In 1971, John Pendergrass was seated in the back of an F-4 Phantom, racing across the skies of Vietnam as a United States Air Force flight surgeon. Forty-five years later, Pendergrass boards an altogether different type of airplane and heads to Vietnam for an altogether different kind of race. A veteran of IRONMAN triathlons on every inhabited continent, Racing Back to Vietnam follows Pendergrass as he returns to Vietnam in more ways than one - revisiting a country that, for him, is bound up in a complicated mess of memory and emotion.