Issue Date: June 17, 2001

Covering old ground

More Americans turn vacations into quests for reconciliation and education.

by Catherine McGrady

It's business as usual in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) a quarter-century after the end of the Vietnam War. Yet some veterans, who feel they have unfinished business, are booking flights to their past.

When Willie Cardwell first planned to travel to Ghana and Senegal eight years ago, she was primarily drawn to the region from a historical and cultural perspective. It wasn't until she was in West Africa that her visit became personal. "I saw people who looked like my grandmother," the 75-year-old Maryland woman remembers. She and her tour group, organized by the African Art Museum of Maryland, toured the forts where slaves had been held centuries earlier and discovered that the Africans had a strong civilization before being enslaved.

"They were not savages. We learned things they hadn't taught us in school," she recalls. Moved by the profound and eye-opening experiences in West Africa, Cardwell inspired her 24-year-old granddaughter to make several trips to the region herself.

Cardwell and her granddaughter are just two of many African Americans who have chosen to travel to West Africa to study its culture and history, including that of the slave trade, and perhaps discover more about their own heritage in the process. According to Pamela J. Thomas, editor of "Pathfinders Travel: The Travel Magazine for People of Color", such trips are becoming increasingly common because more African Americans now have the means to travel abroad. "After going to the Caribbean as a first international trip, they most want to return to the motherland," she has noticed. She believes that many African Americans feel they owe it to their ancestors to take this "reverse passage" now that they are able. For Thomas, "stepping on African soil was a spiritual experience and provided a sense of closure."

Pilgrimages to places that offer the chance to reconnect to one's personal history or cultural origins, whether for reconciliation or education, are attracting a growing number of travelers. Rather than spending vacation dollars and time relaxing on the beach, more and more Americans are looking for an experience beyond pure recreation. Destinations that hold a greater significance both emotionally and intellectually are ideal for this new type of diversionary travel.

For veterans of World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars, returning to battle zones (often with younger generations of their families) allows them not only to revisit their own history but to discover more about the people and cultures of the countries where they served. And young American Jews are making journeys not unlike those to West Africa, choosing to tour Europe's concentration camps and personally confront the grim events of the Holocaust.

Jerry Landman, a Vietnam War veteran who runs Nine Dragons Travel and Tours, arranges trips to Vietnam for more than a thousand people a year. Many of his clients are veterans who, now that they are retired, have the time and money to discover how the country has changed in 30 years. Their reasons for returning vary: Many veterans want to take their families. Others need to exorcise ghosts. Some want to reconnect with people and places.

Vietnam veteran John Nealy of Montana has traveled back to Vietnam three times in the past few years to explore areas he had never seen on active duty. The trips "showed me a new dimension of the people. It was not painful, it was refreshing," he reports. Landman has recognized similar reactions in most of the veterans he has guided: "When they see how Vietnam has changed and healed, they feel better about what they did there."

John H. Daniels of South Carolina helped organize a reunion trip across Europe with members of his World War II battalion to retrace their battle route and meet people in the towns they helped liberate. Their response to the two-week adventure was overwhelmingly positive, and Daniels felt proud to share his experiences with the teenage grandchildren who accompanied him and his wife. He and his fellow soldiers, along with members of their families, traveled with Historic Tours, a company Ray and Cristy Pfeiffer began 18 years ago to offer trips to veterans looking to close a chapter in their lives.

The Pfeiffers expected the height of their business to hit around 1994, when they took 1,000 people to France for the 50th anniversary commemorations of D-day. To their surprise, they have seen greater demand in the past six years, and they now host more diverse groups -- today only about 25% of their clients are veterans. The experience reverberates beyond those with memories of the war.

Pfeiffer attributes this renewed interest to recent anniversaries and to "Saving Private Ryan". Thanks to that movie, a younger clientele is signing up for tours to see the beaches of Normandy or to follow the routes of their fathers and grandfathers. For them, these trips are an opportunity to do more than just travel Europe: They get a history lesson along with a personal connection to this history.

To accommodate the many Jewish Americans aching to retrace the painful paths of their cultural ancestors, New York-based March of the Living annually takes 6,000 high school and college students to Poland to study pre-war Jewish life and tour Holocaust concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Krakow -- tours accompanied by Holocaust survivors.

"We visited the towns they grew up in. They shared their personal stories with us so that it won't happen again," says Brown University student Lauren Wier. Last year, she traveled to Poland, where "I spent my 18th birthday in a death camp. It was an incredibly hard experience that I will never forget."

And for most of these voyagers, not to forget is the point indeed.

Catherine McGrady, a writer in Columbia, S.C., profiled interior designer Sheila Bridges in last week's USA WEEKEND Magazine.