How a Vietnam Battlefield Became a Championship Golf Course.
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Some stories are so improbable that if someone had told them to me years ago, I would have laughed out loud.
This is one of them.
In 1969, I was a young Marine combat engineer riding shotgun in a convoy heading north from Da Nang toward Marble Mountain. The war had a way of making even routine supply runs feel dangerous. You never knew what waited around the next bend.
On this particular trip, it was sniper fire.
Without warning, rounds cracked through the air and the convoy screeched to a halt. We jumped from the trucks and crawled underneath them, using the vehicles as cover while trying to spot an enemy we couldn’t even see.
The firing lasted only a few minutes.
No one in our convoy was hit.
Eventually the shooting stopped, we climbed back into the trucks, and continued on our way as though nothing had happened.
That was Vietnam.
You survived one dangerous moment and immediately started worrying about the next one.
At the time, I never gave that stretch of road another thought.
Forty years would pass before I saw it again.
An Unexpected Invitation
By 2010, I had long since left the Marine Corps behind.
I had spent much of my civilian career in the golf and travel industry, eventually becoming Director of Tour Operations for the John Jacobs Golf Schools in Scottsdale, Arizona. Even in semi-retirement, I occasionally consulted for a Scottsdale travel agency that specialized in golf vacations and luxury cruises.
One day the owner called me with some interesting news.
Luxury cruise line Azamara Cruises, working with golf travel specialist PerryGolf, was introducing a new golf cruise through Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Japan. The highlight of the voyage would be the opportunity to play the newly opened Montgomerie Links, a championship golf course designed by Colin Montgomerie just outside Da Nang.
Golf.
In Vietnam.
I could hardly believe what I was hearing.
The same country where I had carried an M-16 was now advertising championship golf.
Worth Asking
I contacted PerryGolf with what I thought was a reasonable proposal.
I wasn’t just a golfer.
I wasn’t just someone from the golf travel business.
I was also a Vietnam veteran who had actually served in the Da Nang area where this new course had been built.
I thought perhaps they might invite me along to write about the experience.
It seemed like a unique perspective.
They politely declined.
No hard feelings.
I moved on.
Or so I thought.
Google Earth Changed Everything
Curiosity eventually got the better of me.
One evening I opened Google Earth and began tracing the roads I had traveled as a Marine more than four decades earlier.
The technology amazed me.
Places that had once existed only in memory suddenly appeared in remarkable detail.
Then I noticed something.
The fourth fairway at Montgomerie Links appeared to sit almost exactly where our convoy had come under sniper fire in 1969.
I stared at the satellite image for a long time.
Could this really be the same place?
The more I compared landmarks and road alignments, the more convinced I became that it was.
Two Different Worlds
When I closed my eyes, I didn’t see manicured fairways.
I saw red dirt.
Military trucks.
Young Marines carrying rifles.
Dense vegetation hiding an unseen enemy.
Fear.
When I opened them again, Google Earth showed something entirely different.
Perfect fairways.
White sand bunkers.
Golf carts.
Palm trees.
Vacationers.
The contrast was almost impossible to comprehend.
One landscape.
Two completely different lives.
The Ultimate Irony
If someone had told that twenty-year-old Marine lying beneath a truck in 1969 that one day wealthy tourists would travel halfway around the world to play golf on that very ground, I would have laughed until I cried.
Golf in Vietnam?
You have to be kidding.
Yet history has a funny way of rewriting places.
Battlefields become cities.
Foxholes become parks.
And sometimes…
An ambush site becomes the fourth fairway of a championship golf course.
Looking Back
People often ask Vietnam veterans whether they would ever return.
Some have.
Some never will.
I haven’t walked that fairway.
Maybe someday I will.
Not because I need closure.
Not because I have something to prove.
But because there is something strangely comforting about knowing that a place once remembered for fear can now be remembered for peace.
If that’s not progress, I don’t know what is.
Author’s Note
I never did get that complimentary cruise.
But in a strange way, Google Earth gave me something even more valuable.
It reminded me that the world keeps moving forward—even in places where history once seemed frozen in time.
Sometimes the greatest victory isn’t found on a battlefield.
Sometimes it’s found on a golf course.
Continue Exploring
- From Sportsman’s Park to Sunset Hills
A childhood baseball memory comes full circle during a round of golf with Stan Musial. - The Day My Mom’s Babysitter Thought My Vietnam Call Was a Hoax
A long-distance call from Vietnam that nobody believed was real. - Why I Became a Marine
The decision that changed the direction of my life forever. - Back to the Corps
Returning home from Vietnam, rediscovering America, and beginning the final chapter of my Marine Corps enlistment at Camp Pendleton.
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