Searching for Nguyen Tan Hung : For the Daughter of a South Vietnamese Army Captain Missing in Action, the Hardest Part Is Never Knowing. Or Is It?

The military cemetery here in Bien Hoa was once known for the two rows of graceful willows that swayed gently in the breeze. During the Vietnam War, when this small town was the headquarters of the South Vietnamese army, sentimental visitors would wax poetic about the willows crying in tribute to the heroic soldiers who sacrificed their lives in the name of democracy.

In those days, the graves marched in precise white lines through carefully tended grass. Flowers and incense sticks decorated the grave sites. A shrine--an imposing slate monument depicting a tired soldier whose M-16 automatic rifle rests on his lap--greeted visitors at the entrance.

In the early ‘70s, my mother came often to this cemetery, a half-hour’s drive north of Saigon. She walked among the headstones, reading their inscriptions, looking for the name of her husband, my father--Nguyen Tan Hung, a captain in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam--who had been reported missing in action in 1972 in the Central Highlands. She came here just in case the army had made a mistake and somehow buried him without informing her.

Once a monument to patriotism and to the fallen heroes who had fought against the Communists of North Vietnam, the Military Cemetery of the Republic of Vietnam is a wasteland today. Most of the willows are gone, the slate shrine destroyed. The endless rows of tombstones are overrun with wild grass and tangled, thorny shrubs. The gray and white headstones have been defaced, overturned, some urinated upon.

Like my mother, I, too, have come here, tracing the rows of graves, trying to find out what happened to my father. Like her, I find no answers, and the one clue the ruins yield about my father’s fate is hardly bearable: Here, in the land that he fought for, Father is not simply missing and presumed dead, he is despised, and even worse, forgotten.

MY NAME IS NGUYEN TAN BANG PHUONG. I AM THE eldest daughter of Le Xuan Hao and Capt. Hung. But I am also Lily Dizon, adopted daughter of Alejandro Dizon, a former American civil service employee who married my mom and raised her four children as his own. In April, 1975, as Saigon fell, my mother, my two brothers and my sister and I were airlifted out of the chaos to a refugee camp in Guam and finally to a new life in Louisiana.

We left behind a crumbling nation, scores of relatives and my mother’s long, frustrating search for information regarding my father. At the end of that year, she put the past behind her and remarried so that her children could grow up in a stable family. Nineteen years later, prompted by a reporter’s curiosity and a daughter’s duty and fortified with my second father’s encouragement and my mother’s blessing, I decided to take up the search again.

I began where my memories ended. I knew my father’s face from photographs and a little girl’s blurry memories. I remembered a man dressed always in fatigues, who was often away from our home in Qui Nhon, on South Vietnam’s central coast, off fighting the Communists, the “red devils” trying to take over our country.

I remembered being carried on his shoulders; I remembered the life-sized doll he brought me when he returned from training in America; I remembered him, not the maid, sweeping the floor--”No one can sweep it as well as I can,” he would explain to me as he went about the task. Most vividly, I remembered a seemingly forgettable scene: It was in the evening. Father was carrying me in his arms when he suddenly asked me how old I was. I proudly held up six fingers. “No, my daughter,” he laughed, mussing my hair. “You’re 5.”

Years later, I asked Mom why this bit of banter would stick in my mind. It was March 8, 1972, she told me, and I had turned 5 that day: “We went out for dinner to celebrate. Your father left the next day to report to duty, and he never came back.” She didn’t have to remind me what happened next. The morning he left, Father insisted on taking family photographs. “I want to engrave your faces on my heart and mind,” Mom remembers him saying, “just in case.” He had gone to combat many times before, she says, but never with such foreboding words.

A month later, Father called from Fire Base Tan Canh, near the Laos and Cambodia border, to say that he would be delayed. A bridge had been blown up and reinforcements were late. He said he’d be home by April 22.

