I met Jacqueline in the year 2000, when we were launching a restaurant in Delhi. She is married to Dick Celeste, who was the then US ambassador to India. He had been a friend of my father’s and had known him for several years. Jacqueline had an energy, which was positive and of the quality that made you want to stay in touch with
her. However, over a period of time, I lost touch and only happened to meet her again, many years later, at a friend’s wedding in Goa. She introduced herself thinking I might have not recognised her, and we sat down to chat and catch up.
Jacqueline was only three when her father went to war in Vietnam. He was away for one year and wrote 300 letters to her mother and her during that time. He also recorded 300 hours of audio tape to them. All the letters were addressed, “Dear Ruth and Jacquel-ine,” and he signed off as “love Daddy and Donald Karl Lund-quist”. Six months after he came back from the war, he lost his life to a massive heart attack.
She never knew him and over the years addressed all the “Father’s Day” cards to her mother. Her mother put the letters, all 300 of them, into a box along with the tapes and photos and gave them to her. Jacqueline did not read them. She went through high school and college and got married. It was only when the prospect of her becoming a mother became a reality that she “felt the need to read them”.
“I first read them in no order, just randomly and then re-read them in order,” she said, explaining the feelings that went through her. “I felt I was cheated by this man — my father — who was so passionate about being a husband to my mother and a daddy to me,” she said.
After that, Jacqueline and Ruth mourned together. They drove six hours to the beach and on the way, they heard the tape of the man who meant the world to them. Then, sometime last year, she decided she had to go to Vietnam and retrace her father’s past. “I had to find him,” she said.
She traced parts of that country through her father’s letters. “There was a picture of my father leaning against a signpost that said ‘Fat City.’ I found it and took a picture next to it,” she said to me.
Her 10 days in Vietnam were very difficult on her mother who had grown up in Germany during the World War II and had seen war at its worst. But in those 10 days she had found peace with her father. “I found him, forgave him and let him go,” she nodded.
Jacqueline has now written a book that is due to launch this week in India. The book titled Letters from Vietnam: A daughter’s search for her father, will have about 200 letters of her father to them, pictures and the 10 letters that she later wrote to him, after her visit to Vietnam. Her last letter started off with “This is my last letter to you…” knowing that this was an ode to her father, whom she never experienced, yet now knew.