Category: Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the End of the Việt Nam War

The Most Bombed Place on Earth

by Ngô Xuân Hiền | Apr 29, 2025 | Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the End of the Việt Nam War

I was born in June 1976 in Đông Hà, and my birth certificate bore the seal of the Republic of South Vietnam. Later that year, it merged with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. When I was nearly 2, my family moved to the nineteenth kilometer of Route 9, […]

Legacies of War

by Susan Hammond | Apr 29, 2025 | Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the End of the Việt Nam War

The end of February in Vietnam is the beginning of the hot and muggy season. The humidity shimmers under the sun, and the air is so dense it’s hard to breathe. It was on such a day in February 2013, in Quảng Nam Province, in central Vietnam, that our small delegation walked along the berm […]

Napalm, Land Mines, and Poetry

by Wayne Karlin | Apr 29, 2025 | Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the End of the Việt Nam War

In his poem “Song of Napalm,” Việt Nam War veteran Bruce Weigl imagines standing with his wife and watching horses meander peacefully through a meadow, mist kicked up around their hooves, a bucolic scene until unbidden sounds and images from the war begin to churn into his mind: voices “scraped” into the wind by trees […]

Of Memory and Forgetting

by George Black | Apr 29, 2025 | Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the End of the Việt Nam War

Vietnam is a country abuzz with youthful energy. Most of the population have no active memory of the American war, being too young even to remember the great opening to the West in the early 1990s, even though it has reshaped the course of their lives. Yet at the same time, memories of the war […]

To Be Human: Contemplating a War I Never Lived Through

by Phạm Bùi Gia Khanh | Apr 29, 2025 | Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the End of the Việt Nam War

The thought of war pulls me into a strange, suspended in-between: a space where I’m acutely aware of the ordinary peace around me, the warm bustling chatter in the streets where I sit, and yet my mind drifts into this surreal dimension of pain. The kind that feels too overwhelmingly visceral to ignore, yet too […]