This is the story of the last two days of my search for the exact spot where my brother died in the Vietnam war some thirty two years ago. Every quote is exactly right. Every thought I recount is just the way it went through my mind. Indeed, the reason I wrote all this down was for me. So that I would remember what happened, the way it happened. After all, most of it will eventually fade from memory just like everything else. But the other reason is because my going there adds one more drop to that sea which is the overall story of the war. The splash may have ended in 1975, but as long as there are people around who experienced or were affected by it, there are still ripples on the pond.
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"Part One: The Letter," is an E-mail I sent to "Doc" Daugherty on April 3rd, 2001. Doc is one of the helicopter gunship pilots who served with my brother, Vinnie, in Vietnam in the late sixties. He and several other surviving pilots who all flew together around that time, heard of my search to find the exact spot where my brother's gunship crashed into a river near of Saigon. All four men in the helicopter were killed, so there has never been anyone left to tell exactly what happened. For thirty two years I tried from time to time to find any information I could about the
last few moments of those men's lives, with no success. In 1999 I began a twenty month assignment with Disney in Tokyo. Less than one week before finishing that assignment and leaving Japan to travel in China and Vietnam, I began receiving E-mails from one, then another, then another of these men. I don't know how, but one of them had heard about my search for
information on the crash and the location of the site, and because they have kept their friendships together through all these years, it was almost like an "alarm" went off. The next thing I knew, I was receiving E-mails from at least half a dozen men who's names I had never heard before, all talking back and forth between themselves by phone and computer, working together to figure out from thirty two year old information, how to get me to the exact spot where my brother died. One of them even remembered that day, and told me a first hand story about what happened, that I and my family never knew. 

I had not wanted to just fly straight to Saigon, hire a car and go directly to the site. I wanted to make it, for lack of a better word, a "pilgrimage." To spend time in the country first. To get "the feel" of the place. To try and understand what it must have been like to be here then. All for a better level of understanding. After all, going to this site for the "first" time, was only going to happen "one" time. So I spent four months working my way through China and down Vietnam towards Saigon. That lead time turned out to be a good thing, as it was no easy task to convert
coordinates from one old military system to another new civilian system. But in the end, only about a week before I was going to arrive in Saigon, I received a fax of a section of map with an "X" on it, and written directions as to how to get to the river that "X" was floating on.

In the letter, my reference to "lighters" concerns the Zippo cigarette lighters that were (and are) popular with the men who spent time in Vietnam. There has become a market for these in the States among Veterans and military memorabilia collectors. Doc had suggested I buy the ones I'd seen with
individual American's names engraved on them and try to return them to their owners, or in the cases where they might have been taken off the bodies of dead American soldiers, to their surviving families. The "dog tags" were those that a very poor Vietnamese man tried to sell me at the site of our former US Marine base at Khe Shan, near the DMZ, on the day I visited there.
The locals still dig up whatever they can find, and try to sell it to anyone who shows up at the small, lonely, one room museum in the middle of what is now a coffee plantation. Then there are the "maps." These are actual US Military, theater-of-operations maps that were used throughout the country during the war. Vietnam's paranoid government still sometimes tends to freak out at the idea of foreigners from free, democratic, western, anti-communist countries walking around with highly detailed military maps of their part of the sandbox! (Even if they ARE thirty five years old! Like anybody gives a shit!) So what I'm referring to in the letter is the fact that I have been told by more than one long term ex-pat living here in Saigon, I could be "detained" at the airport if they find those maps in my stuff. Maybe, maybe not. You can't predict those things that accurately.

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Part One: The Letter


Doc, (if I may?)

