Return to Vietnam: Meeting a formerly faceless foe(By Col. Jack Jacobs)

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I recently returned to Vietnam, for the first time in about 40 years, to see my old battlefield in the Mekong Delta. And on that day I also visited a man named Pham Phi Huang.

He and I first met on March 9, 1968, but we never saw each other. He was the commander of a force of more than 250 Viet Cong who had lain in wait for my battalion of South Vietnamese soldiers to walk innocently into the kill zone of a large and deadly ambush.

Another officer and I were with the two lead companies of our battalion. We were with South Vietnamese soldiers, but combat had made us closer than any countrymen could be: We were brothers.

I lost friends, comrades and a lot of blood that day, and it changed me forever.

All these years later, I approached my meeting with the enemy commander with a peculiar detachment, rather than anger or even sadness. The life of a soldier is one of violence, but success in war is more often the result of sober analysis and unemotional reflection. So after 40 years, perhaps curiosity had overcome pain and rancor. I wanted to ask him dozens of questions about that day, and I did.

He received me dressed in his uniform. Huang was effusively, contagiously friendly, holding my hand in the typical Vietnamese way during most of the visit. At one point he hugged me, and the hard edge of his right epaulet cut my lip. He’d wounded me again.

About the battle he was fuzzy with some things, but others he remembered in detail. Yes, he had known about our operation in advance – a spy in the province chief’s headquarters had tipped him off – and he had three days to construct the ambush.