How Goes the Trip

This is the way we have rolled in the past week:  Up for sunrise and the hotel breakfast.

Grab your suitcase and bottle water and find a seat on the bus.

We’re off to see the sites of the day.

At Cu Chi we crawl through the tunnels;

In Saigon we stroll through the Presidential Palace;

At Chu Lai I remember the time my trusty A-4 tested the aluminum mat runway for the Marines;

A stop at China beach then swing around Danang;

We walk from South to North across the old bridge at the DMZ;

We go into the underground Village at Vinh Moc;

and visualize the battle at Khe Sanh as we walk the ground.

Traveling from place to place the tranquil fishing villages and rice fields we see from the bus seem remote from the years of war represented by the Veterans on our trip.

Each significant area we pass through is a chance to get a pinhole view into what went on as each Veteran recounts his story.

It would take thousands of pinholes to patch together a coherent picture of all that happened.  But, when a Vietnam Vet returns for the first time to where his personal war unfolded and tells his personal story of what it was like, you get a tiny picture of the tragedy, heartbreak and valor that are wrapped in the package we call the Vietnam War.