I'm so glad to hear from you. Thanks for writing, and thank you for all your time, effort and concern on my family's behalf. Without all the help I have recieved from you guys, I would have had no choice but to come away from this whole sojourn feeling it was all for nothing. I don't even WANT to think about how bad I would have felt. BUT! Thanks to you, Ray, Ken, Roger and the others, I got to within about 400 yards of Vinnie's crash site yesterday. It was getting dark and I had to quit and ride that motorcycle all the way back into Saigon at night. I don't know if you've ridden a bike around Saigon (or practically anywhere else in Vietnam) in the last few years (since everyone in the entire country has gotten one!) but let me tell you, it's every man (woman, kid, girl, child) for himself! In the first dozen days I was in Saigon, I came across two, probably fatal motorbike vs. truck "grudge matches" (the trucks won), and two bad motorbike-only bouts.
(Those looked like draws.) I'll be going back out there tomorrow. (Day time only!) I saw some little, old, piece-of-shit boats tied up at a hut/store (you know the visual) a couple of kilometers away from the site. I'll try to hire one.

Thanks for the insight into the lighters. I thought about that. The same way I thought about buying all those dog tags from that guy at Khe Shan that day and trying to return those. But several different points of view kept colliding in my brain, and I couldn't see a clear "do this!" So I didn't buy them. I'll take another look at the lighters. The only thing that makes me hesitate is the fact that I have those US Army maps you guys used, of the area where Vinnie crashed. Those don't show up on the airport x-ray machine, whereas metal lighters will. I'm sure they look for things like those lighters. I don't want to give them any reason to search my pack. Those maps are important to me. But, your point is noted.

The following is a letter I wrote to a Japanese friend last night. It will bring you up to the minute on my search. Feel free to forward it on to whomever you like. (Actually, her name is Yoko, not "Muchacha." Also, I feel bad about not going back out there today like I told the woman/girl
(below) I would. But I just couldn't muster the juice this morning.)




Muchacha,

I did not find the site today, but I know I got to within 400 meters. I will go back tomorrow and resume where I left off. Today was the long, hard part. Tomorrow should be a lot simpler.

I got pulled over twice this morning by the communist-police-mafia before I ever got out of downtown Saigon. The first two thugs wanted 100,000 Dong (about $6.50), cash on the spot. I said "no, write me an official ticket, and I will take it down to the police station and pay it there, and get a reciept." Then he lowered it to 50,000! I don't think these guys are use to having anyone tell them "NO!" I paid it, laughed and left. Then, two hundred meters down the same street, two more of them pulled me over again! These two said I had run a red light. (Actually, I think I did, but I wasn't about to admit it!) So while one of them was repeatedly raising his two foot long night stick as if to hit a poor looking middle aged man in rags, bullying him over something to do with his tattered old bicycle, I basically argued with the other one in English (which he did not understand, but being Italian, my tone of voice was VERY understandable), and when they
saw my American passport with stamps from all over Asia in it (and I think my birth year of 1951), they whispered quietly between themselves, and then let me go. I'm glad, too. Because while I was arguing with the one and watching the other, I decided I wasn't going to let either one of them get away with raising a club at me. JERKS! Then I spent the rest of the day getting out to and around the countryside, and asking people who don't speak or understand a word of English, where this or that road, village, river, or ferry was. By late afternoon it still wasn't going well. Then, just at the moment when I was at my lowest ebb, when I was beginning to realize I wasn't
going to find the site today, and knew I was not in the right place or on the right road, and it was going to be dark an hour before I would get back to Saigon, and I would have to ride that motorcycle at night on those deadly roads (which is a letter in itself!), and was struggling to pull my heavy motorcycle out of the ditch I had just crashed it into (!), this beautiful young Vietnamese woman (girl really) I had asked directions from a kilometer back down the road, came and found me. She was looking for me. She wanted to make sure she had understood what I was asking her, where I wanted to go, that I was OK. Well, she hadn't, and I wasn't! So after she helped me pull my bike out of the ditch (all 82 pounds of her!), and we did some more "talking" (this time with a translating dictionary), she led me to the village I was looking for. Then she took me to her house (in that same village), where she, her mother, and about six equally beautiful younger sisters (YEOW!) all had tea. I sat there, about a mile from where Vinnie died, drinking tea with some of the nicest, poorest people you could ever meet. She is going to wait for me tomorrow, and help me again. As I followed her on our bikes, I wondered if she was a angel. It was then that I realized angels are just normal people who sometimes do an angelic thing.
It's just that some people do those kinds of things more often than others, and some never do them at all. I DO think, however, that OCCASIONALLY that rare person actually DOES run into a real one.