On the 24th, there were six or seven military Jeeps parked in front of our house when Mom came home from her job at an American supply base. She rushed into the house, where a number of officers were sitting or pacing. When she didn’t see Father, she brushed by them. He was playing hide-and-seek, she thought, as he had done so many times before.

But an officer asked her to sit down. The maid ushered me and my siblings into the kitchen and closed the door. I cracked it open and peeked. A lieutenant colonel began by saying he didn’t want to be there, but Mom covered her ears, ran to the kitchen door and opened it to face her bewildered children. In the background, the lieutenant colonel tried again: Enemy forces had overrun Tan Canh and the whereabouts of my father were unknown.

“It’s not just Capt. Hung but the whole division that has been reported mat tich ,” he said.

“ Mat tich ,” Mom repeated numbly, puzzled. It was the first time she had ever heard that term--”missing in action.” “So Hung is not dead?”

We don’t know, the man repeated. We have no more news.

The officers left. My mother began to cry, and so did my 3-year-old brother. My 2-year-old brother tugged at my hand. I bit my lip as Mom clutched my baby sister to her heart. She was 24 the day she lost her husband. He was 31.

Later, Mom abandoned friends who came to console her and took the four of us to the beach. We walked barefoot on the sand, held hands and closed our eyes as Mom offered up what must have been the first of thousands of prayers. She appealed to the Buddha, to God, to the genies of the land and the spirits of our ancestors to bring Father home safely.

MY PLANE LANDS IN THE NEW VIETNAM IN APRIL, 1994, AND MY OLD HOMETOWN of Saigon (no one calls it Ho Chi Minh City) is in the midst of a suffocating tropical spring heat wave. It is 22 years to the month that my father disappeared; 19 years, again to the month, that I left this land. I have a one-month visa and boundless hope.

Every day for two months, I have been studying military histories and journalistic accounts of the battle at Tan Canh; I have even interviewed two of its survivors, now living in San Jose. (“I didn’t know your father,” they each tell me, though one of them can hardly stand to disappoint me. In the mess hall, he tells me, “we must have laughed together at funny American movies, your father and I. I know we must have at least once shared a beer.”)

And I have written letters--my mother painstakingly translating my queries into Vietnamese, a language I can speak fluently but have difficulty writing--to a multitude of diplomats and bureaucrats. It is my hope that they will help me in my search, perhaps even open their files and allow me to see what my mother never saw--ARVN military records, or better yet, the archives relating to the North’s Vietnamese POWs. After all, the war is long over; perhaps I can reap some benefit from the long and controversial attempts to finally heal its wounds.

In Saigon, Huynh Duong Chinh, a representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tells me he admires me for my sense of filial duty and my journalistic desire to call attention to Vietnamese MIAs, who have so often been left out of the MIA debate in the United States. I meet with Chinh for three days, and he sends me on to Hanoi, and foreign affairs press officer Nguyen Duy Linh.

My task is sensitive. I must somehow convince the Vietnamese government, via Linh, that all I want to do is find out what happened to my father so that I can lay his memory to rest. I am not here to write a typical American MIA story. I am here to chronicle a Vietnamese woman’s search for her father.

Linh turns out to be an arrogant 26-year-old. He is courteously uncooperative from the beginning, telling me not to expect any help from his bosses, who do not want to call attention to the fallen South Vietnamese government. Linh will later bill me $600--a ransom in a country where an average citizen makes $20 a month--for doing little more than giving me the runaround for three weeks. After days of listening to his rhetoric, I resort to a veiled threat.

“Obviously, you understand that if this story is told right and I can write of how helpful the government was in my endeavors, then Vietnam would get good press, especially during these times of diplomatic discussions with the U.S.,” I suggest to Linh, who this afternoon is sitting in my air-conditioned hotel room, puffing heavy cigarette smoke in my direction. “The way things are going, I will have to write that the government was not cooperative and did not support what I am doing.”

Linh, the only son of a high-ranking diplomat, stubs out his third cigarette on the linoleum floor. “That’s fine. And it is true,” he smiles benignly. “You must understand--you’re not in America. Things are done differently here.”

