I created this story about my friend Chuck Searcy but did not write it. I asked my digital friend ChatGPT to “write a short story about Chuck Searcy using the style of David Sedaris.” I then copied and pasted it into Grammarly’s free AI detector. The result? 12% of the content was AI-generated, which shows you how easy it is to fool an AI detector.

In case you’re wondering (I was), Frogger is a 1981 arcade action game developed by Konami and released by Sega. The object is to direct five frogs to their homes by dodging traffic on a busy road, then crossing a river by jumping on floating logs, turtles, and alligators. In Hanoi and elsewhere in urban Vietnam, the stakes are higher because your life and limb are at stake.

It’s true – Chuck does drink a lot of coffee, always black and piping hot.

Enjoy!

Peace, MAA

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The Land of a Thousand Handshakes

I met Chuck Searcy in a Hanoi café, the kind of place where the ceiling fans spin just fast enough to make you believe in hope. He sipped a coffee so strong it could resuscitate the dead, while I sweated through my shirt and tried to figure out how I—a man who still used Google Translate for “thank you”—had found myself sitting across from one of the most respected Americans in Vietnam.

“How do you like it here?” he asked, in a voice that carried the unmistakable calm of a man who’d been through wars, actual and bureaucratic, and somehow come out the other side drinking only coffee.

I muttered something about the traffic, how every street felt like a game of Frogger set to an ’80s action movie soundtrack.

Chuck nodded. “You get used to it,” he said. “Or you don’t, and then you leave.”

We were here to talk about his work—removing unexploded bombs left behind by a war that ended before I was born but still had a habit of reintroducing itself to farmers in Quang Tri Province. He explained it in the same measured tone one might use to describe a neighbor’s dog that occasionally bites children but is otherwise very sweet.

“I imagine that’s hard,” I said, immediately regretting how idiotic it sounded.

Chuck just smiled. “I like to think of it as problem-solving.”

At that moment, a man in a tattered ballcap approached the table, grinning as if Chuck had just given him a kidney. They clasped hands, exchanged pleasantries in Vietnamese, and the man left looking approximately 10% happier than when he arrived.

“You know everyone here, don’t you?” I asked.

“Not everyone,” he said. “Just most.”

Over the next hour, I watched Chuck shake hands with a dozen more people—old men, young women, a guy in a shirt that read “I ♥ Phở More Than My Girlfriend.” They all seemed to know him. And I started to wonder if Chuck Searcy had somehow merged with the city itself, like one of those trees in the Temple of Angkor, roots wrapped around ancient stone.

By the time I finished my watered-down iced coffee, I realized that Chuck had never actually finished his. It sat there, half-full, a perfect metaphor for a man who had spent decades trying to clean up a mess he didn’t make, in a country that had every reason not to welcome him—but somehow, did anyway.

I wanted to ask him why he stayed. But looking around, at the bustling street, the people who gravitated toward him like fish to a steady current, I already knew the answer.

He belonged.