Vietnam felt personally profound from the very moment I set foot on the land. I’m hardly the first American to come here in the 35-plus years since the war. Plenty of tourists, investors, Vietnam vets have come before me. But as soon as I got off the plane from Hong Kong, I was overcome by a strange, even depressing feeling about what they call here, “the American War.”

From everything you read about this country today, almost nobody’s bitter any more. In fact it’s halfway fair to say that with one of the younger populations on earth— almost two thirds of the people are under 30— most don’t even remember (although, to be sure, there are “War Remnants” museums in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, to remind them).

But still, on that first day after landing in the country, when I looked at workers at the airport, then as my driver carried me fifteen miles into the heart of Hanoi, when I looked at motorists on the road and farmers in the fields and pedestrians on the streets, I couldn’t help but wonder, did the war demolish that man’s house? Or that woman’s father? Or that family’s livelihood? I didn’t fight in Vietnam… and the Americans who did were only doing the job Washington gave them to do… yet I felt a weird sense of guilt.

After all, we didn’t go to war here because we were threatened. Even in the contemporary case of Iraq, although the legitimacy of the menace against us was debatable, lots of Americans did feel threatened. Vietnam was different. Beginning almost fifty years ago, the threat we came here to quell was regional communism, which was seen as an ideological peril to the planet but not a direct and immediate assault on our security. And anyway, we failed. The war in Vietnam ended up as a wasteful misuse of lives and treasure. On both sides.

But evidently the legacy of wasted treasure felt stronger for me than it feels for the Vietnamese I encountered. Here’s an illustration: on our first full day of shooting in Hanoi, I met with two aged veterans who believe they were disabled by Agent Orange; one also has a daughter born “abnormal,” to use his word, 33 years ago. In the partial shade of a half dead tree, I interviewed the two vets, and the one with the “abnormal” daughter told me how he was moving south with his North Vietnamese Army unit through the jungle one day when they heard an airplane overhead, and looked up, and saw white smoke. He didn’t know what it was but it didn’t seem good; he ran for four hours to get away from it. Because many of the men with whom he served now have the same maladies he has, and some also have children born “abnormal,” he believes that the white smoke from American planes was the cause of it. But here’s the thing: as the interview ended, he and his fellow veteran not only warmly welcomed me to this country as a friend, they even invited me back.

Here’s the other part that sticks with me: as we spoke, our “minder” from the Foreign Ministry, standing behind me, was translating. At one point when I asked him to put a particular question to the two vets, he didn’t respond. I turned to look back at him, and he was crying. Serious tears, dripping down his cheeks. After we left, I asked what had moved him. His answer was that these two men had lost so much, and suffered so much because of the war, but were able to speak of it all with a smile. It amazed him, and frankly amazes me, looking back. It moves me too. If I felt any guilt at all for the misery of the war here, it wasn’t them laying it on me.

Sure, there was a small sign or two of distrust when we showed up somewhere, or maybe just doubt about us and our motives. One day in a rural province about three hours from Da Nang, three pencil-thin communal police were waiting for us at the isolated home of a poor woman and her disabled daughter we had gone to see. Having heard that a team from an American television network was coming to visit— people in the province must actually register with the police if they are hosting foreigners— they were there to “protect” the family.

But amicable kindness toward a one-time enemy was the rule. One rainy day in Da Nang (actually, it is monsoon season so every day was a rainy day in Da Nang), we were shooting in a poor busy marketplace. Everyone at whom we pointed our camera — or whose path we blocked in the narrow cluttered alleyway to get our shots— was perfectly friendly; nothing but waves and smiles. Eventually, three little old guys without a full set of teeth between them motioned for me to come over and have my picture taken with them. So I asked Paul, the cameraman with me, to shoot it. There we are, a video postcard, these guys old enough to be war veterans flanking me with broad grins and one of them playfully holding his hands in a “V” for victory sign in front of my face. We all had a good laugh.

If that doesn’t seem so remarkable, consider the fact that today, more than sixty years after World War Two, there is still conscious anger towards Japan for the atrocities it committed in places like China and Korea. During the war here, many Vietnamese didn’t think the conduct of the United States was any less atrocious (although, of course, the feeling from our side toward them was mutual). One man told me, for instance, that the most horrifying thing about “the American War” wasn’t the villages we invaded or the chemicals we sprayed; it was the bombs we dropped from B-52s. He explained that their arrival was always a surprise and their devastation was total. From wars I’ve covered I understand the surprise part; since the sound of an aircraft’s engine is pushed to the rear, you don’t know a warplane is headed toward you until it has passed. The boom from the bombs thereafter rudely underscores the announcement.

So, maybe as I came into this country and felt depressed, I was having my “ain’t war a shame” moment. God knows, in my work I’ve seen plenty of wars, and plenty of destruction, and plenty of victims, and while I don’t think all wars are bad, I do think many are futile. Considering the American cost of the war here, especially since the enemy came out on top, this one was.