I have been warned about the bureaucracy here many times. Robert J. Destatte, who heads the research section of the U.S. MIA office in Hanoi, prescribed the course of action I was trying to follow: “Be polite, persistent and patient.” I do everything Linh tells me to do. I sit by the phone when he instructs that I should wait for his calls. He asks, and I provide, outlines of what I plan to write. He demands, and I make, a list of questions I would ask officials. I have meeting after meeting with him. I even beg.

Then, six days into my stay in Hanoi, my patience really snaps.

In a meeting in my hotel room, I press Linh once again on when officials will meet with me and if anyone will be able to give me records of my father’s imprisonment or tell me definitively that no such records exist. If I do not get answers on this trip, would I eventually on the next, or the next?

Linh gazes at me for long seconds through the cigarette haze and says offhandedly: “You know, you’ve done this all wrong. If you had told me in the first place you want to meet with people who could tell you about your father instead of requesting interviews with officials, I would have devoted my time looking for people who may have information about your father.”

I am sure I have misheard him, or that my Vietnamese is not as fluent as I thought. But when I ask him again, he repeats his rubbish almost verbatim. So, I confront him with copies of every letter, every answered request he and his superiors have demanded from me.

“What would have been the most effective was a personal appeal from you to Defense Minister Doan Khue,” Linh says, ignoring the copies. “I can only do so much, you know.”

That is when I tell him, along with a few choice words, that the only thing he has done well is waste my time. And when I hand him a copy of my letter to the defense minister, Linh won’t even touch it, claiming he never knew of its existence.

Perhaps, he continues, I made a mistake when I returned to Vietnam as a reporter. If my task had been less political--”nothing a reporter writes about the MIA issue is nonpolitical,” he says--maybe it would be easier to find out what happened to my father.

“Brother Linh,” I use the appropriate politesse, “you’re saying that if I had knocked on your door--not as a reporter but as a Viet Kieu (overseas Vietnamese)--telling you what I was trying to do, asking for yours or any other official’s help, you would say, ‘I’ll see what I can do’?”

“Of course not,” he replies scornfully, “I would ask you who you thought you were to make that kind of a request.”

IN 1972, SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER TAN CANH FELL, MY mother took a bus to the Central Highlands in search of my father. “I can’t explain my mind-set at the time, why I even thought I could find him,” she told me recently. “I wanted to find out the truth. I wanted to be at peace. I also wanted to make sure that if he had died, that he would be at peace. How can a spirit rest if his family doesn’t know if he lived or died?”

But her bus was stopped in the remote province of Kon Tum in the Central Highlands, about 25 miles south of Tan Canh. Travelers could go no farther because of fighting in the area. She returned home dejected, but that was only to be the first of her many attempts to find out what happened to Father. Most of her efforts included me.

Three months after Father was reported missing in action, we moved south to Saigon. Qui Nhon Regional Area Exchange, the U.S. supply base where she had been working as assistant manager of the cafeteria, was being shut down, so she was transferred to the base at Tan Son Nhat Airport.

In Saigon, our search began again. Every weekend, Mom went to the military headquarters in Bien Hoa, where they updated lists of soldiers who had been confirmed dead or who managed to make it back to the south. Mom showed Father’s pictures around, asking returning soldiers if they had seen him. No one ever recognized him and his name remained on the MIA list.

On the days I had to be at school, Mom’s trek home was always the same. As I stood outside our house waiting for her, I would see a lonely figure, dressed in black, walking unsteadily down a dirt path. Once she reached me, Mom would crumple at my feet and cry, chanting through her tears, “Mom couldn’t find your father.” I would get down on my knees to help her get up. And we would cling to each other for a while.

In March of 1973, as a provision of a cease-fire treaty, North and South Vietnam exchanged prisoners of war. On the designated day, Mom and I went to the Ba Chieu district outside Saigon, where a military camp was set up, and joined throngs of people also waiting for the release of their loved ones. As families tearfully reunited all around us, we felt certain that Father was going to run toward us at any time.

