More than three decades after the war in Vietnam, a Marine named Robert Lucius had a moment of reckoning on the road to Lai Chau.

A naval attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, he was bound for a rural clinic with a donation of medical equipment.

When his car was passed by a motorbike with a wicker basket full of dogs, he locked eyes with one of them. “There was an immediate sense of connection,” he said. “You could see the fear, the dread, the helplessness.”

A vision raced through his mind: Liberate the dogs. Have his driver overtake the bike and dig into his wallet — anything to keep them from being served up in restaurants down the road.

Lucius, now 42, did nothing. He didn’t, he said, want to be seen as a “cultural imperialist” bent on changing a local custom merely because it offended him. But later that day, after a celebratory meal with Vietnamese colleagues, he saw a dog skinned and splayed out on a restaurant kitchen floor.

“That dog was every dog,” he said. “Like a light switch, my life flipped … from darkness to light.”

Lucius renounced meat. Then he became a vegan. Now, two years after his return from Vietnam, he has started the Kairos Coalition, a nonprofit aimed at ending animal cruelty and making amends for what he sees as his cowardice on the road to Lai Chau that day in 2006.

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