As a child I wasn’t always interested in the aftermath of wars. Hollywood made the Vietnam War look cool and exciting. Movies like Rambo made the war into every boys dreams. I didn’t realize that a war could be so deeply connected to me. My parents played a part in the Vietnam war, and their parents as well. As a first generation Vietnamese-American, the Vietnam war has heavily influenced my life.

My parents don’t talk about the war a lot, they usually just tell me bits and pieces. It could be when my mother is folding laundry, she tells me that every morning she would wake up before sunrise to do laundry for the entire family. Whenever my dad drinks he tells us about how he was as strong as an ox back in the day. He would tell me that I’m lucky, that I have amazing opportunities  living in a country like America. I’ve never thought much of it. As a young boy, I wasn’t interested with these parts of my Vietnamese past. I was more interested in the graphic violent parts, I wanted to hear tales from my dad of the Vietnam conflict.

When visiting my grandparents, my grandpa would tell me the same thing like my dad. How he was forced to fight in a war that he didn’t want to fight. His voice was a little sad when ever he spoke about the Vietnam War. He would talk about how he would miss his family. How he would sneak out to visit his wife. He really exaggerated the fact that I was lucky without saying it.

I use to think it was all boring. That was until the movie “Journey from the Fall” came out. I originally thought it was a movie about the war in the perspective of a south Vietnamese during the war, but it wasn’t. It showed the suffering of the southern Vietnamese when Saigon fell, especially for those who greatly supported the southern government. There were scenes of re-education camps and executions of those who supported the Americans and the southern government. I didn’t realize that my own parents had to go through something like this, especially at such a young age. I thought that they just arrived in America on a boat or a plane. However, their journey wasn’t that simple.

I was desperate to know more about their journey from Vietnam to America but I knew it was a dark time in their past. I felt that inquiring about it would make them feel uncomfortable and they would avoid questioning. Luckily, one day my brother had a project about family history and I saw my opportunity. For the first time, I was able to sit down and really listen to their stories. For my mother it was easier for her to tell us her story than my father. She told us how her family had lost almost all of their property and she had to hide the fact that her father was running away to America. If the Viet-cong found out that he left for America, his family would have been executed. After settling down in America for a few years, my grandpa managed to sponsor my mom so she could come over to America as well. She knew no english at the time and had barely finished high school.

Having my father tell us his story was a bit more difficult. I think that it was because of the fact that he had to fight in the war. The experience was more traumatizing for him. Though he did open up a little when he had a couple of beers. He would brag about how strong he was back then and that he was good at shooting guns. He only talked about the good things that happened in Vietnam. Whenever we asked him about what he did after the Fall of Vietnam. He would only say that he left on a boat and somehow got to Virginia. He would try to avoid that topic as much as possible.

Lots of people struggled after the Fall of Saigon. Some people, like my father, tries to avoid the topic. Others want us to be educated by the event so that we could live our lives to the fullest since we never had to struggle like they did. The more I hear the stories of their struggles, the more I want to spread their stories. I want people to know that there was more to the Vietnam War. There was even more suffering. And that suffering lead to me being here today in the land of “freedom”.