What Vietnam Veterans Never Told Their Sons

A boy of ten asks one question at a kitchen table in 1985 and never asks again. This file follows that silence down one line of a life, from the boy at the table to the young man at the door, the man of forty in the attic with the box open, and the son who drives his father to the VA today, using what Vietnam veterans and their sons and daughters have said to oral historians, to strangers, and in the comments of this network. Read in the third person, attributed, never invented. These are not war stories. They are the stories the war stories were hiding. Sources: Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress (created by Public Law 106-380, 2000); oral histories cited as a pattern, no interviewee named Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University, Oral History Project Mark Baker, Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There (1981), interviews given anonymously Al Santoli, Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Thirty-Three American Soldiers Who Fought It (1981) Wallace Terry, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (1984) Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried (1990), cited as fiction; the chapters "Ambush" and "Good Form" Karl Marlantes, What It Is Like to Go to War (2011) Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (1998), on the silence of Second World War veterans Laura Palmer, Shrapnel in the Heart: Letters and Remembrances from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1987) National Park Service, Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection (objects left at the Wall since 1982, held at the NPS Museum Resource Center, Landover, Maryland) Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, on the Wall and its names (dedicated November 13, 1982) U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, public pages on Agent Orange presumptive conditions and on tinnitus and hearing loss Accounts from Vietnam veterans and their sons and daughters in the comments of this network's channels (used without names)