As I recognized all this though, I also wondered if the Vietnamese who are still around from the war feel the same kind of guilt for their own conduct when they see Americans.

However, in society at large, there is only one issue from the war still outstanding, one legacy in the eyes of the Vietnamese that can’t yet be forgotten, at least not in those areas where our forces loaded and launched aircraft with Agent Orange, or where it was actually sprayed.

An example of that legacy, in their eyes anyway, is an impoverished woman I went to meet at a meager house in Da Nang named Kieu, age 38. She was born with badly mangled legs and also now has cancer. She explained to me how she has lived in this house since she was born, and how all her life she drank water from the well behind her dirt-poor dwelling. The trouble is, it was fed by the runoff from the former U.S. airbase there, the main launching point for aircraft heading out to spray Agent Orange. It is not a thousand feet from the house. Now, her husband has left, she’s no longer strong enough to earn, believe it or not, the nine bucks a month she used to earn, and soon her ten-year-old daughter will be an orphan. As she’s holding her daughter on her lap and telling me the story, she’s crying, the girl’s crying, the translator’s crying.

Or Phuong, a 28-year-old man who has a grotesque stump protruding from his chest in which most of his organs are compressed. He weighs 44 pounds and stands not quite 39 inches tall… although he doesn’t really “stand” much at all, because his knees are equally deformed and his calves are unnaturally thin. His pain is ceaseless. His parents lived in a part of the country that was heavily sprayed.

Maybe you know something, or at least remember about Agent Orange. Maybe not.

It was named for the color-coded barrels in which it was stored. We sprayed it to defoliate the jungle and reveal the enemy as he snuck south, but as it turns out, Agent Orange didn’t stop the enemy, and more devastating, it didn’t just kill the trees.

That’s because one element of Agent Orange is dioxin, which is classified by some as the most toxic chemical compound known to man. Scientists will tell you that dioxin can cause horrific birth defects, severe retardation, deadly cancers. Vietnam says that because of the dioxin we sprayed (allegedly on more than ten percent of their country), there are about three million people here who awaken each day with damaged bodies and damaged brains. In some cases, because they have lived in an area that was sprayed and contaminated during the war. Or because they have lived near the airbases from which the planes took off. Or because they were born to parents exposed to Agent Orange during the ten years we used it— like the abnormal daughter of the veteran in Hanoi. What scientists can’t necessarily tell you though is which defects, which deformities, and which cancers are attributable to dioxin, and which ones aren’t. Dioxin sometimes does its damage, then disappears from the bloodstream.

The documentary we came to shoot for HDNet is about all this. And what the United States is, or isn’t, doing to mitigate the problem. The bottom line of the story is that while we left the battle more than 35 years ago, daily life for many people is still a battle, and Vietnam blames it on us.

Like a 13-year-old girl we saw, whose monstrous head is literally as wide as her shoulders; the condition is called hydrocephalus. Or a six-year-old who simply has no eyes. Or another, age 8, whose huge eyeballs are literally halfway out of their sockets; she too is blind. Or a 5-year-old boy with smiling eyes but the lower half of his face grotesquely deformed. Or a 13-year-old whose skin looks like it was burned top to bottom… but it wasn’t. Or a pair of children whose arms are so withered and their legs so twisted that they eat with their feet. Or a dozen other children with skeletally thin mangled limbs, their hands and feet incompletely formed at birth, fused like claws to render them useless.

We met these children, and more I haven’t even bothered to describe, at a special ward at the main hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. Some have parents who visit. Others were dumped there and forgotten and now, no one comes. After three previous stops further north in Vietnam, we thought we had seen the worst of it. We hadn’t. Meeting these children was horrifying. If they are victims of Agent Orange, they are the third generation.

The ward director, a kindly 65-year-old English-speaking doctor originally trained as an OBGYN, explained genuinely that they can’t trace all these birth defects to dioxin, but pointed out that almost two thirds of these kids come from “Agent Orange hotspots,” which both Vietnam and the U.S. now designate as either former American airbases where aircraft were loaded with the herbicide, or parts of the country where spraying was frequent and concentrated. It makes things seem pretty obvious. When I walked through the ward with the director, she picked up the little girl with no eyes and began to cry hard herself. She told me through her tears, “We can’t do anything for her. Anything.”

Thanks to a persistent producer named Kira who’s been working on this all year, we got onto the airbase at Da Nang. This was no small thing; we are the first western journalists ever allowed in since the U.S. pulled out. From the standpoint of our story, it’s what I’d call Ground Zero. This is where Agent Orange was stored, and mixed, and loaded onto planes, then where the barrels that held it and the planes that dropped it were washed off after missions, evidently without much awareness about the long term effects of the residue.

We got to go to three different sections: first, I walked around the part of the tarmac where the barrels were used; from the sloping concrete, the residue poured into a canal… and probably from there it infected the food chain. Second, we paced an expanse of cracked discolored earth where empty barrels finally were discarded, and to this day there’s hardly a blade of grass growing; you can easily see how the residue would seep down into the groundwater. (Did I give my shoes a good washing that night? You better believe it!) Finally, we stepped through a couple of hundred yards of swamp to a lake, called Lotus Lake, in which people actually fished until only a couple of years ago when tests showed it was toxic with dioxin.

