The series of events that formed his story continues to amaze Dan Cherry.
He shared it over the weekend in Vancouver, noting how the condensed version — an American F-4 pilot shoots down a North Vietnamese MiG-21 in 1972 — was just one link in a decadeslong story of reconciliation and forgiveness.
Cherry was Saturday’s keynote speaker at a district Rotary Club conference. The author of “My Enemy, My Friend” also scheduled an informal, conversational gathering Sunday morning.
In a phone interview Thursday, Cherry called Sunday’s session a chance to “flesh out some things that led us to have this amazing opportunity to reconcile and forgive.
“No question in my mind, this whole thing has had some sort of divine guidance,” said Cherry, who also spoke in Vancouver in 2014. “It is very much a chain of events. If any link does not happen when it happened, the way it happened, the entire story falls apart.”
The chain started even before 1972.
“I volunteered for my second combat tour, which I didn’t have to do.” However, “There was a lot of unfinished business.”
On April 16, 1972, Cherry fired the Sparrow missile that blew a wing off the MiG-21 flown by Nguyen Hong My — a former enemy Cherry now calls his friend.
“My flight leader had a tremendous number of other options that day. Had he taken any one of them, we never would have had the aerial engagement, and I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to come away with a victory.”
And if his flight hadn’t performed properly, “I would have been the one shot down.”
After the war, a set of circumstances led him to Ohio. Cherry found his old F-4 Phantom on display at a VFW post. When friends noticed the red star signifying the downed MiG, they asked if Cherry knew what happened to the enemy pilot. A couple of other links in that chain led to the 2008 reunion between Cherry and Nguyen on a Vietnamese TV show.
“The chain is amazing: so many opportunities for the story to stop; it never has,” Cherry said. “It’s all made the story spiritual. The next step is already planned.”
A lot of good things have happened because the way the story took shape, Cherry said. “So many Vietnam veterans have come up at the end of a presentation with tears in their eyes, thanking me for helping them move on from the past.
“It’s making an impact not only on veterans but regular people — people who have a tendency to hold grudges,” Cherry said. “It’s a benefit I never anticipated.”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
