During the life of any heart, this line keeps changing places; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
—Aleksander Solzhenitsyn,
The Gulag Archipelago
Some of the most enjoyable and enlightening moments of my life were when I sat on Kara’s bed reading stories to her when she was a child. She was at her most relaxed and animated then. This was when her insights and innermost thoughts came out in extraordinary ways.
As I read to her one night when she was about six years old, she asked me this: “Daddy, were you ever in a war?”
Yes, I told her, I was. I knew she had seen old pictures of me in uniform.
“Who did you fight, Daddy?” I told her I fought an army that was called the Viet Cong.
“Did you win, Daddy?”
“No,” I answered, “we lost.” Her head went down as if disappointed her daddy would lose at anything. She thought for a few more minutes and asked, “Then why are you still alive?”
I almost fell off the bed laughing. At the end of a war not everyone dies. But certainly no one walks away untouched or wound-free.
In May 2002 I joined three friends on a hajj of sorts. It was a journey other Nam vets had taken, returning to the land where some lost their friends, some lost their limbs, some their souls and all had lost their youth and innocence. Others had found themselves. Our story was probably not unique, but it was ours.
Our group met in Saigon. All of us were born in Upstate New York. All of us came from middle-class, Catholic families. After the war, with the usual crazy readjustments, we each went on to our own successful careers. Two of us hailed from the same hometown and knew each other before the war. Three of us served in the same platoon.
David, who was then 55, served as a Marine radio operator with the 11th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division. He returned to the hometown we shared and worked for the City of Auburn as an assistant civil engineer until he retired.
Pat, also 55, had been an interpreter with the 29th Civil Affairs Company in Hue City and taught school in Vietnam. He worked as a communications and marketing manager for the National Transportation and Safety Board Academy in Washington, D.C. until his retirement.
Steve, 57, had been a medic with the 29th Civil Affairs Company in Hue with Pat and me and was now a retired U.S. Navy doctor and public health consultant. He married his sweetheart from Vietnam, a Vietnamese school teacher, and they lived in Silver Spring, Maryland.
I was 53. I had also been a medic and had done two tours with the 29th. My first tour was spent in Hoi An, where David had seen action with the Marines. My second was in Hue with Steve and Pat. I worked in Atlanta as a consultant researching emergency preparedness and response in public health until my retirement in 2014. I now live in Hillsborough, NC. I was the linchpin of the group.
Pat, Steve and I had talked about returning to Vietnam for years. When I mentioned to David that a few friends and I were planning a trip there, he asked if he could come along for the ride. And so our team was formed. I jokingly labeled our trip the “They Didn’t Kill Us the First Time Tour—2002.”
Our journeys in Vietnam, both 30 years ago and in the summer of 2002, began with our arrival at Tan Son Nhut Airport. Unlike my first arrival, the plane came in low and slow this time rather than the abrupt wartime entrance of drop and stop. Although we had arrived at different times during the war, both Steve and I recall having flown in just after rocket attacks. The heat was the same, but now we entered a modern air-conditioned terminal. No sergeants yelled at us to hurry and get in line with all the flowery expletives they would use to make us feel at home. No departing battle-scarred “grunts” jeered at us or called us “cherry78.”
On our first trip after arrival we had been transported on an old U.S. Army olive drab bus with wire mesh over the windows to repel hand grenades. This time we were picked up by a new air-conditioned minivan from the Windsor Hotel.
Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon as it is still commonly called, remains the noisy, bustling metropolis it was during our war, but now modern buildings and hotels are changing the skyline. We spent our one afternoon there rediscovering the city. We sought out the aging buildings that held the history of our war, like the Continental Hotel where correspondents and writers stayed; the Rex Hotel, where officers were billeted; Le Loi Street, the turf of bar girls and street hustlers.
The building that was once the American Embassy still stood. It was here where our flag came down and evacuation helicopters circled on the day of final defeat and humiliation. The image is forever etched in every Vietnam veteran’s mind.