This is not the only “hotspot” in the country; there are several. The Vietnamese attribute many of their cancers and birth defects to them, because where there’s a hotspot, everything in the area— fish, plants, poultry, meat, or the water itself— evidently was contaminated. Now there’s a guard tower at the edge of Lotus Lake, manned 24/7, to keep people away. But if Agent Orange is the culprit, it’s too late for some.

We met two more of them out in the countryside, but this time, with tragedy came triumph. We were taken to Quang Nhai province, one of the most heavily sprayed spots during the war. We went to two farm homes, reaching one of them only by trudging on foot down a long muddy jungle road that our van couldn’t negotiate, sharing space with water buffalo and toothless barefoot old women and little old men who looked like Ho Chi Minh. On either side, peasants were knee deep in water, working the rice paddies out in the distance. Our Vietnamese escorts were from a foundation called East Meets West, which is mostly funded by private U.S. donors, many of them American veterans of the war. It was created largely (but not only) to help victims of Agent Orange.

At one home we met a 13-year-old girl named Chi, who appears to have cerebral palsy. East Meets West has been providing therapy and tutoring, and has radically changed her life. Eight months ago when they found her, she just lay all day and night on the family’s simple bed in their two room cement home because her illiterate and isolated mother didn’t know she could do more. Now, Chi can lift a spoon of rice to her mouth and roughly voice single syllable words and do simple math with pen and paper and even take slow but certain steps, and that’s the part that was wonderfully dramatic. As we stood watching (with half the commune standing behind us in the muddy little corral, sharing the space with roosters, pigs, and a filthy smelly buffalo), Chi would grip a plastic stool with both hands on the cement porch, conjure up the control to kind of throw it forward and advance it about six inches, then lean hard on the stool and drag her mangled feet those six inches… then do it all again. Each step required about ten seconds to take. But she took it. Each was a huge struggle, but also produced a huge smile.

At the other home in Quang Nhai, we met a 23-year-old named Toan. The foundation funded corrective surgery for legs that were fused together at birth. He also has no left arm. Bizarre as it may sound, the purpose of the surgery was to amputate the legs about six inches below the knees, which obviously seems pretty radical (and I’m not sure it went so well because he lifted a dirty bandage and showed me holes in one stump from which puss is always escaping). But they amputated to allow him to walk on prosthetic legs and as we watched, with the help of a village health worker, he protected his stumps with bandages, attached the prostheses, and stood on a single crutch to take his first step. Then, with a bag slung over his shoulder, he walked with palpable pride all the way down the muddy path away from his home. This time, it was my turn to cry. I later asked and he told me, until he got these artificial legs, he had never stood before. Still, each step produces pain, apparently because the blood in the stumps isn’t circulating and, for good measure, Toan has a cancer at the base of his backbone which presses on the nerves. But from the smile on his face, those hard-won steps also produce supreme satisfaction.

For years now, as our relationship has improved and the war has receded in the minds of many on both sides, Vietnam has pressed the United States to help clean up the mess we made. Not just with compensation, but with enough money to finally contain the spread of dioxin, and eventually remove it from the ecosystem. The thinking is, some problems can’t be fixed— like Chi and Toan and the others we met— but for those that can, we should help.

Yet for years the U.S. has resisted, and here’s why: while the defects we saw seem pretty obvious, they might not be due to dioxin. Cerebral palsy, retardation, hydrocephalus, spina bifida, blindness, twisted limbs— they look the same, whether or not a war has been fought on the land where the victims live. As the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam told me in an interview, we want verifiable scientific proof that the suffering of three million people, whose problems Vietnam blames on us, is really our fault.

Vietnam cannot provide it. All they can show is what the Vietnamese Red Cross points out: that the closer you get to an airbase where Agent Orange was stored and mixed and loaded onto aircraft, the more cases of crippled, cancerous bodies and diminished minds you’ll find. Or they can make the statistical link, as the director did in the children’s ward in Ho Chi Minh City, between birth defects and hotspots.

We still are not accepting legal responsibility for any byproducts of Agent Orange, but we are doing something. We are finally giving Vietnam money for unspecified “humanitarian” help. At the urging of President Bush, Congress appropriated $3 million for both humanitarian aid and chemical mitigation. The Ford Foundation is kicking in even more. It’s only a small start, and it won’t perform miracles; it might not even prevent Agent Orange from infecting a fourth generation of victims. I say that because when I finished my interview with Kieu, the crippled woman now dying from cancer, she hobbled into her rudimentary kitchen to prepare lunch. After filling a pot with good clean bottled water to boil over a fire, she put some greens in a sieve, went behind the house, and washed them with water… from the well.

