In Derry Mason, son of an Army vet, they will see how the war shaped the life of one who wasn't yet alive to experience it.
``There's no avoiding it: Every morning when I get up and put my leg on, I'm part of the legacy of the war,'' said Mason, a first-year teacher of outdoor education at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. He wears a prosthesis on his right leg, the result of an amputation necessitated by a birth defect believed to have been caused by his father's exposure to Agent Orange.
Why would anyone - especially battle-scarred veterans - want to ride the length of Vietnam, through mountains and mud, along the torn nation's one main road?
Why not? asked World T.E.A.M. Sports, a Charlotte, N.C.-based organization that seeks to showcase the capabilities of people with disabilities by pairing them with the able-bodied for international challenge events.
In 1990, World T.E.A.M. climbers conquered Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest peak. In 1995, they pedaled 13,000 miles around the world. In April, a World T.E.A.M. group competed at the Penn Relays in Philadelphia. A mixed team of extreme athletes even won the Antarctica Marathon.
``There is a deep, deep urge in this nation to heal the wound of Vietnam,'' said Peter Kiernan, cofounder of the organization. ``But how? It's an incredibly painful, complicated war. How do you appropriately memorialize it?''
With 1998 marking the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, the organization came up with a humanitarian plan: Form a single cycling team of veterans from both sides of the war, and have them ride through the country along the bombing route.
For most of the U.S. veterans, it will be the first return to the country since the war ended; for most of the Vietnamese, the first postwar contact with their American enemies.
