My second cousin died in Vietnam.
2 days after the family was notified of his death, my uncle recieved a letter from him. My grandmother has the letter and showed it to me. A piece of history was sitting there in my hands. It was amazing. It was the first time I had ever had a piece of my family's past in a tangible resource. The handwriting, the postage, the fact that it passed through the hands of a relative I had never met. A relative that was shot down by his own troops, as they mistook him for the enemy.
He wrote my uncle and told him not to be afraid to enlist. That it was beautiful there and his overwhelming sense of patriotic pride was an amazing feeling.
He told my uncle not to tell my grandmother about the letter, that she would tell his mother and that his mother would get nervous, but he was going to write her later. He never got the chance to.
In history we are learning of the Vietnam War. Sadly, this is the first time I have ever learned about it. I am not only learning the one-sided facade that is printed in grandeuristic textbooks by people in power, I'm learning the true real stories of what it was really like to be an American in Vietnam and a Vietnamese Vet in Vietnam during guerilla warfare.
Through all of this I am gaining some insight to the war in Iraq. How it's not so different after all. How it still kills a mother's child, how it still kills her to lose a child to a lost cause, a fight over power. What is power anyway?
To hold the lives of millions in your hands and send them off to be killed because of some unfinished family business?
I didn't think so. But apparently I'm wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment