Return to Vietnam

Why I Wrote This Book: Return to Vietnam

This is a story about memories.

My thirteen months in Vietnam were merely a fragment of my life, yet those few months have never stopped speaking to me. For more than fifty years, they whispered through my dreams, thoughts, and memories.

The truth is that trauma operates on its own clock. For some, the hands of that clock remain frozen for a few painful years; for others, they never move again.

In the crucible of combat, a soldier is trained to focus entirely on survival, orders, and the immediate presence of danger and duty. But against the brutal backdrop of war, I allowed myself to care.

I found refuge at an orphanage in My Tho. To me, those children were never simply part of the wartime scenery. They became human beings whose smiles and presence anchored my soul.

Then, because of a decision I made—a moment when I was forced to choose, yet truly had no choice at all—they died.

When the dust settled, I did what so many compassionate people mistakenly do after surviving the unthinkable: I chained myself to a ghost, making myself entirely responsible for a tragedy I did not create.

I handed down my own verdict. I resolved never to father children, imposing upon myself a lifelong sentence of self-punishment. Looking back from the perspective of today, it is a decision I carry with deep and irreversible regret.

Decades passed.

Then an unexpected doorway opened when my cousin, Greg, offered me a chance to return to Vietnam.

The central heartbeat of my book lies in the jarring contrast between the Vietnam anchored in my trauma and the country I stepped into in 2019.

For half a century, the landscape in my mind had remained frozen in a state of perpetual violence. But the country I returned to was vividly alive—filled with ordinary families, the aroma of food, rich conversation, curiosity, and boundless generosity.

I went looking for threats, but I was met with open arms.

Today, the Mekong Delta still holds the ghostly echoes of military convoys, even as it flows with breathtaking modern beauty. Roads that once held a suffocating terror now carry the rhythm of everyday traffic.

Most profound of all, men who were once categorized strictly as “the enemy” now sit directly across from you—aging human beings who survived the exact same terrible chapter of history, just from the opposite side of the line.

I will never forget my meeting with a former Viet Cong soldier.

Fifty years earlier, the rules of our youth would have commanded us to view each other through the crosshairs of a weapon. A lifetime later, the weapons were gone. There were just two old men, looking at each other.

War forces people into rigid, dehumanizing categories because survival leaves no alternative: ally, enemy, friend, hostile. Peace is what finally gives us permission to be human again.

Yet the true spine of this narrative is a singular, agonizing mission: the search for that orphanage.

It was a journey back to the epicenter of the most harrowing and defining moment of my existence. Driven by a gripping, restless emotion, I traveled thousands of miles across the globe, desperately chasing a physical structure that could anchor the memory that had haunted my entire adult life.

When I finally arrived, I was met with a devastating silence.

The orphanage was gone. In its place stood a school.

In the quiet heartbreak of that discovery, the truth finally caught up with me. In the back of my mind, I knew I could never find what I was originally looking for.

What I actually needed wasn’t a building.

I needed a witness.

That was when I met Sister Renee—the last living nun who had endured that war at the same time and in the same place.

A real person. A living soul who could look into my eyes and say, “Yes. I remember, too.”

For fifty years, I had carried the weight of those children entirely alone inside my own mind. Then, in an instant, I was standing before a woman who belonged to that exact world, who knew that very orphanage, and who understood the ghosts I had spent a lifetime trying to placate.

It offered a rare, sacred kind of healing that happens when your deepest pain is finally seen and validated by another.

When Sister Renee prayed over me, it wasn’t a magical cure that instantly erased fifty years of PTSD. It was something far subtler, and infinitely more profound.

For the first time in my life, someone inextricably linked to that fateful place gave me permission to stop sentencing myself.

Decades of held-back tears finally fell.

I had survived the war, but a damaged part of my soul still believed that my survival required a lifetime of punishment. Sister Renee stepped into the darkness and broke that cycle.

She could not bring those children back, and neither could I. We could not rewrite the tragedy of 1967.

But when she met the man who had been carrying those children in his heart for half a century, she reminded me of a vital truth:

Love and grief do not have to become a life sentence of guilt.

My book, Return to Vietnam, is the raw, unflinching documentary of this extraordinary journey.

From the moment I left my home in Florida to the moment I stepped back across my threshold, the journey became so much bigger than simply searching for an orphanage.

It lives in the people who altered my perspective along the way.

It lives in that Viet Cong soldier.

It lives in the young schoolgirl who asked me about the war and then looked at me with deep sincerity to thank me for my service—a moment that shattered the agonizing memory of returning to my own country decades ago, only to have eggs thrown at me while being branded a baby killer.

These encounters reminded me that time can change countries, heal divisions, and create opportunities for understanding that once seemed impossible.

This journey back to Vietnam didn’t just change me.

It probably saved my life.

And that is exactly why this story had to be written.

This book is a beacon for the veteran who wakes up shivering at three in the morning, convinced he is the only soul left on Earth still fighting a fifty-year-old war.

It is for the wife who sits in the quiet, wondering why a massive part of her husband’s life remains locked behind an unbreakable wall of silence.

It is for the child who spent a lifetime trying to reach an emotionally distant father.

And it is for anyone carrying the suffocating weight of survivor’s guilt, from any circumstance under the sun.

If my journey can help even one person realize that they are not alone, that their pain deserves to be acknowledged, and that they do not have to spend the rest of their life punishing themselves for the past, then telling this story has been worth it.

Sometimes, the journey we take to find answers leads us somewhere unexpected. We may set out to find a place, a person, or a memory, only to discover that what we truly need is understanding, forgiveness, and the courage to keep living.

We cannot change the past. We cannot bring back those we have lost. But perhaps we can learn to carry our memories differently—not as chains that bind us to yesterday, but as reminders of the humanity that survives even the darkest chapters of our lives.

This journey has touched many, and its soul is perfectly reflected in a timeless verse of Scripture:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” — Matthew 11:28

Amen. 🙏