Even before she became a journalist, Harris Faulkner knew the world was bigger than her backyard. The self-described military brat grew up on Army bases at home and abroad following her father, Lieutenant Colonel Bobby Harris, as his military career took their family around the globe.
“We were world travelers because of the military,” the Fox News host tells TVNewser. “Before that, my mother had never left Texas and neither had my dad.”
But there was one country that remained a blank spot on Faulkner’s personal map until very recently—Vietnam. Only her father had spent time in the Southeast Asian nation, and it wasn’t a period of his life that he relished revisiting. Harris served three tours of duty during the Vietnam War, two as an Army combat pilot, and rarely talked about the experience with his daughter while she was growing up.
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As a result, Faulkner says she never considered visiting Vietnam even after the country re-opened to American tourists in the 1990s. And even though many Vietnam veterans have ventured back in the decades since the war ended, her father never expressed interest in returning.
“My dad never went back, and I never talked with him about it,” Faulkner says. “Had he even given an inkling of wanting to go, we would have done it together.” (Harris died on Christmas Day in 2020.)
Now, Faulkner is making the trip for both of them via the new series, Footsteps of My Father. Streaming on Fox Nation ahead of the Memorial Day weekend, the three-part travelogue finds her retracing the path of Harris’ own soldier’s story through present day Vietnam. It’s a sequel of sorts to Faulkner’s 2019 book, 9 Rules of Engagement, in which her father finally opened up about his wartime experiences. Hearing those stories for the first time planted the idea of visiting Vietnam in her mind, but she still hesitated when Fox executives pitched the series three years after her dad’s passing.
“I thought it was going to hurt my heart,” she says now. “But I asked my dad’s younger brothers about it and they said, ‘You do it—and you do it in the name of your father.’” With their words in her ears and Harris’s military burial flag in her travel bag, she boarded a plane bound for Vietnam in late 2023.
Harris Faulkner and military historian Brian DeToy on the Saigon River. (Courtesy Fox Nation)
Going Upriver
Touching down in the sprawling metropolis of Ho Chi Minh City—formerly and still informally known as Saigon—Faulkner connected with military historian, Brian DeToy, who accompanied her for much of her journey. One of their first stops was the wide and winding Saigon River over which her father regularly flew high stakes combat missions.
At that time, the waters flowed through jungle, with North Vietnamese fighters hidden among the trees, aiming their guns at low-flying planes. Today, the Saigon River drifts peacefully by skyscrapers and marinas dotted with privately-owned vessels instead of military patrol boats. But Faulkner says she could still picture the terrain that her dad saw in her mind’s eye.
“The city’s not so big now that it can shake its past completely,” she notes. “When I was on the river, I looked around and remembered the stories he told me about there being Vietcong soldiers in the trees and following the river back to his base. They’ve chopped down some of those trees now, but being out there on that hot, steamy river it was easy to imagine. It blew my mind at what a survivor he was.”
Later destinations on Faulkner’s tour exposed her to the other side of the war. Visiting a section of the famous Củ Chi tunnels—where North Vietnamese forces carried out subterranean guerrilla campaigns—she came face-to-face with the harsh conditions that those soldiers experienced.
“Going to war doesn’t mean you aren’t human, and supporting our warriors doesn’t mean you don’t have a heart,” Faulkner says. “The heat and humidity down there is punishing, and there wasn’t enough food. It’s not that I feel for the Vietcong, but they had families and people they took into those tunnels. There were women who had babies in those tunnels. What was it like for our soldiers to face that humanity? It’s just heartbreaking all around.”
“I know my father wished he could have saved more people,” she continues. “But maybe the silver lining is that we left some things behind. We left who we are imprinted on the people of South Vietnam. And I know that because I’ve been among them.”
Watch a scene from Footsteps of My Father below:
What’s Left Behind
While Faulkner’s journey through Vietnam largely followed in her father’s footsteps, she did venture down side paths to hear war stories from other veterans. In the third episode, she sits down with retired U.S. army specialist Matt Keenanand former North Vietnamese solider To Nam, who have formed a strong friendship in the decades since they fought on opposite sides. Faulkner characterizes their seemingly unlikely, but entirely genuine bond as a “miracle,” one that signals the healing that’s taken place in the decades since the fighting ended.
At the same time, Faulkner found that many Vietnamese were as reluctant to discuss the war as her father once was, particularly among the younger generations who were otherwise excited to meet a visiting American.
“They wanted to take selfies with me,” she says, laughing. “They were very curious about our fashion and our music. They understood that I was there to cover the war, but that wasn’t their focus. There are very few military remnants still there—our footprint has pretty much been erased. So I can’t tell you what they know or don’t know about the war.”
Faulkner also recalls the mood of the trip shifting whenever they ventured further north. “My dad’s base was in Đông Hà, one of the most bombed-out places in the war,” she explains. “They had razed the whole base and erected an outdoor event space with a statue of Fidel Castro. We had officials with us in our vans, and they were trying to get us out of there because we were too close to the north and didn’t like that I had gone to where the statue was.”
Still, Faulkner ultimately ended her journey into the past with a sense of excitement for the future of the evolving relationship between Vietnam and the U.S., citing trade agreements and a mutual interest in combating drug trafficking. “We are working with Vietnamese law enforcement to try to stop the movement of fentanyl from China,” she notes. “That lets you know that you’re going to need friends in a different type of war to protect ourselves.”
And with Vietnam finally crossed off her travel bucket list, she’s already thinking of new countries to visit. “I’ve got other trips that I want to take with my daughters—Vietnam just set that part of me in bloom,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Now I’ve got to go everywhere!'”
Footsteps of My Father is currently streaming on Fox Nation
