I will graciously accept “Thank you for your service.” But it seems a tad trite and gives me pause. I’d much prefer you welcome me—and every other veteran—home, and live a life dedicated to justice, dignity and equal opportunity year round. That would make my day.Read More
Vietnam War Veterans Day was established to commemorate the day the last U.S. combat troops departed Vietnam: March 29, 1973. Today I look back on my homecoming, knowing fortune smiled on me. In the Spring of 1971, one simple idea obsessed me: getting home from Vietnam.Read More
On a bitter and frigid late winter evening in New York, and simultaneously during the morning heat of Vietnam’s central coastline, a long-anticipated clash between two undefeated heavyweight boxing champions took place as a proxy battle for a nation tearing itself apart over war and race.Read More
August 18, 1969, fifty-six years ago today, I was supposed to be at the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York with my buddies. But instead, on that sultry mid-summer morning, I was in Brooklyn, where I took my first military steps on the way to Vietnam. Read More
Fifty years ago, on the last day of April,1975, the Vietnam War ended when the North Vietnamese Army overwhelmed Saigon. It was also the day that Tran Van Kim, then a fierce young Special Forces Major, made the hardest decision ever for himself and his family.Read More
Fifty-two years ago, the Christmastime night sky over North Vietnam was not an idealized, star-studded obsidian wonderland. Beginning on December 18, 1972, American B-52 aircraft delivered holiday death and destruction to Hanoi in one of the most intensive and lethal bombing campaigns of the Vietnam War.Read More
Early on March 16, 1968, the massacre of hundreds of innocent women, elderly men and children by US soldiers in the tiny hamlet of My Lai took its place as the Vietnam War’s most enduring badge of depravity, and the hapless Americal Division’s most unholy ghost.Read More
54 years ago this day, the heartlessness of the Vietnam War came home to America: four dead, eight wounded at Kent State University in Ohio. More domestic violence would follow. The war against the war raged in a divided nation. Is it 1970 all over again?Read More
Imagine strolling past the Boston home of Paul Revere, and not having a clue. Not likely, right? But in Ho Chi Minh City, revolutionary history is unseen and unheeded every day at an unassuming noodle shop that is the site of a Vietnam War story extraordinaire IRead More
Sgt. Randy Sanders was trim, fair-haired, well tanned and never shut up once. That’s how I remember my seatmate on the “Freedom Bird” flight home from Vietnam on June 4, 1971. He seemed happier than a fat kid in a candy store. He was leaving theRead More
