Soldier of Conscience

It has been 30 years this month since Searcy returned from Vietnam, almost that long since he fell out with his father. He is 53 now, and if he gets a bit emotional talking about the rift with his family, perhaps it is because he has been thinking about reconciliation lately --- not just between fathers and sons, but between soldiers who once tried to kill each other, and between nations that once were enemies. Reconciliation is his job.

Searcy, a Georgia native, moved to Hanoi in 1995 to oversee a children's clinic sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, the only U.S. veterans organization with a full-time office there. The VVAF runs or supports humanitarian programs in six countries recovering from war. Although it has been 23 years since North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon, ending three decades of fighting, Searcy sees reminders of the war every day. In the morning he rides a motorbike to work past sidewalks where legless veterans beg for money. At night he returns to an apartment where the landlord has searing memories of the 1972 Christmas bombing. He was in a car when a B-52 bomb exploded, shattering the windshield and killing the driver. "It was terrible, " he told his American tenant, "but it was a long time ago."

A long time, yet Searcy has never quite gotten over it.

"Vietnam was the most profound experience of my life, " he says. "When I left, it was with a great sense of pain at the destruction I was leaving behind. As relieved as I was to be coming home in one piece, I knew even then that I might want to go back."

Along the way, Searcy compiled a resume that attests to his restless spirit. An aspiring songwriter who once pitched tunes in Nashville, he went to the University of Georgia to study music and ended up getting arrested during a sit-in. A onetime radio disc jockey, he co-founded an alternative paper in Athens and did everything from setting type to writing editorials. A Goldwater conservative in his youth, he became a McGovern liberal who worked in the Carter administration and was press spokesman for former U.S. Sen. Wyche Fowler.

"Chuck is like Forrest Gump; wherever the action is, he's in the picture, " says one of his oldest friends, Pete McCommons, editor of Flagpole magazine in Athens.

In Hanoi, Searcy is at the center of an American community whose 400 to 500 members all seem to have his cell phone number. His belt is constantly ringing when he sits down for morning coffee with the foreign correspondents at the Cafe au Lac, a sidewalk bistro next to his office in the city's colonial French Quarter. When he walks down the street, a conspicuously tall, thin figure with a pink complexion and a flock of brown hair that makes him look like an oversize leprechaun, many of the Vietnamese children know him and greet him as "Mr. Chuck."

"It's like he was the American ambassador before we had an ambassador in Vietnam, " says Bobby Muller, president of the VVAF, who has visited Searcy in Hanoi on several occasions. "He enjoys the Vietnamese so much I accuse him of becoming Vietnamese."

There are limits to Searcy's Vietnamization, though. Once, when he was studying the language with a tutor, a group of local doctors asked how the lessons were going. "I'm not a very good student, " Searcy told them, "but I have a good teacher." Their jaws dropped and they burst out laughing. Apparently, "teacher" sounds like another word in Vietnamese; they thought he had said, "I have a good penis."

Gone with the draft

There was nothing funny about Searcy's first tour in Vietnam. He was an Army intelligence specialist stationed outside Saigon when 70,000 North Vietnamese troops struck without warning throughout the south on Jan. 30, 1968 --- the Tet Offensive. One of his friends took a direct rocket hit, lost his legs and later died in surgery. Another pal from Georgia was killed when he stepped on a land mine.

"We were just as surprised as anybody else, " Searcy says. "We were in intelligence, but we didn't have a clue."

Searcy more or less drifted into Vietnam. He grew up near Augusta, in Thomson, where his father ran the Coca-Cola bottling plant. The oldest of three children, he was a personable kid who played the euphonium in the high school band and was active in student politics. He went on to the University of Georgia and joined the Dixie Redcoat Marching Band, envisioning a career in music, but left after two years with a case of youthful wanderlust. Without a student deferment, he was about to be drafted in 1966 and elected instead to enlist. A year later, he was in 'Nam.

His first inkling that something wasn't right came when he noticed the screens over the windows on the military buses; they guarded against Vietnamese throwing grenades at the Americans. The feeling was mutual. "The Americans here seem to hate the Vietnamese . . . and go out of their way to show their contempt and disrespect, " Searcy wrote in a 1968 letter to a friend back home. "These bastards think the Vietnamese should be able to speak English, mix a martini and tell a dirty joke."

The war radicalized the young man, who had cast his first presidential vote for Barry Goldwater. After he was discharged, Searcy returned to school in Athens and was asked to speak at a May Day rally against the war. His speech was so eloquent that the Christian Century magazine reprinted it. With some other students, he founded a chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and plunged into campus activism. In 1972, he was arrested for refusing to leave the university president's office during a protest of housing policies. The "Athens Eight, " as the media branded them, were found guilty of misdemeanor trespassing and fined $500 each.

Searcy's father, the veteran and small-town businessman, was not pleased.

"It upset me when Chuck and his daddy would argue, " says his mother, Carolyn Searcy. "It wasn't so much that he was for the war; he just felt that everybody ought to do his duty for his country. That protesting got Chuck into trouble."

And not just with his parents. She's referring to a Defense Department job her son didn't get because of his anti-war past. When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, Searcy's days as a campus radical were two decades behind him. He had spent the intervening years in the media and politics: as co-founder and publisher of an alternative newspaper, the Athens Observer; in the Small Business Administration during Jimmy Carter's presidency; as an aide with Fowler and as director of the Georgia Trial Lawyers Association. A faithful Democrat, Searcy raised money for the Clinton-Gore ticket, and when they took office, he was offered a position dealing with Vietnam-era POW and MIA issues.

