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Family

This picture is the Friday Night Club waiting for dinner.  Sherry and I got together yesterday with my sister, brother, sister-in-law and cousin.  Let’s call it a small part of the family of Dan.  That’s a miniscule part of the family of man.  Before you roll your eyes and quit reading, let me explain.  After taking my malaria pill this morning, I fought my way through two airports and now, sardined into an airline seat, I’m underway on a trip to the other side of the world, typing to the whine of the engines while bumping through turbulence.

So, as I look around at my fellow travelers, that has me thinking about family, extended family and tribes we identify with — groups I’ve found myself in from grade school through the Navy and beyond.  I don’t expect to have a problem assimilating into The College of the Ozarks group I’ll meet up with in San Francisco.  After all, I did go to college once . . . a long time ago.  And I was a part of that large tribe called the military with all its branches and subdivisions.  Looking forward to meeting the Vietnam Veterans in our group.  That tribe bonds around taking enemy fire in a common war.

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Trip Planning

 

This is how the packing goes.  It’s rather alarming to think that in two days all this will step up to the American Airlines counter as a well ordered checked bag, a carry-on and a personal item . . . I hope.

 

How could we miss?  Look at these sterling aviators heavily engrossed in a planning session last week. 

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$2.10

Yesterday, I received a very complete packet from Valor Tours, containing ticket information, visa, itinerary, luggage tags, etc.  It makes me realize how unorganized I am and how I need to pack all the important stuff.  You’d think after the previous trips I’d have this packing thing down to a science.  Wrong!

Now that I think about it, I wasn’t all that prepared during the war, particularly when I touched down in the rice paddies of Ha Tinh province.  All the things I held in high esteem like my g-suit, torso harness and survival vest became worthless when overeager villagers destroyed them by roughly cutting them away.  I tried to say “Hey, I can show you how to make that easy by using the zippers,” but the language barrier got in the way.

When I made it to Hanoi, I never saw the stuff again, but for some reason I thought about the two one-dollar bills and a dime I had buttoned into my left shirt pocket. I carried them in case my flight got diverted to Danang, so that I could get a burger and a beer at the O-club.  Later in discussions with cellmates they would tell me what they lost when they were shot down: a good luck charm, a wedding ring or in one case two weeks’ pay stuffed into a pocket on the way from the pay line to the flight line.  I always emphasized, in mock seriousness, how devastating it was to have lost that $2.10.

Flash forward to 1973.  The first release group had gone home and those of us in the second group were hanging around with hopeful expectations for release without a glitch.   The prison staff had the same attitude — biding their time until they could get rid of us.

“Ghi, some officer would like to talk with you.”  Mark, the turn-key guard approached where a group of us stood in a corner of Hoa Lo’s courtyard.  “That’s weird,” I thought, “What could this be about?”

I followed Mark across the courtyard to a building normally used for interrogation.  Inside, a man sat behind a long table, officious but not unfriendly.   He waved to the chair across the table for me to sit.  I couldn’t remember a time when “the chair” wasn’t a low stool.  On his right, a man leafed through a ledger, his pencil at the ready.  The man on his left rested his arm on a flat grey metal box.  I waited while they conversed in Vietnamese.

“Mmm-umm,” the officious one cleared his throat.  “You had some money when you were shot down?”

“Yes,” I answered, “Two dollars and ten cents.”

“Ten . . . cents.”

“Yes, ten cents.”

“Unh, what is cents?”

“Cents, pennies.”

“Ah, pennies, ten pennies.”

Another Vietnamese conversation ensued, with knowing nods and smiles. Then he turned back.  “And two dollars?”

“Yes.”

The man to his left tilted the lid of the grey box open, rummaged around a bit, pulled out a two-dollar bill and placed it on the table.  More conversation, then he counted out ten pennies on top of the bill.  The officious one nodded to me.  “Is this correct?”

So it was, when I flew out of Hanoi two days later I had 2 dollars and 10 cents in my pocket.  I got everyone on the plane to sign my new two-dollar bill.  Or was it my old two-dollar bill in a different form?  Was I the same guy or was my makeup forever altered?

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Colored Glasses

By the way I count, I’ve been to Vietnam five times: the first a completed combat cruise; the second a cruise with an extended stay in N. Vietnam’s prisons; the third with a film crew doing a series on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon; then I tagged along on a university trip to set up an exchange program for Vietnamese students; and the last, a month-long trip from south to north by ground transportation.  A significant part of that last trip was stopping in the villages that participated in my shoot down and getting to meet some of the people who captured me.  (see below)

Each trip to Vietnam has resulted in a life changing experience.  I expect the forthcoming trip will be as significant in its own way.  The odyssey continues.

The trip consists of 12 veterans, 12 students, and a half dozen members of the college staff.  How will their individual odysseys play out?  Each of us relates to the Vietnam War era differently.  Many vets endured things beyond description that defy comprehension by the rest of us.  Some will be returning to Vietnam for the first time.  On my first return trip, I met some ghosts of the past and saw them in the new daylight of the present.  I found an unusual exhilaration walking around the outside of the fifteen-foot-high wall that I had only experienced from the inside before.  25-year-old bomb craters had found new life as a watering hole for water buffalo and a building that once held prisoners became a storage shed.

Much of what we may learn on the trip will be a result of seeing things from the perspective of others in our group.  I’m anxious to hear the views of the students who study it as history.  I expect they will bring a freshness that those of us who lived through it are unable to see.  But isn’t that usually the case?  We all look through our own colored glasses.

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Trip 6?

My friend John called.  “Dan,” he said, “Do you remember that trip I told you about with the Collage of the Ozarks?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Well they’re planning another trip and I think you should go.”

“Okay . . . how’s that work?”

“That’s what I’m about to tell you.”

In summary, he gave this pitch about the uniqueness of the College of the Ozarks in combining a Christian Liberal Arts curriculum with a dose of cultural and patriotic awareness and a work program that takes the place of tuition.  Students are encouraged to compete for the opportunity to go on “Patriotic Education Trips,” which pairs students with Veterans as they visit battlefields that students have studied and the Vets fought in.  The trips began in 2009 and have gone to a wide range of locations related to World War II, the Cold War, Korea and Vietnam.  The concept immediately grabbed my interest, but it was the enthusiasm in John’s voice that sealed the deal.  I was ready to sign on.

Since then, the college accepted me as one of their Vets, a few other details were taken care of and VOILA; we’re set to depart on the 18th of March for our Vietnam Tour.

I could rave about the beauty of the campus when we visited there last month.  I could sing praises of how welcoming and friendly students and staff are.  Did I mention the school’s nickname is Hard Work U?  Of course not, because you can learn all about it by simply clicking on the icon below.

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Why Vietnam ?

Whatever is has already been

And what will be has been before

And God will call the past to account –

Ecclesiastes 3-15

 

In March of 1973, I left Vietnam and swept the eight years of my involvement in the Vietnam War behind me.  For the next twenty years, I focused on being a Naval Officer that defended the world from aggression and later an Architect that built a better environment.  Vietnam Vet was not the first thing that came to mind when I contemplated my image.

In 1994, at a friend’s urging, with reluctance, I attended a writing course for Veterans.  I saw a group obsessed with anger, resentment and in some cases shame over their Vietnam experience.  They were dealing with feelings that I either didn’t have or refused to face.  But what they expressed in writing went to the core of human experience.   It wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to write about, but the more I thought about it the more interested I became in how the Vietnam experience affected and continues to shape my life.  Though I didn’t want to relive the past, I felt that I had been remiss in not giving it more attention.  I wrote some about it, occasionally spoke about it to various groups and when the opportunity came to make a return trip I was ready, even eager to visit the country I had relegated to the past.

On the first trip back, in 1995, I latched onto a few simple thoughts that helped me put the past in perspective:  Vietnam is a country, not a war; Vietnamese are people, not prison guards; Son Tay is a city, not a prisoner of war camp; there is no shame in what we were trying to accomplish in Vietnam; 70% of the current Vietnamese population were born after the war and look to improve their country; and it’s better to seek lessons to be learned than to vilify participants, supporters or protesters on either side.

I made additional return trips in ‘97 and 2001 and found Vietnam to be a country of contrasts, from North to South, from city to rural then remote regions and from young to old.  No matter whether it’s watching Tai Chi classes and early morning exercises around Hoan Kiem Lake or getting involved in a sign language discussion with a village bamboo house raising crew or simply surviving a drive in traffic, there’s never a dull moment.  The energy increases in a more personal setting, such as having a discussion about business with the owner of the family operated twelve room hotel I stayed in, or getting a tour of The Temple of Literature from two Hanoi University students and their mothers.  The only time I became a pure tourist was on the boat trip around Ha Long Bay and there the scenery is simply too spectacular to do otherwise.

 

I’m fascinated by the new way I see things that relate to the time I was there during the war.  In ’95 on the road to Son Tay I could sense exactly where I was along the way from the smells, sounds and other ‘feelings’ that I had picked up blindfolded, in the back of a truck 27 years before.  In ’97 we spent three hours in a tavern swapping stories over a few Ba Ba Ba beers with two Son Tay policemen who were 12 years old the night of the Son Tay raid.  They didn’t know the prison camp existed until later when rumors about what had happened were passed around.  I saw bomb craters still surrounding the abandoned Hai Duong Bridge where we lost John McCormick the first line period of our ’65 cruise.  The former Viet Cong fighter that I met in the south was the only male survivor in a family that lost seven brothers and a brother in law.  In ’65 I dropped bombs on where he was living and fighting in a maze of dirt tunnels not big enough to turn around in.  By some quirk of fate, we both survived and moved on to other phases of our lives.

I don’t seek to sweep my eight years of involvement in the Vietnam War behind me anymore.  Instead, I’ve developed a deeper interest in the broader aspects of the War and all who took part in it.  I’m drawn toward things Vietnamese, the people, the country, the history and culture and look forward to my next visit.  I still search for meaning in this part of my past and where it may lead.

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