My Father ’s Vietnam

Courtesy Jon MeachamJere Meacham on patrol in Vietnam with other members of the U.S. Army’s Fourth Infantry Division. He sent the images to his son in 1999 Thirty years after everything happened–and 31 years since he had first set foot in Southeast Asia–my father, a soldier of the Fourth Infantry Division, wrote me a letter. It was 1999, and the note came with a set of recently rediscovered photographs he and his friends had taken with an old 35-mm Minolta in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. There were images of impossibly young men, their helmets heavy on their heads, carrying M-16s, smoking cigarettes and trying to look happy–itself a form of bravery. There were pictures of the lush landscape and of villagers going about their business, drawing water and sitting, watching, some blankly, all warily. My father’s words, though, were the most poignant part of the package. “I thought you might like to have these,” he wrote me. “You are the historian, and I know you will preserve them. I remember the brutal heat, the more brutal humidity, the chop-chop-chop of the helicopter blades and elephant grass that could cut men up like a knife. And I remember many things that I have never told you, or anyone. Those are the demons that I will always bear. South Vietnam, for me, is a place I’ve never really left.” Neither, truth be told, has America. As I watched Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s illuminating 10-part documentary ...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized History Vietnam Source Type: news