That’s what our program (scheduled to air in late January) will be about. Agent Orange, and the people in Vietnam who believe it’s responsible for their misfortunes. Do I believe it is? In some cases, no, people’s maladies probably are something that would have happened anyway. But in many cases, absolutely.

Now, let me turn a bit to Vietnam itself, because however hard the subject is, the country is fascinating.

First, food. And let me put it this way. We had some downright great meals— including probably the best sandwich I ever ate at an outdoor corner shop in Ho Chi Minh City. Actually, sandwiches, plural; they were so good, the cameraman and I went back a second time. But most days as we drove from place to place, we stopped midday at what we Americans would call some hole in the wall restaurant, where they’d bring heaping bowls of rice and scrawny pieces of chicken and lettuce and onions and mint. I almost always subscribe to the theory of “what you don’t know won’t hurt you.” But one day outside Hanoi, I went to the toilet behind the kitchen, and because it was occupied, I just stood in the kitchen and watched. I shouldn’t have. Women were squatting, cleaning out dead chickens, on the dirty wet tile floor. I don’t think it would pass the health inspector’s test. Every other questionable restaurant we went to probably is the same.

It reminded me of an experience I once had with a camera crew in Sudan, when an American diplomat reluctantly gave the crew and me a list of the three best places to eat in Khartoum (after first trying to convince us to keep eating in the hotel because there were no “best” places to eat in Khartoum). When the cameraman, who speaks Arabic, told the taxi driver to take the three of us westerners to the first place, the driver looked at the list, then turned to look at us and wagged his finger in the air and said, “La la la la la,” which means “No no no no no.” The cameraman asked us if we wanted to go ahead anyway, and for the sheer adventure of it all, we said yes. When we got to the first place on the list and took one look, the cameraman told the other two of us to stay in the taxi while he’d go check out the kitchen. When he came back, the only thing he said was, “The fish are green.” So we did the same drill when we got to the second place, and the cameraman returned with the same report. Only one place left. What we decided to do was, just take a seat (on the outdoor packed dirt floor) without inspecting the kitchen first. We had a great meal— no utensils, but tasty food— and no illnesses afterwards.

Anyway, I survived the food, and maybe more miraculously, the traffic. Paul, the cameraman, is Australian but lives in Thailand and knows Southeast Asia quite well. So he speaks with authority when he says, no place else has motorbikes like they have in Vietnam. Maybe the best way to draw the picture is, envision a sidewalk at rush hour in New York, jammed with pedestrians. Now, in your mind’s eye, turn all the people into motorbikes. The streets here are that full, and that crowded. Our government escort told us that in this nation of close to 85 million people, there are 25 million motorbikes. When you’re stuck in a traffic jam, the only thing you’re thinking is, thank goodness they’re not all cars.

The motorbikes are a sign of prosperity and by that measure, Vietnam has surely gotten prosperous. But the people will only stay prosperous if they live long enough! There are still lots of bikes on the streets too, and between the bikes and the motorbikes careening in their chaotic choreography (which means going both ways on both sides of every road), you have to weave your way through them everywhere you go.

A special feature of the motorbike culture here is the size of the loads they carry. You’ll see a motorbike with a platform across the back fender, with six full cases of beer or bottled water stacked on top. Or cases of live chickens. Or my favorite, a guy sitting behind the driver holding a piece of glass probably six feet high and four feet wide; pity the adjacent motorbike that doesn’t see it. It’s even more interesting when the driver is balancing loads like this on the motorbike’s diagonal frame between him and the handlebars.

And while in our own country you usually just see a driver on a motorbike, or maybe a driver with one passenger behind him, that’s child’s play in Vietnam. Literally! You’ll see loads of motorbikes with a child up front, standing on the floorboard or sitting on the driver’s lap as he holds the handlebars, with the mother squeezed in against the driver’s back. Even better, and not at all uncommon, add a fourth passenger, a second child, sometimes a very small baby, scrunched between the father’s back and the mother’s chest. That’s four human beings on the seat of one small motorbike. And a few times I saw five.

So the streets of Vietnam are not for the faint of heart. Neither when driving, or walking. My first night in Hanoi, I watched how pedestrians cross the street through nonstop waves of motorbikes and believe it or not, they just step out and let the bikes weave around them. What I mean is, what you don’t do is try to negotiate your way across. Do that and you’re dead. Rather, you just take each step with a wary eye but forward motion. They don’t so much go around you as past you; you’ll literally feel either the wind, or occasionally the very edge of the handlebar, brush by you.

By the way, in Vietnam the law requires helmets and just about everyone seems to observe it; I’m told there are strict fines if they don’t. But there’s something else many wear: masks, to keep the bad air out. Vietnam is in its own version of an industrial revolution, and when you’re growing and mechanizing so fast, one thing (progress) has to be a priority and another (cleanliness) has to go.

