Not Unplugged: Phu Bai, Vietnam
A Father's Day story
It’s Father’s Day in the United States,1 so I thought I’d commemorate the occasion with a story I wrote about a trip I took soon after my dad’s death. It was not unplugged, but to this day, it remains one of the most serendipitous journeys I’ve ever taken.
It started with that startling realization that most people make at some point in their lives, the one in which we recognize that our parents are people independent of ourselves. In my case, the realization came only as my father was dying, and when he was gone, it suddenly felt critically important to understand who he was outside of me, who he was besides my dad.
For some reason, I fixated on his time as a surgeon during the Vietnam War. I suspect I landed there because it was the time in his life that was not only furthest from my own experience, and therefore hardest for me to imagine, but furthest from my experience of him, the suburban dad who worked late and bought us doughnuts on Sunday mornings. Fresh out of medical school and having never traveled much of anywhere beyond his honeymoon in Bermuda, he’d been deployed to a mobile hospital unit in Phu Bai, a village outside of Hue that was the base for the 101st Airborne.
He came back from that deployment with a lot of things he didn’t talk about, and an album of photos that gave some clues about why. Shot in black and white, the operating room images were gory enough that, as a kid, I would sometimes pull them out during sleepovers to terrify my unsuspecting friends. But there was one photo of a young boy whose life he had saved that always stuck with me. And so, in my grief, I got the idea of going to Vietnam to try to find the boy. And of writing about it.