Together, Alyssa and I had learned about the mikvah —a natural body of water used for the ancient Jewish practice of ritual immersion. And together, we had confessed that the idea appealed to our growing curiosity about the religion we had ignored as teenagers. So maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised when, on the drive from Vermont to her family’s house near Boston, my college friend suggested a sunrise mikvah dip in Walden Pond.

We were seniors on break for Rosh Hashanah. As environmental studies nerds, we agreed that a detour to Thoreau’s old stomping grounds would provide a much-needed diversion from the holiday’s “pray, eat, sleep” routine. But Alyssa’s plot twist, casually mentioned as we merged onto I-89, represented something more. What better way, she reasoned, to usher in the Jewish New Year (not to mention our imminent entry into the uncertain world of post-college life) than with a skinny-dip in the environmentalist’s equivalent of the Ganges? The remainder of the drive passed in a spell of giddy plotting. The next morning, we awoke in Alyssa’s childhood bedroom, pulled on wool sweaters and sturdy boots, and set out for the woods.

Walden greeted us in its typical way: all pomp and pastoral charm, with the maple trees casting giant shadow puppets across the ground. But as Alyssa and I crunched over pebbles towards the water, I barely registered the scene around me. We weren’t there to leaf peep, after all. Before long, the first minivans would rumble in, depositing a flurry of camera flashes and picnic baskets into the stillness. In the meantime, we had more mischievous goals in mind. We could only hope that pristine woods would not take offense to the more spiritual peep show about to take place.

Alyssa and I had lingered over many dining hall meals, puzzling over the yearning towards Judaism that was taking shape deep within us. Religion had never been a defining part of my identity, but, as I edged towards the precipice of adulthood, I longed for something solid to wind my fingers into. This dip in Walden Pond, then, was something of a belated hazing initiation, the chance to do something completely outside of the college playbook to express my connection to tradition. I had heard that dunking in a mikvah feels like jumping into a swimming pool filled with holy water—an open palm to the soul’s reset button. Now at the water, there was no turning back.

I looked over at Alyssa who flashed me a thumbs-up. With our clothing scattered on rocks, we waded into the pond. Our skin reeled against the September chill. Then, with deep breaths, we plunged. I stretched out my limbs to allow water to flow across every pore. I imagined Thoreau’s bare legs skimming under the pond’s surface on one of his regular morning swims. What would he think if he awoke one day to find two nice Jewish girls splashing like rapturous fish in his waters? Hallelujah, no doubt.

Surfacing, I rejoined Alyssa on shore where we stumbled through a Hebrew blessing we’d practiced on the ride over:

Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who kept us alive and preserved us, and enabled us to reach this moment.

I silently said a second prayer of thanks as an unfamiliar sensation of warmth and electricity spread throughout my body. How strange, I thought, that after a lifetime of being Jewish, it took this accidental pilgrimage to understand what religion actually feels like.

Vinh Thanh is a small village in the coastal lowlands of central Vietnam. It sits beside the lazy Con River, in Binh Dinh Province—not a place you’d expect something life-altering to have happened to an American. Not once, but twice.

The first time I went there was May 16, 1966, as a young infantry platoon leader. I flew in, sluicing above the ground, looking down from a drab green helicopter at the people below. This is the way Americans seem to prefer traveling. Fast, heavily weaponed, power-drunk, godlike —all the better to avoid the natives. The weather sucked. Low clouds glowered at us. “Turn back,” the clouds seemed to say. We were, as you may have guessed, about to be sucked into the whirlwind of our destinies, collective and individual. It would be bad news.

Reaching a ridge just above Vinh Thanh, we set down and left the choppers. I disliked this part. We had arrived at what infantrymen call the “Line of Departure,” one of the almost literary phrases tacticians have come up with. It means, “Ahead lies Indian country. It’s a good day to die.”

