Letters from the Summer I Never Returned

Trigger Warning: This story contains themes of war-related grief, displacement, and emotional trauma.

A story of exile, memory, and quiet love

The heat of this Californian summer is a dry, relentless thing, so different from the humid summers of my youth. It’s the kind of heat that stills the air and bakes the memories right out of the ground. On days like this, with the jasmine vine scenting the quiet afternoon, I find myself unlocking the desk drawer I haven’t opened in years. It’s full now—folded pages, ink faded to rust, envelopes with no address. The letters I never sent to Vietnam.

April 30, 1975

I did not plan to leave that way—like a thief in the fading dark. I had thought there would be time. A letter. A final glance. But the summer morning cracked open with gunfire, sharp and acrid, burning the air with the smell of split metal and smoke. Somewhere beneath it, faint and defiant, the scent of frangipani clung to the heat—sweet, creamy, too soft for a day like this. It was the kind of scent that belonged to schoolyards and slow afternoons, not rooftops and evacuation orders. But it stayed, even as the sky peeled back, and the engines began to scream. By the time the sky turned pale over the Saigon River, I was already above it all, carried away by the thunder of the chopper.

As an officer, I had orders in my hands and ashes in my mouth. We gathered on the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy, boots slipping on dust and panic. When the call came, I turned just once. Not to look for the enemy. But to see if I could find you in the crowd. You weren’t there. Or maybe you were. There were too many faces, too many tears.

The instruments on the panel were dead—altitude unknown, heading guessed by instinct alone. We were flying blind, over an ocean that didn’t care if we made it or not. No radio. No lights. If we went down, no one would know where to look.

I gripped the controls and prayed—not for salvation, but for enough sky to carry us somewhere still breathing. After two hours, just as the sun began to fade into sea haze, Con Son Island appeared like a promise we didn’t deserve. We landed on trembling fuel and luck. Hours later, high above what used to be home, I allowed myself to look down. Not to search. Just to remember.

Below me, the city scattered like rice spilled on the floor—palms, rooftops, tangled alleys, the smoke of someone’s breakfast curling into the sky. I pressed my face to the cold window, trying to memorise the way the Mekong twisted through the land like a silk ribbon pulled loose. Somewhere, someone was lighting incense. Somewhere, someone was calling a child in for soup. Somewhere, someone was still waiting.

I told myself I would write. When I had my footing. When my heart stopped spinning like laundry hung out in a monsoon. But days passed without names, and the further I flew from your voice, the more every word I tried to write tasted like dried leaves.

So I carry them now—these words. Like debts. Like seeds waiting for rain. Like a summer memory no one asked to keep. This—whatever it is—may be the closest I’ll ever come.

July 1977

They call this place Little Saigon. But it doesn’t smell like fish sauce and engine oil. The rain doesn’t fall sideways. And the phở is too clean—like it forgot its own story, or lost the spices somewhere on the flight over.

It’s summer now. Dry and brittle.

The kind of heat that turns lawns yellow and makes the sidewalks shimmer. The jasmine here blooms, but it doesn’t cling to the air the way it did in Vietnam—like memory, dense and unwilling to loosen its grip. Everyone here tries their best to remember, and sometimes I wonder if our remembering is more honest than forgetting—or just more painful.

By now, the Vietnamese have begun opening bakeries, tailors, and small markets in Westminster and Garden Grove. It doesn’t yet have a name, but something is forming. A whisper of home rising between strip malls. A Little Saigon before anyone ever called it that.

I hear people say this place will be ours someday. That the signs will change. That the streets will sound like us again. I want to believe them. But I still walk with my eyes down, unsure if this land will ever feel like mine.

Last Sunday, I met a woman at church who sang your favourite song—the one about voices that remember what time forgets. She sang it with her eyes closed, like the ache was still fresh. She had eyes like yours. But they didn’t ache the same.

And maybe that’s how I knew it wasn’t you.

June 1983

I heard a man curse the old regime at the market today. The words left his mouth like old bitterness stirred from the bottom of a forgotten pot—sharp, steaming, unresolved. No one answered him. We just moved quietly through the shade of hanging bananas and stacked shallots. Perhaps we all understood. Perhaps we were too tired.

