I hired the SUV at six in the morning to see the Củ Chi tunnels before the tour buses arrived. I brought two members of my IT team, Duy and Linh, plus laptops, waterproof clothes, and the kind of confidence that comes from booking things efficiently online.
Duy was in his early thirties, thin in the way of people who forget to eat when focused. Wire rim glasses. Rumpled shirt.
Linh had the careful polish of young professionals in Saigon. Perfect posture. Makeup precisely applied. Dressed like someone who got out of the provinces and intended to stay out. She was twenty-eight.
When I first mentioned the tunnels, Duy gave a small laugh and looked away. Linh said nothing. Later she asked if, after Củ Chi, we could go to Bến Tre.
“My family is there,” she said.
She said it lightly, but not casually. There was a difference. This was not a tour suggestion. It was a counteroffer.
I wanted tunnels. She wanted home. Or wanted me to see home. I did not yet understand those were not the same thing.
When we arrived at Củ Chi, the entrance attendant was alone. It had rained hard the night before, and most of the tunnel lights were out. Linh and the driver decided immediately that they were staying in the car. Duy looked at me the way you look at someone about to make a terrible decision and include you in it.
I covered myself in bug spray and checked the wash hose by the entrance. I had my iPhone, a battery pack, and waterproof clothes.
The tunnels smelled of wet dirt. We walked, then crouched, then I was on my stomach. The darkness was nearly total. My phone’s flashlight made a small circle of white. I kept thinking about the sheer length of the network. Seventy-five miles still exist. We covered maybe half a mile.
This was where Vietnamese soldiers hid during the Vietnam War from American bombs, helicopters, napalm. I was American, crawling through the dark with the right gear and a backup battery.
When we emerged, we were caked in mud. My waterproof outfit performed. I toweled off, changed shirts, and felt pleased in the small, stupid way you do when a plan works.
Linh was waiting in the car, clean, composed, unreadable. She looked at the mud on my clothes and smiled politely. Then she reminded me about Bến Tre.
Not asked. Reminded.
So we drove south to the Mekong Delta.
The ride changed after Củ Chi. Duy slept. The driver smoked at toll stops. Linh sat upright in the front passenger seat and translated road signs when I asked, but she did not volunteer much. I mistook this for shyness. Or fatigue. Or the normal professional silence of someone spending part of a workday on an excursion with her foreign boss, which is its own small hostage situation.
Only later did I understand that she was carrying me somewhere.
We hired a boat. The Mekong was wide and brown and lined with fishing huts, each with a dog. I reapplied bug spray, wore a conical hat, and kept my sleeves down. Protection mattered to me.
Linh pointed out coconut palms, shrimp ponds, ferry crossings. Her voice changed as we got closer. Not softer exactly. More careful. She had built a life in Saigon out of English, office clothes, salary, speed. Now she was taking that life back to the river and bringing along the American who signed her invoices.
Then we arrived.
The boat pulled up to a mud embankment. No dock. The house was built of tile, with no doors or windowpanes, open to the river and whatever came with it.
I took off my waterproof shoes and met her family: sister, brother in law, nieces, nephews. They offered me durian from the tree in the yard. I could not say no. I ate too much because refusing felt impossible. Mud from the tunnels was still beneath my nails. The ground I had crawled through had followed me here.
Linh translated everything. She made my presence seem normal when it was not. She listened, turned, translated, smiled, then listened again. She kept building a bridge while I sat there eating fruit, a man in waterproof pants in a house with no doors.
Her parents were there. Old enough to have lived through the Vietnam War. Old enough to remember American helicopters in the Delta. I did not ask. Linh did not offer. She just kept translating.
In the house, I got my only mosquito bite of the trip, on my heel, the one place I had missed. All that preparation, and one place unprotected.
We boated back and drove through dusk. This is when I understood I had the day backwards.
The tunnels were the easy part. I had treated them like an adventure, something to see before the crowds. I was the guy with the right shoes and the backup battery.
But Linh had brought her American boss to the house where she grew up. To her family, in a house with no doors, in a province where dengue was spiking. Her family had lived through the war with my country. She made it look easy.
There is no gear for what she did. The risk was hers. I just showed up.
Eric Goldfarb’s work appears in multiple literary magazines. After decades in technology and private equity, he returned to writing. His poems and essays explore work, family, memory, and reinvention. He lives in Atlanta with his wife.