Then, Mom saw faces she knew, officers and soldiers in the same artillery unit as Father’s at Tan Canh. There were seven of them and one by one, they all said they didn’t know what happened to him. The unit commanders, Lt. Col. Trinh Le Trien and Maj. Trinh Thanh Khue, confirmed that Father had been captured with them. However, they told Mom, when they reached their destination, a prison camp in Hanoi, he was nowhere to be seen.

We wandered into a medical tent. There, Mom spotted Father’s driver, Corp. Nguyen Van Dong. “Ma’am, the captain died” were his first words. Mom swayed and fell, hitting her head against a wooden chair.

“You saw my husband die?” she weakly asked, as I helped her steady herself. “How did he die?”

“I don’t know, Ma’am. I didn’t see that he died. I just assume so because the last time I saw him, the captain was so weak,” he replied. According to Dong, Father had become ill en route to the camp, and his captors had to drag him by rope part of the way.

In the days and months to come, the military grapevine was full of such tales. Someone said a rocket missile struck Capt. Hung’s artillery gun during the initial attacks on Tan Canh. Another remembered that as everyone surrendered, only Father continued to fire at the enemy and was finally captured at gunpoint. Even my father’s older sister said she saw a soldier on television tell a reporter he overheard a “Capt. Hung” challenge his captors on a bridge during the journey to the prison camp; the North Vietnamese, the man reported, shot the prisoner.

Mom tracked down the sources of all the stories. But they never turned out to be anything but gossip.

“Everyone told me he was shot or had died, but they also said they were not certain,” Mom told me. “They made me despair, then they gave me hope. Every once in a while, I would hear stories of men who returned home even after they had been given up for dead. So I just went on hoping.”

IT IS ANOTHER HOT MORNING IN HANOI, AND I AM SITTING in the office of Vietnam Veterans Association Magazine, trying, once again, to be patient and polite. Since 1991, this magazine has published supplements listing names and photos of missing Communist troops, Viet Cong guerrillas and grave sites. The idea is to encourage readers who may remember a name, a face or a battle to contact family members or the magazine. To date, the magazine has established the fates of more than 600 of those reported missing in action in the North’s cause. The listing is free, assistant editor-in-chief Tran Ngoc tells me, and family members looking for their husbands, fathers and sons “who died for the country’s liberation” are never turned away.

“My father was a Vietnamese officer who fought for a cause he believed was right for his country,” I remind him. I offer to pay to have my father’s name included in the list.

Ngoc gazes at me for several seconds, then replies evenly: “We’re not as opened as that yet. The purpose of our magazine is to find our soldiers first. Once we’ve accounted for all our people who are still missing, then perhaps we can begin to look for others.”

Nghiem Xuan Tue, a spokesman with the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, is a little less diplomatic when I finally talk to him. His agency mounts searches for Vietnamese MIAs. “The only MIA number we have is 300,000, and they’re the brave soldiers who fought for the country’s liberation,” says Nghiem. “The others, they don’t matter.”

It is a shock to hear it said so plainly. The United States lists 2,233 Americans missing in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, including 1,642 in Vietnam proper. The search for these casualties is ongoing and the issue has been so influential that it has prevented Capitol Hill from establishing diplomatic ties with Hanoi. Hanoi itself has begun to look for answers to the question of what happened to its own 300,000 MIAs. These two old enemies have even begun to share battlefield information in search of their missing. But no one is counting my father, no one is sharing information about him, and no one is going to.

Many Vietnamese believe in so, destiny. Some consider it preordained; others think that with guidance, they may be able to shape it themselves. I consider myself thoroughly Western in this regard--my life, I tell myself, is determined by my own actions, my own choices. But now I decide to do as the Vietnamese do. I seek out a fortuneteller.

