Time to Pay the Rent

In 2006, Vietnam combat veteran Michael Primont winds his way through a small, Vietnamese village, searching out a specific residence and its owners. The streets, pathways, and facades rise from the ground as if from his dreams-or nightmares.

He'd last set foot in this place forty years earlier, in 1967, when his military unit set up headquarters here during the Vietnam War. Now, he is seeking out the place he'd commandeered, in order to pay rent for the use of the home. It is a pilgrimage of healing, thanks, and facing the demons of war that linger in the shadows and behind closed eyes.

Since Primont grew up hearing stories of his father's heroics in World War II as well as his grandfather's in World War I, his own experience in Southeast Asia, while heroic on the surface, forced him to question nearly everything in life, including his military lineage. This fresh perspective on wartime doesn't glorify or condemn conflict. It instead explores one man's history, his emotions, and his desire to recompense past wrongs in order to better exist in the present.

Follow Primont, through photographs and words, on his forty-year journey to closure.