This boy’s face has haunted me for forty-five years.  His photo, obviously a school picture, was placed in one of my Vietnam photo albums in 1972 by Lena’s mother, Huong.  The photo albums, familiar to all Vietnam Vets, were covered in brightly coloured leather, red, blue, green, with a map of Vietnam on the cover.  My albums, still intact, are the repository for my memories of a place and time long since gone.  Most of the photos were taken by me or my fellow soldiers.  Some, like Tiên’s, were slipped in by Huong, usually with an accompanying explanation.  Who, what, where.  But not this one.

This boy, Tiên, remained a mystery to me for all these years.  I became accustomed to passing quickly over his photo when glancing through the albums.  Yet there was always a nagging moment, a question.

Recently I came across this photo of Huong’s brother Hung with some other boys.  Hung is the one on the left.  He was well known to me during the war, I would recognise him anywhere.  When in Da Nang, I see him every day, eat meals in his home.  When I looked closely at the photo, there was Tiên, on the far right, smack in the middle of my 1972 Vietnam experience.

Hung told me Tiên’s story and taught me a side of my prospective father-in-law Dat that had alluded me until now,

In the 1970’s, the Americans were embarked on a plan called “Vietnamization”, deserting South Vietnam to an ultimate defeat in their war with the communists from the North.  Years of fighting had left homeless orphans roaming the countryside with no plan, no hope, no future.  Tiên was one of those who had lost his family and was alone.

Huynh Dat, a graceful, vibrant, spiritual man, took Tiên into his home and raised him as his son until 1975.  At the end of the war, Tiên was returned to his village in Quang Nam.

Learning that Huynh Dat had taken in orphans during the war came as no real surprise to me.  His sacrifice and commitment to others was a palpable force.  He enhanced the lives of those around him, not because of what he said, but through the actions he took.  Dat’s legacy grows for me with each new revelation.  I am blessed to have known Huynh Dat.

 

 

 

Bao, Da Nang, Vietnam 1971

Letter from Lena (excerpt): Bao told me once that his mother had actually, he thought, died of a broken heart, though it was the fever that finally took her.  When Bao’s father had wooed his mother in Bang Sai, a village north of Bangkok, Thailand, married her and promised her that they would always live in her native Thailand, he had lied.  He had lied and she knew he had lied, but wanted to believe so badly that she kept his house in a squalid village full of dirt poor ARVN families outside the American base at Chu Lai willing, begging  the war to end.  After the fighting she, Binh, and baby Bao could finally cross back into Thailand, the land of her people.

But  in desperate times Fate is a taker rather than a giver.  It was not Hom’s destiny to see her country or her family again, but rather to die slowly in a puddle of sweat on a bamboo mat as her crazy fever-driven visions wrestled her finally from this life.  Bao was at her side continuously during her ordeal, wiping with a cool wet cloth her sweat drenched face, trying desperately to pry open her hands that had curled into claws as he burned incense, not to please the spirits but to mask the stench of impending death.  When Hom’s struggle ended, as the spirits took her at last, as she breathed her last ragged breath, Bao dug a shallow grave for her beside the wreck of a hovel that they had called home since before his birth. He dug his mother’s grave with one half of a broken plate he had found next to her bed.  No one from the village helped Bao, a half-breed, as he dug.  He was burying a foreign mother in soil far from home, not her soil or the soil of her ancestors.

(excerpt): How Bao found me I do not know.  How he was welcome on the base a mystery.  That was his secret.  Bao never shared that secret, but told me many other stories that will be with me always.

Bao was a fine conversationalist.  Talking with him was a welcome break from exchanges with fellow soldiers that started with cars, ranged as far as what was waiting for them at home, a girlfriend perhaps, and eventually got back around to cars. Bao’s English was good and got better each time we talked.  His memory and capacity for language was uncanny.  We spent hours talking about what the world was like inside and outside of Vietnam.  To Bao, there were only those two possibilities, his war-torn country and everywhere else.  To him the distinction between the United States, Europe, Australia, even Africa did not exist.  They were simply places that carried on nicely  outside the known horror of Vietnamese killing other Vietnamese.

Bao didn’t care that the Americans were in Vietnam.  There had always been outsiders telling his people what to do: Chinese, French, Japanese, Viet Minh, Americans, someday, Bao was convinced, the Communists from Hanoi.  His indifference irritated me.  As we sat in the shade one day dripping sweat and swatting bugs I asked him if the people of his country really believed in democracy.  Brushing back his forelock slowly in an extreme gesture of patience one might reserve for the terminally stupid, he said, “We don’t know what democracy is. We just want peace.”

