Letter of Recommendation. 

Chu Tat Tien once wore the uniform of a soldier in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.
Before and after that chapter of his life, he has been many things: a writer, a poet, a martial arts teacher, a qigong instructor, a volunteer, an artist, a man who prints books and gives them away as gifts. At the heart of it all lies a quiet generosity — a steady impulse toward kindness. 

When he left Vietnam and set foot in Santa Clara, he entered a world that felt almost unreal. The coastline curved as if drawn by a gentle hand. Two squirrels, absorbed in their own shy courtship, darted across the roadside shrubs. Above him, autumn leaves — gold, wine-red, violet-dark — loosened themselves from branches and drifted like slow, deliberate breaths. 

These were the first impressions that America pressed upon him. 

Yet beauty never fully eclipses memory. Before long, the image of Mỹ Lai surfaced again — abrupt, uninvited: “The Viet Cong’s Tet Attack killed many U.S. soldiers and caused some U.S. military men to lose their self-confidence and panic, especially after the My Lai massacre. My Lai was a small village of mostly elders, women, and children in rural Quang Ngai Province, central Vietnam.”

For thirty-four years in exile, these opposing scenes, wonder on one side, grief on the other, threaded themselves through his days.

 He cannot forget the war.

The synchronized thud of boots.

The strained voices of American advisors cutting through the chaos.

The staccato rise and fall of rifles, machine guns, and mortars.

The beating blades of helicopters carving through a sky dimmed by smoke.

These impressions move in and out of his pages, sometimes like shadows, sometimes like open wounds. 

At its heart, his book is the story of a life - his life - woven together with the fragile love between two young people who grew up too quickly because of war. The young man became a South Vietnamese soldier, not through desire, but through the current of history pulling him forward. The young woman, then still a student, carried her own weight of doubt, fear, and longing as the nation trembled around her. 

Like so many wartime romances, theirs was undone not only by separation and uncertainty, but by an ideology preached as “brotherhood” by those whose hearts had grown cold. War split families open. Mothers lost sons. Wives lost husbands. And everything, every loss, every silence … felt senseless. 

But even without choosing the path, the soldier in Chu Tat Tien served with the fullness of a man who understood honor. And even though love could not remain intact, its echo lived on … tender, unfinished… in the quiet memory of the woman who waited behind. 

In reflecting on the war’s roots, he also contemplates the path of Ho Chi Minh, not a path of salvation, but one carved by ideology, stifling the first fragile breaths of freedom just as Vietnam emerged from feudalism and colonial rule, just as it began to imagine a life shaped by its own destiny.

 He revisits Đien Bien Phu, the Geneva Accords of 1954, the return of Ngô Đình Diệm, the First and Second Republics, and the turbulent decades that followed … recounting them with clarity untouched by bitterness. 

Across many chapters, he lingers on the presence of American soldiers in Vietnam — not as symbols of power, but as human beings. In the midst of fire and smoke, he recalls gestures of trust between Americans and South Vietnamese, small acts of care exchanged in the crucible of battle. Such moments reveal a shared humanity that stands in stark contrast to the cold machinery of North Vietnam’s ideological war. 

Tan, the main character in the story (I believe that man was also the author) speaks softly and without embellishment to the woman he once loved — not to justify what was broken, but to remind himself that the war, in some invisible way, still lingers. 

Now, even in safety, even in exile, the author, Chu Tat Tien, believes that the divide between Nationalists and Communists remains a quiet ache beneath the surface of every Vietnamese heart. At times, the weight of memory overcomes him. Yet he clings to a simple faith:
that someday, the scattered children of Vietnam will return to Saigon, the Pearl of the Far East, not as refugees, but as a reunited people. 

Time moves forward, and he feels its pull. 

In the twilight of his years, Kim, the girl Tan rescued from the sea, also offers a confession that reads like an exhale: “Life is so complicated, isn’t it? When I was young, I never imagined its difficult side. After Saigon fell, my life seemed forever broken. Then I met you — my first love, my hero. But by coincidence, I learned that you already had someone, a wonderful woman who had followed you most of her life. You loved her, too. Truly, you never loved me. You only felt pity. Because of your promise and because you have always been a man who helps others, you chose to risk your life for me. And because of that, your own love had to be set aside.” 

The exhaustion is not the fatigue of age. 

It is the weariness of unfinished duty, the burden of hopes that remain unresolved. 

With War and Love, Chu Tat Tien gives us a narrative both intimate and sweeping, rendered with a sensitivity that honors memory, sacrifice, and the fragile persistence of hope. 

We owe him our gratitude for opening the door to a world where war and tenderness coexist, and where the heart of a South Vietnamese soldier continues to beat, steady and sincere. 

Mai Thanh Truyet, Ph.D., Associate Professor

Dean of the Chemistry Department.

Pedagogy University, Saigon