It was one of those thick June mornings, the kind where even silence sweats. The sun had already baked the roofs silver. Flies clung to plastic tarps. The smell of ripe mango and damp earth hung in the air like something that had been waiting too long to speak. And yet—it wasn’t the heat I missed. It was the kind of heat. Here, summer feels like an inconvenience. In Vietnam, it was something we folded into—humid, holy, thick with youth. It carried the smell of motorbikes and sugarcane, of rain about to arrive, of things that meant we were still alive. It tasted like homemade banana ice cream, creamy and soft, with crushed peanuts adding just the right crunch. Sweet, a little nutty, and gone too quickly. It drifted like lullabies on quiet afternoons, when even the dust knew to hush. Even the sweat knew how to belong.

I wondered what pain that man carried. Perhaps promises made in war, broken in peace. Perhaps a brother lost. Or a child never found. Or maybe he was just one of many who discovered that history has no interest in our intentions—only in outcomes. And I wanted to say: what do you know of sacrifice? Not of flags or causes. But of staying behind when your heart was already fleeing. Of waiting in doorways that never filled again. Of choosing love and being asked to pay for it with silence.

I thought of my brother then—how he wore the other uniform. We saluted different superiors, but we knelt to the same soil. He believed in a different promise, but his heart, too, beat for the same motherland. His love was no less than mine. Nor mine nobler than his.

There are no perfect flags. Only imperfect hearts trying to belong. And who among us can truly measure whose heart beats more fiercely for Vietnam?

September 1984

A friend visiting from Paris handed me a cassette this week. Said it was Lam Phương’s newest: Tay Do Afternoon. Phuong had always been the voice of exile. The kind who wrote heartbreak like it was a second homeland. I didn’t think much of it at first. I had stopped listening to music for a while. Too many songs felt like echoes of ghosts.

But when it played—when it reached the line, "We once knew each pebble around the schoolyard / Now even the street names feel different"—something inside me ruptured. It wasn’t a question. It was a wound finally voiced. The kind you carry so long that it becomes part of your posture. My nose burned a little. But I didn’t cry. I just stared at the wall until the sun moved. It felt like someone reached inside me and found the name of a feeling I had buried. It wasn’t just about Can Tho, the city that once held our names in the wind like promises. It was about all of us. Those who left. Those who stayed. Those who wait with windows open and lights never turned off. The song didn’t strike me because I knew the place. It struck because I knew the ache. Everything changed after the fall. The streets. The silence. The way we said each other’s names. That song held all of it.

And in that moment, it felt like someone had finally written a song that remembered me back. But it came too late. Summer is ending now. And I find myself waiting again—another year, another heat, another season that might carry me home.

May 1990

Sometimes, I think of the boy I used to be—the one who walked you home barefoot after Sunday church. The one who wrote your name on his helmet strap. The one who prayed not to win, but to survive. I wrote to you often. But the letters stayed with me. Maybe I thought naming you would let you slip too far from me. Maybe I kept your name unwritten, not out of forgetfulness, but out of something closer to longing. I wanted to keep you in one place—in me—quietly, stubbornly. Not naming you was my way of holding on, even if no one else would ever know.

I don’t know where you are now. Maybe Hue. Maybe Long An. Maybe under a different name. But some nights, when I sit beneath the jasmine vine behind this old apartment, I still see your shadow moving in the breeze.

And now it’s May. The heat is beginning to return. Not the heavy kind that flattens the world—but the first breath of it. The kind that lifts the scent of jasmine before the sun fully rises, the kind that clings gently to the skin without asking to be noticed.

For years, I braced against it. Closed the windows. Turned my face away. But this year, I didn’t. This year, I let the light fall on me. And I didn’t flinch. Maybe that’s what May means now. Not the start of summer, but the moment you let summer touch your life again. Even if it hurts. Even if it doesn’t stay.

