Friend at Last

Welcome new contributor David Truong to the SOOP family. He is the author of Escape to America, a memoir about his family’s escape from communist Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.

I met a new friend named Pat at a recent Vietnam Veterans of America dinner where I spoke about my family’s escape from Vietnam.

Afterward, he introduced himself and handed me a binder. Inside were his personal accounts from Vietnam. Not a book for sale, but a journal written for posterity.

I read it that night, cover to cover.

I learned that Pat was a “Dust Off” helicopter pilot. He and his crew flew into some of the hottest landing zones (LZ) during the Vietnam War to evacuate the wounded. Their helicopters were painted with large red crosses with a white background on the doors, nose, and belly. Under the Geneva Conventions, those markings were supposed to protect the crew from enemy fire. In reality, they served as easy targets.

One account stayed with me. Pat’s in-country orientation flight became his first combat mission when another crew experienced mechanical problems. He and the pilot volunteered to go in their place. It was a night mission into an active firefight.

When the helicopter arrived, Pat switched on the searchlight and looked down through the plexiglass bubble beneath the aircraft. Below him lay a pile of dead American soldiers. Some still stared upward with their eyes open. The helicopter hovered just above the bodies while the crew loaded the wounded.

That night, Pat wrote his last will and testament and sent it home. He was convinced he would never make it out of Vietnam alive.

About the time Pat arrived in-country, I did as well. I was born in Saigon a month after he began his tour, not far from where he was stationed. Yet we would not meet for more than fifty years.

As I read Pat’s account and he read mine, I couldn’t help but appreciate the irony that we were sharing war stories from different vantage points of the same conflict.

Three weeks later, Pat and I met for lunch. The conversation came easily.

I learned that Pat had volunteered for Vietnam. As the sole surviving son in his family, he was exempt from the draft and could have avoided the war altogether. Instead, he chose to serve. Originally, he wanted to become a medic because he thought it would allow him to help people. A recruiter suggested he become a medevac pilot instead. Pat liked the idea because he believed he could save even more lives that way.

I also learned that Pat met his future wife, Janet, the night before shipping out to Vietnam. Their first conversation did not go particularly well. She opposed the war, and he was headed to it. But something clicked.

Pat made a promise to himself that if he survived Vietnam, he would ask Janet to marry him. When his tour ended, he flew straight to see her and proposed. She had no idea it was coming. In fact, she was dating someone else at the time.

She said yes and they were married three months later.

More than fifty years have gone by and they are still together.

Today, Pat serves as Janet’s primary caregiver as her health declines. Of all the dangerous missions he flew in Vietnam, this may be the most admirable calling of his life. The fact that he is not doing it alone, with the help of children and grandchildren, also says something about the family that Pat and Janet built together.

A few years after Pat came home from Vietnam, my family arrived in America. For most of the next five decades, we lived within twenty miles of one another in Northern Virginia. Our lives orbited each other, but once again our paths never crossed.

I later discovered that Pat’s daughter and her family are currently our neighbors. We live in the same subdivision and travel the same roads. When my wife and I moved to Richmond for a few years, Pat’s son lived only a few exits away.

I don’t know what to make of all this.

I don’t know why we never met years ago. I don’t know why we met now.

But the fact that we are both men of faith, both convinced that we would never have made it out of Vietnam without God’s providence, may have something to do with it.

What I do know is this.

Meeting Pat lifted my spirit.

Not because he changed my life overnight. Not because we became lifelong friends after a single lunch, though I hope that to be the case.

Rather, he reminded me that there are honorable and decent people in this world whom I have never met. People can be significant to your life even when they are not part of your life.

The world is larger, richer, and more beautiful than the small corner we happen to see. There are people quietly serving, sacrificing, loving their families, caring for others, and living fruitful lives all around us.

Meeting Pat reminded me of that.

There have always been and will always be good and decent people in the world.

Some, we just haven’t met yet.

David Truong writes about his life and family on his substack:The Leaven