We’ve met up with the Rockland County Rotarians and veterans, and are heading down the Mekong Delta today to visit more orphanages and places where some group members spent the Vietnam War.

One woman we met last week, Kim Browne, is staying in Ho Chi Minh City to keep working at the Go Vap Orphanage. Browne was one of the last babies airlifted out as Saigon fell in 1975. Now 32, she has traveled from her home in London back to Go Vap – her own former orphanage – to teach English and work with the disabled children while trying to find information about her birth mother.

You can view Kim’s story by clicking on this YouTube link.

Stay tuned for more news from our journey with the Rockland group.

On our way back to Ho Chi Minh City today, we drove by a Catholic church in Cu Chi – probably the same parish that helped supply those rabbits my father’s unit gave to the villagers 40 years ago. The church was closed, but my father left a lit candle in the courtyard as a Veterans Day tribute to his friend Lt. Joe Lingle, the Virginia Military Institute graduate killed April 25, 1967 – a month after he and my father had arrived in Vietnam.

Joe and my father had met at the Infantry Officers Basic Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, Read more of this entry »

We spent an hour today trying to get to the former 25th Infantry Division base in Cu Chi, which our guidebook incorrectly stated we could visit. It turns out it’s all part of a Vietnamese military base now, completely closed to the public. My father took some of the red, rocky dirt home as a memento, at least.

After a tour of the Cu Chi tunnels, we discovered two memorials nearby: a large cemetery and a temple whose walls list the names of more than 44,000 Vietnamese people from the Cu Chi area killed in the “American War.”

Here are my father’s thoughts on the unexpected Veterans Day experience: Read more of this entry »

Happy Veterans Day. Thousands of Vietnam Veterans of America members, including dozens from Chapter 49 of Westchester County, are gathering at the wall memorial in Washington, D.C. for the 25th anniversary dedication today. Here in Vietnam, my father and I are heading to Cu Chi, where he was based with the 25th Infantry Division from March 1967 to March 1968, and the area where his friend and fellow Army Lt. Joe Lingle was killed a month after arriving in country.

Check back for news about our experiences there.

In the meantime, click on the audio link below to hear a memorial poem read by Jim Murphy, a South Nyack, NY man who served in Vietnam with the Air Force in 1968. Murphy wrote this to honor Alexander Roczen, a friend also killed just a few weeks after arriving in country. It was recently published in Post Traumatic Press 2007.

Download:

Ed Frank, Rockland VVA president and co-organizer of the humanitarian tour of Vietnam that my father and I are joining tomorrow night, sent me more news about the group’s activities today. (Scroll down to read his Nov. 2, 3 and 4 dispatches, posted earlier this week.)

While traveling south from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City, the group visited the Demilitarized Zone a few days ago. Here’s a photo of Ed (right) with another group member last year.

Click here to read Ed’s news from last Monday and check back for current photos and more updates from this group of Rotarians, veterans and family members. Read more of this entry »

The Rotary Club group visiting the Go Vap Orphanage with us in Ho Chi Minh City yesterday included Jennifer Weaver, a 22-year-old recent Lewis & Clark College graduate who has decided to stay on until the end of the year, while her parents and the rest of the group return to Seattle.

Jennifer will live with the orphanage’s director and work with the disabled babies and children. Click here to watch the YouTube video I’ve made of her story. (I’m having trouble uploading videos directly to this blog right now.)

We visited the Go Vap Orphanage in Ho Chi Minh City yesterday, tagging along with Son Michael Pham and his group of Seattle Rotary Club members on their humanitarian trip to deliver clothing, medicine, school supplies and treats for the children.

This little girl, Hien, stole my father’s heart.

I’m having trouble uploading videos to this blog from here, but in the meantime, click on this YouTube link to watch a scene from the orphanage.

We touched down in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City last night. (Both names are commonly used; I’ll talk more about that in a future blog post.)
We could immediately see the city is a booming metropolis, with blazing lights on jammed highways visible from the air – an inconceivable sight during the Vietnam War 40 years ago. My father was also bemused to see the remains of the fortified U-shaped walls that once protected American military aircraft, now standing vacant in the grassy field beside the runway.

Check back tomorrow to view photos and videos from our trip to an orphanage with Son Michael Pham, the Seattle Rotary Club member who led Ed Frank’s group from Rockland here last year. Pham’s group this year includes a Vietnamese British woman who was one of the last babies airlifted out in 1975 and has returned to search for her birth mother, and a recent college graduate who will spend the next two months volunteering here. The groups will merge Sunday night for dinner, when the Rockland Rotarians arrive in Ho Chi Minh City.

