I grew up watching a battalion of Vietnam War movies and television shows—from Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill, and even Chuck Norris's Missing in Action series. I had forever associated Vietnam with that brutal part of its history. Fast forward to today, I see the city of Ho Chi Minh as a country miles away from that bloody image of Saigon during the war. The peacetime version has disengaged my mind from its former image. Better yet, because the end of the Vietnam War happened almost thirty-seven years ago. It was on the day of April 30, 1975, when a tank belonging to the North Vietnamese Army came crashing through the gates of what was then known as the Independence Palace. The ensuing short battle paved the way for the Fall of Saigon, thereby putting the control of all of Vietnam into the hands of the communist North Vietnamese forces.

I was writing this inside our twelve-dollar room in Saigon. My brother was already snoring and sleeping soundly, while I just had the urge to write something. That was our last night on a journey that had taken us from Saigon to Phnom Penh and Siem Reap in Cambodia, and back again to Ho Chi Minh. It was a trip that finally morphed my childhood fascination with seeing Angkor Wat into a reality. By the next day, that epic on-the-road experience would total eight days—one of my longest so far in terms of traveling in between my day job.