Karen Hall

Vietnam. It almost goes hand in hand with the lives of today’s older baby boomers. It was traumatic for us all, but none more than the servicemen and women who were there. Now-retired police officer Bob Hall is one of them, and only last year did he figure out how to soften the long-festering trauma of the war. With the help of his wife Karen, who wrote this story.

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.
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