I don’t know what happened.
I want to know what happened.
This broader question of “what happened” at first felt like a general inquiry, the kind I could google. So I did. The following images are from the second link on google when you search, “what was the Vietnam war like?'“. The article is titled “15 Poignant Photos That Show What Life Was Like During the Vietnam War”.
The last photo shown is of an American soldier returning home to his family.
It feels cruel. It feels twisted, unsympathetic, overwhelmingly black and white. Why is this photo alongside the others? Isn’t it out of place?
Why does the article finish with this photo?
This is not how my family remembers the war.
All the articles I could find mentioned that America “won the war”. It’s plastered everywhere. But when my spoke of the war, there was never mention of a victor.
The media on the war is overwhelmingly western, political, and didactic. But I know for my family, it’s not like that. So I sought to understand the war, not from the western perspective, but from the perspective of my family.
I want to understand the war through my family.