Content Warnings: graphic descriptions of war, violence, and illness

Imagine being born as a symbol of death. Blood fills your nose, your mother hates your hungry mouth, and your foreign father lays dead in a smoldering plane.

Being born into war was something my parents had to shoulder for their whole lives, and yet, when discussing the Vietnam War, we Americans tend to push it away out of shame. The consequences of our actions will exist whether or not we choose to acknowledge them. When American troops left Vietnam in 1975, they left behind generations worth of effects. It’s time we look at them.

After the United States’ consistent acts of atrocities, their support, national and international, was weakened and their image as hero was tarnished. But to truly understand what happened these events and their weight, one must understand the conflicts started long before the war, and long before the U.S.

In the beginning, it was only China for Vietnam. It was China who first traded with them. It was China who first recognized them as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. It was China who Vietnam first feared, first loathed, still loathe. 

The Vietnam War began like any other war between the two of them; Vietnam feared expansion from China; feared their control. Being a smaller country, Vietnam tends to get elbowed by larger countries like China and France all of the time. This time, they also feared their own people. Northern Vietnam seemed to fall under communist China’s influences and tensions between the north and south came to a boiling point. 

The Soviet Union soon joined as the opportunity to spread communism arose, which prompted America to intervene in an attempt to stop it. The U.S. was determined to contain communism because of the domino theory, the idea that if smaller countries become communist, all surrounding countries will as well.  After all was said and done, over two million Vietnamese lives lay dead as the sign of failure. Countless more suffer from the lingering effects of agent orange and poverty to this day. Communism was not prevented in the country after Americans left and Vietnam was forcefully reunified by the North. 

During the war over 8 million tons of American bombs were dropped on Vietnam. 

All of the destruction on small villages and supposedly empty jungles were usually fruitless, rarely hitting the intended target. Yet the effects on the natural ecosystem, human life, and moral support for the war was devastating. “In 1969 alone, 1,034,300 hectares of forest was destroyed using Agent Orange, a man-made herbicide. Agent Blue was sprayed on crops in an effort to deprive the North of its food supply. Between 1962 and 1969, 688,000 acres of agricultural land was sprayed – primarily on paddy fields.” Vietnam was ruined. Today Vietnam remains one of the poorest countries in the world.

Not to mention how many elders and children suffer greatly from agent orange, which Americans tend to still try to underplay. Agent Orange’s original herbicide qualities also led to physical and neurological side effects on the human body like cancer, skin disease, immune system dysfunction, Parkinson’s disease, nerve disorders, and many more.  Even when researching the effects of the war and agent orange, the results ironically never mention Vietnamese citizens. The U.S. military’s actions in poisoning these countries and their people still stand as one of the greatest war crimes since World War II. Everything from cancer, to birth defects, to losing limbs, etc, and yet, it continues to be swept under the rug.

The U.S. was a perpetrator of destruction, but also allowed for destruction when it ignored the North’s ruthless attack on the South to forcefully reunify the nation. Years later citizens wrestle with the complicated decision of who to trust. In the beginning, Americans were scorned and mixed kids, like my father, were discriminated against, beaten, and bullied. Mothers of mixed children had to burn pictures of their American fathers in order to protect their children, including my grandmother. We still aren’t sure if he’s dead or not. Today, Vietnamese people see Americans as a friend and ally, and idealize the euro features of the mixed race. 

Feeling for China is not complicated. The anti-Chinese sentiment is prevalent across the nation. Civilians go as far as believing China has already taken over the country, using false heads of authority in the Vietnamese government. It is easy to laugh at the ridiculous claim, but one cannot blame a kicked dog for flinching at a raised hand. “The Vietnamese have had too much experience with the Chinese. The Vietnamese can’t trust the Chinese. We’ve had too much practice,” says Duong Trung Quoc, a member of Vietnam’s National Assembly and editor of the magazine Past & Present.

Younger Viet kids today are haunted by their parents’ trauma, but struggle to understand what the war truly is. Their parents usually don’t talk about anything other than how much they hate China and schools refuse to spend more than two pages on the subject.When people do talk about the war they tend to fixate on the mass immigration that followed it. Which is ironic still because not many choose to speak of the Amerasian Homecoming Act, which allowed people to be determined as mixed based off of their physical appearance and successfully sped up the immigration process. 

It isn’t home free after the immmigration process, though. Vietnamese refugees faced discrimination and opression like every other minority group in the United States while also trying to heal from losing their homeland to their longtime enemy. Most of them coped by assimilating as quickly as possible. My father buys a turkey every Thanksgiving and a ham for every Christmas, which usually never turns out as American as he wishes, so while he fusses over the dried turkey, my mother starts preparing a rich noodle dish to his frustration. 

The Vietnam War makes me uncomfortable. Writing this article was a difficult journey of self and family. Every word I wrote brought me back to the rundown district in Vietnam where my family still lives, their bubbling smiles bright despite being locked in by COVID restrictions and my grandfather’s PTSD. Panic attacks kept my fingers from hitting the keyboard, my tongue caught struggling with too much to say and not enough vocabulary to express it. No one can truly understand what it means to be born from war, to be born as a living breathing sign of destruction and corruption.