HOMER -- The retired North Vietnamese general rushed to the back of the boat to photograph two bald eagles perched above a nest at the entrance to Halibut Cove. He had never seen a bald eagle, never been to America.
Then he went back in the cabin with a smile and threw his arm around Louis Block, the disabled former U.S. artilleryman.
Thirty-seven years ago, the two men had tried to kill each other.
Jan. 24, 1968. Highway Nine, just south of the Demilitarized Zone.
The coincidence had emerged slowly the night before, as a small band of Vietnamese and U.S. war veterans, gathered in Homer for a remarkable reunion, sat up late sharing stories.
Maj. Gen. Nguyen Hien, 75, was talking about how his NVA forces, with inferior Soviet weapons, had adopted the tactics of classic Chinese war theorist Sun Tzu, grabbing their enemy by the belt buckle and getting in their face.
That was the familiar enemy to Block, who once perched behind a pom-pom gun known as a Duster firing 240 two-pound warheads a minute in defense of Marines moving down a road called Ambush Alley.
On that day in 1968, Block called to report seeing the NVA crossing a river with tanks and boats. The officer at the other end told him that wasn't possible. Hien, who was then an NVA colonel, was among the North Vietnamese.
"It was a terrible fight," said Block, now 58 and wheelchair-bound.
The two men were touring Kachemak Bay on a nature cruise Friday with other veterans.
A former Viet Cong captain, a woman who led 400 troops on the Mekong Delta, listened as they repeated the story through an interpreter.
Capt. Le Thi Thanh Liem asked Block if he still had many friends from his batallion.
"Yes, but they don't like the Vietnamese like Louie," Block said, referring to himself. He once returned to Vietnam to build a rural medical clinic, before his war injury grew worse. "A few of them are angry at me."
Everyone paused to admire a sea otter lazing on its back.
Liem spoke again in Vietnamese. Her fiance and father were killed in action in 1969, her mother in a U.S. village action in 1970.
"You can tell your friends we are not carrying grudges against them," the interpreter said. "It should be us who hold anger and grudges against them, because we fight for peace."
And so it has gone this week during the "Celebration of Peace and Reconciliation" staged in Anchorage and Homer for Vietnam War veterans from both sides.
"If nothing else happens, what happened last night was the distillation of what it's all about," Wisconsin vet Mike Boehm said of the jaw-dropping encounter between Block and Hien.
GRASS-ROOTS EFFORT
The event, pegged to the 30th anniversary of the war's end, is the brainchild of Homer vet Michael LeMay. It comes at a time of growing cultural and commercial ties between Vietnam and the United States. Participants said the event's grass-roots origins make it unique.
Three Vietnamese military veterans are taking part, along with two officials of the Vietnam-USA Friendship Society. About 15 U.S. veterans from the Lower 48 and Alaska are spending the weekend in Homer, where they plan to go halibut fishing with their former enemies.
Some of the American vets have been involved in other outreach projects, such as construction of a "peace park" near the scene of the My Lai massacre or the Vietnam Friendship Village to care for children with Agent Orange birth defects.
Others are new to the idea of reconciliation.
One of the latter is Eben Olrun, 57, a Cupik Eskimo originally from Nunivak Island, who spent 1970 as a Marine in the Khe San Mountains. He said he returned from his time on Hill 34 in great pain, which he faced at first through alcohol and drugs, and then, for nearly two decades, through sobriety, spirituality and building a young family of his own.
Invited by a friend to participate in the "celebration," Olrun wasn't sure how he felt. He'd carried anger in his head toward the Vietnamese for years, he said. But there he was last week, holding a welcome banner in Vietnamese at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. The only word he understood in the banner was "Alaska."
"When they came, I was searching my heart to be angry at them, and I couldn't find it," Olrun said. "My heart was stronger than my mind."
LeMay, the host, was stationed for 11 months in the Mekong Delta in 1970. Some of the visitors are staying at his bed-and-breakfast, the Good Karma Inn. He is clear in his feelings about the war, which took the lives of 58,000 Americans and an estimated 3 million Vietnamese.