Mr. Huong79 arrived at the hotel as planned at 7:30 A.M. the day after our arrival. Mr. Huong was to be our tour guide. He was a friend, and had been Steve’s counterpart during the war.
Unlike other GIs, civil affairs advisors like Steve, Pat and I worked directly with the civilian population. As such, we were assigned civilian counterparts to develop projects. Steve and I had an office in the Thua Thien Provincial Health Service on Le Loi Street in Hue. Steve was Huong’s counterpart for the construction of the Tu Aui Maternity Infirmary Dispensary near the old U.S. airbase and 101st Airborne Division headquarters at Phu Bai.
Mr. Huong had been a district medicine chief. He was trained as a male nurse with advanced training in family planning. He was now in his late 50s—short and stocky, built like a guard or tackle on an American football team. Like many former workers in the “puppet” regime, he had been barred from working in his profession. His children were not allowed to attend school. He earned about $50 a month teaching English. This was the untold price for having been on the losing side of the war. Mr. Huong jumped at the chance to be our tour guide as he would see Steve and me again and pick up some extra money.
Saigon always was a noisy city and I did not care to stay. It was not where my story was and I yearned to go to where my life had been so dramatically altered. We also wanted to enjoy the countryside. The first leg of our travels brought us to the scenic mountain resort of Da Lat, then the seaside resort of Nha Trang. Both places are beautiful in their own right. We enjoyed the mountain air in Da Lat. There we visited the summer home of the last emperor of Vietnam, Bao Dai. The art deco style of architecture of the emperor’s home seemed out of place in this Asian land—but then again, Bao Dai was out of place, also.
Nha Trang brought us the calm of the South China Sea. We took a half-day boat ride to an island resort, ate seafood that we picked out for our dinner live from fishing nets, and wondered at the striking contrast between Da Lat and Nha Trang.
Then we headed north, up the infamous and scenic Highway 1. During our war, ambushes along this route were common. The Viet Cong were the toll collectors after dusk, and they exacted a heavy price in American and Vietnamese lives. In 2002, Highway 1 was scenic but still miserable, in a state of continuous repair and disrepair. Small sections of the road are smooth and drivable while larger sections, mile after mile, are under construction. All the labor was being done by hand.
The morning was clear, sunny and pleasantly warm. Soon we would be overtaken by the intense heat of the day. We drove north along the coast, enjoying dramatic views of the cliffs, the South China Sea and the bright blue sky. It was hard to imagine the sheer terror produced on this same strip of asphalt so many years before. It was hard for me to picture the war in my mind, but the images came eventually: the long military convoys raising clouds of dust in the air, the constant whump, whump, whump of the rotor blades of our guardian helicopters overhead, the occasional whine of artillery, the clatter of small-arms fire. You would often spot jets streaking in from aircraft carriers off the coast with their heavy bomb loads heading for some inland targets.
The peacefulness of our ride and the postcard-perfect scenery was almost disconcerting. Vietnam had been just as scenic back then, too. But during the war we looked at the landscape through a different lens. We watched for possible ambush sites and the movement of the people for anything suspicious. We’d scour the road for signs of land mines and booby traps. Though we traveled the same roads in 2002, I saw beauty, not fear and destruction.
This was something we needed to witness, that life goes on, that people can transcend the horrors of war. Vietnam had seen some hard times after our war. The country had invaded and occupied Cambodia and had been attacked by China. It had suffered from drought and floods, initially from poor development policies. While living under the communist regime could not have been easy for many people, America did everything it could through economic embargo and propaganda to make the Hanoi regime look like the biggest threat to world peace since Hitler or Stalin. But for most of the population, the American War, as the Vietnam War was called by locals, was behind them. Most of the population were not even born when the war ended. What was currently in vogue politically did not matter much. The people farmed, fished and lived life as they had for centuries. And they were at peace, or Hoa Binh.
