Following My Father’s Footsteps in Vietnam

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.”

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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.