The American Pilot

The passage from "Trip to Hanoi" that touched me the most was the one of the burial of the American pilot. The Vietnamese villagers took the body of this pilot (who no doubt had bombed the same village) and gave him a respectful burial with sculpture of the dissembled airplane and flowers. I asked myself, would I do this?
I don't think that I would. If there was a foreign invader shooting up my neighborhood who crashed his airplane, I'd probably just let him rot. It's amazing to me that the genuineness of this Eastern culture ensured that the American have respect? or forgiveness? enough to have a proper beautiful piece of this earth.
These gestures that differ so much from the American way of thinking confuse me. The author points out that this is a "culture founded on guilt." Do they think that they somehow deserve the ravage that America is impounding on their country? So, is this the reason that they buried that pilot? As a thank you for killing and demolishing everyone and everything in their path?
When reading about Eastern culture and religion, I tend to question Western ideals. In the book, The Tao of Psychology: Sinchronicity and Self, the author outlines the idea of sinchronicity. It is a hard concept to grasp when thinking in the ways that Westerners tend to think. I like to think of it as when two events happen casually, by chance, and occur together in a spiritual or meaningful manner. I'd like to think that these villagers were moved by this event of the crashing airplane. Maybe the burial of this pilot was a movement by the villagers in a spiritual manner that is just not meant to be understood by us. But, by chance, this author came across this grave and made it a point to write about his experiences with the site. And by chance we read about it in this class. Maybe these meaningful occurances were supposed to happen like they did in sinchronicity.
Eastern thought is so different than what Westerners think of as logic. How can we even begin to understand the Vietnamese perspective of the War in Vietnam without understanding how they think?