I had my own opinions as to whether or not Vietnam was better or worse off after the fall of Saigon, but these opinions seemed trivial in the van that day. I did not see good or bad; black or white. I saw only the continuum of life. A man plowing his rice field wearing only shorts and a rice hat, women trotting along the roads barefoot wearing red and green sari style dress and chewing betel nuts with heavy stacks of vegetables on each shoulder, lorries loaded with commodities to be sold in the next town and huge black and grey water buffalo basking in tropical green and blue ponds with Vietnamese children lying or standing on their backs. The conversation in the van was light. There was little talk of the war and how we had experienced it. We talked a great deal on the Vietnamese concept of road construction. Mostly, though, we stared and commented on the view of this vibrant country that had drawn us all back.
We were anxious to get back to what the military would call our areas of operation (AO). We thought we could make Hoi An in a day but we were wrong. The road was not in good shape and the distance was longer than we had anticipated. We spent the night in Quang Ngai and proceeded the next day to Hoi An.
Just before reaching Hoi An, we stopped at a Champa ruin near My Son80, a UNESCO Heritage site, in Quang Nam Province. The young girl who acted as our tour guide at the site spoke excellent English and provided a thorough explanation of the Kingdom of Champa. She was also able to give us a fairly technical description of the ordnance and explosives that had been dropped on the site by American planes. There was something about her Western dress that caught my eye. She was wearing a bright orange sun hat. The name on the brim read “Curley’s Restaurant.”
I pointed this out to David, and we both had a good laugh. Curley’s Restaurant was—and is—one of Auburn, New York’s favorite watering holes. Where she got the hat or if it came from “our” Curley’s we will never know, but seeing the name signified to us how small this world is that we inhabit.
South of Hoi An is the area where David had been stationed at a fire base. Finding the location was a great deal more difficult than finding where Pat, Steve and I had been billeted. We lived and worked in the cities of Hue and Hoi An. We knew the exact streets of our base and offices. David’s firebase was situated in a remote area. Fire bases were generally sited on hills with good fields of fire but away from major roads and villages. All we knew was that David had been based south of Hoi An.
He had a few grainy photographs that showed hills and a few mountain peaks but little else to go on. We searched the area where David thought his base might have been. We were able to piece together an approximate location by looking at several different photos and triangulating our position. But the best we could do was an approximation. We did not even know if there still would be a road to a long-gone, isolated firebase. Thirty years brings a great deal of change.
David seemed satisfied with what we were able to locate, yet I was disappointed that we could not give him more.
David was the most energetic about engaging with the Vietnamese people. He had never had the chance to mingle with many civilians when he was a soldier. He reflected what I observed as a civil affairs advisor during the war, that the grunts only saw the camp followers and not the real citizens of Vietnam. Steve, Pat and I had worked with the Vietnamese during our tours of duty. This type of contact was all new for David and he reveled in the interactions.
It was a wonder to watch David discovering the people and culture of Vietnam. When the rest of us took an afternoon siesta, he would continue on with his own individual tour. After a big evening meal of Vietnamese fare and “333” beer we would head off to bed but David would charge out again to explore, to engage people, and move in a land that was once most unfriendly to him and had now embraced us in peace.
David’s enthusiasm was contagious. It brought new light to what Vietnam had become for us.
Hoi An81 is considered one of the oldest cities in Vietnam. According to the Lonely Planet’s Vietnam guide book, Hoi An was a “bustling seaport” during the Champa Dynasty from the 2nd through the 10th centuries. There are records of Persian and Arab merchants sailing into Hoi An to barter and trade. This city was my personal lonely planet. It was here I learned the meaning of terror, what fear felt like deep in my gut. My first mortar attacks, the deadly night of evacuating the half-soldier, the torture at the Hoi An political prison, happened on the ground where I stood today.
Hoi An in 1969 was the beginning of my metamorphosis. It was my greatest real-world education, a living classroom of torture and terror that was mixed with camaraderie, enculturation and my own hope to do better. And now it had turned into a quaint tourist destination.