Soldiers in the Vietnam War were entitled to at least one Rest & Recuperation trip, usually of about one week. The most popular R&R destinations were Hawaii for the married soldiers, where their wives could meet them, or Bangkok and Hong Kong for the (cough cough) lonely (cough cough) troops.

My father made it to Singapore and Taipei for R&R, and stopped in Tokyo for a few days on his way home, but never got to see the infamous Hong Kong: until yesterday, during our layover.

But Suzie Wong isn’t there anymore; in fact, the Wan Chai district where on-leave soldiers and sailors once congregated is completely unrecognizeable, built over by skyscrapers and infill developments that have added city blocks to areas that used to be waterfront. (The British Navy is also gone, of course.)

On to Vietnam!

Spending Christmas 1967 in a war zone far from home had one perk: a visit from Bob Hope, Raquel Welch and the other entertainers in that year’s USO Show. My father was one of the lucky soldiers who got to attend the show at Cu Chi and, for a few hours, “forget that there was a war going on.”

He took this photo before the show started. Here’s one of the main attraction, taken by another soldier.

Click on the audio link below to hear more about this story.

Download:

Like Ed Frank, most Vietnam veterans I’ve talked to have interesting birthday/holiday stories about the war. Dan Griffin, executive director of Westchester County’s Vietnam Veterans of America, has a good one about a light-up Christmas tree his family sent him, which soldiers took turns looking at on Christmas Eve by going into a muddy foxhole, one by one. (The light would have alerted the Viet Cong to their position.) He gave the tree to a random helicopter pilot resupplying them on Christmas Day; decades later, he found the pilot again when the guy randomly shared the story at a veterans’ event!

My father had been in Vietnam for nine months when he “celebrated” Christmas at Cu Chi. His sister sent him three miniature Santa Claus figures and a small tree, which he put on top of his desk at the 25th Infantry Division’s Lightning Replacements School.

It wasn’t much of a Merry Christmas, of course. Click the audio link below to hear the letter my father wrote to a friend, describing his feelings about observing the holiday while fighting in the Vietnam War.

Download:

My father and I are on our way to Vietnam, where we will be meeting later this week with Ed Frank, of Congers, and his group of Rockland County veterans and Rotary Club members on a humanitarian tour of the country. (I wrote this blog post from the airport, setting it to upload while I’m flying. Ah, modern technology!)

Before his group left last week, Ed showed me photos from his 1968-69 Navy service in Vietnam. This one stuck out – it shows the sticky young sailor on board Tango boat 49 in the Mekong Delta, holding the chocolate cake Mom had lovingly shipped over for his 21st birthday.

Click the audio link below to hear Ed’s version of the story.

Download:

We’re still en route to Vietnam. It’s a very long trip, especially with the 12-hour time difference and the International Date Line, and my father has been sharing memories of times he almost didn’t make it home 40 years ago.

In March 1968, about a week before he left Vietnam, the 25th Infantry Division’s base camp at Cu Chi came under a Katyusha rocket attack. Some shrapnel struck his “hooch,” igniting his mattress as he was sleeping. After the wounded had been evacuated and the all-clear sounded, he picked these pieces of shrapnel off the ground.

Click the audio link to hear the full story.

Download:

Col. Andonios Neroulias and I are on our way to Vietnam right now, to join up with the humanitarian tour group of Rockland veterans and Rotary Club members. So far, it’s a much nicer journey than 1st Lt. Andonios Neroulias took 40 years ago, though the first leg – New York to Los Angeles – is the same. (One big difference: I’m pretty sure we just spotted Eric Dane, aka “McSteamy” from Grey’s Anatomy…)

Hopefully, we will also get a much nicer reception when we finally reach our destination. A few weeks after my father had arrived in South Vietnam in 1967, he was nearly killed by the VC during a search-and-destroy mission in a pineapple plantation. This M-16 rifle saved his life, but not the way it was necessarily supposed to… (hint: that dent in the middle didn’t come with the weapon.)

Click on the audio link below to hear the full story.

Download:

Trying to win hearts and minds in a combat zone isn’t a new phenomenon created for the current Iraq War; my father’s Army platoon tried to do the same in Vietnam.

But their useful gift for the malnourished villagers – rabbits from a Catholic Church charity, hutched in old ammunition crates – had unexpected results.

Click here to see what happened.

