Editor’s Note: This three-part series chronicles the impact of the Vietnam War on now retired Army Ranger Paul Longgrear and his family. Their recent return to Vietnam is the subject of a documentary film “The Man Left Behind” to be shown at the GI Film Festival in April in Washington D.C.

Once Paul Longgrear finished fighting in Vietnam, he never wanted to return.

After his dramatic Christian conversion on the battlefield in Lang Vei, after he finished his final tour of Vietnam, he returned home committed to living a different kind of life with his family. He didn’t look back.

He settled into work in Arkansas, working on a catfish and rice farm. While there, attending a small church with his growing family, a church member looked at him one day and announced, “This here boy’s a preacher.”

He preached the next eight sermons at that church. It began another career for him.

While he spent a total 26 years in the army – 11 in active duty and the rest in the reserves – he also ran a business and served as a pastor to four different churches and as a missionary in the middle east.

Settling into retirement in Pine Mountain, Longgrear received a call from a stranger last year.

“Greg Tomlin called me. I’d never heard of him,” Longgrear said. “He said he was taking three Vietnam vets and their oldest children to Vietnam and he wanted me to be one of them. I asked him, ‘Who are you?’”

Longgrear proposed the trip to his daughter, Honey Lee Walker, 44, who lives in Birmingham. She wasn’t interested. But, Tomlin and Longgrear continued talking and then Tomlin offered a new proposal.

“The more I interviewed Paul and his family, I wanted to take them all. I had taken my father to Vietnam and wanted to give the same thing to this family,” said Tomlin, who lives in Dallas, Texas. “I also wanted to make sure Paul’s full story was told. He’s been in books and a number of documentaries, but everyone edits out the spiritual side of the story. It is, in a word, miraculous, and we wanted to capture the whole picture.”

Tomlin is new to documentary film making. He’s worked in corporate and higher education communication most of his life, doing commercials and corporate videos, but never a documentary.

“I’d always been interested in doing something like this and realized if I don’t do this now, there’s no hope for it,” he said.

Longgrear talked again with his three children: Fred “Bubba” Longgrear, 40, Paul “Bo” Longgrear, 42, and Walker, 44. They agreed to go on the trip with him, but Paul Longgrear had one more condition.

“I told Greg that he had to take the glue that holds it all together – Patty,” he said.

In January, all five members of the family boarded a plane and headed to Vietnam with Tomlin and a film crew. It was an intense trip, but, they all agreed, it was also a good experience.

“There were grueling days, but it was fabulous. I’m grateful for the experience, but I’m not sure I’d sign up for another one,” Patty Longgrear said.

Paul Longgrear admitted he’s not an emotional man, but at one point, he was affected by the place where he stood. It was in Lang Vei, near the place where he had his religious conversion experience in the middle of a battle.

“Greg asked me, ‘Is this where you left the ‘old man’?’ and that got to me. It was where I left the old person behind. When I had left there, I was a new man,” Longgrear said.

He was also shocked by what he saw in the country where he fought – and failed to win – freedom for the Vietnamese.

“Vietnam is better off now than before we fought the war. I believe they’re better off than even if we had won. And I hate communism,” he said. “I talked to college students and asked them how they got to college. They took a test. I asked them if their parents fought for the north. Some did, some didn’t. I saw religious freedom there – we met Christians who are asked to register their religion, but are free to practice it.”

In Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), with eight million people, Longgrear found a modern, progressive city.

“There’s a positive attitude – about 80 percent are under 30 and they have opportunity. They have hope,” he said.

For his children, Vietnam helped them see not only a changed country, but a history of their father, as well.

“Because of my father being there, I think the Lord was able to do a great work in him. It created who he became – a man with confidence and principles,” said Honey Lee Walker. “I found the people in Vietnam to be so appreciative. On the way over there, a woman on the plane asked me why I was going there. I told her and she said, ‘Your father in the war? My father in the war, too. I hope you like my country.’

“Even when my dad met with the colonel who fought for the North Vietnamese, there was no reason we couldn’t say we are no longer the enemy,” she said.

For Walker, however, the reality of the war was seen on American soil.

“When my dad brought his last man home last year, that was reality for me,” Walker said. Last year, she attended the funeral of the last of Longgrear’s soldiers whose remains were identified and returned for a military burial.

“I watched my mother weep. I realized that could so easily be us sitting there. I wonder how different my life would have been without my daddy in it,” she said. “Even though he’s opinionated, he’s a rock.”

Sherri Brown can be reached at sbrown@lagrangenews.com or at 706-884-7311, Ext. 240.