In Search of My Father's Vietnam

Thirty years ago - on April 30, 1975 - the Vietnam War ended as the North Vietnamese army took Saigon and South Vietnam surrendered. The images of the last frantic American helicopter evacuations are seared in the minds of those who watched them on TV.

"We think of Vietnam as a war," he said. "They think of themselves as a country."

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My first lessons in photography came from my father. Although I have no real memories of him - I was 2 1/2 when he died - he left a treasure of little yellow boxes filled with the images of Vietnam, each meticulously captioned in the neat handwriting of an engineer.

Like him, I joined the Army. Affected by his photos, I became a photographer.

He believed in the war. "Freedom, anybody's freedom, is worth fighting for," he had written home in one of many letters.

On May 4, 1966, my father, an elite Army Ranger and a career officer in the Corps of Engineers, was killed running to the aid of two of his men, who were wounded while clearing mines.

Charles R. Kesterson was posthumously awarded a Silver Star.

I went to Vietnam to see where my father died and to find the Vietnam I knew through his photos and letters.

In Khe Sanh

A toddler wears the dog tag of a U.S. Marine, near the site of the famous siege of Marines during the 1968 Tet Offensive. "R.W. Wrightson" - the name on the tag - is not listed by U.S. government records as being killed or missing during the Vietnam War.

In Tay Ninh

Through the First Engineer Battalion Web site, I found Ron Haden, a lieutenant with my father the day he was killed near Nui Ba Den mountain. Ron sent me a map he had kept for 39 years. Some young men helped us find the spot.

In Dak Lak

I came to Vietnam with a view of the country that was 30 years old - older than most Vietnamese today. More than 70 percent of the population is younger than 35, so most people do not even remember the war.

Near Nui Ba Den

This was the place where our lives suddenly turned. My father's life ended and my life turned like that bend in the road. Anh, my guide, said, "Whenever I come to these places with American veterans, I can feel the presence of their tragedies." My tears had been cried out years before, and I just stood there, soaking in the beauty of this awful place.

In Dak To

An Army veteran traveling with us had served at Dak To. As we wandered around "Hill 42," two old men approached and began gesturing with their hands and pointing to the trees. "They want to tell us something important," an American said. The American vets made gun shapes with their hands and said, "Me and you, long ago." The old men nodded and smiled.

Finally, our Vietnamese interpreter said, "They're looking for some of their lost cattle and want to know if we've seen any stray cows." Our battlefield was their pasture. The men, North Vietnamese army veterans, hugged us, and we compared notes about surviving the war.

In Quang Tri

According to our local guide, this Catholic church was the site of a standoff between the North and South Vietnamese armies during the 1972 Easter offensive. It was the only civilian building we saw that still had signs of the war.

In Phu Bai

La Thi Hong, who once worked for the American military at Camp Eagle and didn't look her age of 56, chatted happily with us in broken GI English and offered to take us around. She stopped us when we nearly walked into an intact minefield, obvious to the locals but completely hidden and forgotten by the returning Americans.

At Firebase Bastogne

In the mountains near Laos, the sole of an American military boot.

In Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)

When he saw Saigon in 1965, my dad said it wasn't what he'd expected. The traffic was "about like riding in a circus parade." I had the same reaction to the streams of motorbikes, bicycles and scooters.

What struck me that my dad didn't see was the new construction in every corner of Vietnam. Nearly every road is now paved. And the cities glitter with new investment.

I left with a view of a country with one foot in the present and another leaping into the future.

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Here is the son's complete diary from the trip:

6-7 March 2005
Los Angeles

Flying from Los Angeles to Taipei was like stepping off into a void. With Vietnam the final destination, that first step was the most tentative. Asian people in the airport grab my elbow and say, "you go Vietnam? I go Vietnam too." Eager to talk, these Vietnamese ex-pats living in America say, "you go before? That nice, I welcome you." This is a welcome coming from people who may not have seen their own home since the south fell in 1975. The welcome comes from young and old alike and is heartfelt and warm. Most are Viet Cue, people you fled their country after the American war. Some were older and seemed as tentative as myself about returning to a country that may not exist as they remembered it.

8 March 2005
Saigon

Flying into Tan Son Nhat airport was both very surreal and somehow very familiar. I recognized the hardened hangers from the air and immediately placed myself in historic footage of the same place we know in our collective American memory of Vietnam. Beyond the hangers was a brand new, modern terminal. I felt as if I were walking onto a movie set. Flying in set the tone for the rest of the day, with one foot set firmly in the past and one foot leaping into the future.

