Courtesy of David Helmer

Helmer (left) sits atop an American tank on his recent tour of Vietnam with a group of veterans and their families.

On July 15, 1965, David Helmer landed in South Vietnam aboard the USS Breckinridge, disembarking near the city of Qui Nhon, where he would spend most of the next 11 months as the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War deepened.

On May 11, 2009, Helmer returned to a unified Vietnam aboard a Korean Airlines flight that landed in Ho Chi Minh City, which was still called Saigon when Helmer was last in the country.

He arrived at Tan Son Nhat Airport, “the same place I left Vietnam on June 22, 1966,” he wrote in his trip journal, “except then it was [a] US Air Force base.”

Helmer had returned to Vietnam along with a group of fellow veterans and family members. His mission was “to go back and see what the hell has happened. I wanted to go back to where I’ve been and see the improvements that have been made to that country.”

For two weeks, he and his squad of fellow travelers roamed the country, visiting sprawling cities and tiny villages, and viewing ancient temples, new shopping malls and museum exhibits that told the Vietnamese version of the conflict that left millions dead, more than 58,000 American servicemen among them.

Helmer, 67, sought out the familiar terrain of his first visit, traveling past rice fields and grazing water buffalo as he retraced the rugged mountain route he took regularly with the Army’s 597th Transportation Company. Except that this time, he explained later, he traveled “without hauling napalm, rockets … all the good flammables.”

All the while, he snapped hundreds of photos, drank bad coffee, ate rice three meals a day and noted all that had changed in Vietnam since the days when Lyndon Johnson was president, the Beatles were still on tour and he was a 24-year-old second lieutenant.

“The Business district looks nice — other areas are slums,” Helmer wrote in his journal upon arriving in Ho Chi Minh City. “Hotel is great. We stayed for two days. Internet access is cheap and quick.”

A welcoming country

“First, you need to know the ground rules,” Helmer said as he addressed a Kiwanis Club of Roanoke meeting on June 24. A past president of the group, he began his first public showing of his photographs by explaining how the Vietnamese government interprets the war for their citizens and to visitors, even if they’re American combat veterans.

“The North were patriots. The South were puppets. The United States were the bad guys.”

With that, he zipped through a Powerpoint presentation of more than 200 photos in about 35 minutes, offering commentary about what he saw and what he remembered from his time there four decades ago.

In a rapid-fire narration, he cracked one-liners about Korean Airlines having “great stewardesses and great wine” and about how one particular city had progressed in the 40 years since American servicemen knew it for its two industries: “laundry and prostitution.” He recalled the day he picked up actor Robert Mitchum and drove him to Qui Nhon to entertain the troops. “He was totally drunk,” Helmer said.

He also showed a poignant picture of a Minnesota woman on the tour who was looking for the site where her brother died in 1969. The group met a 66-year-old Vietnamese man who lost both legs while fighting against the communists. They visited the “Hanoi Hilton,” the notorious prison where American soldiers were held (before the war, the French imprisoned Vietnamese civilians and soldiers there for more than 50 years).

In the end, Helmer was impressed and moved by his trip. At almost every stop, his group was greeted by friendly, accommodating citizens. Children flocked to the group and posed for pictures with the 60-something war veterans. Helmer noted how more than two-thirds of Vietnam’s 80 million citizens were born after most of the American combat troops left in 1973. Perhaps, he surmised, that was why his group was treated so well.

“There’s no animosity over the war,” he told the Kiwanis near the end of his presentation. “We didn’t run into any anger.”

No old enemies

Helmer has been one of Roanoke’s busiest civic leaders since retiring from Norfolk Southern Corp. He has served on various boards, and he was a driving force behind the creation of the O. Winston Link Museum.

He was born in Oklahoma, the son of Russian immigrants who came to America as children just before World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. His friends know him as an avid sports fan who still supports his alma mater, Oklahoma State.

After graduating from Oklahoma State, Helmer joined the Army in 1965. That summer, he was deployed to Vietnam during the 1964-65 troop buildup, just ahead of the U.S. 1st Cavalry, which fought against the North Vietnamese Army that fall. Helmer’s transportation company traveled in convoys in support of the 1st Cavalry.

Helmer can look back now and see that he was in Vietnam just as the action was heating up. The Tet Offensive was a year and a half away. Back home, anti-war demonstrations were just gaining momentum. His outfit saw little action.

“We experienced mines, a little sniper fire,” he recounted while being interviewed in a Roanoke coffee shop. “My experiences in-country were milder than the infantry’s.”

Now, metropolitan streets swell with cars and motor scooters, he said. Vietnam, which in the 1990s followed China’s model of mixing free-market economics with strict government rule, has experienced a mini-tourism boom.

Thousands of former vets have returned to the country to revisit the places where they served as young men. Some go to conquer old demons; others, such as Helmer, are curious to see what things are like today.

He even ran into an occasional North Vietnamese soldier but experienced no animosity.

“You have this shared experience” with the old enemies, he said. “I did the job the government asked me and so did they. How can you be angry?”

Near the end of the tour, Helmer met a 75-year-old Vietnamese man who helped build the Ho Chi Minh Trail from the north to the south 50 years ago. The route’s construction escalated the tensions between the communist north and the Western-supported south and helped supply the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong guerillas. Yet, when the two old soldiers met, the Vietnamese man offered his hand.

“He shook my hand before boarding his bus back to somewhere in the country,” Helmer said. “I thought, ‘Maybe the war’s over.’ ”