The American War

Last Saturday there were comemorations of the 30th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. When Saigon fell, I was four years old. My father was still in Saigon at the time, and was pulled out of there thanks to a friend in the Australian embassy (at least that was the story I got, but each of my sibs got different stories, but I digress). My mother and brother and I were already living in safe quiet bustling Hong Kong and my sister in boarding school in Australia.
During this last visit to France, my friend Marianne pointed out something interesting, that various people we talked to often spoke of war, and that she had to keep straight which war they meant. For my mother, it was Vietnam, for my aunt, WWII, and for one roommate, the Korean war. Yesterday I realized that I was actually the first in my family not to have directly witnessed a war. My great great grandfather was conscripted and fought in the Franco-Prussian war, my greatgrandfather in WWI and my grandfather in WWII. As for my mother's side, it was just one continual war. Mike once asked my mother when she had known a time of peace in Vietnam (great question) to which my mother thought for quite a while and said that there were a couple of years right after the Japanese occupation that were relatively quiet, but other than that, not from her childhood until she left in 1971. On a recent NPR talk show, a US veteran who had returned to Vietnam had said he was struck that it could be quiet there, that in his memory Vietnam always existed under the perpetual sound of choppers in the air, and that must have been true, because when I was growing up, my mother would still shudder at the sound of helicopters.
In the US, one rarely speaks of direct wartime experience unless one served in some war. When I was in ROTC in college (for the fun, honest) I was awarded a "Veterans of the Foreign Wars" award of some kind, but really, how many wars have been anything but foreign here? Growing up, in my family, we spoke of the war in Vietnam and it was one endless spectrum of war, from the first Viet Minh insurgencies through Dien Bien Phu and then the American war. It struck me how in my family, I cannot dissociate myself from my lack of experience of war, and how surely this must color my thinking (or bleach it). There are no sights or sounds I associate with war, for me it's a one-dimensional topic. My sister recalls watching a monk burn himself alive, my mother recalls mortar blasts and underground shelters, my dad once had a mild panic attack hearing the sound of a radio bomb siren at a museum in Normandy. In California my friend Janice's husband just returned from Iraq and wakes up still with anxiety. Lucky lucky me.