DALTON, Ga. — On June 15, Whitfield County resident Lee Bell stepped off a plane at Da Nang International Airport in Vietnam, 50 years to the day after he landed at that same place — then Da Nang Air Base — as a young member of the U.S. Marine Corps.

“I wanted to see what was going on over there now … I guess I wanted to see if I could get rid of some ghosts,” he said.

Born in Whitfield County, Bell was raised by his grandparents until his grandmother died, just before he turned 13.

“Then I moved in with my mom and stepdad,” he said.

He dropped out of Murray County High School in his junior year and joined the Marine Corps “to get away from home,” knowing there was a good chance he’d be sent to Vietnam.

“To tell the truth, I never figured I’d come back alive. But I didn’t feel like I had anything to live for at the time,” he said.

Bell reported to boot camp at Parris Island, S.C., on Aug. 11, 1966. He arrived in Vietnam on June 15, 1967.

“I was supposed to be a diesel mechanic. That’s what I was trained for. But I spent eight years in the Marine Corps and never worked a day as a diesel mechanic,” he said.

“I was stationed about a mile from the end of the Da Nang air strip for the first year. I trained security forces for a local village,” he said. “It was just me and eight other Marines. We ate the same thing they (the villagers) did. We slept in little buildings there that the Seabees (Naval Construction Battalions) came in and built for us. We had some rough times. … But nothing we didn’t expect.”

After finishing his first tour in Vietnam, Bell volunteered for a second and ended up spending 26 straight months in the country.

“I volunteered to stay for the same reason I joined,” he said. “I wasn’t married. I didn’t have anything back home.”

After returning from Vietnam, Bell met the woman who would become his first and second wife, started a family and continued to serve in the Marines.

Then, shortly after Christmas 1973, he went to bed and woke up a few hours later unable to breathe.

“They said I had asthma. Yeah, right, after eight years in the Marines I had asthma,” he said. “They discharged me.”

Bell said it was the first of a series of health issues that doctors would ultimately diagnose as connected to his exposure to Agent Orange, a herbicide that was widely used by the U.S. military in Vietnam.

“I’m 100 percent disabled because of Agent Orange,” he said.

In the almost 50 years since he left Vietnam, the war ended, the north conquered the south and unified the country, and the United States and Vietnam re-established diplomatic and trading relationships.

“When I left Vietnam, I didn’t plan on going back. I didn’t even think about it,” Bell said. “But as I got older, as I heard about what was going on over there, I decided I needed to go back. I needed to see it one last time.”

He and his son Justin, 12, spent a month in Vietnam, including two weeks in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon.

“I never got to go to Saigon when I was stationed there,” Bell said.

The city famously has 8 million people and 7 million motorbikes.

“Everyone rides them, and they don’t seem to have any traffic laws, none that they obey,” he said. “But they never seem to have any accidents.”

Bell says that one of the biggest surprises was how young everyone was.

“It seemed like everyone was 40 or younger. I met one my age. He’d been one of our allies. He worked for the United States during the war,” Bell said. “He told me that when South Vietnam fell to the communists (in 1975) he had to go into hiding in Cambodia for years.”

Bell said he wanted to go back and see the area around Da Nang, where he was stationed. But he said it had changed so much he barely recognized it.

“Da Nang Beach, which used to be called China Beach, looks like Panama City Beach, Florida,” he said. “I remember when we used to go down to the beach there, we used to have armed guards. Now, it’s a big tourist destination. I wanted to find the village I was stationed in, but it’s not there anymore. All of those little villages are gone. It’s just one big metropolitan area.”

One thing Bell says he did not expect was how much his diabetes would improve from eating just the simple Vietnamese diet of rice and vegetables and drinking lots of water.

“My weight went from over 260 pounds to the low 230s,” he said. “I’ve kept eating that way since I got back and I’m still losing weight.”

Bell calls the trip very positive.

“Right now, if I couldn’t live in the United States, Vietnam is one of the countries I’d want to live in,” he said. “It was that great of an experience. The people were great. They treated us so well. I didn’t get any negative feedback.”