NVN Saturday: RETURNING TO VIETNAM IN PEACETIME

by Karol Nielsen

New York Times, April 22, 2025

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My father served in Vietnam War with the 101st Airborne, the Screaming Eagles. He figured out that it was not a winnable war soon after he arrived in country. He felt his mission was to keep his men alive. Once, he found a dead North Vietnamese soldier with a photo of his family in his pocket. My father had a family, too. He thought that under different circumstances he and this soldier could have been friends. Forty years later, my father, mother, and I traveled to Vietnam. We traveled to all the places he had been—along the central coast and up in the central highlands. Our guide told us his father had been sent to a reeducation camp. In Kontum in the central highlands, we teamed up with a local guide. He took us to fox holes where Vietnamese took cover from bombings and then to his friend’s cafe. It was in a tropical garden with art about the war. The cafe owner and our local guide had studied art in Hanoi. Later, our main guide told us they were Viet Cong. But in that lush cafe, we all talked like friends. My father thought Vietnam was a beautiful country and he always wanted to return in peacetime. Now our government has told diplomats not to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.

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Karol Nielsen is the author of Walking A&P: A Vietnam War Memoir and other books. Her Gulf War memoir Black Elephants was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her full-length poetry collection was a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her poem “This New Manhattan” was a finalist for the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in Epiphany, Guernica, The New Verse News, and elsewhere.