Tucson – For his first 32 years, all Danny Graves knew about the land of his birth came from Hollywood. He held visions of jungle firefights, Huey helicopters and burning villages.
All of that changed when he and his mother, Thao, returned to their native Vietnam.
“When we flew into the country, it was breathtakingly beautiful,” Graves recalled. “The jungles, the rice paddies, all that green. It was the most amazing experience of my life.”
Graves, a relief pitcher trying to catch on with the Rockies this spring, was an integral part of a delegation that traveled to Vietnam in January 2006 to help mend decades-old war wounds.
“The original plan was to build a bridge between the two countries using baseball,” said Graves, the only Vietnamese-born player in major-league history. “That was our mission. We did that; it was fun and important. But coming back, I realized I’d almost totally forgotten about the baseball side of it. I mean, this was where I was born; this is where my mom’s family is from. This was my heritage. This was her heritage. I still get chills just talking about it.”
Traveling with a contingent from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, Graves toured throughout the country. He witnessed firsthand the scars of a war that took the lives of more than 58,000 Americans and an estimated 3 million to 4 million Vietnamese civilians and soldiers.
The trip began in Hanoi and ended in Hue and Dong Ha, sites of some of the war’s bloodiest fighting. Graves and his mother visited the apartment where he lived as an infant – one that sits in a now-dilapidated section of Ho Chi Minh City and rents for $5 a month.
At the National University for Sports and Physical Culture, a crowd of 2,000 cheered when Graves told them he was proud to be from Vietnam. He held a rudimentary baseball clinic at a Vietnamese high school.
“They didn’t know how to throw, so I just told them to pretend they were trying to break a window with a rock,” Graves said. “I was amazed at how quickly they caught on.”
In the town of Dong Ha, Graves christened the first public baseball field in Vietnam. Only months before, the site had been cleared of hidden explosives by an ordnance-disposal team, a reminder of the 350,000 tons of unexploded ordnance left behind by the war.
During the ceremony, Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund founder Jan Scruggs, a veteran wounded in Vietnam, said: “Here is the opportunity for us to really turn a battlefield into a field of dreams.”
“It was an incredibly emotional experience,” Graves said. “And it meant everything to my mom.”
Graves was 14 months old when his mom and dad packed up and left Vietnam. That was just four months before Saigon fell to the communists April 30, 1975, and became Ho Chi Minh City.
His father, Jim, was an army sergeant stationed in Saigon. He died in 1999. Thao, who now lives in Tampa, worked at the U.S. Embassy. She was 26 when she left her homeland, and she carried the stigma of marrying an American serviceman.
“That was taboo back in Vietnam,” Graves said. “That was one of the reasons she was scared to come back. She wasn’t sure how her family would react.”
Thirty-one years after leaving for America, Thao still lived in fear of retaliation from the Viet Cong. She knew from experience what Vietnam in wartime was like. She was terrified about what her country had become – even more so when she learned that her brother spent 11 years in a so-called re-education camp.
“You have to understand that she left a war-torn country and she never saw her parents alive again,” memorial fund program director Holly Rotondi said. “She had no idea what Vietnam was really like now.”
In fact, at the Graves home in Florida, the war and the homeland were not talked about.
“I was always interested in the Vietnam War but no one in our house ever talked about it,” Graves said. “We knew it was a touchy subject. I always wanted to go back, but I would never go back without my mom.”
His chance came when Rotondi convinced his mom that Vietnam was safe for Americans and that it was a mission of peace.
“I remember that Thao told me, ‘I don’t care about me, but I don’t want them to take my son,”‘ Rotondi said. “She had heard that the Vietnamese take your passports when you check into a hotel. She was scared.”
The trip’s climatic moment arrived when Thao united with her sister, Line, who was just 14 when her big sister fled Saigon.
“Everyone was crying,” Rotondi said. “Thao’s sister wouldn’t let go of her.”
By the end of the nine-day trip, Graves’ curiosity and his mother’s fears had been transformed into a love affair with the land of their birth.
“They treated me like a king, they treated my mom like a queen,” Graves said. “I couldn’t believe how friendly they were to Americans. I was amazed.”
Graves said he believes Vietnam will eventually embrace baseball, much as Japan and Korea have. He reveled in being America’s first baseball ambassador to Vietnam. But ultimately, that’s not what the trip was about.
“I think it was about healing,” he said. “It sure was for my mom. If baseball can help with that, that’s a good thing. I can’t wait to go back.”
Where in the world … ?
Danny Graves is the only major-leaguer who was born in Vietnam. A year ago, players born outside the United States represented 27.4 percent of players on opening-day rosters. A look at countries with five or fewer players:
Korea 5
Panama 4
Taiwan 3
Colombia 2
Australia 2
Aruba 1
Curacao 1
Nicaragua 1
Vietnam 1
(Source: Major League Baseball)
Staff writer Patrick Saunders can be reached at 303-954-1428 or psaunders@denverpost.com.
