Da Nang, Vietnam – Richard Brown did not plan to cry on the side of the Vietnamese road. He returned to Da Nang, where he once loaded the bomb bombed for goals across Vietnam, anger, hatred, perhaps expecting violence. Instead, during his first week, a local motorbike driver held his hand, looked at him in the eye and said: “I want to thank you and your country to send so many boys here to come here and help my country to be free.”
Then the man left, left Richard alone on the roadside to cry.
“I had one experience after another,” Richard told me, sitting near the old Chu Lai Airbase, where he spent a year as a child from Boston-5’4 “, 115 pounds, a former Hels Angills Drug-Runar tried to dodge the jail by signing up with the Marine.
On his first day in Vietnam during the war, he went away after drinking alcohol with some new friends. “Then on the way, someone draws a joint,” he said. “And this is the last thing I remember until I met the plane to come home.”
He spent his visit as a “bomb hosor”, loading F -4 with Neepalum and Rocket. “We were more dangerous to ourselves, which Vietnamese could throw on us.”
When the war ended, Richard went home, but no one asked him about it. “Nobody wanted to know how it was.” He became an aircraft mechanic, an FAA supervisor, and then, decades later, found himself standing at the window of the Vietnamese consulate in California “with fear in my heart,” he said. “I thought I would be rejected or shouted … but I filled the visa application with my unstable hand and pasted it through the window. For Rs 25, I got a week later.”
Hanoi’s journey came immediately after the reunion day, the victory ceremony of Vietnam which is sometimes referred to as the aggression of the US war. Red flags and old slogans were everywhere. Some people almost apologized about it, as if they misbehaved to remind me of my country’s terrible defeat. American likes our victory – Normandi, Desert Storm. The war we lose, we bury. But for a few hundred people, from Hanoi to Da Nang Ho Chi Minh City was scattered, this was not enough. So they came back.
Da Nang makes sense for many of these men. This was often his first and last stop in Vietnam – the place he landed and flew out. Thousands of American giants have returned since the 1990s, mostly to see places where they fought once. A few hundred stopped. DA NANG – Once a major airbase, now a coastal cities with Kondos, coffee shops and ancient beaches – continuously ranks among the most living cities in Vietnam. It holds a symbolic weight: for the agent orange for a hub, bomb and final goodbye.
Richard says that he feels more here at home as much as he did in Boston. Over the years, he worked in Ho Chi Minh City (East Sigon), where South Vietnamese considered him as a hero, but in Hanoi – consultation for Vietnam Airlines – his maritime past earned him some cold stars. “When he came to know that I was an experienced, F — I don’t need to bombing from these people, I got some cold reception,” he said.
It was a former North Vietnamese Air Force pilot, who broke the obstacles. “We were not opposed to. We were only wearing different uniforms, taking orders from different A-Hols,” he said.
(Credit: Daniel allot)
Gordi Thomas also returned. When he went home from war in 1972, America was done with people like him. “We didn’t learn to talk about it,” he said. “I was canceled by everything because I fought in Vietnam. It is the same as people are canceled to support Trump. … It is understandable that you have no moral justification.”
Decades later, long after receiving his experienced disability rating, he sold his house outside Nashville, cash in his delta mile and flew back to Da Nang in the first grade – staying cheap, incense, and chasing my khe beach (China Beach), where Marines descended once. Gordi says that living here was forced to withstand the “moral injury” of war – the belief that an American life was more than a Vietnamese.
“Come here was the last treatment point of my PTSD,” he told me. Now he gives part of his pension to schools and poor families in his wife’s hometown. He said, “So this is the United States government government, which has sent me here in the first place … Now every month I give enough money tax that I can take very little amount and give it to the people here,” he said. “It is very helpful for them and is appreciated.”
Like Richard, Vietnamese never knew during the Gordi war – and like Richard, he met his Vietnamese wife and married from here, only decades later.
The story of Matt Keenan is about incomplete business. He came to Vietnam in Vietnam in 1971 to help in the “Vietnam” war. In 2014, back to New York, he received a diagnosis of cancer tied to agent Orange. “I was not surprised,” he said. “But I wanted to come back and see how those who were exposed were living.”
He found his objective in the Da Nang Association for the victims of Age agent Orange. He was born a few decades later after a few decades of spraying with disabled children. “They have become like my extended family,” he said. “The beach is good, but this is not my priority. I have my whole life in Vietnam.” He has participated in full repatriation ceremonies for the remains of soldiers. Even he stood with President Biden during one, handing over a former Vietnamese soldier back to the diary he had lost 50 years ago. Keenan also met his wife and married from here.
Before leaving Hanoi, I visited Old Hoa Lo Jail – “Hanoi Hilton.” Its yellow walls once kept the Vietnamese revolutionaries under the French. The Vietnam War Wing presents his own well -organized version: the pictures of American Pows smiling, playing basketball, opening the care package – a careful cuisation of the story.
(Credit: Ruby Guyen)
Not far, in a modest house in West Hanoi, I met NGO NGOC Duong. Through a translator, he told me that he joined the Northern Vietnamese army at the age of 18 and fought as a reconnaissance soldier for 16 years – crawling in enemy areas for intelligence, survived on roasted cassava in bamboo tubes.
He described the day when the American helicopters hunted them through a dense forest for miles, as he used to creep in Foxhole, and ran again. “They had aircraft, bombs, the most advanced weapons,” he said. “But in the end … they could not kill me.”
His daughter was born with a heritage of agent Orange, with deaf and intellectual disabilities. Nevertheless, he sees American soldiers, like himself, as a victim of war. “They did not want to attack another country, but due to circumstances and orders, we ended on the opposite sides,” he said. “In the battlefield, we were enemies – but outside the war, they are people like us, with families, dreams and their pain.”
Therefore, even today – after all losses and pain – he warmly welcomes American veterans. He hopes to send hands with them, to talk, become friends, and most importantly, to send a message: “Save life. Save peace.”
All four men became emotional while narrating their stories. The three Americans arrived in their hands with bombs and rifles – or bombs loaded the jet wings. Now, they return with pension checks, agents Orange Scars and local wives. They stand barefoot on the same sand that they were once in the pit, in a country – for reasons they are still finding out – seems more than the house than the house.
Daniel Allot is the author of the former Opinion Editor of The Hill and “.Trump on the street in America: a visit in the heart of a divided country,
