 So I'm going to give you a quick picture idea of my family because I did come from this very San Francisco Bay Area family. This is my grandmother that Joan Jasper was referring to, image in Cunningham, and she was nice. She was known as a fine arts photographer, so she did these kind of beautiful photographs that you just could fall into. And this is a picture of me with Dorothea Lang, my godmother. My editor used to call this the Rickrack Princess Shot. Now her work was much, she was a much more serious person through and through, and this is her most famous photograph, Migrant Mother, which was taken to show the effects of the Great Depression, and all of her life she did a lot of social justice photography. This is my dad, so he was image in Cunningham's son, and then he learned everything he could from Imo when he decided he wanted to be a photographer, and then he was sent off to work with her friend Ansel Adams, and after working with Ansel he was sent to work with Dorothea, and they really bonded and we became part of her family as well. So he did a lot of irreverent photography, like instead of just photographing Yosemite as an absolutely beautiful place, he wanted to show the effects of car pollution to get to a place like Yosemite. So this is a picture of me with my high school boyfriend, whom I'm still good friends with, Warren, but I am the last person you would expect to see write a book about the Vietnam War. I was a protester against the war, I was horrified by the war, by what we were doing in Vietnam, by just all the destruction that was going on, the loss of life, that you know just I was horrified and overwhelmed by the whole thing. So when I was in high school this is what was happening on Telegraph Avenue near where I was in Berkeley. This is People's Park for those of you who might remember those days on Telegraph. This is when they turned the military helicopters against their own citizens, those of us who were protesting. They used to use the tear gas to try to disperse protesters, before they got around to the bullets to dispel protesters. So that was the way I interfaced with the Vietnam War during those years when I was in high school and college. But in 2011 I went to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., where there's nearly 60,000 names of veterans of men and women who died in Vietnam. And I was so moved by the just the sheer numbers of names on the wall. It's an overwhelming experience as you know if you've been there. And I started to cry and I thought, why am I crying? I don't know any of these people. And it made me realize I had a big gap in what I knew about the Vietnam War. And I decided I wanted to begin interviewing veterans and see what the war had been like from the point of view of the guys who were boots on the ground. And I was able to interview seven veterans. One was an army nurse there. And then I also interviewed one refugee because you can't have a war without having refugees. So I needed to tell her story as well. So I began with in terms of chronology with this wonderful guy named Mike Horan. He was a foster kid, bounced from foster home to foster home. He did bond with this one boy. This was his friend Jimmy Mallon, who was his foster brother. And then he went into the military. As soon as he got out of high school, he really had no other options. He had no support system whatsoever. So he joined the military. This was 1963. We did not have an official presence in Vietnam yet. So he was considered a military advisor. He was part of this group that was working with these fortified villages. We moved villagers out of their home village and into these fortified villages and asked them to just change their lives and work, live in these new villages. And he was grabbed by some gorillas and taken into the mountains. And these guys were just running, every day they were just running for several days, just running. And he would just fall exhausted when they took a rest. And they give him a couple of kicks and get him up and get him going again. And he was sure he would eventually be killed and probably be tortured. And one day one of these guys grabbed a knife and pulled his head back and put a knife to his throat. And Mike thought, I'm going to be killed. And he decided he would not, he was going to die with dignity. That's what his choice was. And I remember him telling me this and I thought, what kind of a choice is that for a young kid to make that I'll die with dignity? Why, how is it that we put this guy in the position that this is what he has to decide? So I had to figure out how to boundary my book because, you know, the Vietnam War is a huge subject. So though we were involved in Vietnam long before Kennedy, I decided to begin with Kennedy because really his was the fateful step that took us deeply into Vietnam. He tacitly approved an assassination of the democratically elected president of Vietnam. And that threw us in deeper than we had been before. This was November 1963, early November. And then, of course, he was assassinated himself several weeks later. And then Lyndon Johnson took over the presidency. I had to put this photo in my book because this is Lyndon Johnson doing what came to be known as the Johnson treatment. He was so physically overbearing and he was not the least bit above intimidating people with his height and his weight. Like, this guy he's talking to is like, had to put his foot