I have tried this just once before, in Saigon, while I waited for my official invitation to Hanoi. The soothsayer there dispensed wisdom from an alley doorway, flashing a toothy grin and burping as he sipped a cola. Tracing the lines on my right palm, he prophesied that I would be involved in a “big accident” by year’s end, that I would receive great accolades having to do with my work, that if I wasn’t careful, I would die drowning.

“Your father is still alive,” he told me, and I am embarrassed to admit that my heart skipped a beat.

“He may have been kept from home against his will in the beginning,” the man said, counting the joint lines on his fingers, apparently to determine how Father’s and my destinies were intertwined through our birth dates. “But for a long time now, he does not want to return to the people who knew and loved him. He’s too ashamed. He has lost everything that means everything to a man, his home, his pride, his belief in himself.”

I turned to go, but the fortuneteller would not release my hand. He stared at it a little longer before saying: “Father and daughter will see each other again. He will find you.”

Now, in Hanoi, I find myself in another alley, knocking on another door. The employees at my hotel swear by this woman, Vu Thi Xuan, a 36-year-old Buddhist who reads destinies in cards. I am invited to sit on a straw-mat-covered bed. When I tell her I am looking for my father, I reveal no details of his disappearance. Three different times, she tells me to shuffle the cards and to turn over nine of them.

“I am trying to be sure,” she says, explaining why she has me shuffle so many times. “Every single time, your cards say your father is still alive. He has been living with a son all these years, a son who is around your age,” Xuan says, fingering the playing cards individually. “Without this son, your father would have no home, no one to care for him. As it is, he still has nothing. His fate has always been that he would be separated from his family.”

He doesn’t know you are looking for him, Xuan tells me. But rest assured, “he will read in an advertisement that you’re looking for him and he will find you.”

I tell Xuan I don’t believe in fortunetellers. At her silent, questioning look, I say, “I don’t know why I’m here.” Then: “Am I to just take you at your word?”

“You’ll receive news by November,” she responds quietly.

I do not tell her that I have heard such a prediction before, I do not say that every other avenue of inquiry has come up dry; I simply leave.

IT IS A WEEK INTO MY STAY in Hanoi before Linh finally gives me some good news: He can take me to Tan Canh, the battlefield where my father was last seen alive.

During an eight-hour drive on the narrow highway that cuts through the heart of the Central Highlands, I quietly soak in the scenes around me. I savor every bump and twisting turn on the highway, knowing I am on the same path Father took countless times en route to combat.

This was once a jungle, before B-52 raids cleared the land. Now the government has decided it should be cultivated, and we drive through wooded hills and small orchards of rubber, banana, jicama and pear trees. We pass Pleiku, the province where I was born. We drive through An Khe, a lush, rural hamlet of emerald-green rice paddies where my maternal great-grandmother lived until she died more than a decade ago. As a child, I used to climb trees in her orchard and ride the water buffaloes in her rice field.

Everywhere, military graveyards with ornate signs invite visitors to stop and pay their respects to the liet si , the “heroes who sacrificed their lives for their country.” Even viewed through the window of a moving van, I can tell that these cemeteries--the final resting place of Vietnam’s “liberators”: the Viet Cong and the army of the North--are well-kept and dignified, nothing like the lonely graves at Bien Hoa.

To take my mind off depressing thoughts, I casually ask Linh about the country’s perception of men like my father. I know he studied history at the University of Hanoi, and I pose my question as a journalist seeking background, overview, a sense of the norm.

For the first time, Linh speaks sincerely and without condescension. “In the War Against Americans,” he begins, “Vietnamese who took up arms against their fellow Vietnamese are phan nuoc , traitors.”

I am less shocked than battered by the words. In the long silence that follows, I want to tell Linh that he is wrong, that his history is incomplete: My father is Vietnamese just as he is, just as his father and all the other “liberators” are. His beliefs were different but they were no less noble. He was willing to die for a cause he believed in and chances are, he did. I want to ask, doesn’t any of that count? But I keep my anguish to myself.