The Clintonistas might as well have tossed him a live grenade. Conservative Sens. Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond raised hell at the prospect of hiring someone who had so visibly opposed the war. It didn't matter that by the early '70s most Americans had opposed the war. The White House quietly rescinded the offer and promised another job in Veterans Affairs.

Muller, Searcy's old friend at the VVAF, counseled against taking it. "I told him, 'Chuck, you're too young to die.' I mean, the VA is such a fossilized bureaucracy. I had something else in mind for him."

One-man Marshall Plan

It's a weekday morning at the Olof Palme Children's Hospital in Hanoi, and the wooden chairs lining the hallway outside the rehabilitation clinic are filled with anxious mothers and squirming youngsters. On the wall, there's a cheerful mural showing a cat pushing a kitten in a wheelchair. The patients don't seem that chipper. One of them, 4-year-old Pham Minh Hieu, starts crying as she waits with her mother to be fitted for leg braces that seem small enough for a broken doll. The girl's legs have been weakened by meningitis.

"She'll probably need the braces for several years, but not for the rest of her life, " says Searcy, bending his tall frame over so he can smile at her face to face. Her dark eyes light up, and she smiles back.

As medical programs go, the VVAF's effort to provide braces and artificial limbs for Vietnamese children is not large. The budget for the next three years is only $1.8 million, two-thirds of that coming from the U.S. government. But this is what the Vietnamese authorities suggested when the foundation approached them about setting up a program to help heal the wounds between the two nations.

"The government was taking care of the veterans, " explains Tran Trong Hai, the doctor who heads the hospital's rehabilitation department. "But we had very high malnutrition rates during the '70s and '80s, so we have a generation of children with birth defects and disabilities. It's an indirect result of the war."

For 20 years, the United States and other Western nations maintained an economic embargo against Vietnam, hampering the nation's food and medical supplies. Even today, with normalized relations and a U.S. ambassador living in Hanoi, the United States spends only $3 million a year in aid to Vietnam. It's probably the only country America fought that didn't get a Marshall Plan.

"I think we have some responsibilities here, " Searcy says, as he folds himself into a cab for the ride back to his office.

When he arrives, a shaggy veteran from Michigan is waiting to see him. He's returned to see the Amerasian daughter he left behind. "Wanna see her?" he says, whipping out his wallet.

Ever the Southern gentleman, Searcy examines a photo and says, "She's beautiful."

"Of course she is, " the vet shoots back.

Searcy looks his scruffy visitor up and down. "She must get it from her mother, " he says, laughing, and he's off to his desk to check the e-mail.

It's like this all the time, veterans stopping by on their journeys of rediscovery. "I think we're their second stop, after the embassy, " Searcy says. He spends perhaps half his time on the clinic program, which is expanding with a new facility at another hospital and a mobile clinic in 10 trucks and vans donated by Ford Motor Co. from its new manufacturing plant in Hanoi. Searcy would like to see the VVAF get involved in land mine clearance as well.

The rest of his time is spent as unofficial ambassador --- meeting veterans, showing visitors around, helping American businessmen, navigating the shoals of the Vietnamese government bureaucracy. He still manages an active social life; he knows the best restaurants and nightclubs and has even tossed back a few belts of snake wine, a hideous liquor that comes with an embalmed cobra coiled in the bottle. "Worst hangover I ever had, " he says.

Searcy is single, twice divorced and childless, and he never lacks for dates. "He was quite a ladies' man here, and from what I understand, all the Vietnamese women want to marry him, " says Athens Mayor Gwen O'Looney, who plans to visit her friend later this year.

When Searcy last returned to the States this spring, his mother's first question for him was, "Are you bringing home a Vietnamese bride?"

He wasn't, but there's no denying that he loves the Vietnamese --- their perseverance, their culture, their handsome, high-cheekbone faces and their remarkable willingness to let bygones be bygones. On his first trip back, as a tourist in 1992, he was apprehensive about how he would be received as a former enemy soldier. He needn't have been.

"They don't blame the veterans, " Searcy says. "They draw a distinction between service to country and that country's policies. They respect veterans because they understand better than anyone the hardships they suffered."

Searcy can remember only two confrontations in 3 1/2 years of living in Vietnam. One woman lectured him because her daughter had a deformed hand, the result, she felt, of her husband's exposure to Agent Orange. Another woman in a bar one night asked him, "What do you think of the terrible things your country did to my country?" She had his business card and phoned the next morning to apologize.

Even though he earns less than half of the $130,000 a year he would have made in the Pentagon, Searcy acts like a man enjoying the job of a lifetime. "Every day, " he says, "I'm tempted to write a thank you letter to Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond."

He's committed to remain in Hanoi through the end of the year, and after that, who knows? He's always loved to roam.

It was on a trip to South America in 1991 that he got word of a family emergency. He was fishing on a tributary of the Amazon when a boat puttered up with a message: His father had died unexpectedly. As Searcy scrambled to get back home for the funeral, he was grateful that they had reconciled. It happened years ago when he was still at the university.

"I got a phone call. He was passing through Athens and wanted to meet me for a cup of coffee. So we got together and talked for a while, and finally he got to the point: 'Your mother and I have been doing a lot of thinking about the war. We've kind of changed our minds. This war has got to stop.' "

And then he told his son, "We just wanted you to know that we'd like you to come back home."

Though he is sitting in a cafe halfway around the world, it seems like he has.