Point of View

This painting is tiny, and the Asian feel of it brought back memories of a petite Asian woman named Hahn. Like me, she was also the wife of a professor in the journalism department at the University of Mississippi. One night we all gathered and I'm not sure whose idea it was, but everyone told their most vivid memory of the Vietnam War era. There were intriguing stories from those who had fought, those who had protested, those in the National Guard who'd watched the protests from their posts, those who lost loved ones, and those who will never be quite the same. However, the most unexpected story came from Hahn, the only one among us actually from Vietnam. First, she told a rather ribald joke that had been standard among the Vietnamese people during the war. Then, she told of her idyllic childhood in a village there, and later her escape from Saigon with the airlift. However, the thing that struck me was that, unlike the rest of us, she referred to the war as The American War. It was habit, she said, that's what all the people in her village called it.

Image: The American War
Janice Nabors Raiteri