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

Silences

by Bobbie Ann Mason | Apr 29, 2025 | Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the End of the Việt Nam War

In my novel In Country (1985), Samantha Hughes is preoccupied with Vietnam. Her father had been killed in the war just before she was born. Now 17, she is filled with questions about what it was like over there. Her eccentric uncle, Emmett, a Vietnam veteran, wanting to protect her, is reluctant to tell her […]

War Tremors

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

After the Viet Nam War physically ended, it carried on as a presence and influence in every facet of U.S. society and culture. Now, half a century later, I’m at an age where I feel its aftershocks unexpectedly, almost more than ever, some 55 years after the last day I was in it, and the […]

A Volunteer in Việt Nam

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

For a population as large and diverse as ours, separated by oceans from most wars, war often seems a distant threat. War is something that happens over there. Our American insularity, however, may be a danger in itself. Our distance and lack of direct knowledge may actually lead us to stumble into war, as it […]

Remembering Fire in the Lake: Some Lessons From the War

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

“The French and the Americans tried to stop the revolution, and in doing so they created an interregnum of violence unparalleled in Vietnamese history.”—Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake I understand that the lessons that any one of us may have learned from the long American War in Viet Nam depend entirely upon where you […]

Fragments of Memory From a Writer Born Two Years Before the War’s End

by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai | Apr 29, 2025 | Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the End of the Việt Nam War

The Bamboo Grove Ninh Bình, Việt Nam. Several years after the war’s end. A group of children ran barefoot across a garden filled with banana plants and Vietnamese mints, passing the rows of lettuce, sweet potatoes, and flowers until they arrived under the protective arms of a bamboo grove whose tall, golden culms reached high, […]