We hiked up the ridge looking for “Indian Charlie,” and then we died. We got taken under more fire than I’d seen in five months. Many died soon, within 60 seconds of the ambush, others later, well into the 20 hours that we lay surrounded on that damn hill. But how the nearly 30 who met death that day actually died wouldn’t matter to them anymore. To those of us left behind, however, the how and why of it turned out to matter a great deal. To me, it has mattered more and more ever since.

And so it was that 42 years later, on November 18, 2008, I took the road back to Vinh Thanh. This time I traveled slowly, seated in a cramped SUV, looking up at lush hills that rose from the Con River, looking out at the people passing by at eye level. This is now the way I prefer traveling—though it’s taken me a while to get used to it. Deliberate, unarmed, sober, childlike—the sort of traveler natives like to take in. The only similarities to my first trip were the weather and the fact that I was again accompanied by a small band of brothers.

This time the brothers all chattered along in Vietnamese. I couldn’t understand a word, but I understood how they felt. Once they were busy trying to kill men like me, while I was busy trying to kill men like them. We all got good at it.

When we reached the base of the ridge at Vinh Thanh (I couldn’t say “Line of Departure” in Vietnamese, but there must be a phrase for it), we got out and walked uphill, approaching the old landing zone. End of the road. We stopped, quieted down, and took in the surroundings. I picked a spot in a farmer’s field and dug a small hole in the wet earth. I buried a little 1st Cavalry Division pin, yellow and black. I spoke to the souls of the men I had left there—and to the souls of the men we killed that day. I thanked them all for being patient, waiting for me to come back.

I tried a little prayer, but words choked up in my throat. I felt a good emptiness. I cried. One of my comrades, Nguyen, whom I’d nicknamed “Many-Wounds-Guy,” said the place was now “sacred.” My daughter-like interpreter, Trang, touched my shoulder and said, “Michael, you be alright.”

Then we all walked back down the hill toward the village and had lunch.

A few years ago, I bought an apartment in New York. The city had been my home base for a while. Since serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand in the early 1990s, I’ve shuttled between Asia and the U.S. in my work as an activist for community organizations in developing countries. But as a single woman approaching her 40th birthday, I was feeling a pull to give my home base a more permanent structure.

After eight months of scouring real-estate ads, meeting brokers, and visiting open houses, I found a listing in the New York Times that interested me: a garden co-op in a Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, townhouse. The place certainly had its quirks. The railroad flat seemed to have four rooms, but no real bedroom in its 720 square feet. The front of the apartment was open for the first 20 feet, and then confronted a bizarre half-wall with a large window-shaped cutout and no connecting walls. The kitchen featured exposed brick, subway tile, and mismatched appliances. Beyond was a tiny bathroom with a miniature sink barely hanging on to the wall and an original claw-foot bathtub. The final 6-by-7-foot room was a mess: rotting plywood flooring; a small, plastic-laminate window with a broken sash; and a dropped ceiling that had started to drop even further at the edges. Still, the flat had some lovely features, including 100-year-old pumpkin-pine floors and a garden that had a lot of potential.

I was smitten.

Immediately upon closing, I enlisted my family to help in renovations. My brother, David, is a licensed architect and my mother, a practiced home renovator. I’d serve as the general contractor. I wanted to build a new bathroom in the current bedroom alcove, which would necessitate new plumbing. My mom suggested turning the current kitchen into a proper bedroom, and she recommended transforming the current bath into a laundry, a priceless decision. Mom was irked that there were no closets, so she proposed that we divide a walk-in pantry into three separate closets: a hall closet, a large bedroom closet, and an open linen closet in the new bathroom.

As general contractor, I wanted to find distinct craftspeople for each job and do a lot of the work myself—to save costs, to learn new skills, and to inject creativity into my home. I also knew that I would enjoy it. After work and on weekends, I demolished. I wore weathered Carhartts, drank beer, and listened to a classic rock station. I made a mess and cleaned it up again.