It's late. I'm fried. I'm done for tonight.

Talk to you later,

Me

Thanks Doc, talk to you later.

David
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Part Two: April 4th, 2001

Today, in a small, wooden, long tail, Vietnamese boat, I crossed the spot where my brother's helicopter gunship crashed into the Rach Ong Keo River on the day I graduated from high school in 1969. I occupied the same space. Today a circle closed, a ghost vanished, a message was received. Tonight, I feel more than OK. Tonight, nothing can touch me.

Today, I also met "Cookie." A sixty year old, former South Vietnamese soldier from 1961 until the end of the war in 1975. His official title was "interpreter," but I know he was a lot more than that. He worked with our US Special Forces Rangers. He even used the term "Delta Force." I don't know much about it, but I DO know that the kinds of missions and operations those guys went on, is the stuff of "action" movies. Cookie received a Silver Star. For what, I don't know. Maybe some day I'll ask him. But I do know that he operated along the Cambodian border. Which probably means he was IN Cambodia many times. After the war he was caught twice while trying to escape the country. He was put in prison both times. The first time, he escaped. The second time, he served two years. He's now approaching retirement from a career in a specific kind of manufacturing,
import and export field. (I have written several paragraphs about Cookie, but due to the very real level of paranoia that still exists in this throw-back regime, I have thought better of putting it out into the digital "ethers." Wonderful people like Cookie and his family can still get persecuted here for basically nothing!) I met him, not in a crowded bar or restaurant in Saigon, on a train, or in an airport waiting lounge. I met him in the middle of nowhere, a mile from where my brother died, while I was standing in a vast, treeless expanse of rice fields, staring at an eight foot statue of the Virgin Mary.

_________________________________________________________________
The Day:

After Monday, I took a closer look at the US Army maps of the Nho'n Trach area that I had found at a market in Saigon. As it turned out, I was both right AND wrong in my belief that I had gotten to within four hundred meters of the crash site. Right about getting to within four hundred meters, but wrong about where I was when that happened. I was actually closest at the point where I turned around. Where I dumped the bike, and little Nhung, the woman/girl found me. Not when I was a kilometer back up the road, where I thought it was. So using a ruler I made out of paper, I measured distances from Pagoda to Pagoda to the spot along the dirt road from which, as near as I could figure, the crash site would be perpendicular. I thought if all else failed, I could at least abandon the motorcycle and, using my compass, walk a straight line through the woods until I hit the river. I even wondered, and I don't think "unreasonably," if there might still be unexploded mines out there in the forest. People and buffalos are still stepping on them, and they DID crash just after dropping smoke on a bunker. But, at least so far, that concern has turned out to be
unnecessary. So at nine AM, armed with my maps, a full tank of gas, and wearing the best clothes I have with me (After all, it was going to be a special day. I felt like I was going to church.), I left the hotel and dove into the mechanized madness of Saigon's motorized flesh-and-metal streets.

An hour and a half later, I was back at the fork in the road from which I had taken my measurements the night before. From here go two point six kilometers to a Pagoda on the right. It took three passes before I finally found the low, crumpled, overgrown ruins and tombs at two point seven. Now, three point eight to a Pagoda on the left. Ray Charles couldn't have missed this one! Can you say "bright?" Reset the odometer, and one point eight to the spot in the road. At just about one point eight, there was a small, perfectly straight, dirt road, running out to the south at a ninety degree angle towards where I knew the river was. (Strange feeling number one.) I turned and started out across a square mile of open rice fields towards the low line of trees on the horizon thinking, "it can't be this easy!" Now, I usually like being right. However, not always! Because, of course, less than a third of the way to the tree line, the two rut road turned into a one rut path, and two hundred yards later it stopped altogether. But then, straight in front of me, standing alone, fifty yards out in the open rice paddy, dead in line with the road, was an eight foot tall statue of the
Madonna. She was exactly between me and where I had figured the site to be, marking the location on the horizon, her body breaking the low band of trees a thousand yards behind her. When I turned off the engine, there was nothing but the silence, the stillness, and the heat. And as I stood there in that huge open space that was mostly sky, I saw in my mind's eye, the image of a  helicopter, tiny in the distance, circling above her head, and I almost thought I could hear it's faint thumping just above the quiet.

