Vet Searches for Forgiveness : When Jim Stewart got to Vietnam, what he found wasn’t all blood and guts. There was love, too, and a new life--for a while.

SAN DIEGO —  Jim Stewart, 44, community service officer with the San Diego city schools, never did get over Vietnam.

That’s what you were supposed to do about that place, 20-odd years ago, just forget about it. You were better off just blocking it out. Vietnam sucked up thousands of lives and told America that maybe it wasn’t so tough after all. You were supposed to carry on and not look back. You were supposed to be strong.

“I was in love the first time I walked in the door,” Jim Stewart says.

Lots of guys did that, of course. They did their time, came home and bit their lower lip and then they got a job and a wife and kids and a dog. Maybe they’d watch some of those movies--”The Deer Hunter,” “Apocalypse Now” and on from there--and maybe they could relate or maybe they would just rather not. Vietnam was another life, another dream, or nightmare, or hell.

“I moved in with her in about a week,” he says.

Besides, nobody wanted to talk about it back then. Vietnam was uncool. When Stewart came back that first time, it was October, 1968. The guys who came back, you’d think they were the enemy or something. The way people would look at you, that weird look in their eyes when you told them that you were a vet. Man. So you pretty much stopped talking about it. Even your own family didn’t want to hear. So you went along.

“I was a red-blooded American. What can I say?”

It wasn’t all blood and guts. It was Vietnam. People. A life. The American public doesn’t know about that. Jim Stewart gets really upset when he sees those studies saying that one out of five Vietnam vets have post traumatic stress syndrome. Hell. Only one out of 10 saw combat. Jim Stewart grew up in Vietnam. That’s how he feels. He was 19 years old when he got there. He was playing in a rock ‘n’ roll band before he left. He graduated high school in 1964. This was in Elkton, Md. He joined the Army in March, 1966, because he was bored.

“She has got to be one of the most beautiful women I have ever laid eyes on. Her name is Mai.”

He was military police. He was stationed at Long Binh first. It was the largest military complex in the world then. He transferred to Bien-hoa, on town patrol, after that. Then he was transferred to Saigon. That’s where he met Mai. He extended again to stay with her. After he was decorated, they promoted him and gave him a real cush job on an Army complex. He worked 12 hours a day for three days, then he was off for four days and basically all he had to do was open a gate for an officer.

“She got pregnant. Nobody ever used birth control back then. “

His daughter was born in 1967 in Saigon. He was there real soon, the day after or the day after that. He remembers walking into the hospital and she was rolling a big hot water bottle over her stomach. He doesn’t remember seeing the baby then, but he must have. All he knows is he loved this woman and then there was this real small thing there. He may have been afraid. She was ecstatic. But he was a big dumb country kid.

“I would say, ‘Come on. Let’s go to America.’ She said, ‘Why? The Americans aren’t ever going to leave.”’

As soon as he got on that airplane and left, he thought he had made a major, major mistake. His mother had moved to Washington state and so he was going there. It wasn’t right. He went back to Vietnam a month later. He walked from the Saigon airport home. She had no idea he was coming. None of his letters had arrived. He walked into the apartment complex and there was Mai, holding his daughter, standing at the top of the stairs. Her girlfriend, Dai, let out a scream.

“I was 21 years old, making $7.70 an hour. I was considered filthy, filthy rich in Vietnam.”

He got a wonderful job. It was in security. There were 150 PX facilities in Vietnam, snack bars, clubs, and his office would investigate all the losses and audit the facilities. It was a wonderful learning experience for him because he was so young. Basically they were homebodies. They’d sit out on the street. Occasionally they’d go to the zoo. He remembers she was always discreet. They’d never ride in the same taxi together. He knew she knew that she was being looked at, but she was really a strong person. If someone said something to her, she would talk back.

“I think maybe my second daughter’s name is Phuong. I think I may have blocked it out.”

He’d been there four years. Maybe he was getting homesick. He kept asking her to leave. He asked her to marry him. She said she couldn’t leave, said that her mother wouldn’t be able to find her, and that kind of stuff. He moved into another apartment. She came over, knocked on the door and said, ‘Do you want to see your daughter?’ He picked up his daughter and looked at her. She was different somehow. He remembers that the first, Tuyet, was olive-skinned. Mai said, ‘Look at her feet,’ and they were his feet. Long and skinny feet. He said, ‘Will you leave with me now?’ She said no. So he handed the baby back and went and quit his job.

“I remember she looked at me and said, ‘Your baby took all my milk.” That second time, she didn’t cry when I left.’

He got on that plane and the same thing happened. A terrible mistake. He wanted to get his old job back, but he tried for a month and he couldn’t get through on the phone. He knew mail wouldn’t make it. Then he just sort of gave it up. He was 23. He tried to get on with his life and put it behind him. It was real hard. He was completely lost. He felt like he was in a foreign country in the United States. He came back real square and real conservative and real out of touch with the time. He hitchhiked across the country and let his hair grow long like everybody else and he hated that. He tried to get in a rock band back East. He majored in police science in Seattle. Then he came to San Diego and got married in 1973. They’ve been separated for three months now.

“I had a lot of guilt. I had a vasectomy in 1975. I didn’t want to have kids.”

Jim Stewart started aggressively looking for his daughters two years ago. His wife didn’t know this. She thought it was only one year. He remembers going to the mailbox first and trying to intercept any letters from the people he’d contacted. He’s written to almost everybody. The government and the Red Cross haven’t helped at all. The most help he’s had has come from private people. They’ve even put up signs near where Mai and he used to live. He’s even written to “any child” in the camps in the Philippines asking for information. So far he has nothing. He doesn’t feel that he’s any closer at all.

“I think it’s an inward thing with me. Maybe it’s being older and more melancholy. It’s unfinished business. I’m probably a grandfather now.”

He visualizes walking up to them and everything. There’s this picture in his mind of these two girls with long dark hair like their mother, wearing these Vietnamese dresses. Ao dais, he thinks they’re called. He knows this is such an emotional issue. There are so many different scenarios. What if they don’t want to see him? About Mai, all he can say is that she was a woman he loved very much and always will. There’s a lot of fear there, about what happened to her, about what she thinks of him. And he guesses if he ever does see his daughters, the first thing he needs to ask for is their forgiveness.

“How long am I going to look? I don’t plan on stopping,” Jim Stewart says.

CASTOFFS OF WAR: Dianne Klein This Week in View

Thursday: Trang Nguyen -- The joy of finding a father who accepts her.

Sunday: Bang Quoc Nguyen -- The pain of rejection from a father he’s never known.