That doesn’t mean Vietnam is becoming a mini-America. For one thing, the minimum wage under the Communist government is the equivalent of about $70 a week. The hotel where we stayed in Da Nang paid its employees 80, plus whatever tips they get. But to acquire a qualified and relatively sophisticated staff, the hotel has to provide a few perks I don’t think they do in western hotels. For one thing, nice new shoes because otherwise, just about everyone only has plastic or rubber sandals. For another, fresh shirts. English classes too. But employees at the hotel pay a price for their clean cushy jobs: they’re searched coming in every day to work and anything of value— phones, jewelry, cash— is confiscated until they leave at the end of the shift…after being searched again.

We spent three days at that particular hotel— the longest I stayed anywhere on this long trip. And although at this time last year they had 100% occupancy because the hotel is right on Da Nang’s famous China Beach, right now they’re at just 15%. Russian and European tourists who used to come in droves are staying home. The economy strikes again.

What that meant at the hotel was, it was easy to notice who the other guests were. The whole time I was there, I saw three different youngish (it’s getting to the point where anyone alive looks “youngish” to me) American couples. On the last night there, when we returned from our shoot, I went to my wing of the hotel and stepped through a door that separates it from the stairway. All three couples were out in the hallway… holding brand new adopted Vietnamese babies. Two boys— Brendan and Troy— and one girl newly named Madison. I guess as she gets older in the United States she’ll grow into it.

It turns out all three couples were working with the same adoption agency, and had come about ten days earlier to choose the babies they’d bring into their families. Once they picked up their babies that day, they still had to stay ten days more to get visas to take the babies back to their new homes. But they didn’t seem to mind; you never saw happier people. Or prouder, as if those babies had just come right out of the women’s wombs.

One couple’s room was right next to mine, and their baby, one of the boys, cried all night. Normally that might be irritating (make that “would be irritating”), but I could only rejoice for the new parents and, even more so, the baby. He has a family now. And a hopeful future. Vietnam might be getting better and might be fully recovered from the war… but the U.S. is still a richer, healthier, superior place to grow up.

May your holidays be rich and healthy. And if you own any stock, may it rise as fast as mine had better do!

Greg

My husband, Bob, is a Vietnam veteran. Bob has long fought his ghosts and tried to rationalize the war experience. Unfortunately, these spirits keep creeping back from his past. Bob needed to find that elusive piece of himself that he left behind in 1969, and that led us in March, 2007, to the decision to go back — back to Vietnam, back to find who and what he left behind after his year long tour in Hoi An. That decision was the catalyst for what became the voyage of a lifetime.

I met my husband in 1971, several years after his service. We were married in 1973 and have four children, now adults. I knew some of the details of his tour of duty as a medical corpsmen in the Navy. We had often talked about him trying to find the Vietnamese medical civilians with whom he worked. We started exploring the idea of going back after the kids had grown, but excuses like the long plane ride, the weather and the language stopped us quite a few times. I had a strange intuition though that 2007 was the year Bob was supposed to return.

He enlisted in the NAVY in 1966 and volunteered to go to Vietnam. A corpsman in the Navy is combination doctor, nurse, and combat sailor. He was sent to Hoi An, about 25 miles south of China Beach, near DaNang, to serve with a military medical “Milphap” team. The team’s function was to join forces with the South Vietnamese civilian hospital in Hoi An and help the hospital personnel learn modern-day medical techniques and social values. They taught sanitation procedures and infection prevention and control, as well as other medical measures. As a result, more Vietnamese civilians who were injured in the war survived without fear of serious complications from their wounds.

Bob worked hand in hand with the nurses and doctors on the male surgical ward. His team also helped improve the hospital surroundings by painting and cleaning the hospital wards in their off-duty hours. He had to learn the Vietnamese language in order to communicate with the nurses and doctors. He became very friendly with some of the medical nurses and doctors and as a result, often was invited to their homes. His team was sent back to the US in 1969 after completing its one-year tour of duty. Before leaving, Bob took pictures of three nurses with whom he was friendly and vowed to return one day after the war to find them.

Bob also befriended a wounded orphan boy by the name of “Ky” (Pronounced Kee). Ky was brought in to the hospital one morning wounded after both his parents were killed in an attack. Ky was about three years old and after his wounds healed, he was sent to the Catholic Orphanage two blocks from Bob’s base camp. Bob supported Ky at the Orphanage for $10 a month. He visited Ky often and they became very close. Bob would bring Ky clothes and food and just hang out with him. Leaving Ky at the orphanage was heart-wrenching and to this day causes him mental turmoil not knowing what happened to him. He has never forgotten Ky and has often wondered if he survived the fall of Saigon after he left Hoi An. He has pictures of Ky and on many occasions has shown them to our children.

Today Vietnam is very civilized compared to the war-torn country of 38 years ago. I learned from the travel agent that most toilets are clean and restaurants are safe. What a relief ! We were originally booked only to go to Hoi An where Bob was stationed, but due to conflicting air schedules we had to stay one day and night in Ho Chi Min City (Saigon) before returning to the United States. This unplanned excursion became the catalyst for another meeting later in the story.