(Strange feeling number two.) Exchanging smiles with the middle aged Vietnamese woman in black pajamas and conical hat, bending to some task ten feet away from me in the water filled rice paddy, I half expected her to speak to me in plain, central Florida English, saying something profound
about life, truth, or death. But she never did. I guess she was only human after all. A few minutes later she left, and I was alone. By now my hopes were beginning to ebb under the weight of my sinking confidence. How was I going to get around this vast, open plain to the distant trees? And even if I could, I knew I would never be able to see this little dirt road to line up on. Oh well, I'll just have to figure something else out, that's all.

But first, I'll take a picture. A minute later, while setting up my camera, I turned to the sound of an approaching motorbike. It carried a thin Vietnamese man, nicely dressed in a light blue shirt, brown slacks, and polished wingtips. He seemed out of place here. Too clean. I turned back to my camera as the motorbike stopped a few yards behind me. The man turned off the engine, and for a moment all was still again. Then, I heard a voice in perfect English say, "Looking for something? Can I help you?" And without looking up from my camera, I smiled, shook my head, and while thinking the
words, "Yes, I believe maybe you're suppose to," I said the words, "Yes, I think maybe you can."

At that moment I knew everything would be OK. That I was going to get there one way or another. That I was being "shown," and from here on all I had to do was "follow." So I told him what I was looking for, and a minute later we were pouring over my maps as if we had been on this trip
together the whole time. He said he had a friend living nearby who could help, and while we were looking and pointing here and there, he explained that he and his wife were on their way to a piece of property they were buying, but couldn't find the right road. I mentioned the one where I had
dumped my bike and that it was just a little farther up ahead. So we tubed the maps, rode back out to where his wife and her two sisters had been waiting under a tree, and morphed into an eight wheel caravan, Cookie on point. Just past the vast rice field and well before "my" road, he turned
to the south on a narrow, red, dirt track, and for the next three kilometers, their whining little "rice burners" and my deep throated motorcycle raced along the tops of narrow rice paddy dikes, over two foot wide bamboo bridges, and through pineapple fields and fruit orchards on canopied trails barely wider than our handlebars, while leafy branches slapped at our faces and hands. I remember trying to fix landmarks in my mind so I could find my way back out, but then giving up and thinking
"follow, just follow." As I said earlier, I like being right. Because a few minutes later, up ahead through the trees, I saw water. I knew it was the river. For a few seconds my chest felt tight, and I don't think I took a breath. There it was!

We were heading straight for the it. Then fifteen feet before the edge (at the exact spot where I later learned there had been a VC machine gun bunker), the trail, and we, took a hard right. We sped along the bank. The orchard on our right, and a row of coconut palms and the river on our left. A hundred yards later we came up on a small, open air, thatched roof structure built half out over the water. Cookie turned in and stopped, with me right behind him. As I shut off the engine, I noticed a short but strong looking shoeless Vietnamese man in long dark pants and white shirt, standing
by a table in the middle of the hut's wide planked floor, smiling. There were three hammocks strung in the shade of this third world gazebo, and behind everything was the backdrop of a sun washed tropical river. THE river!

For a minute there was nothing but that image, and the "sandy" sound of a thousand palm fronds sliding against each other in the breeze.

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Meet Mr. Bai.

In the five days I've spent with Mr. Bai (as of this writing), neither one of us has spoken two words in the other one's language. But I truly believe that we know each other on a level that normally takes two people a long time to achieve. (He calls me "anh em," which in Vietnamese means
"brother.") In six months I'll be fifty. I've lived, traveled or worked in every state but Alaska, and about twenty five foreign countries. I've met a few people in that time. But in all of it, I know there hasn't been anyone who surpasses Mr. Bai and his wife in terms of simple goodness. I have both
read and heard it said several times during my two and a half months of travels through Vietnam, that the people here are "so friendly" because they are "so poor." Well I don't know about that. I've seen plenty of very poor people I wouldn't turn my back on. Especially in the cities! But I have to admit that in my experience, it's often the very poor people, living very simple lives, in very rural settings, who will go the farthest out of their way and share the largest percentage of what they have to help you. Mr. Bai and his family certainly support that observation.

