I just spent the last two hours listening to my 10th grader interview me and my three older brothers about our separate, individual conscious experiences of things like America and media and student movements during the Vietnam war era. This is verbal family history that I kind of knew but had never really heard in full sequence and all more or less at the same time. Me, I was born in 1958 when the French were there and maybe a few Americans and I was maybe 6 for the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The Peace accords were what, 1973? So I would have been around 15 at that point. Saigon fell in 75; that would have been the fall of my senior year in high school. That means my entire existence as a child was permeated by war and images of war as well as thoughts about what would happen when I was of draft age (for which I did register, if I recall). I remember all of the TV and the violence: war and protest at dinner and then at school the next day, drilling for nuclear war under our desks. Our desks? Of course I also remember kick-the-can and foursquare too, but then again I was just a kid.
This was really fascinating stuff. My brothers and I were born, respectively, in 47, 49, 53, and me in 58. We each crossed that whole generation and apprehended what was going in the world each in our own different ways and at different times and maturities. In brief, at one particular interview cross section, we were: law student and draft-lottery participant, college student involved in the movements and lottery participant, enlisted Air Force North Vietnamese linguist in the Asian theater, and me, a high school kid preparing to be drafted...or run. Line that up with a good sequence of questions by a good interviewer and it becomes mesmerizing oral history. Can't wait to hear it edited...
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