We arrived in Hoi An late in the day. The hotel Mr. Huong had booked for us looked very familiar to me as I walked in the front entrance. It was of French colonial style and had obviously been recently refurbished. The rooms were pleasant, clean and spacious, and there was a swimming pool to cool off in during the day.
We went to our rooms early. I woke before dawn, anxious to explore the city that had drastically changed me. I think my soul imploded in Hoi An. It was where I lost my ability to cry. The emotions that I first experienced in Hoi An would become magnified during my second tour in Hue. Those emotions were intense. My traveling companion, Steve, has often said that “after war you spend the rest of your life trying to match the intensity of it.”
I walked out of the hotel early that morning. I went alone, not wanting to share my personal Vietnam rapprochement. None of the others had been in my compound. The experience of finding it would mean nothing to them.
After pausing, I went through the hotel’s front gate. I walked across the busy street, turned and faced the hotel. It had been a long time and I tried to orient myself. To my left was the road out of town. Behind me was the port. I looked back across the street, through the bustling morning traffic, at my hotel. This felt familiar. Flashes of old photographs passed through my mind. Vietnamese men in traditional dress carrying colorful banners, another one of the many “fake” pro-government rallies staged in 1969. In the backdrop I could see the Quang Nam province headquarters building. As I stood there, my mind came back to the present. The same building stood before me: our hotel.
Quang Nam Provincial Headquarters Hoi An, 1969.
This realization was a shock. The new regime had turned the old province headquarters into a tourist hotel. It meant that I was very near my old compound. I looked to my left again. My headquarters and where I slept, MAC/V Team 3, would have been on the corner abutting the Province Headquarters. I looked but saw nothing.
I slowly walked to my left, crossing the street again. As I approached the corner I saw that a park now stood on the site of my compound. It was verdant and peaceful, filled with students studying, people exercising and reading, children playing. This place was the base of my nightmares. The place from where I ventured out to care for the blown apart half-soldier, the tortured children, the starving refugees was now a park, a place of life and laughter.
Former Quang Nam Provincial Headquarters, Hoi An
now a government hotel, 2002.
I entered, half-expecting to feel the rumble of military vehicles and hear the squawking of radios from the tactical operations center (TOC), the sound of rock n roll from an enlisted men’s hooch, and feel the dust, sweat and fear. But there was nothing but peace in that place.
A children’s ride caught my eye. It consisted of American-style military vehicles going around and around on a metal track. Metal tanks, planes and helicopters pursued one another on a ride to nowhere. It was somehow so fitting. It’s the ride we’d been on over 30 years ago, only some of us had never gotten off.
I did not share much of this experience with my friends. There was not much to say; or maybe too much to say. I had returned to confront the past but the past was now a place where children congregated before going to school. The past had moved on.
Children’s’ playground at the former site of the MAC/V compound in Hoi An.
The next stop on our hajj was to be the ancient imperial capital of Hue, in Thua Thien Province. Pat, Steve and I had met there in 1970 and developed a friendship that is hard to explain to someone who is not a veteran. That bonding can surpass family ties. Possibly we would not have given each other the time of day in the “real world.” But thrown together in the life-and-death intensity of war does something to forge a bond that can be strong and lasting. You accept people as they are in those circumstances; you understand a person’s weaknesses and what makes him different from you, but you concentrate on his strengths and enjoy his differences. If you are smart you realize that each individual in your platoon has something to offer. In your desire for self and group survival you embrace those strengths.
On the way to Hue we drove through Da Nang a few hours to the north. Mr. Huong suggested we stop in Da Nang for the night but we were anxious to continue on to Hue. So, we continued up Highway 1 and across the Hai Van Pass. Hai van means “sea clouds” in Vietnamese. The pass goes through the Trung Son Mountain range that noses out into the South China Sea. It is truly a breathtaking ride. The road winds through a mountain pass along sheer drop-off cliffs with views of the sea and pristine deserted beaches.
