Tommy Denton

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Some people encounter one phase of their lives so up-close and ugly that, having survived, they spend much of the rest of their years trying to make sense of it all.

For some, journeys to old battlefields may help bury some lingering ghosts that still haunt their memories. For others, in the modern turn of therapeutic phrase, they seek "closure."

Whatever the reason, returning carries with it a deeply personal sense of discovery, a probing into distant reaches of memory that somehow, decades later, demand to be examined, if not reconciled.

Last August, I responded to the beckoning of that siren song a second time. I had gone back to Vietnam in 1989 with a journalistic tour, before the United States normalized relations with Vietnam.

The second return, 35 years after my tour of duty during the war, afforded the chance to show my wife some of the places she'd heard me talk about all these years.

Much good has happened to Vietnam in the years since the country opened itself to the rest of the world and liberalized many -- though certainly not enough -- of its economic and social policies. Jean and I stayed in fine hotels, ate in wonderful restaurants and managed to navigate amid swarms of motorbikes and cars that gorge the broad boulevards of Hanoi, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City (which most everyone but government officials still refer to as Saigon).

Tourists visit from all over the world, including American veterans. At the Saigon war museum one sweltering morning, I was studying a map depicting combat zones during what the Vietnamese now call the "American war." Illustrating the U.S. positions were assorted insignia for the combat units, one of which was mine: the 196th Light Infantry Brigade.

Behind me, a voice asked in English: "Hey, man, you recognize any of those?" I turned to see a bearded man, an American with an earnest gaze and mildly grizzled countenance. I pointed to the shoulder patch and indicated that I had been assigned to the 196th.

He introduced himself, Carey Spearman from Staten Island, N.Y., and said that he had been a combat medic during the 1968 Tet offensive and pointed to the patch worn by his helicopter medical evacuation unit. We swapped pleasantries and exchanged e-mail addresses.

Frankly, I thought the brief conversation at the museum would be the end of it. Returning to our "trip of a lifetime" that would also include Cambodia, India and Russia, my wife and I moved on.

Months later, a package arrived at our house. Besides a brief letter signed by "Doc" Spearman, the padded envelope included a black silk scarf hand-embroidered in the Vietnamese central highlands city of An Khe and a book: "Vietnam Veterans' Homecoming: Crossing the Line," by Carey J. Spearman.

The paperback, published in 1999, is a compendium of vignettes and reflections on the horror of war that Spearman experienced -- the bloody work of retrieving the wounded, bandaging and consoling those who survived and bidding a sort of farewell to those who didn't.

But the passages also offer the meditations of a man who, like countless others scarred by war, yearns for meaning, hope and purpose from the memories of the savagery that formed at least part of who he was to become.

"I have seen soldiers come in dead," he wrote. "I have seen soldiers fight for life and lose. I have seen soldiers fight to live with no arms or legs, and some cut in half. I have seen soldiers just give up and die. I have seen soldiers who were in very bad shape. If I were in the shape they were in, I wouldn't want to live. But they just wouldn't give up. I have seen myself in all of these soldiers."

In 2005, Spearman followed that book with a sequel, "36 Years and a Wake-up." Those more extensive, deeper reflections grew out of more trips to Vietnam, and he plans to leave this summer for his ninth visit.

In a recent message to me, he revealed a sublime irony about how the Vietnam War has shaped his life: "I have to go back. There is peace there for me."

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.