The Waco Tribune-Herald published an essay on Sunday that was written by current BIC student, Christina Nguyen. The essay was originally written for Christina’s World Cultures IV class as a response to Tim O’Brien’s book, The Things They Carried. The essay serves as an excellent reflection for Memorial Day. Here’s a brief excerpt, and you can read the entire article above (click on the image to enlarge) or at the WacoTrib website.
My parents never spoke of the Vietnam War. Growing up, it had never been a part of my life, though it easily could have been. The stories my parents told my brother and me were lifted from American children’s books.
The oldest photographs my brother and I ever saw of our parents were in high school and college in the United States, in which they wore American clothes, carried American tennis rackets and smiled with their American friends. It seemed to me that my parents had never been anything other than American, and that the war I read of in history textbooks for class was something far removed from the house we lived in, something distant and impersonal. It had happened decades ago in another country and to other people. It was dead and past.
It wasn’t until I grew older that I began to notice the war here, in the United States and in my family. The shadows of it lurked in places I had always overlooked. (read the full article)