 

Rainy Day in Da Nang so Van and Tam took me to breakfast and the market.  My Vietnamese is woefully inadequate, without family to take care of me here in Da Nang I would be nothing more than a victim.

 Our first stop was my favorite breakfast place in the heart of the city, Bò Né Lan Húóng.  Kind of like steak and eggs would be if there was no Texas.  During the meal we planned an upcoming trip to Kon Tum in the Central Highlands, near the borders of Laos and Cambodia.  Driver, hotel, route, dates, length of stay all decided through the use of Vietnamese/English Online Translator.  Thankfully every shop, restaurant, and coffee house has WiFi.

After breakfast, we went to a coffee shop nearby since coffee was not served at the Bò Né restaurant.  Over bac Xíu nam (hot Vietnamese coffee with milk) we concluded our trip planning.

We then traveled by taxi in the rain to the market to buy items for my apartment.  Of course the market has no WiFi, so now we are on different planets, speaking different languages.

 I am particular about my coffee cup.  I usually bring my favorite from home, but forgot it this time.  I like to drink strong, rich Vietnamese coffee out of a ceramic mug in the mornings.  Without WiFi translation in the marketplace, this concept was impossible to convey.  Tam and Van brought me plastic and flimsy ceramic mugs, one after another.  I’m afraid I taxed their well-meaning patience to the limit.  Finally convinced them I would take care of it another time.  I know just the place, but it’s all the way on the other side if Da Nang.  Called Play With Clay Cafe, you can buy a wide variety of hearty clay mugs, nicely glazed.  Or you can make your own using their clay and potter’s wheel.

Maybe I will.

Aunt Thu and I having breakfast my first morning  back in Vietnam, April 11, 2017.

Da Nang Redux

Reluctantly aware that I have never used the word “redux” before in any way.  A perfectly serviceable 17th century word to describe “returning, as from war or exile”. Somehow the word seems appropriate and has established itself in my head as the title for my latest trip to Da Nang, my fifth trip to Vietnam, the 4th in the past year and a half.

My first trip to Vietnam at age 19 in 1971 led me on a fate-powered journey to write my daughter’s story, “Letter from Lena”.  I am here for 5 weeks to finish that story.  I live in an apartment near my family, none of whom speak English.  For the next few days I am without the aid of my able interpreter and niece, Xuân.  She is in Saigon with her father Hung completing an exit interview so she can accompany me back to the United States in the middle of May.  Xuân plans to attend the University of North Texas while living with my daughter Lena in Dallas.

On the plane flight from San Francisco to Seoul to Da Nang, I re-wrote and shortened the book’s prologue for the twenty-somethingth time (thanks Diane, you were right) and have now pledged to put it aside for good.  

This afternoon after lunch I will begin writing the story of Huong’s years in a Re-education Camp for the crime of having an American soldier lover.  This one is the hardest chapter to write and I’ve put it off with the never-ending excuse that it needed more research.  Well, there’s no more research to do.  Now it’s just the words, the story, the memories.

 

 

 

 

 

Writing today about two 19 year old lovers in war-torn 1971 Vietnam teaching each other to speak their respective languages.  Not the language of things, but the language of feeling and want and hope.  It rained for most of the day.  Perfect day for writing scenes so delicately intimate that I imagine them being read by flashlight under the bedcovers during a storm that has robbed any possibility of household electricity.   I looked up to see this scene out the window of my apartment and I had to stop and reflect.

My young assistant on this trip to Vietnam is my 26 year old niece, Xuân Huynh.  As we were running errands in a taxi in Da Nang in the rain this morning I was struck by just how impossibly young she is.  Competent, articulate, inquisitive, she reminds me of her grandfather Dat who I have researched steadfastly and written about extensively.  Dat was my friend and one of the most interesting, engaging, and authentic  of men.  And here she is, taking Dat’s place in the world and in my imagination as the bright future of Vietnam.  Notebook always at hand, Xuân is learning English as she works as an interpreter.  Try that sometime.  To improve her English skills Xuân is reading a copy of John Steinbeck’s “The Red Pony” while listening to a narrated version accessed through Audible on her iPhone.  She makes notes and the following day asks for clarification on details like what a “bunkhouse” might be, or why when Billy Buck “curries and brushes two saddle horses” he uses spicy Indian food on the horse.  Tenacious, motivated, inspired.

