I’ve known JP for most of my life, though there is some debate between us as to our actual meeting. Each time he introduces me to someone as, “I knew her when she was this tall,” gets shorter and my age gets younger. I keep telling him that eventually he’s going to claim to be the presiding midwife at my birth.

During the Vietnam War JP served with the 1st Cavalry Division as a helicopter pilot. And a dang good pilot too. But, in Vietnam you had to be good.

Fully acknowledging my redundancy, I can’t stress how special it was to visit these locations and listen to his southern drawl on about them. Places I still find exceedingly difficult to pronounce, much less spell- Phước Vĩnh, An Khê, Pleiku (probably because Vietnamese does not translate well into Texan), but are now cemented into my memory log with the visuals I took in and the dirt still imbedded in my boots (to clean or not to clean… That is the question).

These locations have largely been built up over the last 50 + years. In some cases built up, torn down, and built up again multiple times. Often times there’s a paved road where there used to be a tarmac made of Marston Matting (a perforated steel material that was used as makeshift runways and landing pads. Visualize flat legos fitting together like a puzzle)… Or locals dry their rice on cement sidewalks and grassy areas where we used to have hard back tents housing our boys.

(Incidentally - it was with amusement that a few times we saw farm trucks drive by with their sides encased in Marston mats from the war. Quite clever in fact as it converted the bed of the truck into a suitable way of carting animals or large and bulky items).

But even though there is little evidence of great military force that was once there, if you just sit still enough for a minute and imagine - it’s not hard to see the helicopters coming in and out and hear the purr of their turbos. And lemme tell you, it’s a beautiful noise.