behind him to just stay up, right? Anyway, Johnson was doing some amazing work, civil rights work. Well, the Vietnam War, he just kept putting us in deeper and deeper. He's the one who got the whole gulf of tongue and thing going and then put boots on the ground. And initially, our losses were small and every casket was covered with an American flag and pinned with medals before the bodies were flown home. So in order to do the civil rights work that he was doing, Johnson was worked with a number of civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King. But in 1967, King decided he had to come out against the war. This was a terribly difficult decision for him because he knew he was going to lose Johnson's support. Because Johnson, if you cross Johnson, you're finished. But for King, it became a moral conundrum for him and he felt he couldn't support civil rights in the United States and turn a blind eye on what we were doing in Vietnam. So one of the people that I interviewed was a man named Henry Allen and he had grown up in Selma, Alabama and he was trained in nonviolence by Martin Luther King as a teenager. So he was one of these kids who was a foot soldier for the civil rights movement and in Selma they were working on the right for the vote and he would go out with these other kids from the churches and they would get jailed. Then as soon as they got out of jail, they'd be back in the churches. So it's hard to imagine, but he was sent to Vietnam and became, he did two years of college, then he didn't have more money for college and he ended up deciding he's just going to join the military because he was about to get drafted because we did have the draft until 1973 and if you didn't have a good excuse and a way to get out of the draft, you were going to get put into the military. So he went ahead and joined and he went from being a pacifist to being a machine gunner and as a machine gunner, as he said, you know, he was trained to be a killer and at first his, as he said, his heart was set on not using that gun but you can't do that for your own safety and you can't do that to your buddies. Everybody has to be part of the machine when you're in that position. So he said, when you watched enough people killed, he became his heart got set on revenge and he was full on into being a machine gunner, which this was very interesting to me, like how do you take someone's morality and change them from something we're all trained in, which is the value of life, other humans and change over to no, now you need to kill this group of people and then how do you change back? You know, how do you get your humanity back? Those are just really complex issues that I would ask people about as I interviewed them. This is a beautiful photograph of a service for Dr. King that was in Da Nang because while while Mr. Allen was in Vietnam serving, that's when King was assassinated and this is a beautiful memorial that they had and I just love this photograph. So what, when I was asking about how that what the racism was like in Vietnam for Henry Allen, he said, he told me several stories of like when he was first there, they asked for volunteers in the base for people to just do some volunteer work around the base and he raised his hand. He was happy to do it. Well, the white guys who raised their hand were given trucks. He was given a wheelbarrow and told to clean the human excrement out of the toilets that they had there that were, you know, not water toilets but they were these contraptions where actually there would be buckets that would be below where people would go giant buckets and he was put in charge of scooping those out and then he had a number of other incidences that happened to him but once in the field that wasn't true. Everybody had to work together and I just think this is such a beautiful photograph of these two guys. This medic has, you know, he's got his pistol out and he's defending the life of his patient man. He's not going anywhere. He's staying right there with his patient. So I also interviewed David Oshiro who had grown up in Hawaii and became a Green Beret by his own choice and joined the military. The very first day that he went out, he was dressed in jungle fatigues and they were with a group of South Vietnamese people who were also military who also in jungle fatigues and David was shot through the neck. It didn't kill him. He was on the ground bleeding when the medics he heard the chopper coming in, the American medics, chopper landed, medic walks over, takes a look at him and says leave that gook on the ground. We'll come back for him later and David pulled out his dog tags and like he's like I'm an American, I'm an American. So they picked him up but he said from that point on he never trusted anybody because he could be assumed to be the enemy by somebody with a gun in their hand. So he always carried a little pistol tucked into the back of his pants for the rest of the time he was in Vietnam. As the war progressed more and more people died starting with the Tet offensive was a huge mess, hugely costly for everyone, Americans included. This is a copy of this a photograph of the caskets that are now being just lined up, body goes in there and then they used to fly them back at night so that the servicemen wouldn't see the outgoing flights of these filled caskets going back to the United States. There's no more flag draping on these. So I also interviewed