After the Flag Has Been Folded (35 page)

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.”

 

A
NOTHER 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
P
ETER
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 her 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:

Many American soldiers wanted to marry Peter's mother, to take her to the land of the brave and the free. “She was young, thirty-five,” Peter said. “And very beautiful. Americans liked her.” But she was not interested in moving to America with any of the strong soldiers who offered to take care of her and her children.

Peter's mother kept a picture of his father, decked out in his ARVN uniform, above the home altar, and the mandatory photo of Ho Chi Minh, or as the nationalists call him, “Uncle Ho.”