🔹 Part 5
The next morning, the rain had stopped. The streets of Da Nang glistened, and the scent of wet brick and sugarcane drifted through the open café where Jack sat, stirring a lukewarm coffee.
He hadn’t planned on seeing Mai again today. The thought of pushing too far, of digging too deep into her life, unsettled him. Some wounds healed better in quiet.
But just after eight, she appeared at his table, holding a folded envelope.
“I wasn’t sure if I should bring this,” she said. “But something told me it was time.”
Jack stood, pulled out a chair. “You can always bring me something. Even silence.”
She smiled briefly and set the envelope on the table.
“It’s a letter,” she said. “From someone you knew. Maybe.”
Jack looked down. The paper was old, yellowed at the edges. The name on the front was in English:
To Jack Callahan
– If found, please deliver –
Hue – 1968
His heart jolted. He opened it carefully. The handwriting was familiar—slanted, confident.
It was Davis.
*“Jack—
If you’re reading this, I guess I didn’t make it out. Don’t blame yourself. You always had the better aim, and I always had the bigger mouth.
Remember the girl? I think she’s why we’re here. We weren’t sent to win anything. We were sent to give her a chance.
So if you ever get the chance to see what she became—
I hope she made it. I hope you did too.”*
— Davis
Jack’s hands trembled.
“How did you get this?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
Mai hesitated. “A monk found it. Among some scattered belongings. He didn’t know what to do with it, so he kept it. Years later, when I started volunteering at a small village temple, he gave it to me. Said it felt… connected to me somehow.”
Jack sat back in stunned silence.
“I didn’t know who Jack was,” Mai said. “Until yesterday.”
––
They spent the day together, walking through the backstreets of old Hue. She took him to the temple ruins—what was left of the pillars, the courtyard stones, the broken dragons on the gate.
“I used to come here with my mother,” Mai said, brushing her fingers over the mossy wall. “We’d feed the birds and pray before Tet. That’s where I was when it started.”
She pointed to a blackened corner. “There. That’s where I saw the soldier fall. The one who threw me the toy.”
Jack stepped closer.
“It was Davis,” he said.
She nodded. “I think so.”
The place felt smaller now. As if memory had exaggerated its size over the years. But the pain still lived in the stones.
Jack turned to Mai. “Did you ever want to leave?”
“Sometimes. When the rains came and the roof leaked. When the power went out, and I couldn’t afford school fees. But I couldn’t leave the people who remembered me.”
He looked at her, seeing not just the girl but the woman.
“You’re stronger than I ever was,” he said.
Mai met his eyes. “We just survived different kinds of wars.”
––
That evening, they sat outside her home again, under the mango trees. The fruit hung low, green and hard, weeks from ripening.
Mai’s eldest son, Huy, returned from work and politely introduced himself. He wore a pressed shirt and glasses, soft-spoken like his mother.
“You were in the war?” he asked Jack in careful English.
“Yes,” Jack said. “A long time ago.”
“My mother said you were kind.”
Jack shook his head. “I think your mother gave me too much credit.”
“No,” Huy said. “You gave her food when others gave her fear. That matters.”
Jack swallowed hard.
Later, as the sun set, Mai lit three incense sticks and placed them at her father’s spirit house. One for her family. One for Davis. One for the child she once was.
And Jack, standing beside her, felt the war lift slightly from his shoulders.
Not gone. But lighter.
🔹 Part 6
The next morning, Jack stood alone at the banks of the Perfume River.
The mist rolled low over the water, the way it had on a morning in 1968 when his unit had crossed it under fire. But now there were no gunboats. No shouting. Just the quiet call of a fisherman steering his sampan through the fog, and the steady hum of life returning.
Jack reached into his pocket and pulled out the letter from Davis. He’d read it four times already, but still couldn’t shake the feeling that Davis had known something Jack hadn’t.
We weren’t sent to win anything. We were sent to give her a chance.
Those words had burrowed into him, deep.
He turned and began walking back toward Mai’s home, the streets coming alive with the morning rhythm—children in uniforms, women slicing fruit, radios buzzing with folk songs.
When he arrived at her gate, she was sweeping the courtyard. She looked up and smiled without surprise.
“I had a dream about Davis,” Jack said softly. “Last night.”
Mai leaned the broom against the tree. “Tell me.”
“He was sitting beside me at the mess tent, just like always. Laughing about something stupid. But then he turned serious. Said I still owed him one more thing.”
“What do you think he meant?”
Jack shook his head. “Maybe that I wasn’t finished here yet.”
––
Later that afternoon, Mai took him to a small nursing clinic on the outskirts of town. A narrow building with crumbling paint and hand-written schedules taped to the door.
“I volunteer here sometimes,” she said. “Just checking blood pressure, giving rides. Most of the people have no one left.”
Inside, the walls were lined with photographs of veterans—South Vietnamese soldiers mostly. Some missing limbs. Some with medals. All old now.
Jack stared at the faces. One man wore the same insignia as a soldier Jack had once shared cigarettes with before a joint patrol.
He suddenly felt very far from home—and yet oddly anchored.
“These men,” Mai said, “they come here every Thursday. They talk about the past like it’s still alive.”
Jack sat beside one of them, a man with a missing eye and a deep cough. Through Mai’s translation, they spoke for an hour—about gunfire, betrayals, jungle rot. About the smell of fear and the taste of bitter coffee boiled over portable stoves.
The man clutched Jack’s wrist at the end. Spoke with intensity.
Mai translated: “He says you carry something you shouldn’t.”
Jack didn’t answer.
“He says maybe it’s time to bury it here.”
––
That night, Jack opened his duffel bag and pulled out a small metal box he had carried for decades. Inside was a Silver Star, a letter from the Army, and a bullet fragment removed from his leg at a field hospital near Chu Lai.
He showed them to Mai.
“I was never brave,” he said. “Just lucky. This medal? It should’ve gone to Davis. He jumped without thinking. I hesitated.”
Mai took the box, looked inside, then closed the lid gently.
“I know a place,” she said. “To leave it.”
––
The next morning, they rode two bicycles—hers from the day she’d passed him, and one borrowed from a neighbor—up a narrow hill outside the city.
The path was rough, strewn with red clay and roots. But the view at the top opened onto a quiet clearing above the rice paddies.
A single bodhi tree stood there. Wide branches. Deep roots. A place older than war.
They dug a small hole beneath the tree. Jack lowered the box into it with both hands.
No speeches.
No music.
Just the rustle of the leaves and the sound of breathing.
Then Mai handed him a small stone carving.
A child’s face. Carved from white river rock.
“I made it,” she said. “To remember the girl I was. Before the war changed her.”
Jack placed it atop the buried box.
The wind picked up.
And for the first time in a very long time, he cried.
Not the tears of guilt. But the tears of something long denied:
Release.