Download:

If you’re voting in Ramapo Town Hall today, or just passing through in the next few days, check out this painting by “Doc” Bernie Duff, a veteran who moved to Vietnam and paints scenes from the war. He donated it to the Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 333 (Rockland County) in 2005, and the VVA has loaned it to the Town of Ramapo for display in the Council Room.

This painting, “Hot LZ,” contains sand from China Beach, mixed in with the paint.

I’m meeting Duff later this week, so let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to ask him…

I’ve been checking the Vietnam weather forecast every day for the last few weeks, and had been relieved to see the temperature hovering in the 70s, in contrast to the reports from last year’s humanitarian tour group from Rockland County about their muggy experience.

Well, it turns out I’ve been foiled by the 12-hour time difference; every afternoon, I’ve been checking Ho Chi Minh City’s temperature … at 2 a.m. During the day, it’s in the 90s!

At least now my luggage will be lighter! OK, back to packing…

Ed Frank, Rockland VVA president and co-organizer of the humanitarian tour of Vietnam that my father and I are joining later this week, sent me some news about the group’s activities yesterday. (Scroll down to read his Nov. 2 and 3 dispatches, posted yesterday.)

The group is visiting the Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone and the Khe Sanh battlefield today. Here’s a picture of some of the travelers standing on the red clay of the battlefield last year; Ed is holding Jack Corbett’s West Dickens Avenue, which tells of the 1968 siege there.

Click here to read Ed’s news from Sunday and check back for more updates from this group of Rotarians, veterans and family members. Read more of this entry »

Great news from Ed Frank, president of Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 333, on what the Spring Valley Rotary Club’s humanitarian tour group has been up to in Vietnam so far. The Rotarians, veterans and family members are heading south from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City, where my father and I will join them next week.

So far, they’ve visited orphanages and schools in Hanoi and Haiphong. Here’s a photo of Ed at one of the orphanages during last year’s trip. (No photos from this year’s group yet – stay tuned.)

Click below to read Ed’s dispatches from Nov. 2 and 3. I’ll post the next one tomorrow.

I’m told American dollars are widely accepted in Vietnam. That’s a relief; we’re leaving in a few days, and I haven’t had time to try to get any Vietnamese currency (dong).

Last time my father was there, he used neither dollars nor dongs. Instead, troops carried Military Payment Certificates, which look like Monopoly money:

“American soldiers in Vietnam were paid with MPCs rather than actual dollars in order to prevent black market and money laundering activities,” he explains. “These notes were used just like regular dollars at the PX, officer’s and enlisted men’s clubs. Upon leaving Vietnam, a soldier turned in his MPCs and got regular dollars to go back home.”

From Betty Grable to Jessica Simpson, pin-up girls have been putting smiles on soldiers’ faces since before World War II.

During the Vietnam War, while other guys drooled over images of Ann-Margret and Raquel Welch, my good Greek father fixed his gaze on Corinna Tsopei, Miss Universe 1964. (Measurements: 36-22-36.)

Tsopei appeared a handful of movies after winning her big crown, and this promotional photo in The Army Reporter caught my father’s eye.

According to Wikipedia and IMDb, she’s now 63 and married to Freddie Fields, an agent and producer. My father has gotten over it – so he says. (He saved the pin-ups…) Click below to hear the full story.

Download:

As promised, here’s the video of my father reading one of the first letters he sent home—New York, NY—during the Vietnam War, dated April 1, 1967. (Scroll down to last night’s post for more details.)

Download:

“It’s a strange feeling and very hard to get accustomed to the idea that there’s a war going on, but I have convinced myself to keep my eyes open and my gun ready.”

Those are the closing lines of one of my father’s first letters home during his service in Vietnam, written April 1, 1967 on the back of this large military map of the country.

Click below to hear him read the letter. I will post a video version tomorrow.

Download:

Apocalypse Now, Rambo and other popular movies about the Vietnam War don’t show the real thing, according to my father and the other veterans I’ve talked to lately. Instead, they’ve given me a long list of books to read, supplemented by suggestions from people who have recently traveled to Vietnam.

Nearly everyone’s list includes The Girl in the Picture – the story of Kim Phuc, the burning girl famously photographed in 1972.

I’ve also read The Father of All Things by Tom Bissell (the author wrote about returning to Vietnam with his father, a former marine); If I Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O’Brien (I read The Things They Carried in high school, then saw him read from it at Cornell a few years later); and Letters from Vietnam. There are plenty of books I haven’t had a chance to read – including Red Thunder Tropic Lightning by Eric Bergerud, my father’s Read more of this entry »