March 2007 arrived and with three suitcases in hand we were off to our destination. Never could I have imagined going to a third world country like Vietnam, yet here I was flying more than twenty hours so my husband might find some peace that had eluded him since the war. We left on a Friday night and finally arrived at a lovely resort on the Thu Bon river on Sunday night, two days later. The heat was instant; thick stagnant air intermingled with tropical flowers and foliage. Hoi An is a very small, quaint, old town. Tan Son Naut airport was a scene out of a 1975 movie. There were hundreds of people outside the main gate shouting and waving, trying to find their relatives getting off the planes. If you have transportation waiting for you, you must wade through the throngs of relatives and find your agent with the sign with your name on it. After navigating the chaos, we were in Hoi An.

It was around 8 o’ clock in the evening when we finally arrived at the resort. It boasts magnificent views of the rice paddies across the river. It is hard to believe there was ever a war here in the midst of the tropical ambience. Yet, here and there on the way in from town, we did see shreds war: a jeep here, a uniform there. Hoi An still retains much of its charm. In the midst of decaying homes and stores is a bustling business center geared towards the tourist trade. English is spoken, though at times difficult to comprehend, and the American dollar rules.

Air conditioning is sporadic since the Vietnamese infrastructure is still struggling with electrical and plumbing issues in a fast-growing tourist economy. Construction is everywhere and foreigners can now own land, to the delight of developers. Everywhere you go in Vietnam, north or south, city or country, driving or walking, requires the negotiation of a mixed flow of bicycles, motorcycles, cars, carts, and buses. Cyclists are not expected to confine themselves to any one lane and continuously weave back and forth between lanes. The motor vehicles, some of which have all the acceleration of a grocery cart, are not about to lose precious momentum by slowing down unnecessarily and they all keep going, stopping and merging with unremitting horns blaring. I felt like we were in a travel documentary, but realized that as long as our taxi didn’t do anything the rest of them couldn’t possibly anticipate, like come to a stop, they would simply weave us into their traffic pattern.

Monday morning, after a decent night’s sleep in a lovely room, I decided to relax on our balcony with my usual cup of coffee and watch the water buffalo across the river. Apparently, it was time for his morning bath. Reality check, yes, I grasp, I’m really sitting here in Vietnam, watching the rice paddies wave in the breeze with a water buffalo prancing around in the river. Bob went outside to check out the resort layout and get his morning java. Ten minutes later, Bob appears at the door of our room with one of the gardeners from our resort. “This is Hung,” he says, “I started talking to him and he may know the nurses I’m trying to find.” “Excuse me?” I say. Hung is now bowing and trying to talk English. “I see picture, I can tell” he says. In disbelief, I watch as Bob shows Hung the pictures from 1968 of the nurses at the hospital. Hung says, “I was born in 1968. I live near Hospital and Orphanage.” Hung is now talking very fast and gesturing with his hands and neither of us can understand him. He is pointing excitedly to Bob’s pictures and we are realizing he may know some of nurses. Maybe? Bob and Hung make an effort to communicate, more or less, but unsuccessfully. We finally grasp that Hung will get back to us by evening with some information on the nurses.

What was the probability of Bob meeting a stranger who barely speaks English, born the year Bob was in Vietnam, who works at the resort where we are staying, and may know the nurses Bob worked with in 1968? Eerie, to say the least.

Into Hoi An we go to see if anything has changed from what Bob remembers. What a shopper’s paradise! Hoi An town is a thriving, bustling tailors’ village. All types of clothes, purses, shoes, and scarves are made to each person’s exact specifications from exotic silks and leather. They show you hundreds of different types of materials from which you can choose your garment. Then they measure you and you come back to get the clothes within a few hours. The clothing is extremely affordable; one dollar is equal to 16,000 VD (dong). We went crazy trying to calculate things but all the merchants have calculators. I had heard the Vietnamese negotiate prices on everything, but they have taken haggling to an art form! No way can anyone get away from the “market ” without buying something. I love to haggle so I felt right at home, but it was still a unique experience.

We had lunch in town at a small restaurant on the river called “Brothers Café.” The French had occupied Vietnam for many years before the American war and I noticed the French influence in restaurants. In the middle of rundown buildings with no or little exterior décor or paint, every restaurant still had its own ambience. Every café we visited had a white linen tablecloth with linen napkins and fine china. The waiters put the napkins on your lap as in a fine French restaurant. The glasses are refilled immediately and the plates are removed instantly after you are finished. The other custom was that every dish served had charming vegetables formed into floral shapes as a garnish; a disparity to the surroundings. During our shopping expedition, we had passed the old hospital. There is now a new building with the crumbling ruins of the old hospital behind it. Passing the old hospital brought back harsh mental flashbacks for Bob; he could not go near it.

