Dave, 
Karen's Dad-
Vietnam 1966
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

     The vets had given the girls nicknames like Tennessee and Maryland. And they carried pictures of the gals stuffed in their shirt pockets. Viet said he figured it was long shot that they would be able to find the women, who were only 15 when the photos were made. They had sold colas and beers to the GIs who were patrolling the road alongside Nui Ba Den. Viet humored the vets and took them back to their old stomping grounds. He was as shocked as anyone when the veterans walked into a local eatery and, sure enough, spotted Miss Tennessee and Miss Maryland across the room.
     "It was the most emotional moment for me," Viet said. "And the husband of Tennessee was all confused. He didn't know his wife could speak English until she started talking to the vets from 30 years ago."  So, perhaps, I would be able to find one of those children, Viet mused.
     Somehow, standing there in the gully, none of that seemed to matter to me any more. I could sense my father's presence, the same way I had when I stepped off the plane at Pleiku earlier that morning and saw what looked every bit like the Blue Ridge Mountains to me. 
     I knew instinctively that my father had been here. Near this spot. Perhaps in this very spot. Turning to my teammates, I asked them to please help me gather rocks.
     I hadn't really planned this memorial service out the way some folks had. You'd think as a writer I would have penned a letter, or written a poem to read. Something to share with my teammates.  But all I had was a couple of pictures my sister had given me the morning I'd flown out of Portland's International Airport. A photo of our mom and brother and us. And a snapshot of all the grandchildren.
"You are supposed to leave these somewhere," she said.  "Where?" I asked.  "I don't know. But you'll know it when you see it," she said.  She was right, of course. This was the spot.
     I didn't need to find the place where my father took his last breath. I wanted to remember him this way, smiling and surrounded by children. He was such a loving man. Like many soldiers, he sought the company of children wherever he went in Vietnam.  He told Mama that the children always reminded him of us. And, I suspect, the reasons why he was willing to die a violent death in such an exotic place.
     The violence of war still echoes throughout Vietnam. I heard it in the wind and felt it in the soil and saw it on the faces of a people still oppressed by a communist regime.
     All my life I had grown up thinking my father had died in vain. The result, no doubt, of coming of age during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The My Lai trials had taken place at Ft. Benning, practically my backyard.  
     But now, as I carried stones from one side of the roadway to another, I began to understand. When two of the little girls ran home to put on their best dresses to pose in a photo with me, I  knew why my father loved the Vietnamese people. Despite the poverty and oppression of life under a communist regime, they possess the treasure of a warm and gracious nature. 
     I sat on the red clay with my back at Dragon Mountain and a stone monument in front of me. My teammates formed a half-circle around me. Viet asked about half-a-dozen kids to stand directly behind me. I handed each of them a photo of my father. A photo in which he struck the same pose. His back to Dragon Mountain. And his buddies and his howitzer behind him, along with a couple of dozen children, dressed in rag-tag clothes. The best they had, I suspect.
     I opened a plastic jar that I had brought with me from home and began pouring out the contents.
"In here I have the soil from Ft. Benning, where my father trained troops for many years. And sand from the North shore of Hawaii, where my father loved to fish," I explained.
     With my head down, I began to dig at the red clay with a rock. I scooped some up and put it in the jar.
"I'm leaving some of this here and taking some of Vietnam's soil home with me,"  I said.
Then, I explained the  rock monument. An idea that had come to me shortly upon waking earlier that morning in Saigon.

     "When Native Americans were nomadic tribes, they would build rock monuments before moving on to another camp. The monument provided a way for them to measure their journeys. By looking back, they could see how far they had traveled and in which direction.     
     "We military children are a nomadic tribe. And for those of us who lost our fathers here, Vietnam is the monument by which we measure our journey. My hope is that when we look back we will see how far we've come in our love and respect for the Vietnamese people."
     Tears where streaming down my face. I looked up to see Cammie Olson and Kelly Rihn and many of my other teammates weeping as well.
     I was reminded again that grief is a journey that has a beginning but no end. Grief had brought us all here, to the base of Dragon Mountain, on the outskirts of Pleiku, near a village of people whose language we could not speak and customs we did not know. It bound us together in ways that only death can. The way it had bound our fathers to one another.
     The way it continues to bind many of the Vietnam Veterans to that beautiful and distant land. 
I hugged each of the children and gifted them with colorful sunglasses and balloons.  Then, my teammates gave me a moment alone.  Bowing my head over my father's monument, I thanked God for being my constant companion over the years. No one knows better than God how lonely the journey has been at times. Thankfully, He's sent loving people to encourage me along the way. He's sending them still. 
 

Karen Spears Zacharias, author of Benched (Mercer Univ. Press, 1997) writes from her home along the Umatilla River in Pendleton, Ore. She is currently at work on a book about the aftermath of her father's death.