war and memory

In 1972, cyclist Rebecca Rusch’s father’s plane was shot from the sky over Laos. Steve Rusch was flying a mission for the US Air Force during the final years of the American war in Vietnam. Rusch has few, if any memories of her father.

But in March 2015, she went in search of his ghost, and herself. Together with Vietnamese rider Huyen Nguyen, Rusch retracing the 1,200-mile Ho Chi Minh Trail, an historic secret network through Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos that Northern Vietnamese once used to supply battleground forces to the south. From her bicycle, Rusch planned to read in the contours of Vietnam’s terrain the entwined stories of the war and her family. — Read the rest at Bicycling.