Cookie had brought me to his friend's house. I don't think he planned to go there, because we were well over a kilometer away from the property he was buying. He had taken me there so I could get help. (By now I almost feel as though I'm being "carried" to the site.)

After some bilingual introductions and some Vietnamese-only small talk, I could tell Cookie was explaining "me" to Mr. Bai. I always know when whoever is translating gets to the part about my brother being killed in the war. The smile on the other person's face instantly turns to a look of sad
recognition. As if hearing of my family's loss reminds them of their own. (About three million people from this very small country died in what are known here as the French and American Wars. It's hard to imagine anyone over the age of thirty five who didn't lose somebody.) So a minute later the maps had reappeared, and once again fingers and faces were pointing this way and that, and soon the decision was made that, after tea, we would all overload a small, wooden, long tailed boat and head up the river.

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Message Received:

On April 4th I wrote that " a circle had closed, a ghost was gone, and a message had been received." It was while riding in the boat that I got the message.

When I first realized the plan was for ALL of us go together, I thought "no, that's not how it's suppose to happen, this isn't a picnic! I'm going to where my brother died!" I had always pictured myself being alone, or maybe with one guide when I finally reached the site. Not as just another
character in a surreal Vietnamese version of a Renoir "good times in Paris" painting! (Complete with umbrella!) For a minute I almost didn't get on the boat. But then I remembered "follow, just follow," and I climbed in. Mr. Bai's son (looking very Vietnamese in his conical hat), pulled the rope
crank, the little engine coughed to life, and we were off. And as I was slowly chugging my way up to the spot where the biggest life-changing tragedy of four families occurred, with six people I had just met, all pointing, talking and laughing as if this was just another normal day, just another fun outing, I wondered why they felt the need to accompany me on this trip. Didn't they realize how personal this was? And I felt the beginning of a disappointment I knew I'd never get over, start to creep in.

After all this time, I was going to have to "settle" for something far short of what I wanted it to be. I even wanted to apologize to Vinnie. Say I was sorry I blew our time together right here at the end. And then it started to hit me. It WAS just another normal day and fun outing for these folks.
They were doing just what they were suppose to be doing, living! And what about me? I had not come here to find death. I had come here to get past something in order to live better. Hadn't I? Wasn't I here to find answers? Lose some questions? Lighten the load? Hell yes! And right there in front of me was the counter-balance to the dark side of this place. Life! These were people looking to find a special place to start a new chapter in theirs. And I realized on a deeper level than I ever had before, that there's a time for both ( turn, turn, turn). I'm sure that Vinnie and the others are handling their after-life just fine. I need to handle my existing life as well. While I'm living it! That's when I nodded my head, and said to myself, "OK, I get it."

Less than a minute later, we crossed right through the splash zone their helicopter made when it hit the water.

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Strange Feeling Number Three:

After crossing the site, Mr. Bai's son steered for the only clear spot along the shore. Although much of the surrounding area has been turned into farms, most of the river itself probably still looks about the same as it did thirty two years ago, wild. We landed in a small clearing with a VERY
third world looking dwelling up against the trees on one side. A young mother in rags and two small children in nothing shyly stood half inside the dark, doorless opening. As I heard Vietnamese exchanged behind me, I began taking panoramic shots of the river as artfully as I could with the sun in the wrong place, while the image of a Huey, upside down, just above the water burned itself into my mind's eye. I'm an artist. A painter. I've been one all of my life. I see images very clearly in my mind. But the picture of that helicopter just hanging there, perfectly still, in that unnatural pose, was the clearest I've ever seen any image in my waking life. Then, without my participation, it would switch to motion. From vertical, with nose down at seventy five feet, all the way to the end of the splash. I even heard it.