It was now around 4pm and the phone rang. It was the front desk calling. “Please meet Hung out front” the clerk says. We walked out to meet him and he motioned for us to get on the back of his motorized scooter and his friend’s scooter. Okay, should we trust this unknown gardener or not? It just seemed okay, a gut feeling. Off we go on the back of very small motorbikes with two strangers. Where we were going, I had no idea. This has been one bizarre day already and getting more wacky all the time. We arrived at a stucco house which belonged to Hung and his sister and her husband. He took us inside to meet his sister Ly (Lee) who speaks (thank goodness) better English. He parked his bike inside the home on the marble floor across from the sofa we are now sitting on. We are immediately served tea. When you are a guest in any Asian home, you are always served tea first — a very watered down version of green tea. Several hand gestures and language attempts later, it is determined that Hung knows someone from the hospital. Hung calls him on his cell phone. In Vietnam, almost everyone owns a cell phone, a TV, and a motorbike and that is basically it. There is also no carpet — only marble, tile, or wood flooring in the majority of homes. They own very little else — no refrigeration or hard-line phones or washing machines, no modern conveniences as we are accustomed to having everyday in our homes. Houses are stucco or wood and most are not painted and have little décor if any.

Roughly 15 minutes later a motorbike pulls up with an older man, I’d say in his late 50′s. Bob immediately recognizes him. Through tears and several chaotic dialogues, I identify this man as the anesthesiologist with whom my husband worked 38 years ago in the hospital. I was astounded and stunned that we had actually found this person from that long ago in a country that had gone through a complete political regime change. I was astonished that someone who had worked with the U.S. military had actually survived. Not only survived, but here he was in front of us. Wait, it gets better. Cell phones start ringing and up comes another bike with a different man and women on the back of the bike. In walks one of the floor nurses and her husband! By now, Bob’s mind is in a maze of current times and past. His emotions are on a roller coaster that wouldn’t stop. He is having a difficult time speaking what little Vietnamese he can remember, but with Hung’s sister, Ly, communication is achieved, to a degree. The nurse is crying, everyone is crying and laughing. The nurse and her husband in their late 60s are retired now after surviving a traumatic life. They had been sent to the re-education camps like many Vietnamese after the war. The anesthesiologist never married and also survived the re-education camp. The nurse and her husband have four grown children. Bob shows them the pictures from 1968 with the three nurses. “I remember,” she says, “You smoke pipe.” They laugh. “Yes, I did,” Bob says, “I still do.” Bob takes pictures to show everyone back in our town how his story unfolded and we vow to send them copies after they are developed.

Bob tries to establish if they know where the other nurses are. More chaotic discussion, hands going back and forth between the anesthesiologist and Hung. Hung tells us with a smile, “I call, I try to find by tomorrow.” He promises to see them again before we leave Hoi An. What a day! We are both worn out and back we go, on the motorbikes to the hotel. Addresses have been exchanged for future letters. I fall into bed and sleep; however, Bob is way too excited and wakes up at least every two hours.

One piece of the puzzle has been solved but the emotional distress sustained in a war never really goes away. Call it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or anything else, the pain is always just under the surface. Going back for Bob may help settle some concerns and raise other questions. I get up the next morning to find him sitting on the balcony in tears. Holding his hand was all I could do, because I have never felt the terror that comes with working a year in a war zone and trying to make sense of it after it is over. One minute he may have been helping piece together a wounded soldier and the next moment shooting at someone coming through the concertina wire with a grenade in his hand. And in his war, that grenade may have been attached to the hand of a child.

We got up the next morning and decided to go to the orphanage. Ky is still a missing piece of the puzzle. The orphanage still looks the same and Bob has to stop before entering to collect his thoughts. It is still the exact same building but now run by the Communist government. The Catholic Church is still next door and well preserved. The orphanage is rundown. There is almost no paint on the walls and almost all the rooms are open with no doors. I assume this is to let air pass through from the stifling heat. The regular children are in classes while others who are disabled with things like cerebral palsy are in assorted phases of physical therapy. Volunteers do most of the therapy. They are from various charitable organizations that send doctors and physical therapists at sporadic times of the year to help the children.

There is no formal program for disabled children — it seems as if they are tolerated. The government gives the orphanage supervisor $10 monthly for each child, which barely feeds the children. There were 53 children at the time of our visit. There is no money for repairs to the crumbling building. We have brought with us several hundred toothbrushes, which are desperately needed. We have also brought some toys and coloring books and crayons. Bob tries to communicate with the supervisor about Ky, but it does not appear there are any records from the war. We are escorted through several rooms and allowed to give the children the gifts and spend a short amount of time with them. We are allowed to take pictures of the children but cannot video the facility. We leave after 45 minutes. We come away with a very peculiar assessment of the orphanage. Bob and I just stood across the street and stared — a feeling of satisfaction eluded us. These children almost seemed like throw-a-ways.