In 1970 this pass was both beautiful and frightening. Viet Cong would often conduct ambushes from the high peaks along the pass. There was not much that could be done if you were caught in an ambush except to keep driving through the attack and hope you didn’t get hit or go over the cliffs. Today there was no such fear about getting shot at. As we drove I spotted a small cove down on the shore where a German NGO had operated a hospital for lepers. At the peak of the pass there still stood a series of massive French bunkers, relics from the First Indochina War. As we cleared the pass, we could see the long white sand beach that runs toward Hue. On the northern end of the pass sits the village of Long Co82 a picturesque village on a small barrier island. The steeple of a Catholic church rises from the center of the village.
In an hour we were on the outskirts of Hue. As we approached the city, the huge Notre Dame Cathedral greeted us. A large statue of Jesus Christ still stood in the foreground of the church, his hands outstretched, and welcoming visitors. If Hoi An was where my soul descended into darkness, Hue was the site of my rebirth. It was here I reached my zenith. In 1970, I was 22 years old and I felt unbeatable.
In Hue, during the war, those of us in my platoon spent our days trying to help the Vietnamese and our nights engaged in serious conversations about war, politics and life after Nam. It was the movie M*A*S*H personified but on steroids: a small group of cocky Americans fighting a war within a war. As America bombed and strafed for democracy, we also fought to improve the lives of civilians and refugees.
To locate the old MAC/V compound where Steve, Pat and I were housed would be fairly easy. Steve and I had been back to Hue since 1970 and had visited the compound. It was across the river from the Citadel and a few blocks behind Le Loi Street near the Provincial Health offices. Steve and I worked in those offices in 1970. But we were in for some surprises.
Former Doezema MAC/V compound, 1992.
Former Doezema MAC/V compound 2002.
Mr. Huong brought us first to the government-run hotel where we would be staying. Again, the area looked vaguely familiar. It was getting late as we checked in. The place was clean but Spartan. The staff spoke English and was extremely helpful and polite. We settled into our rooms and agreed to meet once we freshened up.
Leaving the hotel with the others I first found it difficult to get my bearings. I had last been in Hue in 1991. It was amazing how much things had changed in the interim. Within a few minutes, though, Steve and I knew we were close to MAC/V. We simply had to walk out of our hotel, turn right, walk one block and there it was. Our hotel actually butted up against the back of the old MAC/V compound.
The MAC/V Team 18 compound in Hue had formerly been a French hotel. At the corner there used to be a huge bunker that covered both streets. We entered the compound from a side street. There was another bunker at the gated entrance where 30 years earlier an MP would direct us to clear our weapons. As we went through the gate, there stood the two-story L-shaped hotel.
In 1970, the hotel housed the officers’ quarters and mess hall. Behind the hotel were two rows of what we called hooch’s, semi-permanent screened–in barracks made of cement and wood that housed the enlisted ranks. The compound also had a small PX where we could buy toiletries, canned goods and beer. There was a basketball court, an enlisted men’s, NCO and officers bar, a chapel and a dispensary.
The compound we were now facing had seen better days. The last coat of paint was probably pre-1975. The cement was riddled with cracks and the compound was dirty. There was no one to stop us at the main gate. Mr. Huong was not with us so we simply walked in, stopping to take pictures. There were some Vietnamese nearby who seemed to be a little perturbed by our visit. We passed the officers’ billets and went directly to where hooch #19, the Civil Affairs hooch, would have been. We came instead to a fence and found ourselves staring at the back wall of our hotel.
We looked at each other and laughed at the irony. Our hotel was placed directly over where the enlisted men’s hooch’s used to be. We were sleeping in the same spot that we had slept in more than 30 years ago. The next day we learned that the compound itself was now the billet of the North Vietnamese military. The billets now held soldiers wearing different uniforms but ironically the compound continued in the same function. I was amazed we were not arrested, considering that we had strolled through a military area taking pictures. We had inadvertently infiltrated a North Vietnamese installation!