I bought a handheld sanding machine for ceiling beams, an eight-foot ladder, and a drill gun. I used a crowbar toun- cover brick in the bathroom, going through Sheet rock, wood lath, and cement layers.

I finally called in a general contractor for the electrical work, plumbing, Sheetrocking, tile work, masonry, and scraping 100 years’ worth of paint from the flat’s window trim, doors, and doorframes. Meanwhile, I focused on details. Relying on my subscription to This Old House, I learned how to boil the paint off of original black porcelain doorknobs and mortise locks.

I visited an architectural salvage shop in Manhattan and bought old glass knobs for my doors. I also found antique coat hooks for a coat rack I constructed for my foyer, using a scrap from the yellow pine wood as the baseboard. For finishing touches, I gravitated to my traveler side. On one of my trips to Cambodia, I hauled back French-style concrete tiles for the new laundry floor and wine-colored silk material to make living room curtains.

After more than two years of dust, sweat, and tears, my house was a home. I would do it again in a minute. Just don’t tell my family that I’ve begun browsing the real-estate section for my next project.

During my four years at Middlebury, I pledged my allegiance to the Panther. I woke up before sunrise on J-term mornings, merging with other bundled figures slinking along the unplowed sidewalks to track practice, ran the workouts and the meets, even captained the team my senior year. I was dedicated. But, deep down, I daresay, my loyalty was with the Great White Yak.

The Great White Yak was a mascot dreamt into being by my sports-happy intramural friends. We rallied behind the yak, of all animals, because it was fearsome and obscure, an animal whose potential for mascotdom was untapped in the realm of professional sports. We chose white yaks to reflect our pure, angelic sportsmanship, and our white yaks were “great” because, well, we were a confident bunch.

To cement the fraternal bonds of our members, we tagged two Greek letters, chosen simply based on their aesthetics, to the team’s name, making us the Xi Omega Great White Yaks. We even designed a logo, the symbols for xi and omega encircled by the outline of a yak, for our uniforms. We wore that insignia like a tattoo, and three years, three Yak jerseys, a hat and a pair of shorts later, we were a bona fide franchise—some 30 players that, in different permutations, fielded a hockey, soccer, broomball and softball team.

Our players ranged in ability from a kid from India who had never seen ice before, let alone played hockey, to two Minnesotans and a Canadian, retired from the men’s and women’s varsity hockey teams (Division III national champions, mind you), who had ice in their veins.

The energy my friends put into the team was contagious. As a varsity athlete, I was torn between the two levels of play. I thought it was against my better judgment to play in intramural games, for fear that I could injure myself and jeopardize my track season. But, while I managed to abstain from a few sports (hockey and softball), soccer and broomball were my guilty pleasures. Of course, concealing my closet intramural addiction was tricky, and I, admittedly, didn’t do so well at it. I lined up on the indoor track decorated with bruises from broomball spills. And just as I had feared, I jammed my foot enough in indoor soccer to cause a season- and career-ending (since it was my senior spring) stress fracture that secured me a few months in a supportive boot.

At the time, I was devastated by the injury (and to this day still have pangs of regret), but I was recently reminded, albeit bittersweetly, of what I had sacrificed my varsity career for—an indelible bond among Yaks. When one of our own lost his father to cancer, a core group of us flew to his hometown in Nebraska for the funeral. Not a second thought was given to what we’d do after the service. We played a game of Wiffle ball in his backyard and reverted right back to our Yak ways, heckling whoever was at bat and never, of course, forgetting the score. As close as we are, it was a sad day, the saddest most of us had ever experienced in our 24 or 25 years, and yet, we found comfort in that game. It was our way of showing our friend that we were there for him. And the simple, Norman Rockwell-esque scene of us playing showed me that I was wrong in ever thinking it was against my better judgment to be a Yak. As ridiculous as the Yak bond can sound, we’ve gone from being teammates to extended family, and being a Yak was the best judgment call I’ve ever made.

Megan Gambino ’06 is an editorial assistant at Smithsonian magazine.