Da Nang, Vietnam — Richard Brown hadn’t planned on crying by the side of a Vietnamese road. He had come back to Da Nang, where he had once loaded bombs bound for targets across Vietnam, expecting anger, hatred, maybe even violence. Instead, during his first week back, a local motorbike driver grabbed his hand, looked him in the eye and said: “I want to thank you and your country for sending so many boys here to come and die and help my country be free.”

Then the man walked away, leaving Richard alone on the roadside to weep.

“I had one experience like this after another,” Richard told me, sitting near the old Chu Lai airbase where he had spent a year as a kid from Boston — 5'4", 115 pounds, a former Hells Angels drug-runner trying to dodge jail by signing up with the Marines.

On his first day in Vietnam during the war, he went drinking with some new friends. “Then on the way back, someone pulls out a joint,” he said. “And that’s the last thing I remember until I got on the plane to come home.”

He spent his tour as a “bomb humper,” loading F-4s with napalm and rockets. “We were more dangerous to ourselves than anything the Vietnamese could throw at us.”

When the war ended, Richard went home, but nobody asked him about it. “Nobody wanted to know what it was like." He became an aircraft mechanic, an FAA supervisor, and then, decades later, found himself standing at the Vietnamese consulate window in California “with fear in my heart,” he said. “I figured I’d be rejected or yelled at… but I filled out the visa application with my shaky hand and stuck it through the window. For 25 bucks, I got it a week later.”

My trip to Hanoi came just after Reunification Day, Vietnam’s victory celebration in what is sometimes referred to as the American war of aggression. The red flags and old slogans were everywhere. A few people spoke of it almost apologetically, as if they pitied me for being reminded of my country’s........

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