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

A Memory, and Sorrow

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

Early one dark morning in the winter of 1966, my twin brother Bobby and I were force-marched in a freezing drizzle with a lot of other young men to a building the Air Force was pleased to call the Dining Facility, for an institutional meal of fish sticks and french fries. This was in Illinois, […]

How to Write an Ending to a Never-Ending War

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

I once stood in front of a roomful of high school students and read a story about the end of the Vietnam War, and how I fled to America as a child, and how that experience continued to haunt and inform me, when a young woman, moved by my story, raised her hand. “Can you […]

Tự do

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

Fresh from having hosted a conference at Tulane for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the My Lai Massacre,in December 1994 I traveled to Vietnam with a group from Northern Illinois University. It was a pivotal time, as the normalization of diplomatic relations were scheduled to take place six months later. Over three weeks, we traveled from […]

A Day Nothing Happened

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

We would take a 6-by truck into An Tan from Ky Ha, to buy soda or beer or sex. A line of little thatched-roof kiosks, some of them walled with flattened beer cans from our trash dumps, strung along a dirt road rutted with land-mine craters, a cloud of reddish dust hanging perpetually over it. […]