When I first sat down to write The Delta Divers of Vietnam, I thought I knew where the journey would end.

I was wrong.

At first, I was simply trying to tell the story of a handful of Army Divers who served in Vietnam. But every question I had uncovered another question. Every photograph seemed to lead to another photograph. Many veterans I spoke with introduced me to someone else whose story had never been told.

Soon I wasn't just researching the Delta Divers.

I was discovering Army Divers from every corner of Vietnam.

Divers working in Cam Ranh Bay. Qui Nhon. Vung Tau. Bong Son. The Mekong Delta. Men assigned to port construction companies, dive detachments, and engineer units whose stories had remained scattered for nearly six decades.

The deeper I dug, the clearer it became that one book could never do justice to all of it.

Not because the book wasn't big enough.

Because the story was.

I finally understood that I wasn't reaching the end of my research — I was standing at the beginning of something much larger.

That's how the Delta Divers Project was born.

The book tells one story.

The project allows the story to keep growing.

It gives us a place to preserve newly discovered photographs, share forgotten missions, introduce veterans whose names have rarely appeared in print, and continue uncovering pieces of Army Diver history that many of us never knew existed.

In many ways, Discovery stopped being part of the project.

It became the project itself.

The 2024 Army Divers Association Reunion had a huge impact on the book. It brought four Delta Divers back together after fifty-six years — the first time we'd been together since our days in the Mekong Delta in 1968.

As we swapped war stories that first evening at our riverside Airbnb, I couldn't help thinking about all the Army Divers I'd tracked down during the first few years of researching the book. Every one of them had a story worth telling, and every one added another piece to a history I never imagined was waiting to be discovered.

But by then, something else had happened.

A couple of years into writing the book, the war finally began to catch up with me.

My exposure to Agent Orange — and the lingering effects of PTSD — had already begun to demand a lot of my attention. Years of diving in the zero-visibility waters of the Mekong Delta had left scars I never fully understood. I began experiencing blackouts lasting four or five hours, with no memory of what had happened. The told me I had learned to shut down to push through the stress of diving in zero visibility

Then, in 2017, I underwent open-heart surgery for a condition later connected to my Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam.

For a while, the book had to take a back seat — But it never went away.

The reunion reminded me why I had started writing in the first place. More importantly, it reminded me that the story didn't end with my tour in Vietnam — or even with the last chapter of the book. There were still Army Divers to find, photographs to uncover, and stories to preserve before they disappeared forever.

Over the past few years I've uncovered Army Divers, dive units, photographs, documents, and stories I never knew existed when I first sat down to write this book.

Each discovery answered one question while raising three more. It didn't take long to realize the book was never going to be the end of the story.

If I hurried to publication and walked away, too much history would remain unexplored. Some discoveries deserve an article. Others deserve an entire chapter. A few may even deserve a flipbook of their own.

That's why the Delta Divers Project exists. It gives me the time — and the freedom — to follow those trails wherever they lead. Preserving history isn't just about recording what we already know; it's about making sure the stories we haven't found yet aren't lost forever.

And with all the support and interest we've received since launching this site, I honestly believe we can do it.

Together, we'll make sure these stories are never lost again.

Bubbles Up,

— Jax