Ho Chi Minh City isn't a place you can ease into. Sights and sounds quickly surround you. Senator Chuck Hagel and his brother, Tom, plunged into this environment without a clear idea of how it might affect them. It didn't take long to find out.
[Tom] "This was an unusual thing because there that spring offensive was about intensely for about two weeks. Things were just going crazy all over the place."
The first stop was Cholon, the Chinese section of Ho Chi Minh City. The Hagel brothers fought here during the spring offensive of 1968. Their job was to clear the area of Vietcong soldiers.
[Chuck] "And these people would look like anybody else. And you know, obviously they didn't have uniforms on so you'd walk by a guy. He might look innocent enough and he didn't have a rifle, he didn't have anything. And what he would do, they would have all these areas pre-positioned with weapons. And they would run in to a side store here or Anywhere, pull up a machine gun or an RVG and that fast, you know, they could they could take out a tank or kill three or four GIs and throw the gun down and run."
[Tom] "Look at that. There's about a hundred different places that a person can hide or dive into. They can stand out, open fire on you, and then immediately dive into a doorway. There's nothing you can do about it."
Chuck Hagel was 21 when he joined the Army. He was picked to learn how to operate a new shoulder-fired missile. His orders were to go to Germany and train others on the new weapon. Hours before he was supposed to leave he asked for new orders.
[Chuck] "And I had my orders and I said, I'm Private First Class Charles Hagel. Here are my orders. I'm on an order to go to Germany. I want to volunteer to go to Vietnam And when I did that the entire orderly room at headquarters just stopped."
This was not a frequent request. And the officers in charge wanted to know what was going on.
[Chuck] "And I simply said, Well, if I'm going to be in the Army I should go where they need me most. And I didn't think Germany was that important. I thought Vietnam was the most important location for our country and if I was going to wear this country's uniform then that's where I wanted to be."
Chuck Hagel arrived in Vietnam December 4, 1967. At the time he didn't know it but his younger brother had followed his footsteps and volunteered for Vietnam. Tom Hagel got there about six weeks after Chuck arrived.
[Tom] "Frankly I grew up with this idea that every generation had their war and okay, this is our turn. Our father had his turn; I have pictures of great-uncles and that of tombstones up in Rushville that served in every war. A Hagel serving in every war going all the way back I think there was there in the Spanish-American War. I just assumed That's the way we were brought up. I just assumed it was our turn."
Tom managed to get transferred into Chuck's unit, the Ninth Infantry Division, B Company. More than thirty years later they returned to the scene of a painful experience.
[Tom] "But this is what we were talking about. About the heat this time of day, and this is not even totally surrounded by jungle. But this intense humid heat and the especially if you're carrying about a hundred pounds of gear. And you do it day after day after day; it wears you down a little bit."
On March 28th, 1968 they were on an ambush patrol at a place called Binsahn in the jungle northeast of Saigon. Chuck and Tom had been walking point most of the day but their commander rotated them to the back. Minutes later the soldiers who replaced them on point tripped a booby trap. Exploding mines full of shrapnel that were planted in the trees.
[Chuck] "When you're hit like that you don't know if the VC are all around you. You know there are explosions and there were secondary explosions. And so the first thing that you think of is is protecting yourself and your and your buddies. And Tom and I were next to each other when it happened and I was hit pretty hard up in the chest area and So Tom bandaged me. The first thing Tom did was he grabbed me and pulled me out of the water. And then put bandages around my chest because I was bleeding pretty good."
[Tom] "And I instinctively turned around and he was on his back. Because I thought at the time that the only thing happened to me was being knocked down by the concussion so I assumed that's the only thing that happened to him until I went back and looked at him. And I could see blood on the front of his shirt, and I tore his shirt open and that's when geysers of blood went up. And so I got out my, you know the bandage and wrapped him up."
[Tom] Finally we were able to clear an area well enough to get get the really seriously wounded out first. They had to drop baskets down into the thicket of trees and we had to cut down trees with machetes to get the baskets down. And then load the very serious wounded in those baskets first.
[Tom] "And then after all of that was over with, we were told by them our commanders who were not there, of course, that they could not extract us with helicopters because the jungle was too thick. And so that weird have to walk out."
[Chuck] "So, if weird still been walking point most likely we both each been killed or wounded a lot worse than we were because those guys at the front took it took the first I mean, the bad, bad hit on this thing."
[Tom] "To think that we were a couple yards away from where friends of ours were killed and maimed and we were wounded. I mean, that's incredible experience. I find it that way, and especially the everything was so incredibly real. The smells, the heat, the surrounding jungle and all this, it almost is overpowering for me because it put me right back there."
But the Hagel's visit to Vietnam was more than a journey into the past. Senator Chuck Hagel was fixed firmly on the future when he met with leaders of a government he once fought.
[Chuck] "We must all move forward and anchor our relationship on the hope and the prospects of a better world."
Diplomacy was the official reason for Senator Hagel's trip to Vietnam. He raised the flag over the new U.S. Consulate in Ho Chi Minh City.
The consulate is on the site of the former U.S. Embassy to South Vietnam. The evacuation of the embassy marked the fall of Saigon in 1975. It marked the end of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. Now this place is a symbol of a different relationship between the two nations.
[Pete] "So while this building represents a physical structure of reconciliation, these two individuals physically in a human way suggests that reconciliation as well."
Ambassador Pete Peterson is a native of Omaha, but he shares more than Nebraska roots with the Hagels. He was a pilot during the war with Vietnam. He was shot down and spent years in the infamous Hanoi Hilton POW camp.
[Pete] "It was just very perfect to have him come back and to go through the process of true reconciliation on the ground. He had clearly done so in his own mind but he hadn't seen where he had been. And the cathartic aspect of it hadn't been completed. I just thought it was useful for him to come back; and for him then to bring his brother Tom with his is just a wonderful event."
[Chuck] "Great changes have happened for the better in Vietnam. It is the twelfth largest country in the world. Almost eighty million people. Vast, rich country. It's going to be a major Asian power economically, geopolitically, as it develops. America wants to have a role in helping shape that. Be on the inside, not the outside. I think we have a rather significant future with Vietnam."
Tom and Chuck Hagel still carry shrapnel in their bodies from that booby trap at Binsahn. It will always be with them. Other, less tangible evidence of their service lingers as well. Thought of what happened and what didn't happen.
[Chuck] "There is no glory in war, there's only suffering in war. And there is nothing pretty about it, it's a very messy, bad business. And a lot of innocent people get hurt. but but the emotional psychological physical pressure that is on the soldier who has to carry out the the day to day dirty business of war is something that most people can have no true appreciation of. And I I understand that. But, this kind of an experience I think helps frame this in a very real in a real way. And also reminds us of the of the frailties of who we are as humans. And the breaking points that we all have."
[Tom] "When Chuck and I went through wasn't unique. Just multiply that by a couple hundred thousand. I consider both of us incredibly fortunate. But those people I don't even worry anymore about the people who were killed. That was bad enough. What I worry about are the people who are still in veterans hospitals and that, with no legs, or half their brain gone, or paralyzed who still have to live this through the folly of some politicians who have walked away clean." Reporting for STATEWIDE, I'm Brad Penner.

Captioning by Nebraska Captioning Center, Lincoln, Nebraska .