A Vietnam veteran and a 1960s radical met on a bus headed for Khe Sanh. Here’s what happened.
The Washington Post
Daniel Malloy
DA NANG, Vietnam -- A half-century ago, they were on opposite sides of a nation divided over a distant war.
Suel Jones fought with the Marines in the jungles near the Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Vietnam. Later, he broke up an antiwar protest in Texas with his fists.
Mark Rudd was a Columbia University campus radical turned domestic militant with the Weathermen, battling those he called warmongers by any means necessary.
Last month they sat on adjacent bus seats in Da Nang traffic, having formed an unlikely but powerful bond. Jones spoke of rejecting his former self, forging a new path.
“What you’re describing is word for word my situation,” Rudd replied.
The men had joined a two-week tour of Vietnam sponsored by the antiwar nonprofit Veterans for Peace -- part of a group of a dozen veterans, protesters and others who were just curious about what the country looks like today. The group leaned left (Bernie Sanders would have won a bus straw poll), but individually, the travelers approached Vietnam from strikingly different perspectives.
Jones, 73, who helped lead the tour, had a story a minute as the bus snaked through the mountains on the way to Khe Sanh Combat Base, the Marine outpost that was the site of a disastrous siege in 1968. The hilltop now boasts a museum, a coffee shop, a U.S. helicopter and a couple of tanks.
The native Texan never made it up to Khe Sanh when he was here in uniform, but he fought the North Vietnamese Army as an infantryman at Razorback Ridge and The Rockpile along Route 9 and was injured by mortar fire.
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