"I suffer culture shock coming back to America but not when I go to Vietnam. It’s all reversed now,” says Blackburn. A buoyant man with a round face, grey mustache and beard, he speaks like someone who is used to performing in front of an audience—a remnant from his days as a teacher. He is in Madison, Wis., attending the twenty-eighth annual convention of Veterans for Peace, a nonprofit organization with the mission of ending all wars. Despite being back in the country of his birth, he says, he can’t shake the feeling of being a foreigner in the United States.
Blackburn explains that living in Vietnam these last eight years has helped him break free from the painful memories of the war.
“One of the reasons I continue living in Vietnam is I can sleep through the night, almost every night, without nightmares of the war,” Blackburn says. “I rarely experience a flashback of any kind when I’m in Vietnam, but they start again when I return to the U.S.”
Blackburn now lives most of the year in Nha Trang, which is forty miles north of the area in which he served in 1967 and 1968. As a self-professed beach bum, he says Nha Trang’s oceanside location suits him well. He goes swimming as much as possible and takes walks on the beach. When not exercising, he visits his Vietnamese friends and serves on the board of Friendship Village. He also stays in touch with other American veterans living in Vietnam through the local Veterans for Peace chapter. There are a few hundred American veterans living there today, many of them drawn, like Blackburn, to spending their retirement years getting to know their former enemies.
Blackburn rents a narrow three-story house from a top-ranking officer in the Vietnamese military.
“When he realized he was renting his house to an American veteran, it was pretty interesting,” Blackburn recalls with a smile. “He got me quite drunk. He had never spoken to an American before.”
Drinking with his former enemies is something that happens to Blackburn quite often in Vietnam. While traveling by train or walking on the street, Vietnamese people approach him and ask him if he’s a veteran. He could lie and walk away. Instead, he faces the past head on, welcoming such meetings, hopeful they can help heal the wounds of the war.
Blackburn says that he’s never been treated poorly by the Vietnamese and, for the most part, they are glad to hear that he’s a veteran who has returned to help the victims of the war. He’s found that the Vietnamese make a point of differentiating the wartime policies of the United States government from the actions of American soldiers who fought in Southeast Asia. More than once Vietnamese veterans have told Blackburn that they respect him for serving his country at war. Even on one occasion when a group of Vietnamese veterans seemed to feel uncomfortable around him, Blackburn notes that they were not mean or rude in any way.
Many American veterans living in Vietnam tell similar stories of friendship between the former adversaries. Greg Kleven, a Marine Corps vet who was one of the first Americans to live in Vietnam after the war, says that Vietnamese veterans have welcomed him and other American vets back with open arms.