Having located the old MAC/V compound, we began our quest to see some of the other sites we wanted to focus on in our short time in Hue. For any traveler, Hue City is another tourist delight. It straddles the Perfume River. It is a lush green emerald with French-style architecture and broad tree-lined boulevards. Hue University in Vietnam had the same reputation as the University of California at Berkeley had in the U.S. Both were known for high-quality education but they were also known for graduating free thinkers and outspoken radicals. Hue University had graduated some of the best and brightest of the military and political intellectuals who would end up fighting on both sides of our war.
We made full use of the time we had in Hue. We visited the six-tiered Thien Mu Pagoda on the Perfume River. We toured the tombs of the ancient emperors outside the city. In 1970, several of the tombs were under control of the VC and NVA and could not be visited.
A trip to Hue would not be complete without a visit to the famous Citadel that once housed the Imperial Court of Vietnam. The citadel had been constructed in 1804 by Emperor Gia Long. It houses an incredible array of Mandarin-style architecture and history.
During the Tet Offensive in 1968 the Citadel was the site of some of the most intense hand-to-hand urban combat of the war. As many as 10,000 NVA and VC troops took Hue City83. They held the Citadel for more than 3½ weeks and flew their flag on the 37-meter high Flag Tower to show the world that they were in charge of the area. It was only through direct frontal assault that U.S. Marine and Army units, supported by air strikes, tanks and artillery, retook the Citadel.
I arrived in Hue as a civil affairs advisor two years after that horrific battle. At that time, much of the Citadel remained in ruins. Indeed, much of Hue still showed the bullet and fragmentation scars of battle. Our forces were still uncovering mass graves of civilian casualties. In 1970, few people went to the Citadel. But I used to drive over there when I was having a bad “war day.” I would find a place to park my three-quarter-ton Army truck, and walk the gardens and narrow streets. There was a calmness and serenity there, a place where I could find solace from a war about which I had come to have major doubts.
Following our visit to the Citadel we sought out the high school where Pat had taught English. It was a French style, gated, red brick school on Le Loi Street along the Perfume River. Because we had dropped off Mr. Huong for the afternoon, we did not have anyone who spoke Vietnamese. Classes were not in session and the guard would not let us onto the grounds. His reluctance was not due to any anti-American sentiment but because of regulations. How many schools in the U.S. would allow strange men to walk around on their property after hours? Pat had to settle with looking at his former school from outside. It was enough.
Pat, Steve and I had no real battlegrounds to visit. At least there were no battlegrounds in the classic sense. My daily battle, and that of many in my platoon, was to save or improve the lives of the Vietnamese.
While my enemies included the Viet Cong and the NVA, they were not the ones highest on the list. For me the real killers were those who betrayed the trust of the Vietnamese people, the war profiteers and those who were hypocritical to our own principles. The VC and NVA were trying to kill me but the hypocrites and those making money off the lucrative government contracts had set us all up for a grand fall.
The war was personal for most of us. We worked, laughed and cried with the Vietnamese. Many soldiers used terms like “gooks,” “dinks,” “zipper heads” and “slopes” in order to de-humanize the enemy. It made killing easier. For civil affairs advisors it was different. Respect and cultural sensitivity was the mandate for our work. It is an easy mandate, for this is what all humans should do.
We worked alongside the Vietnamese. They were friends, colleagues and associates. We knew their families and their joys and hardships. It was the gift and the curse of the double-edged sword I had first became aware of as a young army advisor. I would often have dreams that I was a child looking in the window of my family home, a family I would never be totally part of again. My strength and my Achilles’ heel was that I saw the war and life through the eyes of the Vietnamese and, during the war, I did not like very much of what I saw.
Over the course of a long dinner, we looked at the American effort in Vietnam through the eyes of our guide, Mr. Huong, and Mr. Keim, who had been the number two person at Provincial Health when Steve and I were advisors there. He had an effervescent smile that lit up a room and an advanced degree in public health from a university in Europe. He, like the director of public health in Thua Thien Province, Dr. Do Van Minh, never believed that America would desert Vietnam. Now here we sat on a hot evening in Hue City in his small apartment with him and his wife.
