Because the Rex Hotel maintains computers with Internet connections, I was able to post a letter to the Virtual Wall so that veterans and loved ones, particularly Mama, could log on and read about the journey as it was happening. This was my journal entry for Friday, March 7:
As brother Mark Pitts and I walked back to the hotel from the Saigon bar last night, a boy approached me. (Can you walk on these streets without someone somewhere approaching you to buy something?)
“Jerry’s my American name,” he said, in the best English I’ve heard from a Vietnamese person yet. Jerry proceeded to tell me that he needed to sell $20 worth of goods before he could go home. It was already 10:30 p.m. “I have to pay for my school and my brother’s school. I only have a mom. Dad left us for another woman,” Jerry explained. “In my school I have the best English, but my writing is bad.” I know how he feels some days.
Jerry, 14, took my hand and led me across the streets near the Rex Hotel. Not an easy feat. It’s kind of like bungee jumping into early morning rush hour. Stop, go, bounce, dodge, OHMYGOD THERE’S 1,500 motorbikes headed straight for me! “Don’t look. Follow me,” Jerry said. Jerry was able to weasel a couple of bucks from Mark, who said as he handed over the dough, “Jerry, you’ve got game. Now go away.”
Our group started out at the Apocalypse Now bar but had to change plans when a fellow took a special liking to our great leader, Tony Cordero (son of MAJ William E. Cordero). Wrong crowd at that bar, we decided. But Brother Terry McGregor could not escape the clutches of the most cunning 8-year old girl who wrapped her arms around his waist outside the bar. She pleaded with McGregor to buy her wares. When he refused, she cast slurs his way. “Charlie! I no like you!” Beggars are on every street corner in every place we’ve been so far. Outside the Rex last night, in a red and white dress with a peter-pan collar, stood a girl, about 7, begging folks to buy her flowers. There was no parent in sight. Nothing. She was absolutely beautiful, with her big almond eyes, pleading and holding flowers up to the bus windows or in front of pedestrians. “Please, madam. Please, sir,” she begged. But even her poverty didn’t compare to what we saw along the Mekong Delta on Thursday.
A three-hour drive from the Rex, the Mekong is flecked with banana, pod and palm trees. But everywhere we went there were people. In the most rural, remote areas, people squat and eat pho from ceramic bowls, or sit on plastic chairs. People pedal bikes loaded with straw, or balloons or baskets, three and five bikes deep as buses and vans, and cars whiz past, blowing horns. No one flinches. Not ever. There is a motorbike repair shop in every block, even in the country. And graves, likes those in Louisiana sitting above ground, are scattered randomly about. Stuck in between the rice paddies or the bike shops. They are brightly decorated and often have miniature temples built into them. A place for sacrifice and incense.
The Mekong River reminded me much of my beloved Chattahoochee River in Georgia. It was muddy and wide and surrounded by thick vegetation. Flowers, scarlet, ivory, and lavender, grew among the wildest brambles. We ate a lunch of elephant fish, pork, chicken, rice, rice, and did I mention rice, at this far-out-of-the-way place, which was a nursery of some sort. Lots of potted flowers about. Instead of kids begging for stuff, however, a group of children handed us purple and pink roses as we disembarked from the boat. We toasted our dinner with rice whiskey. I shared a shot with a friend. Have you ever tossed back a shot of diesel fuel? Then, you understand. My head was spinning within seconds. I kept eating, hoping that would help me center myself once more. Geeish! Then, after dinner, the dessert. No, not passion fruit. But the delight of holding a 50-pound python in my very own hands. A truly spiritual experience for me. If you haven’t read it, you should read Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sand Mountain. The story of a journalist who, while on assignment, gets caught up in the spirit and ends up taking up the rattler like those faith-based southern folks he’s writing about. I love that book. Not because I’ve been a member of those churches, but because I think being able to grasp in our hands the things we fear most is a powerful thing. Even if we can only hang on for a moment.
