Vietnam, U.S. Vets Go Full Cycle on Trip

A bunch of middle-aged veterans from Vietnam and the United States, many of them disabled, set out on an improbable journey Thursday to bury a war and test the limits of sinew as well as heart.

They gathered with their bicycles at dawn in the shadow of Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum in Hanoi, the morning misty and charged with the veterans’ sense of both sadness and relief, and behind a police escort pedaled off for what was once known as Saigon--16 days and 1,200 miles away.

Three of the riders are blind and rode as stokers on the rear seat of tandems. Seven are partially paralyzed, but their three-wheeled hand cycles--low-slung carriages pedaled by hand--sped along as surely as the standard bikes ridden by disabled vets who have high-tech artificial limbs made of carbon fiber.

Along the way to Ninh Binh, the first night’s stop 55 miles south of Hanoi, thousands of children lined Highway 1--the war-battered route the French called the Street Without Joy--and shouted all the English words they knew: “Haaallo,” “Very good,” “OK.” Old women in conical hats smiled, and men with wispy white beards flashed thumbs-up greetings.

“I really didn’t know how I’d feel coming back to Vietnam,” said Dan Jensen, 48, a commercial photographer from Sioux Falls, S.D., who lost his right foot to a land mine in 1971. “But the minute I stepped off the plane, I felt as though I was completing something. It was very emotional. One thing I know for sure: I don’t feel any animosity toward these people.

“I didn’t mope around after I got injured, but I didn’t do any sports either. I’d try to run, and my stump would bleed. Then in 1990 I got this Flex-Foot prosthesis, and it changed my life. I can run, swim and, yeah, bike from Hanoi to Saigon. I can be a kid again.”

Nguyen Van Bao, at 71 the elder statesman of the ride known as the Vietnam Challenge and a 33-year veteran of the Vietnamese army, pedaled briskly and stayed in the pack just behind Jensen. Twenty-five years ago, during the Americans’ Christmas bombing of Hanoi, he was guarding a power plant that U.S. jets attacked in seemingly endless waves, killing and wounding a score of people.

“Actually, I hated you Americans then,” Bao said. “If anyone had said that on New Year’s Day in 1998 I’d be bicycling from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City [Saigon] with American veterans, I’d have said they were, well, crazy. But that was then, and this is now. This is a new chapter.”

The Vietnam Challenge--which is being followed by tens of thousands of U.S. schoolchildren on a Web site (https://www.askasia.org)--is sponsored by World TEAM (The Exceptional Athlete Matters) Sports, a nonprofit organization in Charlotte, N.C., that specializes in sports events for disabled people. It is supported by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, or VVAF.

Riding new 24-speed Cannondale mountain bikes, the participants--some neither veterans nor disabled--who left Hanoi on Thursday include 39 Americans picked by TEAM Sports and 14 Vietnamese chosen by Hanoi’s Communist government. Hanoi ignored a request that it include in its group someone who had fought for what was then South Vietnam, the U.S. ally in its war against the North.

Traffic thinned two hours out of Hanoi, and the landscape flattened into clusters of rice paddies where water buffalo and peasants sloshed through knee-deep water. “So beautiful, so peaceful,” said Diane Evans of Northfield, Minn., a nurse who served in the southern town of Pleiku and later spearheaded the campaign to build the memorial to women veterans in Washington.

With the Americans and Vietnamese riding as a single team in which the slowest rider sets the pace, Greg LeMond of Medina, Minn., hung well back, stroking at a leisurely clip. A three-time winner of the Tour de France and a TEAM Sports board member, he was 13 when the war ended in 1975. To bone up, he was reading two books: Michael Herr’s “Dispatches” and Bao Ninh’s “Sorrow of War,” the story of a North Vietnamese soldier’s fight for survival.

“To tell you the truth, I get more inspired riding with disabled athletes than I ever do with so-called able-bodied ones,” LeMond said. “Professional athletes get caught up with money, but these people never forget exactly why they are out here.”

The bond between the American and Vietnamese vets was slow to grip but was evident in little ways. When Diep Duc Quyen’s hand cycle tipped over, it was an American who stopped to help, and they embraced. Jensen, the South Dakota veteran, found a Vietnamese rider with a prosthesis just like his, and they rode side by side, gesturing and talking a mile a minute--even though neither understood much, if any, of the other’s language. George Brummell of Washington, blinded by a land mine in 1966, found himself a little surprised to be saying, “The Vietnamese have been so wonderful and friendly. They act as if they really want us here.”

Before setting off, TEAM Sports and VVAF presented a check for $200,000 to build a new orthotics clinic at Hanoi’s Bach Mai Hospital, where 30 patients and staff were killed in the Christmas bombing of 1972. Vietnam’s National Symphony Orchestra serenaded the U.S. riders, and the Americans laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Hanoi as a sign of respect for men from both sides who fought in the war.

“When they were laying the wreath, I started thinking about the young boy who shot me and the boys I had killed, and I started reciting the Lord’s Prayer and crying,” said former Marine Jerry Stadtmiller of San Diego, a blind stoker who has undergone more than 100 reconstructive operations since being shot in the head.

Rarely, if ever, has an event in Vietnam brought together foot soldiers from both sides, and although they had a long way to go from Ninh Binh--across the old demilitarized zone through places full of ghostly memories, such as Dong Ha, Hue, Da Nang--the Street Without Joy is teaching them that, as one vet put it, “We all ride the same road.”