July 1998

I received a letter today—creased at the edges, rain-stained, written in the curling script only he used. A friend had brought it back, tucked into a worn paperback of poems by Trinh Cong Son. He told me he’d been keeping it safe ever since his visit to Bien Hoa. Said he thought today felt like the right day to hand it over. My brother had handed it to him quietly, almost shyly, years ago. Said he’d written it long before, but couldn’t bring himself to send it. “Just in case,” he said. “In case our paths ever crossed again.”

The envelope was dated long ago, but somehow it had made its way here—across time, distance, and everything we never said. Inside were only a few lines. No anger. No politics. Just this:

Still alive. Still thinking of you.

I don’t know if we’ll meet again in this life—but if there is another,

I hope we’re not born on opposite sides again.

I sat with it for hours. The words settled in my chest like water in an old well—deep, still, hard to reach. There was a lump in my throat that refused to go down, like silence had taken root there. I just kept rereading the way he signed his name—softly, as if it had to knock before entering. As if even love needed permission to come home.

By the time I learned he was gone—buried quietly in a small cemetery near the river we used to swim in as boys—the jasmine in my garden had begun to bloom again. Its scent drifted through the kitchen window, thick and inescapable. The air was heavy, not with heat alone, but with memory. Summer had returned in full. Maybe the letter was his way of reaching across time. Maybe it was a door left open, in case I ever wished to walk back through. Grief is strange that way. It always arrives late, like a guest too shy to knock.

We were born under different stars, perhaps. But we drank from the same well. And we both dreamed of a country that could love all its children. If he were here now, I would have told him: I never blamed you. I only missed you.

August 2001

My son asked me why I don’t go back. He said that Vietnam has changed. That maybe it’s time. But what would I return to? I left with a duffel bag, a torn photo, and the smell of burning rain in my nose. This heat, dry, and cloudless weather reminds me of the day I left. Not the war. Just the weight of it. The way summer can feel heavy when it has nowhere to go. If I returned, would the country remember me? Would you?

He didn't ask about the war. Just what it meant to me. I told him I once knew a place so well I could walk it blindfolded, and now I couldn’t draw a map of it if I tried. He said maybe that’s how it is with memory—you don’t lose it all at once. It just fades like ink left in the sun.

He asked if the country had forgotten me. I said maybe. But the question that stayed with me was the one he didn’t ask: Did I forget it first?

April 2025

I’ve begun forgetting the street names. The way your voice said Let it be.

But some things stay.

This week marks fifty summers since the day Sai Gon fell. The commemorations play on every channel—flags, songs, words heavy with victory. And yet, to those of us who lost everything in the name of that love, it feels like salt stirred into an old wound. They celebrate their liberty. I don’t fault them for it. But we had love, too. Ours just didn’t win.

Winston Churchill once said, “Victory is not always the end, and defeat is not always the worst.” We didn’t lose because we didn’t love hard enough. We just weren’t the ones history chose to carry forward. Like the way rice fields bend in the wind. Like the smell of smoke in spring. Like your handwriting in the margins of borrowed books.

I’m writing now not to be read. Only to tell someone this: I never stopped loving Vietnam. Or you. Leaving didn’t mean I let go. Fighting on the other side didn’t mean I betrayed anything. We were two hearts loyal to the same land, just pulled by different winds. Your side called it liberation. Mine called it surrender. But we both called it home.

And when Sai Gon fell, it wasn’t just a city that broke. It was a sound. A taste. A way of walking through evening rain. That essence—our essence—was never just political. It was jasmine on a school uniform, hot bread in the morning, your shoulder brushing mine on the bridge.

I left. But my love didn’t. And I know yours didn’t either. So I fold these words into silence, like prayers dropped into a river. Not all homes are places. Some are memories that refuse to leave. And some wars don’t end. They just go quiet.

Now, the drawer stays open.

Not in invitation, but in acceptance.

My son never asked what the letters meant. He only gently placed them back, as if folding a flag, and said, “I didn’t know you still remembered so much.” I didn’t answer—not out loud.

Because remembrance isn’t always a gesture, sometimes, it’s the way the light hits a room. Sometimes, it’s a jasmine vine blooming despite the soil. Sometimes, it’s the way you carry a name in silence for fifty summers, and never let it fade.

The war ended. The country changed.

But some things stay written, even when the ink is gone.