n 2003, for the first time in a decade, I thought about my father.
Our guide at the time also pointed out the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the west. Across the border, I could see a little road running through the jungle. I knew my Dad, an Air Force weapons systems operator, was shot down over the trail, but I didn’t know much more about its complex history or route. I didn’t know much about my Dad, either. He disappeared when I was three years old. I took a picture of the lush green hills and the trail. I had a fleeting thought that I wanted to go there one day and travel along those roads. Four years later, in 2007, a search and recovery mission finally identified my Dad’s remains at the crash site. After more than 30 years of wondering whether he might still be alive, or may have been captured, finally we knew that he had died in the crash that day in 1972. Part of me was relieved to find out he was dead, and more than anything, that he hadn’t been tortured and hadn’t suffered. Again, I thought about going back. And as my cycling was evolving to include more expedition riding, my idea to ride the Ho Chi Minh Trail took shape.
I was competing in a jungle expedition race in Vietnam that entailed navigating more than 1,000 miles of brutal terrain on bikes, in kayaks, and on foot. I knew that across the border was Laos, where deep in the jungle, my Dad’s plane had crashed during the Vietnam War. My adventure racing team wasn’t being shot at, but we were being chased as we struggled to survive the intense elements and unforgiving landscape. I wondered, “Is this similar to what he and the other soldiers went through?” After the race ended, my Mom and I visited several important locations from the Vietnam War... Da Nang Air Base, where my father had been stationed in 1972... the DMZ, the demilitarized border between North and South... and Khe Sanh, location of one of the bloodiest battles in the war. So many physical remnants of the war remained: bomb craters, defoliation from Agent Orange, tunnels that had been repurposed as homes, and even plane wreckage. But the people have moved on. For example, Khe Sanh is now a beautiful coffee plantation. You would never know its horrific history without reading about it in a book.
74 | September 2017
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