Adrian Fitzpatrick holds the Christmas card he received from the South Vietnam president while serving in the Vietnam War. Morris News Service

Vietnam's Christmas wish heartened troops

ATHENS, Ga. - Adrian Fitzpatrick has received hundreds of holiday cards over the years, but every year about this time, the Athens man pulls out one that was hand-delivered to him on a foggy Christmas Eve 35 years ago while he patrolled his brigade's bunkers near Duc Pho, Vietnam.

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A Vietnamese officer delivered the envelope and a ceremonial speech to Mr. Fitzpatrick, then a 25-year-old infantry captain, at about 4 a.m. Christmas Day. Morris News Service

The envelope is tattered, but the card is remarkably preserved, just like Mr. Fitzpatrick's memory of that night, which grows clearer with each passing year, he says. It brought him a message that he didn't know he needed to hear, a message that he would turn over in his mind for decades.

The card actually arrived at about 4 a.m. on Christmas Day 1969, but Mr. Fitzpatrick hadn't slept, so he remembers it as Christmas Eve.

He was a 25-year-old infantry captain, the headquarters company commander, worried that the Viet Cong would pounce on a relaxed brigade, full of soldiers thinking of home. Determined that it wouldn't happen, he patrolled one bunker after another, as the hanging mist turned to fog and he realized he couldn't see to the barbed wire fence surrounding camp.

Discontent was growing in those days, Mr. Fitzpatrick remembers, as antiwar sentiment in America began to creep into soldiers' thoughts.

"Jane Fonda and company were really raising hell in the streets," Mr. Fitzpatrick says, and soldiers' morale sunk to a new low.

As Mr. Fitzpatrick stood and gathered his gun to go out on yet another round, a Jeep pulled up to the hut.

A South Vietnamese lieutenant came inside and asked to speak to Capt. Fitzpatrick, whose uniform - like that of other infantry officers fighting in Vietnam - didn't show rank to avoid attracting the enemy's notice.

The Vietnamese officer gave Mr. Fitzpatrick an envelope and a ceremonial speech, most of which the exhausted captain didn't comprehend.

The image on the card melds strange messages - East and West, war and peace, light and dark. In the landscape painting, a small group of Vietnamese people walk under a starry sky toward a small village, where a church dominates the other buildings in the town.

A single bright star hangs over the church, which seems to glow, despite the darkness.

Silhouetted GIs with machine guns stand in the foreground, seeming to guard the small group, and a prison camp stands far behind the city.

"Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year on behalf of the Government and people of the Republic of Vietnam," the card begins with greetings from Nguyen Van Thieu, the Catholic president of South Vietnam. "The people of the R.V.N. are deeply moved by your supreme sacrifice for you have had to leave your loved ones and Fatherland to help the R.V.N in its fight against Communist aggression and to preserve its freedom and independence."

Mr. Fitzpatrick didn't think much of the card that night. He was too tired.

More than three decades later, Mr. Fitzpatrick sees a profound message in the card and how a simple Christmas wish gave him and his men something that they needed that year: a sense of hope and gratitude.

--From the Friday, December 24, 2004 printed edition of the Augusta Chronicle