I lived my early life in fear after Daddy died. He was the center of what made me feel safe. I’ve spent much of my adult life trying to regain that sense of security and safety and to not feel so threatened by the powers of this world that are beyond my control. So it seemed only spiritual that I should come to Vietnam and pick up the python. The place where my fears began and now the place where I have held those fears in my hand, if only for a moment. Brother Mark Pitts didn’t have quite the same spiritual experience with his snake-handling moment…. Yes, us fatherless children of ’Nam have all sorts of fears. But we are here facing them. The way our fathers did before us. Today we split up for the first time, to head to the sites where our fathers fought their battles. Keep us in your prayers. Courage is not the absence of fear but the ability to press on in spite of it. You veterans taught us that. Thank you for that.
ON SATURDAY, MARCH 8, we split up into smaller, color-coded teams, to begin our trek in country to visit our fathers’ death sites. I was part of the Orange Team, which all the veterans agreed had the most grueling itinerary.
We were headed into one of the most remote areas of Vietnam, the Central Highlands. Our team boarded a bus at o’dark-thirty for a ride through Ho Chi Minh City. We stared bleary-eyed as people clustered like starlings in parking lots and grassy knolls, contorting their bodies into tai chi pretzels as part of their morning exercise regime, and buzzing into markets with baskets of fish and fruit, and baskets of baskets. Heavy-equipment trucks, a rare sight, roared by us. They are allowed on the streets only during the dark, Viet, our guide, explained, because it’s too dangerous during daylight when the city’s fifteen million people are hustling about on mopeds, bikes, and cyclos.
At Tan Son Nhat Airport, we boarded a turboprop plane and headed into Pleiku, in the Central Highlands. The plane was cramped; a national soccer team filled up most of it. Our group of ten sat near the back, and the turboprop engines were so loud we couldn’t hear one another over their roar.
Most of the way, I studied a Vietnamese family sitting just ahead of me. The young mother nestled down on the inside seat as the father tended to three girls. The youngest was a dark-eyed cherub obviously proud of her new walking shoes, which she kept untying and her daddy kept retying. The toddler ambled about the aisle the entire trip.
The mountain range stretching out beneath the plane reminded me of the Great Smoky Mountains that Daddy loved so well. I wondered if Granny Leona knew where I was at that moment. Could she look down from heaven and see me? Could Daddy?
I pulled a pair of plastic heart-shaped sunglasses from my pack and handed them to the toddler. Her nose was too pug to hold them up, so the glasses fell sideways across her cheeks. While her father laughed at the silly sight, I fought back hot tears. I was thinking about Cammie and Kelly. Their fathers hadn’t lived long enough to see them strut about in their first new pair of shoes or put on their first pair of plastic sunglasses.
At Pleiku’s airport, as a warm wind billowed, I stood on the tarmac and made a 360-degree turn. I couldn’t get over the mountains. I had never pictured Vietnam as a country with mountains. I thought only of blood-soaked jungles. I was glad for the ridges that rose up out of the valley. I knew Daddy would have felt some safety, hedged in on all sides by mountains. After all, he was a son of Appalachia.
Our veteran guide, Dick Schonberger, informed us that we would have a full day. We had thirty minutes to clean up at the Pleiku Hotel, the town’s best hotel, before heading out for Dragon Mountain and the Ia Drang Valley.
A snappy wind blew across the fields of brittle grasses at the base of Dragon Mountain, just outside Pleiku. Shortly before he died, my father had sent a picture to Granny Leona. In the photo, Daddy and his Army buddies posed with a couple of dozen Montagnard children. The Montagnards are a mix of tribal people, including Banar and Jarrai. They supported the American efforts during the war
and continue to suffer under Vietnam’s Communist rule. In the picture Daddy sent Granny, the kids’ clothes are ragged. Each child stands barefoot in a muddy gully. Behind them is a sturdy howitzer and the slope of Dragon Mountain. I wore a copy of that photo about my neck throughout the trip.
As we drove past Dragon Mountain, our guides, Hai and Viet, began chattering excitedly. Viet explained that they felt we had found the gully where Dad had posed for that photo thirty-seven years past. Directing the van drivers to pull over, they climbed out of the vehicles and began passing copies of the picture to local villagers. The villagers concurred with Viet and Hai. That was good enough for me.