Needless to say, I wasn't paying much attention to anyone else during all this. But eventually I finished, and began "returning to the living." I noticed that Mr. Bai's son, the woman and two children were the only ones around. All the others were gone. The ever present language barrier
prevented me from asking where. So I waited. About ten minutes later, they all came shuffling back, engaged in conversation. As they arrived, Cookie stopped next to me and said, "it's more than we really need." I said, "what's more than you need?" He said, "the property." And then I realized
what had happened. They weren't accompanying me, I had been accompanying them. They had just picked me up along the way. And out of a thousand square miles around Saigon, the three and a half acres he was buying, were on the very bank of the river, fifty feet from the exact spot where they crashed. Coincidence?

Follow, just follow.

Epilogue:

Since that day I've been back out to Mr. Bai's farm three times. One time for an overnighter. And I'll be going again before I leave the country. I've gotten together with Cookie and his family several times. I even dropped by Thrung's house the afternoon I found the site, as I felt bad that she had probably waited for me the day before. I've swum in the river. I've walked the land. I even slept on the ground by the water with only a mosquito net canopy between me and one of the half dozen most beautiful, cloudless, full moon nights I've ever seen. That evening at about midnight, in moon light you could read by, I got up and rowed a small wooden boat down to the spot in the bend of the river. This time I was alone. Only the quiet swirl of my paddle, a few crickets, and the occasional bark of a far away dog broke the absolute silence. And after all these years, I finally
got to have that conversation I've pictured a thousand times. It's contents are private, but I'm sure similar to those of anyone else's if in my place. It was perfect.

Shortly after Vinnie was killed, I had a very powerful dream. It was one of those you remember as clearly thirty two years later, as you did the moment you woke from it. I was paddling a small wooden boat in a quiet bend of a very peaceful, tropical looking river, at night. (Until now I had always thought it was in Florida.) Next to the boat, a whirlpool began. It grew until the boat was helplessly circling the expanding black hole in the middle. A moment later, I was in the water trying to hang on to the boat. Then I was torn away and pulled down into the blackness. For a while, all
was quiet as I hung weightlessly in the dark. Then, the blackness slowly began to fade. I could see light coming towards me. It grew and grew until it seemed I was moving through it. Nothing was clear. It still felt as if I was under water. Then a hazy figure appeared ahead. As it came closer,
it got clearer. It was Vinnie. At about ten feet, he stopped, gave a quick little smile, said "OK," turned and led me out into the normal daytime world, and then he was gone.

I think it was in the science fiction classic "Dune," where I read the example of a woman touching two spots on opposite sides of her apron together to illustrate the concept of faster-than-light space travel. The warping of time/space. I don't know if I understand that, and I don't claim
to know what's on the other side of death. But over the decades I've pared a lot of thoughts down to a few ideas I'm basically comfortable with. One of those is that if time on the physical plain could be described as a "line." Then time in the spiritual realm could be more like "volume." An
infinite number of lines in an infinite number of directions. It's being comfortable with that idea that allows me to be comfortable with the "fact" that a dream I had thirty two years ago, of something I did just last week, which told me the same thing then, that I told myself a few days ago, but
didn't know it until now, could happen. Do I believe Vinnie played an active part in all this? Yes I do. Do I believe there was some big supernatural occurrence here? Not really. This story isn't anything "Ripley" wouldn't believe. That's not the point. I just think if, first, there was really some "orchestration" from "outside," then to me it would mean that, second, everything "is as it's suppose to be." And in the end, that's the point. On April 4th I also wrote that a circle had closed and a ghost was gone. The closing of the circle was not just me coming to the place where they died. It was also the touching of the apron. The past dream and the present reality coming together. The "bending" of thirty two years. And the ghost? Well, there was no ghost. The "haunting" turned out to be the "not knowing." There's a lot I'll never know. At least not in
this lifetime. But now, there's also a lot more I DO know. And it feels great! So when it's all said and done, the question has to be asked, "was it worth it?" The answer is, "you bet."