Following My Father’s Footsteps in Vietnam

A solemn pilgrimage to a distant land where a GI fought for his country

Abraham Mahshie,

AARP Experience Counts

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Published September 05, 2024

Abraham Mahshie recreates a photo his father took in Vietnam

Courtesy Abraham Mahshie

I was wearing camo pants and a G.I. Joe cartoon shirt when I approached my father at his workbench. “Dad, how many bad guys did you kill in Vietnam?” I asked.

He was shirtless, wearing cut-off jeans. His shop fan hummed as it blew air in his direction, the pages of a pinup calendar flickering behind him. “What?” he responded. “Go back in the house with your mother.”

I never spoke about Vietnam with him again. He died a year later, at just 39, when I was 8 years old. His heart attack was later linked to his exposure to Agent Orange during his service in the country from March 1968 to March 1969.

Now, 37 years after his death, I was going to Vietnam to walk in my father’s footsteps, but I needed help.

Six weeks to prepare

I waited nine months for a thick yellow envelope of my father’s military records to arrive from the National Archives just six weeks before my trip.

In it, I found one line that would open his world for me: Alpha Company, 864th Engineering Battalion (Construction), U.S. Army Pacific, Vietnam.

That led me to a Facebook group page for old soldiers of the 864th, which had been responsible for road maintenance and construction in the central lowlands and highlands of South Vietnam, the roads that emanated north and south of Cam Ranh Bay and Nha Trang Air Base.

The group administrator, Ralph Willing, 78, a former company commander in the 864th, shared my details and half a dozen vets reached out to help me.

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“My goal is to help you track your father and walk in his footsteps,” fellow 3rd Shop machinist Jim Christopher, 77, wrote me.

“It was very, very little sleep because we always got attacked at night.” 864th diesel mechanic and Sgt. Ralph Olson, also 77, told me, describing his experience in Nha Trang during the same time that my father served: “You just stayed in fear the whole time.”

Willing sent me a topographic map of Camp McDermott and Google Earth links and instructed me on how to use the oil tanks that remain in Nha Trang to locate the precise position where the 3rd Shop stood.

Col. Rick Anderschat, 82, another former company commander in the 864th, said he likely knew where my dad’s mobile machine shop was located.

On a 1968 map of the region, he wrote “TTT,” and circled the fishing village of Thon Tan Thuy.

I posted the central lowlands photos to a Vietnam War group on Reddit. Within hours, a re-post yielded three GPS coordinates from a geo-locator.

Feeling my father’s presence in Vietnam

I arrived on a steamy night at the same Saigon airport where my father had landed more than two decades before I was born. Outside, I met a friend, and we were soon racing in a taxi through the neon-lit streets, buzzing with mopeds and weaving vehicles in what is now Ho Chi Minh City,

In Cam Ranh, a hotel driver took me in an air-conditioned van along a coastal road lined with Vietnam flags. The sun was blazing. Tourists were everywhere. Green mountains surrounded the city.

My guide, “Captain Thao,” met me beside the pool. His father served in the South Vietnamese Army in Nha Trang and he fought the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Soon, we were driving in his diesel 1964 U.S. Army Jeep up the coastal road toward the oil tankers.

As we cut down an alley and passed a broken chain-link fence, my chest started to rise. I felt a heavy presence as we moved closer to 3rd Shop.

We drove into what was once Camp McDermott, now an upscale housing development. I got out and walked its length. There were no more trucks, military buildings or troops, just the echo of an assembly at a nearby school.

We drove to Nha Trang’s Long Son Pagoda, which my father had visited. The bullet holes that marked Buddha’s back after the Tet Offensive had long since been smoothed over.

The Central Lowlands is likely where my father was involved in an ambush that nearly took his life and where he was exposed to the lethal agent that did.

As we approached the GPS location there, we parked along a lowlands highway and continued on foot up a dirt road.

I gazed across a lagoon at an island and distant mountains. With sweaty fingers, I swiped through my dad’s photos. The mountains matched exactly the picture of my father on the peak.

We drove west of Ninh Hoa, the road snaking through the mountains as we climbed into the highlands. In some areas, gum trees had been replanted where Agent Orange had destroyed the vegetation.

Across the valleys at the distant mountain ranges, trucks rumbled by me and spewed black smoke just as they would have done 56 years earlier. The heat was sweltering, even in the mountains. The road was under construction again.

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Abraham Mahshie is the former Pentagon editor for Air Force Magazine. As a journalist for two decades, he covered national security and politics across the U.S. and Latin America and also worked as a defense contractor before becoming a U.S. diplomat. He grew up in Miami and is currently based in Australia. The views expressed are his own and not necessarily those of the U.S. government.

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