Three years ago today, I published For the Love of Vietnam: a war, a family, a CIA official, and the best evacuation story never heard.
The book gave me the opportunity to engage with audiences in a variety of ways for the Commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War in 2024 and 2025.
While the subject matter of the Vietnam Era is often tragic and grievous, what has stayed with me about those presentations and meetings is the way so many people found their way through the grief and trauma to once again live with vitality and hope.
In this “Stories of Vietnam” Substack series, I’ve shared a variety of stories, some included in my book and some ancillary to it. I’ve also highlighted others’ experiences, among them an on-the-ground story from my Uncle Jim, a Vietnam Veteran and Green Beret,
and the memoir pages of Karen Kaiser, the librarian at the Phoenix Study Group, the American school in Saigon in the early 1970s.
This fall I’ll take a new tack with a new name: “The Saigon Diaries—The story and the stories behind the story.”
In the upcoming posts (1-2 times/month), you’ll find out how and why I began a novel about Vietnam for young people, how much of the protagonist is based on me, and more about her Vietnamese friend, Hong.
I will be digging back into my personal journals and notes, and more of the family ephemera, for subject matter that may not have seemed fitting for the motif of “Stories of Vietnam.”
While all those posts were genuine, they were written at an arms’ length; “The Saigon Diaries” series, I think you’ll find, will have a more vulnerable feel to them. I am not entirely comfortable with this but as every true writer knows, the deepest writing is not a place of comfort, at least not until one has traversed the entire battlefield.
If you would like to read an unedited entry from my April 11, 2013 “Writer’s Diary” for a glimpse of some of my material for future posts, click here.
I hope you’ll join me on another sojourn into history and meaning through upcoming stories about the in-progress novel for young people, The Saigon Diaries.
“ . . . the young are not afraid of telling the truth . . .”
~Eleanor Roosevelt
Introduction to The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
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