My teammates asked what they could do to help. I asked them to gather rocks with me. I was constructing a rock monument, a cairn. Half a dozen local children from the nearby village joined us. Two of the girls dashed home to put on their best dresses. I handed copies of my father’s picture to the kids as they formed a crescent behind me.
Then I reached for the family photos that my sister had given me days earlier as she said good-bye at Portland’s airport. She’d told me that God would show me where to leave the photos. She was right. I placed them in front of the makeshift monument, propping them against the cairn with smaller rocks.
Opening the lid on a plastic jar I’d brought with me, I began to pour the contents out. “Inside this jar is dirt from Fort Benning, the place where my father trained troops for years,” I said. “And sand from the North Shore of Hawaii, where he loved to fish.” Then, scraping it with a rock, I scooped up the red clay soil of Vietnam and mixed it into the jar.
“When Native Americans were a nomadic tribe, they would build rock monuments before leaving camp,” I explained. “These monuments were a way for them to mark their journey—to see how far they had traveled and in which direction.”
I looked up at my teammates who had formed a half-circle in front of me. I saw the tears streaming down the faces of my sisters, Cammie and Kelly. I recognized how fortunate I’d been. I was nine when my father died. I could remember the way Daddy walked and the way he talked. I remembered how he smelled of sun-dried T-shirts and Old Spice. And I recalled how his laughter made a room rumble. Daddy laughed a lot. It troubled me deeply that Cammie and Kelly lacked such memories of their fathers. Tears streamed down my own face. “As military children we were a nomadic tribe,” I said. “And for those of us who lost fathers here, Vietnam is our rock monument. My prayer is that when we look back we will realize how far we’ve come in our love and appreciation for the Vietnamese people.”
I’ve walked the streets where my father roamed as a boy. I’ve sat in the pews of the church where he was baptized. Over the years, I’ve made several trips to my father’s grave at Andrew Johnson National Cemetery in Tennessee. And trips to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. But I’ve never felt my father’s presence more strongly than I did there in that dusty red-dirt gully at the base of Dragon Mountain, in a land full of people whose language I couldn’t speak and whose customs I didn’t know. Finally I knew what it felt like to come home. This was the place where my father had been waiting for me all these years.
It was then that I understood what widow Treva Whichard had meant on that first day in country when we were standing in the customs line at Tan Son Nhat Airport.
I bowed my head and uttered a prayer of thanks: “Thank you, God, for taking care of our family all these years. Thank you for Mom, and Frank and Linda. And for all the mercy and grace that got us through all the hard times. We still miss Daddy, but it’s okay. I know he’s been right there with you, watching over us all these years.”
ANOTHER SEVERAL HOURS passed before we reached the remote village of Plei Me, site of a special forces camp, and our only access to the Ia Drang Valley, where both Cammie’s father and my father bled to death. The Ia Drang Valley was one of the more violent regions of the war.
In a manioc field just outside Plei Me we found the untouched remnants of our fathers’ presence—rusted hinges from ammunition boxes, chunks of mortar, and shards of shell casings. At the base of a bush, I placed a bouquet of flowers, alongside those Cammie left in honor of her father. Even though Cammie was blessed with a devoted stepfather who honored the memory of her dad, she is still haunted by her father’s absence.
“It’s that not knowing, not knowing anything. Not knowing what his voice sounds like. Not knowing how he walked. It’s hard. It’s not fair,” Cammie said, her voice breaking with emotion. Kelly and I wrapped her in a hug.
Like the kudzu vines common throughout America’s Southeast, dense overgrowth covers the Ia Drang Valley as far as the eye can see. Because of continued unrest among the dozens of bickering minority peoples in that region, visitors are not allowed into the valley. Historically, the minority groups have tried to separate themselves from one another, and from the Communist regime. Cammie and I made a vow in that field; we vowed we’d make it into the Ia Drang Valley someday, to our fathers’ death sites.
Then, as our teammates waited in vans, Cammie, Kelly, and I walked through the village of Plei Me, passing out colorful balloons to the children. Mothers covered their mouths and giggled at the spectacle—three prissy white girls strolling down the red-dirt road of a Third World village. We wondered if they had seen Americans since the soldiers pulled out. We might have been the first white women some of them had ever seen.