On Oct 14, 1966 my father wrote, "I left the area here for the first time and went to the PX in Saigon. I just saw the outskirts of Saigon, but what I saw didn't look like what I expected. Maybe it is better in the middle of town. The streets were really full of bicycles, pony carts, motor scooters and cars. It was about like riding in a circus parade."

The scene has changed little since then as my experience was the same as his.

The streets were filled with streams of motorbikes, bicycles and scooters moving like schools of fish in a dangerous ballet of movement. The traffic moved in laws of fluid motion and all the riders seem to be connected by a group intelligence, like endless flocks of birds flying south for the winter. Overwhelmed by the fluid motion of traffic, it takes a little while to realize all of the actors in this dance are young people. Teenagers and young families with babies held on the handlebars of these machines zipping by as if just for fun. Saigon is Peter Pan's Neverland. With the majority of the population under 35 there are no parents here to tell these young people that babies on a motorcycle might not be a good idea. No one has told them that they can't fly either, because they prove it to each other as they dance through the streets on their noisy machines. I'm sure that whenever these people get to where ever they're going, they throw their bikes down in the yard and they run with scissors in their hands, because they're in charge and there are no parents to stop them.

Our first stop of the day was the Nguyen Dinh Chiew School for The Blind on Nguyen Chi Thanh street. We had come with school supplies of tape recorders for the students. Children with empty or missing eyes smiled up and sang to us "hello, how are you, I am fine." The children were eager to touch our hands and keep saying like a mantra, "hello, how are you, I am fine." They didn't understand what they were saying, but they certainly enjoyed saying it.

A young blind woman of twenty-five named Ahn covered her mouth and giggled as she spoke to the American visitors. Unlike the young children, she spoke very good English and was eager to try her language skills on anyone who would hold her hand and listen. She smiled and waved enthusiastically as we boarded our bus to leave.

There are 180 students at this state run school for the blind. There are two others in DaNang and Hanoi. Many of the children lost their eyesight from the lack of vitamin A, malnutrition or from premature birth. Others were born blind due to Agent Orange contamination in the surrounding provinces and of cancers of the eye.

9 March 2005
Tay Ninh province

"This area was hot," the American veterans in our group remembered. They were not talking about the weather. During the war Tay Ninh province was the southern terminus of the Ho Chi Minh trail and was hotly contested throughout the conflict. My father described it in letters home as "Indian Country."

The road from Saigon to Tay Ninh is a wide and modern four lane highway which continues past Tay Ninh city to the Cambodian border just a few miles away. During the war the road west was a dangerous stretch of crumbling asphalt and red clay which cut through the village of Cu Chi, famous for its miles of Viet Cong tunnels directly below the American camps above. The Americans fought frustrating battles against an enemy who would appear and disappear with no apparent reason as they slipped around like ghosts in the night. It was generally agreed that the Americans controlled the daytime hours, but Charlie owned the night.

My father was killed in this province at the foot of Nui Ba Den mountain. Aided by a map given to me by Ron Haden, who was with my father the day he died, we drove around the mountain searching for a tiny dirt road, which may no longer exist after 39 years since my father walked down it, leading from the front with his company of men. With a couple of false starts, our guide, Anh stopped at a house and asked some young men if they knew of the road. Five minutes of puzzled looks at the old map and they excitedly exclaimed we were already there, although the road, actually a simple dirt track no longer used, was right behind their house. Fifty yards down the rutted track the road turned a sharp right and there was the spot, exactly as described in the map saved all those years by Ron. A beautiful vista opened up with that little stretch of forgotten road, shadowed by the dormant volcano Nui Ba Den.

William Faulkner wrote of Pickett's charge: "For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet, but there is still time for it not to begin. . .. . ."

This was the place where our lives suddenly turned. My father's life ended and my life turned like that bend in the road. Followed by well meaning veterans trying to help me find this spot, I had to continue on with just Anh, a Vietnamese man ten years my junior. I preferred to walk in silence with Anh, it was his country after all, and my father and I were only visitors.

I photographed Anh there, who said, "when ever I come to these places with American veterans, I can feel the presence of their tragedies." I told him that if that were true, he should feel that presence all over south Vietnam, because each street corner or forgotten piece of road was witness to someone's tragedies. My tears had been cried out years before and I just stood there, soaking in the beauty of this awful place.

We returned to our traveling companions, who were waiting just a few yards away, and we chatted under the shade of the banana trees lining the road. Jim Buckner, a retired Special Forces officer, commented that he was the same age as my father. As we talked we realized that until my father died on that road, Jim and he had similar Army careers. Jim grilled me about my dad's duty stations and training as an Army Ranger. He compared dates and after a pause of concentration, Jim looked up and said, "my goodness, your father and I went to Ranger school together!"