The road trip blessedly ends when the van has to wait its turn to cross a bridge. I am certain that this is the Bo Ko Bridge, the same one blown up by Communist soldiers 22 years ago, ensuring that my father never returned home. I tell the driver to let me out.

I walk slowly across the unsteady frame of steel bars and creaking wood planks, staring at the deep, flowing water that was the divide between Father and home so long ago. On the other side and farther down the road, a huge concrete sign proclaims, “Historical Ruins . . . Victorious Battle.”

What used to be Tan Canh firebase is now an empty expanse at the top of a plateau, one of the highest points in the strategic Central Highlands. Geographically belonging to South Vietnam, this region separated northern Communist Vietnam from the towns and provinces of the south. For most of Father’s 10 years in the army, he was stationed in the Highlands. He spent the last two years at Tan Canh under the ARVN 22nd Infantry Division.

The fight for Tan Canh was a small part of the 1972 Easter Offensive--a series of strategic attacks the Communists launched across all of Vietnam in April that year. South Vietnamese who lived through that season, when fires from the battles scorched most of the countryside, call it Mua He Do Lua --Red Fiery Summer. At Fire Base Tan Canh, 6,000 Communist troops crushed the 3,500-strong ARVN 22nd.

I have already heard the story of the battle from the American point of view. “The officers were not trained well,” U.S. Army historian Dale Andrade has told me in a telephone interview from his Washington, D.C., office. “They just wouldn’t fight. Some of the men just ran pell-mell to Kon Tum. Many deserted the army, just went home to their family.”

But I also have heard another version from Tam Vu and Khoi Ha, the ARVN veterans I visited in San Jose. “For two days, rocket missiles rained and pounded on our bunkers,” Vu, now 54, told me. “I was scared. We all were. But we still shot back, at what we didn’t know. The more we fired, the more they came.”

Many of those who survived the onslaught surrendered or were captured, according to Vu, an infantry captain who escaped as he was being led to a prison camp. Some, like Vu’s friend Khoi Ha, also an infantry captain, did indeed “run.” “For every one like me,” remembered Ha, 58, “there were 10, 20, 30 men who were killed. Maybe I shouldn’t have run. Maybe I should have stayed and died. But I did run and I lived to fight another battle.”

“I will never forget Tan Canh,” Vu said. “I fought for more than 10 years up until then, and Tan Canh was the first time I knew our side was going to lose. We didn’t have enough to win.”

It is hard to match Vu’s horror-filled memories with the sweeping field of dirt that is now Tan Canh. It is scattered with bushes, trees and tumbleweeds. There are pieces of rusted metal here and there, and a few bomb or bunker craters in the ground, but those are the only visible reminders of the battle. It is also hard to hear Vu’s voice in my ear as Col. A Minh, president of the local chapter of the Vietnamese Veterans Assn., gives me a tour. “This was one of our most glorious battles,” Minh tells me.

I had hoped that being where my father was last seen would give me a sense of peace, a measure of closure. But the voices of my escorts intrude. They stand in the shade of a tree watching me.

“What does this Vietnamese foreigner expect to find here,” one of them, a local, asks the others loud enough for me to hear. “She goes abroad and she comes back thinking that anyone would help her find her father, a traitor to his people? It’s very funny.”

Heading back toward Bo Ko Bridge, I look again at the sign that marks the battlefield. The passing years and scorching sun have faded much of its blue-gray paint, but nothing dims its preamble--”On the morning of April 24, 1972, our forces overran (Tan Canh) firebase”--or its purpose, to celebrate the day I lost my father.

BACK IN SAIGON, I WAKE UP at 4 a.m. on the last day of my journey. I want ample time to find Dong Ba Pagoda, the temple where Mom had set up a shrine for Father on the third anniversary of his disappearance, the day before we left the country in 1975.

In most Vietnamese homes, an ornate red-and-gold altar is set up so that family members can pray to the spirits of the dead. But because my father had never been found, dead or alive, and had no burial place, my great-grandmother advised Mom that a shrine at home wouldn’t do any good; it would only invite a restless spirit to steal his children to keep him company in the nether world.