A boy and a man drove by us in a wagon with wooden wheels, pulled along by a water buffalo. Kelly stopped suddenly. “Do you hear that?” she asked.
Cammie and I stood still as gateposts. “Hear what?” I asked.
“That music,” Kelly said. “It’s the Beatles.”
Sure enough, in one of the most surreal moments of our trip, a Beatles refrain echoed from a nearby hut: “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.”
We burst out in laughter. Was it possible our fathers were serenading us from the heavens above?
I MET PETER in a marketplace, but Peter is not his real name. Because he lives in a Communist country, under an oppressive regime, Peter asked me not to use his real name. On the day we met he asked me why I was in his country. I told him all about Sons and Daughters in Touch and our historic return to the battlefields where our fathers were slain.
“I am like you,” he said.
“In what way?” I asked.
“My father, too, was killed during the American War,” he said. “He was an ARVN soldier.”
I invited Peter to drop by my hotel room after dinner for a visit. When he arrived, he pointed out the rules posted near the phone: “No guests allowed in hotel rooms.” Another sign that Big Brother is watching, Peter said. His almond-shaped eyes lit up as he laughed.
Peter wore a short-sleeved cotton shirt and black pants. His dark hair was cropped close on the sides, longer on top. His laugh was a deep bellow, something you’d expect from a much bigger man. Delicate of frame, he weighed about 135 pounds and was only about five feet eight inches tall. But his spirit was overpowering; it filled the room.
He wanted to share his story of growing up fatherless in Vietnam. I admired his bravery; this one indulgence could have landed him in jail and gotten me a swift boot home, or worse.
The youngest of seven children, Peter was three years old when his father was slain. An ARVN lieutenant, he was killed at Quang Tri in 1972, during what the Vietnamese refer to as the Summer of the Red Fire. “There was very terrible fighting there for three months between the North and South Vietnamese,” Peter said. “Only you can guess the South was naturally all blown away.”
Peter’s last memory with his father was a surprise trip to Quang Tri. “I remember it was two weeks before he died,” he said. “He took me and an older brother in a jeep to his base camp. It was the first and only time. We were very excited. He took us to a munitions-storage room. He let us play with the ammunition. I don’t know why. There was guns, bullets, everything.”
A short time later, when Peter’s mother heard he
r husband had died, she took her older sons and went in search of the body. But the North Vietnamese had piled the dead ARVN in heaps alongside the roads in Quang Tri, Peter explained. “It was impossible for my mother to find him.”
So she returned to their home in Hue without a body to bury. She wasn’t the only distraught widow in the neighborhood to do so.
“In my village between 1972 through 1975, I could say everyone’s house lost someone,” Peter said. “There were so many.”
After the Summer of the Red Fire, Peter and his family had to flee Hue when the North Vietnamese drove them out. Peter remembers his mother handing him a basket of household items and telling him to run quickly for his life. “She tells me, ‘Run. Be safe. Run to Da Nang,’” Peter recalled.
Throngs of people were fleeing the city. Along with dozens of refugees, Peter and his family climbed into a military van. There were forty people crammed one on top of the other when the rig rolled on an S curve at the top of Cloudy Mountain and down a steep ravine. Peter and his family escaped mostly unharmed, save for bruises. Sixteen others died in the crash.
For a while Peter was forced to head into the jungles to find work. That was the worst time, he said. I asked him to write down the story as he told it to me that night. Here is what he wrote:
After finishing my high school, being unable to go to university, to find any job, I had to go to the jungle to work as a gold prospector to earn my life and to support my mom. So many dangers in the jungle: dangerous animals such as tigers, leopards; high and slippery mountain sides; tunnel collapse, disease such as malaria, yellow fever and so on. Many young men died there forever. There were so many threats that it’s necessary to go in a group. Truong Son range lies along the western side of Vietnam, so we just headed west, sometimes from our hometown, sometimes from the DMZ or further north. The first time I did it I was nearly 18 and I worked that field for a year, each journey lasted around one month.
After the Flag Has Been Folded Page 33
