For much of my young adult life, I have written, near obsessively, about the things that I do not know – namely about the life my father led before he was recruited to fight other Vietnamese people in the Vietnam War. I try to sift through the silence, relying heavily on history books and literature to compose a narrative that I still know very little about. I feel as I have spent my years and my youth endlessly scavenging and rummaging for pieces of a story that I am not quite sure is mine.

In the little that I do know – strung together by pictures, bits of conversation, and academic text – I can only write. I write partially to record the history for myself, but mostly because the story feels so inconceivable that, in verbalized discussion, it sounds fictitious. In writing, I can cite the sources, I can refer to history, and I can defer to pictures. In my own family narrative, I still harbor an incessant need to show proof that what I say, in its seemingly hyperbolic nature, is true.

And so I preface the forthcoming story with a picture:

My father is in the top row, the farthest left. By his accounts, most of the men in this picture have died – causes of death are various and unknown. Herein lies what I know to be factual: My father was in first years of studying law when he was recruited to fly cargo planes for the South Vietnamese Air Force. In 1975, when the city of his birth proverbially fell to communism, he could not return home lest risk political imprisonment. In the 1980s, he received a letter informing him that his father – my grandfather – had died in a re-education camp in the northern region of Vietnam. In a tale that reads almost Homeric, it was my grandmother who traveled up the spine of the country to retrieve her husband’s body so that he could be buried, rightfully and honorably, in the country’s southern terrain. I attest that all of this is true.

Today is Memorial Day and I question, as I always have, the sentiment of the occasion, how it is separate from Veteran’s Day and, most importantly, how it can be a holiday of nationalism when the ramifications of war seep across borders and generations. The tragedy of war (and its constant repetition through history) is not solely in those who have died, but also in those who have somehow managed to live – and what it means to survive those who have survived. One of the greatest tragedies of my lifetime – one that pervades my daily life – is that my father would have been a far better lawyer than a solider. Yet he (and to an extent, I) was never given the opportunity to live and tell that story. It would have been a hell of a lot easier to believe than this one.