There we stood on the far side of the world on a long forgotten road, strangers the day before. Jim did not know my father; there were three hundred soldiers in their Ranger class. Only seventy of them completed the course to wear the coveted tab of the elite Army Rangers. Jim and my father crossed paths at one of the most important periods of their lives when they were recognized as the best of the best in the US Army. Now Jim and I crossed paths under a looming mountain where my father lost his life thirty-nine years earlier. The unbelievable circumstance of our meeting was not lost on either of us.

11 March 2005
Phong Bhu

Just outside of Saigon our group stopped at a community for lepers and their families. Not all of the folks living in this little community of streets, like any other Saigon neighborhood, were suffering from leprosy; their families lived there with them as well. We arrived with bags of rice, sugar, noodles and medical supplies and the eager villagers lined up, patient and smiling for their foods. Unfortunately our group didn't have the proper permissions to be there on a humanitarian mission and soon the police arrived and animated negotiations took place as the villagers feared that the food, so close and in sight, would be taken away.

We distributed our food quickly with little time for photos and moved out of the village on the way to the Central Highlands and the town of Dalat. I worried that with good intentions we may have done more harm than good. I worried that the police would take the people's food away after we left, or hassle them with a heavier presence for the next few days. Our guide, Ahn, assured us not to worry, that because once the people received their food there was no way anyone could take it back from them. He said the local communist party officials were more afraid we would try to stir up dissent among the people there.

On Nov 25, 1965 my father wrote: "The people here are very glad to see American troops. A lot of them had left because the VC treated them so badly. They said several of them would come into a village and tell the people to feed them. They are very poor here, so they told the VC they only had enough for themselves. They said the Viet Cong would just kill three of their people and say, "now you can feed three of us." So a lot of the people just ran away."

Bao Loc

Nearing the town of Dalat we stopped for a farmer pushing his cattle across the road as we passed through a tea and coffee plantation. We stopped and got out to examine the rows of tea plants when two young boys came running, excitedly waving their hands and smiling. Expecting them to beg for change we were hesitant to engage them, soon however, one boy thrust out his hand containing a small lizard. They had come to show off their prize and to visit with these strange looking westerners. The boys beamed in the late afternoon sun as they held my hand and smiled. Gingerly, one of them slipped a piece of hard candy into my hand and closed my fingers around it. These boys were dirt poor and we had expected them to come begging. Instead they were filled with warmth as they shared what little they had with us. These boys reflected the welcome we received throughout Vietnam.

12 March 2005
Nha Trang

Nha Trang is a seaside resort city filled with western tourists and upscale hotels. During the war this was an R and R center for American troops and a number of our party remembered coming here to see the beach and the giant white Budda on the south side of town.

14 March 2005

On the ride from Nha Trang to Pleiku we stopped our vehicle in Buon Tung village where children from the Ede tribe stared up at us from the side of the road as their parents worked the fields. Soon we were surrounded by children as we passed out toys and candy as they posed for Polaroid photos. These children are very poor and they live with their families in simple raised houses made of wicker. The children also made use of our empty water bottles and they lined up to each take one to use again later. One young woman asked for a Polaroid photo of herself and her young baby. As I handed her the print, I realized it may be the only photo she had of her and her child.

One of the veterans we were traveling with had served at Dak To and we searched the area for his old base camp. Our local guide knew of one place called Hill 42 and we walked through the old South Vietnamese Army encampment dotted with the remains of old bunkers and fighting positions. While all the structures were gone, some of the fighting positions (fox holes) looked as if they had been dug yesterday. The ground was littered with the debris of war. Everywhere there were bits of plastic, the remains of claymore mines, and bullets from M14 and M16 rifles, their brass cases long ago scavenged for their scrap value leaving the lead bullets behind. Our guide, Huyen, a teenager at the end of the war, picked up some cordite propellant spilled long ago from an artillery shell and lit it with his lighter. It flamed up in his hand with a poof and a small ball of smoke. Huyen looked up and smiled and said, "it smells like war."

As we wandered around the old site, two old men approached from the tree line and began gesturing with their hands and pointing to the trees. They smiled and nodded, shook their heads and kept pointing back to the trees. We were so absorbed with the moment we were sure they wanted to talk to us about what happened there during the war. "They want to tell us something important," one of our American group leaders said. "I think they're trying to show us something beyond those trees." We were sure there would be some significant artifact or war story the old men would want to share with us. The American vets made gun shapes with their hands and said, "me and you, long ago." The old men nodded and smiled. Finally our Vietnamese interpreter arrived and spoke to the old men at length as we longed to know what these old men would have to share. The men continued to gesture with their arms and draw imaginary figures with their fingers and hands. We held our breath as we waited for the tale to unfold and eventually Ahn, our interpreter said, "They're looking for some of their lost cattle and they want to know if we've seen any stray cows in the area." Our battlefield was their pasture.