Both Mr. Keim and his wife had aged a great deal. He had major health problems. He was not permitted to work in public health after the fall of Saigon. His dedication to public health and the people of Vietnam was forgotten in the new political order. He lived and would die in poverty, yet he did not talk with anger or hatred of the new regime. In fact he did not mention it at all. We reminisced about the old times. We shared photographs and stories. We talked about Dennis Barker, my civilian boss, who had died in 1991, and Dr. Minh, who went insane under captivity.
We hear a great deal about how Americans suffered during the Vietnam War—our dead, our POWs, our mentally and physically wounded. Little is mentioned about what the Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians lost. Like Mr. Keim, many Vietnamese went along with the corrupt South Vietnamese regime because they believed that America, the land of freedom and opportunity, would never leave them. We could be trusted. But we had left our fairness and democracy at home. In Vietnam, we were not trustworthy. America paid the price in wasted and lost lives. But the loss of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian lives, homeland and culture dwarfs our sacrifices.
It was bittersweet seeing our two counterparts. How I loved seeing them again. These were the men who helped mold my life and guide me through Vietnamese culture and public health planning. To show our honor we brought them treats and some money but this hardly compensates for how America ruined these men, their careers and their families’ lives.
The evening ended quietly. We departed from Mr. Keim knowing that we would probably never see this kind man again.
The next day David and Pat had to catch a plane to Saigon, so Steve and I said our goodbyes. I sometimes think that Vietnam is mostly about goodbyes. Steve and I continued on with Mr. Huong to the last stops in our journey to the past.
Steve and I had been responsible for the construction of two public health dispensaries while we worked in Hue. They were actually called Maternity-Infirmary Dispensaries or MIDs. Their function was to provide public health services to a number of villages or to isolated areas. I was responsible for the An Duong village MID. Steve helped build the Tu Aui clinic on the road to Phu Bai, near the old 101st airborne base.
Original An Duong MID in 2002.
We went to my village first. I had been there in 1991 and I felt confident we could find it quickly. The trip to An Duong took us east of Hue toward the coast. In 1970, I would drive to the Tam My port and go across to the barrier island on converted US Navy landing craft. In 2002 a bridge had been built to connect the narrow island to the mainland.
As Steve, Mr. Huong and I drove over the bridge, the landscape looked barren. The bridge had brought progress and progress had overcome this barrier island and the quaint little fishing villages along its dunes were gone. The road was no longer sand but asphalt. This sandy strip of land now housed ship-building yards, oil storage tanks and areas where small seagoing ships were berthed. It was difficult to find a familiar landmark or a village but I did spot a large ornate graveyard on a dune that I seemed to recognize.
Then we passed the An Duong Dispensary. I almost missed it because it was in such disrepair and the village that surrounded it was all but gone. The MID was a long one-story building with fading pink paint. I remembered calling the facility “the Bowling Alley” because it was so big. It was apparent that it had not been used in some time. I recalled that Mr. Keim had told me at dinner that the MID had been damaged by a typhoon several years before and had not been used since.
The MID was testimony to the unstoppable march of nature and time. The typhoon had washed sand deep inside the building. The walls were falling apart. The ceiling had collapsed. The only utility the building served now was as shelter for animals.
A little girl who stopped to look at us told us there was a new dispensary down the road. We went to investigate. This dispensary was being run by a young Vietnamese doctor who greeted us at the door. Here was a man who projected the energy and future of Vietnam. He seemed very engaged in his work and about caring for the people in the surrounding hamlets.
This doctor verified what I knew about the dispensary I helped build in 1970. The dispensary transcended the war. It was used as a dispensary until 1985. It then became a community center, and for a time was a training center used by a United Nations agency. I did not feel so bad that it took a typhoon to finally end what I had started with a group of Vietnamese villagers.
