Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
They were pretty glad to see me. Imagine, we would joke in the days to come, the
publicity for their business when it became known that they'd somehow misplaced a re-
porter for the
Times
. They were good guys, a bit overwhelmed.
Everyone else was welcoming, too; I was the star of the evening, regaling people with
my story over drinks and laughs. Only Albert looked a little rueful that I had shown up
before the search could get going; maybe he was hoping to recoup some of the excite-
ment he'd missed.
This little episode, a rescue from what I'd perceived to be oblivion, is something I've
thought about frequently over the years. In addition to saving my life, or so it seemed at
the time, getting on the bus was also a bit of a disappointment. Before the road turned
bad I'd had a hell of a ride, and now, of course, I wasn't going to be able to finish the trip
on my own.
Still, by then I'd already had one of the great moments of my life, the moment of being
an ordinary guy in extraordinary circumstances and not losing my head, the moment of
being a hero to myself.
After all, if I'd known in advance that my journey would take me to as remote a place
as I'd ever been, but that I'd be stranded there without food or water, I doubt I'd have
even started out. As it stands, I can look back with astonishment at where I managed to
get to on a bike when I wasn't being prudent or especially smart.
Tonight, sixteen years later, in a motel room somewhere along the border of North
Dakota and Minnesota, it's what I remember most from my memorable trip to Viet-
nam—that measurement of my fortitude.
It doesn't escape me that I learned my lesson in personal bravery in a significant
classroom, the distant, almost mythic-seeming land where, twenty and thirty years be-
fore, so many Americans—my age or older now, if they even survived, but not much
more than kids, really, when they were there—had to plumb their guts for far more cour-
age than I've ever had to do.
Having experienced the war in Vietnam from the New Jersey suburbs, and having
felt, even from a distance of eight thousand miles the impact of its radiating terrors, I
was grateful for the chance, a generation later, to be more intimately connected to such
a powerful chapter of American history. It has been instructive: Character in context is
a good thing to get a grip on.
