Every veteran has a story. It has to be earned — then it is carried.

Eventually, if we're fortunate, it is shared. That's the natural course of a veteran's story.

So, where did our story begin?

When we arrived in Vietnam there were no "Delta Divers." There were Army Divers. We weren't thinking about history or legacy. We were young soldiers trying to learn our jobs, complete our tours, and make it home. We replaced the first group of Army Divers to dive in Vietnam as they were rotating back to the States — with little to no time to assimilate any passed-on experience.

We had to learn from the divers beside us, and figured out the rest one mission at a time. No one explained where we fit into the larger picture. We certainly didn't know that, over the course of the war, only about 140 or so Army Divers would serve in Vietnam.

We simply did the job, and when our tours ended, we scattered across the country carrying little more than our own memories.

For decades, that's where the story remained.

Each of us knew what we had experienced — but only our own small part of it. The early divers in Qui Nhon knew Qui Nhon. The divers in Cam Ranh Bay knew Cam Ranh Bay. Those of us who spearheaded the move into the Mekong Delta as the war expanded, knew that part of the war as well.

After 1969, the second generation of Army Divers to arrive in Vietnam — trained under a more developed program than the one we had entered — would serve in different locations, performing many of the same missions. Every one of us carried home a different piece of the same history.

Years later, almost by accident, we began finding one another again. One conversation led to another. A forgotten name unlocked another memory. Stories that had been carried separately for nearly sixty years suddenly began fitting together. We weren't uncovering forgotten records hidden away in government archives. We were discovering the history of the Army Divers in Vietnam — a history that had always existed but had never been gathered in one place.

That discovery changed everything.

For the first time, we began to understand that what each of us had carried home was only one piece of a much larger story. We hadn't just found old friends. We also found the Military Diver family we had been drafted into — without ever realizing how large that family would become. Meeting the modern-day Army Divers at the recent reunions, and online, has brought us pride in showing us how the job has evolved, and the caliber of the men that do it.

That's how the Delta Divers Project began. Not as a plan to write a book or build a website, but as a search to understand who we were and what we had shared.

The book tells our story because it's the only one we can honestly tell.

The Delta Divers Project exists to bring those individual stories together, preserving not just one diver's experience, but the history of an entire generation of Army Divers who quietly served their country and then quietly went home.

Because every year makes discovery a little harder.

Because the men who still carry these stories are disappearing.

Because stories that are earned deserve to be carried, remembered, and shared.

For nearly sixty years, each of us carried a different piece of the same history.

Today, we're finally putting those pieces together. If this project helps one family understand where their father served, reconnects one Army Diver with his past, or inspires a new generation of Army Divers to discover those who came before them, then the story will be in good hands.

The Delta Divers
Vietnam 1966–1973