The morning of September 12th had finally arrived, and Lan, 67, was both excited and nervous as she made her way through Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Ho Chi Minh City with her family. For fifty years, she had carried the memory of a young American soldier she had fallen in love with during the Vietnam War. Now, at nearly ten in the evening, she was about to meet him again. While her family waited near the arrival gate, Lan insisted on standing at Pillar 12, the exact spot where she and Ken Reing, the former US Army soldier, had agreed to find each other.
An hour passed after his flight landed, and the veteran still had not appeared. For Lan, the tension was almost unbearable. Then he came into view, wearing a green shirt that mirrored the one in a photograph taken half a century earlier. He immediately looked toward Pillar 12.
After the long journey from Ohio, the 71-year-old man was tired, but he smiled when he saw Lan in her ao dai, the traditional Vietnamese dress. As Ken walked toward her with a bunch of roses, Lan held out her arms, and they both burst into tears. They spent several minutes holding each other. The first thing Ken said to her was simply, “Sorry, I could not keep my promise to come back earlier.
” He had chosen the shirt so she might recognize him from that old picture. Ken was visiting Vietnam for only the second time in his life. His first visit had been in 1969, when he was 22 years old and the war was raging across the country. Back then, he would spend his evenings at the EM Club, the enlisted men’s club, drinking and listening to music.
One night, he saw a bar hostess named Lan and fell for her at first sight. Among the countless American servicemen seeking her attention, she chose him. They quickly became a couple. Since 17-year-old Lan was not allowed inside the military area, they met every weekend instead.
“I never met anyone like her,” Ken later recalled. “Her black hair, fair skin, and beautiful smile, they were more attractive than anything I could imagine. ”
In September 1969, Ken learned he would be leaving Vietnam. Before departing, he asked Lan if she would come to the United States with him.
She refused. She did not want to leave her family. “I thought our situation would have been different if she had agreed to go with me,” he said. “Then I hoped it would not be too long before we reunited.
”
The day before he left, the two went to a post office, bought fifty envelopes, and placed them in a box. Ken told Lan that when he received the fiftieth letter from her, he would return to Vietnam. He expected the letters would take about a year to write. Lan finished them in less than three months.
She kept writing beyond that, but Ken could not come back as he had promised. In 1973, they lost all contact with each other. When the war finally ended, Ken wrote several letters to the EM Club and to Long Binh Post, hoping to reach her. He received no reply because those places had closed, and the letters he had sent earlier had been burned by Lan’s family.
That loss weighed heavily on him. “I failed to keep my words. It broke my heart. I was so stupid,” he admitted.
Even after the connection was severed, Ken could not stop thinking about Lan. Inside him remained a glimmer of hope that she had survived the war. Eventually, all he wanted was to know whether she was still alive and safe. He regretted not having asked for more detailed information when they were together in 1969.
He was not even certain of her full name. All he knew was that she came from Long Binh Province. Once the internet became widespread, Ken hired international detective agencies to search for his first love. None succeeded.
He also enlisted the help of a man living in Bien Hoa who made several trips to the Long Binh area over the course of two years. Ken wanted to find Lan quietly, out of concern that he might disturb her personal life. The breakthrough came only in June 2019. Robert Frank, who lived in Ho Chi Minh City, learned that Ken was looking for a Vietnamese woman and approached him.
Ken agreed to send Frank some photographs of Lan he had kept for decades. Frank posted the information on social networks and found Lan within a day. At first, both Ken and Lan were confused. But when they spoke with one another, memories of their love came flooding back.
Lan had never used a smartphone until they began calling each other daily. “It took me a few days to get used to speaking in English with him on the phone,” she said. “I had not spoken English for long. ”
Ken told her he wanted to visit Vietnam.
Lan tried to delay him. She did not want him to travel such a distance alone. She had a sister in the United States who planned to visit during the Lunar New Year festival, and Lan suggested Ken wait until then so he could travel with her. “But he did not listen to me,” she said.
“He wanted to come. ”
Now that they were reunited, the two were determined not to let go again easily. Ken, a retired veteran living in Ohio with his cat, Chester, had been through a failed marriage. Lan, who had run her porridge stall in Bien Hoa for thirty years, lived with her daughter and granddaughter.
She introduced Ken to friends and neighbors as her honey, and his presence turned her modest stall into a local curiosity. Customers came for the porridge but stayed for the love story unfolding in front of them. Ken learned the names of all the neighbors and tried to chat in Vietnamese, stumbling through phrases with endearing effort while Lan watched him closely. Though he offered to help with her work, she refused, fiercely independent and insisting on doing it herself.
Still, she never let him cross the street alone. They spent hours flipping through old photo albums, recalling the letters once exchanged, and rediscovering the pieces of a life that could have been. “I want to spend more time with her, go on more dates,” Ken said. “She’s more than a friend to me now.
” He smiled at the thought of their upcoming weekend getaway to Vung Tau. “I just want to be with my Lan. ”
Ken was scheduled to return to the United States at the end of September. Whether Lan would one day join him remained an open question.
Fifty years earlier, she had told him she could not leave her family. Now, her answer was softer, uncertain, but not closed. The future was still unwritten, but for Ken and Lan, the present was a gift neither had ever expected, and they were savoring every second of their second chance.