I feel deeply honored that my journey to tell Lena’s story has gifted me so many times over.  Meeting and getting to know the young people of Vietnam who are her future has been a joyful, rewarding experience.  On Tuesday Xuân has organised a trip to a children’s kindergarten in Quang Nam Province so that we can view the work of a Da Nang non-profit, Children of Vietnam, that works to provide better lives for disadvantaged indigenous children living in rural Vietnam.  Not something we had planned on this trip, but a strong reminder that there are no accidents, only fate by a different name.  Thank you Xuân for all your help and particularly your unflinching faith in this journey.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

on

Da Nang, Vietnam – I have spent the past few days in the on/off pouring rain visiting the gravesites of relatives as far north as Quang Tri and as far south as Quang Nam.  Many of the sites honor men and women that I knew during my previous time here in 1971/72.

A number of them, including my father-in-law Dat, play major roles in the story I have come to Vietnam to tell.  This is the site where he rests.

During our time in Vietnam, American soldiers had access to the PX when in base camp, a kind of poor man’s Walmart.  Cameras and other electronics were by far the most popular items, many of them making their way into the thriving Da Nang black market.  Nearly every American GI hootch had a reel to reel tape player as this was before the availability of cassette tapes.  Not surprisingly, the problem was getting quality music that 19 year old rock and rollers with one foot in the grave wanted to listen to.  Tapes for sale in the PX generally ran to the “Bing Crosby’s Christmas” and Nat King Cole’s “Love Songs” variety.  Most of our music was bootlegged, sent from brothers and sisters at home originally and duplicated and reduplicated (my apologies to the artists of the time).  We wanted Jimi and Janis and the Airplane and the Stones and the Dead.

I had purchased a reel to reel at the PX for Dat’s house in his village of An Cu.  He took great pride in this gift and would bring others from the village to look at it.  Strangely, looking seemed to be enough.  I never saw him once demonstrate the machine for anyone. I had the good fortune to get my hands on a copy of “Freewheeling’ Bob Dylan” and would play it soft and low some evenings when staying in the village.  This recording was Dat’s favorite and he would often look up from his reading during particular segments of the playback.  Of all of the brilliant tracks on that album, the B Side of “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” was dearest to him.  On hearing Dylan perform that song, Dat would have me rewind the reel so he could hear it again.  And maybe again.

While visiting Dat’s grave this week I took along my Da Nang built May Guitar and played two songs for him. The first, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” I do not know if he had ever heard before as it was released one year after my time with him in Vietnam.  But it somehow seemed just right and if even unfamiliar, I am hopeful he accepted it with the gratitude and love with which it was meant.  the second song, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”, I knew he would recognise and being the man that he was, forgive my sloppy rendition.  So marvelously coincidental that Bob Dylan has been rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature at the time that I could share Bob’s masterful work with Dat one more time.  Rest in everlasting peace my friend, Huynh Dat.

It is the rainy season here in Da Nang where we can expect an average rainfall of 15 to 25 inches of rain for the month of October.  I was here on active duty in 1971 when Typhoon Hester, the most powerful typhoon to hit Vietnam since 1945 ripped through Da Nang.  Here is an excerpt from my impression of that time:

I came to, a man ascending out of a yawning bottomless well.  I was curled up on the customarily flooded floor of a sandbag bunker wrapped in a poncho so asleep I may as well have been dead.  But dead men don’t feel, and I could certainly feel someone shaking my drenched jungle boot.

Over the muffled scream of the wind I faintly heard a voice whispering my name, “R.C,, R.C., wake up, come quick!”  The bunker was dark, cold and wet.  I could hear that it was still raining sideways.  It had been raining for days, weeks, months, I had given up keeping track.  I had spent the night at the airfield “guarding” aircraft that were as securely tethered as possible in this storm, armed with an M-16 rifle and a red flare in the event something went terribly wrong.  I spent my time huddled in the relentless rain wondering what I was going to do if one of the birds actually came loose.  Run like hell seemed a prudent course of action.  There was no radio at my post, certainly no way to alert the detail sergeant in charge of any mishap.  At 0600 the duty driver of a deuce and 1/2 truck picked me up, left the next hapless guard duty victim in my place, and slowly made his way through mud and the relentless downpour back to base camp and the evil smelling bunker.

As I came to slowly, rising from the deep well of dream-rich sleep to the soggy reality of the bunker, I heard my name again, “R.C., come quick, ông nôi! Very sick! Bà ngoai say come now!”  