We then walked around town a bit. The historic area has a strong communist presence and we saw guards every 4 feet or so sitting and watching everyone. The Communists are wary about anyone who may try to take away historic objects from the temples. We had lunch and then took a taxi back to the hotel. After a brief dip in the pool, we went back to the room and the phone rang again. It was the front desk: “Please meet Hung at 7pm next to Brothers Café” the woman says. Off we go again, this time in a taxi, to meet him. Next to the café, apparently oblivious to us earlier, was a historic home from the “Trung” dynasty that many charter tours visit. We are introduced to a professor of math from the university in town. He is the brother of the head nurse in my husband’s picture! We are served tea and are motioned to sit on two very hard but exquisitely carved low wood chairs. The professor speaks English very well but in sporadic clips. “She die,” he says. “She go on boat to Cambodia with our parents and die in typhoon April 1975 when Communists take over our country,” he says.

Bob is shocked and saddened. Tears begin to fall. This nurse was the head nurse with whom he had become the most friendly. The nurse had apparently tried to escape with her parents as the Communists entered Saigon — all three perished in a typhoon some time after Saigon fell in 1975 to the Communists. No bodies to bury, no grave to visit, just gone, lost at sea. Lost, like many other “Boat People” who tried to escape the horrors that awaited them after the war ended. Countless Vietnamese perished in the rough seas, fell victim to pirates as they tried to escape, or starved from lack of food, but the alternative of staying under the Communist rule was worse.

The professor tells us more details and then he allows Bob to place incense at his sister’s alter which is in the home, as an offering to her memory. All homes in Vietnam have altars to their deceased relatives and they believe their spirits live on to help the remaining family left on earth. The professor provided new insights into her story. She had married in 1970 and had a daughter in 1972. According to the professor, her husband stayed with the child when Saigon fell. The husband was sent to the re-education camp and the professor raised his niece until the father was released from war camp. The child is now a teacher at the high school in town.

Bob has now located two of the three nurses in his picture. The professor discloses to Hung where the third nurse is. She is in Saigon living with her daughter. Hung tells us he will try to find a phone number and call her. Remember, I said we were not originally supposed to go to Saigon. Our itinerary changed right before we were due to leave for our trip and we were then scheduled to stay one day and night in Saigon before we leave Vietnam to come home.

Back to the hotel and no sleep again for either of us that night. This bizarre trip is affecting my sleep pattern now. Next day, we get a phone call. It’s from the brother of the third nurse in Saigon. She lives outside of Saigon and is retired and living with her daughter. Bob agrees to call him when we get to Saigon the next day so he can bring her to our hotel or to meet somewhere. By now, the avalanche of emotions is both exhilarating and exhausting

6 a.m. Saturday — we are getting in the taxi and are amazed to suddenly see the anesthesiologist and the husband of the nurse standing at the gate. They had gotten up very early to see us off and came all the way in from town to our resort to see us leave. BIG HUGS and tears and off we go to Saigon.

Saigon! What a city — it may as well have been New York City. Saigon has lots of noise, traffic, and skyscrapers. We get through the airport scene again and are whisked off to our hotel on the Saigon River. We called and left a message for the brother of the other nurse advising him we were at the hotel. We then made a short hiatus to the local flea market in the center of town; another mish mash of assorted merchandise with lots of haggling. We came back to our hotel and up to the rooftop pool to have cocktails. Then dinner. Finally, the phone call came but it was not what Bob had expected. The brother had been delayed at work and he and his family could meet and talk with us at the hotel but he would be unable to bring his sister with him for the visit since she lived too far from town. That was fine; Bob was still amazed he had found her at all. They met us in the lobby of the hotel. There was now a string quartet playing classical music, which made the whole experience like another scene from a movie. Bob and the brother talked for about an hour while I tried to make small talk with his wife … not easy with the language barrier. The nurse’s brother then called his sister on the phone and with varying degrees of success, Bob finally was able to talk with the third nurse. It was another emotional visit but it still helped to cement the bonds after the war. This nurse and her brother have family in Massachusetts. Bob promised to call and inform them that he had spoken to their family in Saigon. Bob and his new friend exchanged emails and addresses and also supplied addresses for later communications.

We left the next morning for the long flight back to the United States.

There is great comfort in connecting the dots of the past and bringing them forward into the future. The search for one’s identity is ongoing throughout life and Bob is now better able to accept the past and move on with his future. I appreciate Bob’s struggle and why he needed to go back. I feel I have a enhanced understanding of the connections that are formed by war. I can’t escape the oddity or “karma” of how all these people came together so easily during our trip. Everything and everyone just fell into place, and it was an amazing adventure for both of us.

I was also able to see what a beautiful country Vietnam is today and Bob was able to see how far it has come since the war. I can better appreciate the wonderful country we live in and how lucky we are. We have good plumbing and electricity that we take for granted. We have refrigeration and washing machines. We have modern cooking appliances and safe food and water. Yes, I did have a slight tinge of “You should not have tasted that tea” syndrome since we had tea with Bob’s Vietnamese friends made with water from their homes. To refuse the tea would have been considered rude.

This is a story I felt compelled to recount. I feel all who read it will gain by our exotic and chaotic trip. In future generations, I’m sure, there will be other veterans replaying this scene, but in a different country. I hope they, too, will be able to rationalize their experience.