Eventually we found out the old men, who really weren't that old, (they were 60 and 54 years old), had served in the Second Division of the North Vietnamese Army during the war. They greeted us warmly when we explained that most in our party were also Vietnam vets. We posed for photos and compared notes about surviving the war. We never did help them search for their cattle though, as they slipped back into the tree line and we headed back to the bus with our pockets filled with bits of metal and broken plastic.

15 March 2005
Qui Nhon

Near the village of Bong Son we searched for the spot where Jim Buckner fought the Viet Cong when he was a young captain with the First Calvary Division in 1966. We snaked our big bus down dirt roads as Jim scanned the ridge line for the silhouette of a mountain that would look familiar to him thirty-nine years after being pinned down by sniper fire from the boulders above. We eventually had to stop our bus and continue on foot through a tiny village as curious women and children followed us as we tromped through their back yards and between their houses. The women didn't seem to mind as they laughed at the odd looking Americans. We visited with them on the beach as they smiled and asked us to take their photos. Each click of the camera brought more laughter as they looked to the backs of our cameras to see how they looked.

As the women talked on and on in a language we didn't understand, Jim came to realize that his mountain of boulders no longer existed. It was likely quarried away for gravel to complete the new roads lining the tiny village and the neighboring towns. So we visited some more with the ladies and distributed candy and toys for the children. Old men came out of the woodwork and explained how they had fought with the VC.

On the way out of town our large bus snagged a power line and pulled it down, killing the power to the tiny hamlet we had just visited. An afternoon of diplomacy, healing the wounds of war thirty years old, shot to hell by an oversize bus on a tiny road. At the next village some people had blocked the road, mad as hell that their electricity was out. We paid them six bucks to repair the downed wire and we were friends again. Ugly, American friends.

16 March 2005
My Lai

Today is the 38th anniversary of the My Lai massacres and we visited the village where US Army Lt William Calley ordered his troops to open fire on hundreds of civilians. The village was never rebuilt, however the site has been transformed into a park and memorial. Survivors, family members and tourists from Japan and the US gathered as incense was burned and wreaths laid in memory of the victims. When the ceremonies were over, an 80 year old survivor led us through the village and described how she survived the shootings when she was shot through the thighs and given up for dead, covered by the dead bodies of her children.

18 March 2005
Phu Bai

As we stopped for directions between Phu Bai and the city of Hue, fifty-six year old La Thi Hong stopped our bus and enthusiastically described how she used to work at nearby Camp Eagle, a base camp and staging area for the US Army's 101st Airborne Division. She directed us to the site, which still lay largely intact next to a Buddhist cemetery. Gary Stocker, a sergeant in the 101st immediately recognized the area and we walked over the remains of the black top road that once bisected the camp. La Thi Hong was very glad to see us as she rattled on in broken GI English, beaming with pride as she remembered working for the Americans. We walked the site picking up counterfeit hundred dollar bills carried by the wind from the neighboring cemetery left as offerings to the dead. As the lure of the fake cash led us further into the old camp, Hong stopped us when she realized that we were walking right into an intact mine field, obvious to the locals but completely hidden and forgotten after 35 years to the returning Americans.

19 March 2005
Khe Sanh

Khe Sanh, site of the famous Marine Corps siege in 1968 sits high in the mountains near the border of Laos. Traveling near the famous battlefield we passed cigarette smugglers on the dirt road passes of the Ho Chi Minh trail. The airfield of Khe Sanh is now a tea plantation planted on the shadow of red clay landing strip. The bunkers were blown up and plowed under as the Marines abandoned the camp, but local entrepreneurs have dug pits around the area searching for trinkets of old medals, shell casings and metal objects to sell for pennies to visiting tourists. Over the years they've found as many North Vietnamese objects as they have American.

Leaving Khe Sanh and traveling over treacherous roads toward the A Shau valley we stopped at an ethnic village where women and children peered up at the strange looking American visitors. A toddler held in the arms of his father wore an American dog tag that once belonged to a Marine named "R.W. Wrightson." The boy's father, clearly too young to remember the war, was unwilling to part with the tag and not eager to discuss it's origins. We were left with nagging questions as to the significance of the tag. Had it been left to the family by the marine? Was it kept as a talisman of good luck, or was it worn as just another shiny object found on the ground?