Run of Reconciliation : Veteran Revisits Vietnam for Cross-Country Marathon of Friendship

Along a lonely road strewn with drying rice, Vietnam veteran Michael Liscio halted as he reached the fishing village of My Lai, the one stop he felt he had to make.

He had been warned he would not be welcome in the place where U. S. soldiers had massacred hundreds of men, women and children 27 years ago. But the visitor from Sherman Oaks had come too far--halfway into a 1,300-mile marathon run through Vietnam--to turn back.

He ran on. He found himself at a tombstone next to a man who, as a boy, had been pulled alive from beneath the body of his dead mother. Then the unexpected happened.

“He put his arms around me and thanked me for what I was doing, what I was doing for friendship,” said Liscio, 52, during a telephone interview from Ho Chi Minh City. “Later on, he ran with me.”

Such was the journey of Liscio, a part-time actor and carpenter whose cross-county run from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City over 81 days chased away personal demons and united old enemies who once saw each other only through rifle scopes.

Like a real-life Forrest Gump, Liscio drew hundreds of followers who ran with him, often alongside bomb craters untouched since the war. The former Navy seaman’s visit ended when he returned home Saturday, but the marathon’s healing power remains.

“The war left scar wounds,” said Liscio, whose Vietnam tour of duty was in 1965. Although he suffered little more than the occasional nightmare after the war, he nonetheless felt compelled to return to the country where he had watched friends die and history unfold.

“It was a great feeling being accepted by these people. It relieved me of any problems I had. Even more, I wanted to show that Americans can come here and have a wonderful time without any problems,” he said.

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His north-south journey along Liberation Highway, Vietnam’s main coastal roadway, was not without hazards. Hurdles began even before he left Sherman Oaks in January.

During a run in December, Liscio broke his left fibula when he tripped over a Sherman Oaks pothole. Doctors wrapped the leg in a cast and gave him the OK to run. But then, early during his trip, Liscio’s cast shattered during a 23-mile run in Hanoi.

So Liscio decided to run without a cast, hiring a driver to follow him during his trek in case the leg broke again.

A few days before Liscio left Hanoi to run in the hinterland, a Vietnamese official offered to send along an army truck with half a dozen soldiers. “They don’t see too many foreigners in the countryside,” Deputy Foreign Minister Le Mai warned him.

But Liscio refused, believing a military escort would stifle his message of friendship. Instead, he hired a Vietnamese translator. He made up a T-shirt with the Vietnamese and U.S. flags side by side, which he put on as soon as he started his journey. The Vietnamese got the message.

“I would pass a school, and hundreds of kids would run alongside me with their backpacks,” said the tanned veteran with a broad smile. “They all knew what it was about.”

News organizations noticed, too. Soon, both Western and Vietnamese reporters followed alongside Liscio and the barefoot children.

“Our Vietnam newspapers covered very largely these events,” said Vu Xuan Hong, vice president of the Vietnam-USA Society in Hanoi, a 45-year-old group promoting economic, cultural and academic trade between the two countries. “It was very significant because we are ready to put the past behind us and look to the future.”

Even when Liscio ran alone, the Vietnamese kept him going.

“They would run outside and hand me bananas and rice cakes,” Liscio recalled. “I was eating a dozen bananas a day. That’s good runner’s fuel. I can’t get Power Bars over here. Or Gatorade.”

One Western journalist who followed Liscio on his route found a trail of goodwill and adoring fans.

“I walked into this one cafe in Da Nang and they had a picture of him up on the wall,” said the reporter, who asked not to be named. “It was if they had met Michael Jackson or something.”

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Aside from Liscio’s charm, there was another reason behind the positive response: economics. Only last year, President Clinton lifted the embargo against Vietnam, freeing the way foS. dollars to again pour into this impoverished country.

“They are really excited to see Americans back because it means money,” the journalist said.

Not all inhabitants were friendly, however. As he jogged through the lush, green countryside in his white T-shirt and red shorts, sometimes a hundred miles away from the nearest city, Liscio encountered the same snarling nightmare he sometimes did at home: dogs.

“I was worried because there’s a lot of rabies around here,” Liscio said. “My driver actually lost his mother to a rabies-bitten dog. He would drive behind me. Whenever he would see any dogs around, he would drive right at them. The dogs got so close that I had to jump on the hood of the car a couple of times.”

Liscio nonetheless managed to average about 25 miles a day, sleeping at night in the back seat of a rented Russian car, which was “often better than the accommodations we could have had.” Many of the villagers lived in teetering, grass-roofed huts without walls.

Although cities had hotels, they also had suffocating pollution. When he reached Da Nang in mid-March, Liscio recalled, “the fumes from the cars were worse than Los Angeles. I had to stop running and go into a hotel to take a shower.”

There, Liscio also ran headlong into his most horrifying memory of the war. As one of the first major American supply posts of the war, China Beach on the Da Nang coast was constantly hammered by North Vietnamese mortar rockets during Liscio’s eight months of service there.

“One morning, I went outside with my clipboard under my arm, and my best friend was doing jumping jacks,” Liscio said. “I heard a thump. It was the sound of a mortar launching a rocket. I turned around and warned him. As he acknowledged my warning, the rocket hit him dead center. All I saw of him was a pink cloud where he had been.”

This time, the warmth of the people Liscio encountered in the countryside followed him into the old military base. His bitterness over his friend’s death lay somewhere behind him on the asphalt road.

Nearly all the Vietnamese that Liscio met seemed to share his sense of peace. Only once, at a restaurant north of the old demilitarized zone, did anyone express anger about the war. An old soldier pointed his finger at him and shouted “U.S.A. B-52. Bombs.”

The soldier was thrown out of the restaurant. And the rest of his run was marred by only one other misstep.

“I slipped in a pile of [water buffalo] dung,” said Liscio. “I went down on my buttocks very hard. I took a couple of days’ rest after that.”

If running helped emotionally, it had its practical uses, too. As Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) was preparing for the 20th anniversary of the North Vietnamese takeover on April 30, Liscio requested that the city clear a path through traffic so that he and fellow runners could finish his marathon there together on April 27. City officials refused.

So Liscio did what he always does when faced with a problem: He went for a run.

“I was running next to this man who I found out was the boxing trainer for the sports center in Ho Chi Minh,” said Liscio. “Sports carry a lot of weight in Vietnam. I asked him if he would join me.”

Liscio’s jogging companion did more than that. By the time April 27 arrived, the trainer had contacted officials who not only cleared a path through traffic but arranged a 20-motorcycle escort into Ho Chi Minh City and presented Liscio with a “citizen hero” award.

It’s the costliest award Liscio ever received: He ate up his life’s savings--about $30,000--during his four months in Vietnam. But it was worth every penny, he says.

“People thought I was crazy for doing this,” he added. “But my run here has been a success as far as extending friendship.”

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Nor, it seems, will it be his last. In Hanoi, an Israeli businessman asked Liscio if he would do a similar run for friendship from Syria to Jordan.

So this winter, Liscio will pack his bags for the Middle East.

“I’m not a rich man. I can’t help people economically,” Liscio said. “But sport is a great avenue for friendship. And I’m a damn good runner.”

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Vietnam Run

Vietnam veteran Michael Liscio of Sherman Oaks ran 1,300 miles from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City to promote peace between the United States and Vietnam. The run took just less than three months.