a wonderful woman, Lily Lee Adams, who was a half Chinese and half Italian and she was raised a Catholic and she would always pray when she was working with these severely injured people and here's what she told me. Not this one, not this other one either, she would pray. They are so young so she did everything she could for her patients but sometimes they were just too badly wounded to survive and it was very bittersweet for her. When they did die she said I experienced a peace I had never known. I could tell the moment they left me it was like a puff of energy was turned loose. When a soldier died I felt as if God and I were looking out for both as if he, God, was looking out for me as well so I was stuck between blaming God and asking for his help, his grace. That was such a perfect example of one of the complexities we put people in in a state of war. I also had the pleasure of interviewing Jan Scruggs several times. I kind of like these roughy, toughy guys. I think it's because my dad was kind of roughy, toughy. Jan is like rough on the outside but very sweet on the inside so he served his year in Vietnam. He was badly wounded, was given a purple heart but that's not what his big trauma was about the war. His big trauma was that 12 of the guys that he knew and worked with were killed in a mortar explosion because someone had left a pin out that should have been reinserted and there was a whole explosion of mortars and Jan was one of the very first on the scene to try to save these guys lives which was impossible. So he comes back to the United States and he is really kind of at loose ends and in fact he lives in the Washington D.C. area, was raised there. He came out here to Berkeley in San Francisco, hitchhiked out and traveled all around and slept in the parks and in people's houses and went to rock shows, goes back and he put a gun to his head and decided he was just couldn't deal with it and was ready to kill himself then he decided he would go watch in the bathroom mirror. So he walked into the bathroom and was so horrified when he saw that he was holding a gun to his head that he carefully put the gun down. If he had committed suicide we would not have the Vietnam Veterans Memorial today because he's the guy who got it built and working with Myelin's beautiful design. So I just feel tremendous gratitude towards him and his life has not been easy he's a hard worker his body's kind of roughed up but he's really a terrific terrific guy. So all of the all of the veterans I interviewed except one have been to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to see to take a look at it. For all of them it was a very cathartic experience I mean I can barely imagine what that's like since it's very cathartic if you've never served in the war but if you had friends whose names were there that would be very intense but there was one guy who didn't go and what he said to me was this was David Oshiro he'd never been he said to most people it's names dead people but I always picture just eyes eyes eyes that's why I can't go to Washington I'm sorry I can't face that wall I can't have 60,000 pairs of eyes staring at me that wall is a symbol of a lot of my PTSD symptoms and anxieties I don't know if I'll ever visit the wall and face my fear will it heal or destroy me. David died a year ago and never made it to the wall so what can we do for veterans today as well meant as it is they deserve more than us saying thank you for their thank you for your service my primary primary feeling is they desperately need and are entitled to better medical services including psychiatric care for PTSD the veterans veterans administration has really fallen down on this a number of times and in a number of ways they also deserve to have us know their stories I'm very grateful that I have David's story and I will submit it to the veterans history project and this is something really cool that we can all do anybody in 10th grade or above can interview a veteran either by audio or with a video recording and submit it this is the Library of Congress runs this and they will they will take in any of these interviews that are done from anybody about a veteran from any war but we got to catch hold of these Vietnam veterans because they are going fast so when I was at the wall I met this young man who came up to me waving his cell phone and he said kind of apologetically to me I told my grandmother I would photograph my grandfather's name on the wall but I'm out of batteries could you like take a picture of me and send it to me I was like sure I'd be happy to yeah just he had this beautiful open face so he pointed out the name of his grandfather whose last name was Galen and I sent the photo to him and I realized okay so there was a grandfather named Galen that he never met who already had children and one of his children had a child and here's this kid who's still got a connection to the wall but really there's plenty for all of us to learn from our past here there's plenty of decisions and choices during the war that were made some good some bad and the more we know about those choices the more we can make good decisions today because here we are again in this period of tremendous political uproar so I hope by learning a little bit more about what happened during the Vietnam war we can take some of the best of the things we learned and leapfrog ourselves forward into some good decisions thank you