his sins and those of the United States, his stepdaughter said, Brinson signed up as an international peace worker in war-torn Sri Lanka. He monitors human rights and helps protect people at high risk in a zone on the northeast coast partly controlled by rebels.

Now Brinson is in the middle of another calamity. His village of Mutur was among the hardest hit by the tsunami, which he escaped unscathed because he happened to be riding a bicycle inland Sunday morning in the nearby town of Trincomalee.

That's when Brinson suddenly saw people fleeing the waters, said his stepdaughter, Jennifer Suchman, 28, of Chandler, Ariz. He headed for the coast, and saw that a 10-foot-high wall of water had leveled part of the town.

"When the water hit it drowned a number of people and when it receded there were bodies lying all over the street," Brinson told KOLD-TV News in Tucson, Ariz., in a telephone interview this week.

"Seeing the bodies ... the shock of it. Like the girl we pulled up yesterday. I came across the bay on a ferry and we picked up the body of an 8- or 9-year-old little girl," he said. "And there are many more that I'm sure we'll be finding."

An editor at the Web site TamilNet.com, which supports the Tamil people and rebels in Sri Lanka, said yesterday at least 350 people were killed in Mutur.

Brinson lost many of his belongings but saved a few, including a cell phone and an iPod, though the chargers were washed away.

With death and disease mounting, his friends and relatives are urging him to come home. But in the brief phone calls and e-mails he's sent, he hasn't said whether he will. The social worker and therapist already was busy counseling survivors, said Brinson's son Tommy, 24.

"There's so much of a risk of disease right now with all the dead bodies in the water," Jennifer Suchman said. "There's no clean drinking water, no clean shelter, no nothing. We're just saying, 'Come home.'"

Brinson, 61, arrived in Sri Lanka in September 2003 as part of a peacekeeping mission run by Nonviolent Peaceforce, based in St. Paul, Minn.

"This is his repentance," she said. "He's kind of repenting for his wrongdoing in the Vietnam War, although it wasn't his fault that the war happened."

He recently returned twice to Vietnam, where he visited the orphanage and reunited with some of the Vietnamese he knew who were maimed as children.

With his mission of helping other people clear, his family wonders whether he will heed their pleas to come home. In a message posted yesterday on his blog site, Brinson said he saw hope among the ruin.

"Relief supplies and volunteer assistance are literally pouring in with much more positive force than the destructive impact of the tsunami," he wrote. "The big wave did its destructive work in less than a minute; the reconstructive work ... will last lifetimes."

Brinson's blog Web site