Believing in great-grandmother’s wisdom, Mom had purchased an altar for Father at a temple instead. From there, if he were dead, his spirit would still be able to guide us. If he were alive, the shrine would serve as a permanent prayer for his return.

The pagoda turns out to be an unassuming two-story, wood-and-concrete structure. I arrive before the opening hour, so the gatekeeper and his wife run to awaken the nun in charge. A gentle smile spreads across her face when I tell her why I am here.

She takes me upstairs into a loft, where two large and dusty hardwood tables dominate the room. Propped on them are hundreds of pictures memorializing the dead. I lean across the tables, poring over each image. Here and there are photographs of men in military uniform. I know that Mom had used a copy of a picture of Father’s graduation from military school. I have seen it countless times. I would know it in my sleep.

But even here--as in the rest of my journey--I am unsuccessful. My father’s picture is nowhere to be found. Downstairs, the nun and I riffle through the temple’s tattered record books for Father’s name. Again, nothing.

“I didn’t want you to be disheartened before you looked, so I didn’t tell you,” the nun says as she bundles the books back together. “Some of the records were lost or burned. We tried to safe-keep all pictures of military officers, but many were taken and destroyed after liberation.”

THE SEARCH FOR MY FATHER would end almost exactly where it began--in memory and in resolve.

When I had first arrived in Saigon, I briefly reunited with my uncle, my father’s oldest brother, Nguyen Quoc Hung. I couldn’t know it then, but finding Uncle Hung was the closest I would come to finding my father in Vietnam. Listening to his comrades in the United States, meeting his adversaries on the battlefield, hearing the old conflicts debated again through the differing stories of Tan Canh--all of that taught me about his time, the why and how associated with his disappearance. But it was my uncle’s recollections, stored now with my own and my mother’s, that helped make my father come alive in my heart and mind.

From Uncle Hung, I discovered that my father’s fate might have been completely different but for his stubbornness. When Father was 18, Uncle Hung told me, he was turned away from the military because, at 120 pounds, he didn’t weigh enough. Undaunted, Father bought a long steel rope and wound it snugly around himself. On his second try, he tipped the scale at the minimum required, 135 pounds. His zeal, according to my uncle, came not so much from wanting to fight as wanting to help rebuild a democratic Vietnam. But first he had to get through the war.

As happy as Uncle Hung was to see me in Saigon, after 19 years of separation, my return also reminded him of the emotional burden he had been carrying. “For several years after 1975, every time I heard a knock on the door, my heart would stop and I would run to greet the visitor--just in case it was your father coming home,” Uncle Hung told me, staring out the opened door into the humid night. “I never believed, in the beginning, that he died. So, I kept hoping, and praying to the Buddha, that he would come home. After a while, I stopped running to the door when someone knocked. For my peace of mind, I gave up hope. But, as you know, the hardest part is never knowing.”

That night, as I began my journey, I agreed with him--not knowing was the hardest part. But three weeks later, I had learned that there was something harder, something worse than not knowing. “When the living forget the dead,” one of the nuns at the Dong Ba Pagoda had told me, “the dead die once more.”

In Vietnam, my father and thousands of heroes like him have been dying--and disappearing--again and again for two decades, without memorials, without a tally, with hardly an official ripple. And in the United States, the land of his allies, my father also continues to vanish. My discovery saddens my mother, who is more disappointed for me that I did not find anything concrete. Mom says she came to terms over Father’s disappearance a long time ago. She hopes I can, as well.

As for me, I have to admit that I have not yet given up hope. Even though my intellect tells me otherwise, some small part of me still clings to the unrealistic hope that he is alive and that the soothsayers’ prophecies will come true.

But whatever my hopes, whatever my ambivalence, I keep coming back to the nun’s words, and the real discovery at the end of my search: If nothing else, I can find my father in memory. If nothing else, I bring him home alive by never forgetting.