Above, Jim, back center, and another vet reunite with Vietnamese he photographed thirty-five years ago. |
Standing in the middle of a dirt street in the U.S. Depot at Cam Ranh Bay, Jim Bambenek was as lost as he'd ever been. After eight months of trying to stay under the radar of the draft board, the 23-year-old Winonan was sent to Vietnam. Now, dressed in fresh green fatigues and shiny black boots he was the FNG (an unflattering acronym for new guys) and everyone around him was drunk. It was Christmas Eve of 1968.
Christmas has never been the same since.
Thirty-five years later, Bambenek found himself standing on a street not far from the first one. As a convoy of scooters approached, he felt apprehension, but not the same kind as that bewildered day in 1968.
This trip to Vietnam was his own doing and the people riding toward him cramped two to a scooter had just ridden two hours to see him. They were coming, he could only surmise, for essentially the same reasons he had: curiosity, nostalgia and an invisible yet powerful bond forged at the Saomai Orphanage near Cam Ranh Bay 35 years ago.
For Bambenek, the prequel to this trip had been a visit to Vietnam with his wife, Nancy, other veterans, and veterans' family members in 2003. On that visit, Bambenek and the other veterans spent day after gut-wrenching day reliving memories and staring down the demons that followed them home after their time at war. For family members, many of them children who came without their veteran fathers, it was a time of understanding, healing.
Operated through Tours of Peace, both trips were comprised of hand-selected participants who indicated they were ready to at least soften the edges of bitter memories by adding new ones of a beautiful country that is itself healing from the war. Participants get a precise blend of tourism, humanitarianism and soul-searching, and many return a changed person.
For his year at war, Bambenek was an Army photographer, an odd position specially created by a full-bird colonel who liked the idea of having someone document the goings on at Cam Ranh Bay. Bambenek's assignment was to photograph daily life and send those photos with short news bites to newspapers back home.
Being the company photographer brought Bambenek certain privileges, particularly that he could ride along on any convoy he wanted to. Many days, Bambenek claimed a much coveted seat on the convoy headed for Saomai, a sad place that soldiers clamored to go to just the same.
It was a grim home, where babies without diapers slept on concrete floors, the "kitchen" consisted of a pot over a fire and dozens of orphaned and abandoned children tried just to survive while a war raged on around them.
Located in a village near the base, the orphanage had drawn the attention of a civilian contracting firm and soldiers looking for something to do. Thanks to surplus materials and a little free time, the orphanage got some new buildings and whatever else the Americans could "appropriate" for the cause.
They brought the children toys and food, a new stove and clothes. They siphoned gas from Army jeeps when the orphanage generator ran out. Once they transported the entire orphanage to the base for Easter dinner.
Somehow, Bambenek said, being around the children made the soldiers feel more normal in a place where everything else was strange. The list of men wanting to join the convoy to the orphanage was always full. "It was a good excuse to find some sanity," he said.
There were certain children who impressed themselves into Bambenek's memory, children whose haunted faces fill the photo albums now in his basement. For three decades he wondered about children like General George, a once-malnourished two-year-old who stole everyone's hearts, or the quiet girl called Van, whose entire family had been killed by the Vietcong.
On his first visit back to the orphanage in 2003, Bambenek left behind photos of himself and the children he was asking about, as well as his contact information. It was a long shot, he knew, but he was banking on the fact that people in Vietnam didn't typically go far from where they grew up.
Seven or eight months went by, and then Jim got a letter printed in neat but broken English.
It was from a young woman who saw the picture of Van and recognized her as the girl her family adopted many years ago.
With the help of the woman, who spoke passable English and had access to the Internet, Bambenek began the arduous process of confirming it was the same girl and inquiring if Van knew the whereabouts of any of the others.
With Van's help Bambenek was able to locate two more children, one of them General George and the other an older boy with a pronounced limp that Bambenek had come to know.
And now, after 35 years, they were on scooters riding towards him as he stood on the steps of his hotel.
After a moment, Van, Little George, and the boy with the limp whose name Bambenek never knew were standing in front of him. Members of their families rode along, no doubt curious about the unusual meeting.
For two hours the group crowded around a table, telling of their lives through the words of an interpreter. They talked about their families. They talked about the orphanage. They talked of their hardships. Bambenek wanted to take them out to eat, take them shopping, but with a two-hour return trip on the mopeds and a typhoon bearing down on Vietnam, the group had to cut the visit disappointingly short.
Watching them pile back onto the scooters, Bambenek was moved. "After doing this I truly think I know what the term bittersweet means," he said. "I was so happy to see them, but they've all had such hard lives. And then they're riding away into the sunset and I'm standing there bawling my eyes out. They spent four hours on motorscooters to come see me."
Bambenek says he would like to go back to Vietnam, but not for the same reasons he did before. This time, he said, he'd like to sit by a fire somewhere and really get to know these people who would be forever imprinted in his life. They'd talked about the bad, but he wanted to talk about the good too, about their wonderful moments since the sad days at the orphanage, about how people become strong enough to survive the way they have.
But he doesn't need to talk about war for himself anymore, because meeting the children he tried to help all those years ago completed the circle for Bambenek, and he felt the weight of war lift off him as if it had wings.
But a different set of wings during Bambenek's Tour of Peace trip sealed the deal.
In Halong Bay in North Vietnam, the group chartered a boat for a cruise that lasted several days. The masthead on every other vessel was a fierce looking dragon of some sort, but, by absolute coincidence, the masthead on Bambenek's group's boat was a single white dove.
One night, as the boat gently rocked on the South China Sea with a serene dove leading the way, restless members of Bambenek's group dragged their bedding above deck to sleep under the open sky.
In sometimes hushed, sometimes angry, sometimes sad tones they cast their memories to the stars, setting them free.
And as this assemblage healed in the same place they would have been killed 35 years ago, another rather serendipitous coincidence sat silently on the face of the calendar. It was November 11 - Veterans Day.
|
