Seattle, WA — Author Calmar Austin McCune has released Vietnam, Port Townsend Bay, a novel that follows the wealthiest man in Vietnam on a final, unforgettable flight back to the small Washington town where he grew up.
The story opens at a Hanoi airport, where a Vietnamese-American surgeon named Dr. Thu is unexpectedly recruited to serve as an in-flight physician aboard a private Boeing 747. Her patient is Dexter Rowell, an elderly, ailing businessman who owns the plane, and who has just been given two weeks to live. Rather than spend his final days in comfort at home, Rowell has decided to fly across the Pacific to Port Townsend, the small waterfront town on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula where he was born and raised, and where his parents are buried.
Over the course of the flight, Rowell tells Dr. Thu the story of his life: a difficult childhood, an unlikely stint as a high school quarterback, and his enlistment in the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in 1966 as a demolitions specialist. There, he became one of the “tunnel rats” who crawled through the Viet Cong’s underground tunnel networks near Cu Chi, narrow, booby-trapped passages filled with venomous snakes, scorpions, and near-total darkness. Captured and held by North Vietnamese soldiers and villagers, Rowell endured months as a prisoner before a forced march to Hanoi and, eventually, release at the war’s end.
Decades later, haunted by memories of the woman who helped care for him during his captivity, Rowell returned to Vietnam, married her, and built an unlikely fortune there, turning a wartime observation about rice paper into an international business empire. Now, with his health failing, he is drawn back to Port Townsend for one last look at the schools, streets, and shoreline of his youth.
Dr. Thu, his in-flight physician, becomes an unexpected confidante on this journey. A gifted facial reconstruction surgeon trained at Harvard and the Royal London Institute of Surgery, she has her own quiet story of leaving Vietnam behind, and the long flight across the Pacific becomes a conversation between two people separated by generation and circumstance but bound by the same distant homeland.
McCune weaves together two vividly rendered worlds, the claustrophobic terror of Vietnam’s wartime tunnels and the quiet, salt-air familiarity of a small Pacific Northwest town, into a meditation on memory, homecoming, and the pull of the place where a life began. Readers familiar with Port Townsend will recognize real landmarks along the way, including Fort Worden, the Hood Canal Bridge, Water Street, and the beach where the story reaches its close.
The novel closes with an unexpected final gesture from Rowell, one that reaches beyond Port Townsend and back across the Pacific to the country and the people who shaped his life, bringing the story full circle.
Though presented as fiction, the novel draws on extensive research into the tunnel warfare of the Vietnam War era and on McCune’s own long familiarity with Port Townsend, where he lived and worked for three decades. The result is a story that moves fluidly between two very different settings, always circling back to the same questions of home, identity, and what it means to return to a place after a lifetime away.
Vietnam – Port Townsend Bay is available now in hardcover, softcover, and eBook editions through Xlibris and major booksellers.
About the Author
Calmar Austin McCune grew up in Seattle, Washington, and went on to practice law in Port Townsend, Washington, for many years. He now lives back in Seattle, where he continues to write. McCune is 87 years old, and Vietnam, Port Townsend Bay draws on his deep familiarity with the Olympic Peninsula town he called home for decades, as well as his lifelong interest in the history and legacy of the Vietnam War.