"They were the minutemen. We were the redcoats," he says. American soldiers bonded because they had a simple motivation, he said. "We fought to keep each other alive," he said.
But LeMay has worked to keep the political temperature down at the event, especially at a time when U.S. troops are deployed overseas in another controversial war. There was much talk of world peace and little of Iraq at the gathering's Homer kickoff Thursday, an hour-long "water ceremony" attended by the vets and some 80 Homer residents. Amid hugs, vials of water from around America, from the Anchor River and the Mississippi, were mingled in a fountain with water carried from Vietnam. The combined water will be frozen and set into Kachemak Bay on Tuesday at the event's end.
ALASKA VETERANS' REACTION MIXED
Alaska had the highest percentage of Vietnam veterans of any state in America in the 2000 census. Not surprisingly, support for the gathering is not universal among them.
The event has the backing of the state's chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America, whose president, Bob Moore, spoke at an opening ceremony in Anchorage last week. But Homer-area veterans groups have chosen to avert their gaze.
The American Legion post voted not to participate after listening to a pitch from LeMay, said post commander Bill Sheldon, a Korean-era veteran. A few Vietnam vets in the group are pretty bitter, he said.
"They just seen too much to ever forget about it," Sheldon said. "I'm not saying hate 'em forever, but I'm not saying give 'em a big open-arms hug, either."
Still, Sheldon said the reaction was much different from the one to antiwar protests staged over Iraq in Homer two years ago. Many local veterans turned out then to stage noisy counter-protests.
"We told individuals it was OK to participate," said Jim Dress, a three-time past commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Anchor Point, which likewise voted not to endorse the gathering.
"I do not oppose the event. It's probably doing a lot of good for a lot of people," Dress said. "I would love to go back if I was able. But I figured this effort would be a group of colonels and generals and Communist Party members who were being sent here as a reward for their lifestyle. That's not the group I would like to visit with."
Judging from their official biographies, Dress is not far wrong about the Vietnamese visitors. The three ex-military hold high ranks in the official Veterans Association of Vietnam. Capt. Liem, 58, is now a provincial official, and appealed for help for what she said were 59,000 deformed victims of Agent Orange in her region. Gen. Hien and Col. Tran Van Sang spent much of their career as political commissars in the military.
Press accounts of recent 30th anniversary celebrations in Vietnam noted the commercial motives underlying the spirit of reconciliation to the United States, which is now the country's largest trading partner. Likewise, Gen. Hien's speech at the Homer water ceremony began with "Warm greetings of friendship, peace and development."
SENSE OF FRIENDSHIP
But the three Vietnamese vets displayed an easy friendliness, despite the language barrier, and their combat experience was real. Gen. Hien, for instance, had been wounded three times before French colonial forces surrendered at Dienbienphu in 1954.
The American veterans who came to Homer were not officers. But they were hard-core combat troops whose lives were transformed, said New Hampshire vet Rick Ducey.
Gravely wounded in the war, Ducey was disabled for 10 years but went back to work as a veteran's advocate in 1980, angered by the government's foot-dragging over providing health benefits to military victims of Agent Orange. The issue was personal -- his own tissue showed deposits of dioxin from the defoliating agent sprayed to clear broad sharpshooter zones along the Cambodian border, where Ducey had worked as an infrared night-vision specialist.
For 20 years as a medical advocate for nonprofits and state organizations, he avoided political events like the one in Homer. But in 2000, Ducey was diagnosed with metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer. The doctors gave him six months to live. He quit and started working for peace.
"The illness is a kind of freedom," he said.
Ducey, 55, said he cried at the end of "Saving Private Ryan," when director Steven Spielberg's character looked back on his life and asked if it had been worth the sacrifice of others' lives. It made him recall his last fight in Vietnam, when he was wounded and his unit was overrun -- "These little guys kicked our ass bad" -- and an airstrike was called in on their own position to protect an artillery piece.
"I never understood why I was one of the few guys who survived," Ducey said. "I think being a veterans' advocate for 20 years helped answer that question for me. And now, being a witness for peace helps explain why I've survived for five more years."
Reporter Tom Kizzia can be reached at tkizzia@adn.com or in Homer at 1-907-235-4244.
