Welcome!

Welcome to what we hope will be an active source of information for news related to the book, Backtracking in Brown Water.

This book, as I relate in the Preface, really started as an article in 2010 in Naval History Magazine.  That article was prompted by a return trip I made to Vietnam in 2010.  The trip, in turn, was made possible through the efforts of a good friend, Thu Trung Van, who was back in Vietnam visiting his family.   Thu, like many Vietnamese Americans, is a veteran of the Vietnam War.   He is from South Vietnam and was fortunate to have escaped the country in 1975 before becoming one of those incarcerated in what were then called "re-education camps."   With only a three hour notice of the surrender to the North, he left Vietnam with his family and with essentially the clothes on his back to begin a new life in the United States.

I was fortunate to have been able to help Thu and his family get started in this country.   That, along with my own involvement as a U.S. Navy patrol officer in the Mekong Delta, is a history I have never forgotten.  My memories of what happened are reinforced by a Journal I kept while in Vietnam.   I hope that what I have written does justice to Thu's story as well as mine. 

Finally, there were three friends I made in those days whose names are on the Vietnam Wall.   Two were Navy and one was Army.  They were involved in different aspects of the war then being waged in the Mekong Delta.  What happened to them and, subsequently, to their families is a central part of the narrative in this story.  The experiences of those left behind is sometimes overlooked when writing about war.  What I learned from these families brings the experience of Vietnam back to today.  The book ends in a tribute to them and to their loved ones.

As our nation begins to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, it is important for Americans today to remember this time.   I hope that this book can help in understanding that history, at least in the way it played out in 1969-1970 as the War, though winding down, continued to be waged in the Mekong Delta.

Rolland Kidder