“Bao, is that you?”, I croaked in what I thought was a whisper.  I had been dreaming of my grandfather John, he and I adrift in the cold morning in the middle of a deserted North Missouri lake fishing in the pouring rain.  I was five years old and had peed my pants, too embarrassed to stand and urinate over the gunnel of the boat in front of my grandfather.  With the rain I hoped he would not notice the circular stain at my crotch.  I straightened my legs, hoping that my jeans would become soaked, guarding my secret, hiding my shame.

Now I had to choose which dream was real.  None of the information that had come my way since awakening fit together – Bao, improbable green eyes flashing in fear, here in the base camp, here in the bunker no less, with news that Huong’s father Dat was sick, sent by one of his wives to fetch me in a storm so intense all military operations everywhere in Vietnam had come to a complete halt.  This was the stuff of dream or nightmare.

I arrived in Da Nang at 9:00am this morning and fired up my iPhone on touchdown, aviation navigation interference be damned.  Giants, Mets in the 7th with no score.  I’m shouting the news to asians, europeans, hasidic jews, all of whom thought I had lost my mind.  And I had.  WiFi being what it is at Da Nang Airport, it wasn’t until I got to my apartment that I learned the shocking truth of what our Boys of October had pulled off this time.  Bum with a complete game 4 hit shutout? Gillespie the new reigning Barry Zito/Ryan Vogelsong improbable superhero?  I will be at my usual seat at the Universal Bar & Cafe 2 at 8:00am Saturday morning for the Giants opener against the Cubs (we are 14 hours ahead of Pacific Time). My buddy Charlie, an ex-pat who owns the joint opens an hour early on big game days for fanatics like me. Best breakfast in Da Nang. 

Sunrise over Hong Kong thrilling as I change planes to transit to Da Nang, a one and a half hour flight.  Sat next to a perfectly adorable Chinese couple on the 14 hour flight who had been vacationing in San Francisco, Las Vegas, and improbably, Horseshoe Bend.  When they learned I was on the way to Da Nang to finish a book I am writing, the husband said, “Ah, another Vietnam War Story.”  I corrected him, telling him this was a love story and family saga, the war was simply a compelling backdrop.  Hearing this, they insisted on hearing the entire story.  Love trumps war every time.  Boarding for Da Nang, goodbye for now.

In 1971 I was 19 years old, stationed in Da Nang, Vietnam.  I met and fell in love with Huynh Thi Huong. She and her family welcomed me into their village home.  As my time to return to the US drew near, Huong and I agreed that she would follow me to become my wife in the United States.  After a tearful, yet hopeful goodbye, I left Vietnam.  Four days later the communists crossed the Demilitarized Zone with Russian tanks in what would be called the Easter Offensive, taking control of many of the northern provinces of South Vietnam, including Huong’s Village. In terror, Huong burned all of the documents we had so carefully assembled, paperwork that was her ticket out of  Vietnam.  I never saw her again.

Unknown to either of us at the time I left Vietnam, Huong was pregnant with my child.  That child, Lena Huynh was born into a world of hatred for any reminder of the “American occupiers”.  Bravely, she survived and succeeded in leaving Vietnam at age 16.  Her grandmother, Phai, accompanied her on the journey, leaving her own husband and children behind.  The last words Lena heard from her devoted grandfather were, “Go find your father”.

25 years later she did.  Without benefit of my name or any other identifying information, armed with nothing more than my 1970 high school graduation picture and a 1968 photo of my mother, Lena found me.  Her mother Huong died of liver cancer a decade ago.  The book that I am writing,”Letter from Lena”, is her story.

Today is Tuesday, October 4, 2016.  I am waiting at SFO International Gate A9 for a Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong and then on to Da Nang.  This is my third and final trip to Vietnam this year,  It is the rainy season in Da Nang, average rainfall for the month is 15 to 25 inches.  My rented apartment is in a vibrant, safe neighborhood several blocks from the home of Hung (Huong’s younger brother), Thu, his wife, and daughters Xuan and Ha.

Thu’s cooking is a keenly anticipated highlight of my visits to Da Nang.  She watches my rice bowl as would a bird of prey, constantly refilling it with morsels more delicious than the last.  I have, at times, resorted to hiding my bowl in self defense.

“Putting myself back in that place again” is at once exhilarating and terrifying.  I look forward to an October in the rain, continuing to write, unlocking more of the elusive mystery of Lena’s heroic story.