They came here to bomb. They returned here to live.

Da Nang, Vietnam — Richard Brown hadn’t planned on crying by the side of a Vietnamese road. He had come back to Da Nang, where he had once loaded bombs bound for targets across Vietnam, expecting anger, hatred, maybe even violence. Instead, during his first week back, a local motorbike driver grabbed his hand, looked him in the eye and said: “I want to thank you and your country for sending so many boys here to come and die and help my country be free.”

Then the man walked away, leaving Richard alone on the roadside to weep.

“I had one experience like this after another,” Richard told me, sitting near the old Chu Lai airbase where he had spent a year as a kid from Boston — 5'4", 115 pounds, a former Hells Angels drug-runner trying to dodge jail by signing up with the Marines.

On his first day in Vietnam during the war, he went drinking with some new friends. “Then on the way back, someone pulls out a joint,” he said. “And that’s the last thing I remember until I got on the plane to come home.”

He spent his tour as a “bomb humper,” loading F-4s with napalm and rockets. “We were more dangerous to ourselves than anything the Vietnamese could throw at us.”

When the war ended, Richard went home, but nobody asked him about it. “Nobody wanted to know what it was like." He became an aircraft mechanic, an FAA supervisor, and then, decades later, found himself standing at the Vietnamese consulate window in California “with fear in my heart,” he said. “I figured I’d be rejected or yelled at… but I filled out the visa application with my shaky hand and stuck it through the window. For 25 bucks, I got it a week later.”

My trip to Hanoi came just after Reunification Day, Vietnam’s victory celebration in what is sometimes referred to as the American war of aggression. The red flags and old slogans were everywhere. A few people spoke of it almost apologetically, as if they pitied me for being reminded of my country’s catastrophic defeat. Americans prefer our victories — Normandy, Desert Storm. The wars we lose, we bury. But for a few hundred men scattered from Hanoi to Da Nang to Ho Chi Minh City, burying it was not enough. So they came back.

Da Nang makes sense for many of these men. It was often their first and last stop in Vietnam — the place they landed and flew out from. Tens of thousands of U.S. veterans have returned since the 1990s, mostly for short visits to see the places where they once fought. A few hundred stayed. Da Nang — once a major airbase, now a coastal city with condos, coffee shops, and pristine beaches — is consistently ranked among Vietnam’s most livable cities. It holds symbolic weight: a hub for Agent Orange, for bombs and final goodbyes.

Richard says he feels more at home here than he ever did in Boston. Over the years, he worked in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), where South Vietnamese treated him as a hero, but in Hanoi — consulting for Vietnam Airlines — his Marine past earned him some cold stares. “When they found out I was a veteran, bombing the f--- out of these people — needless to say, I got some cold receptions,” he said.

It was a former North Vietnamese Air Force pilot who broke down those barriers. “We weren’t adversaries. We were just wearing different uniforms, taking orders from different a--holes,” he said.

Gordy Thomas came back too. When he got home from the war in 1972, America was done with people like him. “We learned not to talk about it,” he said. “I got cancelled from everything because I’d fought in Vietnam. It’s the same way people get cancelled now for supporting Trump. ... It’s that sense that you have no moral justification.”

Decades later, long after getting his veteran's disability rating, he sold his house outside Nashville, cashed in his Delta miles and flew first class back to Da Nang — chasing cheap living, sunshine, and My Khe Beach (China Beach), where Marines once landed. Gordy says living here forced him to confront the “moral injury” of war — the belief that an American life was worth more than a Vietnamese one.

“Coming here was the final healing point of my PTSD,” he told me. He now gives part of his pension to schools and poor families in his wife’s hometown. “So what it comes down to is the United States government, who sent me down here in the first place…now gives me enough money tax-free each month that I can take a very small amount and give it to the people here,” he said. "It’s very helpful to them and is appreciated."

Like Richard, Gordy never really knew the Vietnamese during the war — and like Richard, he met and married his Vietnamese wife here, only decades later.

Matt Keenan’s story is about unfinished business. He came to Vietnam in 1971 to help “Vietnamize” the war. In 2014, back in New York, he got a cancer diagnosis tied to Agent Orange. “I wasn’t surprised,” he said. “But I wanted to come back and see how the people who were exposed are living.”

He found his purpose at the Da Nang Association for Victims of Agent Orange. He volunteers with disabled children, some born decades after the spraying stopped. “They’ve become like my extended family,” he said. “The beach is nice, but that’s not my priority. I have a whole life in Vietnam.” He has attended solemn repatriation ceremonies for soldiers’ remains. He even stood alongside President Biden during one, handing a former Vietnamese soldier back the diary he had lost 50 years before. Keenan, too, met and married his wife here.

Before I left Hanoi, I visited the old Hoa Lo Prison — the “Hanoi Hilton.” Its yellow walls once held Vietnamese revolutionaries under the French. The Vietnam War wing presents its own tidy version: photos of American POWs smiling, playing basketball, unwrapping care packages — a careful curation of the story.

Not far away, in a modest home in west Hanoi, I met Ngo Ngọc Duong. Through a translator, he told me that he joined the North Vietnamese Army at 18 and fought for 16 years as a reconnaissance soldier — crawling into enemy zones for intelligence, surviving on roasted cassava in bamboo tubes.

He described the day American helicopters hunted him through dense forest for miles as he dove into foxholes, crawled forward and ran again. “They had aircraft, bombs, the most advanced weapons,” he said. “But in the end ... they couldn’t kill me.”

His daughter was born deaf and with intellectual disabilities, a legacy of Agent Orange. Still, he sees American soldiers, like himself, as victims of war. “They didn’t want to invade another country, but due to circumstances and orders, we ended up on opposite sides,” he said. “On the battlefield, we were enemies — but outside of war, they are just people like us, with families, dreams, and their own pain.”

That’s why, even today — after all the loss and suffering — he warmly welcomes American veterans back. He hopes to shake hands with them, to talk, to be friends, and most importantly, to send a message: “Cherish life. Cherish peace.”

All four men grew emotional while telling their stories. The three Americans arrived with bombs overhead and rifles in their hands — or bombs strapped to the wings of jets they loaded. Now, they come back with pension checks, Agent Orange scars, and local wives. They stand barefoot on the same sand they once cratered, in a country that — for reasons they’re still figuring out — feels more like home than the one they left behind.

Daniel Allott is the former opinion editor of The Hill and the author of “On the Road in Trump’s America: A Journey into the Heart of a Divided Country.”