We bid adieu to the doctor and headed for the MID that Steve had helped build. Tu Aui was on the road south of Hue back towards the Hai Van Pass. It took us a while to locate it. The march of time and development compacted the area where the MID was located in a maze of old and new construction. Through the help of Mr. Huong we finally found the building.
It was now being used as a dormitory for nurses. As we stood staring at the building, unsure what to do next, a woman approached. She questioned Mr. Huong about who we were and what we were doing. She thought she recognized Steve. Fate was kind to us. The woman had been a midwife when the Tu Aui dispensary was a working facility. She left us for a short time, returning with a woman in her mid-20s. The older midwife said that this young woman had been born at the MID Steve helped build. We could not have asked for a greater reward to mark the end of our journey.
Former Tui Ai midwife standing with woman born at the MID.
The MIDs at An Duong and Tu Aui transcended the war in Vietnam. Both were glowing embers in a black universe of misguided foreign policy and government corruption. For me, it was humbling to re-visit them. It was not a reflection of what “I” did but rather a reflection of what a group of people from different cultures did for the health and welfare of a community. I knew that my initial development model still rang true, well after the guns were silenced: that people from divergent cultures and backgrounds could and should come together as partners for the common good.
These sites proved to me what I have believed from the very start: public health should never be used as a political tool. Relief and humanitarian programs should never be managed by those who use them for political gain. But when public health and humanitarian efforts are pursued purely and with the support of the people they serve, then the projects will thrive, often beyond their original intent.
I had returned to Vietnam with my brothers-in-arms searching for something—resolution, perhaps, or closure, or forgiveness. As a soldier, there was certainly much I had lost, including my naiveté and my blind trust in our government. There was much that had haunted me and perhaps needed to be exorcised: the ghosts of a half-soldier, tortured civilians, starving refugees. But I found that what I had lost I could do without, and what I needed to exorcise was there but lingering on the periphery of my life, not as threatening. Perhaps I rediscovered a country and a people who had moved forward after our war, more so than most Americans had.
I could leave Vietnam with an internal peace, my own Hoa Binh. In my life since the Vietnam War, I have tried to help others and tried my best to keep faith with my inner self. I have been an educated voter. I have always supported our troops, no matter what quagmire our government puts them in. I have learned so much from some very powerful individuals.
Like the Vietnamese rice farmer who talked with me about the limits of American politics. In Sudan, a Belgian nurse taught me about compassion and going the extra mile to save a child. In Pakistan, I learned about God from a Muslim.
Looking back on my life there is little I would change. My wife and daughter give me my heart, soul and reason to live. I have wonderful friendships, people who are compassionate, funny, and who sometimes even laugh at my jokes, who are from diverse political and religious beliefs and cultures and who always seem to be there when I need them. I hope my daughter, in the course of her life, will be able to say the same thing on the paths she will take.
78 Cherry is military jargon for someone who has not seen combat.
79 This is a fictitious name to protect his identity.
80 Mỹ Sơn is a Hindu temple complex built by the Champa, a united kingdom of various tribes of the Cham ethnic group. The Champa ruled South and Central Vietnam from the 3rd century until 1832. Upon their succession, Champa kings would build temple complexes at Mỹ Sơn.
81 Once a major Southeast Asian trading post in the 16th and 17th centuries, the seaside town Hoi An is basically a living museum featuring a unique mixture of East and West in the form of its old-town architecture. Hoi An has been successful in preserving and restoring its charming roots and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in December 1999. Read more at: http://www.vietnam-guide.com/hoi-an/hoi-an-old-town.htm?cid=ch:OTH:001
82 This scenic village is a good stop over place for a lunch or even a day with a beautiful beach to swim at or the village houses and the church to explore Vietnamese lifestyle.
83 For an excellent account of the fighting in Hue City during the 1968 Tet offensive read Mark Bowden’s account “Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam”